THE OLD MONEY

Today’s attempt at laps takes place in the Coffs Harbour Olympic pool, just a five-hour drive north of the Yugoslavs because we’re halfway to the Stardust drive-in, near the outer limits of Brisbane, where Ashley starts his new job tomorrow. The water is cold because it’s still winter though technically spring. A cold pool is a cold body, but it’s the eyes that feel it most, and soon these cold eyes beading up and down the lane locate a black blob, which could just be a clump of leaves on the bottom of the deep end. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but what I’m finding is that on every approach my body does a little detour to avoid ever being directly above the blob. ‘Why the crooked swimming?’ Ashley asks when I stop at the shallow end after twenty laps. ‘I keep getting a stitch up there,’ I suggest, and he says, ‘Come on, we might as well go,’ and we go and go until we pull up at dusk in this town just big enough for its one public pool and one drive-in theatre for me and Ashley to slot right in.

We’re renting the left half of an old Queenslander backing onto rail tracks at the bottom of a hill so steep I’m sure that’s why our street was named Dark Street; at the top of our hill is not the top of a hill at all, but the flat land everyone else lives on. When the town pool opens ‘for summer’ a week later, I train with the local swim club until Ashley hires a separate lane there to coach me on my own; in the very next lane is another boy already coached solo by his dad, but they operate from the far end and we don’t talk to them. Club swimmers call that boy Laphead for obvious reasons, and within days I’m overhearing my new nickname of Lanehead.

One warm October morning, with the Hitachi on the sink rattling cutlery and belting out the Monkees’ fabulous ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’, Ashley shares his plans to boost takings at what he calls ‘this town’s old dinosaur drive-in’. As I sip my daily eggflip, he’s running promotional ideas by me, this first a letter-drop promising free LSD to patrons in November. ‘But it’s only a gimmick, a play on words,’ he clarifies. ‘LSD is actually the old notation for pounds, shillings, pence; it’s the old money for the old money — get it?’ I don’t get it, but it seems he’ll be shelling out random pennies and threepences as customers enter: ‘It’s a way of getting tongues wagging with a bit of harmless fun.’

The idea of promising movie-goers free drugs, only to short-change them with petty amounts of soon-to-expire currency at the pay booths, seems fine by me. What would I know compared to a father who was once marketing head of the world’s biggest cinema chain? Trying to appear interested, I ask if his plan can get us into trouble. ‘What if hundreds of tattooed people turn up and riot when they don’t get their free drugs?’

‘Great point,’ he mutters, jotting a pretend note beside his list.

Near Christmas, after a neighbour tells Ashley a stranger’s been lurking in our street at night while he’s at the drive-in and I’m home asleep, he says I’ll have to come to work with him for a few nights. ‘Cat Ballou’s playing,’ he says, ‘with big Lee Marvin, so at least you’ve something lively to watch.’

I’m happy to go see big Lee and his unshaven amigos fill the night with great dollops of technicolour, but oddly I’ve also developed a dread of tiny motionless grey things: after a moth refuses to give up its ceiling possie in the car on my first night of Cat Ballou, I sit out on the asphalt. When Ashley brings out a milkshake, he asks why I’m out here. ‘It’s too hot in the car,’ I lie.

‘Well, you’ll have to get back in,’ he says, ‘a reversing car could skittle you.’ So back in with the moth I go until Ashley leaves, when I’m out again. Luckily — and because I’ve made a point of leaving the windows down — the moth soon gets the hint and I’m back inside for good, windows up. Except that I can’t understand why I’m suddenly so scared of the world’s most harmless insect, a tiny life I could snuff out in the blink of an eye with barely a powdery smudge left on my fingertips. I can’t be sure, but I suspect it’s connected to the Coffs Harbour blob fear.

Moving interstate again means I’m back in primary school, where a boy in my new class, Mack, is also a swimmer. When I visit him on the weekend, I’m told his father, the tallest dad I’ve ever met, was a prisoner of war. He looks saggy and weak standing at the kitchen table where we’ve shaken hands, his eyes dreamy and gummy. He’s started to ask me something when his wife butts in, ‘Now, don’t be askin’ Brad about his family and where’s he’s from ’n’ all. He’s a swimmer just like that one,’ she says, nodding at Mack through a half-scolding, half-joking singsong accent I faintly recognise.

‘She’s Irish, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Mack says when we’re outside.

When I ask if his dad has the flu, to look so hangdog, Mack says he’s ‘never really recovered from Changi’.

Mack and I like drawing, so when my father gives him a lift to a carnival today in Nambour, we spend the entire trip sketching our own series of Prince Valentine comic adventures. (Mack himself could be a cartoon character — freckles, button eyes, gaps between his teeth, wild cowlick for a fringe.) Mack’s only a breaststroker, but I have to say the way he does it in his carnival race makes it look almost worthwhile. He has the longest kick and glide I’ve ever seen, and he draws his shoulders up ever so slowly as he begins his underwater pull, then those same shoulders do a big loose jump for this goanna tongue to flick out of his chest, and that’s his hands.

With no carnivals the following weekend, Mack cycles to my place to play, and I want it to go well because he’s our first guest since the divorce. When he tells me he’s been in a wrestling program at the YMCA since he was seven, we spend an hour grappling in the backyard. Suddenly he remembers a new technique a visiting instructor showed him. ‘It’s not exactly wrestling,’ he says, ‘more like a karate move. Want to see it?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘You wait right there,’ he orders from a strange oriental crouch. Without warning, two heels thump my chest and I’m flat on my back two metres away, completely winded, while he lands cat-like on all fours and bounces to his feet. Dusting myself off, I decide it’s the official end of our friendship, except at school where it’ll be business as usual because he can’t be avoided.

Because Mack and I are the only ones in class who can render a decent likeness of anything beyond alphabet letters, our teacher Mr Grange tells us to sketch a three-metre-long mural — a frieze, he calls it — using only charcoal sticks on taped-together lengths of butcher’s paper. The subject is ballerinas, and our finished piece will adorn the entire length of the blackboard this afternoon when parents arrive for end-of-primary-school celebrations. We sketch feverishly between flipping the pages of a coffee-table book on the Bolshoi Ballet supplied by Mr Grange; it’s full of twirling, curtsying, and leaping dancers. If you close your eyes when Mr Grange speaks, he could be the Homicide series actor Leonard Teale, but when you open them again you find this slight man with a tiny waist, round shoulders, a large spongy nose, and no detective’s hat in sight. He’s also the only man I’ve ever heard call people coves (‘When you boys leave, tell those coves in the corridor to report to me’). And he’s an expert on opportunity. Knocking hard on the blackboard several times, he’ll ask, ‘Is that opportunity knocking?’ and we’ll answer, ‘No, sir, because opportunity only knocks once.’

Mack and I are definitely being challenged by this new charcoal medium: if you stuff up a line you can’t just rub it out like a pencil mistake. Yet it’s been going well enough until we reach a certain area that in terms of draughtsmanship is one of the ‘busiest’ — the sudden tuck that marks the convergence of legs and body, with the odd fold and crease of leotard. I’m not at all sure we’ve been up to the job here, and when Mr Grange walks back in an hour later, his eyes nearly jump out of his head when he says, no longer in his charming Leonard Teale voice but in almost a shriek, to ‘Get rid of those, those … private parts’ — with parents due in an hour.

We immediately tackle the stronger lines with some brisk smearing, but when this flattens the area into a shapeless mass, we add even more charcoal to rescue some form. It’s only when we step back for a breather that we realise it’s all become an indistinguishable smudge. ‘Wow, Ballet de Bushes!’ Mack yelps, annoyingly blind to our predicament.

As soon as Mr Grange returns a second time, he takes a sharp left towards us and I know exactly what’s about to happen: he sweeps the entire mural off the floor with one sharp tug, his arms now flailing and tumbling the paper furiously without even glancing at us. Now he drives that messy ball deep into the wastepaper bin with an angry twisting of his foot so it can’t pop out for a disgraceful encore in front of parents, but, when his shoe comes out, sticky tape has attached itself and the girls follow in a tangled conga line as Mr Grange hops and stumbles to regain his balance. When the dancers go back in a second time, under his hands now, he drops half a brick on them to be sure.

For Christmas, Ashley’s bought me a bike with gears concealed in the rear hub instead of the usual mess of cables and cranks; it takes only the slightest back pressure on the pedal to change them. ‘They’re new in Australia, so yours might be the first in town,’ he crows. The downside to being the local champion of cycling stealth is that mine has only three gears for hills, instead of the twenty-odd on my friends’ obsolete derailleur set-ups. But I guess this is the price for Ashley’s love of all things stylish and novel. Waiting beside the bike are some American-style Adidas running shoes he found in a Vinnies store, and a pair of ancient, rusty 20lb barbells to replace the sissy 5lb dumbbells I’ve used for years. Every morning now, I’ll stand in the kitchen to contort my way through fifty butterfly strokes, feeling stronger every day. My gift to Ashley is the thickest book I could find on a bookstore bargain table, chock-full of famous quotes, from Socrates to Kennedy. When he picks it up, jiggles it up and down, and says, ‘All this wisdom to get me safely across the road,’ I wonder if he’s gone totally bonkers to think a book so heavy and clever won’t do more than save him getting skittled. We sit to a Christmas lunch of nuts and salad, the Executives’ ‘My Aim Is to Please You’ on the radio, and I’m definitely tipping a big future for this fine Australian band.

In the new school year at Bream High, I soon find myself class captain. Although it’s only a state school, they must think making us wear heavy-weave black shorts with a matching felt hat makes us look like toffs, but we’re only hotter. Across the road in this pampas-flat end of town is the tiny bedsit we’ve found. Here Ashley sleeps with a thick oak nightstick by his bed, which is just as well, because he caught someone snooping outside his window last night. I didn’t wake, but he says he reached through, grabbed a fistful of someone’s hair, and whacked the back of his neck before the culprit broke free and fled.

Being voted captain in a show of classmates’ hands was a surprise honour, but maybe it was only because they saw me pose for the local paper after I won a few minor medals at the state titles. (Following the photographer around the school grounds during lunch in only my speedos while we searched for dive props was almost as embarrassing as those occasional nude-on-the-school-bus dreams.) My first assignment as captain begins promisingly when our teacher leaves me in front of the class before darting off to the principal’s office for a phone call. For the first minute, it’s all heads down; I’m not exactly dizzy with power, but couldn’t be prouder. And when I see the Turner boy lean his chair back to chat with Ducey behind, I seize the opportunity to act. Knowing I’m not here to be an ogre, I see humour as the middle ground and think up a ripper: in a mock teacher’s voice, I boom, ‘Turner, turner round,’ not even sure if the pun will take. But within moments the class begins responding in a shower of appreciation, first with wads of compressed paper, followed disastrously by pencils and biros. Thankfully the teacher walks in before it’s scaled up to chairs, though I quickly see he’s speechless with disappointment, his wild-eyed and dismissive double arm sweep in my direction promising a review of my captaincy.

A fortnight later, Mr Grange’s former pupils are invited back to share first impressions of high school. When he makes his grand entrance into the room that’s been our holding pen for the past half-hour, I quickly see it for the brag-fest it is, each of us expected to charm him with reports of our successes, preferably in his favourites of maths, music, and drama. When it’s my turn, I take care not to overwhelm him, by limiting my boasts to class captain. But he doesn’t acknowledge me at all, his head swinging past like a boom of blinding pride to the next boy. Christ, I think, I’m still the Bolshoi-bushes boy.

It’s the Olympic year 1968, and when our geography teacher mentions one of Germany’s major cities, Munich, she singles me out to ask if I’ll be competing at the Games there in four years’ time. ‘Who knows?’ I say with a furnace face, knowing full well there are four Australian boys my own age who are faster, in addition to the several age groups above mine, each with its own contenders I’d have to beat when those Olympic Trials come round.

I know all this because proper swimmers (not the ones I hear coaches call their ‘champion dreamers’, who ask to be champions but train randomly and never in the holidays) always know our exact place in the scheme of things. We learn it in club-night gossip or from our results at the state championships — that’s if we’ve made the qualifying times at weekend inter-club carnivals we attend all season. Or we devour the results in the newspaper sports pages when the Australian open titles are on, or ‘The Juniors’, which start at age fifteen. Then there’s The International Swimmer, a magazine you buy with — but not for — its scholarly articles with accompanying photos of their balding authors, along with its three-month-old results and ‘regularly updated’ national rankings in every age, stroke, and distance. (No one knows why it’s The International Swimmer, unless it was first published before Federation, when each state was its own overseas colony, since nothing beyond our shores gets a mention.)

And we’re all steadily moving up that age-group elevator, the age immediately above yours always those few seconds faster — in everything — and the age above theirs likewise, and so on, until you’re sixteen or seventeen, when everyone’s nearly the same size and expected to be hitting their career peak. That’s when your age-group days are supposed to crumble behind you like rusty trainer wheels, along with the almost weekly improvement you’ll always have taken for granted — and suddenly you’re out on the Serengeti alongside those big scary names you’ve idolised for years. Then there’ll be nothing holding you back from the Olympics but times.

Because it’s never about you against an adversary, like in boxing or tennis, where a tricky southpaw could have his jab in your face all day, or where you’re chopped down by a fierce serve and volley your opponent has identified as your weakness. It’s never personal, even when your times actually do race other times — with pool and swimmers attached. (Sometimes I try to imagine if they did make it a bit more mano a mano, where perhaps you could tumble and push off into the next lane for a few laps to draught on someone — as long as you were back in your own lane by the end of the race. Now that would be fun! Ashley says they actually had obstacle races in the first few Olympics, and wouldn’t they have been something!)

When the town pool closes in April, Ashley suggests I extend the season a month by catching the train to Brisbane’s heated Valley Pool three afternoons a week. ‘In a few years, nobody will be talking about the swimming season,’ he quips, ‘it’ll be year-round training for everyone.’ Mack’s parents are of the same mind, so I wait after school at his place for his mother to drive us to the train. Pulling up at the station, she pivots suddenly to face us and say sternly, ‘Remember that there’ll be a hundred pairs of eyes on everything you do on the train, particularly himself there,’ glaring at Mack. ‘I might be a housewife, but I’m not altogether daft.’

‘How are you coping with all these eyes on you,’ I ask Mack when our carriage chugs off, and we both laugh. The laughing kicks in again when Mack tells of his shock after climbing the town-pool fence at dusk on the last day of the season to search for a towel he left behind, only to come across a lifeguard pissing into the pool, behind the pump room.

‘The dirty bastard just said, “Water shortage, young man, every bit counts,” and left it out — it was a helmet — until he shook every last drop into the pool.’

When I tell Ashley about the poolie pissing into the pool, he says, ‘The man deserves a medal — all pool workers pee in the pool on the last day of the season. It’s an old superstition giving thanks for a year without a drowning.’

‘Really?’

‘At least they used to.’