‘The Baths’ by Conor Crummey

The Falls Baths in West Belfast exist in a place between generations. Young parents hold toddlers on the water as though trying to balance them on the surface, primary school classes splash and squeal their way through the roaring excitement of day trips, teenagers steal glances at uncovered flesh that has started to take on new meaning, the middle-aged choke and gasp and cling to resolutions, and the older flotsam drift contentedly around the adult children that brought them. Visit on any given day and you will see these generations laid on top of each other like panes of different coloured glass. Were you able to look through them all from above, you might see the full spectrum of life refracted in the water of the pool. 

The part of the Falls Road on which the Baths are to be found has known joys and atrocities. The ground remembers these. The pool lies on ground that trembled in previous decades. The ground remembers these tremors, and therefore so does the pool, and so do the people in the pool, though many were not alive to feel the tremors first hand.

*

Katie observed the fleshy menagerie in the water from a slouch in the lifeguard’s chair. She narrowed her eyes so that the scene blurred into an impressionist tableau of pinks and blues. She herself did not feel a particular affinity with any of the groups that circled in the pool’s imaginary currents. She was too old for the younger teenagers, the ones who still did their drinking in parks instead of clubs. The adults who used their own IDs to get into those clubs, instead of skulking like paparazzi at the corner awaiting a pass-back, were another class above her. She glanced at the red neon of the enormous digital clock on the wall, and listened to the crashing echo of voices that is produced only in leisure centres and dreams.

Katie let her toes rest on the cool metal of one of the rungs of her chair. She had not, so far in her tenure, had to dive in to assist anyone. This pleased her. It amused her to view her role as one of Attenborough-like detachment. Document and report. Don’t interfere with the delicate ecosystem. There was balance in this place, and since this place was the whole world while she was in it, there was balance in the world. This was not something that she felt in other places, home least of all, and so the Baths offered respite. 

At first the name ‘The Baths’ struck her as rather outdated. The building was home to a leisure centre like any other. ‘The Baths’ seemed to belong to the same family of antiquated classification as her mother’s talk of going to ‘the pictures’. The younger employees had no memory of the days of overcrowded terraced houses and outdoor toilets, when a weekly visit to the Baths was community ritual. Yet even to them, the Baths were the Baths. 

It was only when Katie saw the shoal of middle-aged men who came daily to the pool that she realised how well the name still fit. The unhurried calm with which this group moved through the water was hypnotic. They would hop from one foot to another, allowing their toes to touch the bottom then pushing off, never allowing a foot to fully land but somehow never seeming to exert any effort either. They crossed the pool horizontally like this, in the way, she imagined, that astronauts might traverse the surface of the moon. 

The lifeguards had taken to referring to this group collectively as ‘The Buoys’. This nickname could be used aloud without causing offence. The Buoys thought that they were the Boys, or perhaps the Bhoys. Peace was reached through ambiguity, as was tradition. She intuitively thought of the Buoys as middle-aged, but on further reflection this was charitable. They were at that age where it would be unkind to call them ‘old’. However, she reflected, women of the same age would undoubtedly be thought of as ‘old ladies’ by these old-middle-aged men. She decided to be charitable. A-Level results were to come out in two weeks and it was important to keep the karmic scales tipped the right way. Too much was at stake. 

A circle of old ladies – real old ladies – used the northwest corner of the pool as a makeshift boardroom. This parliament had something of the occult about it. Its members spoke in hushed and urgent tones. They cast arcane incantations. They discussed with heavy seriousness the price of lamb and sausages in Shearer’s Butchers. They gossiped of the transfers of various priests to various parishes, a bitter rival’s suspicious good fortune at the Westway Bingo, and the Celtic results. Katie had seen these women’s names flash up on her screen while she worked at the front desk. Their names struck her as almost impossibly old-fashioned. She watched Bridie Maginn hold court in the circle. She tried to picture a baby named Bridie. The invisible conch soon passed to Kathy Fitzgerald. ‘Kathy’ was separated from ‘Katie’ by two letters and about a hundred years. Next it was the turn of Cissie O’Connor, then Effy Nolan, then Deirdre Kennedy. Millie – Millie – McBride patrolled the perimeter of the circle with a beady watchfulness.

There was an ineffable sense among the lifeguards that these women were privy to information that was beyond the reaches of younger swimmers. These women had felt the tremors that rocked the ground into which the pool was built. They knew what the pool knew, and what the ground beneath it knew, and this connection with the past gave them some clairvoyance of things to come. There was probably some word in Irish for it.

Katie turned away from them and watched Declan Ryan instead. He had come to the Baths every day so far this summer. Declan swam lengths of the pool with an easy grace. Always he swam twenty lengths in total: five front crawl, five breast stroke, alternating. He was on his thirteenth length now and doing his best to circumvent the Buoys. He propelled himself from the hips, his shoulders rising above the water in powerful strokes. His head turned to the side to draw breath without compromising the arc of his stroke. The pale hue produced by the tungsten lights overhead gave him the look of a painting whose colours had faded. Every few lengths, he would intersect with the Buoys on their crossing and adjust his course with a twist of his abdomen. He knew better than to ask them to adjust the course of their own crossing. That request would be met only with derision. Aye, no sweat Michael Phelps.

The lifeguards had exchanged real and invented tales of the coterie of others who moved in uneven orbits through the sapphire waters. The truths and falsehoods swirled and mixed like dark liquors in a glass. The Irish aural exam tape clicked and whired into life in Katie’s head. True or false? Fíor nó bréagach? Fearghal Fleming, who put away twenty-six pints of Harp larger in the Duke of York, in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising: one for each county free, and six shots of whiskey for those yet under the jackboot. Róisín O’Connor, the librarian from St Mary’s college up the road, who had a crack-up in the black December of 1987 and who, when on dry land, could now abide only the company of her books. Danny Hayes, the plumber and paramilitary bomb maker of some notoriety, whose neutered expression he had worn since his release under the Good Friday Agreement. Eileen McIrlaine, of the slow and mournful backstroke, whose son John Paul was born on the day that very Pope visited Ireland, who got 4 A’s in his AS Levels and who opened his wrists in the bath before he reached his eighteenth year. 

Any ecosystem can be disrupted by catastrophe. Coral reefs are blanched by acidified oceans. Forests are struck down and the creatures within starve. In North Dakota an entire species of elk was killed by a bacteria that lived peaceably in its tonsils. A change of two degrees in the climate caused this bacteria to mutate and attack the immune system of the elk. In Madagascar, a species of crab was eaten alive by invading worms that stowed away on cruise ships, as though they knew the meal that awaited them. 

The feathery equilibrium of the Falls Baths was thrown by what happened to the child Orla Walsh on a hot Saturday in August.

On that day, Katie watched Orla at play with her family. Her father held both her hands carefully and took slow steps backwards, keeping the girl afloat and letting her propel herself in an uncoordinated flutter. Orla was known to many of the pool’s regulars, having been brought to the Baths by her parents since she was a toddler. First her older brother and then she were brought to the surprisingly utilitarian mother-and-baby classes offered by the leisure centre. In these classes, the poor babas were abruptly dunked and submerged in the water, the violation of any right or interest they may have held against this treatment justified by the attainment of some obscure end. Katie wasn’t precisely sure what the near-drowning was supposed to accomplish, but the parents seemed convinced by Mirella, the severe instructor whose Mediterranean name and unfamiliar almond tan gave her an authority over the water in the minds of the parents. Orla did not seem to mind this second baptism and thrashed around happily. From here, Orla’s parents had brought her consistently, smiling proudly as she graduated from water wings to brief spurts of unassisted swimming at the age of just three or four. She had an explosion of black curls and uneven milk teeth, and was universally regarded as a wee dote.

Summer, by that day, had begun to collapse in on itself and give way to what comes next. The pool was effervescent with life and possibility in the face of this sense of ending, as the swimmers soaked up the final stretch. The Buoys crossed the pool with their usual directness. Bridie and her coven floated in their elliptical orbit and cycled through the day’s gossip. Declan Ryan avoided both schools with a more practiced ease as he moved into the final quarter of his lengths. Katie sat in her chair and imagined opening her results the following Thursday. She tried to picture the severe, Soviet typeface on the page. If 4 A’s came out she might yet get into medicine in Queen’s. Less than that and she could do pharmacy. The main thing was that she could move into the Elms Student Halls and leave her family home, if it could be called such a thing. She let her gaze drift up to Declan Ryan. He had flashed a smile last week as he made a dripping goose-step past her chair to the changing room.

Katie cast the swimmers on this day as adoring audience to silent speeches that she gave, the lifeguard chair’s elevation from the ground aiding in the fantasy of a stage. She made a powerful feminist statement by giving a speech at her sister’s wedding, in their father’s absence. There was a best supporting actress acceptance address in there somewhere. Her words were always carefully chosen and always powerful. Declan Ryan’s eyes were not unknown to brim with tears during the more stirring numbers.

Those who were there on that day would later say that there was something off about the place that afternoon; some acidic taste to the water or extra heat in the air, detectable to those of a discerning palette beneath the cosmetic excitement of summer. Bridie Maginn would swear blind that her shoulders had been ticklish that morning, an occurrence that had happened before only on the day when her brother was killed on his way to the shops by a stray sniper’s bullet. 

Opinions on the substance of these premonitions differed, but one thing universally agreed upon was that there was something off about that fella that no one had seen before and would not see again.

Katie had noticed this man in the mid-afternoon. She would later admit that something about him unsettled, though whether the testimonials of others had made of her past self an unreliable narrator she could not say. Already that time seemed long ago, obscured by mists that gathered almost immediately.

What Katie noticed first was not the man himself, but the stirring of the other, more familiar groups within the pool. She had learned in Double Award Science that astronomers postulated the existence of Neptune by observing the patterns and behaviours of other celestial bodies, before eye was ever laid on the planet itself. So Katie’s attention came slowly to focus on the changed rhythm of the pool on this day. Something about the pattern of the familiar movements was off. The notes of the pool’s song had been rearranged, and the new sound was of a minor key. Katie watched as the pool’s inhabitants stirred and fluttered in response to the new presence.

The Buoys slowed the usual pace of their crossing to avoid intersecting with his length.

Bridie Maginn and her conspirators moved unconsciously to the opposite corner of the pool, further from the man.

Declan Ryan swam an extra length to avoid stopping at the same end where the man now rested.

Later, Katie would not remember the man’s face, or very much about his person. She recalled the unnatural slowness of his stroke, his arms rising out of the water with great effort, his head turning to the side to suck in air in great gasps. A skin coloured swimming cap was fastened to his skull. Light caught the wet latex and made Katie avert her eyes. He would swim only one length at a time before resting. At the end of each length he lounged with his shoulder blades resting against the pool’s edge, arms in messianic stretch. He lay motionless in this way for five minutes or more, eyes hidden behind black goggles, before continuing.

At the pool’s opposite end, Orla Walsh’s high laughter echoed as she kicked and thrashed, her father’s hands under her belly for support. Katie watched as he took his hands away with a surgeon’s care. Orla cackled and kicked and swam in little circles unassisted. Her father turned and treaded to her brother, who was attempting a clumsy handstand.

Katie let her eye travel to Orla’s mother as she glided lengths of the pool. 

A consensus on what happened next remains elusive.

An unfamiliar motion drew Katie’s eye to the end of the pool. Orla Walsh’s father twisted and turned. He stood at the shallow end of the pool and was not in any danger. His movements became sharper and more agitated as he looked around. She remembered a story about Cú Chulainn from primary school, in which the hero twisted and torqued his body with enough forced to dispatch legions of enemies on the battlefield. An riastradh. It had seemed an absurd image to her, but the movements of Orla’s father now evoked that force and desperation that the old storytellers must have sought to capture.

‘Orla!’

‘Where’s Orla?’

Orla’s brother was beside him and he drew the boy into his side now with one arm. 

Orla’s mother reached the end of the pool.

‘Damien?’

‘Is she with you?’

‘Orla!’

The other swimmers now began to take note. The pool’s whirring cogs slowed and stopped. Bridie Maginn cocked an inquisitive head. Some of the Buoys craned their heads forward from where they reclined by the pool’s edge, causing their many chins to fold into their necks. Declan Ryan stopped mid-length to look about him.

‘Oh Jesus.’

‘Orla?’

‘What’s happened?’

‘The wee child is missing.’

‘Orla!’

Katie leapt from her chair and ran to the far corner of the pool. She crouched to where Orla’s parents continued to twist impotently about them, as though their daughter might be hiding just behind their backs. 

‘Are you ok? Can you not find the wee girl?’

‘Just here a minute ago —’

‘Was helping her brother’

‘Left her sitting on the edge’

‘It was just a minute’

Katie scanned the room, but no mound of black curls disrupted the white and blue of the great cavern. She stood and thought to give instruction, but there was little need, for the pool swelled and began to find its rhythm and move as one now. Bridie Maginn marshalled her troops ferociously and scattered them to the corners of the women’s changing room. The Buoys took the men’s area. Declan Ryan and others ran to check the five aside football hall, the weights room, the waiting area at the front; all running off without pausing to dry themselves. 

No sign of the girl was found. The pulsing of the pool’s movements slowed now as all considered the next move. Orla’s parents stood at the water’s edge and cast smaller, quieter looks around them.

It was Bridie Maginn who noticed first that the man was no longer in the pool.

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘Who?’

‘That queer looking fella with the bake on him.’

All froze. The pool by now was empty, its waters still. Orla’s brother was crying. No one else made a sound.

‘Where the fuck did he go?’

‘Sure we don’t know…’

‘Yiz are jumping to conclusions now!’

‘Ack did you look at him?’

The search burst into being once more with a new frenzy. The plastic doors to individual changing cubicles crashed open and the more lithe hurled themselves prone to search under benches and toilet stalls. Katie ran to the front and roared to the shocked receptionist not to let anyone leave through the front door.

The search ran desperate.

The steam room, where an enormous mound of flesh poured water from a plastic bottle in cascades down his bald crown.

The jacuzzi, switched off in order to see the bottom. The exhausting relief at its emptiness.

Talk turned to the police. The Buoys spoke in hushed tones of men in the Celtic Supporters’ Club who might put the word about. Men with pool cues and hurls attached to their hands.

The old ladies surprised all with their gentleness. Clucking recriminations and insinuations of maternal shortcomings were expected, but none came. Their talons were kept withdrawn and they took Orla’s mother gently around the shoulders and gave quiet reassurances:

‘It’ll be alright, love, she’ll not have gone far.’

‘Wee ones are always running off.’

‘Sure my John Paul when he was that age, you couldn’t keep an eye on him for more than a minute.’

‘She’ll not have gone far.’

‘It’ll be alright, love.’

Orla’s father displayed a distinctly male sort of guilt. He walked around with a dazed expression, like a man in a foreign country searching for an official with whom to lodge a complaint. He clasped his son more tightly to him with a single arm.

Katie continued to storm the changing rooms and corridors. She thought of the immense injustice at parents as caring as Orla’s losing their child. She cast the thought from her mind; too early for that, don’t think it into reality. She ran a fingertip over the scars on her arm for the first time in a long time. 

She froze. Hot bile rose as she thought of the fire escape in the back corner of the building, the one that hides beneath its disuse. She ran now. Her chest tightened and she tasted sulphur and iodine. She roared:

‘The door! The fire escape!’

She quickened and pelted down the corridors. A low rumble behind her – her call had been heard. Full speed now, the door around the next corner, she shouted to anyone or no one:

‘Orla! Whoever’s there the police are fucking coming! Orla!’

She rounded the corner breakneck. Puddles of water gathered on the tile floor. She stopped. The puddles flickered red with the reflection of the ‘Exit’ sign. Please Jesus let it only be that. She took a step forward, the water cleared. Her gaze travelled up to the door: closed. The low light was enough to see the black curls and frightened eyes standing against the wall, alone. The girl trembled, clenched and released tiny fists. Her lips formed silent and meaningless shapes.

Others rounded the corner.

‘Orla!’

‘She’s here!’

The great wave of people broke and crashed against the walls of the corridor and the girl’s parents swarmed and enfolded her. 

Her mother melted to the tiles. Her father curled over them and choked back guttural, animal sobs. Her brother stood along side them, awkward and bewildered. 

The girl looked up from the nest of arms around her. The ranks of adults all looking so strange now, standing out of the water without their clothes, unsure of themselves, like ducks waiting to cross a road. She scanned their faces, met Katie’s eyes for just a moment. Then the girl balled in earnest.

The veil of uncertainty that obscured the events of that day helped the Baths to reset its great metronome. Orla could say little of what had happened. Her child’s mind had already misted the window into her memory. Whatever strange shapes danced behind it were unknowable. Rumours of chilling CCTV footage were put about. Cracked images of a man walking towards the heavy fire escape door, the one that few even knew was there. Was it a child’s hand that he held, just outside the camera’s frame? When he turned to look back as though disturbed, was it a rueful glance that he cast down to what he had left behind before proceeding out the door alone? Or was it always just this solitary figure? Few saw these images if they existed, and what truth there was in these tales blended with other falsehoods, the medicinal cocktail of real and unreal swallowed by the swimmers with a grimace. They did not think of the awful resilience they might have shown had the greater disaster come to pass. That resilience was hard won and too terrible to consider. Instead, the Baths returned to its easy pace, and the swimmers pulsed anew to its gentle summer cadence. 

*

What transpired on that day only the ground knows. These human traumas register as only the mildest of tremors, the gentlest of ripples in the pool’s yawning history. Look again at the great panels of coloured glass. See the final one, at the bottom of all; the great pane of lapis lazuli through which the light bends and casts the ever-changing image onto the canvas of the water. Cracks appear at the edges of this pane, but it holds firm, though the image projected becomes obscured by mists and rainfall.

From issue #9.5: spring/summer 2020

About the Author
Conor Crummey is a Belfast-born academic and writer. He lives in London, where he lectures at Queen Mary University of London, School of Law. He was the winner of the Moth Short Story Prize 2019 for his story ‘Journeys’.