Free Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam Page A

nicely, my mother said. We went up to the place 5’6” was marked, as tall as me and a lot taller than Anne, and we clung to the edge waiting for the two-thirty waves.
    There they came, rolling, smooth, every seventh one bigger, so high you could see through it.
    Was it every seventh one? There was a magic number, but I forget it now and surely the rhythms of those warm false waves cannot be those of the lunar paradigm awaited by surfers in the real seas? Our waves were warm with the extra heat from the power station; now it might be called recreational pollution-cycling. Between waves, we toiled up towards the shallow end, always combed out and back a little deeper by each inevitable buffet as it came, hitting us in the chin and lifting us so we stood like soldiers held in the apex of each wave, before sliding down its lee-side and readying ourselves to breast the next. By the time the five minutes of waves were done, our eyes were red and our fingers white and crinkly at the tip. We were also hoarse with screaming, and ready just to splash in the shallow end for a while, biding our time. We sat on the red Dumfries sandstone steps, rough on our bottoms, and watched the youths and girls (Anne said ‘girrul’) whose play was as formal and pointed as a dance. We did not look at the youths; this would be too rude. But we did watch the chests of the girls with the attention of doctors. The big boys would splash at the girls with their feet, or dive near them and rush up through the water to stand breast to breast in the warm blue which might rock them into touching, skin washed innocent of heat and hair by the water. The girls made much play of ignoring the boys and when the boys looked away the girls redrew their eyes with particularly ostentatious displays of indifference. One girl moved her head and clapped her hands more than the rest. Even in the rubber cap her face was pretty; on her right hip was a tiny embroidered diver. When she shrieked, she took her hand away from her mouth as though holding a cigarette. She was not chicken-wired with pink veins on her legs like Anne, nor was she freckled like me. She was pale nut colour all over, not the nuts my mother had with her drink, but the sugar brown of tablet. Her breasts moved after she stopped, and she wore tiny rings in her ears. In Edinburgh, it’s the Poles and the Scots-Italians who do that.
    ‘You’re right stupid, that you are,’ called one of the boys to her, in a yearning voice. ‘You canna even do a duck dive. Get on, have a wee go. I’ll help yas.’ His voice was about seventeen.
    ‘Och leave her, Ian, I’ll give you a race,’ said another boy, with an older voice and a ringleader’s way to him.
    The girl looked up, and lifted both hands to her rubber head, touching it lightly as though it were curls. All in the same moment, she pushed her hands flat to her head and steered her elbows simultaneously out and over her head, never moving her eyes and lifting her front, so two solid hemispheres rose between the scoops of her collarbones and the navy cotton of her bathing costume. She stared until the boys had gone, knowing they would be back, and went to clutch and giggle with her plain girlfriend by the side (4’6”, just right for spying out the lads without getting bombed by the bullies). Anne and I were going to discover radium, or something of the kind, so we’d not much time for boys, but I did see a glimpse of how that girl could burn in the water, incandescent even in her rubber hat.
    For some weeks Anne and I had been doing research in our laboratory; my mother naturally got it wrong and called it the nursery. There we stirred shoplifted fizzy sweets into water and sealed the solution in test tubes; we each had a Letts’ chemistry set, though the copper sulphate had run out long ago. We had dissected a shrew and felt a breakthrough was not far away; the teacher who was as near as we had come to Madame Curie was Miss Lindsay. She was firm but