Toby said Istanbul, though not even he really knew where the Maynards had gone. In the end it didn’t matter. The point was they were gone, Jamie was gone. He had taken his scrawny hand-rolled greyhounds and his careless, wolfish mouth with him, and Toby and I were at a loose end all summer. January in Newstead stretched out, dangerous and glittering as the lapis at the lip of an artesian well, deceptively far off. So far off, you felt you could drown before you reached the end of it.
Toby and I played squash that month. We were hardly even friends; he barely spoke to me back at Knox. But there was nothing to do with the hours except waste them, so we met Monday and Thursday afternoons at Ascot and hammered a rubber ball as hard as we could at a black smudge on the wall. Sometimes Toby would feign an injury when he was out of breath.
‘Christ,’ he would say, bending over. ‘My ankle.’ He would rub his shin, wincing, then fiddle with his racquet head.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I would say, exasperated. ‘Get on with it.’
We would turn back to the wall. Squash must be the most draining sport on earth. The rhythm of it made everything recede. Toby cut across me, a clean white blur. After a while, I could feel something in me hurtling off and breaking up. A dangerous feeling, a falling away.
*
It was after one of those sweltering games that Toby suggested we go to the Maynards’ place. We were in the change room, a dank space where the closed-in smell of men – sweat, Right Guard, menthol salve, Lux – was both arousing and vaguely sickening.
‘February,’ he said.
I looked up. Toby was eating an egg sandwich. He must have packed it in his bag.
‘They’re not back until February. Jamie said.’ His face was bland, freckly. I knew that expression from school.
‘So?’
‘They’ve got a swimming pool.’ He angled the sandwich into his mouth artfully, so as not to lose any of the egg.
I tried to imagine it: Jamie’s pool. My stomach turned. ‘Porter, you’ve got a bloody swimming pool.’
‘Not like that. It’s half-Olympic.’ He paused. ‘You’ve never even been, have you?’
‘Why would I want to?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Why would you?’
Toby must have known it even then. There wasn’t an instant that summer I wasn’t excruciatingly aware that Jamie wasn’t here, was out there somewhere, with his parents, with the witch Cecelia. It was a kind of fever: my mind kept reaching out airy feelers, sweeping its corners for some scrap and returning with dust.
‘Fine.’
‘I thought so,’ Toby said smugly, pulling his shirt off. ‘Jamie told me you like swimming.’
I felt a slow burn creep across my face. I thought, quite disconnectedly, that I could kill him, that it would be easy to do it.
‘Shut up.’
‘God, calm down.’ He sounded pleased with himself. ‘Look, you don’t have to.’
‘Piss off. I’m coming.’
I felt for the key in my pocket. No one would be home. My mother would still be at work; my sister would be at her pottery class, making another one of the lumpy vases that were converging in an unruly line on the kitchen windowsill.
Coming home for the holidays had become an awkward, uneasy affair. I had grown inexorably apart from the both of them, from my mother’s solicitous attempts to read my essay on Whiteley’s Summer at Carcoar, from Katie’s pitiable infatuation with David Bowie, her tatty photos cut from magazines and sticky-taped to her school books. I felt further than ever from our house on Kingsholme Street, its chipping gunmetal-green stairs, the tired orange trumpet creeper shrinking against the fence.
Even Brisbane itself had begun to feel limp, burnt out, sun-blasted. As Toby and I left the building, the air was smothering.
Toby swore. ‘That bastard.’
‘What?’
‘That bastard’ll be lazing about, being fanned by palm leaves. Jesus Christ.’ He grinned. ‘They’re probably feeding him horses’ bollocks.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I unlocked my bike chain.
‘Jamie, idiot. In Istanbul.’
‘They don’t eat horse, you dunce.’ I felt victorious. ‘They eat dates and chickpeas. Apricots. It’s not China.’
‘Whatever,’ Toby said casually. ‘Anyway, we’re going to Greece again for mid-year. To Milos.’
I didn’t have anything to say to that. In July I would be killing time back in Brisbane, holed up in the State Library reading Caulaincourt or Horace, or cycling along the river to prolong going home to Countdown with Katie and my mother.
‘What about you?’ Toby said.
‘What about me.’
We pulled up at the bottom of the hill. Hamilton rose up in front of us, block by block, sandy brick and cream. There was a patch of green up the top, and an enormous gothic revival house, its roof gleaming in the sun.
Toby was breathing hard. ‘What’re you doing for break?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. It was true.
‘You’re on scholarship, aren’t you?’
‘None of your business.’
We pushed our bicycles up the hill in silence. The houses on the road were large and shaded by trees, their fences tall and uninviting. A dog was barking steadily somewhere. I tried to imagine Jamie walking up this hill when he was young, before Knox, but I could only conjure an image of the Jamie I knew, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, his waist slim and firm, his back coolly turned away.
*
The Maynards’ place was just below the hill’s crest, a white and brown mock-Tudor monstrosity behind a patterned brick wall. Through the gate, the garden looked mannered and spare; the footpath was lined with mock oranges and there was a row of savagely pruned rose bushes beneath the front windows. I kicked my bike stand and let Toby go ahead.
Inside the gate, a little path of stepping stones led along the side of the house to a lattice gazebo. There was a set of white wicker chairs in there, and an empty glass ashtray on the table. Perhaps Jamie smoked here at night once his parents had gone to bed. I traced the edge of the ashtray. I was in Jamie’s garden. I was going to swim in Jamie’s pool.
Toby yelled something from around the back.
‘Porter?’ He didn’t answer. I slung my shirt and shorts over a chair and followed his voice to the pool.
Jamie hadn’t been lying: it was half-Olympic. I could see the sky cut up in its surface, splinters of sun peaking and breaking. In the shallow end, Toby was floating on his back in his boxers, which ballooned like parachute silk around his thighs.
‘Not bad,’ Toby said. He kicked a few times, then cupped his hands behind his head. ‘That prick. Not bad.’
As I dived in, the water shattered over my head, cold and clear. Veins of light rippled over the tiles. I swam along the bottom until I could feel my lungs burn, then I pushed up. Hold your breath: it was an old game Katie and I used to play at the Spring Hill baths. In those seconds before breaking through to air, I imagined I was a corpse, drifting dumbly towards the surface. I dived down again and again, sinking and rising until my heart was hammering and I couldn’t swim anymore.
*
I had probably only been going down to the Knox pool a few weeks before Jamie caught me, although those hours feel endless now, inviolate; nothing can or will ever touch them. The mornings he trained I left the dorm early, in the half-light, and took my books down to the pool. I would crouch in the stands with my scarf wrapping my mouth and nose; then when I picked out Jamie making his way across the grounds, I would pore over my book with a pencil. I never lifted my head until he was in the pool.
The day it happened was clear and cold. It must have been close to six-thirty; I could hear the thin pipe of a whistle intermittently from the oval. My book was open at a colour plate of Zurbaran’s Saint Agatha, who was holding her severed breasts on a tray like, the caption said, two heavenly pink scoops of gelato. Her face was pale and soft, and the rich red cloth was spilling off her shoulder like a ribbon of blood. The image was strange, savage; it seemed to me to signify neither revelation nor transcendence.
It was September, so the water would have still been freezing. Lines of flags snapped overhead in the wind. Jamie dived from the blocks and struck out at a sprint. The water churned white behind him, then stilled. I felt a thrill rush through me. Watching him swim was my first apprehension of something approaching beauty: the dark lines of his back, his hands dragging and reaching in the water.
By the time Jamie was finished training there were a few other swimmers, and he lingered with them at one end, his arms folded on a plastic barrier. As always, he was at the centre of it all, laughing with someone I didn’t recognise in a blue swimming cap.
At any rate, it was far too late when I realised I was being watched. Two of the boys had seen and one of them elbowed Jamie. I ducked my head.
‘Wentworth,’ Jamie yelled.
I stared at the page. The words winnowed and slid.
‘Wentworth.’
I could see his chest beaded with water, the sliver of his smile. I lifted an arm.
‘You fucking fag.’ He was grinning. Behind him, the boy in the blue cap laughed and said something I couldn’t hear.
‘What’s your problem, Maynard?’
‘You’re a fucking fag.’ He was drying his back with a towel. ‘What the fuck are you doing down here, anyway?’
‘Reading.’
‘What?’
‘I was reading, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ My voice sounded reedy, weak. I felt as if I was seeing myself from a great distance – from the future, even – as a wretched, faltering thing, an insect trying to make itself invisible.
‘What, Arsefuckers? Cocks and Frocks?’ Jamie laughed. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Yeah, fuck off,’ one of the others yelled. Anders, from Sinclair. ‘Jamie’s already got a girlfriend.’
Everyone was watching now, from the shallow end. The one in the blue cap smiled mockingly at me.
‘Get stuffed.’ My heart was beating dizzyingly fast. I scrabbled for my things.
‘You wish,’ Jamie said. Someone whistled. ‘Now fuck off out of here.’
*
From the Maynards’ pool, the city was faint as a backdrop in a play. Blocks and bands of light glinted coolly in the sun: windows. And behind them, people working; behind one of them, my mother. Beyond the city, suburbs stretched out in an endless expanse. Hidden somewhere in the cubist mosaic of roofs was our house, but it was impossible to make anything out from this distance.
‘Istanbul.’ I said it more to myself than to Toby.
‘What?’ Toby asked suspiciously, propping himself up on one elbow.
‘Why would you go to Istanbul?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
Toby sighed, then laid back down. His skin was mottling pink in the sun.
‘Would you stop that?’ he said abruptly.
‘Stop what?’
‘You’re staring at me. I can feel it. Just stop.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Why are you always staring at everyone?’
‘I’m not. Don’t be ridiculous.’ I felt a sudden swerve of hatred for him. ‘You’re going red, you idiot.’
‘Don’t call me an idiot,’ Toby said sharply.
‘I’ll call you an idiot if I want to,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you one if you’re acting like one.’
I could feel the rage roaring up in me. This perilous sliver of time might be the only afternoon I would ever be here, at the Maynards’, and Toby, thick, fatuous Toby, was ruining it.
‘Porter.’ My pulse was thrumming.
Toby shifted his leg slightly and said nothing.
‘Porter, you stupid arse. You’re burning.’
Up close, there was nothing to like in his face: the disturbing translucence of his cheeks, his fleshy lips, the bulbous flare of his nose. Before Jamie came to tolerate Toby, he used to call him Pufferfish, and even once the nickname died, the image remained, lodged in my mind for good.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said. He was the one who was staring now, dispassionately, at me.
‘What do you mean, what am I doing?’ I said irritably.
‘I mean here. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘What’s your problem?’
‘Jamie doesn’t even like you. He said he wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.’
‘You suggested this, you imbecile.’ I was shaking all over.
‘You wanted to come.’
‘Of course I did,’ I said. ‘I wanted a fucking swim! You wanted one too, remember?’
Toby just looked at me. There was nothing to read in the glaze of his eyes, his slack, slightly opened mouth.
‘Everybody knows, you know,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘About the pool.’ Toby said. ‘Everybody knows.’
I let it sink in once, quickly, then I turned and dropped down into the water. I sank to the bottom and held my breath, then pushed back up to the surface for air. I sank back down again and again and when I finally turned around, Toby was gone.
*
It was late by the time I realised Toby had taken my clothes with him. The houses next door were quiet and dark and the sky was pale and washed out. I could see the lights across the river beginning to flicker in the water’s surface. There was nobody anywhere.
I walked around the house a few times, looking for a sign. Nothing. The Maynards’ pool was a faint silver and I could see the lines of the roof cut up in it. The city looked cold and sepulchral over the water, a dark echo of its daytime self.
I thought about going around and smashing in the Maynards’ windows, but I didn’t do anything. I just sat there.
My mother and Katie would be standing, now, in front of the sink, listening to the radio and clearing the dinner plates, probing my absence like a bad tooth.
I picked the ashtray up. Behind me, the lights in the house clicked on; the Maynards must have set a timer. I let my hand sag with the weight of the glass. I could throw it, now, through one of the second-floor windows, Jamie’s perhaps, so that when the family came home, they would find it. They would stand around the bed for a long minute like a nativity, trying to divine some message in the pattern of splinters and shards fanned over the sheets, then someone would gather the glass away.
The Adelaide Review