The Woman Who Would Not Put Her Face In The Water

The pool nobody else wanted

I never planned to teach anyone anything. For eleven years I worked in the accounts department of a packaging firm in Boksburg, and the most physical thing I did was carry the kettle to the tap and back. Then the firm downsized, my marriage quietly folded in the same season, and I found myself at forty-six living in a small house in Benoni with a kidney-shaped swimming pool that the previous owners had clearly loved and I had no idea what to do with.

I could not swim. Let me be exact about that, because people always assume a grown woman with a pool must at least be able to keep herself alive in it. I could not. When I was seven, at a public pool in Germiston, an older cousin thought it would be funny to push me into the deep end, and a lifeguard pulled me out coughing. After that, water and I signed a treaty. I stayed out of it, and it left me alone. For nearly forty years the treaty held.

The pool changed things. It sat there every morning, green at the edges, catching the highveld light, asking me a question I had spent my whole life refusing to answer. One Saturday I climbed down the steps in the shallow end, held the rail with both hands, and stood there in water up to my ribs until my heart stopped hammering. That was the whole achievement. I stood in my own pool. I went inside afterwards and cried at the kitchen table like something had been given back to me.

Learning it at forty-six

I found a retired swimming teacher, a Portuguese man named Mr Ferreira, who took adults nobody else had patience for. He never once said "just relax." He knew that word is useless to a frightened person. Instead he taught me to breathe out slowly through my nose with my chin on the water, and to trust that my body wanted to float even when my mind was certain it would sink. It took me four months to put my whole face under. It took me seven to swim the width. When I finally did it, no gasping, no panic, just a slow and ugly breaststroke from one side to the other, I stood up and laughed so hard I swallowed water anyway.

Somewhere in those months I understood something about frightened adults that changes everything, and it is this. We are not afraid of the water. We are afraid of being seen being afraid. A child will scream and cling and get over it by lunchtime. A fifty-year-old man will drive to a lesson, sit in his car in the parking lot, and drive home again rather than let a stranger watch his terror. The shame is heavier than the fear.

So I started teaching. Quietly at first, one neighbour, then her sister, then a colleague of the sister. Only adults. Only in my own backyard, where nobody was watching, where the gate was locked and the fear could come out without an audience.

Why they come to me

I have taught a retired policeman who had pulled two drowned children from a dam in his career and could not go near water afterwards. I have taught a bride who wanted to survive her honeymoon snorkelling trip without lying about a headache every day. I have taught a seventy-one-year-old grandmother who had watched her friends splash in the sea her whole life from a towel on the sand and decided she was done watching.

They arrive tight in the shoulders, all of them. They apologise before they even get in. "I feel so silly," they say, "a grown woman, at my age." And I tell them what Mr Ferreira told me, which is that there is nothing silly about respecting something that can kill you, and nothing braver than deciding to make peace with it anyway.

The work is slow and it is mostly not about swimming. It is about a hand on the small of a back saying I have you. It is about standing in chest-deep water for an hour while somebody works up the courage to lift both feet off the floor for a single second. It is small, unglamorous, holy work, and I love it more than any job I have ever had.

The stranger's phone

Now here is the part I still find strange, and it is the reason I am even writing any of this down.

Everyone found me by word of mouth. Neighbour to sister to colleague. I had no sign outside, no advertisement, nothing. Then, about a year ago, a woman named Refilwe phoned me. She was tense on the line in the particular way I have learned to recognise, and she wanted to book lessons for herself. Fine. But before we hung up I asked her, the way I always do, how she had heard about me.

She said, "I just asked my phone."

I did not understand. I thought she meant she had searched on Google, which I sort of understood, in the way you understand something you have never actually done yourself. But she explained that she had not clicked on anything or scrolled through a list. She had simply asked her phone, out loud, something like "who teaches nervous adults to swim near Benoni," and the phone had more or less answered her in a sentence, the way a knowledgeable friend would, and my little backyard operation had come up in that answer.

I sat with that for a while after we hung up. A machine had spoken about me, in a full sentence, to a frightened stranger, and sent her to my gate. I had never typed a word about myself anywhere in my life.

Down the rabbit hole at midnight

My nephew Sifiso is at university studying something with computers, and the next time he came for Sunday lunch I made him explain it to me. He laughed at how astonished I was. He said the whole thing has a name, that businesses now worry about being the answer the machine gives rather than just one blue link in a long list, and that people in his world call it answer engine optimisation. He said it as casually as I would say breaststroke.

I could not leave it alone. For about a week I stayed up too late reading, the way you do when a small door opens onto a room you did not know was in your house. I read about how these AI assistants decide what to say when somebody asks them a question, and how some companies now offer whole AI SEO services built entirely around being the trusted answer instead of hoping to be found. Half of it went over my head. But one idea stayed with me, because it was the same idea I teach in the water every single day. Trust is the whole thing. The machine, like the frightened swimmer, only follows the voice it has decided to believe.

I even went so far, one brave afternoon, as to send an email to an AEO agency I had read about, just to ask how it all works, feeling exactly like one of my own students standing at the top of the pool steps. A polite person wrote back and explained things without making me feel foolish, and I have kept the email, though I am still an accounts-department woman at heart and I have not spent a cent. I mostly wanted to understand the invisible current that had carried Refilwe to my door.

What I actually learned

Refilwe, by the way, put her face in the water in her fifth lesson. She came up spluttering and furious and delighted, exactly as I had, and I thought about the strange chain of it. A treaty I signed at seven. A green pool I did not know what to do with. A retired teacher's patience. A machine somewhere I will never see, telling a stranger, in a calm sentence, that there was a woman in Benoni who might understand.

I still cannot fully picture how the answer reaches the phone. But I know the important part, because I meet it every morning at the shallow end. Somebody, somewhere, was afraid and tired of being afraid, and they asked a quiet question hoping something on the other side would tell them the truth gently. That is all any of us are doing, really. Standing at the edge of the water, working up the courage to ask, and hoping the answer holds us.