Billy stands at the edge of the diving board, toes gripping concrete like a new-born grasping a pinkie. Five metres below, the pool sparkles in the sunlight, the water clear as tourmaline. He takes a breath and looks down but sees only air and the void he must fall into, and the giddiness returns and swirls behind his eyes as the torment of yesterday’s voices, the laughing, the taunting, rings in his ears.
‘Billy, ya coward!’
‘Scaredy-cat!’
‘Wimp!’
The soles of his feet tingle as they recall the metallic chill of each rung of the ladder he had climbed back down, the shame of it all imprinted in the cracks between his toes. And Billy cringes as shame takes hold and pinches his gut.
He repeats their words out loud and listens as his voice reverberates in the early morning quiet. No one else there to hear it. Only Billy, snuck in at dawn, a skinny kid standing on a diving board, facing something there was now no turning back from.
‘Scaredy-cat, coward, wimp.’
And despite himself, he thinks of his mother, asleep still and safe, unaware. If she saw him there, how would he explain it?
‘Those boys,’ he could tell her. ‘Those boys.’
She would understand. She knew how boys were. Boys like him. Boys like them.
He shivers, then opens his eyes and steps forward into emptiness. No one to witness it. To the boys of yesterday, he is Billy, still. The boy who did not jump. The boy who climbed back down.
But today he is the diver. Today, he steps into the void and plummets. His body bending in a beautiful arc as he hits the water.
In the morning air there is a quiver of sound: the slap of flesh and muscle as it hits the water. The rush of bubbles, the thump of a heart. Then silence.
Below, Billy floats under the shimmering blue, looks up and blinks, then kicks to the surface, and breaks through into sunshine, into air; while the boys of yesterday turn in their beds and mumble in their sleep, then wake, one by one, not yet knowing their laughter is already forgotten.
The Billy of yesterday is gone.
Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Amsterdam. Her stories have appeared in various journals and magazines including: Carve, Folio, The Lonely Crowd and Bare Fiction. She is the author of three novels forthcoming with Bookouture in 2020 and 2021. Find Jennifer at @JenAnneHarvey1 and www.jenharvey.net.
