The pool. A little bit of the ocean in your back yard–except in my case it is in the shape of a Santa’s boot and lies in my mother’s house in Australia.  It has been a long while since I last thought of that pool, but now that I am older, I feel a twinge of regret that I had never really used it to its full potential. Here in Tokyo, with the furnace of summer chomping at my heels, I am nestled in a valley of concrete and green, wishing ‘till my palms bead with sweat that I had that boot of blue at my beck and call.  Yet I admit that even whilst I was back at home, I was unable to enjoy that promise of coolness freely.  Why? For two reasons: one very real and breathing, the other, very imaginary and all in my own head.       

Think of a back yard and you will probably think of a calm, rectangular and green space, a neat border containing chaos in which there may be, potted plants, a vegetable patch, chimes, deck chairs, banana lounges…perhaps even some gnomes.  But my backyard was the complete opposite.   On one side there lay the pool on a large wooden deck, set on a hillside against a large, unruly slice of Australian bush. And then there was the garden: a patch of messy green, entangled with wildflowers and native spiny bristles, a home to countless of unknown creatures, some with legs and some with none that lurked and hissed through the undergrowth. 

In my mind there were two evils to be faced, and I literally had to psyche myself up to go anywhere near it.  Once I passed the slimy or multiple legged dangers (evil 1) there would be what was in the pool to affront (evil 2).  My mother would often ask me to clean it, which was the summer job that I most despised.  I would scrub the tiles whilst immersed in the water, yet despite the relief from the heat , I would freak out and see (well, at least in my mind) two scrawny legs dangling into the beneath.  Scenes from Jaws would play on a loop in my head, except that in my version, the shark had somehow entered the pool and was trapped within a cage that was located at the deep end. Why I let this artificial fear overrule logic was (and remains) a complete mystery.

But it is also true that while I was concentrating on the job at hand, at the back of my mind I sincerely thought there was a man watching me from my basement window, his finger on a button, waiting for the optimum moment to strike…

Filed under: Living