GOOD NEWS

It’s late March 1970, I’m fifteen-and-a-half, and these are my first Australian open championships, at Sydney’s Drummoyne pool; actually, my first Australian championships of any kind, since I wasn’t old enough for last year’s Juniors. This year, of course, they double as Commonwealth Games Trials. Shane, Talkback, and Nickname are also here with Gordon’s other top swimmers, and we’re having fun being carted around in big Valiant hire cars in our new Queensland tracksuits in crisp Sydney weather.

This morning Nickname and I are first to arrive at a daily briefing in the room of one of our drivers, in this case a coach nicknamed MS. Since it’s anybody’s guess what those letters stand for — they’re not his initials — my stab is monster set, because he’s reputed to have dished out the longest training set known to swimmingdom, at least the Queensland version of it: forty times 100 metres freestyle, leaving on 1 minute 20 seconds. Pausing conspicuously at MS’s half-open Travelodge room door, we find him sprawled on his back on his bed, and on the phone, a chicken wing waving over the mouthpiece like a baton in his free hand. Without acknowledging us, he tilts the wing at a few plastic chairs for our benefit while continuing his conversation, evidently with a fellow coach: ‘Yeah, this new ten-year-old I’ve got can already do his 50s on the 45,’ he informs the other end. ‘No-no, that’s the medley kid,’ he spits back. ‘He’s been eating 400-metre medleys for breakfast since he was eight.’ Now Nickname nudges me and whispers, ‘What about the six-year-old who finishes training and freestyles out across the car park to his mother’s waiting car.’ To which I add, ‘And the foetus doing its hundred laps of the uterus every morning.’ We’re both sniggering when MS frowns our way and hangs up, as more swimmers file in. The wing, now sucked to the bone, is dropped into a waste-paper bin before MS licks his fingers and stands to organise today’s car pool.

On the first night of the championships, I can hardly believe I’m leading my 100-metre open backstroke final down the first lap. This is me, the best in Australia, I tell myself the moment I’m sure of it. But after I glance over my shoulder to judge the turn, my world goes black. When I’m certain all my body parts are still in motion, I realise I haven’t experienced some sort of mental blackout — not a total one, anyway — and do my best to turn where the wall should be, but miss it altogether. I stretch my toes in case I’m a millimetre off, but still no wall, so I swim off from a dead start and try to find top gear as quickly as possible. My slight lead is now a metre deficit to the new leader, Neil Rogers, and I’m still wondering what happened back there in the black. I try my hardest to swim him down in the last 25 metres, only to be beaten to the wall by two tenths of a second. I’m disqualified, of course, for not touching at the turn, and soon learn that my puzzling ‘blackout’ came from a bag of black dye tossed into the pool by anti-apartheid demonstrators protesting the selection of a small team to tour South Africa next month, the dye a symbolic gesture. I’m reassured by Queensland officials that selectors will take the dye bomb into account when they pick the Games team, so it’s fingers crossed.

Shane’s been talked up in the papers, but her best effort so far is to make the odd final. She’s having a quiet carnival as they say, but at thirteen she’s years younger than any other finalist. As a swimmer lucky even to qualify, Nickname never anticipated getting past the heats and he’s been on the money every time. Talkback was an outside chance to make the odd final with slight improvement, but, like the vast majority of qualifiers, she’ll go home without that honour; and she’s been oddly distracted the whole time, so that can’t have helped.

I’m shocked to discover Ashley here at Nationals; there was never any talk of him coming down. I was playing poker on the mezzanine deck yesterday, slouched in a mess of mats and sleeping bags with my head down, when he walked by. By the time I convinced myself it was really him, he’d started down the stairs, and because I was sweating on a picture card I let him go. Then I felt guilty and avoided him the rest of the day, leaving me even guiltier today. So, naturally, I’ve been dodging him like the plague ever since. But that’s not hard, because his eyesight isn’t too flash these days.

A few of us are watching TV in my motel room after our fourth night of finals when there’s a rattle on the flyscreen door. It’s Laurie Lawrence, or, as Nickname whispers, ‘Uh-oh, Manny Manson.’ I let him in, and, typically, he’s soon bouncing around and telling us we’re all swimming fan-tastic, and flattering the girls. ‘Youse girls scrub up great,’ he cranks in that fierce nasal Strine. (Scrub up, I wonder, in tracksuits? But why isn’t he with his own swimmers? He has five down here.) There’s a guitar strapped over his shoulder, so it looks like we’re in for a song or two.

I’d always heard of national championships doubling as trade fairs for coaches who turned up at dorms to invite swimmers to come and train in their ‘part of the world’ (‘The Coorong? Sure, I’m there every other school break!’). It made sense though, because years of frustration coaching hapless juniors could be redeemed with one fortuitous burst of killer charm on a ready-made champion. But Laurie himself seems a cut above such oafish overtures when he arranges himself on the lounge to tune his guitar.

Nickname and I exchange a sly grimace because Laurie barely knows any of us, and now we’re expected to drop everything to listen to Laurie the troubadour. And we do so without protest because he’s a coach and we’re only swimmers, even though we’re not his swimmers. I just hope he won’t take too long. After a few Bob Dylan numbers which he absolutely murders while forcing a cloying eye contact on at least one of us through each verse, he leaps to his feet and clownishly demands to know what sort of hosts we are, not to offer him even a coffee. Nickname and I volunteer like rockets, and as soon as we’re in the kitchen fall about in vomiting theatrics. But when we return with the coffees, he’s gone. ‘He thought you were taking too long,’ Shane informs us, ‘and he had some swimmers to check on.’

‘Yeah, his own for a change,’ I laugh.

‘What an ordeal,’ Nickname groans in the girls’ direction, before Talkback leaps to Laurie’s defence.

‘I thought it was … kind of cute,’ she says, and when I shoot Nickname a despairing glance, he salutes the door to bark, ‘Mission accomplished, Manny.’

After morning heats the following day, I return to the motel to find Nickname in his room reading the Bible. It’s no musty Gideon exhumed from a motel bedside drawer, but one he’s brought down with him, and titled, worryingly, ‘Good News for Modern Man’. Possibly sensing my disdain (‘Is that a friggin’ Bible you’re reading?’), he insists it’s not the stuffy old King James version, but a special new edition in modern idiom. I can also see it’s full of cartoon line drawings, most likely a pitch for the comics market. Still finding it cringe-worthy that someone so smart could stoop to Bible reading, I give him the only benefit of the doubt to offer a shred of dignity: that he’s swotting for quotes to impress Talkback and Shane, whose families are known to be churchy. But surely no one’s that cynical, even under the spell of hormones!

‘You should have a read, Brad!’ he urges shamelessly. ‘You don’t have to swallow all that resurrection and trinity stuff, or even believe in God.’ Nickname says he reads the Bible purely for its beautiful parables. ‘It’s like any other literature, and as much a part of the western canon as Shakespeare.’

Although Nickname’s selective engagement with the Gospels seems on the same curve as going Mormon for the polygamy, I open the Bible to keep him happy, and can’t believe my luck when I’m struck by a thunderbolt within a few random page turns. ‘Hey, Nickname,’ I call out. When his head pops around the servery, I tell him Manny Manson even barges into rooms in the Bible.

‘What are you on about?’ he snorts, approaching cagily as I prepare Manny’s entry for perusal.

‘It’s true,’ I insist, tapping at the particular verse in John. ‘Right here!’

Nickname scans the verse to read haltingly, ‘In my father’s house … are … Manny Mansons,’ and breaks into hysterics. ‘Good one, Brad,’ he roars, repeating the line before whining, ‘And good grief, there’s more than one of him!’

In midafternoon Talkback wanders in to join Nickname and me watching TV, settling surprisingly close to me on the lounge. When our bare thighs press firmly together and stay glued for minutes, it’s like two entire telephone exchanges have been hooked up. Whatever garbled words proposed this, we’re now on someone’s bed and all she has left on her venetian-shadowed curves is a bikini. We’ve carelessly left the door open, and Nickname occasionally wanders across the lounge room, but we don’t care. And now we’re kissing. I’ve heard of this pashing business before: Nickname and Talkback supposedly once set a kissing record, huddling for an entire hour in a wardrobe at one of their parents’ dinner parties. It really is the most intimate thrill, though Talkback’s efforts are definitely on the sloppy side. And now, she too finds fault with the technicalities of snogging when she squirms, pulls away, and, in a surprisingly tetchy tone, insists on another attempt. What’s there to lose? I’m thinking, even as her renewed efforts bring more lip chaos. Not only this, but her tongue has now shockingly breached my pucker to take up residence within my mouth, where it frantically explores its unfamiliar back-to-front surroundings. Of course — and to my eternal embarrassment — I suddenly grasp that this is real kissing, and it’s disgracefully crude and exciting. When Nickname pauses at the door, he says, ‘I think that’s our driver about to leave without us,’ and barely a minute later we three are in the back of another Valiant gliding to the finals.

When the Games team is announced, neither Shane nor I are mentioned. This doesn’t bother me, because we were only ever long shots, and I’ve come away rated Australia’s number-two backstroker, at least for black-dye races. With continued improvement, I’m a shoo-in for the next team. Among the few non-Sydney selections is Helen Gray, the girl Laurie Lawrence predicted wouldn’t be good enough to make the team. But that was before her medal hit the tracks at the Queensland titles, and now I have to wonder if that stunt was a stroke of coaching genius.

In the days after I return to our ‘digs’, as Ashley calls our Edmondstone Street bedsit, he asks if I’ve given any thought to training in Sydney. ‘It’s obvious now,’ he begins solemnly, ‘Sydney’s where the best training is.’ By Sydney, he means Don Talbot or Forbes Carlile; in my case, Talbot.

‘There’ll be no more taking winters off down there,’ he chirps, before reeling off familiar Brisbane names already in Sydney or moving soon, including Shane and Talkback with their families. Shockingly the list includes most of Gordon’s top lane. ‘I wouldn’t go with you, of course,’ he adds. ‘We’d have to find you a family to board with.’ Soon I find myself in total agreement, and it’s such a big move that I can’t see the point of mulling over what else it entails. It now enters my head that this is what he’d been up to in Sydney — sounding out coaches and interviewing potential billets, for me to train under Talbot. (Did my avoiding him help make up his mind?) Soon Graham Windeatt makes an unexpected appearance in my dreams, weirdly taking the form of two boys.

My very next thought about my Sydney future is when I’m actually in it, one surprisingly mild April evening a month later when our Torana slows outside a block of blood-red brick units in Maroubra. Ashley jerks the handbrake and pulls an address from the glove box before stating the obvious: ‘This is it.’ Somewhere in that four-storey cube, behind its curtain-muted flashings of quiz shows, is my new home. About the only Brisbane swimmer I won’t see down here is Nickname. After his pathetic Nationals performance, he said his moving down ‘would be overcapitalising’.

When the father of my new host family greets us, he takes my butterfly barbells from me the moment I’ve pulled them from the boot. Now he’s cramming them in a back corner of a dark little garage under all the units, slamming its tilting door down as if a dog’s been dropped off at the pound, and I have a sense I’ll never use them again.