Sexy Goggles

I see it all around me in the dull splash, the curved arm, the pointed toe. Amidst black, insect-eye goggles and red rubber cap (talcummed and pulled apart, ready for the swim). Amongst those in and out breathes, plunging hands; knees raised towards chests. Amidst all this oh-so-god-forsaken unsexy behaviour, underneath that water: wet tongues of desire, the cuff of repulsion.
     Two teenage boys, willow-thin, chase each other up and down the Medium Lane. I wonder if they are considering the twenty-year-old woman in front of me; if they swim behind her just so they can watch her part her legs as she breast-strokes towards the deep-end. Glimpsing the soft inner flesh of her thighs, a ripple of buttocks in the water.

     A man with curly, silver hair and a lard fat belly sits alone in the kiddie's pool. The children have all gone. I noticed him earlier, watching me as I stood up in the shallow end to adjust my bikini top. I note his saggy, checked pants; surrounded by blue mist and1970's orange tiles. A water slide, in chipped turquoise, looms behind him. Is it hard to be a sixty-something-year-old man amongst the young, and occasionally, beautiful? Watching bits and pieces wobbling, opening and closing? I shiver as another man glides past me, his arm raised into a perfect arc, his fingers piercing the water's surface like an arrow. I chug along beside him, feeling blessed by the elegance of his movements. He is a perfect machine.

     Sixty-something and saggy - that's no perfect machine. I wonder if I've got this old man all wrong. If I project my own sexual predatoriness onto his pink, spreading body. Teenage girls, limbs like HB pencils, breasts almost alive in their bikinis, run along the poolside. Do we all cruise youth and beauty, if only for a few seconds? For enough time for us to get our hit?

   In the Slow Lane, an old lady sails past me like a sack of flour. I see plump thighs, fat breasts floating on the water as she feigns backstroke. She's hardly moving. Her white hair is scraped back under a rose-studded rubber cap. Fat hands; rouged cheeks. She lifts her hand up in the air and it sails backwards. She is a Queen greeting her subjects.

     Above me, a high ceiling is intersected with gleaming orange tiles, and all around, potted palms. Below I think I see something floating - some object I don't recognise: white and puffy. I try to wipe the image from my mind. Instead, I survey a clutch of thirty-something men in the shallow end, and wonder who they are behind their dark goggles. They all look so serious - like they mean business. It's hard not to look that way in goggles. Do I look like I mean business? Do I mean business? My arms already ache and I've only done twenty lengths. This isn't like me. I have a tenth of my usual strength. Is it because I had a hard day at work, or have I lost 'it'? Six months ago I'd have swum twice this and not given it a second thought. Tonight my breathing resembles a pensioner's, and I have to pause at the side of the pool after every six or so lengths.
     But I am happy. I am back where I belong. Public swimming pools are wonderful places; I cannot escape humanity here. Intimacy is foisted upon me even as I try to maintain my own space, and my own schedule. A man's hand strokes my leg as he passes by me the other way. I realise that I like some men looking at me. With others I try to make my goggles as intimidating as possible. Oh, the harshness of it all.

     Now I'm home. My skin is hot. I'm bundled in my pink towel robe, knees up in bed, notebook on knees, writing this. My eyes hurt; I cannot write anymore. So tired. My body is happy for me; it says "I knew the water would save you from yourself". I need saving from myself sometimes. 
      So tired. Words drift off like old pensioners on their backs, their red lipsticked mouths catching the electric light on the water. Floating sacks of flour, drifting down the Slow Lane.