Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

go yours, and this is what you’ll miss.”
    “Won’t.”
    She kissed the top of my head. “Will.”
    If you stand on your tiptoes and lean out the window, you can see the bay from our house. The bay curves out, and the part that juts into the ocean everyone simply calls the point. Beyond the point, there are the Octopus Beds, rocks that have long, smooth indentations where it looks like giant octopuses sleep. The channel itself is wide and deep, a saltwater sea. As I stand by the window, the channel is dull grey-blue under the clouds. The Greeks ironically called the Black Sea
Euxinos:
friendly to strangers. Those who know the ocean know it doesn’t make friends.
Exitio est avidum mare nautis
—the greedy sea is there to be a doom for sailors.
    I never understood Jimmy’s implicit trust that the water would hold him safely. The first time we were at the Sam Lindsay Memorial Pool, Jimmy got in line for the swing, a thick, knotted rope that hung from the ceiling. The lifeguard asked Jimmy how old he was, and when he admitted he was six, the guard herded him back to the shallow end, where I’d been watchinghim. I shook my head, “Told you so.” He sat miserably on the side of the pool and kicked the water.
    The pool was a novelty. Usually we went down to the docks at the bay and splashed around. Jimmy liked the diving boards and the swing and the balls and other toys. I think he had no sense of smell, otherwise he would have been be as nauseated as I was from the bitter smell of chlorine. But that year in school, all the kids in my class had gone to the pool for swimming lessons. You had to be able to duck underwater twenty times in less than five minutes, stay underwater and blow bubbles through your nose, float on your back and do the deadman’s float before the swim instructors would allow you to progress to dog-paddling. I hadn’t even managed the bobbing-underwater part. Once underwater, my ears would ache and the water would press against me unpleasantly. I was afraid to open my eyes, afraid of the darkness and of not being able to breathe. I would shoot to the surface, gasping and frantically splashing. At the beginning of the lessons, there had been ten of us in the shallow end. By the last lesson, there was only me and a frustrated instructor, who put her hand on my head and held me under to show me I wouldn’t drown. I hit her shin until she let me go. She passed me on condition that I wouldn’t tell anyone what she’d done.
    I was determined not to be the only kid in the shallow end when we started swimming lessons again in the fall. I had four weeks left before school started; I was going to learn to bob if it killed me. It didn’t help that Jimmy copied me effortlessly. As I scrambled for the surface, he would stare up at me from underwater. Ifhe’d been smug, I could have coped with it. I would have given him a good whack. But he gave me these soft, pitying looks that people give only when you are being truly pathetic.
    Jimmy copied everybody. If the kids hurled themselves off the diving board, he was next in line, making a ferocious run for it, bouncing off the end, curling up and cannonballing into the water. If some girls dived underwater for brightly coloured rings, Jimmy had to do it too. I would watch him go into the swimming lane and copy adults doing strokes, afraid that he was going to get hit, but he never did.
    That was the summer Jimmy found his calling. Even though he was scared to run home alone in the darkness, and was still pissing his bed because he was too afraid to go to the bathroom in case the monsters hiding underneath grabbed him, he decided what he was going to do for the rest of his life. We were watching a documentary about the Moscow Olympics on TV. A Canadian swimmer came in second doing the butterfly stroke. As the guy was standing on the podium, Jimmy said, “I’m going to get a gold.”
    I think my reaction was, “Yeah, yeah. Shut up and watch TV.”
    He pushed