The Fish and the Knot

Fionn Duffy

The endless splashing of chlorinated water shimmered in David’s ears: the constant hum of this sweltering arena whose Olympic-sized pool he now sat in front of, staring at the white starting block he would soon be leaping from into that exhilarating underworld. On the base of the block, he read a black number 4. His eyes panned from left to right, surveying the currently occupied lanes. It would be good to start Summer Nationals with a win in the heats. He slouched back in his foldable chair. Behind him, he overheard one of the two volunteer timekeepers sitting behind him talking about how this was their young one’s frst time at Nationals: “They now have her doing fve sessions a week, not including the gym!” David raised a brow. This was his fourth year being part of his club’s ‘Performance’ group. Five mornings a week at 4.30am, his mother pulled him out of his unfnished dreams to speed along the empty lamplit roads into the pool in town. At 8am, he’d plop onto a quiet bench at school to begin his homework. At school the lads all called him “The Fish”. They had actually studied a poem that year called ‘The Fish’.

“Here and there

His brown skin hung in strips

Like ancient wallpaper”

Well David’s skin was red, especially around the eyes because of his goggles. And his hair was frizzy and smelled like a package holiday. But at least he was in good shape. “Beast” was his other nickname at school. Once, at a school football match, the rich and popular Kevin O’Connor spent the game groping David’s equine right thigh and remarking incredulously to the rest of the bench.

David brought a hand to that thigh now, caressing the ultra-thin layer of supposedly carbon-fbre infused fabric that made up his racing togs (and took him 20 minutes to pull on in the men’s bathroom, drenched in sweat and talcum powder). He remembered walking home from school once as a kid, along the bend, tearfully grasping and pulling at his big fabby quads cursing his parents.

David now felt down to the smooth naked skin just above his knees. He had only cut himself once shaving last night. He spent all evening shaving because his coach always said men waxing was gay. David liked having shaved legs. It made him feel like a statue. Whenever it was time to shave his legs, he shaved all his body hair. Hair below the neck was the earthly punishment of puberty. He wanted to feel smooth. He wanted to be felt smooth. Now he felt only the hot cotton of his grey team hoodie. But David liked wearing his hoodie before racing. With his hood up, he was a dormant volcano, an Olympian. His eyes bore in the starting block now; he was a lion. His hood was kind of tight though. He grasped for the drawstrings and felt a knot. Of course.

Three months ago, they were sitting face to face in an empty group changing room at Regionals. Caitriona Bakalova’s dusky fngers glided down the drawstrings of his hoodie.

They’d met for the frst time during the icebreaker session at the start of the inter-provincial training camp in January. She had been howling with scandalous laughter at the centre of a group of girls when he entered the hotel conference room. They were put on the same team to build the tallest structure possible out of marshmallows and spaghetti. They argued constantly resulting in her accidentally stabbing him with spaghetti. At this moment, she decided to call him “Leo”, a nickname her teammates soon began using too. They lost, but out of the chaos came a spindly spaghetti fgure that Caitriona named Gina.

Caitriona crossed the drawstrings. David watched her left eye; the shadowy amber surface of Mars, as seen from above, expanded for miles and miles out from a perfect black hole. She was completely focused on the task at hand. Murmuring fuorescent light bounced off her clear nail polish. She looped the strings.

At Regional Championships Caitriona waltzed up to David’s team area and interrupted his high-stakes Uno game to give him a big wet hug. She brought Gina.

As she left, the whole paddock turned to David, wide-eyed, to ask who she was. His coach later patted him on the back; “Not bad,” he said. David shrugged his shoulders, his eyes trained on the matte blue tiles running along the edge of the water. In the afternoon, before his 200-metre butterfy fnal, he found an empty changing room where he could be alone and enter the zone. Kanye West was blasting in his ears as Caitriona quietly entered the room, saying she had a fnal too.

There was a thin tan-line on Caitriona’s right shoulder: a line of desert sand. A little diamond ring hugged the cartilage of her right ear. She pulled the drawstrings tight. “There you go now David!” She now looked him in the eyes. He looked down and chuckled. “Thanks,” he said. David had thought of her frequently since camp. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and a chorus of giggling.

As David left the changing rooms, his paparazzo teammates pressed him for details:

“What happened???” “What happened???”

“Nothing.” David replied.

After Regionals David began texting her. She became one of his few Snapchat streaks. He hated texting. When he texted people, everything felt so concrete. In conversation things were fuid; there was tone, body language, smiles; the person he was talking to couldn’t just walk away. But on text he couldn’t fool anyone.

He was David Nolan.

He started watching Love Island on her recommendation, but he couldn’t watch it every day for eight weeks. He didn’t think she’d be interested in movies or books, so he didn’t talk about them.

She replied less and less to his messages until there was total silence.

The swimmer in the heat before David was now barrelling past the fags. He held the knot between his index fnger and thumb. On his way to his race this morning, he had seen Caitriona laughing away with her teammates as usual, but he did not say hello. Maybe they could never have had a good conversation, but he wished he had told her how beautiful she was.

David stood up and carefully pulled off his hoodie, leaving the knot intact.