EIGHT
Relay season took place in spring after the September holidays. The playing fields were always green and moist and soft under foot. It was during relay season that things hotted up between the girls and the boys. Who was going to be the first girl to write a note to a boy? Who was going to be the first older boy (for we were only interested in older boys) to steal a kiss from a girl? And which girl would take the plunge and wear her summer uniform to school? One brave girl usually broke ranks and appeared in her pale cotton frock weeks before the rest of us considered giving up our drab grey wintry outfits.
Relay season. The purple magnolias in the teachers’ courtyard were in full bloom and hay fever was making Tracy’s eyes water. Mr Connor had a big smile on his face as he walked us towards the empty soccer field. The pesky boys kept asking, ‘What’s in the bag, Sir?’
Finally, Mr Connor opened the drawstring bag and revealed the hallowed merchandise. The metal batons glittered red and green and gold and blue. We held them in our hands with the same awe that we used to hold Roman candles on Guy Fawkes Night before fireworks were banned. A team loss didn’t entail the same shame as coming last in the three-k run. In any case, Mr Connor made sure our teams were evenly balanced. And he reminded us it wasn’t only speed that decided the result.
‘The baton is a very temperamental instrument,’ he said, giving us one of his goofy demonstrations. Gripping the baton almost rudely, he made it shoot up out of his hands like a rocket. ‘Sweaty hands beware!’
The boys loved this catchphrase, and they spat on their palms and wiped them on each other, repeating ad nauseam, ‘Sweaty hands beware!’
Baton error, Mr Connor claimed, was very high. Expect a disqualification at every carnival, even the Olympics. Those were the stats.
Mr Connor was also a history teacher at our school, and he loved to entwine historical facts into his PE lessons. ‘The modern Olympics are an express-lane sport, but the ancient batons remain. Today we’ll be doing what the Greeks were doing five thousand years ago. Just think about that, George! We owe an awful lot to your kinsmen.’
‘But I’m not Greek, Sir,’ said George. ‘I’m Macedonian.’
‘The faster you run during baton changeover, the bigger the risk,’ Mr Connor stressed. ‘The timing of your exchanges and your positioning in relation to the incoming runner are of great importance. We need to work at these things. Don’t forget to call out “Stick! Stick!” loudly when you bring in the baton. And for those of you accepting the baton, keep an eye on your teammate’s approach. Leave blind baton transfers to the experts,’ he chuckled, giving Tracy a deferential nod.
Tracy exhaled briefly and closed her eyes. How she loved being the teacher’s pet. Now she strode to her changeover mark with her chest thrust out. When she got there she pulled up her long socks, though they were already at the top of her shins. The marvel of Tracy’s suspended socks had a simple explanation: first thing in the morning she would slide a circlet of thick hat elastic up under the top fold of each sock. Tracy stored pieces of coloured chalk in her socks and sometimes musk sticks (her favourite lollies), which she’d break in half to look like chalk.
Relay training put our whole class in a good mood, even slow runners like me. Judy fell silent and ran her heart out, and even the pixies had a real go. We never wanted the bell to ring, and when it did Mr Connor had to bribe us to give the batons back.
‘What are we doing for lunch today?’ Judy would ask. ‘Same as usual?’
‘I guess.’
We would grab our lunches and stroll down to the small pavilion beside the main training oval to observe our sprinter classmates in action. She’s less pugnacious these days, but at fifteen Judy had a snarky type of humour that she reserved for our private chatter. She had disparaging nicknames for them all: the runners were ‘the trotters’, the high-jumpers she called ‘the bum-biters’, and the long jumpers were ‘the kangaroos’. For Judy, we swimmers were superior individuals. I can hear her chortling to this very day: ‘Beth, us water-babes’ll be walking around when this lot are bumming it in wheelchairs.’ Judy’s father was a physiotherapist and she spoke with authority about the crippled futures awaiting our star athletes, who pushed their juvenile bodies to the limit. And she was quick to spot afflictions as soon as they occurred. When a sprinter pulled up short, grabbing the inside of his thigh, Judy was beside herself. ‘He’s done a hammy, Beth. Quick, look. The silly bugger’s done a hammy!’
Judy and I would be sitting with our feet up on the seats in front of us, tucking into our food while waiting for dramas to unfold on the track.
‘Hey, the baton-changers got down here before us today,’ Judy commented dryly, biting into her salad roll. ‘How do they run so fast when they never eat? Hmm.’
And later on, when Skinny Binny jogged past in her singlet top and nothing shorts, Judy said: ‘Shivers, Beth, would you look at those jutting collarbones?’
Sometimes, when she became too cruel in her denouncements, I’d say: ‘Stop being a Punch and Judy.’
She would snigger in delight at this nickname, but it would clamp her mouth for a while because she didn’t like being put in her place. She was a classy entertainer for one so young, and I envisaged my friend forging a career for herself as a stand-up comedian.
I was protected from her sarcasm and didn’t fear her because she was my best friend. There were no grounds for competition between us in the pool – Judy was clearly the better swimmer. She was a competent butterfly specialist who always made the club team, and complacently expected to do so. I didn’t mind being the underdog, because a day never went by when I wouldn’t have preferred to be a runner.
Over time the baton-changers grew accustomed to our presence, and sometimes they’d wave me down from the pavilion and send me to the lockers to get things they had forgotten: bandages, water bottles, Tracy’s stopwatch and sunvisor.
‘There you go, Trace,’ I’d say, handing over the loot. She’d give me a fond smile and finger-flick me away.
Tracy used her coloured chalk to mark the acceleration and baton transfer zones on the track. When the incoming runner trod on a pink mark, the outgoing runner took off from a half-crouch position. In these sessions, the incoming runner would have to run flat out to catch the next runner within the yellow triangle. Mishaps were intentional. Tracy wanted them to happen so she could iron them out. The incoming girl would sometimes trip the outgoing girl by zooming in too fast and close. The outgoing girl would sometimes zip away too quickly before the incoming girl could reach her. From my elevated seat in the pavilion, I witnessed plenty of baton fumbles and bumbles. The moment was lost. In a real race the rival teams would have been uncatchable, the race forfeited.
Tracy and her friends were going to give themselves every chance of beating teams with faster individual sprint times. They honed and perfected their rotations with conscientious zeal.
When the bell rang Judy and I would sometimes converge with the athletes as we returned to class. Binny and Pen would be chatting about ‘lightning transfers’ or ‘crap transfers’. Mish was always playing with her hair. She’d readjust her hair ties, scooping up her fringe or twisting her ponytail off her sweaty neck. Tracy would be a little to one side, twirling her baton like a Yankee marching band leader at a gridiron game. We might hear her absentmindedly humming the Happy Days theme tune. Her dark blue eyes would be shining, her hair a shaggy mess.
It was more than simple admiration. Tracy was carrying my feelings for me like a surrogate. It was too much effort for me to carry my own feelings like other people did. I was ungainly with my feelings, like a spoonbill trying to swim with a fish in its beak. It was much easier to stash my feelings safely in another person who could feel excitement for me – then I could come to school untroubled. And most of the time it was no bother to Tracy. She wouldn’t even have suspected she was helping me out.
For most of secondary school Tracy tolerated a quasifriendship with me. I was a team helper at running carnivals and a trusted batgirl of sorts. We’d always have a chat first thing in the morning at the bus stop. She never spoke about her steady, Jordan Sinclair, but she deigned to tell me things about the relay team when it suited her. Once she confessed she went to sleep and woke up dreaming of baton changes. ‘Am I quite normal?’ she wanted to know.
‘You live to run, Tracy. That’s the reason,’ I said, dismissing her concern.
Later, when I shared Tracy’s confidence with Judy, she retorted, ‘I can’t believe she’d be dreaming of baton rotations when she has Jordan Sinclair to dream about.’
‘Why would she need to dream about him? We can do that for her,’ I swiped back.
Judy was annoyed. ‘Speak for yourself, why don’t you?’
One cold, dark morning, while sitting under the fluoroescent light at the bus shelter with goosebumps spotting our legs, I got a chance to quiz Tracy about her latest relay strategy.
‘You know the runner receiving the baton?’ I began hopefully.
‘Mmm?’
‘She should never look back, should she?’
‘No way. She has to trust her teammates to hit the spot.’
After a pause Tracy started giggling.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Oh, just Mr Connor.’
‘What about Mr Connor?’
‘He’s a silly billy.’
‘Because he says you have to look back?’
‘Uh-uh. No, not that.’
Tracy was sucking on the fingertip of her glove. ‘Mr Connor says if you don’t like the other person you’ll botch the transfer.’
I managed a nervous little laugh. ‘It’s a good thing you’re running with your friends then, Tracy.’
I had said the wrong thing. Tracy’s glance was riddled with guilt. I had never seen her look like that before. I hadn’t intended to sound judgemental, or to remind Tracy that I’d been excluded from her inner circle for so long. I could only infer she thought I was making a point about having been left out. People always misunderstand other people. It’s the worst thing about life.
To change the topic, she told me she was pissed off with Mr Connor because he wanted her to run fourth and last split for the school team. She wanted to run third split, the leg usually allocated to the slowest runner. If she ran the anchor, she would accept the baton but not get to exchange it. And if her team was lagging behind, she wanted to run round the bend, which she loved doing best of all.
I’d watched Tracy run third split often enough. On the curve she leant sideways as motorcyclists do when they burn around a corner. She could run even faster that way.
I gave her my stamp of approval. ‘Yeah, Tracy. That’s the best possie for you. On the second bend.’
At the next inter-school event, as predicted, Mr Connor put Tracy down as the last runner. She showed me the program, ‘There you go, Beth. Told you!’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably nothing.’
I was a volunteer usher and a scribe at that race. This was a great lurk because I got out of regular school. I was sitting out in the open, brushing flies from my face and handing out numbered bibs, but I ignored the queue at the table to watch the Under-16 girls compete.
The baton-changers had adhered to the program listing. They were in their preselected spots, with Tracy running fourth split. Mr Connor was on the fence, standing as close as he could to the starting blocks. When the gun went off I saw him spasm. ‘Someone’s just been shot’ was Judy’s mocking lingo for the starter’s gun firing. I always heard Judy saying that when a gun went off, even if Judy wasn’t around.
Penny didn’t come off her starting block quickly. She later said that Mr Connor put her off, hanging over the fence and yelling out encouragement. Thankfully, Mish and Binny ran good legs and made up some lost ground. Tracy swiped the baton with absolute precision from Binny, never looking back, using her second sight. She bolted down the straight as if there were a grass fire licking at her heels.
That was the day our girls won their first big race. I lip-read their exclamations as they came off the track with their arms wrapped around Tracy.
‘Fuck, we won.’
‘We did it!’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘But that’s what the best relay runners do,’ a flushed Tracy claimed as they converged around the winners’ table. ‘They never look back. It’s called non-visual baton exchange.’
As a reward, in subsequent races Mr Connor succumbed to Tracy’s preference and I saw her run third split in the southern region championships. The baton-change girls won that race too. We honestly believed that our homegrown team were experimenting with the fastest baton transfers ever. At the state trials that would make them famous at our school, Tracy’s relay team would beat three classy Victorian teams in the final. They had scored the unenviable inside lane, but they came home from Olympic Park with the royal blue ribbons pinned to their tracksuit tops. By then we were in Form Five, I think, and the baton-changers were sixteen going on seventeen. That was their heyday.
At morning assembly they marched up on stage to receive their medals amid loud applause. Success briefly altered them. They took days off school, granted liberties the rest of us were denied. I spotted the baton-changers walking down Main Street in Mornington one Friday evening, braving the cold in miniskirts and high heels. With the rain spitting on their bony clavicles they must have been freezing. Who knows where they were heading? Cool clubbing? Disco dancing at sixteen? Nothing was beyond them.
Then they were back in serious training. Tracy was juggling her red and green batons in the school corridors. She was wearing her tracksuit bottoms to class and getting away with it. She stank of Deep Heat and she had the gall to clean her spikes under her desk, jabbing the soles with a ruler and letting the clods drop straight onto the floorboards. The dirt lay there like cow dung. Tracy could do no wrong in the eyes of the deferential teachers.
In the months leading up to their big race at the nationals in Canberra, the relayists colonised our minds with their imaginative training rituals. When we went on excursions or school camps, the girls took whatever free time was available to hone their skills. I can remember them running round a cow paddock near Hastings, while our class sat on a wooden fence and cheered. On a trip to Sovereign Hill they ran four abreast down the main street, almost bowling over a couple of gold-rush damsels who’d come out of a shop at an inopportune time.
Shortly before they left for Canberra, the famous four battled the clifftop winds at Split Point, near Aireys Inlet. While we were waiting for our buses we watched the relay girls zip around the lighthouse at mind-dizzying speed. Round and round they went till Binny put up her hand and broke the formation, telling the others she couldn’t go on because she was seeing stars.
They were our high school heroes, those speedster girls, and each of us was convinced that this relay team, which was our relay team, could take on the world if they wanted to. And I’ll tell you what. The boys in our year were just as impressed by the soaring fortunes of the baton-changers as we girls were.