Team Building
Molly didn’t think anything of it the first time. The surf breaking in the patrolled area was packed with people. It was summer holidays, a Sunday and Molly thought that as usual, the lifeguards had not allowed enough room in the flagged safe swimming area. Plus accidents do happen.
“And people never say sorry anymore,” Molly mumbled to herself. “Actually,” Molly thought further, “That’s not true. These days people seem to apologise when they don’t need too but never when they should.”
And she hated it.
A set of waves came through and Molly dived under the first wave in unconscious unison with the massed bodies on either side of her. As she squatted on her haunches under the white water, enjoying the temporary buffeting of the swell’s power, a body bumped into hers again and this time a hand touched her side and the bottom curve of her right breast. It seemed to stay a second longer than necessary and when Molly popped to the surface and looked around there was a man beside her.
He was skinny and short and his sun-tanned face was streaming water from a thick head of grey and sun bleached blonde hair. He had sloping narrow shoulders and his skin was leathery from years in the sun. She looked askance but there was no acknowledgment or apology. His eyes, bright blue and shining with excitement, didn’t look at her face but were fixed instead at the cloudless sky over her shoulder.
Molly looked away. It had been a hard week at training and the ocean after a week of practice was her treat. The other girls were always sick of the sight of water by Sunday and usually escaped to the nail clinic or the hairdresser or the shopping mall but Molly just wanted to feel the waves. She loved the ocean. Being in the surf was so different from water polo where you were expending your energy, forever churning water, swimming up and down the pool. The waves made her feel more buoyant and alive than a swimming pool ever could. But today with the crowded ocean and the screaming kids and now her new friend Molly’s good feeling started to fade away.
Further out another set of waves began to stand up and Molly saw they were bigger so she started to swim further out but she was too slow and the first wave was already pitching forward. She dove under, cutting off the high-pitched screams and yells from the kids that were swooping down the wave’s face, careering towards her on boogie boards.
She was again conscious of a body near her as she went under. Suddenly she felt a hand on the small of her back and then, while the turbulence was at its strongest, the hand unerringly felt the cheeks of her bottom and lunged further into the cleft between her legs. For a second Molly thought the hand would squeeze past the elastic, grab the material of the swimsuit’s crutch and rip her bikini bottom off her. The action was so quick and practiced. Then the turbulence was decreasing and Molly jerked herself to the left violently colliding with flesh that was soft and yielding.
A lady, her skin porcelain white, clad in a black one piece straining at the seams berated her in a language that may have been Spanish. Molly paid no attention but jerked her gaze toward the beach. The skinny man was swimming away and Molly turned to follow. But the Spanish lady was still yelling so Molly reluctantly turned to quickly apologise. By the time that was done and Molly looked again the man was disappearing in to the crowd. He was getting away. The last she saw of him was his narrow back; a canvas for a large Southern Cross tattoo outlined but not yet inked in.
Molly swam and then walked back to the beach, she pulled the fabric of her togs out of her bum crack and felt her rage turning into cold hate. She scanned the packed beach for the man but could not see him.
Grabbing her things, Molly went to the lifeguard stand and told the two lifesavers what had happened. One of the lifeguards, a woman using a pair of binoculars, just kept them to her eyes and didn’t even look at her. She just kept scanning the crowd while mumbling something about writing down a description. The other lifesaver, a gangly teenager a few years younger than Molly was more help. He couldn’t stop looking at her though and was almost too eager to fetch a pad and pen. Molly, her hate slowly fading to resignation and a weird feeling of fault, wrote as many details as she could before she surrendered to a rising feeling of shame and impotence.
The next weekend there was a club competition and Molly was replaced halfway through the game. She could only agree with the coach’s assessment that she was lacking focus. The next day was her stepfather’s birthday. At his birthday dinner, Molly realised with horror that she was looking at her stepfather Damian differently. Damian had a faded tattoo on his forearm. Once Molly had asked him about it and he had laughed it off, said it was the result of being young and stupid. The faded image on Damian’s sun damaged skin was of a kangaroo on its hind legs holding an Australian flag.
Damian and Molly’s mum got together when Molly was ten. Damian loved the ocean and had swum regularly all his life. When he got up before dawn to go to the local pool and swim laps Molly started to tag along. With Damian’s encouragement Molly joined the swim club becoming a strong if not world-class swimmer, her dedication to training and a desire to win driving most of her success.
When Molly was twelve her mother was seriously injured by a hit and run driver. The driver was a woman from her mother’s social circle. They had been to the horse races and both the woman and Molly’s mum were drunk. The woman was also high on cocaine. Following a short argument Molly’s Mum got out of the woman’s car and stalked off. The woman enraged, waited for ten seconds before gunning the engine and mowing her mother down. In the courtroom she showed no remorse and instead seemed to blame Molly’s mum for being foolish enough to argue with someone drunk and filled with coked up paranoia. Seeing her mum recovering in the bed for months and hearing her apologise to Damian for being a burden infuriated Molly. Why did she need to apologise?
As Molly grew older her swimming times fell behind the other squad members. She started to get into trouble at school. She found that what she came to know as “impulse control” was a problem for her. Molly’s developing temper quickly became the stuff of legend at school and twice Damian had to argue with the school’s principal for her to avoid suspension or worse. Both of the times what saved Molly was that any time Molly started any trouble at school whether it was talking back to a teacher or punching a fellow student she always delivered herself straight afterwards to the principal’s office. Molly always admitted it was her fault or that she had started it.
Around the same time Damian suggested water polo as something she might like to try. Molly was hesitant. She had no interest in team sport but Damian convinced Molly that her swimming ability and her emotions correctly channeled could make her a valuable recruit.
More importantly Damian’s face, a mixture of love and despair after the last visit to the school office, somehow penetrated the wall that Molly had been starting to build between herself and the world.
After the birthday dinner Molly went to bed and cried. To look at Damian and his tattoo and somehow equate him with her attacker was too much. She sobbed herself to sleep and dreamt of the man. In the dream she was at the beach but the waves were no longer buoyant and refreshing. The ocean’s salty coolness was now tepid and syrupy. The water made her heavier, the waves held her down. Every time Molly went under the water it seemed to envelop and trap her. And then she would feel his hands run over her curves, pinch them hard, touch her pubic mound and attempt to cup her there. Just before she woke she saw his face, his averted gaze sparkling with hunger and fake innocence, she could feel the contempt wrapped up in his leathery skin with its half finished tattoo. And Molly knew when she went to the beach again he would be there. Predators always go to where the prey congregates.
Molly tracked and watched the man for the next three Sundays. The beach was over a kilometre long from rocky headland to headland with three separate sets of flagged safe swimming areas. They were all busy so the man moved around from area to area being careful not to stay too long in one place. Molly saw the victims and the aftermath. Of course he targeted the vulnerable, young teenagers. It took all of Molly’s will to resist the impulse to go and intervene but an idea was already forming in her mind.
Every now and again, for thrills Molly guessed, he would target someone older like herself or even the woman in a couple. Molly saw him fool an outraged girl and her angry boyfriend on two separate occasions. The first time in a loud whine that was clearly audible even to where Molly was standing and watching, he loudly proclaimed his innocence with mock outrage at the accusation. He blamed the rough bathing conditions for the incident. He never said sorry. The other time to Molly’s horror and disgust he acted as if he had a mental condition to calm the situation. Both times he just walked away.
Her water polo team knew something was wrong with Molly. Although initially against her nature to feel part of a team Molly was now part of the squad both out of the pool as well as in. The squad had a common goal and Molly was central to their campaign, so at a team meeting they asked Molly what was wrong and if they could help. Molly decided to tell them what had happened and everything that had happened since. They all listened. And when Molly told them what she wanted to do, they discussed it for a long time. They talked about some other events, similar things that had happened to different squad members or their friends over the years. And the squad decided that they needed to do something.
Two weekends later there was a bye in competition so that was the weekend that Molly and the rest of the squad caught the bus to the beach. It was hot again but the beach was quieter as school had gone back after summer break. So Molly and the team found a spot near the stairs at the south end of the beach against the headland and waited.
Not long after Molly saw him come down the stairs from the boardwalk onto the sand. He was dressed in a washed out, stretched T-shirt and baggy board shorts garishly printed with yellow smiley faces that had been redrawn to look stoned instead of happy.
Molly watched as the man moved through the people on the sand. He had eyes for all the sunbathing girls, flickering and appraising as he walked through the crowd. His walk was not furtive. Even though he was at least half a head shorter than most adults he walked tall with his skinny shoulders back and Molly knew the man had been doing what he did for a long time.
Molly watched as he found a position close by a large group of teens, almost all of them female. He sat down on his towel, pulled from his shirt pocket a pair of dark sunglasses and he looked and he waited. Molly pointed the man out to the team.
Eventually four girls from the group of teenagers stood up, walked down to the water’s edge and waded out. After a few minutes the man stood up and walked towards the water. The surf was bigger than before so the surf zone where the waves were breaking was not crowded. Molly stood and followed him.
She found him on the edge of the flagged area. He was standing a few metres behind the teenage girls. But they had stalled in waist deep water and showed no interest in heading out deeper where the waves were breaking. Molly could see the frustration and hunger in the man. He was literally swaying from side to side in the water, his gaze unrelenting, his weight moving from foot to foot. If he had a tail, it would have been twitching. Molly moved past the man and the girls out to the deeper water. She angled closer to the rocks.
He was there beside her within a few minutes; she could feel him lurking at the edge of her vision. She didn’t turn around, the ocean had gone quiet and there was a lull in the waves. Then a set of waves approached and Molly dived under the first one but did not feel the man near. She almost looked around when she surfaced but willed herself to keep looking out to sea. She took a breath and dived under the second wave and again surfaced untouched and alone. But with the third wave she suddenly sensed him near and as she went under there was fleeting bump as he rubbed against her. She came up and took a step away before the last wave in the set broke. She dove down and this time he was beside her and she felt his hand searching for her crotch. Still under the water she turned and grabbed his wrist with both hands.
Molly came up for air and still holding on to his wrist began to drag the man out further. She could see his look of excitement turn to surprise through the water streaming down his face. She actually dragged him a couple of metres before he started to resist when the water got too deep for him to stand. Molly said nothing. She just kept a tight grip on his wrist and kept pulling him out, her extra five inches of height in her favour as his feet begun to lose the bottom. It was only then that he started to look angry. Molly realised that until then the man was actually thinking that this was a game, a positive response to his actions. Molly felt sick at the thought and unconsciously loosened her grip. The man pulled his hand back and his face broke into a sleazy smile. He opened his mouth to say something and that was when the squad swam forward and formed a half circle around him, their backs to the beach. The squad started to herd him into the deeper water again.
Caught unawares the man tried to turn around but he was too short to push off the bottom without going under. He got half away around before the squad pushed him forward again and Molly placed her hands on his shoulders and drove her knee into his groin with all her strength. The water provided resistance but the man still gasped and sagged. The squad held his arms so he could not struggle and she punched him hard in the diaphragm stealing his wind so he could not yell. When it was deep enough the squad formed a circle, practiced their egg beating and passed around a ball while taking turns to attack him. They pulled his hair and kneed his thighs and groin. Every time he began to get his breath back or a wave came through they held the man’s head under the water or punched him in the stomach, all the while keeping him afloat. Their circle of bodies, the churning legs and ball passing hid their attack from the other swimmers.
The girls continued to practice until the man was battered, bruised and half-conscious. Gasping weakly for air he stopped abusing them and instead started to beg for mercy. Only when the man, now crying and whimpering had become an object of pity were the girls satisfied. Then they stopped.
The girls split up and left the water. Molly stayed and helped the man to shallow water where he collapsed. She raised the alarm and when the lifesavers ran over she told them that she had seen the man swim too close to the rocks as a set of big waves came through. Molly said the man had been rolled and smashed repeatedly against the half submerged boulders. Then, as the lifesavers carried the man up the beach Molly slipped away to join the rest of the team.
THE END
Photo by Jernej Graj on Unsplash
