THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

My Sunday club times at Brisbane’s Valley Pool were pathetic again this morning. Actually, two were almost Queensland records, but anything’s pathetic these days because that’s how my friend Nickname and his twin brother have begun describing their races. I still can’t spit it out with the disgust they do, but I’m getting there. When my old Sydney club mate Jim Findlay turns up in Brisbane the following weekend for a carnival, he asks how my first race went. ‘Fucken pathetic,’ I spit back, expecting him to be up to speed on this pathetic business.

‘Go easy on yourself,’ he blurts, ‘I heard it was your best time.’

At last! I think, I’ve nailed the tone, though I’m shocked at having been taken so literally: I’d hate him to think I don’t enjoy racing because there’s nothing I love more than finishing a club race and waiting expectantly for the timekeeper to chalk up my time. And as soon as I’m back in the stands, the first thing I do is check if Ashley entered it correctly in our logbook.

Nickname and his brother are from seriously clever stock. Not only is their dad a scientist, but Nickname’s school even bumped him up a year because he embarrassed teachers with such elegant maths solutions. Thanks to hanging with geniuses like these, I can now denounce the long flat facade of Brisbane State High as fascist, and sneer that most people never honestly review their life choices but merely rationalise. Christmas, of course, is just a retail scam and not really Christian at all but, like Easter, an early Church theft of pagan dates. Nickname never tires of reminding me his brother is schizoid, verging on paranoid. But then the brother tells me Nickname himself is ultra-conservative, neurotic, and so insecure he dragged a hug-rug around till he was nine, and that his knock-knees and pronated feet, which collapse the inner walls of shoes within weeks of purchase, are ‘biomechanical manifestations’ of that insecurity. And then Nickname says his brother’s streamlined, swimming-friendly ears were once wing nuts before a cosmetic procedure pinned them back when he was ten, and that those ears are now abused daily by weird musicians I’ve never heard of, like Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, and the Velvet Underground. The military industrial complex underpins every western economy, pulls the puppet strings of leaders, and has others assassinated.

Amused as I am by the brothers’ merciless bickering, with its fictitious psycho slurs, it can still disappoint me because I’d always imagined brainy families to be above all that. Fighting was easy to live with in mine because we boys were getting boxing gloves for Christmas by our first year of school.

The only time I’m not tempted to mimic Nickname is when he offers me the latest book he’s finished, Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I fully intend reading it until he lets slip that a major character time-travels. ‘No thanks,’ I groan, because I exhausted my suspension of disbelief by reading almost every superhero comic ever published after my parents separated, in those two crazy years when Ashley confused addresses with ping-pong bats. (The exception back then was Batman, because I’d refused to unsuspend my disbelief for two earthbound mummy’s boys whose only advantages over Constable Plod were connections in city hall, high-tech gadgets, and designer capes.) If I read anything now, heroes must keep their feet on the ground. Time travel? Nickname should have known better.

Tonight I’m sleeping over at Nickname’s home in leafy, petite-bourgeoisie Chelmer. When his parents go out, they’re not off to meet friends, or to have drinks, but to trip the light fantastic. They won’t be long, his mother assures us when they’re leaving, because she’s still recovering from the dreaded lurgy, and his father’s been in high dudgeon all day. ‘Oh, and don’t forget to put the moggy in the laundry,’ she reminds Nickname at the front door.

‘They’ve actually gone to a concert,’ Nickname translates when I ask about this light fantastic guff and other terms I’ve never heard before: ‘My dad’s favourites, Mahler and Sibelius, are being performed by a touring orchestra.’ One of the games we play to keep occupied is one he grew up with, dictionary roulette, where we take turns to nominate a word to see who can find its listing with fewer page turns; bonus points when your opponent doesn’t know at least two synonyms. We’re pretty even on the page turns, but I’m killed on the synonyms.

They only give you life membership when your death membership’s overdue, but our coach Gordon Petersen gave so much of his youth to a surf club that they cursed him with it in his thirties. Twenty years later, he’s still running the Valley Pool to help swimmers like us. Apparently he had a go at boxing too, though he rates himself just a journeyman. And Gordon’s actually his middle name; he told me he thought his real Christian name, Lindsay, a bit sissy, so he switched them. He says he was named after a famous poet, and you wouldn’t see that in a million years with other coaches. There are also these great sayings on his office wall: ‘You can tell the ones who could have … They did!’ Nickname likes it best, but my favourite is, ‘Tomorrow’s champion? He quit yesterday!’ A third advises, ‘Never confuse promise with promises.’

When Gordon’s excited by impressive training, he can look like a snow skier launching from a jump ramp, angled staunchly over the end of the pool with chin thrust and hands clutching his buttocks instead of ski stocks. When it’s stormy and he’s carrying on like this in his yellow sou’-wester, it’s a sight. Other times when he’s fired up, he’ll rake his fingers fiercely through his oily red hair, thickets flicking up like baby carrot spears. Dozens of kickboards, piled like an alley of mini skyscrapers along the end of the pool, serve two purposes: we kick laps on them, and use them as cooling towers on hot days by clasping a stack overhead for breeze-cooled water to drip down our backs. That was Shane Gould’s idea. She wants a royalty, but we let her go first instead.

Whenever Nickname’s brother baits Gordon about his supposed ignorance of technique or physiology, Gordon gives as good as he gets:

‘What do you know about muscle memory, Gordon?’

‘Enough to know yours have been given nothing to remember, boom-boom.’ (There’s always a boom-boom when he cracks a joke.) Yesterday’s big comeback was, ‘If theory’s so important, jump out here and answer multiple-choice questions all afternoon.’ His final word today is to jab petulantly at the pace clock and bark, ‘In the end, kiddo, it’s not technique that counts, but tick-nique. Get it? Tick-tick-tick-nique,’ reminding us it’s the best trainers who win races.

This afternoon, Shane and I are let out early to be interviewed by the doyen of Brisbane sports reporters, Frank O’Callaghan. High in the stands, Frank tells us we’re both considered dark horses for the 1970 Commonwealth Games team, even though I’m only fifteen and Shane’s just thirteen. Who could not like Frank, with his kindly, quizzical expression and craggy grin, firing off his questions? Snapping his notebook shut, he asks Gordon if he’s thrilled to be coaching two of Australia’s genuine up-and-comers. ‘I couldn’t wish for two better students,’ Gordon answers, his eyes flashing back to the pool where a girl is accusing a boy of fishing her, and he’s denying it.

‘Yes you did!’ she shrieks.

‘In your dreams!’ he scoffs back. Fishing supposedly happens in backstroke, the only stroke to make your hand pull wide into the adjacent lane, where it inevitably brushes against the odd passing swimmer. (If the by-catch includes sea slug, a disgusted ‘arggh’ is heard from both boys.) As Gordon scurries down to calm the situation, Frank wishes Shane and me good luck at the Commonwealth Trials, and ambles off.

I truly die a thousand deaths whenever Ashley calls at the pool on his way home to see how I’m training, as he has again today. It always seems to be when I’m doing backstroke, and once again I can’t rid myself of this idiotic face-splitting smile from the moment I spot him. It’s so unbearable that I have to bury my face sideways underwater to hide it. ‘Go away, piss off,’ I tell the imbecile grin, but whenever I come up for air it’s still there. I just hope Gordon doesn’t ask why my face is underwater all the time. Nickname’s away today, so if I am asked, I’ll say he told me it’s a new technique his father found in an American journal. (That’s not so ridiculous: every now and then there’s some crazy coach teaching butterfly with sideways breathing.) When I’m at the wall in our next break, Ashley’s gone, and my face is sane again.

We’re in our HB Torana heading north to Redcliffe for the season’s biggest non-championship carnival. As usual in our longer drives, Ashley’s busy with car gym. This particular exercise is ‘wheel-press’, where he pushes against the steering wheel to bury himself into the backrest, a hundred reps to a set. ‘Pecs, deltoids, and triceps, this one,’ he grunts. If he’s not doing proper car gym, he seems to be doing thumb gym by rubbing both thumbs agitatedly on the inside of the wheel. (When I told Nickname, he said this was a sure sign of an anxiety disorder.) On the rickety planks of the ancient Hornibrook Bridge, five minutes from the pool, Ashley asks for the soccer ball, which is always bumping around my passenger footwell. When I wedge it into the crook of his left arm, he cranks it with slow, dogged compressions. ‘Biceps-traps-pecs,’ he grimaces. With the left arm spent, he snaps it straight for the ball to bounce across the steering wheel into the crook of his right arm for another set, and all this without veering an inch off course.

At the Redcliffe pool, I’m gobsmacked by the number of inspirational mottos near the entrance, though none is as clever as the few pinned up discreetly in Gordon’s office, and most are surely plagiarised. Nickname says the one I’ve found most lame, condemning ‘the impostors of triumph and failure’, sounds suspiciously like Kipling. I also find it offensive, since one of those two frauds is my guiding star. When I quip to Nickname, ‘If failure and triumph get equal billing in this pool, let’s cut our losses and go now,’ he laughs and smacks haughtily, ‘Indeed!’ Now he says he’d love to scribble his own maxim on the wall.

‘What is it?’ I insist.

‘Coaches find self-belief with other people’s bodies!’ he fires back, and we both buckle over.

‘Brilliant,’ I roar, ‘spot-on!’

In my second race, the open 200-metre backstroke, I’m ecstatic to find I haven’t fallen my usual body-length behind the reigning state open champion, Arthur Shean, the swimmer Ashley has dubbed ‘the Rolls-Royce of backstrokers’; with one-and-a-half laps to go, I’m at his ribs and gaining. Pushing out from the last turn, I put everything into an overtaking burst. Fifteen metres from the finish, I’m parked head and shoulders ahead of the Rolls-Royce and hold it to the wall. Nickname’s dad is one of the three timekeepers for my lane, and when I glance up for my time he croaks in a quaver, ‘Wonderful, wonderful swim, Brad,’ a knuckle dabbing his leaking left eye: ‘2 minutes 14 point 7, a state record.’ The timekeeping shift over, he accompanies me back to Nickname and Ashley for the lunch break.

After our next race, Nickname and I return to the stands to find our fathers gone. ‘They must have taken a walk,’ Nickname huffs (the pool’s in a private Catholic school grounds). When the missing dads finally turn up near the end of the carnival, Mr Nickname seems uncharacteristically jovial, and a tad unsteady. It seems Ashley and his new mate have been sampling the hospitality of the Monsignor’s temporary grog booth.

As we leave, Ashley and Gordon chat for a moment at the turnstiles before we head to the car park. Waiting at the crossing, I catch sight of Nickname standing at the driver’s side of his dad’s parked car up the street, and carping, ‘You shouldn’t drive, Dad, you shouldn’t drive!’ His dad, propped cheerfully in the plush leather driver’s seat, could easily fly the car home. As we exit the car park, it occurs to me to ask Ashley if his new friend (and my old friend) will be okay, but the impulse dies when he toots the horn as we pass, signalling all’s fine. Soon I begin a side-mirror vigil to check if they’re safely following us, particularly along the rattling planks and bolts of the narrow Hornibrook Bridge, where a breezy hand on the wheel and an admiring glance at the bay could send a car through the rails in a flash. But I catch not even a glimpse of them in the receding distance, and, more importantly, no splash.

A few blocks after the bridge, we pull into an RSL club to celebrate my impressive performances: every race was a personal-best time. ‘Gordon at least has you in good shape for the state and national titles,’ Ashley declares, parking his keys and wallet on the table we’ve found. He always prefaces Gordon’s contributions with ‘at least’, as if he’s just managing to head off failure at every point. I’m not sure what Ashley thinks of Gordon. Sometimes it seems affectionate when he wistfully calls him an old commie (even Nickname thinks Gordon is ‘a Maoist’ because of his battered Gladstone bag and bland clothes) yet much less so when old commie becomes old woman.

As usual in our RSL celebrations, I sip a shandy under our section’s gaudy resin light-shades while Ashley sinks a few middies, showing no sign of the many he must have downed at the pool. When requests are invited by the club’s resident band, the Percolators, Ashley joins the trickle to the stage. I don’t need to ask which song he’ll ask for — it’s the same wherever we go — and it soon booms through the auditorium: Neil Diamond’s stirring ‘Solitary Man’. But it’s not my absolute favourite. I’d have chosen ‘Itchycoo Park’, ‘Guantanamera’, or ‘Jennifer Juniper’. Now I’m suddenly wondering if Ashley can see the perfect irony that his favourite song could well be about him. ‘Solitary Man’ — what a neat coincidence! And he starts singing along, though far too loudly for my liking: ‘I’ll be what I am, sol-it-ar-y man,’ now beaming around conspicuously to see who else approves — ‘I’ll be what …’ After two more songs, we leave, arriving home just in time to watch Daniel Boone. It’s been a near perfect day.

On Monday, thankfully, Nickname turns up still in one piece for our morning training session. I wouldn’t mind knowing how the drive home went, but can’t bring myself to ask.

At afternoon training, I’m about to push off during a set of 100-metre sprints when I notice that Ginger, who left a few places before me, has stopped swimming several metres out. I delay my own departure by five seconds because he’s now completely hunched, seemingly tugging in angry frustration at his paddle straps, which probably loosened on push-off. I start my swim, but, after becoming the third to stroke around Ginger, I glance back to find him still tightly arched — except that those minor paddle-fiddling jerks are now seismic snaps of his entire body. Something’s surely wrong, so I splash back and drag him to the side of the pool, where I hand him over to a lifeguard, my new karate-champion friend, Cyrus. When Gordon and a few parents finally have him cocooned in a blanket, Ginger drowsily responds to their shouts and shakes. By the time we’re on our last lap of training, he’s in his tracksuit and waiting outside the first-aid room for his parents.

After training, the squad stays back for our occasional game of water polo, renamed walker polo because our rules allow standing at the shallow end. Today there’s a new player, Talkback, who’s considering joining our squad. After she takes a pass and hogs the ball beyond the five-second limit, two boys pounce to reclaim possession. But she hugs her prize tightly to make them earn it, before slamming the ball on the surface with all her might. When the towering syllable ‘NO’ rings out, her challengers fall away as she lectures them: ‘I totally understand boys having their bit of fun, but I don’t appreciate your hands going there when you’re supposed to be after the ball.’ Wow! is all I can think to myself, not even sure what I’m so impressed by. After a half-hearted attempt to restart the game with a few self-conscious passes and goal feints, we all pack it in and go home.

The following day, after hearing I was the one who saved her only son from drowning in a fit, Ginger’s mother traps me in the world’s longest poolside hug. Over the next week, these grateful embraces continue, and although the gratitude’s appreciated I’m secretly relieved when they eventually peter out to a big smile.

On Sunday, our entire lane turns up at Thor’s birthday party. He’s Thor because he was born in Scandinavia somewhere. We’re playing Monopoly at his parents’ imported dining table when he gets tetchy over a dice roll. This surprises no one since Thor is among the more highly strung of us, though he’s really losing it this time. When his hands dive beneath the board, its entire contents explode upwards, and in an instant the ceiling fan has gunned dozens of plastic houses around the room from their former smug London holdings, the board itself flapping off like a headless pterodactyl as banknotes rain down. For the next five minutes, we scout around to prise dice and houses from exotic new addresses, from a stuffed polar bear’s gaping jaw to the pelt of an arctic fox. When I find Thor in his bedroom ten minutes later, he’s absorbed in drawing finely detailed images in one of his many sketchbooks, mostly full of mythical dragon and warrior scenes. ‘They need you back out for Twister,’ I tell him, and he says he’ll be out soon.