Read Online Pool by Justin D'Ath - Free Book Online Page A

case.’
    Charity case. Her words haunted him for the rest of the day. It certainly wasn’t charity. Wolfgang did the maths on the calculator function of the electronic cash register at the ticket window. Every time he took Audrey out, he was earning roughly fifty-seven dollars and fourteen cents.

    ‘How’s it going with the blind girl?’ Michael Hobson asked him after lunch.
    Wolfgang’s eyes were drawn automatically to her spot beneath the peppercorn tree. She hadn’t come to the pool today. He was partly relieved, but another part of him felt disappointed.
    ‘What are you on about?’
    ‘You and hippo-girl. I’ve seen you chatting her up.’
    ‘It’s nothing like that,’ Wolfgang said, blushing. ‘Thhhe left her hat behind the other day and I took it back to her, that’th all.’
    Michael grinned. ‘You’re a sly one, Hulk,’ he said, and walked away, shaking his head knowingly.
    Wolfgang wondered how many other people had noticed, and whether they had drawn conclusions similar to Michael’s. Mistaken conclusions. He decided to keep away from Audrey when she came to the pool in future, to confine their meetings to after-hours, and preferably to places where they wouldn’t be seen together and recognised. There were only four days left in the ‘contract’ he had with her father. Three, really, because technically he had already spent more than an hour with her today (ending at ten past one in the morning, when they’d said goodbye in the shadows at the bottom of her driveway) and he’d spoken to her on the phone. Already done his fifty-seven dollars and fourteen cents worth.
    ‘No, you aren’t a charity case, Audrey,’ he could have said to her when she asked. ‘I’m doing it for the money.’

18
    There was a near-drowning the following day. A middle-aged man – a pilgrim with a heart condition, it would be revealed in Monday’s newspaper – suffered a stroke in the centre of the pool. Paralysed, unable to call for help, he floated face-down, drifting slowly with the slope of the water, for perhaps a minute or more before anyone noticed he was in distress. It was a young woman standing on the crowded lawn area fifteen metres back from the pool who drew attention to his plight.
    ‘Help her!’ she shrieked, fluttering her pale hands out in front of her like two frantic butterflies. ‘Help her! She’s drowning!’
    Mrs Lonsdale was first to react. Wrenching off her shoes, she jumped into the pool fully clothed and threshed out through the gawking swimmers in an untidy but efficient freestyle. She rolled the man onto his back, tilted his mouth clear of the surface, and stood there, chest deep in the sparkling, twitching water, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Michael Hobson and Declan arrived. Between them, and with the belated help of one of the swimmers, they carried the unconscious man to the side of the pool and lifted him out onto the wet concrete apron. Mrs Lonsdale and Michael kept up the resuscitation while Declan ran to phone for an ambulance.
    Wolfgang, who had watched from his vantage in the office, was secretly ashamed. He’d had a phone at his elbow throughout the crisis, but had not thought to use it.
    When the ambulancemen arrived – less than eight minutes after they’d been called – Michael had taken over the resuscitation and Mrs Lonsdale was kneeling beside the patient applying heart massage. They had saved his life.
    Michael and Mrs Lonsdale were heroes. They both appeared on the local television news that evening, and on Monday they would be on the front page of the Advertiser.
    To Wolfgang’s relief, his failure to summon help went unnoticed. From the beginning of the drama until the patient was carried away on a stretcher, nearly everyone’s attention had been focused on the stricken man and his rescuers. They forgot about the young woman who had first called attention to him. She was left standing on the towel-strewn lawn while the rest of the crowd