Before the Lifeguards

Six a.m. at Bronte and the lifeguards aren't on yet. That's when we go in. There's about a dozen of us. There's no club. There's no WhatsApp group, thank God. There's just the same people at the same time, and if you're there you're there. Kerry, who is sixty-something and has a swim cap with a shark on it. Two brothers who don't talk to each other on land and swim side by side in the water. A woman I only know as the Doctor because someone called her that once. Me. I'm forty and I started two years ago when my marriage ended and I needed something that would make me cold enough to stop thinking. The buoy is about four hundred metres out. Out and back. Nobody's timing it. Nobody knows their pace. Kerry doesn't own a watch that goes in water. If you asked one of the brothers how long it takes he'd look at you like you'd asked how long a kiss takes. Winter is best. Fourteen degrees, the sky just going grey, the sand hard and cold under your feet. You walk in and your body files a formal complaint. Then you go under and everything in your head goes quiet, all at once, like someone's closed a door on a party. Out at the buoy you stop. That's the rule nobody wrote. You hang on to it or tread water next to it and you look back at the beach, the flats, the headland, the one guy with the dog, and you don't say anything much. Kerry sometimes says "beautiful" and no one argues. Then back. The swell pushes you home. You come out and stand with your hands on your knees while the water runs off you and the first lifeguard is driving the buggy down the ramp, and the day has started, and you have already done the best thing you're going to do in it. Last Thursday the Doctor didn't come. Nobody said anything. Kerry looked up the beach a couple of times. We went in. She was there Friday. Nobody asked.