Free The Swimming Pool by Louise Candlish Page B

protection and terrified we would not give it. I tried not to notice that she always reached for Ed first, tried not to think that she had
good reason to trust her father over her mother. During these episodes she suffered nausea, palpitations, diarrhoea and, worst of all, hideous choking convulsions, though there was never any obstruction in her throat.
    As her speech developed, so did her ability to describe her fear.
    ‘What do you think the water will do?’ I asked her once.
    ‘It will swallow me,’ she said, and a grotesque image spilled into my consciousness, an image of hands tearing at blonde hair, of desperate eyes still open under water. I purged it at once, like bile in the gullet.
    Seeking advice online, we came upon the glass of water test, which involved turning a glass upside down and plunging it into a basin full of water. ‘See, the air is still inside the glass,’ I told Molly, though she could hardly bear to look, doing so only through splayed fingers. ‘The same thing happens when you put your head under water. You see, it can’t go inside you! The air prevents the water flowing into your nose.’
    ‘So long as you don’t tilt your head back,’ Ed said.
    ‘Ed!’
    Molly tilted back her head and cried.
    Swimming lessons, conducted by instructors experienced with nervous pupils, were, without exception, disastrous. However thoroughly we briefed the teacher, however specialized he or she claimed to be, it made no difference to the strength of Molly’s aversion, the depth of her anguish. It was heartbreaking, over and over.
    On
good authority, we tried a lake instead of a pool: no sudden drop, no queuing or climbing required on exit. We tried to tempt her to the water’s edge with a chocolate finger for each step taken. There would be a toy, we promised, if she just put her toes into the water. She became hysterical, straining against our grip to escape us and calling out that we were hurting her, which drew concerned approaches from bystanders. We concluded that we – like the swimming teachers – did not have the necessary expertise to tackle what must surely be a form of post-traumatic stress disorder: a psychologist would succeed where we were failing, an expert in childhood phobias.
    That was when the word ‘aquaphobia’ entered our vocabulary, as did the necessary definition for explaining to others how it differed from hydrophobia. (Very occasionally, word leaked that poor Molly had rabies.)
    And so to the years of therapists, so many I lost count. The process never varied: waiting for the referral to reach the top of the waiting list, waiting for the next appointment, waiting for advice about subconscious learning and empowerment through knowledge. The Archimedes Principle was discussed, the buoyancy laws we’d demonstrated so unsuccessfully in the bathroom basin explained over and over. Hippocrates came up (so, once, did
Jaws
). We were told that instead of following our teacher’s instinct patiently to detail time and again the technical reasons why a situation was safe, we were simply to say to her, ‘You know the facts.’ And yet the
facts included statistics that made Molly’s fear so understandable in the first place – and stirred our own, frankly. People
did
drown, thousands a year worldwide, about four hundred annually in the UK; and for those who could not swim, the risk was considerably greater, making our daughter’s condition a catch-22.
    ‘What do we do?’ I asked Ed.
    ‘We get on with it,’ he said. ‘With the rest of life.’
    Not all of it, however: for one thing, there would be no second child until we’d fixed the first, until I’d stopped blaming myself, stopped declaring myself unfit. But how could I stop when I knew that Ed had not? Even the least educated or experienced of parents knew you didn’t take your eye off a toddler in water, however shallow; a teacher of young children and possessor of an up-to-date first-aid qualification had no excuse.