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Sport 7: Winter 1991

The Lovers and the Shark

The Lovers and the Shark

Two years ago it happened I found myself in a motel swimming pool in New Mexico. I like swimming. I swim quite purposefully and I had the swimming pool almost to myself. Not quite however. At the shallow end of the pool stood a young man and woman, passionately, indeed it sometimes seemed permanently, embraced. I didn't mind this while I was swimming away from them, but as I swam towards them I found myself filled with the embarrassment of someone who is intruding into a private space ... a space which they have no right to violate. My shyness, my wish not to intrude on this couple, alternated with something less charitable—self-righteous indignation. After all this was a swimming pool and I was swimming backwards and forwards, which everyone knows is the proper thing to do in a swimming pool. Why should I be the one to feel intrusive and guilty? I felt like this swimming away from them. Then swimming towards them I began to think—ah but am I jealous of their youth and passion and so on (kicking regularly, surging to the other end of the pool). Yet who wants to be bothered with self-analysis when you are trying to shoot through the water like a silver arrow? As I swam backwards and forwards I began to dream of dressing up as a shark, and gliding, up the pool towards them. I could see myself soundless menacing and ruthless, my skin set with sharp close-set denticles, my silent crescent snarl filled with rows and rows of teeth. The lovers would suddenly see my dorsal fin approaching. They would leap out of the water screaming. I would have the whole pool to myself, free to be a silver arrow to my heart's content. It would be all my space, and deservedly so.

After I left the pool, I found myself haunted, not by the lovers themselves but by the one who had wanted all the space in the swimming pool, this page 6 person usurping the primitive power of the shark, the fin cutting through the water, the huge mouthful of teeth rising up over the back of the boat ... this temporary villain I had contemplated becoming, in order to have all the swimming pool to myself. It had in some ways been a tempting and empowering persona, and one I recognised, although I had never met it in quite that shape before. My temporary shark began to make other sharkish connections. Sharks have been a part of my life for a long time. Though shark attacks are almost unknown in New Zealand, we all know the sharks are there. Parents sometimes warn their children. 'Don't go out deep! There might be sharks!' Of course the children already know. Sharks!

Once, dramatically, I saw a shark caught on a hand line pulled up and left to die on the sand. It was only a small one, but it was a genuine shark. I stood over it watching it drown in the sunny air of a remote North Island beach. When it began to rot away, someone threw it back into the deep water where smaller fish flickered around it for a while, eating what was left, but even then its bones still glimmered mysteriously through the water if you knew where to look. It was the year I turned five. It was also the year I learned to swim. I couldn't write much in those days, but was already a slave to fiction. I talked aloud, waving sticks in the air, conducting unseen orchestras of stories remembered, recreated and invented, stories which I inhabited by temporarily becoming what I was inventing. That shark and the mystery and menace of the glimmering bones and what might have happened—that it might have been my bones glimmering there I suppose—were part of those stories in those days. It was certainly part of the first nightmare I can ever remember having: that my little sister vanished under the water and after a second or two her sunbonnet came floating to the surface. We were living in a caravan in those days. I woke up in the top bunk, crying and bewildered, to find that something which only a moment before had seemed so utterly real had dissolved into nothing. I think it was that same shark, flesh on its bones once more, that came out of the past to inhabit me and swim up and down the motel swimming pool. It's just as well I didn't have my shark suit with me.

I like to swim in deep water. I like to be where I can't feel the bottom and I have always liked that from the time I was very small, but there is always the fear of the shark sneaking up from the darkness below, and grabbing your foot. After you've been frightened of the shark for a while, you begin to tell stories about it, to take it over ... and in odd moments of life, when page 7 you have a little go at being the shark yourself, you recognise an old truth in what you are doing.