A UNIFIED FIELD

Something weird happens between Laphead and me when I start at his school. Not only does he make a point of sitting at the far end of our train carriage, but at school I don’t see him all day. Of course, he’s a grade above me since he’s nearly a year older, but even when I track him down at lunch he turns away to face his group if he sees me coming. But then I’ve never attended the school of my best — only — training mate before, so maybe this is what happens: different mates for pool and school.

Luckily I start getting on well with one of his classmates, Jack. That is, we sit together on the train. We must seem an odd pair, because I’ve just turned fourteen and don’t even look it, while Jack is hilariously mistaken for a student teacher when his tie’s off. One morning as we drift along with the train platform’s usual tide of uniforms, two girls approach front-on to make us stop. Jack seems familiar with the one with frizzy red hair fanning her shoulders like some hellfire wimple, though there’s no actual greeting. They’re girls I’ve already noticed because they wear the shortest seersucker skirts in school. After we pull up, it’s like a face-off until Jack breaks the ice with, ‘Does your friend fuck?’

‘Yeah,’ parries the redhead without a blink.

Did he really just say … fuck? I wonder. And did she really just say yes? Not that I’ve … ever … What on earth will the next voice say?

When it comes, it’s Jack again: ‘Well, tell her to fuck off!’ And we step around them. This is shocking, funny, crazy, and disappointing all in one. But I think Jack’s words were only for show, and after school he’ll probably be doing both of them behind some shed.

A fortnight later, Ashley and I still haven’t been back to the Heads’ for lunch. In the August school holidays, we quit the Germans for an old Tudor-style boarding house, much closer to Brisbane. It’s only now that I twig there’s been a serious falling-out between the swimologists and that the visits are over, though there seems no point asking. I still haven’t trained since Mack and I caught the train for our first brief taste of winter training, but Ashley says I can start again at the Valley Pool, the site of my first state title win, when school resumes in September. I have no idea if Laphead will start back then too, or even where he’ll train this season.

This new boarding house looks like it was once a normal home. Our room seems a recent addition, and juts like an internal promontory from the rear wall it shares with the house, into a vast dark lounge room and the comings and goings of patrons. Whenever Ashley and I head out, we have to pass in front of the communal TV, which is always running, always viewed by some of our sleazier fellow boarders slumped at odd angles like leeches across two battered floral lounges. If I’m passing alone and say, ‘Excuse me,’ I sometimes hear the low grumble, ‘Yeah, piss off,’ but don’t look up to see who it is.

We soon move again, into a room — a burrow, really — in a brick wall holding up its end of a three-storey building in the Valley. An external staircase stitches the full height of that clay cliff past our room and up to a gambling den at the very top; Ashley says we got it cheap for him being on call for security duties. Because the staircase rail is made from old gal pipe, some of the drunk card players making their way down at dawn stumble and laugh and say things like, ‘Bloody hell. First they fleece you and then they let you fall off the side of a building.’

When school resumes, I start at Brisbane State High; that afternoon, I complete my first training sets for the season at the Valley Pool under my new coach, Gordon Petersen. On my second school day, my new classmates have somehow scored an early edition of the afternoon Telegraph, whose entire front page is a photo of Australia’s Ralph Doubell breasting the tape for the Mexico Olympics 800-metre running gold, and I have to pinch myself to believe he beat the Americans.

At the end of my first summer of training at the Valley Pool, I’m part of a celebratory bus trip to Sydney for Brisbane’s top swimmers. Laphead stayed training alone in his dad’s hired lane again, but he’ll be on our bus because he made a point of registering in Brisbane at the start of the season. By season’s end, I’d beaten him in everything but 50-metre sprints, where his size is still an advantage.

Most swimmers boarding the bus are my new training friends, and we immediately claim the rear bench seat for the best chance of a sleep during the overnight trip. The very last waiting to board is Laphead, who’s wearing black jeans not blue, with coarse seam stitching probably run up by his mother, and chunky silver pocket zippers front and back. And he’s in — oh no — tartan slippers, while everyone else wears Levi’s and ugg boots. Everyone else, that is, but for the charmingly eccentric Nickname, who’s in pearl-white Levi’s and moccasins, and whose dad’s a scientist. Nickname predicts one day he’ll discover what Einstein couldn’t, a unified field theory. At the moment, he’s going crazy about some new take on matter called string theory. Whenever he tries to explain the physics he’s in love with to me, he gives his index finger a mock professorial wag and says things like, ‘So — let’s imagine there’s this kind of field,’ and I have to cry out, ‘Stop, you’re going too fast.’ The one and only annoying thing about Nickname is when he starts his explanations with ‘So’. That one tiny word — so — followed by the usual pause long enough to say once upon a time, makes me feel even dumber. (Occasionally, to reassure him his efforts aren’t totally wasted on me, I’ll throw him a scientific conundrum like yesterday’s, ‘How can scientists be sure the planets are in orbit, and that it’s not just an illusion caused by the sun itself spinning?’) Nickname has officially replaced Laphead as my best swimming friend, and I’ve made some non-swimming mates, like Roland, Dale, Bruce, and Kent at Brisbane State High.

Now Laphead pauses on the front bus step to scan the seating arrangements, clutching his overnight bag and pillow. It’s too bad about his fashion crimes and not really knowing anyone, but I can’t risk losing my seat to go down and chat. Instead, I give a cheery wave, and he replies with a switch of his index finger before dropping onto the front seat for the night.

You know you’re going to have fun when everyone laughs at your first lame joke. One that gets the giggles going is ‘that Hitler dad’, one of the goodbye dads I pointed out on the footpath, who just happened to have an index finger resting on his top lip as he raised his farewell arm in a perfect Fuhrer salute.

My best time all summer for the 400-metre freestyle was 4 minutes 42 seconds. But within an hour of disembarking our rollicking red-eye express the next morning at Forbes Carlile’s ancient indoor 25-metre pool in Pymble, I climb from the bath-warm lanes to learn that I’ve not only trounced this time, but even bypassed the entire 4-minute-30s to win in 4 minutes 28. That’s a fourteen-second PB! Sure, 25-metre pool times are officially five seconds faster than Olympic ones over 400 metres because of all the extra tumbles, but even allowing for this it’s almost a ten-second jump. I’m over the moon to think I won’t have to waste the entire next season wallowing through the 4-30s; apparently all it needed was a rowdy bus trip. And there are only two boys my age in Australia who have swum faster this season: Graham Windeatt and Graeme Romei. ‘I’m up there!’ I silently rejoice all day, all week, all winter.