"No running. No pushing. No bombing. No spitting," reads the sign by the swimming pool, as you pass through the turnstile. The sun is rising and your Speedos sagging from the toll of a thousand tumble-turns. It's dull sport but your knees are too shot to jog any more. You plan for 20 laps but lose count somewhere about 16.
Where else would you be on another scorcher in Sydney, when towels crackle on the clothesline and wet footprints are steam-cleaned from the concrete. The humidity used to hit in February. Now it's December and your collars are yellowed and skin stinks of chlorine.
Suburban swimming pools take a while to warm up over summer, says a lifeguard at the Ruth Everuss Aquatic Centre, in Lidcombe. People fight the first day of heat at home, he reckons. On the second hot day they seek out shopping malls. On the third, finally, they come to the cool water.
Framing the pool are technicoloured rectangular tiles – in red, orange, pink and blue. Picnic tables sit in the shade atop dark green grass. Paint cracks on the concrete grandstand. On the wall outside the men's change room is a confused jungle mural of monkeys, parrots and a platypus. In the kiosk are 50¢ mixed lollies wrapped tight in plastic bags. There's hot popcorn, meat pies, Wizz Fizz and something called sour clouds, too, wheeled in from the storeroom in a supermarket trolley.
"Ice-cream makes U happy," reads the sign on the red flags strung above the deep end, as you switch from freestyle to backstroke, swimming blind with your arms outstretched. Trains shriek by as you take another turn. Hands flail the water like weary boxers. You hear the wrench of air between strokes and parents screaming at children with sticky hands.
There is a constancy to suburban swimming pools, a familiarity not earned by ocean baths and their choppy tides. Teenage boys adjust wet shorts and laugh loud enough for the girls to hear. A Muslim woman in full-body bathers is doing breaststroke in the slow lane, her broad white hat bobbing up and down like a buoy. A man stands and stretches in the shallow end, his scalp shaved clean and briefs worn high over his gut. But all you see is the slosh of water in your swimming goggles, and the wall, not so far away now.
Thoughts flitter about as you trundle back and forth. How many laps is it now? When did I start needing goggles? Or a rashie? You remember long, hot days as a child, scalding your soles on hot tiles and hopping and shaking your head until the water spilled out. Summers when your back was so red you had to sleep on your stomach under a sheet. You scratched at peeling skin. You watched the way the water bent the angle of your prune fingers. Or stayed underwater until your lungs burned.
Storms came and spat fat drops on the water, scattering sunbathers. "Don't get wet," your dad called. The steamy beads fizzed on the water. Lightning came and you ran for shelter, mopping yourself with a damp towel, not caring how your hair looked.
The water was clear and always cold, even when it was hot out. Kids pissed in the pool, making little warm halos. Pine needles filled the gutters. You hugged yourself while climbing the stairs to the waterslide. Rumours spread that lifeguards found razor blades on one of the turns. Winter came and swimming pools were turned into ice-skating rinks or trout farms. You swore you could still smell them when summer came again.
Sydney's public pools are now year-round aquatic centres, with indoor gymnasiums and "cardio theatres" with classes in aqua Zumba and cafes serving large cappuccinos – no one drinks regular-size coffee anymore. The water at the Ryde Aquatic Leisure Centre is stuck at 29 degrees – still cooler than your Bikram yoga studio – with a wading pool and bubble whirl pool and 56-metre waterslide, and a mock surf wave that never breaks. "If you come off your board it's like landing on a household mattress," the website says, and you wonder what other kind of mattress there might be. "Remember too, the water temperature is 29 degrees all year round!"
Blacktown Leisure Centre has a lap pool, creche and 200-seat function room. They're serving herb-crusted beef carpaccio in the sun at Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool. Over at Sydney Olympic Park, children scream with shock and awe as giant buckets of water are tipped over them from on high. The water playground sounds like a horror show. Dads stand in the shallows, arms crossed and stomachs sucked in.
By the 50-metre pool, where Olympians once gasped through post-race television interviews, you sit in the stands with a chocolate milkshake and watch a girl launch backwards from the high diving platform, twisting more times than you can count. American author David Foster Wallace once imagined a 13-year-old boy on his birthday, standing on the diving board and spying two dirty spots on the end – formed by the "bits and shards and curls of skin" scraped from swimmers as they leap. "The abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind", he wrote, from more people than you can ever know.
Down below are draw-string bikinis and flabby skin, old men with biltong hides, families tearing at barbecue chicken with greasy fingers. Young couples fumble under beach towels. Children play Marco Polo or flick water at bees or run along the side of the pool under the glare of the lifeguard in dark sunglasses. You smell salt and sunscreen and fresh-mown lawn. Your body is bleached and your hair like straw. You step into the skin and disappear.
The diving tower at Lidcombe is riddled with concrete cancer and closed for now, glowering at the pool like an invalid at an athletics carnival. Swimmers turn laps in its shadow, pushing off from the wall and kicking their feet in some kind of rhythm. "I spend six hours a day with my head in a bucket of water, looking at a black line," Kieren Perkins once said. You wonder how he kept himself under for so long.
So you stare at the line and the white tiles on the tank floor and convert the laps into fractions to make the toll seem smaller: at 10 laps you're halfway, 12 laps is three-fifths, 15 is three-quarters. Then you lose count. The sun is high by the time you climb the ladder and wrap a towel around your wet swimmers. You can't shake the smell of chlorine, no matter how long you stand under the change room shower.
