LAB RATS

In the 1969 Christmas break, I hang at the Valley Pool each weekday while Ashley’s at his new job as a Government Housing field officer, listening to tenants’ gripes in the hot sun with a clipboard under his arm. (‘I’ve the common touch for that line of work,’ he boasts.) And somehow he’s convinced Gordon I should do a midday training session on top of my usual morning and afternoon ones. Luckily Nickname has joined me as an experiment. With his scientific pedigree, he’s always up for one of those.

On day one of our new regime, Nickname assures me the Hungarian national team trialled something similar before the last Olympics. They apparently trained three sessions a day for three consecutive days, followed it with a three-day break, and sustained this cycle for three months before the Olympics. And — this is the part Nickname seems to like — each session lasted three hours. ‘All those threes!’ he gasps.

‘Three hours a session, three times a day, for three months!’ I groan. ‘But why the three days off?’

‘They were trialling a new stress-rotation concept called super-recovery.’

‘But wouldn’t they … leak a bit of fitness in three days off?’

‘It’s touch and go, but four would definitely have been taking things too far.’

‘And how did they go at the Olympics?’ I think to ask.

‘Pretty much the same,’ he shrugs, ‘but one trial can’t tell you too much.’

‘Great!’ I huff.

Something else Nickname tells me after training is far more interesting than an unproven fitness theory based on a number fetish. He claims there’s this edgy new scientific concept called morphic resonance, which says that when a critical population of a species learns a new behaviour, members elsewhere on the planet soon mysteriously share it. ‘It’s not exactly mainstream science,’ he adds, ‘but its proponent has pretty good credentials — he’s this Cambridge Royal Fellow in Botany, Rupert Sheldrake.’ If I’ve understood Nickname, the theory was a chance outcome of experiments testing for Lamarckian heritability: thousands of American lab rats were repeatedly swum to exhaustion through mazes in giant vats to see if they passed adaptations on to offspring.

‘The Lamarckian part proved inconclusive,’ Nickname sighs, ‘but they found an almost simultaneous improvement in swimming abilities of overseas lab rats.’

I ask if this explosive finding is ever cited to explain the relentless global improvement of human swimmers in our vats. ‘Not that I’ve heard,’ is all his scientific mind can offer. (I often wonder if there’s anything Nickname doesn’t know. I imagine him wandering his dad’s lab each evening with unfettered access to microfiche libraries of every science journal ever published.)

By the end of our first week, I’m suspecting Gordon’s heart isn’t in this three-sessions-a-day caper. Our lunchtime training lasts hardly an hour, and most of that time he’s in and out of his office, barely throwing us a sideways glance. Then he might disappear into the pump room as he did yesterday, emerging twenty minutes later with an ancient motor wrapped in newspaper under his arm, wires dangling forwards like a catfish he’s caught for dinner.

Between sessions today, Nickname and I wander up Wickham Street for some pretend shopping. Crossing the road between McWhirters and TC Beirne’s, we catch sight of that famous old greaser Rock ’n’ Roll George cruising up Brunswick Street in his notorious beige FX Holden, wheel discs painted red like some petrol-head gusset fantasy. Coming down the TC Beirne’s elevator to our right as we’re heading up is one of the swim-club dads, Mr Kitchell, wearing a suit. He looks as surprised as we are to be recognised, before he suddenly puts on a stern detective’s voice to call across, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to check the contents of that bag, boys,’ and we all explode in laughter because there is no bag and Mr Kitchell is no detective. Other days we just hang at the pool and chat with some lively Bowen Hills girls who’ve been turning up lately. I can’t believe Nickname’s dorky confidence; the girls keep cooing that he’s a dead ringer for a famous folk singer I’ve never heard of, Arlo Guthrie.

I’ve been coming home tired and hungry from my triplicate holiday sessions, though this has nothing to do with my new habit of leaping out of bed at night and telling Ashley I’m going into the kitchen for a biscuit. He knows I’m lying, because he asks if everything’s okay. That’s when I reply evasively, ‘Yep, yeah,’ while the truth is that I’m freaking out after randomly thinking about death, eternity, and infinity in bed. How can things just go on and on without end? I wonder. And what can scientists mean when they say the universe is expanding? (I thought whatever it expanded into was already the universe.) I hadn’t been totally ignorant my life would one day be over, but I’d obviously been avoiding placing myself at the scene. Suddenly, at a certain point, the only option is to jump out of bed before my racing heart explodes. That’s when I’ll tell Ashley I’m starving, but instead go out and pace the kitchen lino for a minute before cowering back to bed with an Iced VoVo to validate my alibi. It’s been happening too often for my liking, so I hope it’s only a phase like the one Mum says Ashley went through early in their marriage. (He’d apparently sit bolt-upright in bed in the middle of the night and keep yelling, ‘I’m dead, I’m dead,’ until she convinced him otherwise.) ‘But it was just after his widowed mother died,’ she explained recently. He supposedly stopped the ‘I’m dead, I’m dead’ stuff by the time he learned his mother had bequeathed their Blue Mountains family home to his sister.

Some days even swimming can seem a little futile in the face of seeing out the front end of eternity dead. Gordon doesn’t help with his usual bleak quip when we train badly — ‘That’s a pretty poor imitation of a fish today, kiddo’ — which makes all human swimming seem a pointless homage to fish, a dumb phylum unchanged for millions of years. How demeaning for we supposed exemplars of evolutionary advance! Almost as offensive was my younger brother claiming last week that the main reason I succeed is because I try harder than the rest. Until that point in our spat, I’d been ahead in the sledging, but his ‘trying harder’ slur knocked me flat because I’d felt accused of cheating. From a coach, of course, this would have been high praise, but coming from family somehow made it different. Only later did I see how silly it was to be accused of trying harder, because I train in a pool full of equally desperate try-hards; and how many lanes of us are there in Australia? I should have asked exactly how hard we’re all meant to be trying, and who was doing the measuring: I wanted to be seen winning fairly, not just because I’d clinically engineered it with harder training. Then, after some thought, I realised I wouldn’t want to win purely on presumed talent either. What would that prove but privilege? Yes, there was still real glory in winning a tight contest, but not if that heroism could be traced back to inevitable causes. And then I felt a little confused because there suddenly seemed no perfect way to aspire, and I wondered if I’d fallen for some monstrous con to have become a sportsman in the first place. And now I suspect it’s too late to change anyway, because the only alternative seems not to try, and that’s a sorcery even Nickname steers clear of. Or maybe I could just try at the usual things that make a go of life — school and career. But that wouldn’t impress Ashley. ‘Half the world gets to pass an exam,’ is the way he sees it. Besides, swimming’s been in our family for centuries if you can believe him, so it’s something we do, win or lose.

As if the week couldn’t get any more whacky, today’s Weekend Australian has this spiteful Murray Hedgcock opinion piece where he totally unloads on swimming, claiming the only stroke deserving to call itself a legitimate sport is freestyle. ‘Butterfly,’ he writes, ‘resembles some undignified picnic sack race’, and backstroke ‘would only make sense as an egg and spoon contest’. By the time he’s dumping on breaststroke, I’ve stopped reading in acute embarrassment. (But then, even Gordon’s been known to crack the odd breaststroke joke. ‘What’s a medley relay?’ he loves asking, before self-answering, ‘Three swimmers and a breaststroker. Boom-boom!’)

I feel like quitting for days after the Hedgcock rant, until it dawns on me that all sports are completely arbitrary challenges. I mean — who uses javelins or bows and arrows to catch dinner these days? Or hops, steps, and jumps to the office? And it’s not as if anything real happens anyway. Even the so-called results are concocted news, the reportage value founded entirely on someone having once said ‘let’s race’ or ‘let’s play’, the outcomes a kind of embellished coin toss: dog-bites-man on one side, man-bites-dog on the other. ‘So how’s a coin toss news when it’s designed specifically to create news?’ I ask Nickname as we sun ourselves in the stands after another session.

But he seems almost not to listen, volleying deadpan, ‘The only way to understand sport is as a play where the characters get to change the script: if a play’s worth a review, sport’s worth a write-up too.’ I give this some thought and concede he has a great point. In fact, I can’t help repeating a play where you can change the script over and over in my head, deciding it’s the cleverest line ever spoken about sport. Suddenly sport’s much more interesting than a dead play — as different as photos and movies. And now he says anyone wanting a meaningful justification is barking up the wrong tree anyway. ‘Sport’s all about the peacock feathers,’ he quips. ‘The human brain’s pretty sophisticated, but there’s still loads of Jurassic wiring hanging around for dumb stuff like showing off.’ Nickname predicts there’s at least another 100,000 years of ‘reptilian display behaviour’ to play out.

‘Then what?’ I ask.

‘Eternal peace and happiness,’ he laughs, and I laugh.

Seeing yourself as a peacock with a prefrontal cortex doesn’t seem to bother the brightest boy I’ve ever known, but I’m still left uneasy. In fact, the more knowledgeable I become under his mentorship, the more fragile the world seems. Soon he’s explaining how we never engage with the outside world anyway; all we know is our own sensory data. So now I’m just a processing automaton, interacting exclusively with myself via some drip-fed facsimile of reality, filtering just enough information to avoid walking off cliffs or being eaten by lions. How lonely this sounds! Not that it doesn’t make perfect sense, but I was happier deluded the world I saw was really out there.

Seemingly as an afterthought, Nickname lets me in on a personal secret: that some other friend of his developed a weird illness after spending too much time on this line of thought. He apparently told his parents he was just some dumb, soggy machine, and everything he touched had this dead, rubbery feel, particularly himself. Then he started refusing to get out of bed and saying life was pointless and now he’s in hospital. Suddenly I wonder if just knowing Nickname is a health hazard. Maybe he’s the one responsible for my leaping out of bed at night! The only consolation is that despite all the soul-destroying stuff Nickname knows, he’s still upbeat about his own second-rate existence.

A month later, the night panics disappear as abruptly as they started. Despite the obvious relief, I now find myself cautiously trying to think my way back into them, as if they’re an insight I’m scared I’ll never have again. Yet as hard as I try, I can no longer find the groove.