Lane The Swimmers

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-450-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Longlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2021 The outcast in a family of former competitive swimmers must prepare for the end of her mother's life in this sharp, sparkling debut from a bold New Zealand talent. When an affair ends badly and takes her career down with it, 26-year-old Erin leaves Auckland to spend the holiday weekend with her aunt, uncle, and terminally ill mother at their suburban family home. On arrival she learns that her mother has decided to take matters into her own hands and end her life - the following Tuesday. Tasked with fulfilling her mother's final wishes, Erin can only do her imperfect best to navigate difficult feelings, an eccentric neighbourhood, and her complicated family of former competitive swimmers. She must summon the strength she would normally find in the water as she prepares for the loss of the fiery, independent woman who raised her alone, and one last swim together in the cold New Zealand Sea.

Chloe Lane is a writer and founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. She was the 2022 recipient of the Todd New Writer's Bursary and a 2021 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow. Her debut novel The Swimmers was longlisted for the Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham NZ Book Awards. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and young son.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lane, Chloe

Leseproben

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 pohutukawa 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 road, ditch, wonky wire and wood fence, empty hump of paddock, three dusty nikau palms. It was a mirror image of the scene out the other window. Except for those exoticlooking nikau palms, which appeared alien against that gorse- ravaged backdrop.

‘Hello, Erin,’ Aunty Wynn called.

I turned to witness her putting her fingers in her mouth and whistle at me like she was summoning a sheepdog.

‘Erin! This fellow and I are going to need some assistance.’

In what was admittedly a pretty petulant move, I heaved the package in my lap onto the driver’s seat, but with too much force so it bounced and rolled out the open door. I could clearly see Aunty Wynn’s face as she watched her bundle of sausages and chops reach the centre of the ditch. Next she looked at me with the kind of expression my mother had used all those times when as a teenager I’d come home at three in the morning stinking of rum and Cokes, with mince-and-cheese pie spillage down the front of my outfit.

I collected the meat package on my way to join Aunty Wynn in the paddock.

The goat was bigger up close. Its coat was off-white with a clean brown splotch on its back, and it had a beard that looked as though it had recently been trimmed and conditioned. Its horns were both hooked around and wedged into a fork of the lowest branch of the pohutukawa. It wasn’t clear how it had got stuck that way. Its yellow eyes were round with panic, but beyond that they were just cold animal eyes. I didn’t feel comfortable being that close to it.

‘We’re going to have to lift him up off the branch and this way a bit,’ Aunty Wynn said, as if none of this was new to her. ‘He’ll kick and it might not be pretty, but it’s the only way.’

For decades Aunty Wynn had worn large unflattering glasses, similar to those of the Queen, but in the last year she had updated to more modern frames coated in a cheap turquoise that brilliantly matched her pants. They were exactly the kind of glasses you would expect a small-town nurse to wear. From beneath a helmet of curly auburn hair, she blinked at me through her thick lenses, waiting for me to respond.

‘How’d it get like this in the first place?’ I asked.

The goat was wearing a collar, and attached to the collar was a long metal chain, which trailed back down the paddock towards a triangular hut constructed out of pinewood and rusted-up corrugated iron. I’d seen several of those goat huts already on our drive from the bus stop.

‘Goats like to jump about.’ Aunty Wynn said this in her most condescending tone. ‘Though I’ve always thought they must have bad depth perception—you wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve found various goats.’

‘Like where?’ I asked.

Aunty Wynn shook her head and smiled. I could see her mind turning, remembering those various goats. She had no intention of sharing them with me.

My mother and I had always approached the annual Moore family gathering—which for reasons that had never been revealed were always held on the most innocuous of public holidays, Queen’s Birthday Monday—as if it were something to win. Me and Mum against the rest of them. Every exchange was up for grabs. In that moment I hated Aunty Wynn for keeping me out of the loop about her various goat rescues, for the small power she wielded.

‘What do you want me to do then?’ I said, determined to win something back. I placed the meat package on the grass beside me and clapped my hands.

‘I’m going to give this fellow a hug,’ Aunty Wynn said. She was wearing a baggy grey-marle sweatshirt with two pink dolphins embroidered over her heart. She rolled up her sleeves to reveal two soft freckled forearms. ‘Then I’m going to lift him up and sideways so you can unhook his horns.’

‘Yup,’ I said, pretending I was bored.

I moved so I was standing directly opposite the goat. Despite the pitched angle of its head, and the branch between us, I could see into both its eyes. I wondered whether it knew we were trying to help. It hadn’t made any move to kick. In fact, if it weren’t for its fraught bleats, I would have said it seemed weirdly resigned to its hanging position in that tree.

Now Aunty Wynn leaned in, and with a ‘Here I go’ she grabbed the goat around its middle. That started it kicking— Aunty Wynn was only just out of reach of its hooves. Its four legs went wild. It was running for its life.

‘I’m going to lift him on the count of three,’ she said.

She counted down and then she raised the goat up with a groan, lifting it clear of the branch,...