Free A Short History of Richard Kline by Amanda Lohrey Page B

scrub your body with a loofah, scouring the skin hard, almost to the threshold of pain, stopping every few minutes to sluice you down with warm water out of a long-handled bucket that attendants constantly refilled.
    This was the best moment of all, the sluice of clean water across your shoulders, your lower back, thighs and feet. The warm, willing cascade of it; the luxurious blur of expectation just before the next deluge; the grateful exhalation of relief as you lay there like a slippery fish foetus in the womb of the pool room, with its dim, steamy air and its becalmed bodies.
    And I would walk out of there, loose and light, and drive home, and often eat nothing that evening because I felt clean. Purified.
    One night after a session at the bathhouse, I had a dream. I was in the big circular pool, or a space that resembled the pool, only it was not. And there was no-one there but me, floating outstretched and naked on a raft at the centre of the water. And I dreamed that the raft was also my bed, so that it was not as if I were somewhere else; rather, it was a sense of being on my bed in a state that was half-awake, and the surface of the bed was the surface of the raft. And all the while the raft was bobbing idly on the surface of the pool … And every now and then I would wake …
    It was such a long, drifting dream, but even in the waking state a mirage of water persisted in my brain, like an hallucination, so that when I looked up in the dark I could see the water eddying across the ceiling, around the fan in a soundless swirl, rippling on and on across the blackness. And after a while it came to me. I can’t get off the raft. Any moment now I will fall and sink to the bottom of the pool, and there’s no-one here and they’ll never find me, and my body will be flushed away through one of the corner drains.
    That’s when I saw the woman. Standing at the end of the pool was a woman in a white dress, and in her arms she was holding a baby, an amorphous white bundle wrapped in swaddling clothes, wrapped so tight that all I could see was its eyes. And the woman? She was familiar to me; I had seen her before. But where? And as I stared at them, thinking – who are they? and what are they doing here? – slowly, the baby began to glow. At first it shone faintly but then it began to glow brighter, the white shimmer of the image growing more and more intense until at last it flared into a blinding cone of light. At that moment I felt a tight, nostalgic sweetness in my chest, a terrifying vertigo of joy, and I knew then that the light was coming to annihilate me …
    And I woke with a gasp. And lay in the dark, open-mouthed, holding my breath. That feeling … that feeling was indescribable. For a moment I had felt as if I were falling … falling into bliss.
    And the feeling stayed with me for the whole of the day, until late afternoon, when it began to fade. As it receded, I tried to hold on to it, to wilfully recapture glimpses of the dream – the tilt of the raft, the hem of the woman’s dress, the glow from the baby – but inevitably it grew more and more faint, like a silk fabric dissolving in the mind’s eye. It could not be hung on to, and by late evening I had ceased even to try. The yearning around my heart had evaporated, the painful joy in my chest was gone.

    I began to look forward to my visits to Tamarama. I grew fond of the boys, remembering on each occasion to bring them some small treat.
    One night, when Kieran was away on business, Julie packed some cooked sausages in buttered rolls smeared with tomato sauce and we walked to the beach. After a no-frills picnic on the sand the four of us played beach cricket until it began to grow dark. At one point Matt lobbed a ball into the water.
    â€˜I’ll go,’ I said.
    â€˜No, I’ll go.’ And in one supple movement Julie had slipped out of her shorts and waded into the surf.
    Later, when the boys