The Shallow End of Certainty

The public pool had rules against running, diving in the shallow end and bringing glass beyond the gate. It had no rule against arriving twenty minutes before closing because Raven had bet me I could not swim ten lengths without turning the last two into an argument.

“An argument with whom?” I asked.

“The water, probably.”

She paid for two admissions before I could improve my defence. At the lockers I put away my jacket, notebook, watch and pendant. The locker key came on a yellow rubber loop large enough to restrain a modest pumpkin. Raven wore hers round her wrist. I put mine round mine and announced that the design showed a lack of trust.

“It shows experience,” said the attendant.

His name was Len. He had a paperback open beneath the counter and the expression of a man who had watched generations of clever people discover wet tiles.

The pool was nearly empty. An older woman travelled up and down the centre lane with slow, economical strokes. Two teenagers were conducting a kickboard race which the lifeguard had declined to recognise as an official event. In the shallow end, a girl called Amara was learning to put her face underwater while her father stood close enough to catch her and far enough away not to do it for her.

I swam my ten lengths. On the ninth, Raven passed me with offensive serenity. On the tenth, I attempted greater efficiency and swallowed enough chlorinated water to become briefly municipal.

“You argued,” she said when I reached the wall.

“I lost on a technicality.”

We were climbing out when Amara gave a sharp cry. The brass token from her locker key had slipped off its split ring and fallen into the pool. It lay on the pale blue floor a little beyond her reach, bright and perfectly visible.

Her father asked the lifeguard for the long-handled net. I was already beside the step.

“I can get it,” I said.

Raven looked at the token, then at me. “Can you get where it is, or where it looks as though it is?”

There are moments when affection is indistinguishable from an audit.

I knelt on the edge and reached into the water. The token appeared scarcely deeper than my forearm. My fingers met tile several centimetres short of it.

Amara watched with grave interest. “You missed.”

“The pool has misrepresented the distance.”

“It’s a pool.”

Her father turned away, but not before I saw him laugh.

Light had done what light does at a boundary. Rays leaving the token travelled through water and then air. Because the two materials slow light by different amounts, the rays bent as they crossed the surface. My eyes received those bent rays; my thoroughly obliging brain extended them backwards in straight lines and placed the token higher than it really was. Viewed nearly straight down, something under water can appear roughly three quarters of its actual depth. Viewed at an angle through a rippling surface, its apparent position becomes even less cooperative.

I explained only the last sentence. Amara had already discovered the rest experimentally.

“So look from above,” she said.

“That would be the sensible procedure.”

“Were you doing a different one?”

Raven sat on the edge beside her. “He was doing the confident one.”

The lifeguard arrived with the net. Her name badge said JULES. She offered it to Amara’s father, who offered it to me, perhaps because by then my dignity was clearly public property. I moved directly above the token and lowered the net vertically. A return jet pushed the mesh sideways. I corrected too much, scraped the tile and collected a blue hair tie instead.

One of the kickboard racers applauded.

“Useful,” Jules said. “Not the assignment.”

The water trembled under the overhead lamps. Bright threads gathered and separated on the pool floor as the surface changed shape—little moving concentrations of light, made by ripples acting as shifting lenses. The token seemed to jump among them without moving at all.

Amara lay flat on the coping and covered one eye. “Left,” she said.

I moved the net left.

“Your other left.”

“A dangerous phrase in any technical operation.”

“Stop. Down.”

This time the brass disk clicked into the mesh. Amara took the net handle from me and drew it in herself. Jules checked the split ring, found it bent and replaced it with a fresh one from the first-aid desk’s small treasury of things people drop, snap or forget. Len brought over a second yellow wrist loop without putting down his paperback.

“Experience,” he said.

Amara fastened both loops round her wrist. “Now it can’t escape.”

“It never moved,” I said.

She considered this. “You did.”

The closing whistle sounded. The older woman completed her final length before acknowledging it. The teenagers declared their race a draw because neither could remember the score. Raven and I collected our things and stood beneath a hair dryer that produced warm air with the force and conviction of someone sighing.

Outside, the pavement still held the day’s heat. I put my pendant back over my shirt and checked the locker key twice before returning it.

Raven slipped her hand into mine. “You know,” she said, “I would have let you dive for it.”

“In the shallow end?”

“Only after Jules explained the rules.”

“Cruel.”

“Experienced.”

Through the glass doors, Amara held the recovered token up to the light. It was exactly where it appeared to be now. I found that mildly suspicious, but kept the opinion to myself.