Category: #20laps

“Some white people come here, especially on a Sunday. But I don’t know where they are today,” says Thando.  His faded, red board shorts have a large rip on the right leg, as if a sabre-tooth tiger got hold of them. He holds a plastic Power Rangers mask in one hand; its thin elastic bounces between his index and middle fingers. When he talks, his gold front tooth glints in the sun. Lots of small black children are at the Bez Valley Pool; Thando, the lifeguard, is one of the few adults. A group of teenage boys play soccer, a man with a Rasta hat sits on a bench under a tree and strums a guitar, while a guy in an incongruous Angkor Wat T-shirt stands with arms folded, looking at the kids splashing in the pool, wistfully (I wonder: where did he get the T-shirt from? Was it given to him? Has he been to Cambodia?).

Walking into the change rooms of the Sydenham Public Pool is like stepping back into my 1980s childhood, except instead of a magical cupboard that opens onto Narnia, the change room reveals mirages of late apartheid, that I thought I’d forgotten: signs on the walls read DAMES/FEMALES / CLOAKROOM/ NA SWEMBAD TOE; the Nationalist concrete tiles; a broken deckchair; the slatted wood to sit on. NA SWEMBAD TOE. The language hasn’t changed but the sunlight now refracts off black bodies. The public pool is fairly busy on a hot Sunday afternoon, and there are a number of small black kids splashing in the shallow end. A young, beefy white guy walks next to the pool. He has a half-done dragon tattoo on his back, and a silver spiral pushed through one of his earlobes. A little black boy creeps up behind him and taps him on the back; the hulk-man pretend-smacks the boy on the cheek; the boy giggles and scampers off. Another kid springs off the diving board, feet first, while a guy with a man bun balances a small blond boy on his shoulders. At the far corner of the poolside there’s a middle-aged man with a black yarmulke atop his head, a lilo is stuffed under his wife’s arm. Another women wears a headscarf; her elbows and ankles hidden. There aren’t many people in the deep end…