Drowning, not dancing

I still love to be in earshot of the ocean, to step into a wave, or sit in a pool. It is a wondrous thing to sit somewhere and watch the water, or walk along a path overlooking the sea, even if I am not going to enter into it. I can enjoy being a spectator. And I usually am, because I cannot swim.

I can’t dance either. Not officially. I do not know how to foxtrot or waltz, and fall over my feet when the music for The Rocky Horror Show starts up, and people start moving their arms and legs in time together. It’s a code, and I don’t know it. I must have turned my head when it was being whispered in my ear. Or maybe it was never whispered my way at all.

With dancing, I do not enjoy watching others; at weddings I feel as if I am missing out on something, because I am not confident enough to get up and move my body to the music. There seems to be an invisible barrier between those on the floor, oblivious to everything except the beat and the pulse, and those sitting it out. The lustreless gazing in upon the shining.

It’s not as if I cannot dance at all. I have, in the past, got up and twirled and had fun. Just for a while, and only in a group, or with children. And nobody laughed, or if they did, I didn’t notice.

I thought I was missing something when, at an adult’s birthday party, I watched a couple amongst the crowd on the floor who really seemed to want to be somewhere else. By that I don’t mean they were miserable to be there; they were dancing as if they were in love. The old joke: dancing as a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. Their desire was palpable, and I felt as if I was sexless because I couldn’t get up and dance like them.

Not knowing how to swim and not knowing how to dance have obviously different consequences. You’ll be safer with me on the dancefloor than in the pool, or amongst the beating waves.

The first memories of being in water are when my family- my mother, father and me- lived on the Gold Coast, which seems like a good place to start swimming. Since my birth, we had been on a loop of travel, little of which I remember. From New Zealand to Australia to England and back again. I went to eight different primary schools. We eventually settled back in Australia in 1974, and lived in a caravan near the beach for three or four years.

There are photos showing us all in swimsuits, me even baring flesh in a floral bikini. We would go, not to the popular beaches so much, but over the border to Fingal’s Bay, where there was a large swimming hole coming off the Tweed River at one point. My father tried to teach me freestyle there, and some Aboriginal kids tried to tempt me into swimming across to the other side. I managed to avoid embarrassing myself and pretend I didn’t want to, then watched them with envy as they effortlessly raced each other across, their heads staying above the water as they swam, turning from side to side, laughing at the sheer pleasure of it.

Then there were numerous school trips to swimming pools, year after year, with varying results. Sometimes a sympathetic teacher would get those of us who were not swimmers to gain confidence enough to swim across the pool, and the first time I did this and received praise for correct style, I felt as if I had achieved something momentous. But then, my family would move again, and the little gain I had made ebbed away. Or the next lesson would be with a different teacher, who was considerably less sympathetic. I would not be able to repeat my efforts, would instead flounder and splutter, swallowing chlorinated water until I felt sick.

The confidence to try deep water, to try swimming freestyle properly, to try swimming the whole length, would depend on my relationship with the person at the edge of the pool.

As I moved up through primary school, the group of learners got smaller and smaller. I sensed that I was not a natural water baby, that something was wrong with me. I was living in a nation of swimmers, of beaches, surfing, water. Why could I not swim?

One physical education teacher took our little group to the deep end one day. You can all dive in there, one by one, he said, moustached lip unsmiling. And you’re to do it properly, hands together, head down. If you look like you’re half-drowning, I’ll come get you. But not before I can see you’re trying.

I dived, and struggled and surfaced, because I was terrified. Of his disapproval mainly. I would have drowned quietly rather than been embarrassed. He sniffed at my effort, said I needed to work on the dive. I survived, but distrusted swimming from that moment on. Deep water frightened me. If I couldn’t touch the bottom I panicked.

On into high school, and somehow I managed to learn how to dog paddle and tread water. Another sympathetic teacher. I felt better knowing I had a chance of surviving if someone threw me in the water. With a small win, I gained a small confidence.

My last offical lesson was a couple of years on, in the pool of a boys’ school our class went to for lessons or training. The boys’ eyed us off, muttered salacious comments on who was hot or who was ugly; we ignored them or flirted or watched them surreptitiously. I was down the bottom, as usual, and never got out of the learner’s class. The teacher watched us swim across the pool. I was last to the other side, and she told me, with a puzzled look on her face, that my bottom seemed to stick up in the air so that each end of me sank in the water. I was doomed. I never went again, having the excuse of an allergic rash.

Since then, I have splashed at the edges of the ocean, never going in deeper than my waist. I have tried pools, and can actually swim about twenty metres freestyle, but I don’t breathe. I can’t work out how to turn my head and take a breath. Water comes in and I choke and have to stop. I can float in the deep end once I have been in the pool for a while and got some confidence again. But if you ask me to do anything, my eyes will widen, and breath quicken, and I’ll sink.

I don’t go into the water much now. It’s forests that draw me. When I last plunged into a sea of giant trees, I came out a different person.

As for dancing, I still cringe. I did have one dance lesson, many years ago, when I was in my twenties. It came from a friend who was a ballroom dancer, and she had free tickets to encourage people to have a go. The memory of learning the steps as a single then applying them as a double, with a partner, is one I tell people when explaining why I don’t dance. I can see, with absolute clarity, the curved line of chairs, upon which all the beginners sat as they waited for the experienced to take them by the hand. I was at one end, and they swooped down the line of us, arms out, plucking nervous learners off their seats and plunging them into the swirl of music and thrashing limbs.

I was rigid and sweating and had no idea what to with my feet. My dear, you are very stiff, said one man as he tried to wheel me around the dancefloor. I remained stiff until my personal space was returned to me, and everyone got up and simply danced in a huge circle around the hall. It didn’t matter then what I did with my feet.

When swimming and dancing, my body will not do what it should. It forms a circumflex in the water, or a flagpole on the dancefloor. Maybe my time in my mother’s womb, curled up and waiting, stuck with me? When I hit the water, that fetal memory curls me up. Dancing, well, who knows? Some of us just don’t get it. Some of us have memories that tarnish future experiences.

But just as I love watching the water, and dipping a foot into it, I have one memory of dancing that remains with me. And although I was not the one doing this dancing, it gives me hope.

At a Greek wedding we went to some years ago, there were the guests on the dancefloor, and there was the two of us, sitting it out. As the floor cleared, and people went off to have another drink, or walk in the cool air outside, there were only two or three dancers remaining. They were not dancing together.

I focused on the man, because it was unusual to see a man dancing alone, and dancing the way he was. He was in his own world, his arms held out, his eyes closed. He swayed and dipped and slipped his feet around the floor. The music was only for him. He had his own style, and it was no one else’s.

© Sue Bond 2006