Nerd Do Well (9 page)

Emerging into the cavernous interior of the main pool, I spied cousin Tim some way towards the mid-shallows. What the heck? I thought to myself, I’m six, I’m wearing a rubber ring, I can handle the mid-centre with the teens, you just see if I can’t! I had no idea about the level of panic involved in drowning. The hopeless desperation that floods your body, way before the water fully invades your lungs. I’m not sure what I expected my rubber ring to do as I rashly leapt in. Probably that it would do its job in preventing me from sinking beneath the water before I had a chance to hold my breath. It certainly fulfilled its primary purpose in remaining topside. In that respect, I let the rubber ring down by not remaining topside with it, as was admittedly my responsibility.

As I hit the water, the ring stayed where it was and I slipped through into the wash, kicking with sudden ineffectuality towards the surface, immediately aware that I was literally out of my depth. I can’t remember who pulled me out. I don’t think it was a lifeguard, I think it was a civilian man, with a beard; maybe it was Rolf Harris. Needless to say, the experience left me shaken and rendered me strictly baby-pool material for a while afterwards. A shadow of my former water-baby self, my confidence gone, I tried to rope a few toddlers into playing ‘thumbs up underwater’ but only got as far as asking a little girl’s father before I was banned from the leisure centre for a year by a cabal of angry parents.

That’s not true but it seemed like a good way to end the story, which, let’s face it, petered out. I’m likely to do that from time to time. It comes from being a stand-up comedian. If a joke or story doesn’t work, you keep adding to it until it gets the requisite response and then you move on. I promise to let you know when I do it, as I want this to be a truthful account as well as an entertaining read. The truth is always preferable in the context of a memoir because the enjoyment lives and dies by the reader’s belief in the events being described. So, unless I tell you otherwise, I am conveying to you the absolute truth and not in a double-bluff, Whitley Strieber’s
Communion
-type way. So now, with that short digression out of the way, let us plunge back into the suspiciously warm waters of my aquatic past and get to the bottom of this, as far as I know, nameless childhood phobia.

The second event (of the fabled three) occurred not in the voluminous blue of the Gloucester Leisure Centre main pool but in the changing rooms. The whole incident came about as the result of me accidentally kicking the person behind me in the eye as I exited the pool. Rather than apologise when I turned and saw him rubbing his face, I made a face as if to say ‘Don’t be such a baby’. He and his friend then acted out vengeance on me and my friend in an extremely cruel and scary way. They kept us in the changing rooms for at least ten minutes, holding Sean Jeffries and me hostage, and repeatedly calling us bummers before threatening to make us perform bum-based acts on each other, until I was a mess of terrified tears. I always remember being impressed by Sean, who remained stoic, even in the face of their chilling threats, while I whined and begged them to let us go.

In the end, I think they felt a bit sorry for me because I was such a baby and they did indeed let us go unmolested. I wouldn’t go swimming for a few months after that. Years later, as a lifeguard at the same pool, I caught a couple of kids terrorising a younger swimmer in the very same changing space and exacted cathartic revenge upon them, as if they were the very same bullies who had terrorised me ten years earlier. The two perps were probably in their mid-teens, both were already dressed as they circled in on a wet boy, no older than ten . . .

‘What the hell’s going on here?’ asked Pegg, settling into a stance that projected strength and authority, a demeanour only augmented by his red, white and blue lifeguard uniform, which clung to his muscular form as though it could not bear to be separated from his sweet-smelling skin; a combination of natural musk and Brut 33.

‘What’s it to you, grandad?’ said the more dominant of the two absolute shitheads.

‘I’m not your grandad,’ Pegg replied with a knowing smile. ‘I’m not even old enough to be your father. Someone’s clearly failing math,’ Pegg quipped, firing a reassuring wink at the victim, whose face had become a glowing beacon of gratitude and admiration.

‘What are you talking about?’ spat the lowlife pool bully, his eyes disappearing into a hateful squint.

Pegg sighed. ‘I’m saying, I’m not old enough to have fathered a child that could have given birth to you let alone fathered you myself, unless I impregnated your mother when I was five which would have been sick and impossible, not least because your mum is a right pig.’

The bullies looked at each other, simultaneously confused and enraged by Pegg’s intellectual prowess. The young future hero was already winning and hadn’t even had to deploy any of his limbs.

‘I could be your uncle,’ he pursued, further confusing the rat-like attackers as they fought to keep pace with his brilliance.

‘Look, just fuck off, all right?’ said the alpha. ‘This is none of your business.’

‘Oh, I beg to differ,’ Pegg intoned like an ancient wise man, despite being just nineteen years old. ‘Anything that takes place in this changing room is my business. Not just this changing room but the general pool area, incorporating the boards and flumes, and roller-skating in the sports hall on Saturday.’

‘Look –’ the vocal bully spat.

Pegg cut him off with further affirmation of his inarguable status. ‘I also oversee old people’s water aerobics on the first Sunday of every month, so don’t tell me it’s none of my damn business.’

The bullies fell into a stunned silence. Pegg had them exactly where he wanted them.

‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to reading
The Dark Knight Returns
in the staff canteen,’ crowed Pegg. ‘So, let’s bring this little encounter to a close, shall we?’

The bullies looked at each other, then, with a silent terrified agreement, produced a fine pair of lock knives, as if to say, back off or we will stab you to death with this pair of fine lock knives. Pegg shook his head slowly, a wry smile creeping across his taut young face.

‘Oh, you’ve done it now,’ he chuckled. ‘I was going to let you off with a warning but I’m afraid that time has passed. If you want to play it this way, then this is the way it will be played and play it we will.’ Pegg knew full well his poetry would confuse them. It was all the time he needed. The bigger one fell first. He glanced at his friend for a split second as if Pegg’s linguistic dexterity had short-circuited his brain.

By the time his beady eyes had flitted back to where the statuesque lifeguard had been standing, Pegg was upon him. Steel fingers clamped around the goon’s bony wrist, twisting his warty little claws into open helplessness. The shiv hit the floor but not before a bright, sickening crack bounced off the tiled dividing walls of the recently refurbished changing area. A voice in Pegg’s head suggested he stop with the wrist but he didn’t listen to it. He ducked underneath the bully’s willowy arm, pulling it straight, just as the first screech of agony left his thin lips.

Extending his own arms to their full impressive length, Pegg gave himself room to lift his muscular leg between them. With balletic poise, he curled the piston into his chest, pleasantly noting how his shorts revealed his bare thighs and the rolling muscle beneath the skin, which bunched into a terrifying coil of explosive power. Are you taking this too far? He didn’t pause to answer the internal question. His foot sprang from his hip like a missile in a mid-price training shoe, the sole of which met the back of the scumbag’s elbow with a formidable impact, snapping the arm in two, propelling the jagged ends of his ulna and radius through the soft flesh in the crook of his elbow, spattering blood across his cohort’s horrified face. The defeated bully fell to the floor in a splutter of retching shock. Tears flooded his friend’s eyes as thick blood glugged out around the snapped ends of his forearm, and a knife clattered across the changing-room floor as it fell from the terrified sidekick’s fingers.

‘I’m glad you see things my way,’ Pegg whispered. ‘You’re both banned for a month.’ The boys looked dis appointed, even the one who would probably never do breaststroke again.

‘Oh, and that’s effective immediately,’ Pegg asserted. ‘Check in with Canterbury on the way out, he’ll take your pictures for the wall of shame.’

‘W-w-who’s Canterbury?’ stuttered the weaker of the two twats.

‘You’ll know when you see him.’ Pegg smiled, thinking of his uptight robotic friend, whom he had only just finished constructing and who was in no way a derivative combination of various other famous robots.

The bullies left. The smaller herbert supporting his broken friend. The boy smiled at Pegg, his face a mixture of awe and admiration.

‘Thank you,’ he gushed. ‘Thank you for helping me.’

‘I wasn’t just helping you, kid,’ Pegg said in a way that was reminiscent of Harrison Ford talking affectionately to a small Chinese boy. ‘I was helping every kid that has ever been intimidated in a swimming pool changing room and that includes me.’

‘Y-you?!’ the young boy stammered, as if he couldn’t compute the notion of Pegg being a weedy little crybaby, terrified of being threatened and called a bummer.

Another lifeguard entered, a beautiful French girl whose name was Murielle. She seemed worried, approaching Pegg at speed.

‘Simone, Simone,’ she cooed lovingly, despite the note of concern in her sing-song voice. ‘Someone did a bellyflop off the top board and his tummy has exploded!’

‘Excuse me,’ Pegg apologised to the grateful young boy. ‘I’m needed elsewhere.’

He was gone before either of them realised (because he was so quick like the Flash or Mr Muscle), leaving an air of confused wonder between the Gallic goddess and the small boy, a boy whose long-term sanity Pegg had just rescued from a future of regret and obsessive, cathartic reimagining.

Pegg opened his eyes.

‘Remember Murielle back then, Canterbury?’ asked Pegg, drifting out of his reminiscences back to the reality of his luxurious quarters aboard the hi-tech private stealth jet.

‘Indeed I do, sir,’ Canterbury’s voice sounded over the intercom, startling Pegg slightly, despite the fact he had asked the question. ‘A true beauty then as she is now.’

‘It still amazes me,’ Pegg mused. ‘What she became.’

‘Perhaps it was fate, sir,’ offered the droid thoughtfully.

‘Perhaps it was,’ agreed Pegg with a rueful smile. ‘How long until Marrakesh?’

‘Thirty minutes, sir,’ returned Canterbury.

‘Good. That gives me enough time to watch the escape montage from
The Shawshank Redemption
,’ fizzed Pegg excitedly.

‘How many times do you think we’ve watched that film?’ added Pegg.

‘I’ve lost count,’confessed Canterbury.

‘Really?!’ worried Pegg.

‘No,’ admitted Canterbury. ‘It’s 137.’

The whole experience of lifeguarding the big pool at Gloucester Leisure Centre had a pleasing sense of completion for me. As if I had finally conquered an old fear by returning to hold partial dominion over it, or at least uphold its ancient laws. I would sit in the high chair at the edge of the deep end (roughly where I had almost drowned fifteen years prior), swinging my whistle, a languid prince meting out justice to those who transgressed the list of very clear rules. Rules that are well known to any of us who have frequented the local baths; rules which, in the main, make complete sense. With a few variations between principalities, they are as follows:

1.   No running.

2.   No pushing.

3.   No acrobatics.

4.   No bombing.

5.   No swimming in the diving area.

6.   No diving in the shallow end.

7.   No unaccompanied minors.

8.   No heavy petting.

These commandments were usually emblazoned upon a pool-side billboard, each diktat accompanied by a cartoon illustration, in case swimmers were too busy bombing, running and petting to address the written word. They were all very clear in their depiction of the prohibited act: a naughty-looking person running; a suave-looking, hairy-chested brute balancing a bikini-clad young woman on his shoulders; a hapless swimmer oblivious to an imminent collision from above. The only cartoon that failed to convey its intent or reasoning was the coy representation of heavy petting: a man and a woman in a tentative embrace, looking amorously at each other as tiny love hearts popped in the air between them.

As a child, this was particularly confusing to me. I had no idea what light petting was, let alone the heavier variety. I still recall the sense of bewilderment as I regarded the poster, not understanding why this particular pastime was banned in the water and where one might indulge in it legally. Even now, I’m not entirely sure what they meant by heavy petting. Was it simply a case of saving the embarrassment of others, or were these strictures put in place to prevent more sinister hazards? A watery collision with a freshly released skein of bodily fluid for instance could really spoil a Sunday-morning swim and, as a lifeguard, you never truly know what goes on beneath the ever-moving surface.

The other poolside warning sign that sticks in my memory is the one that whimsically reminded bathers that the baths were not a toilet. ‘Welcome to our “OOL”. Notice there’s no “P” in it? Let’s keep it that way.’ I always felt the designers of this poster missed a trick by not going one step further and proclaiming ‘Welcome to our “L” . . .’

I actually used that gag in my very early stand-up routines, which I would perform wearing my lifeguard’s uniform. It was a fun joke to tell because it required the audience to apply the final piece of the comedic jigsaw themselves. In the same way that Meredith Catsanus’s mother had got the giggles in the Lady chapel of Gloucester Cathedral having mentally contributed the word ‘crapped’ to the end of ‘the cat crept into the crypt’ tongue twister, the audience for my lifeguard character comedy would do a little linguistic arithmetic and come up with the word ‘poo’, no doubt followed by a visual representation all their own. Terribly juvenile, I know, but there is often comic value in juvenility and the process by which this gloriously childish punchline is reached is gratifying by its collaboration, which, in contrast to giggling at a floater, is quite grown-up.