Water ways.

“This water’s so hot!” says the woman who’s just come off the ramp.

I am on my way out. I give her a smile and say that it’s not really that hot at all, after a bit.

The hydrotherapy pool. Every second or third day I’m there, walking forwards to the deep end of the ramp and backwards to where it’s shallower. Thirty minutes of it, up and down. Around me the other pools are alive with the action of swimming lessons, lap swimming, frolicking and birthday parties. The screech level is very high.

In the hydrotherapy pool it’s gentle exercise only thank you, sedate and quiet. People stand talking, walk about, stretch and bounce, lift and drop foam dumbbells. Some days, about 10 older women descend into the waters, stand in a circle and chat for 20 minutes and then disappear back to the change room. Children are drawn to the hydrotherapy pool as to a magnet. Lifeguards – young and often achingly shy – shoo them, and their hilarity, back to the noisy pool on the other side of the ramp.

It is not a meeting place. There’s an occasional exchange as the wounded and injured pass each other, perhaps a polite excuse me or just a smile. Most people, if they come alone, seem, like me, to get into the zone to do what needs to be done. Repetitive exercise isn’t the bit where you have fun. You do what you do and try not to watch the clock too much.

When I answer the woman who thinks the water’s hot, something in her unleashes. Standing in the up-to-her-chin water and bouncing from foot to foot on her toes, she begins to talk to me. It seems that 10 minutes pass before she draws a breath. She tells me her husband is having respite care this afternoon so she’s out for a bit. He’s had cancer, something went wrong with the surgery and he was in hospital for three months. But he’s all good now, nearly better, he can walk a bit. She’s had cancer too, five years ago, same cancer even but nothing nearly as bad.

She tells me this is the place to live for services at a time like this. Respite care, house cleaning, gardening. And – she beams with the announcement – very cheap rates can be organised to have the spouting cleared and the windows cleaned. But the window cleaner didn’t clean the fly wire screens as well, he just put them back on dirty. There was a cobweb on one! Her husband got that cobweb off in the end. He could do that.

She thinks, after her time in the pool, that she will visit her friend. There’ll be time if she doesn’t stay too long in the water. But with one thing and the other she hasn’t been able to get to the pool much at all. And she needs to, she’s the better for it. But when her husband had this – what was it, a resection or something of his bowel? With the cancer. And everything just went wrong, But he’s good now, really. He can even walk a bit now.

When there’s a pause I tell her in a smiley way that I need to get going. She stops bouncing for a minute and focusses fully on me.

“Are you going straight home?”

It seems such an odd question to ask a stranger you’ve been offloading to. I don’t know how to answer it for a moment and then when I’m ready and have something to say the woman is already nodding at me and waving me off with the back of her hand. It’s a dismissal of sorts. She’s already looking for someone else who’ll listen.

In case I didn’t know it, I am too easily replaced.

It’s time to go straight home.