Page 32 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“If I wasn’t working I would cancel this and just check in to the nearest hotel,” he said. “Carrie Cole, I can’t get enough of you.”
“You should not be talking to me like that,” I said, straightening his jacket. “You’re my teacher.”
We went inside and the rest of the group joined soon after. We were given wet suits and then met by the pool to talk about safety, before Johan’s colleague took us through the equipment basics. I tried to listen, but really I just wanted to stare at Johan in a wet suit, hair wet, long legs pacing between the class participants.
After his colleague had showed me how to inflate and deflate my buoyancy-control device, I lay on my back in the pool, watching kaleidoscopic water reflections pulse on the arching roof lights above. Johan was somewhere to my left, teaching two young guys how to do their BCDs. I trusted this man completely, I thought, as I bobbed weightlessly on the surface of the pool. Not just to show me how to breathe underwater but to show up for me—today, tomorrow, the next day.
Until now, the only man I’d trusted had been Dad, and even he’d let me down at times; all that bile and hatred toward my mother had often stopped him being present. Johan was an entirely new kind of human. He washere.
He returned to teach me how to find my regulator and its backup, amusingly called an octopus. He checked and rechecked my technique, standing there in the water, glorious and untouchable. Then, when I’d cleaned my mask and deflated my BCD, he showed me how to take my first breath through the regulator.
When I was breathing smoothly, he said, “Let’s try a couple of breaths underwater.”
And suddenly we were kneeling underwater, watching each other through masks, breathing through regulators. I knew breathing apparatus inside out, I realized, once I’d taken the first few breaths. And I’d never been afraid of water, nor suffered claustrophobia. As we faced each other on the pool floor, gently waving our arms for stability, I began to see that my fear had really been of the unknown, of environments over which I had no control. Medicine was a surprisingly safe, closed-off environment, if you never stepped outside.
Johan signaled, in the underwater language they’d just taught us,Are you OK?I shook my head:No.
He made the signal for us to move up, but I shook my head again. He realized then that I was smiling; he started smiling too. Bubbles catapulted happily up to the surface as we knelt opposite each other, Johan and I, clad in wet suits in a pool in central London. He made a shrugging gesture as if to say, what’s wrong then?
I make an obscene gesture:I want to fuck you.
Bubbles shot up in a sharp cloud from his mask and he rose to the surface. “Behave,” he said when I emerged. He moved to the two lads next to me. He was laughing.
—
A couple of hours later we were perched at the bar of a Japanese place on Kingly Street, drinking bottles of cold Sapporo while we waited for our food. Johan wedged my knees between his. “I enjoy these strong legs of yours,” he said. “I especially enjoyed them in a wet suit.”
“For what it’s worth, I thought you were a great teacher.”
He smiled. “I only wish I could say the same about you as a student.”
“Excuse me? I went underwater, I faced my fears—what more do you want?”
“You also tried it on with your teacher.”
“He’s hot.”
Johan chuckled, those eyes trained straight on me. “I heard he’s been fired.”
“What? Why?”
“Under duress, he admitted that he wants to have sexual relations with you. We can’t allow that.”
We finished the food as quickly as we could. When I left the final tiger roll on my plate, Johan picked it up and ate it, and I felt recklessly, almost violently happy inside—it had only been four days, but we already had a thing.
Ten.
My mother fell in love with Johan on the spot.
“I think she might actually be flirting with you,” I said, when Mum went to the loo. We’d met in the bar of the Royal Festival Hall because Mum was speaking on a panel that night about medical poverty. Outside, rain fell in sheets from a brown sky. Johan and I had been together three weeks.
“She’s your mum,” Johan said.
“That’s why it is of no surprise to me that she’s doing what she’s doing.”
He just laughed.
“She’ll forget about you in five minutes,” I reassured him, although, in fact, that did not come to pass.
