The Ladies' Midnight Swimming Club(9)

And yet, Jo still felt it lingered between them. It wasn’t an argument or even regret – more a narrow apprehension that might detonate at some point and it meant that for years she’d guarded her words carefully. So, although Lucy only lived three hours away, sometimes it felt as if she’d moved to a different world. They’d drifted apart in some indefinable way; not that they didn’t speak every other day, rather, they didn’t talk to each other as they had before and Jo missed this dearly.

Three curlews circling stridently above her head brought her thoughts back from things she wished she could change. God, she loved this place. She loved everything about coming down here to swim when darkness closed in on her and freed her from the cumbersome truth of her age and aches and the gnawing certainty that time was running out. She loved the godliness of it all, which was strange, because she’d never been a religious person. Perhaps it was the sense of how completely irrelevant all her fears were in the face of the utter vastness of the sea and sky around her. She loved the silence and the roar of the ocean, the velvet sky and the inky water. Mostly she loved the fact that it made her feel alive in a way that nothing else could. She even loved the biting cold that ate through her skin and into the very marrow of her bones – in some absurd way, it warmed her from the inside out, as if it lit some fire that would never be extinguished.

There was no turning the clock back on what might have been. Out here, with the sea gently embracing her in its icy seal, she could clear her thoughts. It was time to think only of those things she might be able to change for the better.

Elizabeth O’Shea was every bit as lost as Lucy, even if it was for very different reasons. Whatever about the surgery, or her husband’s debts or that old mausoleum of a house she was rattling about in – Jo knew that no matter how she tried to set up the dominoes, ultimately Lucy taking over the surgery was out of her hands and she was fine with that. If it’s for you, it won’t pass you. Isn’t that what her own mother had said many years ago?

No; she’d done what she could there. Jo sighed, feeling a familiar wave of contentment wash over her – as if she was closing the page on another chapter where she could read no further.

But this, an unexpected thought was edging its way into her now; this could be the greatest gift she could ever leave with both Lucy and Elizabeth. These days, she thought about leaving a lot, as if some message had long been printed on her DNA and she was responding to its inherent whisper. She sighed deeply now, wondering how she could put into words the nirvana state of joy that swimming each night in the freezing waves brought to her.

She would bring them swimming with her, down here, at night; somehow she would talk them both into it, just once. It would be something they’d remember when she left them; perhaps they would cling to it when she was gone, or maybe, just maybe they could come here together occasionally.

Overhead, the moon stole swiftly behind a swollen grey cloud and darkness enveloped her further, so it felt as if there might not be a soul about for miles. Then, as if to reassure her, the little church bell far up above her rang out its midnight chimes. Jo closed her eyes. She was too old for making wishes, but one floated up and she murmured it onto the stillness of the air around her. The Ladies’Midnight Swimming Club. That’s what she wanted more than anything else now and somehow, some deep part of her knew with certainty it would be the answer to so many other questions.





4


Dan


Dan exhaled – a long, ragged sound that felt as if it might fill the whole city. Of course no-one else heard it. He looked out across the rooftops. People were getting on with life, oblivious to the fact that his world was crumbling around him. It was one of those stupid, horrible coincidences, that was all – but Leah Maine wouldn’t see it like that. He was quite sure of that.

Leah was head of the studio, parachuted in six months earlier when the new owners decided a more aggressive approach to growing the audience was required. Dan knew even then, neither the Americans, nor Leah, boded well for the sitcom he’d written to be commissioned for a third year. He was right. Still, although he could see the final curtain before they’d even completed recording, it was the unfortunate timing that had finished them off. The red tops were full of it, mind you; it was an easy gambit to make a short and screeching headline of his downfall. The worst of it all was that the show was good. The critics had praised everything, from the writing, to the acting; even the costumes had picked up prizes at the annual awards.

‘The problem,’ Clive Cooper said as they waited for their final sentence, ‘was not with the show.’

‘It’s not you, it’s me?’ Dan said, as if that insufferable break-up line covered the train wreck this would make of his career.

‘Yeah, something like that,’ Clive said and he began to inspect those perfectly manicured hands. Clive would recover. He had fingers in so many pies; he was up to his elbows in work and he’d been in demand since his one big hit, The Green People, had bagged every gong going a few years earlier. ‘Look, hardly your fault that the episode went out on the same night that a tourist boat sank on the Thames…’

‘No, but very unfortunate that the whole episode was one long joke about a modern-day Titanic bringing down the whole of Westminster…’ In fairness, Dan felt bad for the real-life victims whose faces would probably live on forever in scenes that were televised on all the major news channels. That was it, really. While the news channel was beaming out pictures of the greatest tragedy London had seen in his lifetime, their channel had audiences laughing their heads off at the same story, but in a spoof docu-comedy that suddenly no-one found funny.