Treading Water [Paperback]

Childhood and adulthood combine to give this novel great human perspective. An unforgettable vision...a book to be prized.

Sexy, moving and funny... It honours the superficially mundane exchanges that populate – and redeem –everyday life.

Collison writes sensitively and movingly - and with a nice dash of black comedy.

Claire’s keen insight into relationships and internal struggles is extraordinary.

In the summer of 2001 Beth Vine's daughters collect her ashes, to release them to the sea near Andalucia. An emotional story about survival, bereavement, friendship and love.

Claire Collison spent fifteen years as a photographic artist, working around themes of female identity. Her short stories have been awarded various prizes, including the Woman's Own Short Story Competition, Virago/Marie Claire, and the Bridport Prize.

What Have You Lost?
‘I dreamed I was eating a giant marshmallow. When I woke up my pillow was gone.’
Tommy Cooper
What have you lost?
I have lost my innocence
I have lost my figure
I have lost my appetite
I have lost my confidence
I have lost my keys
I have lost my sense of perspective
I have lost my sense of smell.
It wasn’t the first time Alison had played this as she swam up and down the length of the pool at the Brixton Rec. The chlorine stinging her eyes, she changed her course to avoid the lap Nazi who pounded towards her, and made herself do a final length of crawl, her least favourite stroke.
I have lost my memory
I have lost my temper
I have lost my favourite earrings
I have lost my sense of humour
I have lost consciousness
I have lost a bet
I have lost my cat
Thick blue nylon rope divided the pool into thirds. The lane nearest the changing rooms was ‘fast’ and the middle lane was ‘slow’. Arrows directed you to swim clockwise. The third lane had no instructions. Alison always swam in the third lane. The truth was that although she enjoyed the freedom of being able to stop mid lap to just float or tread water for a while, she would be hard pushed to classify herself as fast or slow. It depended. She held onto the edge of the pool looking out of the window, across the railway track with its clumsy bronze statues of people waiting for trains that never arrived. Beyond the platform, rooftops slung with washing lines. Pegs like ossified birds swung to and fro.

In the gym above the pool, people on treadmills walked nowhere. The ‘No Petting, No Dive Bombing’ poster displayed on the wall was - amazingly - the same one that Alison remembered from her childhood. Before, it was funny in the way that it was so blatantly disregarded. Now it was merely anachronistic in a place that seemed to already have shaken off any associations with fun. You swim to de-stress; you work out to live longer. Swimming had changed in her lifetime, Alison thought. She remembered a painting she’d seen at the Tate; a swimming pool full of turquoise, chlorinated noise. Above all, it was the noise of the painting that she remembered; that din of the baths.

The floor was slimy when she heaved herself out, and she imagined verruca viruses breeding in the warmth and wetness, as inviting as agar jelly in a Petri dish. She padded back to the changing room and retrieved her stuff from the locker. As she headed to the showers, she thought about that cat.
On her way to the Rec, she’d seen a poster for a lost cat. A pathetic black and white A4 photocopy that had got soggy in the rain, the words were written in loopy seventies bubble writing filled in with scribbled Biro. Underneath was a photograph the size of a large stamp. Alison had studied it. The black and white cat looked supercilious, the kind who would lash out. Alison disliked cats, but nevertheless she had to congratulate herself on this little show of resilience. Time was when that would have reduced her to floods. That’s the thing with grief; it unhinges your judgement. You find yourself no longer exercising the discretion of where, when, and how you emote. It decides.
What have you lost?
I have lost my sense of decorum
I have lost my mother.