Chapter 1: “Who’re you calling Juliet?!”-2
933 Words
“Eyup, Luca!”
Luca raised his hand in greeting, squashing the phone between his ear and his shoulder to accept Aaron’s offered hand-clasp-man-hug-thing. It had no name. It was just an Aaron Kowalski thing.
“Okay, okay. Yeah, I’ll get some at Wilko’s if you want. Okay? Okay. Baci, mamma, ciao.” He clicked off the phone. “Alright, Az?”
“Livin’,” Aaron said, and grinned. “Hey, I might need to ask a favour of you in a bit. For drama, like.”
“Okay?”
“Dunno yet. I’ll let you know. How’s you, anyway?”
“f*****g cold,” Luca complained as they wandered into Pond’s Forge. It was a vast leisure complex, with an Olympic-sized pool. Heeley was closer to the school and where the whole team lived, but Coach Cooper preferred the facilities at Pond’s Forge for training. “I swear this is Finland, not England.”
“We’re not all hothouse plants, you dago.”
“Shut your gob,” Luca said, shoving him in the shoulder. Aaron cackled. “Least I’m not coming over here and stealing jobs, you f*****g Polack.”
“Oi! I’ve never worked a day in my life.”
“Nah, and it shows!”
Luca and Aaron went way back, but on a fairly superficial level these days. They’d gone to the same primary school and been best friends in Tadpoles, the under-eights swimming club. Then they’d grown up, Aaron had gotten into girls and acting and the stage, and Luca…hadn’t. They didn’t really see each other too much these days outside of the locker-based banter at school, and Pond’s Forge for the swimming team, but they were still mates.
Which meant getting all the racist banter out the way before Coach Cooper showed up and did his nut. Guy couldn’t take a joke, seriously.
“Your Tav not here?”
“Later. Your Emily?”
“Later,” Aaron echoed, then shrugged. “I dunno if she’ll be here, like, her nana’s up at the hospital. Looks like she’s on her way out.”
“Harsh.”
“I’m happy, mate! Ding dong the witch is dead and all that. Just got to put the face on for Emily, yeah?”
Luca sniggered as they passed into the changing rooms. A couple of the others were already there—David and Ryan, and a new kid who’d apparently come to live with his aunt and uncle in Totley—and hellos were exchanged before Luca said, “You sure you didn’t bump her off?”
“Nah, it’d give her too much satisfaction, she hates me.”
“What’s that?”
“Emily’s nana is gonna shuffle off the mortal coil.”
“Snuff it.”
“Peg it.”
“Kick the bucket.”
“Like that song in The Simpsons last night, you see it? About the tree and it got hit by lightning?”
Luca stripped off his shirt and let the hubbub wash around him. He loved swimming. He was okay at school, and Dad was big on getting him into university somewhere, but in all honesty, Luca just wanted to swim. He’d live in the water if he could. If he found a lamp, right, and there was a genie, he’d wish to become a fish. A shark-type fish, obviously, but a fish all the same. To get to swim around all the time and not have to come up for air, that would be awesome. Maybe he should go to university in Australia and just go diving all the time?
“Hey, Luca, you hear? Cooper’s decided we’re going in for the Edinburgh competition anyway. How’s your butterfly?”
“Stings like a bee,” Luca grinned, and got cuffed around the head by Aaron. “Lay off, you perv. Touching me up. I know I’m hot, you don’t have to boost my ego.”
It was met with general jeers, and the new kid smiled awkwardly, on the edge of the jokes. Luca had to respect him for his skills—guy could get up to a f*****g phenomenal speed in the water—but he never said anything.
“Here,” he said, flicking his towel in the new kid’s direction. “Jack, ent it? Punch Aaron for me when he gets out of his locker.”
The kid—Jack something—blinked. “Er.”
“Go on, sock him.”
The kid shrugged, and obligingly flipped the locker door shut against the back of Aaron’s head.
“Hey!”
“Look at that, Az, I don’t even have to cross the f*****g room,” Luca jeered, and got shoved on his way to the showers. “Perv!” he yelled over his shoulder.
The chatter died down a bit in the showers, and started up again as they wandered through to the pool. It was booked out for a bunch of swimming clubs, the little tots in their armbands bobbing around in the kiddie pool, and a few hot blokes and birds bouncing on the diving boards. The girls’ swimming team were doing a relay, almost finished, and Samantha Marks from the end of the road pinked and waved shyly at him where she was waiting for her partner to reach the pool wall.
“You seriously need to bi the f**k up and hit that,” Aaron advised, and Luca snorted.
“Yeah, okay. You wanna watch while Tav tortures me to death by reading aloud his shitty books?”
“Could be worse, he could write shitty emo poetry about you and torture you with that.”
“Urgh, true. Or he’d just club me to death.”
“More likely?”
“Way more likely.”
The pool was vast and echoing, a rippling invite. Luca practically itched whenever he saw a body of water large enough to swim in, and he gave into it, jumping into the pool with his knees tucked into his chest. The water was a cold shock, and it closed over his head with a clap. As he slowed and the weightlessness in water began to take hold, Luca felt both entirely free, and entirely at peace.
Then he surfaced, and the world re-intruded. “Watch out, Jensen!”
Aaron crashed into the water with a whoop, and the floodgates had been opened. Soon, the entire team were in the water, and Luca ducked back under to explore the tiles at the bottom, eyes wide open and smirking at the comical sight of bodies cut off around the n*****s. Maybe he should learn to dive—proper dive, like, with the wetsuit.
A whistle tore through the water, and Luca broke the surface again, shook the water out of his hair, and joined the heads flocking to the edge where the vast bulk of their enormous brick shithouse of a coach, Coach Cooper, loomed.
“Alright, lads, let’s get this show on the road.”
- Writer
