GRIZZLY VS LION

Ashley and I watch the Sunday-night news from adjacent beds in our cramped South Brisbane bedsit, itself sandwiched between the huge white loaves of the Greek un-Orthodox church (as we now call it) and the ‘Belvedere’ flats. We’re a week into the new school year, and my 1970 Queensland titles start in a fortnight. Commonwealth Games selection trials are a month off in Sydney.

The buttery waft of a slow fry, our typical rice and diced-vegetable dinner, fills the room. Ashley’s hands are clasped behind sixty-year-old salt-and-pepper hair pressed deep into two pillows. His right knee is drawn up, left ankle slung across, with calf muscle yolk-loose under scaly, puckered skin. Through the ad breaks, I’ve been doing my usual bed gym, this particular routine requiring me to reach up and push against the middle rail of the bedhead to bury myself into the mattress a hundred times: triceps, traps, pecs, and deltoids. Other times I pull myself up instead: biceps, lats, teres major, rhomboids.

‘Best car, Dad?’ I ask, to break our usual silence.

‘Rolls-Royce, of course.’

‘Best camera?’

‘Rolleiflex. Remember ours?’

‘Best watch?’

‘Rolex.’

‘Why do so many luxury brands begin with Roll?’

‘Dunno. Maybe the marketing people think it rolls better off the tongue.’

Ashley’s Rolex is in the top dresser drawer, under our socks, sitting on old yellowed newsprint covering Harold Holt’s disappearance. The particular model is an ‘Oyster Perpetual Datejust’, though it clammed up itself after a decade of Singapore sweat and steam supposedly entered the seals. And though it’s now nothing more than a timeless sculpture barely glimpsed as we fish for socks, I’m more in awe than ever. One day I’ll have a Rolex on my wrist.

‘Best singer?’

‘Cliff Richard. No. Make that Roy Orbison — he’s had a lot of tragedy in his life.’

Changing the subject slightly, I ask, ‘What wins between grizzly and lion?’

‘That’s a close one. Cashed-up miners pitted them in the California gold fields when they had nothing better to do than ship the odd lion over.’

‘Really? Leopard and gorilla?’

‘Leopard, if the gorilla can’t quickly break its back.’

‘Doberman and Alsatian?’

‘It’s the fight in the dog, not the dog in the fight.’

Next day I’m hoping Nickname’s dad will have all the facts — not just opinions — on animal winners. It’ll help that he’s a scientist, though his lab specialty is only in the micro-predation of free radicals on cell membranes. In their car on the way to training, I ask, ‘Leopard or gorilla, who wins, Mr Nickname?’

He darts me a raised eyebrow in the rear-vision mirror. ‘I doubt they’d meet. Are we talking highland or lowland gorilla?’

‘The one closer to leopards,’ I volley, tempted to exclaim, Duh!

‘I don’t think either would risk injury,’ he drones. ‘They might give each other a wide berth.’

‘Grizzly and lion?’ I persist, adding for his benefit: ‘Apparently the miners fought them in the Californian gold rush.’

‘Never heard that one.’

For a biologist, Mr Nickname’s apathy about inter-species conflict is nothing short of scandalous, though I could never hold it against him, because his is the most relaxed and friendly face of all the swim-club dads. In fact, he could easily double for the sleepily charming Skippy dad, the actor Ed Devereaux; it’s just too bad about animal champions. Maybe I’ll have to ask our landlord, Mr Cowley. Landlords might be more in tune with the law of the jungle.

My father calls Mr Cowley a devout Catholic, while we apparently call ourselves Calithumpians (is this is an Ashley joke about some creed of thumping people, or a real religion?). Originally from Lismore, Mr Cowley lives in the big front unit with his wife and two little boys, and looks far too young to own a block of flats. In the driveway on Sunday morning when he’s off to church in his squire’s hat and I’m off to swim club, he and my father chat. Mr Cowley seems willing to talk for as long as required, even as he squirms and tugs at his collar and tie in the midmorning sun with the smile of a boy trying to grin his way out of trouble. When I ask how much he earns from the flats, to see if it beats Ashley’s wage, both men are suddenly tongue-tied until Ashley quips, ‘That’s entirely between Mr Cowley and his accountant,’ after which Mr Cowley protests that he doesn’t mind one bit. But a minute later when we’re waving goodbye, I realise he still hasn’t let on.

Without fail these days, whenever my father talks about him, it’s ‘nice Mr Cowley’ this, and ‘nice Mr Cowley’ that. I’ve never heard him call any god-botherer ‘nice Mr Anything’ before, even a top-notch edition like my Uncle Martyn, who almost became a priest after years as a brother in some religious order yet who has recently, according to my mother, ‘finally put all that behind him’. He now appears in toothpaste and beer ads on TV, does a midnight-to-dawn DJ shift on commercial radio, writes love poems he hand-delivers in pink envelopes to new girlfriends, lifts heavy weights daily, is halfway through a sociology degree, and is at this very moment cooling his heels at Mum’s place after supposedly ‘breaking a Yugoslav’s jaw’ in a Sydney road-rage incident. He also has one of those winning, lopsided actor’s smiles, and currently gets around with his balding head looking like it’s been wearing an octopus, its strips of raw, fleshy plugs courtesy of pioneering follicle grafts to reverse male-pattern baldness.

So special is Mr Cowley these days that if I wake early on Sundays, Ashley has me under strict orders of silence, as if all the Cowleys are deep in warm-up sacraments for mass. And neither do I ever seem able to pin him down about animal winners, though he at least has a feisty little Fox Terrier, which, on this rent day, has again darted into our kitchen to clasp its legs around my shin to deposit its usual filthy dollop of smegma. ‘His calling card,’ my father chirps, and we all laugh to see the dog tear back into the dark hallway.

Mr Cowley and Uncle Martyn are as close as we ever come to discussing religion, if you don’t count Ashley’s jokey opinion on who gets to heaven and who doesn’t. ‘Even priests and the pious get there eventually,’ he says, ‘but the idiot will never be let in.’ Whenever he says the idiot (which he pronounces eejit), he means the French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal, whose famous proposition ‘Pascal’s Wager’ advises believing in God in case he turns out to be real.

‘As if an all-seeing creator won’t spot that scam coming through the gates,’ Ashley scoffs. ‘A billion heathens will be let in before the eejit,’ he roars, as if the smart each-way money’s on atheism.

We discuss history even less often. When I ask about Australian history, with a school essay due at the end of the month, Ashley says he knows ‘the long and short of it’, but insists I’ll have to decide between those two versions to hear any. When I choose the short, he quips, ‘Guns beat spears.’

‘Is the long much longer?’ I ask.

‘Significantly,’ he says, but recites it anyway: ‘And then there were shops.’

Other times he’ll just say, ‘Nothing’s happened since the Romans.’ As pithy and funny as I find these accounts, I’ll be padding my essay with the usual stuff on settlement, Federation, prime ministers, and the economy. And of course the wars, which Ashley won’t talk about anyway, even though he served in New Guinea on cipher breaking, and his father was gassed in France.

On Wednesday when our essays on a more contemporary topic, ‘The Generation Gap’, are handed back by our English teacher, I’m stunned when she singles mine out with special praise for being the only one to have taken an impartial position. This is embarrassing enough, but it seems she’s going to — oh no — she’s actually reading from it: ‘Whether the phenomenon is global, or restricted to the west, is unclear. It is not known, for instance, if there is such a thing as The Generation Gap in Communist China. Perhaps a Confucian respect for parents prevents such attitudes taking hold, and it is unlikely that pop music and its irreverent influences have reached there. But with so little information coming out of Mao’s China, we can’t be sure.’

Labouring her point to the class, she scoffs, ‘With the exception of Brad, everyone used the essay to take a cheap shot at your parents.’ Now almost terminally self-conscious about my sudden star status — star betrayer, that is — I wonder why I’m the odd one out, the odd, happy, gap-less one. Is it because Ashley’s old enough to be my grandfather, so he doesn’t count? Or perhaps my generation gap is with my mother, whom I’d forgotten to even consider. Neither do I understand the teacher’s harsh tone with my classmates, whose gritty despatches from the front lines of the conflict seem worthy enough.

When those Queensland championships eventually roll around, I’m well on the way to an anticipated handful of wins on my first night, the first two in quick succession. Nickname’s third place in one of my finals narrowly guarantees him qualification for Nationals — at least as one of the paying entrants — so I’m hoping he’ll be in Sydney with me for the Commonwealth Games Trials. On the second night, Ashley’s trialling a new mail-order cushion purchased specially for his piles, its forgiving doughnut shape mercifully muted within a busy floral sleeve; you’d need to gawk pretty hard to see the haemorrhoid connection.

In the stands nearby is the young firebrand Townsville coach Laurie Lawrence. He’s been running and skipping along the bottom rail all night to wave a battered program at his swimmers in angry gusts of encouragement, two fingers of the other hand shoved in his mouth for ear-piercing whistles. Between races he sees me and rushes over to tell Ashley he’s a big fan of my backstroke; he loves the way my head swings from side to side. ‘It’s like he’s pumping his shoulders with all that head movement,’ he gushes in big, friendly, outback vowels. Neither Ashley nor I respond to this, while Laurie keeps his excited expression in my face until distracted by his assistant coach.

When Nickname finds us, he nods discreetly in Laurie’s direction and whispers, ‘I see you’ve found Manny’ — this is the moniker Laurie was given in our training lane’s contest to think up jokey code names for various coaches. Most of them got saddled with notorious historical figures, but with Laurie we went for alliteration to mimic his name: Laurie Lawrence, meet Manny Manson.

Half an hour later, Nickname’s back with news that Manny threw a swimmer’s silver medal over the pool fence onto the train tracks. ‘I saw it happen!’ he gasps. ‘The girl was showing it to him after her race and he just went bananas, saying silver isn’t good enough if she expects to make the Edinburgh Games team at next month’s trials. Then he just turfed it over the fence.’

The girl is Helen Gray, a Townsville distance swimmer. Neither Ashley nor I can quite believe all this until we see the jerky skating of torchlight ovals along the sleepers, maroon-coated officials dimly attached, and someone like Manny checking the ballast. Over the next twenty-four hours, Laurie’s medal-chuck is big news, his poolside detractors and defenders equally strident.

After my successful state titles campaign, I’m back into my normal morning bedsit routine, preparing for school. Ashley left for work half an hour ago, and now it’s my usual time to check on the lady next door in her ground-floor bedroom of the ‘Belvedere’, a white suburb-grade tissue-box of rooms with Tudor trim, overlooked by our bedsit. Once or twice weekly around this time, she crouches below a large open window in her short tunic to reach forwards beneath a double bed in a dextrous display of spring cleaning. Under and back, under … and … back, in long slow stretches with the dustpan. It’s usually a great show for that minute or so, but evidently not today. Now, with a guilty shudder, I hear a knock on our door. Who could it be but Mr Cowley, possibly — hopefully — just looking for my father? I open it, but the hallway’s empty. Did I imagine this? I have tinnitus, but that’s never knocking, merely ringing in the ears (‘Never pick up!’ Ashley cautions). A minute later, I’m combing my hair in the dresser mirror when there’s another rap. I walk over, open up, and again no one. On impulse I stroll a lap of the hallway in an eerie goosebump inspection, pausing briefly at the three doors on the other side and two on ours, unsure exactly what to check for, or even which senses to use. Soon I’m back waiting at our kitchen table with a glass of milk, in the unlikely event of a third knock. When it comes, I slam the glass down and fly across the lino, but all I see when I open the door is a wing of bouncy curls almost guillotined by a slamming door in the full glare of the street end of the hall. Aha! I suddenly realise: the church girl who lives with the single mother the Cowleys have recently taken under their wing. She must be in there alone with nothing better to do than play knock-and-run games on my door. I have to leave for school now, but if she tries it another day when I have more time, I might just walk down and knock on her door until she answers. I’ve no idea what would happen then. Not that I’m at all interested, because there are other girls I know who don’t have to play those games, and whose parents never have to be taken under someone’s wing. And there’s something odd about a girl my age who rarely goes to school.

I’m glad we’re at swimming club Sunday mornings because I’d hate to be home when Ray Stevens’ sad song ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ is on the radio. It reminds me too much of the alcos sleeping it off in Musgrave Park across the road, and all the dead local streets. Fortunately we’re not home from club till around one, when Sunday morning’s well and truly gone down and we’re settling on our beds to read the papers or watch Daniel Boone and Uptight on TV. They can play it all they like then, and it’s actually not such a bad tune, though it’s got nothing on Perry Como’s ‘The Bluest Skies You’ve Ever Seen Are in Seattle’. Ashley calls Como ‘an old crooner’, whatever that is.

In the evening, when there’s an old clip of the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘Creeque Alley’ on The Ed Sullivan Show, Ashley barks, ‘Look carefully, because you might just see the exact point in history when beatniks became hippies, right there in John Phillips’ big silly fur hat; the very moment beatniks shaved off their goatees and grew long hair, swapped their turtlenecks for tie-dye, daddy-os for groovy, and bongo drums for love-ins. Except that beatniks read books.’

And then there’s this Jose Feliciano character. How’s a blind Puerto Rican with an acoustic guitar fit in to all this psychedelic mayhem? His ‘Light My Fire’ hit certainly brings something new to the Doors’ version, though all those pitch acrobatics stretch the melody too far out of shape for my liking. Jim Morrison’s version is tighter, darker, scarier, and suits the times.