Stairlift to Heaven (14 page)

“Sorry. Your garage was locked and when I asked The Trouble for the key she wanted to know what I wanted it for and I told her and she told me to clear off and to tell you what it feels like to be told to clear off like you told her Feng Shui instructor to clear off. Anyway I haven't got any planks and I don't know anybody who has so I had to buy a couple, you owe me fifteen quid.”

No, I didn't fall into the canal when I crossed the planks, thank you for asking, although by then I couldn't have cared less if I had.

****

May 2 2008.
SWIMMING LESSONS.

A few weeks ago The Trouble indicated something in the freebie newspaper that had caught her eye. “Have you read this?” she said. “It’s just what you need.”

I looked to where she was pointing. “Incontinence pants? My trouble is not being able to pee, not peeing too much.”

“Not that! Underneath.” She read it out. Apparently the local leisure centre would be holding free swimming lessons specially designed for Oldies. She suggested again that I might take advantage of the offer.

“Why?” I asked. “I’ve got by for the best part of seventy years without knowing how to swim, I’m sure I can manage a bit longer.”

“People who do as much walking along the canal as you do should be able to swim,” The Trouble argued. “What if you were to fall in?”

“I’ve managed to avoid falling in up until now.”

“You had a narrow escape not long back And you’re getting older . What if you had a dizzy spell?”

“I don’t have dizzy spells.”

“Not yet. But you might start getting them.”

I thought about it. Maybe there was something in what The Trouble was saying. Maybe I might start getting the odd dizzy spell now I’m well into my sixties, I’ve heard of other people my age who have started having them. I decided to go for it, as they say nowadays, and a couple of weeks later found me presenting myself at the swimming pool at the appointed hour of 9 a.m. Apparently there would be twenty lessons in all, one every Monday morning. I would very soon be Ian Thorpe.

There were twelve would-be swimmers in total, all male, the powers-that-be having deemed that any prospective Oldie women swimmers would be accommodated in another session, possibly on the grounds that the swimming lessons would go more swimmingly if any scope for hanky-panky had been eliminated.

Of the twelve of us one man has only one leg, one must weigh thirty stones if he weighs an ounce, one is a dwarf, and one is a hunchback. The other eight of us could be classified as normal, although two of them can’t be a day under ninety and another has a glass eye, which strictly speaking is not completely normal, but a lot more normal than the four I’ve mentioned. Lined up we must have looked like we were auditioning for Star Wars 7, The Return of the Grotesques.

I had grave doubts that when the fat one entered the pool he would displace such a volume of water that we’d all be swimming in the rafters but I kept my thoughts to myself, at least for the time being. But watch this space.

“Have you all brought along your birth certificates?” the swimming instructor now asked.

Well I hadn’t and nor had any of the others judging from their reactions.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to,” said the man with the glass eye.

The instructor gave a long-suffering sigh. “How am I supposed to know if you are entitled to free swimming lessons if you haven’t brought along you birth certificate?”

“How am I supposed to know you’re a swimming instructor?” the man with the glass eye, sharp as a tack, shot back at her,

“Because I’ve got a whistle round my neck,” she said.

I almost chipped in with “You could be the referee for the five-a-side football in the gym and you’ve turned up at the wrong venue,” but held back, mindful that she was a woman who would very soon have my life in her hands.

“I sincerely hope you’ve all brought swimwear?” the instructor asked, our inability to have brought our birth certificates obviously prompting the enquiry. “If not you can hire one,” she added.

One of we normal ones raised a hand and said, a little embarrassed, “Where can you hire them?”

The hunchback, demonstrating a ready sense of humour despite his affliction, said, “There’s a little press stud on the waistband, you just push it and up they go.” I’d have been proud of that one myself.

After we’d all got kitted out the lesson began. First we had to lie flat on our bellies and do the breast stroke, as demonstrated by the lady instructor. This involved moving our arms and legs, or in the case of the one-legged man his arms and leg, in a sort of frog-like motion. After a minute or so the one-legged man asked, reasonably enough, if, once he was in the pool, his being minus a leg might cause him to go round in circles rather than in a straight line. The instructor said she hadn’t come across this potential problem before but that they would “cross that bridge when they came to it.”

A bridge that needed to be crossed immediately, as we’d already come to it, was that the fat man, balancing somewhat precariously on his belly, kept toppling over every time he made more than the smallest frog-like motion with his arms and legs, and on a couple of occasions would have squashed the man with the glass eye and maybe caused his glass eye to pop out if the latter hadn’t had the good sense to fling himself out of the fat man’s path. The instructor solved this hitch in proceedings by moving the fat man over against a wall, which stopped him toppling over on that side, and by shoring up his other side with the aid two medicine balls borrowed from the fitness centre.

The hunchback, demonstrating his sense of humour again, said he was thankful we weren’t doing the back stroke or he’d be in the same boat and would also require shoring up. His mention of boats got me thinking that if you wished to propel yourself through water then a boat would be a far easier and safer way of achieving this rather than by swimming; certainly a less tiring way, as after about five minutes of lying on my belly and moving my arms and legs in frog-like motions I was absolutely knackered. I mentioned this to the instructor who said that once we were in the pool it wouldn’t be so tiring due to the buoyancy of the water. Fortunately we were then asked to get in the pool to test out this theory.

At this point the fat man excused himself as he ‘wanted the lavatory’. I hazarded a guess that it would be doubtful if the lavatory would feel the same way about him once he’d deposited his thirty stones on it.

There were stone steps down into the pool, which is three feet six inches deep at the shallow end. When we walked down the steps the dwarf, at three feet at the most, disappeared completely under water before bobbing to the surface again and splashing for dear life in a furious mixture of the front crawl, backstroke, butterfly and dog paddle. The instructor, obviously never having had to instruct a three foot dwarf trying to stand up in a three feet six deep pool before, told him to get out while she had a think about it.

The fat fuck returned from the gents - the reader will see why I have relegated him from a fat man to a fat fuck in a moment - and eschewing the steps, and quite without warning, jumped into the pool. A wave of tsunami proportions headed for me at about two hundred miles-an-hour, completely engulfing me and filling my eyes with the heavily-chlorinated water. Minutes later my eyes were red raw from a combination of the effects of the chlorine and from rubbing them, and several hours later I still looked like something out of a Hammer horror film. The Trouble couldn’t look at me without her eyes watering.

The following Monday, more than a little dubious about continuing after what had happened the week before, but having taken the precaution of equipping myself with a pair of goggles should the fat fuck Mr Liddiard take it upon himself to jump in the pool again, I went for my second lesson. I was glad I did because it went a lot more successfully for me than had the first. The same can’t be said for one of my fellow learner swimmers, the dwarf, Mr Leeson, for reasons which I will now disclose.

One of the teaching techniques employed by the swimming instructor, Miss Hobday, is to have the learner swimmers stand in the shallow end of the pool, squat down a little so that their shoulders are level with the top of the water, and practice the arm movements of the breast stroke whilst walking along the bottom. This, she assured us, would give us the feel of actually swimming in addition to building up our confidence.

This exercise is fine for people of normal height, but as I have already mentioned the shallow end of the pool is three feet deep six and Mr Leeson is only three feet tall, a discrepancy of six inches on the part of Mr Leeson. Last week when Mr Leeson got in the pool and promptly disappeared underwater he quickly got out again before he drowned. He obviously didn’t want the same thing to happen again so when Miss Hobday - who had more than likely instructed dozens of other would-be swimmers since our session last week and had probably forgotten all about Mr Leeson’s problem - asked us all to get into the pool, Mr Leeson refused point blank, and went on to tell Miss Hobday his reason for refusing, i.e. that if he did he may never live to tell the tale.

Miss Hobday had a think about it but from her bemused expression clearly a solution to the problem was beyond her. She told us to practise the arm movements of the breast stroke on dry land and disappeared for about ten minutes. When she returned, obviously having taken counsel from a higher authority, she told Mr Leeson that to overcome the problem he would be transferred to the ten-year-olds’ swimming classes, where the pupils would be the same size as he was. She added that unfortunately, unlike the Oldie lessons, the lessons wouldn’t be free and would have to be paid for by Mr Leeson, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

Mr Leeson hit the roof. Or as near to the roof as it’s possible for a dwarf to hit it. “Are you joking?” he protested. “If you think you’re putting me in with a load of ten-year-old kids and expecting me to pay for the privilege you’ve got another think coming. People will accuse me of being a bloody paedophile!”

“Yes, I’ve already had to stop being a Santa Claus because of that,” said one of the normal men, Mr Littlewood, although without bothering to enlarge on his statement.

“And anyway,” said Mr Pargeter, the man with the glass eye, “How do you manage to teach children? If they’re the same height as Mr Leeson how come they don’t disappear under the water?”

A good point, and one I hadn’t thought of myself.

“Yes, if the water goes over Mr Leeson’s head it’ll go over a child’s head as well,” said the hunchback, Mr Gearing, adding his three-pennyworth.

Miss Hobday had the answer however. “We use a different teaching system for children,” she said primly.

“Well then use your usual system for us and the children’s system for Mr Leeson,” said Mr Pargeter.

Rather reluctantly, and against her better judgement it seemed to me, Miss Hobday agreed to do this, starting the following week.

One week on we found that the system employed by the local leisure centre to teach ten-year-olds is to first kit out him or her with inflatable arm and leg bands. Having been made buoyant little Brad or little Angelina is then fitted with a shoulder harness attached to a long length of rope. The child then gets in the water and whilst simulating the arm and leg movements of the breast stroke is gently towed across the width of the pool by the instructor. The idea is that over a period of time the child will become less and less dependent on the arm and leg bands, the harness and tow rope, and will eventually be able to swim unaided.

This system was now being employed by Miss Hobday to instruct Mr Leeson. Naturally when she is towing Mr Leeson to and fro across the pool she can’t be instructing the eleven non-dwarfs in her class, who are left to their own devices. Miss Hobday apologised in advance for this inconvenience but said there was nothing she could do about it, that another instructor couldn’t be spared, they didn’t grow on trees, and that she had been told by her superiors to devote half her time to teaching Mr Leeson to swim by the ten-year-olds’ method, and the other half to teaching the rest of us to swim by the normal method.

One of the normal men using the normal method men, Mr Hall, said that this was patently unfair as there were eleven non-dwarfs in our group and only one dwarf, and that to be fair our hour’s instruction should be split up in the ratio 11.1, eleven parts going to the normals and one part to the dwarf. Mr Leeson said this would mean that it would give him only five minutes instruction time per session while the rest of us would have fifty five minutes, which was not only clearly unfair but also discrimination against dwarfs.