We count them in at the turnstile and we count them out. For two years the pool has run one over, every single weekday, and the count comes right the moment anybody looks.
I have guarded the early swim at our baths for two years.
The baths are 1936 and they are listed, which means the roof leaks and nobody is allowed to fix it properly. There is a main pool, twenty five metres, six lanes, and a learner pool that is shut half the year because the boiler for it went and the part is obsolete. There is a spectator gallery upstairs that has been closed since the eighties and still has the seats in it.
The early swim is six until eight, weekdays.
It is a lane session. Slow, medium, fast, and the other three lanes roped off for the aqua class that comes in at eight. It is the same people. It is always the same people, because a person who is in a chlorinated municipal pool at ten past six on a Tuesday in February is not doing it casually, they are doing it because it is the shape of their life.
There is a man called Peter who has swum a mile every weekday since 1994.
There is a woman I only know as the physio because that is what she does, and she swims two thousand and then sits on the steps for exactly four minutes.
There are the two lads from the ambulance station who come in off nights.
Nineteen or twenty, most mornings.
Here is how the counting works, because the counting is the whole of this.
You get in through a turnstile with a barcode on your membership card or a token from the desk. The turnstile increments a counter. The counter is a little unit on the wall in the office that has been there longer than I have and probably longer than the manager has. When you leave, you push through the exit gate, and that decrements it.
On top of that, the guard on duty writes the number on a whiteboard by the poolside door at the start of the session and updates it when people come and go, because if the fire alarm goes you need to know how many bodies you are looking for and you cannot go and read a counter in an office that is on fire.
So there are two numbers and they are meant to agree.
They agree. That is the thing. The turnstile says nineteen and the whiteboard says nineteen and the register on the desk says nineteen.
There are twenty people in the water.
I counted for the first time in my second week, because you count. It is not a suspicion, it is the job. Every fifteen minutes you sweep the pool and you count heads, and you do it without deciding to, like checking a mirror.
I counted twenty. The board said nineteen.
I assumed I had counted somebody twice, because in a lane session people are passing each other and turning and half of them are under, and it is easy. So I counted again slowly, lane by lane, waiting for each swimmer to touch the wall.
Twenty.
I went and looked at the turnstile counter. Nineteen.
And then I came back out onto poolside and counted again, and it was nineteen.
That is the pattern and it took me a long time to see it as a pattern.
The count is over by one when you are not counting properly. When you sweep, when you glance, when you take it in as you do fifty times a session. And it comes right when you slow down and do it lane by lane and mean it.
So for a while I thought: fine, I am a bad counter, and I got on with the job.
What changed it was Peter.
Peter swims a mile, which in that pool is sixty four lengths, and he counts them by moving a hair bobble from one wrist to the other every eight. He has done that since 1994 and he is not a man who makes errors about it.
He came up to me in the March of my first year and he said, in the flat way he says everything, that there was somebody in the medium lane who was not in the medium lane.
I said what do you mean.
He said, there is a swimmer between me and the physio, and they have been there since about the fifteenth length, and they never touch the wall.
Lane swimming has a rhythm and you can hear it as well as see it.
Six people in a lane going anticlockwise is a rolling thing, and there is a sound to it, the slap and the breath and the turn, and after two years I can tell you with my eyes shut roughly how many are in a lane and how fast.
What Peter was describing is a gap in that.
Somebody who is in the lane, in the sense that people move around them and give them room, but who is never at the wall when everybody else is at the wall. In a twenty five metre pool every swimmer arrives at an end every twenty to forty seconds. There is nowhere else to be.
I watched that lane for the rest of the session. Forty minutes.
I did not see anybody who did not touch the wall.
I also did not see the lane empty, and I want to explain what I mean by that, because it is the closest I have got to putting my finger on it. In a lane session there are moments, brief ones, where everybody in a lane happens to be at the same end. It happens two or three times a session. The lane behind them is water.
That lane never emptied. Not once, in forty minutes.
I told the manager. He was decent about it, which I appreciate more now than I did.
He said the turnstile counter had been wrong on and off for years and it was on the list. He said if I was concerned about numbers I should count lane by lane, which comes right, and he said that if I ever counted over on a proper lane by lane count I was to clear the pool.
That was a fair instruction and I have never had to use it.
He also said, and he said it while looking at his screen, that I should not raise it with the customers.
I said Peter had raised it with me.
He said: yes.
The morning I want to tell you about was in the November of my second year, and it was the day the fire alarm went off for real.
There was a fault on a panel in the plant room and it took the whole building. Half six in the morning, the pool full, the alarm going, and every one of us doing something we have practised and never done.
You clear the water. You get them out at the nearest steps, you do not let them go back for anything, you count, you take the board, and you assemble on the car park side of the fence.
I got them out in about ninety seconds, which is quick, and I am proud of that.
I stood at the fence with the whiteboard in my hand in the cold and the dark, with nineteen people in towels off the shelf by the door, and I counted them.
Nineteen.
The board said nineteen. The turnstile said nineteen. Nineteen people stood in front of me shivering and swearing and asking if they could go back for their car keys.
And the surface of the pool, through the glass, forty feet away, was moving.
Not lapping. It lapped for a while, the way it does, and then it settled, and I watched it settle because I could not do anything else while we waited for the engineer.
And then a length of it, in the medium lane, went again.
I have thought about whether I could have been looking at the filtration inlets. I have gone in on a day off and stood at that glass and watched what the inlets do to the surface, and they do something, and it is not that.
It was the shape of somebody swimming.
Not a person. A wake. The V and the roll and the little chop at the end that a body puts into the water, and it went the full twenty five and it stopped at the wall and it did not come back.
The engineer got there at twenty past seven and we did not reopen.
I still do the early swim.
I have got used to it in a way I would not have believed two years ago, and I think that is what happens with anything you see every day. It is not frightening at ten past six with the lights on and Peter counting his lengths on his wrist. It is a number that is wrong by one.
I count lane by lane now. Every sweep. It takes longer and I do it anyway.
And once, in the summer, on a morning where the sun came through the high windows and put those bright wobbling lines on the ceiling that you only get in old baths, I counted lane by lane and I got twenty.
I did not clear the pool.
I stood there with my whistle actually in my hand and I did not do it, and I have not told anybody that until now, and the reason I did not is stupid and I am going to say it anyway.
The twentieth one was in the slow lane, at the far end, with their arms folded on the rail and their back to me, resting, the way people do.
And they had the same swimming costume as the physio, and the same haircut, and the physio was in the medium lane doing her two thousand.
I counted again. Nineteen.
The physio got out at ten to eight and sat on the steps for exactly four minutes, and she said morning, and I said morning.