NINE
It was more than a year before that fateful race in Canberra that I noticed my priorities were changing. While I was watching the baton-change girls, Jordan began to rival the girls for my attention. What began as a Third Form crush became a complete fixation, so that even when I had a cold I still wanted to come to school so that I could get my Jordan hit.
Waiting for sparks to ignite between the male and female competitors on the track held Judy and I riveted as we sat in the pavilion sipping our pink or yellow milk. I was impatient to open my own account with the guys, preferably Jordan, and so was Judy in her sniping, killjoy way. ‘Would you look at Jor-Jor’s wimpy headband. Who does he think he is? Björn Borg – or someone better.’
While the boys wolfed down their lunches in the canteen, we dutifully watched the drills of the baton-change girls, who’d been demoted to the support act for the afternoon. I loved the relay girls not one jot less. It’s just that I loved Jordan so much more.
A scrunched-up paper bag wafted across the grass and onto the track but no-one bothered to pick it up. The bag was bouncing like a ball on a string as a strong breeze pushed it upwards, rather than across the ground. The relentless breeze funnelled our skirts and we had to tuck them between our thighs.
‘Bloody hell!’ screeched Judy as her straw blew away. She had to drink the rest of her Big M through the cardboard spout. Banana milk spilt down the front of her dress, and the yellow stain made her furious. The blustery wind was shaking the canvas awning of the little pavilion. The poles keeping the roof on grated ominously in their sockets.
If Jordan didn’t appear very soon, I thought, it probably meant he wasn’t coming outside today. I would wait for him; I would not go back until the bell had rung.
Just when I had given up hope, the delectable lad came gracefully loping along the gravel path to the oval. He slung his schoolbag onto a mountain of other bags, creating an avalanche of sorts. His mate must have razzed him about it because Jordan cuffed the boy softly over the back of the head. He then retrieved his bag and pulled out a pair of stretchy grey tracksuit pants and some runners. He changed in public without embarrassment but he already had his shorts on under his trousers.
Jordan zipped up his schoolbag and threw it on top of the pile again. He spoke briefly to one of the coaches and then sat on the grass, legs apart, bending over to touch his right knee, then his left knee, with his nose. The stretch. The pull. The hold. On another male body these warm-up exercises would have looked rude or crude, but on Jordan they were sublime. I would have loved to flit past him and catch his eye. I would have loved to be doing what the baton-changers were doing at their relay station on the other side of the track – out of his immediate sight, but ever in his thoughts. Alas, I was stuck in the pavilion, a plastic duck dreaming of a deluge that would flood the fields and give us water babies a distinct advantage.
Eventually Jordan stood up and surveyed his kingdom. What was he thinking on that pale gusty noon as he contemplated the rolling plains of green, which drivers along Nepean Highway might assume to be an offshoot of Mornington Golf Club? His gaze flickered over to the little pavilion. Judy and I looked away quickly, but we needn’t have worried. We were only part of his deception. Jordan was trying not to be obvious about searching for the only person he was interested in. A girl who was rechalking the changeover marks recently washed away by rain.
Jordan was there for Tracy; she was there for him. Or so I imagined.
The wind was blowing Jordan’s hair over his face. His luscious brown hair, straight out of a women’s shampoo ad. The texture and colour were familiar from my covert inspections of him on the bus, though sometimes Tracy made Jordan sit down the very back, to avoid the scrutiny of covetous girls like me.
Jordan’s beauty was delicate rather than striking. He had a curved chin and his mouth was small and kind, like his speech. He had a flashy smile back then, which you don’t see much nowadays. His flashy smile was for winning races and receiving compliments. But the smile I saw that day as he observed Tracy down on her haunches was his I’m-not-quite-certain-I’mgoing-to-be-loved smile.
He has retained that smile, and sometimes he has used it on me, even though he may no longer feel the same emotion he felt when he used it at school. That doubtful smile survived his adolescence. It’s had its uses. He’s gained from it by making others think he is a shy or reluctant hero.
Oh yes, he was well aware in his schooldays that success can breed resentment in others. How easily cheering becomes jeering. Jordan was never one of the boasting boys – far be it for him to put himself on a pedestal. His schoolwork was only average and that could have been a choice too: to excel only where it counted, knowing our school put a premium on how fast he could run, and cared little about his classroom performance.
Jordan was jogging backwards around the boundary, possibly to conceal his identity from Tracy or feign disinterest in her. He was going at a slow pace, almost floating, his movements governed by an inner metronome. No runner weighs much, and Jordan wouldn’t have weighed much more than sixty kilos. He was finely built, almost slight.
Pensively, he kept his eyes on his girl. Tracy was at that moment flexing her baton in a demo with Pen. Skinny Binny was bent over, in a world of her own examining a scab on her knee. Mish was burning off steam doing sequential cartwheels, her hot-pink underwear exposed for all to see.
Judy was less than impressed. ‘Would you look at that show off! Candy-coloured undies. Ick.’
Another barb was on the way. ‘Jor-Jor’s spotted Miss Candy Daks, and he’s moving in for a specky.’
Judy had got it all wrong. Jordan wasn’t a perve.
He went for a sprint, cutting to the centre of the oval with elliptical precision. Surreptitiously he entered the zone of the baton-change girls. A thrill went through my body and my heart started pounding. Something was going to happen between Jordan and Tracy, for sure.
Tracy was oblivious to Jordan’s imminent ambush. She burst forward from her stationary half-crouch, her left arm thrust behind her, preparing to accept the baton from the incoming Pen. But she was too late. Jordan’s dextrous arm shot out and he grabbed the baton before Tracy could get hold of it. Immediately Tracy twisted around, shouting displeasure, and stomped at a fast pace towards the thief. Jordan brandished the snaffled cylinder in a game of keepings off. Holding the baton out invitingly, he tempted Tracy, drawing her towards him, then dashing away laughing.
I was making a lot of noise with my straw as I sucked the last dregs of strawberry milk from the carton. This was a play put on for our benefit. I had my own versions of Tracy and Jordan to nourish, just as people do with their favourite characters in a good book.
Tracy stood still, shoulders slumped, head bowed. A pretend sulk? Registering her protest, Jordan jogged over to give her the baton. He held Tracy’s hand between his fingers for a moment. Gee, that was arousing! But Tracy didn’t melt. She shook the baton free, tossed her head dismissively, and ran over to her friends.
‘Got it back,’ she crowed, flourishing the baton.
The relay team mustered around their leader. Baton rotations resumed while Jordan loitered on the periphery. Again, he let the wind drape his hair over his face, concealing his dejection. Yet he must have been able to see through the strands, because he began to shadow the paper bag that had been blowing around the oval. He sidestepped to pick up the bag, then he squashed it into a small, dense ball and tossed it up and caught it as he ran another languid circuit around the girls’ circuit, throwing and catching the paper ball, all the while watching Tracy through his screen of hair. He drew so close to the relayists that he was able to reach out an arm and trace fingers with Binny as she passed him by. No hard feelings about his earlier interference. Not from Bin, anyway. The baton-changers kept on training. Jordan drifted away and ran several more laps without exerting himself. When the bell rang he looked at Tracy to see if she had forgiven him. She ignored both the bell and her boyfriend.
Jordan jogged towards the pyramid of vinyl schoolbags. (Boys changed outdoors; girls retired to the change sheds. There was no law about this – it was just a gender thing.) He pulled his singlet top over his head, and as he lifted it I spied two dark tufts of underarm hair. He put on his grey shirt and left it hanging open as he dragged his trousers on over his shorts. Then he hoisted himself up on the metal railing around the oval, balancing there with his toe tapping the grass. He was nattering to his mate, a contented smile on his face, not a qualm in the world about exposing his lean white chest to the chill spring breeze.
Judy and I descended from the pavilion and put our rubbish in the bin. When we passed by Jordan he treated us to one of his flashy smiles. And for a moment I believed my time had come.
As Judy and I trekked self-consciously along the gravel path to the school buildings, Tracy was at our heels. So she hadn’t paused for her usual cuddle with Jordan before the start of afternoon school.
‘How’d we go today?’ Tracy asked as she scooted past. There was a heightened volatility about her, which I attributed to the spat with Jordan. She was silly to ignore his advances. I’d have made more of a fuss of him if he’d been pestering me. I’d have whacked his bum with the baton. I’d have said something salacious when he held my hand in his.
I can’t speak for Tracy, but I loved Jordan all the more for being a droll interferer. I have cherished this memory so much that I’ve retained every detail. I have to admit that never with any of my boyfriends, not even with Jordan at twenty-three, have I attained a sweetness of connection comparable to the one I vicariously experienced that day, watching him make out with Tracy. And I admit it with a twinge of self-disgust, for this was to set a pattern of relating at a distance that has been hard for me to break. Maybe I have not been able to inhabit any relationship fully because I trained myself not to do it back in high school.
As I sat on the bed looking out the window in the Bayview Room, it occurred to me that Tracy might have been calling my bluff when she’d shunned Jordan’s attentions on that gusty day long ago. Perhaps she faked toughness with her boyfriend to protect their privacy. She wasn’t going to let us two peeping Toms see any of the spicy bits. She was playing hard to get. Not with Jordan, as I’d supposed, but with Judy and me.
Could this interpretation not also be applied to my wedding day kerfuffle? Tracy might be sending me up via her bluffing letter. Jordan loves me and not you. Her intention was to give me a scare and a spook – to summon the vanquished internal demons again. Make me remember my humble past.
This was not the first time I’d wondered if my fascination with the baton-change girls had impaired my own development. It was definitely an expression of my adolescent neediness and dependency.
But I shouldn’t be so negative. It was the time when I first hungered to be someone special. The girls represented temptation and danger. Imagine if I had tried to do what they were doing –? I would certainly have failed. Nevertheless, I had worked out a way of penetrating their circle without conflict or failure. Doing athletics myself was deflating, but watching others excel at it was fulfilling.
I made that luminous teenage world with my camera eyes. It was my world as much as it was theirs. I was a passive participant, yes, but it was never to my detriment. Being two people wasn’t a handicap. If anything it was an achievement because imaginative Beth could do what the others were doing in her mind.
Which was why I was in such a mess today, of course, to come full circle. Imaginative Beth kept getting in the way of Participant Beth. Active people don’t have trouble making up their minds. Introspective people do because they overthink everything and are often fantasising three scripts concurrently. Judy was a person of action. Naturally she had resented keeping me company in the little pavilion. In class Judy was a fidgeter, a plait-flicker, a religious pencil-sharpener. All her pencils had the sharpest tips.
Judy had been very critical of me just now, yet this afternoon’s discussion with her had deflected some of my inner turmoil. She had failed to comfort me, she had let me down really, but I was already better for having spoken to her. It was as though she had come into a super-messy bedroom and picked up all the clothing and things on the floor and packed them neatly away in cupboards and boxes, so that the room was liveable again. Yes, Judy had tidied up my reality for me.
It was pretty much the same as before, but it was manageable now.
Outside the hotel the sky was almost entirely blue except for two round, dense clouds that sat like dollops of clotted cream so high up they posed no threat of further rain. As the weather had vastly improved I grabbed my satchel and went to the beach for a walk.