Drowning — Part I
an Extract out of “Stuck on My Maid’s Floor”
“Did your mother ever smack you?”
I read in a Police Interrogation DIY book (as one does) that in order to extract something out of an interview subject, you must first throw them off balance (What you looking at!!! — see). My aim when reading the book was to use some of these techniques in evaluating candidates at my former mining company, for obvious reasons. Now I have decided to deploy these tactics on the subject of this book.
“Eh?”
I repeat my challenging question faster.
“Your mom… smack you? Hmm? Hmm?”
“Alon, I don’t understand the question.”
Good, I’ve got her confused.
“Hit you, physically correct you.” I slap the kitchen counter, bad cop.
“For being naughty?” I soften it somewhat, good cop.
Subject turns her back to me, hunches her shoulders forward and pretends to be busy.
“Everyone is naughty sometimes.” Group identification: a well-known interrogation trap.
“Yes.” Subject is crumbling.
“And did your mother hit you?”
“Yes.”
“Where did she hit you?”
“Here.” Evelyn gently slaps the back of her thigh.
A smack on the back of the leg versus a smack on the bum — the way I used to get it. I wonder for a moment about the significance of the point of impact. I imagine a little black girl goose-stepping away from the hand and then segue into my own bum-saving manoeuvres. I conclude that a smack on the bum is less painful but more humiliating.
“What did you do?” Confession time.
“It was when I went to swim, but I could not swim,” she says solemnly.
“And?” Dread is already welling up inside me.
“My friend Connie, she took me out of the water.”
“You nearly drowned?” My insides squeeze. This wasn’t what I was looking for. School truancy, incomplete chores or a fight with a sibling, not a near-death tragedy.
“Yes,” she says, still not looking at me, no doubt reliving this trauma. As I start reliving mine.
I nearly drowned once too. Sucked back by the mighty sea, losing my hitherto inexhaustible strength to something even more powerful than youth — a rip current. I didn’t want to remember being swept away, my arms flailing in vain against the waves. I was scared to look into what I imagined to be a giant mouth. It was perhaps my first moment of pure existential fear, the realisation that no one, mom or dad, was there to save me.
“Can you swim?” I ask Evelyn, my tone becoming empathetic.
“No.”
Her answer comes in a single syllable, tinged with embarrassment, pain and resignation. Even though I could swim it wouldn’t have rescued me. It was a hand then the arm attached to it — a hairy arm, a stranger’s arm, a most beautiful arm — that grabbed me and towed me to safety.
“Then I will take you to swim!” I resolve to do so, here and now. I will give new meaning to my own hairy arm. I will be the wondrous arm that helps Evelyn overcome her trauma.
“Swim?” She turns to face me.
“Yes. Swim in the sea,” I declare melodramatically.
I could take her to the pool in the complex downstairs, or maybe even to a large municipal pool in the city, but it wouldn’t be the same. NO! We both need to face our greatest oppressor: the great blue demon that is the open sea.
“We will go to the ocean!” I am on a mission now. I will help Evelyn face this, I will heal her, I will fix her world. This is my calling,
“But I don’t have a bathing suit!” she protests and straight away my inspirational mission runs aground. I take a moment to process this distracting detail.
She is smiling. Subject has neatly turned the tables on the interrogator.
I smile back at her with a renewed sense of respect at how quickly she floated to the top.
I will have to get Evelyn a swimsuit.
