GROWTH SPURT

It’s January 1969, I’m fourteen-and-a-half, and there are just two more sleeps before the Queensland championships. Tonight’s so clammy that Ashley and I have only one sheet on, and all night there’ve been disturbances from the courtyard of our new New Farm boarding house: just muffled stuff down in the dark, but enough to keep us up — catcalls and the snapped-off heads and tails of obscenities (‘ucken! — ssole! — slu’). Sometimes things go quiet and I think it’s over, but then the cursing starts up again. Midnight can’t be far off.

Now a bottle smashes shockingly close by, followed by a long howl fading to sobs, and at last it’s all out in the open. ‘That’s it!’ huffs Ashley, swinging his legs over his side of the bed, feet slapping the lino hard. He opens our door and strides onto everybody’s balcony in his speedos, leaning on the rail to lecture the darkness near and far to ‘Keep it down, I’ve got a champion in here.’ That’s me he’s talking about, and I require my sleep.

Ten minutes later, it seems people do have respect for a champion in these parts, even if they’ve none for themselves, because it’s all gone quiet. ‘Oh, if only we’d known there was a kid in there with a big race coming up, we’d have taken our problems elsewhere,’ seems the consensus.

In the morning, Ashley says it’s unhealthy, our sharing a double bed here this past month. He’s already told me the boarding house was a wartime hospital, its wide enclosing verandah servicing twenty dim rooms above a rubbly courtyard. But what does he mean by unhealthy? Is our mattress still contaminated with some old wartime gangrene or plague the nurses couldn’t sponge out? ‘We’ll find some new digs after the state titles,’ he promises.

The following day, it’s my last free time before an intense four-day program of racing; I always take the day off everything before a big competition because it pays to dive into your race as fresh as you can possibly be. (For a while, I was even in the habit of eating an orange the night before race day because I’d once swum sensationally at club after an orange the previous night. But that was before I told Nickname and his brother, who both broke into fits of laughter and scoffed that the orange link was ‘all in my mind’ because my body would have had no trace of it or its energy by the next morning.) Stifling heat again, and only the double darkness of the verandah and our cavernous, one-tiny-windowed room can make a difference. There’s a naked globe hanging high above our bed, but it barely throws a shadow from the pencil I’m using to draw the electric jug on my sketch pad. After a decent likeness, I lie flat on my back to work on my pretend powers of levitation, glaring hard into the high lime-green vaulted ceiling to imagine I’m actually looking down, to trick myself into falling up. But I can never make myself fully believe this ploy, and then decide it’s probably a good thing because my fledgling skills might not be able to control a sudden fall. I often do this pretend levitating just for fun, but in my dreams I actually fly. (Those dream neighbours don’t believe me when I excitedly run in to tell them I can fly for real — not just dreaming this time! But when they reluctantly file out and their faces strain up to see me flitting among the fruit bats and stars, you should see their expressions.)

Now bored by mere three-dimensional fantasies, I ponder what — and where — I’ll be, far into the future. Let’s take a round number like the year 2000, where I see myself — see myself doing — no, I realise I can’t see myself there at all. The world in 2000 is as empty as its zeros, my only presence there as the number forty-six, my age. As usual whenever I try to think about time, I’ve become so confused I’m even having trouble seeing it as something moving forwards. Maybe this means I can stay fourteen, or whatever the calendar says I am. In fact, I now decree this moment to be the ever-present centre of my life. Who’d want to be any older? My past and future can continue to knit right here, in some vague outward expansion of the present. If I’m still around in 2000, it’ll be nothing to do with the supposed forward passage of time, or of me within it.

And now I give my new tree-ring existence its next growth spurt by wandering onto the verandah, where Ashley suns himself at the top of the rotting steps, shirt off, transistor on, sipping tea, and studying the form guide. Peering over his shoulder onto the Courier-Mail lift-out, I can see the jockey name Alan Cooper circled several times among the Doomben starters. Ashley follows this particular hoop on the sign of his surname alone. Why, I wonder, would a grown man believe a shared surname had anything to do with the outcome of a horse race? But there can be no surer bet than that he’s had a few bob on Cooper’s rides again today. Now a gust swats the slope of his old shoulder with the claw of a dead pawpaw leaf, and he brushes it off in fright as if it’s a spider. When my half-a-head shadow darkens the Flemington field, he adjusts his reading glasses to look up.

‘Drinking hot tea on such a scorcher might seem a little odd, but it draws the heat from the pores,’ he exults, now handing me the page with Mac’s Cartoon Tip on it. ‘Go back inside and work out Mac’s tip for the fifth at Doomben,’ he says. Today’s cartoon is a line drawing of a desert landscape, with a boy in the foreground seemingly set to dive into an oasis pond — or perhaps a mirage — under a blinding sun and barren sky. After barely a second examining the image on our bed, I’m about to run out and tell Ashley that Mac’s big tip is Lonely Diver, when I find another starter, Desert Sands, similarly fitting the bill. And over the following minute, I discover almost every other runner is referenced in some cryptic way, from Make a Splash to False Promise, Blue Skies, and even Hesitate. Just when I’m certain the only nag that can’t be linked to the scene is Late Rains, I notice the faintest squiggle on the horizon, hinting at an approaching squall. After I hand the page back and tell Ashley, ‘Mac tips the whole field,’ he laughs till he almost cries, braying, ‘How about that!’

I’m not sure I like the songs I’m hearing in this creepy boarding house. It’s almost as if the stations have conspired to play hits only about dysfunction, while we’re stuck here in dysfunction-central. First, there’s this new manic-depressive number about some ‘Eloise’ by Barry Ryan, which alternates between a screeching chorus of obsession (‘I’ve got to see her, yeah!’) and an equally troubling dirge of slow strings and wretched resignation (‘but she’s … not there’), only to lurch back into the key of maniacal hope. And then there’s ‘Lily the Pink’ by the Scaffold, a rollicking bar-room ditty seemingly about some tragicomic alcoholic barmaid, while the real-life alco lurking in the next room is anything but funny. I try hard not to look in on her on my way to the bathroom and back, but can never resist. (Why is her door wide open all day, every day?) And there she is, glowering back from the edge of her bed where she sits stiffly in puffy-shouldered, puffy-hipped, muslin shorty pyjamas, like some ghostly hybrid of senior lingerie queen and conquistador. Even with make-up on, it’s clear she’s quite old.

In the room along from her are Slow Man and Quickstep. That’s what Ashley calls them. Slow Man has one seriously mangled eye from a machining accident down in the Valley, and Quickstep a pronounced limp, though this doesn’t stop him hobbling the streets after he sets out at eight a.m. daily in his cowboy shirt and jeans. It’s nothing to see Quickstep right across town — Newstead one day, Bulimba the next — forever banging fist on palm or doing crazy clickety-click things with his fingers. I always wave to him from the car, but he’s never waved back yet; neither does he answer my hello on the verandah or in the bathroom. According to Ashley, Slow Man doesn’t trust Quickstep one bit, and sleeps with a knife under his bed. (Ashley will talk to anyone here, and somehow gets them chatting about all sorts of things, even though he calls them life’s failures.)

And it’s taken me a while, but it’s just occurred to me that what people here have in common is what they don’t have — a family. You never see families at all, and it’s as if the tens of thousands of generations that brought them to these walls, and the myriad phyla and strains that led to those, become extinct right here. Even the one boarder who has a steady job, the man whose every day begins and ends in ‘Greensleeves’ blaring from his Mr Whippy van, never has a visitor. When I ask Ashley why all these people haven’t been able to get on with their families, he tells me that Tolstoy, ‘or one of those Russian writers, said all happy families are the same, while unhappy families are all different’. Then he thinks on this, and says, ‘Or maybe it’s the other way round.’ I try to help him out by saying that maybe families stay happy simply by deciding not to fight, and this makes them the same. But then he says it could be the unhappy families powerless not to fight who resemble each other, and we both give up on this bad Russian proverb.