WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND
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I swam in this pool when I was back in New Zealand for a month, and my father and I visited Wellington. The first thing we did after leaving the airport and checking in to our hotel was head to a nearby sushi train. Perched side by side on a pair of high wooden stools, we proceeded to eat more than sixty dollars worth of sushi. My father is a fantastic eater, and he wants everyone else to be fantastic eaters too. He smiles and makes satisfied noises while he chews––his grey-blue eyes twinkling with pleasure. He’s like one of the puffed-up rodents I’ve seen in YouTube videos, chewing with adorable focus on a nut or carrot stick, and this is true whether he’s eating an expensive meal out, or munching on a simple cheese sandwich while standing at the kitchen sink. It’s hard not to be egged on by his enthusiasm.
Later that evening, I believed that meal might be the last my father and I shared.
I’d arranged to meet friends for drinks. My father had made his own plans––he was going to visit an old friend who lived above the city. We agreed to keep in touch––maybe we would meet up later on, maybe we would see each other the next morning at the breakfast buffet, the plan was loose––but when I called to see how he was doing, his cellphone rang and rang. My father is only in his late sixties, but after three failed calls, the image that formed in my head was of him lying prostrate on the floor of his very small hotel room in our below mid-range hotel, dead from a heart attack. This picture made no sense––my father had left the hotel hours ago––but I’d started to panic. I left the bar to stand on the street, and while dialing and re-dialing, I watched the people walking past me on the sidewalk, and I was envious of them and how confident they seemed in the knowledge that their loved ones weren’t lying facedown on thin hotel carpet. One of the people to cross my path was a man near my father’s age. He was walking a dog that was a bizarre mix of some kind of working dog and one of those large round-faced dogs with curly hair. The dog’s tail was monstrous and vertical, and it bounced with metronomic precision, keeping time with its owner’s stride.
My father and mother had dogs before my brothers and I arrived. I’ve seen Super 8mm footage of my father showing one of the dogs in a competition. He’s wearing trainers, and is running around the circumference of the arena with one arm outstretched, the leash in his hand short and taut, he and the dog keeping perfect stride. I thought of this footage while I tried his cellphone again. My parents didn’t make sense to me as Dog Show people. If I hadn’t seen the proof of them in action––there were photographs, too––I wouldn’t have believed it. But then again, that was another life ago––a time when they were younger than the age I was now, a time before children, a time of pleasures I knew nothing about, a time when there was probably more to be excited about than dignified portions of sushi arriving on a little conveyor belt.
When my father finally picked up, he sounded annoyed. He was fine––he was enjoying his dinner with his friend, his phone had been on mute in his jacket pocket. I pretended I was drunk and apologised for all the missed calls. I laughed it off. I felt embarrassed about how swiftly I’d jumped to the worst conclusion, so embarrassed I couldn’t bring myself to tell him how worried I’d been, and how guilty I’d felt that this might have been it for him.
I went for a swim in the hotel pool the next morning after my father and I’d enjoyed the breakfast buffet––how his face shone as he ate his mini croissants. Swimming in this pool was like swimming in a shipping crate. It was too short to stretch out for proper lap swimming––it was more of a flap around after a few cocktails at the hotel bar kind of pool. Walls surrounded it on three sides. The windows on one wall made the space only slightly less claustrophobic. These windows continued below the water line, so while I was swimming I could look out at the street several storeys down. It was an inner-city back street––the kind where people parked their cars and left their cardboard boxes and old broken pieces of furniture for collection. I couldn’t see anyone out the window, but while underwater I tried out waving at the building across the road. It felt silly, so I only did it once.