I’LL NEVER BE A CHAMPION

When my parents split up after six months in Brisbane, Dad and I leave the rented Kenmore family home for a boarding house in Indooroopilly, closer to town. I decided to go with him after Mum said she wouldn’t have time for my swimming. Not decided, actually, since nobody seriously thought it would be any other way. Then there was her other problem of never having learned to drive, putting carnivals out of the question too. This suited my brothers because they got to quit, while I wanted to keep at it. When we were all saying goodbye, Mum went from someone cheerfully waving in a doorway into this crazy lady yelling, ‘You look after him,’ which made me instantly the luckiest boy alive to be stepping through a car door I’d be slamming shut in a second neat. It was strictly windows-up waving as I floored my pretend pedal to leave that racket behind.

And I wouldn’t have cried at school the next day had a teacher not wandered into the empty classroom where I’d decided to spend the lunch hour alone. ‘You should be out playing; get outside now!’ he barked, before I burst into tears and dropped my head to the desk. Lucky for both of us, he was gone when I looked up.

I don’t know why my parents separated, but there was one bigger-than-normal stoush about Mum always being far too nice to the oldest son, a university student, of a family we knew from Rocky. We didn’t even know they’d moved to Brisbane until they spotted Mum at the post office. I remembered them because they’d owned the only Porsche in town, Dad always saying their dad ‘stood out like a sore thumb’ for wearing pink blazers everywhere. (Another Rocky friend, the pie man Sid Sawyer, owned the only Citroen in town, and he was always pulling a crowd by making the springs rise and fall by touching something on the dash.)

This season was my best ever, with a win in last week’s Queensland Primary Schools 50-metre backstroke championship. ‘That showed Carew a thing or two,’ Dad said when I showed him my medal in the famous Valley Pool stands. I’d left John Carew’s squad at the Jindalee pool a fortnight earlier, after he and Dad had a blow-up at training; I watched the pair waving their arms at the far end of the pool as I talked to the manager’s sons, the Lacey boys, at the entrance. When it was over, my father’s walk along the pool didn’t look normal: he was leaning forwards as if held up only by a headwind, his stride rounded and rolling, shoes stabbing up and in before striking the concrete hard. It must have been his ‘I was that far from decking him’ walk.

‘You know, this Carew clown said you’ll never be a champion,’ Dad tells me on our first night in the boarding house, ‘and then he says, “Take him away, he’s too skinny.”’

When I nod to agree, he asks, ‘Can you believe the man?’ — answering himself this time by repeating it without the question mark and giving ‘believe’ his heavy treatment, laughing finally. As if I give a tinker’s either way, I think back, because I’m a state champion now. That’s champion enough, surely, even if I was racing kids a year younger because of a mix-up in my last interstate grade transfer. Anyway, I wonder if Carew really said those things. Who remembers exactly what’s said in a fight?

Our boarding house is at the top of Moggill Road opposite the rail overpass, on the bus routes to my Kenmore state school and Queensland University. It’s sprawling and haunted looking, all gables and lattice, and our long, thin room at the very back feels set to topple down the slope below. In bed at night, I pretend I’m in one of those grand teak mansions teetering above the headwaters of the Ganges in National Geographic magazines. But I don’t hear the Ganges’ roar, of course, just the gurgle of a suburban trickle at the foot of the block, and an almost-whoosh after rain.

Dad says most of the young men boarding here are uni students down from the country. ‘It’ll do you good to be around them,’ he tells me, as if their intelligence will be seeping through the walls. I love the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, with its snaky rhythm and strange Indian sounds. Most of it’s this sleepy-dreamy talk struggling for a tune, when it suddenly all spills into a kind of kids’ chorus with ‘Straw-berry fields for-ever’. It’s on the radio most mornings while I’m dressing for school, but it’s not the only fantastic song here. Others are ‘Matthew and Son’ by Cat Stevens and ‘Pamela Pamela’ by Wayne Fontana. Having music going feels like being in two rooms at once.

My father’s looking for work. He gave me a Sydney-addressed envelope to post a fortnight ago, and now he’s fretting he hasn’t received a reply to a job application. ‘Did you post that letter?’ he asks.

‘Of course,’ I reply, despite having forgotten to post it on the day he gave it to me. And the next. When I finally remembered on the third day, I decided sending it so late was beyond all forgiveness and kept walking. Not sending it meant nothing could be proved; it might have been lost in the mail. Maybe I should have thrown it away then too, but it’s stayed in my schoolbag all this time, getting mangled between books from one class to the next to make me sweat every time I see it. This afternoon, as I swing my bag onto my bed to pull out homework, the lid flies open and books spill everywhere, the battered envelope dropping like an old lettuce leaf onto the chenille. When Dad’s eyes rivet onto it, I expect the worst, but he only says, ‘So you didn’t post it after all,’ like he’s reading a sign. My face is on fire for the next minute and it’s almost impossible to breathe, let alone breathe a word of reply.

A fortnight later, he’s saying some of the brilliant uni students are on drugs. ‘So watch out,’ he warns. Watch out for what? I wonder. He’s also heard the manager, a former chef, is a crook: ‘He did time for cooking the books at his last boarding house.’ Yuk, no wonder, I think back. Sometimes I play with that crooked manager’s son under the building. At eleven, he’s a year younger than me and seems a bit sly, come to think of it, but also tack sharp. Today he’s been carrying on about Russians he met in their last boarding house. ‘Do you like Russians?’ he finally asks. How on earth would I know? I wonder, while actually replying, ‘No, but I respect them,’ totally clueless why I say such shit. All this time, the Hollies’ ‘On a Carousel’ has been playing on a tranny in the laundry.

Saturday morning I’m downstairs moping around the long dark galley kitchen, where everything’s olive green. When I open up the fridge to enjoy its air conditioning and check who has the best food for the weekend, a tall blond student in a baby-blue skivvy strides in like he’s returned famished from the ski slopes. I step aside quickly in case he needs something cold, but it seems he doesn’t. Instead, he spins me around by the shoulders and squints hard into my eyes like he’s lost a parrot in there. His eyes are bloodshot, very bloodshot; maybe from all that study. Holding me there at arm’s length, gazing down without blinking, it seems he’s setting me up to say something hilarious — a real jokester. But then he squeezes my shoulders with raptor strength, gives me a neck-snapping shake, and says, ‘These are the best years of your life.’ Another shake. ‘Do you realise that?’ he asks, his face now twice the size because it’s within an inch of mine. ‘Do you really understand — your best years!’ (As if I wouldn’t, I’m thinking, heart thudding, though I can see they’re not his best.) With all my strength, I smash through this psycho’s left arm and bolt upstairs to our room. When my father asks why I’m panting, I say I ran up the stairs for exercise. ‘That’s the way,’ he says, and now I know what he meant by ‘watch out’.

We’ve moved again, to a boarding house in New Farm; our sleep-out is one half of the front enclosed verandah of a street-level, tin-roofed fibro place. The exact address is 212 Harcourt Street, but it’s even more exactly like nowhere via anywhere. From the waist up, we’re encased in louvres of random colours, mostly ale brown, slime green, and rose red, several cracked ones barely held straight by wire gauze. Some are just ply. There are no students because it’s too far from uni, and after an entire week I haven’t seen another boarder, even with four other doors numbered 2, 3, 4, and 5. It’s spooky — you never even see the owners. Luckily the run of great songs continues on the radio: ‘Happy Together’ by the Turtles, and ‘Different Drum’ from the Stone Poneys.

I hate Harcourt Street. Nobody ever strolls the footpath in front of all the sagging lattice-wrapped verandahs, or under the sprawling confetti-leaved trees nobody’s quite sure whether to call ‘poinsettia’ or ‘poinciana’, or near the scrappy pawpaw trees with the odd amputee branch capped by a rusty can; maybe humans only come out at night here. And all the roads are patched with random crossword squares of bitumen along their pale, news-sheet base. Weekends are so dead that even Ashley (I’ve been calling Dad ‘Ashley’ and he doesn’t mind) must be feeling it, because we’ve headed down to the Gold Coast a few times. It’s okay there, but I’m a little over paddling a hire canoe to death around the same flagged Broadwater course outside the Grand Hotel, where Ashley never glances up from his form guide and beer.

It’s so quiet, he even stumped up thirty bucks for some dumb camp at Tallebudgera, but it’s beginning to turn out the best week ever. On a drama and talent night requiring each cabin to present an act, my classmate Leah stars in a play where some old codger is terrorised by phone calls threatening a visit from ‘The Vipers’. When they’re finally at his door, the dreaded Vipers are in overalls and carrying ladders and buckets, and Leah hisses to the petrified owner, ‘Vee are ze Vipers and vee are here to vipe your vindows.’ Everyone else loves it too, because after that punchline they laugh, clap, and cheer.

This Leah’s eyes seem an even blue from a distance, but up close you find they’re all these splintery spokes of every blue. (I once overheard my parents talk about leg men and breast men, so I guess I’m just a face boy.) I forgot about Leah’s hair. It’s perfectly brushed and parted, swooping in neatly under her jaw to cup her face. And it’s the first brown hair I’ve seen as its own colour, not just shades of failure to be blonde.

For my cabin’s drama-night performance, we boys form a choir to sing ‘On Top of Old Smoky’, with supposedly side-splitting lyric substitutes taken from Mad magazine. But we’re hardly second-rate or ordinary: we seem to have dropped right off the appreciation scale into objectionable, because only two people pity us enough to clap. Adding injury to insult the next day is a tumble I take at tennis. When some of us boys are told to race three circuits of court one for a warm-up, I’m leading the front group but don’t expect the net cable to be connected right through to the next court, and have to be helped to my feet after being body-slammed by that thin wire roadblock.