At the start of clinic, Simmons told us that the swimming carnival was fast approaching and that focusing on technique would give us the winning edge in the pool. He separated us into the four stroke groups to be filmed by overhead and underwater tracking cameras. Butterfly was first. My fear of the nub being caught on film was so intense it induced vertigo and high-frequency tinnitus simultaneously. I told Deb Gelber I felt sick.
‘You’re still doing it,’ she said.
One by one we swam a lap of fly, then returned to have our technique scrutinised. Everybody else looked natural and fluid – born to swim. I appeared to be swimming a stroke of my own invention.
‘Jerky and spasmodic,’ Gelber said. ‘Next time focus on minimising resistance, gliding not churning. Soften your hand entry. And stop looking for the camera.’
On our way down for a second attempt, Pericles asked where I thought my centre of energy was.
‘I don’t know, maybe here?’ I pointed to my sternum. He pressed his palm against my chest.
‘Okay, this time imagine it’s a furnace, and focus on releasing a blast of fire out through your back, shoulders and arms every time you launch.’ He swept his hands across my upper back then down, a little close to the nub for comfort. ‘Allow the burst of power to travel down your spine and through your torso, keeping it strong all the way down your legs and out the tips of your toes. It should be a perpetual wave of energy moving through you, a cycle of tension and release – not separate stroke and kick.’
‘Thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a try.’ I held up his goggles. ‘I’ve still got these, by the way.’
‘Keep them.’
We repeated the exercise and I followed Pericles’ advice, visualising my core as a blasting furnace. I ignored the black line and the lane markers and the camera and felt no resistance or struggle, only slickness and buoyancy, as if I was swimming butterfly for the first time ever – almost like a dolphin.
Gelber and the other swimmers were astonished by the obvious difference between playbacks. I was almost feeling proud until she froze a frame in the aerial footage to talk about my alignment. My arse was sticking up out of the water, and there it was, visible even beneath my black Speedos – a bump in the topography casting a tiny crescent of shadow, vague but still damning evidence of my nub for anybody who was looking hard enough. But nobody was because they were all doubled over, laughing at my butt in the air . . . I think.
On the way to Mum’s office I called the restaurant again to ask if they’d found a mint-green jar. The lady said nothing was handed in last night, which made me gloomy. And walking into NOW BE TIGERS! and seeing Penny slumped behind the reception counter failed to lift my mood. She was in a bummed-out torpor because Curtis now wanted an open relationship.
‘We broke up,’ she said. ‘And tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Curtis is the only guy who’s given me flowers, and I threw them out when they died. I don’t have anything to remember him by except the seven thousand happy-couple photos I made him pose for, and the little cupid I gave you. Sorry for asking, but could I have him back?’
‘Not a problem,’ I lied, because last week I’d transformed him from cherub to satyr with a goatee, XXL dick and balls.
Emma and Jules came into reception, followed by Morgan. ‘Your mother!’ he said, making devil horns, and invited Penny to join them for a ‘soothing elixir’.
Before they could escape, Mum poked her head through the door and said, ‘Remember, Morgan. The word “can’t” isn’t in our vocabulary.’ I think that’s what she said.
On the trip home, Mum told me that the cost of having the Venus shell move through the sea was beyond their budget, so they’d settled for a stationary shell. But Morgan had failed to get approval to stage anything in the water. ‘There’ll be no wow factor without water,’ she said.
‘I thought “can’t” wasn’t in your vocabulary?’
‘Don’t throw my words back in my face.’ She put music on and neither of us spoke till the Wakehurst Parkway.
‘I’ve got an idea, but it might be a bit gay.’
‘That’s perfect for a cosmetic launch, because every single man there will be homosexual.’
‘You know what I meant.’
‘No, I don’t, actually. Did you mean “excessively flamboyant” or “feeble and insipid”? You know I don’t like the word being used in a pejorative fashion.’
‘Have you just figured out that you’re a lesbian or something? Because if you are, I don’t have a problem with it.’
‘I won’t legitimise that with a response.’ Mum turned the music off and we drove through Oxford Falls, both simmering in silence. I apologised at Mona Vale.
‘Apology accepted,’ Mum said. ‘Now tell me your idea. Anything would be appreciated.’
‘Well, you could still have the launch beside the sea, but have the shell floating in a giant inflatable pool on the grass.’
‘Interesting . . . We could have a bar in the pool that the guests wade out to. Perfect for social media. Hashtag wetbar. Hashtag bottomsup. Yes, and inflated balls with the product inside, like bubbles floating on the surface. Yes, yes. I have to call Morgan right now.’ She pulled the car over and told him my idea over speakerphone.
‘Love, love, love!’ Morgan gushed. ‘That son of yours is an absolute genius!’
‘Careful, he can hear you.’
‘It’s obviously genetic.’
‘You don’t think the idea’s a bit gay, do you?’ She winked at me.
‘Absolutely,’ Morgan said. ‘Beyond fabulous!’
‘Maintain your enthusiasm. We need to nut this thing out ASAP. Are you available tomorrow morning?’
‘Of course, El Capitane.’
On Saturday morning, Mum left for the office before seven. I was sitting in the kitchen considering an early surf when Venn came in, took a peach and scored the furry skin with a knife. ‘Happy Valentine’s Day,’ she said. ‘Four months without Elliot.’
‘You’re way better off without him.’
‘I know that now.’
‘You changed so much when you got together.’
‘It’s funny, because at the start he said he was attracted to my free spirit. But then pretty soon he started trying to change me and contain me. He used to tell me that I was “too much” but could never explain what he meant.’
‘Too interesting, too smart, too fun?’
‘I think probably too strange.’ Venn frowned.
‘Remember all the games you invented for us to play on Mackerel when we were younger, all the rituals you made up? Elliot made you think they were stupid and childish.’
‘Hmm.’ Venn peeled the fuzz off the peach and then ate it anyway.
‘Isn’t that defeating the purpose?’
‘I can’t stand eating the fruit covered in fuzz. Separately they’re fine. That’s probably a metaphor for something.’ She paused for a moment then turned to face me. ‘Elliot schmelliot,’ she said. ‘Why did Nicole break up with you? You’ve never really told me.’
‘She thought I was the embodiment of evil.’
‘Is that all?’ Venn laughed. She cut up the peach and gave me a slice. I was reminded of when Mum first returned to paid work. Venn used to prepare health snacks like almond and chia spread on apple slices for me after school, then would take me out catching crabs or exploring the bush with my dog Gus instead of making me do homework.
‘Aside from telling Dad about your change of direction, you hardly spoke to him at my birthday dinner,’ I said, to deflect from Nicole.
‘Do you blame me?’
‘I haven’t been able to bring that stuff up with him yet. Do you think things will ever return to normal?’
‘Lincoln, there is no normal and there probably never was. Things will eventually settle and improve, but they’ll never be the same. “Normal” is a construct anyway – like Valentine’s Day. Speaking of, I’ve thought of a little ceremony we could perform, something to prove to you that Elliot Grobecker failed to make me conform to his idea of normal. A Solemn Relinquishment.’
Venn took a large sheet of origami paper and wrote NEED FOR ROMANTIC LOVE on the plain side, then instructed me to write whatever I thought I most needed or wished for in secret on another sheet. I wrote NEED FOR A FRIEND and WISH TO BE ANYBODY BUT ME. We folded our squares into little boats and took them down to the shore.
‘By solemnly relinquishing your need for something, you’ll be freed from the power it holds over you. And one day that very thing might return of its own accord.’
‘Reminds me of Pop Locke’s advice to cast your bread on the water.’
‘My inspiration comes from a variety of sources.’
We launched our boats from the end of the jetty. A gentle offshore breeze blew them twenty metres out and left them bobbing merrily. Then the whiny roar of a speedboat split the air as it rounded the point and ploughed right through them.
‘Nothing solemn about that,’ Venn said.
‘Definitely won’t be returning.’
I envied and admired Venn’s ability to attach significance or meaning to something one day then let go of it the next, while I tended to get stuck on things. She’d become intensely serious and seriously intense last year – understandable, given everything that had happened, but it was good to see her recovering her independence. I just hoped her decision to steer away from environmental law was what she really wanted.
We walked home, and I joined Oscar the Burmese out on the deck to read My One Redeeming Affliction.
Performing the role of a respectable lady in polite society held no appeal for a young woman of infinite capability like my mother. Not only had she been overlooked for the role of taxidermy assistant by her father, she was also forbidden from pursuing any form of paid work or formal study. Her prescribed lot was nurturing her younger brothers, Samuel and Arthur, in the sanctuary of the family home – a duty made insufferable by the jealousy her elder brother Frederick’s departure for England had aroused. Unwilling to continue practising the accomplishments of singing, dancing and deportment under her sharp-nosed governess, Esther secretly responded to a milliner’s advertisement for an assistant with taxidermy skills. Her knowledge of hat-making was negligible, but being the only applicant with the required ability to skin and stuff animals, she won the position. Walter, though perplexed by his daughter’s caprice, allowed her to accept the role, declaring it a ‘self-inflicted punishment commensurate with her defiance’.
Coming from a good family won Esther no special attention from her employer, Madame Zora, who vacillated between extreme irritability and crippling shyness, the legacy of mercury poisoning from years working in a pelting factory. Suffering frequent tremors and dizzy spells, she relied heavily on her employees Henriette and Maude to cover for her. Both from humble beginnings, they’d endured unpaid apprenticeships for the sake of eventual remuneration and assumed the new girl, having no financial imperative, would be gone before Friday.
But Esther was driven by a stubborn determination to prove her father wrong. Apart from the aching back and raw-boned fingers, she preferred labouring in the cramped and stuffy studio to the supposed reward of serving on the floor. There she found it galling when customers from her genteel suburb, on discovering her in a position of servitude, affected an air of superiority. Her most frequently recounted incident involved one particularly haughty neighbour, Mildred Babbington.
The Vice President of the Hospital Spring Gala Organising Committee had ordered a hat for the event, which Esther had spent every night of the prior week constructing. A magnificently verdant study in the cycles of nature, it featured on one side a leaf-chewing caterpillar, a chrysalis suspended from a pink orchid and an iridescent blue-winged Ulysses butterfly. The other boasted a worm peeking from a crabapple beneath a swooping lark. Dipping the poor bird in molten silver had been the most irksome task for Esther, who considered it a distasteful indulgence.
Mrs Babbington was delighted with the assemblage and spent fifteen minutes before the looking glass, gazing at the exotic garden sprouting from her head. Finally yielding the hat for boxing, she asked if Esther was attending the gala.
‘Unfortunately, circumstances prevent me,’ Esther said.
‘Come now. The Gardens are already in full bloom and all of Sydney’s most eligible men will be there.’ She paused. ‘Why the look of vexation? You’ve turned the colour of a plum.’
A handsome moustached fellow on the other side of the window was stealing glances at Esther while feigning an interest in the display. It was my father’s third such appearance. Hoping to send him on his way before Mrs Babbington turned and caught sight of him, Esther said loudly, ‘My Aunt Harriet has insisted on introducing a Melburnian to me, and my father has forbidden me from any other social occasion until I comply.’
Mrs Babbington clucked her tongue. ‘A peach not picked in due season will soon overripen and fall of its own accord.’
The hat’s elaborate architecture was preventing it from fitting into the box, so Esther forced it down and gave the lid a decisive tap, causing Mrs Babbington to scowl. ‘One must treat Madame Zora’s work with the utmost delicacy,’ she said. The woman’s misattribution of the hat’s creator, and her comparison of Esther to rotting fruit, sparked a small angry flame in Esther’s chest. Wishing the woman gone, she tied the package with string instead of ribbon. Apropos of nothing save her penchant for gossip, Mildred Babbington said, ‘I understand that Althea Beauclare has been showing uncommon kindness to your family lately. The spinster’s charity must be a welcome relief to your father.’
Esther was overcome with prickly heat, fiercer than a company of ants biting at her neck and sides. She glared at my father till he left, then, abandoning all concern for etiquette, scratched at her arms and neck, and tugged and twisted her corset to prevent further aggravation. Mrs Babbington, appalled by Esther’s lack of decorum, smacked the service bell repeatedly, demanding to see Madame Zora.
‘That won’t be possible,’ Esther said. ‘She’s taken ill.’
Suffering a bout of anxiety, Zora Blatchford had taken refuge behind the two-way mirror and nothing had gone unnoticed. Her hands trembled as she scrawled a rebuke, inserted it into a wooden ball and set it on the cash railway. It rolled through to the other side, then down a switchback before dropping onto a red velvet cushion in a basket.
‘Troublesome thing,’ Esther said, making a performance of unscrewing the two halves. She turned her back on the customer to read the scrawled message:
Insolence will not be tolerated!
Venn came out and caught me reading the end of the passage aloud to Oscar. ‘He’s very intelligent,’ she said, ‘but he only has a vocabulary of thirty-seven words. What’s the book about?’
I told her about Esther’s lack of opportunity in the world, and said how much better it was for women today.
‘Yes, things have improved dramatically,’ Venn said. ‘But there’s still a long way to go.’ And then she delivered a short but assertive lecture on the perpetuation of rich, white, heteronormative male privilege.
Neither Oscar nor I had a leg to stand on. We were two ostensibly straight guys sunbaking on a third-level deck with uninterrupted water views. And I was soaking in as much as I could before returning to the grinding city.