“Isolation” by Edward Barnfield

 

You grab your shins and pull yourself into a ball, your body a walnut, and sink. There’s pressure on your eardrums at first, but you acclimatise and then the only sound is a faint lapping, like distant waves. They pull the cover over the pool and the light disappears, and all you’re left with is the sound of your breath, the mask tight on your nose, your limbs losing sensation as the water takes your weight. 

The colours begin then, lightning streaks of crimson and canary sparked by the mechanical stimuli of pressure on your eyes. You lose yourself, the narrative in your head fading, the burden of the day dropping away. All that is left is this small, swaying ball that used to be you, held in the combination saline solution. 

Caroline started work at the Silence Centre at the start of the six-month summer, following some backroom dealing by her sad, sick dad who had been to college with the owner. A phone call with the day manager did little to explain the nature of the role, which would require her to be on-site six days out of seven and sleep in the employee villa. There was some discussion as to whether Caroline could swim or not – the woman on the phone seemed sceptical – and a stern warning to never use the washrooms in the main building. 

“Those are for guests only,” the woman said. 

A car with tinted windows arrived a few days later. “So proud of you,” said Mum, who chose to ignore the nepotism and instead concentrated on the increased food allowance the new position would bring. Caroline hugged both parents, reaching through the tubes and wires for her father, and then slipped into the backseat. 

It was a long drive to an area she’d never been to before. There were three checkpoints on the way, the road draining of traffic with each one. Finally, they arrived at the centre’s tall, barbed gates. The driver, who had been silent for the entire journey, leaned out of the window to show their papers. 

“Got a new attendant in the back,” he said, and the guard opened the backdoor and stared at her impassively for a full five seconds. Caroline suddenly felt very young and exposed, there on the backseat with her best shoes on. The man’s uniform shimmered with metallic fibre, and his gun dangled ominously on its strap, a dog on a leash.  

“This used to be a golf club,” said the driver as they crawled up the driveway. “You know what golf was? They teach you that at school?” 

Caroline shook her head and stared out of the window. The Silence Centre was engulfed by sand dunes, flat plains of grey dust with odd peaks and valleys. There was a dry riverbed that snaked around them, and a pavilion in the distance, its roof collapsed. 

“Here you go. You be careful,” said the driver, who clicked the boot open and pulled out her bags. He seemed like a kind man, thought Caroline, although his eyes were sad. 

The building was like nothing she had seen before, sheer white walls and green sheets of glass. A man in a tunic stood at the entrance, stoic as a statue, but she had been instructed to enter from the side. A sign with dimpled logo pointed the way. 

Annika, the day manager, was waiting at the security desk. 

“Caroline?” she said, her accent all flat northern vowels and second-hand tobacco. “Right, you look strong enough.” 

There were guidelines to read and forms to sign, and a short tour of the grim staging areas within the facility. Then Annika took her to the outdoor section and Caroline fell hopelessly, ruthlessly in love. 

At the core of the Silence Centre’s offering was the isolation pool. Two intersecting orbs ringed by concrete and composed of iridescent depths of blue. It was an intensely hot day, but Caroline was struck by a strange shiver of longing that stayed long after. 

“That’s where you’ll be working,” said Annika.  

What Caroline remembered most from those first dizzying weeks was the unceasing downpour of rules – no nail polish, no facial jewellery, no photography, no eye contact with the guests. Not to initiate conversations but to always respond clearly and politely to any questions. To touch only arms and shoulders in the pool. Every eventuality, every form of social and professional conduct accounted for and managed.  

She worked with three other junior attendants – Astrid, Sarah, and Roshni, all teenagers – and Diana. They wore old-fashioned one-piece swimsuits with ruffles around the waist that Caroline loathed. There was a cabana by the water where they were permitted to shelter from the sun, but they had to be available and in costume from sunrise to nightfall each day. The other girls seemed quiet, withdrawn. They ate their meals silently and slept when they could.

Diana was the main attendant, the first servant. An older woman, flinty, much better suited to the swimming costume and general atmosphere. She was the one who led the patrons down to the pool and eased them into the water, pulling the floating oxygen tanks into position. Hers was the face they saw when they surfaced. 

The others went into the pool on demand, to help guests whose masks didn’t fit properly, or check the levels on the tanks. They handed out towels as the patrons left the water, walked them to the recliners if they were unsteady from the experience. 

“What are they doing there?” Mum asked on her first visit home. “You hear stories.” 

“They float in the water,” Caroline replied, oddly shy of her new vocation. “There’s an oxygen mask, and the water is treated with a special formula, and we cover the pool, and they stay there in the dark. Some of them stay for hours.” 

“Why?” 

She had no answer to that. The first patron she saw came down in a white robe and flip-flops, inching his way to the waterside. He was a fat man, a great roll of pale flesh, with harsh black hair like netting across his back and legs. Roshni nudged her as though it was a face she was supposed to recognise, but Caroline – ever-mindful of the rules – looked down at her feet. 

Diana was at the bottom of the steps for the hairy man, Sarah alongside her. They each took a hand as he came down. He looked nervous, and the girl and the woman made gentling noises, like you would to a child or a fretful horse.  The man turned and let the attendants take his weight, pulling him out towards the centre. Diana hooked an arm under his chin and placed her hip against his back, then deftly fitted his mask with her free hand. She and Sarah did elegant little twists to take him under. 

There was a pause. The commotion stilled, and the three forms blurred at the bottom. Caroline held her breath in sympathy. Then Diana bobbed out at the far end, raising a thumb, and pulled herself onto the side with infinite elegance, and the attendants moved to pull the cover across. 

“There. Not much to it.” Annika had emerged from her office, a clipboard clutched to her bosom. “If the pool gets busy, you buddy up, and if it’s very busy then you help the client on your own. Maximum capacity is fifteen bodies.” 

Caroline smiled at the idea of fifteen little spheres hanging beneath the covers, the human equivalent of a naval minefield. 

She found it hard to settle on the first few nights, the sunburn and strange bed creating a perfect storm of sleeplessness. She tried to lay still, not wanting to disturb the other three in the dormitory. Sarah was a snorer and Astrid regularly hurled perfectly aimed trainers to get her to stop. 

Washing ahead of work one morning, Roshni placed a margarine tub next to the sink. 

“What’s this?” 

“Homemade sun lotion. It’s a coconut oil and spread combination. Astrid makes it.” 

Caroline handled the box cautiously. “Does it work?” 

“Stinks a bit but stops the burning. We don’t let Sarah use it, so put it back in my locker when you’re done.” 

It was the first indication of friendship. 

“Is it comfortable where you’re staying?” Mum asked. 

Mum seemed fascinated by the details of the Silence Centre, the raw mundanities. Caroline didn’t mind telling her, recognising the need for a distraction from the daily grind of caring for her father, but carefully sanitised the details. They had clean sheets once a week, recycled from the living areas in the main building, but sometimes hers hadn’t been washed properly. The food was regular – better than at home – but small portions and the same menu day after day. 

“What about the other girls? Do you get on?” 

Another question without an answer. She envied Astrid’s body and bearing, the confidence in her stride and stroke, and felt a bubble of pity for Sarah. Astrid and Roshni had formed a tight pair, disappearing into the dunes to gossip about the guests away from the ears of management. They cordially loathed Sarah, who was seen as a sneak and a favourite of Diana, ostracising her at every opportunity. It seemed strange to Caroline that women in their shared circumstances should find reason to compete, but that was how it was. 

She tried to stay friendly but distant with them all, making sure that whenever gifts she brought from home were equally divided between her colleagues. She was probably closest to Roshni, who had a sly sense of humour when no-one was watching and claimed to recognise 90 percent of the guests. 

“He’s the Minister of Transportation,” she whispered one afternoon as the man in the white robe slipped back into the pool. “He’s nervous his wig is going to come off in the water, that’s why he’s so cautious.” 

They were all in awe of Diana, who moved in the pool as a goddess. She had apparently been some sort of champion back in the days when they had swimming contests, when there was still clean water in abundance. They craved her recognition and respect, beaming on the rare occasions she complemented them on a job well done. Caroline suspected Diana knew this and doled out her praise strategically. She shared a room with Annika, a strange double act of personalities that made up the core of the Silent Centre. 

The rest of the facility was busy with conferences and meetings, delegations from around the country descending to discuss matters of state and urgent commercial treaties. Most of their patrons came out of the sessions and slipped into the water, trying to grab moments of mindlessness after long days of dialogue. As an attendant, Caroline rarely saw the other staff members. Pool girls were not welcome inside.

The other person she had contact with was the technician, Arhaa. He was a slow, shuffling kind of man, who always carried a battered plastic case stuffed with devices and cylinders, taking measures from the pool for further analysis. 

And so it was, for a while. Caroline liked the work and was proud to be of an age where she could repay her parents’ support and solidarity. She grew stronger in the water, and found other ways to make herself useful, fetching and carrying, and sometimes working with Arhaa in the hot concrete shell that housed the pool’s mechanics. 

“How did you get into this line of work, Arhaa?” she asked one evening, as he poured out the saline solution for the next day. “Were you a doctor or a guru somewhere?” 

He smirked at that. “Not guru. Used to be fish farmer. Tropical fish. Had big tanks of flower horns.” 

She pondered on that, on the transferability of skills that had brought him here from Malaysia or wherever he had lived before. 

“That must have been very relaxing,” she offered. 

The smirk again. “Good day. Tank full of money. Very relaxing. Bad day. Feeding tube fails. A thousand dead. Not relaxing.” 

In July, Annika sat her down for her appraisal. There was good news and bad news, she said. The bad was that her trips home would no longer be possible. The Centre’s fuel ration had been halved, she explained, and they needed to prioritise ferrying the customers. 

Caroline sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair and thought of her mum with her chipped cup of coffee, and her dad’s slow breathing beneath the wires. 

“The good news is we’re giving you more responsibility. Diana is going to take a bit of a break, so you and Astrid are going to alternate as first servants. Congratulations.”

Diana had been off her game recently. A few times they’d found her squatting on the concrete, gazing into space. Even in the pool, where she’d previously been so effortless, she seemed slower, more tentative. 

“It’s the chemicals,” explained Arhaa. “Prolonged exposure no good for adults. Impacts the memory. That’s why they hire kids for the job.” 

“But if it’s dangerous, shouldn’t you change the mix? If it’s impacting memory…” 

“Heh. Impacting memory whole point of exercise. People get into water to forget.” 

“Forget what?” said Caroline, the long-unanswered question blossoming in her mind. “Why would people want to forget?” 

“Look outside window. People who come here same people who wrecked the world. Left mess for you kids to carry. Why remember that?” 

Late in September, when Autumn still refused to come, Caroline felt the girls withdraw their kindnesses. The soothing cream disappeared from the shared bathroom, and her sheets were invariably the most soiled and torn. Astrid refused to look at her, and once or twice, when she reached for Roshni’s hand to get out of the pool, it was withheld, and she feel back into the salty, stinging water. 

Sarah broke the news. 

“You talk about your folks too much.” 

“What? Why is that a problem?” 

“Astrid’s from Northampton,” said Sarah. “She’s an evacuee.” 

Caroline felt twin pangs of guilt and cluelessness. It seemed an adult habit, to drop the name of a place and assume that the listener knew the associated calamity. But so many places had experienced disaster since the climate had changed that it was impossible to remember them all. 

“She thinks you’re flaunting your privilege when you talk about living parents.” 

Sarah was trying to show sympathy, but she couldn’t keep the glee from her voice. She was evidently relieved at no longer being the lowest on the pole. Within a few days, she too had stopped speaking to her. 

Those weeks were the hardest and loneliest of Caroline’s young career. She would stand by the pool, burning, and tears would come unbidden. She was missing the trips back home, the updates on Dad’s condition and Mum’s endurance. Without Diana, it was just three bitchy girls whispering on the dunes about her. She was alone.

Life was getting harsher at the centre, too. Small economies grew like tumours, daily meals dropping from the menu, lights going out at 8pm to save energy. 

In November, Annika called them into the main building for an all-staff meeting. Caroline was surprised at the number of faces she didn’t recognise, the strangers she’d been working alongside all year. 

“Tomorrow, we’re going to be hosting a significant meeting of the cabinet,” Annika explained. “They’re going to use the conference facilities in the morning, and then the isolation pool in the afternoon. As always with high priority guests, we expect everyone to be on their best behaviour.” 

A groan across the room. 

“However, the meeting itself is top security. The organisers have asked that we have only a skeleton staff on site for the duration, the minimum required to function. So, we have drawn up two lists. If your name is on list A, you’re in for a busy day. If you’re on list B, we’re sending you home for the rest of the week. Those of you who don’t have homes, we’ve arranged alternative accommodation at one of our sister facilities.” 

As the lists were passed around, Caroline felt her pulse beat a little faster. Being on list B would mean a chance to see her family again, to hold her father one more time. But list A represented professional opportunity. She could see that in the faces of everyone who scanned the sheets. Astrid passed her the plastic clipboard hard, shunting the sharp end into her chest with a look of pure spite.

List A. She held on a little longer, tried to see where the people she knew had landed. List A seemed to be composed exclusively of the most obviously English names, the Sarah’s and the Simon’s, the Claire’s and the Caroline’s. Astrid and Roshni were out, as was Arhaa. She tried to tell herself it was a coincidence. 

There were twenty guests in the pool on that fated afternoon, the most they’d ever dealt with. She and Sarah swam back and forth, ferrying the passengers into position. She had expected short tempers and entitlement, but the politicians were mostly docile and compliant. The prime minister was the only one who came with helpers, two broad security men walking her down to the pool, while the agriculture minister couldn’t swim, so had to be consigned to the shallow end. They all seemed impossibly old to her; bodies wrinkling like burnt paper. It was forty-two degrees in the shade. 

When their human cargo was sunk and the cover pulled over, Annika called her out of the pool. “Okay. Two hours maximum for this group. You need to have them all out by five pm sharp. Their handlers will get them showered, dressed and in the cars.”

“Right.”

“After that, I need you to go clear the conference centre. Needs to be spotless, no trace of today’s meeting. Anything left behind goes straight to the incinerator, understand?” 

Caroline noticed that Annika’s hands were shaking. 

For two hours, Caroline stood poolside with Sarah, hands folded in front of them, the sun harsh on their bare legs. It was strange to think of the country’s leadership curled and bobbing in the water. When it came time to remove them, she noticed how weak they seemed, the struggle it took to return them to dry land. She counted the liver spots on their backs and arms as their people led them away.  

That evening in the boardroom was the first and only time that Caroline experienced air conditioning. They had left it on after the meeting, despite the expense. It was unsettling, the prickles on the skin, the cold you could feel at the back of your throat. She wanted to stay in this strange new landscape as long as she could bear, clearing plastic coffee cups and full ash trays into grey plastic bags and scrubbing the whiteboard clean. 

Crop failure + soil sterility, someone had written in green marker.  Minimum nutrition requirements, another had added. There were numbers too, percentages matched with dates, ticking down from eighty percent to forty-six percent to zero in three years. Caroline turned them all to smears with a few quick strokes of the board cleaner. 

It had been an unsettling sort of day, she thought, the pool packed tightly with ancients, like a produce basket from a failing corner shop. She wondered what it was that people of their status needed to forget. As Arhaa had said, that generation had so much to be guilty about, so many apologies to make to the collapsing world. Why today? Why now? 

It was only as she swept the papers from the table that a disquieting thought lodged within her. What if whatever they had spoken about in this meeting was the topic they were trying to forget? Rather than the distant past, what if the time in the pool was a collective attempt to scrub the day’s decisions from their minds, as permanently as she had erased the numbers on the board? 

The last piece of paper to go was the largest. It was a photocopy of a photocopy, faded with time, but large and a shape she recognised. It was her country, flattened into two dimensions with blue lines to show where the rivers had been and dark black marks for the motorways. 

Someone had drawn three circles in felt-tip, concentric like the pool. The first circle’s circumference stretched from Scotland down to Newcastle, scrawled in thick red pen. Then there was another amber circle that spanned the way down to the base of the island. Then a final green loop in one small area in the south, cocooned within its larger amber cousin. Another hand had written notes in the margin: Year one restrictions, troop deployment, withhold deliveries, rationing and last stand linked to the green circle with a line.  

Caroline hovered her finger above the map and stabbed it down where her folks had lived – were living. It was firmly in the orange territory. Year Two, said the key. 

She thought of the shortages of the last few years, the declining petrol rations and shrinking portions. She thought of the numbers on the board ticking down. Outside the conference room window, the last of the politicians was being helped into her car, a small grey woman leaning hard on the man in a tunic. And she knew what the conversations had been about and why they needed to forget what had been agreed that day. 

On good days, there is abundance and it’s very relaxing. On bad days, you cut off access to the failing food supply. It’s not relaxing. 

When the last bag of garbage was disposed of, Caroline wandered through the empty golf club hallways. The place was eerie now, the security guards and special assistants having melted away, and no trace of the skeleton staff. She knocked gently on Annika’s door.

“All finished,” she said. 

Annika was on the bed, a glass of something clear in her hand. She had stripped to her bra and shorts, old flesh sagging over the waistband. 

“Diana won’t be coming back. Too much damage from the toxins, they’re saying.” She sniffed. “I suppose that makes you the first servant. Congratulations.” 

Despite everything, Caroline’s heart skipped, a smile splashed upon her face. She couldn’t wait for Astrid to find out. 

“Is that a promotion?” 

“If you want to call it that. No additional benefits, though. No increased food allowance. Those days are over. They made sure of that today.” Annika put the glass down and rolled over on the bed, squeezed a pillow under her head. “Turn the light out.”  

Walking back to the employee villa, Caroline took a detour past the pool. The water was still now, a light brown sheen on the top left behind by all those bodies. She could see the stars reflected in it, winking. Perhaps, when the truth of the world became unavoidable, she would slip out here one night, take her own dip in the isolation pool. She could curl her body like a walnut, let her illicit knowledge leak into the saline. But for now, she was young, she was healthy, and the water was beautiful. 

Perhaps hope would float to the surface.

*

Edward Barnfield is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Roi Fainéant Press, Ellipsis Zine, The Molotov Cocktail, Third Street Review, Punk Noir, Third Flatiron, Galley Beggar Press, Leicester Writes, Shooter Literary Magazine, and Triangulation, among others.