Four Degrees

by Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The water at the bottom of the quarry was four degrees, and had been four degrees since 1971, when the company switched off the pumps and went home. That was the thing about deep fresh water, Shelagh said. It was heaviest at four degrees, and the heavy water went to the bottom and stayed there, summer and winter, under everything, and nothing that happened on top made any difference to it. She told every new swimmer this on the first morning, standing on the slate at the edge in her dryrobe with her tea in a flask lid. She said it as if it were good news.

Gwil Rowlands heard it in the second week of October, with the sun not yet over the far wall and his breath going up in front of him. There were nine of them that morning. They stood about on the flat grey shale where the old mill had been, among what was left of it: a rusted bracket, a run of brick footings, a cast-iron wheel the size of a dinner plate half sunk in the spoil. They took their clothes off in the careful, hopping way of people who have done it before and still dislike the moment when the second sock comes off. Below them the pit went down in terraces, the galleries the quarrymen had cut, each one a ledge of blue-grey stone with birch trees growing out of it, and at the bottom the water lay perfectly still and very green, the green of a bottle held up to a window.

"You'll feel it in your hands first," Shelagh said. "And your feet. That's the burn. Breathe through it. Long out-breath. Don't fight it. Somewhere round six, seven minutes, you'll go through."

"Through what?" Gwil said.

She smiled at him. She had been a PE teacher in Wigan for thirty-one years and had a way of smiling that let you know the question had been asked before, by children.

"You'll know," she said.

---

He had come because a man at work told him it was good for knees. Gwil's knees were not good. He spent his days on the platform at the top of the big wire, going up and down a steel staircase of a hundred and twelve steps, checking harnesses. The wire went out from the platform across the whole width of the quarry, the best part of a mile of cable, and people paid seventy-nine pounds to lie face down in a padded sling and go along it at a speed the website gave as a hundred miles an hour, though the man who serviced the brakes said it was nearer seventy. They went off the platform screaming. You could hear them all the way across. Then the scream got small and stopped, and a light came on in the hut on the far side, and the next one stepped up.

Gwil checked the leg loops. He checked the chest strap, the karabiners, the swivel, the trolley. He asked them to take off their earrings and their watches. He said, "Arms by your side, chin up, enjoy," which was what it said on the laminated card, and then he opened the gate. Some of them cried. Some of them said, before they went, things they had plainly planned to say, to the camera on the post or to someone back in the queue. A woman from Leeds once said, quite quietly, "I don't want to come back," and went, and he had to ring the hut to make sure she had arrived. She had. She was sitting on the bench by the brake taking her gloves off and laughing.

From up there you could see the whole of the pit. You could see the old inclines going down the far side in straight grey lines, and the drum houses at the head of each one with their roofs gone, and the level where the mill had stood, and the swimmers, if it was a Saturday, standing on the shore in their caps, very small, like the pegs in a board game. You could not see the bottom of the water. Nobody could. That was the other thing Shelagh said.

---

The first time he went in, it was eleven degrees on the surface and he thought he was going to die. Not in a frightened way. It was more like being told something. His chest locked and the air went out of him in a noise he had not known he could make, and Shelagh, who was already out beyond him doing a slow breaststroke with her head up like a swan, said, "Out-breath, Gwil, out-breath," without looking round. He breathed out. His hands burned. Then they stopped burning and were just somewhere at the ends of his arms, like gloves somebody else was wearing. He swam out to the first buoy and back. It took four minutes. He did not go through anything. When he got out he stood on the slate and laughed, and could not stop, and Shelagh put a flask lid of tea in his hands and folded his fingers round it, one by one, because he could not do it himself.

Twenty minutes later, in the car, the shaking began. It came up from somewhere under his ribs and went out into his arms and his jaw, huge and regular, like something being wound. That was the afterdrop, they told him the next week. That was the cold coming back in from your arms and legs, where it had been waiting. You had to have the heater on and something sweet. You had to let it go through you.

Everybody used that phrase. Go through.

---

There was a woman who did not swim, but came. She sat on the bench, a slab of slate on two blocks that somebody had built at the top of the shore, in a big man's parka zipped up to her chin and a woollen hat pulled down over her ears, and watched. She was there every Saturday and most Wednesdays. She was perhaps forty. Her face was narrow and pale and very still, and she kept her hands in her armpits as if she had just come in from somewhere.

"That's Corinne," said Mike Tunnicliffe, a retired surveyor from Mold who swam in a pair of tiny black trunks and called everybody my love. He said it in a lowered voice, the way people speak about someone who has had an operation. "Corinne went through."

"Through what?"

Mike looked at him. "New Year's Day," he said. "Last year. Four degrees on the top. She went out past the second buoy, over the incline, and she put her face in and kept it in." He shook his head slowly, admiring. "Shelagh was going to go in after her. But she came up."

"And?"

"And nothing. She came up. She swam in. She got dressed." He looked across at the bench. "She hasn't been warm since. Doctors can't find anything. Bloods fine. Thyroid fine." He said, with a kind of pride, "She's not been in the water since. She doesn't need to."

---

Shelagh started the Threshold sessions in November. Before that the group had been free, a few people with a WhatsApp, and you turned up and went in at your own risk and nobody minded. Now there was a website with a photograph of Shelagh on it, standing in the water up to her waist in the first light with her arms out, and a booking page. Fifteen pounds for the hour. Guided cold-water immersion in a unique post-industrial landscape. Breathwork. Community. Find your threshold. She had orange caps printed with the word THRESHOLD in white and gave them out free with your first booking. There was a waiver to sign. There was a woman who came on Saturdays to take photographs.

Nobody objected much. Shelagh had a husband with emphysema and a son who had gone to Australia and did not ring. Mike said she had to make a living. People came from Chester and Liverpool and Manchester, in good cars, and stood on the slate in new dryrobes with the labels still on the cuffs, and listened to the thing about the four degrees, and went in screaming, and came out laughing, and shook in their cars afterwards with the heaters on, and drove home. At the top of the track, on the way out, they passed the queue for the zip wire coming the other way.

Shelagh kept Wednesdays free, for the old group, and Gwil went on Wednesdays. On Saturdays he was on the platform. He watched them from up there. Orange dots on the grey shore. Orange dots in the green.

The man who serviced the brakes, whose name was Eifion, stood next to him one Saturday with a can of something and said, "That's us, that is."

"What is?"

Eifion pointed with the can at the swimmers, then out along the wire, where a man from somewhere was going away from them on his stomach, getting smaller, his scream going thin. "Same thing," Eifion said. "Other end." He drank. "My taid split slate down there forty-four years. Never went in that water once. Said it was full of the dead." He thought about it. "It's not, mind. I've seen the survey."

---

In December the surface went to five degrees, and then to four, and stayed there. Now the top was the same as the bottom. Shelagh said this too: that in the depth of winter the whole column of water was one temperature, top to bottom, and it could turn over, the bottom coming up and the top going down, so that you were swimming in water that had lain at the bottom of the quarry since the pumps were switched off. She said it as if it were very good news.

Gwil's hands no longer burned. His feet went numb in the first minute and stayed numb, and he had learned to walk out over the slate afterwards without looking at them, feeling the ground come up through his heels like something heard through a wall. He could do ten minutes. He could do twelve. He did not go through. Sometimes, round about the eighth minute, the cold seemed to stop being a thing that was happening to him and become the place where he was, and he would feel quite clear and quite calm and slightly let down, as though he had arrived early somewhere and found the doors locked. Then Shelagh would blow her whistle from the shore.

He started to talk to Corinne. It was not difficult. You sat on the bench next to her and she moved along.

She did not want to talk about New Year's Day, or not about the part they wanted. She was an analyst for a building society, she worked from home in a cottage further up the valley, and she had had a cat that died. She asked him about the zip wire. She wanted to know how fast it really went, and what it was like on the platform when the wind got up, and whether anybody ever refused at the gate.

"Some," Gwil said. "One in fifty."

"What do you do?"

"Walk them back down. Refund. They're always very polite about it."

She nodded, as if that were what she had thought.

"What was it like?" he said. "Under."

She looked at the water for a while. It was a dull day with no wind, and the water was so still that it held the far wall upside down, every gallery and birch tree, so that the quarry seemed to go down twice as far as it did.

"It was very clear," she said. "Clearer than you'd think. You can see the incline. The rails go down into it, and the trucks are still there, three of them, on the rails, going down, and then there's just green. Then a bit further there's darker green." She stopped. "That's all."

"That's not what Mike says."

"No," she said. "Mike wasn't there."

The upside-down quarry lay in the water in front of them, perfectly finished, with nothing in it.

"Everyone wants it to be something," she said. "Shelagh wants it to be something. Those people from Chester. They want to come out different."

She took one hand out of her armpit and looked at it, front and back, and put it away again.

---

The Saturday after Christmas, the brake on the big wire froze and they shut it at eleven. Gwil walked down the hundred and twelve steps and along the track and onto the shore in his work fleece, because he had nowhere else to go. Shelagh's session was in. Eleven orange caps bobbed near the first buoy in a tight knot, and Shelagh stood at the edge in her dryrobe with the whistle round her neck, counting them, saying, "Out-breath, out-breath, that's it, my lovelies, find your threshold."

Corinne was on the bench.

Gwil sat down next to her. Then he got up. He took off his boots and his socks, and his fleece, and his work trousers and his shirt, and stood on the slate in his underpants with the wind coming over the lip of the quarry. Corinne watched him and said nothing. Shelagh turned round and opened her mouth, and saw who it was, and shut it again.

He did not go in at the beach where the group went in. He walked along the shore, over the spoil and the bits of iron, to the foot of the incline, where the rails came down the face of the quarry and went straight into the water without stopping. There was a ledge there. He stood on it with the water over his feet and could not feel it at all.

He went in.

It was not like the first time. Nothing locked. The cold took him the way a hand takes something it has been given, without surprise. He swam out along the line of the rails, past the second buoy, where the group never went, and there was nobody blowing a whistle at him, or if there was he could not hear it. Then he stopped, and turned onto his front, and put his face in.

Corinne was right. It was very clear. He could see the rails going down side by side, furred with something pale, and the first of the trucks standing on them, then the second, square and patient, their iron rims gone soft-looking, like bread. Beyond them the incline went on, and down. Green. Then darker green. Further than he would have thought.

He waited for it. He kept his face in and waited, his heart going slow and enormous in his ears, for the door, for the thing that would come up out of the four degrees and take him through to the other side of whatever this was, and the trucks stood on the rails and did not move, and the green did not change, and nothing came.

He lifted his head. Out of the water the noise came back: the wind, a crow somewhere on the galleries, and a long way off on the shore Shelagh shouting his name in the voice she must once have used on a playing field when it was getting dark. He turned and swam in. He did not hurry. He was not frightened, and not let down, and not anything, and his arms went on moving.

---

They wrapped him in two dryrobes and gave him tea and someone's chocolate. Shelagh said he could have died, with tears in her eyes, quite furious, and then wanted to know how long he had had his face in, and what he had seen, and whether he had felt it. The woman with the camera stood a little way off and did not take a photograph, and then did. Gwil said he had seen the trucks. He said he was fine. He went up to his car and sat in it with the engine running and the heater on full and the chocolate on his knee, unopened, and waited for the shaking.

It did not come.

He sat there a long time. The windscreen cleared. Behind him the Threshold people came up the track in twos and threes, red-faced and talking loudly, and got into their good cars and drove away towards Chester. The light went down behind the far wall of the quarry at about half past three, the way it does at the end of December, all at once, and the water went from green to grey to a kind of polished black that held the sky.

He was not cold. He put his hands against the vents and felt the hot air on them, and knew that it was hot, the way you know a thing you have been told. He was not warm either.

After a while he got out of the car and walked back down to the shore. The bench was still there. Corinne was still on it, in her big parka, with her hands in her armpits, looking at the water.

She moved along.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Fictiōnis Sōlācium Recūsantis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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