It all started a few weeks ago.
OK, I'm going to make no excuses here. I was young and male and single. I was going through a dark and depressing part of my life, where I was having to face up to some harsh realities about someone I had regarded as one of my closest friends and a potential lover. Bluntly, I was waking up to the fact that several promises that I had taken on faith had been based on a tissue of lies that were now being torn apart with a brutality that was taking my breath away. Suddenly, the most committed relationship I had ever had, was no longer with the owner of that soft, sweet voice on the end of the telephone or those words on my computer screen. Those early days where we took solace in the gradual discovery that we were kindred spirits, separated by thousands of miles and united by mere chance. Those 'phone calls where we shared our hopes and dreams for the future, exchanged our mutual ideologies and discovered fresh common ground. Those long, long conversations where we shared our erotic fantasies and always finished off with gasps and moans, as we each listened to the other frantically clinging to that series of moments and movements that would bring about our powerful orgasms, bask in an afterglow that we could never quite share with each other and delay that final, brutal and very lonely click and buzz of a telephone being hung up, leaving us to our sweaty sheets and our very individual loneliness.
OK. Yeah. I admit it. It was an internet relationship and was probably doomed right from the start. How can someone really get that close to someone they've never even met? I could kid myself for hours about the fact that the lack of a physical presence made communication and mental interaction that bit more important and thus deepen the connection between two people. Oh, I knew all the excuses. I'd made them too often. But an internet relationship – like any relationship – is dependant on communication and communication is dependant on honesty. And... yeah... she had lied. She was married. She was married, there was no future and one day... without warning... it was all over.
I didn't take it well.
Masturbation after that was half-hearted at best, and I found that the desire to even do that much had virtually disappeared. Days on end would go past, with no desire to do anything at all. My erections were half-hearted and short-lived and would slink back into flaccidity, when I simply ignored them. That's all my cock ever did at all, in fact – just slink. From three times a day (and that was on a slow day) it was now getting no attention at all. On the couple of occasions where I did set out to chase down that solitary orgasm, I was left all too conscious of the similarities, rather than the differences with how it had been during that long-distance relationship – with the exception that without the click and buzz of the 'phone to trigger it off, the bleakness set in right from the first moment I'd lay hands on myself.
I needed some kind of a distraction to take my mind off what I had lost. Not alcohol, because I don't drink alone and not drugs because... well, alcohol is my drug of choice. Not a choice made through judgement or morality – I just wasn't overly inclined to experiment in that direction. I'd had the occasional misadventure with weed, a disappointing experiment with coke and a highly enjoyable night when I'd taken some speed while I'd been out drinking with a couple of friends – but on the whole, I was a social drinker and that was it.
Exercise seemed right. Get the endorphins flowing and do myself some good at the same time. So one evening I decided to go swimming. And I knew the perfect place to go. I'd been planning to pay a visit for ages and one night – in a moment of rare motivation – I decided that it was time to go.
It was on Clerk Street. There was an old cinema that had been unable to keep pace with the competition provided by the various multiplexes that were springing up all over the city and had gone out of business. Boarded up and abandoned, a tragic victim of those soulless places – in my self-pitying mood, I felt like I could relate. Anyway, for a long time it seemed unlikely that it was ever going to recognise its potential again. It didn't look like there was anything in its future that would be kinder than a demolition crew and something new – some office block – springing up in its place. A soulless building to replace it and finish off the job that had been started by the soulless multiplexes that had usurped it.
And then, one day, it had been bought. And shortly after that, builders and workmen were going into the building and tearing out its heart. Seats were dragged out and taken away, deliveries were made, painters went in, came out... And then there came the day when the exterior was cleaned up and suddenly there was a new vitality to the building. It seemed cleaner, brighter, happier. The final boards were removed, the windows were cleaned and the cinema suddenly became a place that people wanted to visit once more. Only... now, it was no longer a cinema.
I heard all the rumours, long before it was reopened. No two people could completely agree on what was happening. It was a health club, said some. There were jacuzzis and saunas and gyms and all sorts of things like that. Others swore that it was being stocked from top to bottom with bondage equipment and was being turned into a brothel, a dungeon, a massage parlour. Many people were convinced that someone actually lived there. One room had apparently been a dance hall and had now been converted into the apartment of a reclusive, eccentric millionaire.
I think a lot of people were disappointed when it was revealed that the health club rumour was the most accurate one – complete with all the theorised jacuzzis, saunas and swimming pool.
As usual, I was in a particularly bleak and cynical mood on the night I went to the club, but despite that, I was pleased with what I found when I first walked in. Someone really had loved this place. The main foyer had a similar feeling to the open, welcoming place it had been before it was closed down. There was a staircase on the left hand side that – I remembered – used to lead up to a pub. It was a staircase that provided a weak spot in the cinema's security that I'd exploited on more than one occasion. When I was 18, I would go up to the pub on the pretext that I was going for a drink, then I'd walk up the rest of the stairs and into the cinema itself, through a doorway that had no ticket inspector on guard. I'd seen more than one film that way.
There were to be no films tonight. And there was to be no use of that staircase, if the velvet rope barrier was anything to go by. And there was to be no cheating, either. Instead, I got there about an hour or so before it was due to close for the evening, paid my admission and followed the signs for the swimming pool. I got changed quickly, left the changing room and dived into the water at the deep end, without even bothering to use the board.
