The Gate at Ten to Five

The lock, the dark, the smell

The gate at the municipal pool in Gqeberha has a padlock that was old when I was young. It is rusted through on one side, and the shackle sticks, and on a July morning at ten to five you cannot see the keyhole because there is no light there, the streetlamp on that corner has been out since before Easter. So you do it by feel. You get your thumb on the body of the lock and your finger under the shackle and you push the key in blind and you turn.

That is the problem. The turning.

My hands do not close properly in the cold anymore. Not properly. There is a stage, first thing, where my fingers are more like a set of tools I am borrowing than parts of me, and I have to warm them under my armpits inside my jacket for maybe a minute before they will grip. My shoulders are worse. The arthritis sits in both of them like something that moved in years ago and paid a deposit. In winter, in the dark, in that wind that comes straight off the sea and up through the fence and into the gaps of your clothes, my shoulders feel like they have gravel in them. Turning the key means rotating the arm. Rotating the arm is the whole trouble.

I have never said this out loud. Not to my swimmers. Not once in eleven years.

The gate opens and then there is that smell, and it is the same smell it has been since I was fourteen and my father dropped me at a pool in Uitenhage with a towel and a five rand note. Chlorine and wet concrete. There is a difference between chlorine on its own and chlorine on cold wet concrete, and if you have spent your life in this you know it immediately, the way you know a person's footsteps. It is a smell that says: work now.

What the water takes

People think a swimmer's body is a gift. It is a debt.

I swam competitively until I was twenty-nine. Not famous. Not Olympics. Nationals a few times, provincial for years, one relay medal that is in a shoebox in my garage under a broken kettle. What I have to show for it is a set of shoulders that were built to do one thing about eight hundred thousand times, and then went on doing it, and then wore out the way anything wears out when you use it that hard for that long. Nobody tells you at nineteen that the same joint that makes you fast is the joint that will make you old.

I feel it now in things that have nothing to do with swimming. Taking a shirt off over my head. Reaching for the top shelf where my wife, Nomsa, keeps the good glasses. Reversing the bakkie with my arm over the passenger seat, which I do not do anymore, I use the mirrors like a driving instructor.

But I stand on the deck every morning in a windbreaker with my whistle around my neck and I call splits and I do not rub my shoulder. That is a rule I made for myself, and it is a stupid rule, and I have kept it like a religion. Because the day my kids look at me and see an old man in pain instead of a coach, I lose something I am not ready to lose.

Sinovuyo

He came to me at thirteen. Some teacher at his school had seen him swim at a gala and phoned the club and asked, more or less, whether we would take a boy who could not pay.

He is sixteen now and he is the fastest thing I have ever had my hands on.

Not the strongest. He is thin. He has that long back and those elbows and the kind of catch on the water that you cannot teach, where the hand goes in and just holds, does not slip, does not spill, and the body comes over it. I have coached maybe two hundred kids in this town. I have seen that maybe twice.

His mother works nights. She cleans offices in Newton Park and gets home at six in the morning, which is more or less exactly when Sinovuyo is climbing out of the water, so they wave at each other across the day like people on two different trains. He walks to the pool. In winter, in the dark. I have told him a hundred times to phone me and I will fetch him, and he says yes coach, and he does not phone, and I know why he does not phone, and we both leave it alone.

Some mornings the water is fourteen degrees because the boiler has failed again and nobody has told us. Fourteen. You get in and your chest locks up and your breathing goes to pieces. And the other kids stand at the edge complaining, and Sinovuyo just gets in, quietly, like it is a thing that must be done, and starts swimming. I have watched him do it in the dark with his lips going grey and I have thought, you should not have to be this tough. Nobody should have to be this tough at sixteen to get a chance.

The committee, the braai, the boiler

Our club is not a club the way people imagine clubs. It is nine adults who argue in a room with a broken heater, a bank account that mostly contains regret, and a WhatsApp group where somebody sends a voice note about chlorine prices every second week.

The boiler died properly in May. Not the usual sulking. Died. The man who came to look at it stood there for a long time with his hands on his hips, which is never a good sign, and then said the word "coil" and the word "obsolete" in the same sentence.

So we had a braai. Of course we had a braai. That is what you do. We sold boerewors rolls at fifteen rand and Piet's wife made koeksisters and we put a bucket on a plastic table with a piece of paper taped to it. Parents came. Old swimmers came, men my age with knees, and we stood around the fire lying to each other about times we swam in 1989. We raised a bit. Not enough. Never enough.

And it was at that braai, standing near the coals because my shoulders had been screaming all week, that Thandi from the committee said something that turned out to matter. She said, my brother sits in a hot room after rugby and he says it is the only thing that lets him sleep.

I said nothing. I moved closer to the fire.

The cabin in the Drakensberg

Here is the thing I had been not saying, for about four years.

In 2021 an old training partner of mine, Gerhard, invited us up to a place his family has near Champagne Castle. It was freezing. Proper Drakensberg cold, the kind where the mountains look like they are made of glass. And in this cabin there was a small wooden room, a sauna, that he lit in the afternoon with actual wood, and I sat in it because I was cold and because I did not want to be rude.

I sat in there for maybe twenty minutes with the heat pressing on me like a hand.

And my shoulders let go.

I am not going to make a claim about it. I am not a doctor and I am fifty-seven and I have been wrong about a great many things. All I can tell you is what happened in my body, which is that something that had been clenched for years, something I had stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a noise, went quiet. I sat there in the dark with the wood ticking and I felt my own arms hanging off me, loose, and I had a stupid moment where my eyes went hot, and I was very glad that Gerhard was outside.

Then I got dressed and I did not mention it to anyone for four years. Because to mention it would have been to admit that my shoulders needed anything at all.

Getting a hot room into a poor club

I brought it up in October. I said it badly. I said something like, look, the kids are getting out of fourteen degree water and standing in a wind, and if we had somewhere warm, and then I ran out of sentence.

Piet said, warm how.

And I heard myself say the word. A sauna.

They laughed. Fairly, honestly, they laughed, because we were a club that had just had a braai to pay for chlorine and here was the coach talking about heat. But Thandi did not laugh, and afterwards, in the parking lot, she asked me quietly how I knew about it, and I told her about Gerhard's cabin, and I did not tell her about my shoulders, and she looked at me in a way that suggested I had not needed to.

It took fourteen months. Two donors, one of whom is a woman whose daughter I coached in 2009 and who I did not know had done well. A quote that made us all sit down. Then a smaller quote. Long evenings with Thandi's laptop on my kitchen table, reading about saunas while Nomsa made tea and said nothing but put the cup down harder than necessary, because she had known about my shoulders the whole time, obviously, the way wives do.

There were forms. There is always a form. The municipality wanted to know about the electrical load, and there was a change room nobody had used since the nineties full of broken lane ropes and a dead pigeon, and there were three months where I genuinely believed the thing would not happen, where I had already started arranging my face for the version of my life where it did not.

Somewhere in that mess I ended up on the phone at half past four one afternoon, standing in the wind by the fence, talking to one of the sauna suppliers about whether the room we had was even usable, and I remember watching Sinovuyo doing a warm down while I talked, and thinking that this whole ridiculous project had stopped being about me a long time ago.

Small things

It went in on a Tuesday in March. I had imagined the day would feel like something. It did not. It felt like a morning of men carrying panels through a doorway that was slightly too narrow, and somebody's radio, and me being useless because I could not lift anything above my head and would not say why. That is what sauna installations actually look like from the inside, I think. Not a ceremony. Just a Tuesday, and dust, and a bloke asking where the plug point is.

We turned it on properly a week later.

Now this is the part I actually wanted to tell you.

It was a Thursday, early July, this year. Cold. The wind doing what it does. Boiler behaving for once but the air still bitter enough that the kids came out of the water with that stunned look. I unlocked the gate at ten to five with hands I could barely close, same as always, and I stood on the deck for two hours and called splits and did not rub my shoulder.

And afterwards I came round the corner and the door of the little room was open and the steam was coming out into the cold air in a slow column, and Sinovuyo was sitting on the bench in his costume with a towel over his knees, sixteen years old, eyes shut, and his shoulders had come down. That is all. His shoulders had come down off his ears where they live, where they have lived since he was thirteen and walked into my pool with a plastic bag for a kitbag, and they were just sitting where shoulders are supposed to sit.

He did not see me. I did not go in.

I put my hand on the steel rail by the door, and the rail was warm, and I stood there for a while with my hand on it, in the steam, feeling the ache in my own shoulders go quiet, and I let myself have that. Just for a minute. Then I went to lock the gate.