Animals - Keith Ridgway

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      The mouse’s corpse was washed away by the rain, I suppose. All the gutters were raging when I left the café. But a few streets away they were calmer, and when I got to the place where I’d seen the mouse, the ground was almost dry. I don’t know if that meant that the rain had been very localised or that the sun was very hot. It didn’t feel very hot.

      I was feeling, by this time, if I’m honest, a little perplexed. I know that when I list the things that happened that day, they don’t seem to amount to very much. And they don’t. But nevertheless, I was, even by the time I left Michael after lunch, feeling somewhat rattled – on edge. Stress had crept into me. Even stepping out of the café I moved very slowly, nervously, afraid that the dog might still be around. So much so that I think Michael had to nudge me in the back to get me into the street. I think it was mostly the dog. The rain and the dog. They had, both of them, unsettled me slightly, but I wasn’t sure why, and maybe I was simply, unconsciously, the victim of various automatic associations that had no relevance to me personally. Michael was going to the left, and it made sense for me to go to the left as well, as there was a bus stop in that direction from where I could catch a bus home. But it was also the way the dog had gone. I can’t remember what I told Michael now – that I wanted to look in some shops or something – but I made an excuse, said my goodbyes and walked instead to the right.

      I wonder now why I didn’t tell Michael about the mouse. Perhaps because I knew that he’d have wanted to look at the photographs stored on my camera, and that he would have had some wry way of making the whole thing seem a lot less strange, a lot more unremarkable. He would have been quick to puncture what would have seemed to him a typically inflated sense of significance and drama which I had attached, not for the first time, to something banal. I regret it now. Because that is probably exactly what I needed just then, and it may have proved useful later on. Delete the photographs if they bother you. Forget all about it. Put it out of your mind. But of course, as you know, I kept it to myself. Which is typical and predictable. But I shouldn’t make the mistake now of believing that my failure to talk to Michael – and the consequent failure to be convinced of the insignificance of the mouse – was in itself significant. There’s no point is replacing the ridiculous Oh my God a dead mouse with the equally ridiculous Oh my God I didn’t tell Michael about the dead mouse.

      In any case, I have no way of knowing that telling Michael would have made any difference anyway. He might have had the same reaction as me. He might have been moved by the same odd mechanism and been knocked off balance – reinforcing my sense of peculiarity and low-level but elaborate menace. I was stuck with my weird mouse reaction. Nothing had defused it. And if you add to it my reawakened worries for Rachel and the slightly disconcerting talk of building ghosts (though, to be honest, Michael’s story hadn’t really made its full impact on me at that point), plus the rather biblical rain and the demon dog, then I think it’s fair to say that I had a head full of negative thoughts. I felt a little queasy.

      I decided to go for a swim.

      I took a bus home, dropped off my bag (I left it on a chair in the kitchen), changed out of my shoes into some trainers, picked up my swimming things, and walked to the quiet end of our street and through the park to the sports centre. It’s a brand new centre, and the local council has spent a lot of money on it, but it has been very badly designed, or perhaps very badly built (Michael suggests a little of both) and already it looks somewhat dilapidated. Most days when I go, some part of the changing rooms, or the reception, or the gym, is inevitably cordoned off – due to leaks or problems with ceiling tiles falling down or the floor buckling or otherwise giving way. One day I was in the communal shower area when a large tile fell from the wall, coming away as neatly as if it had been pushed out from the other side, and it shattered on the floor in a cloud of dust and fragments. Luckily, no one had been standing close to it at the time. Despite all these problems, and the huge controversy which they have engendered, I still love going to the pool. You don’t have to be a member or anything, you just have to pay a small per-use fee. You have to be careful with timing of course. Sometimes it’s not open access, it’s booked up by clubs or schools. Or some days, especially on warm days, it can be very busy, and after-school hours can be filled with noisy kids. This time of day, though, is usually perfect, and when I got there I was cheered up greatly by the fact that there were only a handful of people in the changing room, and all of them seemed to be getting dressed, having finished their swims.

      I love to swim. I always have. It calms me, soothes me. I don’t really know what it is about it that has such a positive effect on me, but it’s not unusual I suppose. It’s sensual of course – being almost naked, surrounded by warm water; and it’s exercise, the only exercise I get really; and it’s also the only physical activity that I do relatively well. Perhaps it was for all these fairly mundane but sensible reasons that I decided to go for a swim. But I remember wondering, as I undressed, whether it wasn’t something as well to do with the rain I’d seen from the café during lunch with Michael. I wondered whether what I was actually doing was attempting to reassert myself over the element. As if I needed to reassure myself that I had the measure of it, that I had it tamed, that I could be a master of water – that it was, after all, only water, and that it was there for me to use and enjoy and not to fear. The thought made me laugh as I stepped beneath the lukewarm shower and slipped my goggles over my head. Then I made my way carefully through to the poolside, thinking that mine is a daft psychology, and that I would make K laugh later that evening with an account of my redemptive exorcism down at the sports centre.

      There was a middle-aged woman swimming slow, sedate lengths, and a young girl and her father, clinging to the side, chatting. They were all in the slow lane, and there was no one else. I had never known the pool to be so empty. I think I probably grinned as I walked to the middle lane at the deep end. I nodded to the bored-looking lifeguard slumped in his high chair and asked him if it was all right if I dived in. He nodded, unconcerned. Normally I ease myself into the pool, most of the time I use one of the ladders at the sides, and then swim to the middle lane. But I felt today that the more exuberantly I took the opportunity to enjoy myself, the better I would be able to clear my head of all my concerns and my worries.

      I dived. I’m not a great diver, but still, I dived this dive well, and my body went into the water as it should do – hands, arms, shoulders, head, chest, and then the rest of me, slicing into the water neatly, quickly, cleanly. It was a good dive. Something has to go through your mind at a moment like that. It is like a moment of violence almost – like a knife into skin, or the moment of an accident. It is heightened. I mean, things go through our minds all the time, endlessly, but there are certain moments when the thought gets caught, amplified, recorded. It’s like someone takes a photograph. And always, after that, you remember what it was you were thinking when whatever happened happened. When your car hit the kerb; when you lost your footing; when you heard the news; when you heard the bang; the moment you jumped; the moment you dived. I’m not saying that anything other than the dive happened. I just mean that a dive into a swimming pool, as you force your body to trust your brain – if you’re not used to doing it – is just such a moment. As with a trauma moment, the shock, or the adrenalin, or whatever it is, captures your thought and shows it to you in rare clarity, and stores it with those other heightened moments and their associated thoughts. And when I dived into the swimming pool that day, the thought I caught myself thinking was this one: the stain was shaped like Australia.

      It was what Michael had said, when he told me about the building ghost. That there was a stain on the carpet of the fourth floor and it wouldn’t go away and it was shaped like Australia. I couldn’t remember really what emphasis he’d given it, if any, and didn’t even know whether it was accurate or something he’d added himself as an evocative phrase, not knowing in truth what the stain looked like at all, thinking that it would assist me in visualising something. And perhaps he’d chosen Australia just because it has a distinctive shape, and also because it suggests something of considerable scale. You don’t really think of something shaped like Australia as being small. At least, I don’t. If it was something that someone had actually said to him, that had been reported to him as an accurate description, and which he had in turn reported accurately to me, did that mean that it was accurate in fact? That the stain really did look

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