Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Avonmouth ·
The Lifeguard of the Dry Pool at Avonmouth
A municipal baths in Avonmouth closed a decade ago, but a lifeguard still sits in the high chair above the empty pool each evening, blowing a whistle at swimmers who are not there and checking they have stayed between the flags.
The Avonmouth municipal baths closed in the spring of 2014. The water was drained, the lights were switched off, and the last lifeguard, a sixty-year-old man named Alan Rudd who had worked the deep end for thirty-one years, signed his time sheet and went home without looking back. The building was boarded up. The council meant to demolish it. Then the demolition was delayed, and then delayed again, and the baths stood empty on the seafront while the gulls nested in the roof.
Mariam Haddad, who walked her dog past the building every morning, noticed the chair first.
It was the high white lifeguard's chair, mounted on its tall steel legs at the shallow end, and it was visible through a gap in the boards where the fence had come loose. On the first evening she walked past in the autumn, she saw a figure sitting in it, a tall man in a red swimming costume and a white cap, a whistle on a cord around his neck. He was looking down into the empty pool with a steady, professional attention.
She stopped on the pavement. The man did not turn. Then he raised the whistle to his lips and blew, a single sharp note that carried clearly over the sea wind. Mariam jumped. Her dog pulled at its lead.
She thought she saw the outline of a swimmer in the empty basin, a dark shape sliding toward the deep end, and then she saw the lifeguard shake his head and point, firmly, back toward the shallow end, where a line of white floats had been laid across the dry tiles.
Mariam walked on. She did not look back until she reached the corner, and when she did, the lifeguard had climbed down from his chair and was walking slowly along the edge of the empty pool, scanning the bottom, checking the flags. Then he stopped, and turned his head, and looked straight at her across the road.
She told her husband. He laughed and said she had been reading too many ghost stories. She said nothing about it for a week. But the following Friday she went down to the seafront again, and the chair was still occupied, and the lifeguard was still blowing his whistle, and this time she saw the swimmers. Dozens of them, perhaps more, pale and quiet, moving through the dry pool in slow, careful lengths, always keeping between the flags, never once straying toward the deep end.
The town's young people started going to look. They climbed the fence and stood on the scrubby ground by the entrance and watched. A boy from the comprehensive said the lifeguard once blew his whistle at a girl who had tried to jump off the high board, which was not there any more, and that she had stepped back onto the empty tile and cried. Another said he had seen the lifeguard come down from the chair and walk to the edge of the deep end and stand looking into the dark, very still, for a long time.
In January there was a storm. The sea came over the seafront and filled the lower streets, and the water rose up to the boards of the baths, and for one night the pool was full again, black and cold and deep. In the morning the water had gone back out, and the lifeguard was in his chair as usual, wet to the skin, his cap dripping, his whistle silent on its cord.
Mariam walks past the baths still, every morning, with her dog. The lifeguard is always there at dusk. Sometimes he raises his hand in a small, polite salute. Sometimes he blows the whistle, once, to remind someone to keep between the flags. She has never seen him come down. But she has noticed that the boards along the fence have been quietly replaced, plank by plank, each one painted a faded red, the colour of a costume that has been washed too many times.