The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

start to coast down the far side. Soon they're flying, laughing in the darkness. The wind presses her skirt to her legs, then catches it, flipping the hem up against her waist. Her slip slides up her legs, billows in the breeze as if remembering its past life as a parachute, and her knees and then one white thigh flash in the starlight. She
    wants to lean down to fix it, but Colin has her hands pressed under his on the handlebars, and when she wriggles he tells her, "Hold still, luv. I've got you."
    She has never been to Sunnyvale, the old holiday camp, but she remembers, as a child before the war, seeing posters showing all the fun to be had there: pictures of cheerful tots and bathing beauties by the pool. Arthur recalls when the camp was the site of finishing sheds for the quarried slate, when the lane leading to it was a track for freight wagons bringing the great slabs off the mountain. The rails had still been visible farther up, beyond the camp, until '39, when they'd been hauled away for scrap. They're probably part of a
    tank now, Esther thinks, or a battleship, miles away from where they started. The camp itself had opened in the twenties as a hiking base--a favourite pastime in these parts since the Ladies of Llangollen popularised it in their diary-- and enjoyed a brief boom after Mallory stayed there while training in Snowdonia. But his disappearance on Everest, coupled with the Depression, had ended the camp's first period of prosperity, and the war had put paid to its second, after it reopened in the late thirties with much-trumpeted improvements, like a children's playground and the swimming pool.
    On hot summer days, gathering the flock from the hillside above, running to keep up with her father's long, loose stride, Esther would steal glances at the faceted blue gem of water below her and imagine its coolness. But such places aren't for locals. Even in better days, the most her father could afford was the odd day trip on a growling charabanc to Rhyl or Llandudno. Besides, as he used to tell her, "Who needs a
    pool when there's the ocean for free?" But she hates the sea, the sharp salt taste, the clammy clumps of seaweed. She's only ever seen swimming pools at the pictures, but for her that other Esther, Esther Williams, is the most beautiful woman in the world (Welsh to boot, judging by her name). She'd seen Bathing Beauty three times that spring.
    So as soon as Colin coasts through the back gates of the old camp, she asks him to show her the pool. He looks a little surprised--probably has one of the empty, mildewed chalets in mind--but something in her voice, her eagerness, convinces him. He props the bike in the shadows behind a dark hut and leads her through the kids' playground. She clambers up the slide and swishes down on her backside, arms outstretched.
    He studies her from the roundabout, circling slowly. There's a watchful quality in him, as if he's waiting for something, the right moment, and the thought is delicious to her. When she
    bats at the swings, he calls softly, "Want a push?" and she tells him throatily, "Yeah."
    She settles herself, and he puts his hands in the small of her back and shoves firmly to set her off, and then as she swings he touches her lightly, his fingers spread across her hips, each time she passes. "Go on!" she calls, and he pushes her harder and harder, until she sees her shiny toe tops rising over the indigo silhouette of the encircling mountains. When she finally comes to a stop, the strands of dark hair that have flown loose fall back and cover her face. She tucks them away, all but one, which sticks to her cheek and throat, an inky curve. He reaches for it and traces it, and she takes his hand for a second, then pushes it away. He's on the verge of something, but she doesn't want him to come out with it just yet, not until it's perfect.
    "I saw the pool from up there," she tells him breathlessly and she pulls him towards it. She can see the water, the choppy surface,