The Swimmers


 
 
 Chloe Lane is a writer and the founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. The Swimmers is her first novel and was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her husband and young son. 
 The Swimmers
 
 Chloe Lane
 
 Gallic Books
 London
 
 A Gallic Book
 First published by Te Herenga Waka University Press
 New Zealand in 2020
 
 © Chloe Lane 2020
 Chloe Lane has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
 
 First published in Great Britain in 2022 by
 Gallic Books, 12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT
 
 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention
 No reproduction without permission
 
 All rights reserved
 
 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
 
 ISBN 978-1-913547-31-8
 
 Typeset in Minion Pro by Gallic Books
 Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)
 
 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
 
 For my family
 
 
 Contents
 
 
 The Saturday Before
 
 
 The Sunday Before
 
 
 The Monday Before
 
 
 Tuesday
 
 
 Wednesday
 
 
 
 The Saturday Before
 
 1
 
 ‘It’s a painting show,’ I said. ‘Geometric abstraction.’
 ‘Geometric abstraction,’ Aunty Wynn said.
 ‘Shapes,’ I said. ‘Squares and triangles, etcetera.’
 I had no desire to discuss art with Aunty Wynn. This was the first time she had shown any interest in my interests. I had my mother to blame for these questions about my recent curatorial debut, and while trapped inside a car.
 ‘I can remember the difference between an isosceles triangle and the other one.’ It was typical of Aunty Wynn to veer the conversation into a zone where she could be in control, in the know. ‘The isosceles and the triangle with three sides the same.’
 ‘You mean the equilateral,’ I said. ‘And there’s the scalene— you’ve forgotten that one.’
 ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t ring a bell.’
 Then, before I could respond, as if it were the only play she could think of to again shift the subject of attention in her favour, Aunty Wynn tugged hard on the steering wheel, and I was thrown sideways in my seat.
 ‘Shivers,’ she said. She brought the car to an uneasy but deliberate stop on the grassy verge on the wrong side of the road. She hadn’t lost control of the vehicle—she had seen something. ‘Look at that.’
 I was holding a brown paper package of raw meat that Aunty Wynn had collected from the butcher shop after collecting me from the bus stop. It was our red meat for the long weekend. She had insisted I nurse the parcel, which was the size of my head,all the way to the Moore family house. I was no vegetarian, but the car was filled with the stench of uncooked beef and lamb. I’d already spent two hours on the bus. Now I just wanted to reach our destination and see my mother, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a month. I wasn’t interested in any kind of delay.
 I squinted through the dirty windscreen. ‘Look at what?’
 Aunty Wynn flung open her door and skidded down the small gravelly ditch, and was climbing over the wire fence that separated the verge from the paddock before I saw, strung up by its horns and swinging from a low branch of a bare pōhutukawa about twenty metres away, the stricken goat. The animal’s back hooves were a foot off the ground. I could hear it bleating. It was a wretched sound. The desperation in its cries, now waning, now increasing.
 I had no intention of getting involved. I hadn’t even planned on coming north for Queen’s Birthday weekend. Only a lastminute change of circumstance had dragged me out of my previous obligation at Mean Space, the gallery where I’d been interning the last six months or so, and where I’d just curated my first show. Knowing how much it meant to me to have my foot in the door with Auckland’s art scene, my mother would have been the first to be baffled by my affair with Karl, the gallery’s director. The affair had ended abruptly on Friday, after Karl’s wife found us in the storage room, backed hard against a rack of paintings covered in bubble wrap and corrugated cardboard, our hands down each other’s pants. I hadn’t told my mother that was why I’d changed my mind about attending the annual Moore family lunch. I hoped she thought it was because I missed her.
 I watched Aunty Wynn from the safety of the passenger seat. Her figure was that of a woman who had once been an athlete but who hadn’t managed to keep a full grip on her fitness through middle age. She was in her late fifties, older than my mother by a couple of years, and, as of two weeks prior, mymother’s primary caregiver. She was standing with her hands on her hips with her back to me. Her three-quarter-length turquoise pants were made from a synthetic material that clung to her legs and was bunched up around her backside and waist from the time she had been sitting in the car. On her feet were brand new Nikes, road-cone orange. She was a confusion of wealth and small-town fashion sense. The goat was bleating and softly swinging beside her. I guessed she was figuring out how to extract it from the branch without getting kicked or head-butted. As I was reassuring myself that she wouldn’t trust me to be of use anyway, she turned and flapped her arm in a way that suggested she expected me to join her. I pretended I couldn’t see.
 Like I said, I had no intention of getting involved. I was a born and raised city girl—starting in Wellington and recently settling in Auckland. I looked out my side window: roughly sealed