BODY PARTS

‘Coaches work better without body parts,’ Ashley quips when I mention the shark-bite-sized scar above my new coach Don Talbot’s right hip where a rank kidney was once plucked in a hurry. It’s our first chat since he drove me down six months ago — trunk calls aren’t cheap — but I urgently need him to settle a passport hitch before I can be considered for coming representative tours.

I knew nothing of Talbot’s missing kidney until I asked his son Jon why two crates of soda water turn up on their back step every Tuesday. ‘He drinks nothing but tap or soda water,’ Jon said from his bunk, crouched with a flick-knife to trim proud tinea flesh between his toes. ‘It’s better for his kidney.’

‘Don’t you mean kidneys, plural?’ I corrected.

‘No,’ Jon replied, ‘check his scar next time his shirt’s off.’ (That’s easy because the shirt’s started coming off at training, now summer’s almost here.)

Never one to be outdone, Ashley asks if I’m aware Laurie Lawrence has only one lung.

‘No way!’ I exclaim. ‘What’s Gordon missing?’ I shoot back, hoping he measures up.

‘His curse is to have all organs intact, if you don’t count the charm bypass.’

‘Forbes Carlile?’

‘He only has one … head — Bye,’ he laughs on the time pips, hanging up.

When swimmers address Talbot, we’re meant to call him coach, except that I can’t; it has this fake American ring and after all this time I’m yet to utter it. (I don’t even call my dad Dad half the time, so I’m not starting with this coach business now.) Yet his swimmers use it every day and seem to like it, even those who tower over him and whack hardest in the change rooms when we boys take turns to run the gauntlet through a tunnel of thumping arms and lashing legs after training. This is at Talbot’s heated Hurstville winter pool, aka Hurts-ville, where the ceiling’s lined in a thick, grey layer of asbestos fibre with dents and gouges because kids with a death wish have frisbeed thongs up, and where we’re supplied with salt tablets because the water’s kept at a bath-like thirty-three degrees for babies’ classes. A sign high on the wall at one end says, ‘A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.’ At the opposite end, its evil twin posits, ‘A diamond is only a piece of coal that stuck with it.’ When Talbot switches on the fluorescent lights at five a.m., you can’t see the other side for the mist. Then he makes a coffee from the plastic espresso bar in the foyer, drinks half, then, probably remembering his kidney, flicks the rest into the pool, where I watch its beige clouds hang about for ages. So many bodies churn up and down these shallow lanes that once we’re wedged in file there’s no speeding up or slowing down: it’s a caterpillar chain circling itself for kilometres with only the briefest breaks. Sometimes we wear huge masonite paddles; their edges will soften but there’s always the odd new set passing the other way to nick your exposed fingers, and when those cuts heal they’re like extra knuckle creases.

I’ve been with the Talbots a month, after my first Sydney boarding stint ended badly. They lived three floors up on a patch of cement an Olympic runner could flash across in a second neat, housing seven of us in three tiny bedrooms in a kind of double-bunk bedlam. God knows why they thought they could take a boarder: generous, of course, but doomed. Their only swimmer, Rupert, was my age and trained with Talbot. I suspect he’d lost heart after falling well off the pace last season, so perhaps his parents thought rooming with someone on the up, like me, would breathe life into his tired gills — he’d been quite the super-fish in his young days. Maybe he was too small, anyway — five foot nine compared to my six foot. (As Gordon always said, ‘Shorter swimmer, longer pool!’)

Space was also a problem in the outside world — too much of it. Even without traffic, Talbot’s pools were a thirty-minute hike across town. Catching most red lights as he carted us through empty pre-dawn Sydney, Rupert’s poor dad was forever impatiently reversing over embedded signal strips to trip them green again. His balding pate was rarely sighted from behind, but on every red light his left arm hooked fiercely over the seat back and those black-rimmed glasses exploded above his shoulder on a face contorted with frustration as he gunned us backwards.

There was no sign of trouble for a month or so. ‘Just tell us if there’s anything you want,’ Rupert’s mum parroted through the first week. I just want out of this 24/7 living in each other’s pockets, I thought-bubbled deafeningly in reply. And ominously, even the songs were disappointing: ‘Airport Love Theme’, ‘Yellow River’, ‘My Little Green Bag’ — each in its own musically mutant way. (‘El Condor Pasa’ was passably pretty.) And there was one song I didn’t know whether I loathed or loved. Always on the radio on our way to morning training, ‘My Baby Loves Lovin’’ seemed all chorus, and so catchy it might have been stamped out by a machine to perfectly mock the sense of bleak enterprise I felt I’d sentenced myself to in that cross-town stupor. (What kept it from being pure bubble-gum was a slow refrain in the middle with a tiny sigh of soul.) A month later, when a stinging sensation turned up in my right side after every porridge breakfast, I hoped it wasn’t the start of an ulcer like the one that sometimes gnawed at Ashley.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t admire the way this family strived. Each parent held down two jobs — few dinners saw both at home — and the kids were strapped so tight into a school-and-study juggernaut that, barring derailment, it couldn’t fail them. Yet none of this diligence could make them see that you couldn’t be a straight-A student and a swimmer, or that Rupert’s decline in the pool was terminal. They had the drive of migrants and few callers to distract them: at least none came in my normal hours there. (In this at least, it was a seamless transition from my Ashley days, except that we’d lacked even a phone for people not to ring.) And despite being high off the ground, the atmosphere was subterranean, ant-like.

Unlike them, I’d given up on school: this was my fifth interstate syllabus shock. In my first week at Hardwick High, I wasn’t even sure I was attending the right class. The school obviously received its fair quota of daylight, but my memories now seem framed in a gloomy cloud; I sat alone every lunch hour for three months. (I’d mistakenly presumed friendship on my first day when a classmate assigned to explain our compulsory school diary guffawed at my first entry under the index heading ‘Contact in case of accident’, where I’d chosen to scrawl ambulance.) The school highlights at this point were a visit by the almost-centenarian former premier Jack Lang, and everyone getting fingerprinted.

It was the first school where I actually embraced this level of popularity, and only once was I threatened with meaningful interaction. Sitting against a chalky demountable at lunch, I’d bitten into a sandwich when jarred by a loud bang barely a metre from my head, as a cricket ball ricocheted from cladding to bitumen. Only when it hit the ground in a bounceless grainy lump did I find it was a chunk of sandstone and not an unlikely six from the sports oval. After I glanced up to see a nearby gang of Greek boys laughing, one peeled off with a kind of power waddle in my direction before settling beside me, his face an impish and pasty duplicate of the Munsters’ grandad. Planting a foot heavily on the next bench, he rolled his sock down to expose a hairy calf with a waxy pallor. ‘See my calves?’ he asked without the scorn of his recent collective mirth. ‘My ancestors the Spartans marched to battle on these.’ There was no reply to guarantee his marching back to his current phalanx, so I said nothing, though relieved his ominous approach had ended in such an infantile boast; I almost liked him now. His raw ancestral pride even had me about to share similar tidings, since I too boasted anatomy passed down from heroic times: my great-grandfather had been swimming champion — grand champion was Ashley’s term — of the British fleet in the days of sail. Then I hesitated, unsure it would measure up to the Classical sensibility of my new brother in myth. I was spared that trouble when he suddenly stretched the sock back over his calf, fastidiously levelled it, and waddled back to his gang, who eyed me menacingly before drifting off.

Rupert’s parents’ attitude towards me soured terminally when his swimming showed no sign of improvement, his acne enjoyed a bumper season, and I showed no sign of tackling homework. His mother kept her head wrapped day and night in a tight pink scarf, rollers bulging beneath like smuggled munitions, and she never wore anything dressier than a faded shift. Add gumboots and shovel, and, in my unkinder moments, I could see her in a Soviet tractor poster; she wasn’t one for airs and graces. (In all that time, I saw her hair out of the scarf only a few times, and was startled each time by how full and wavy it was.)

One day Rupert’s mum opened our bedroom door — she rarely knocked — and shook a new pair of speedos at Rupert before tossing them across with a stiff, ‘Try them on.’ Now she might have put herself in reverse and shut the door, but she wasn’t going anywhere. With Rupert’s shorts and undies suddenly around his ankles, my disbelieving gaze zeroed in on his sweaty post-school tackle for confirmation. And now I suspected the tiniest effort to avert my eyes might bring me unwanted attention, as Rupert’s free-hanging school shirt alternately displayed and curtained everything through his fumbling, adding burlesque to bollocks. Is this okay, I wondered, for mothers to see their fifteen-year-old in the altogether? I was a bit rusty on this sort of entitlement because I hadn’t lived with my mum since I was eleven. (For all I know, this could go on for life, I pondered — and maybe she just hadn’t thought things through before entering, expecting to find just Rupert in there.) This was their business, of course, but there was also my present situation — of being within a metre or so of both a grown woman and youthful manhood. If there was an algebraic indecency going on, I was unsure of the equation. When I could no longer resist turning to Rupert’s mother, her pupils were still lasered on her son, now trudging dutifully through the speedo leg holes. After he tied the drawstring, the togs were mutually deemed ‘on the small side’ and would need exchanging, which seemed an oddly precious concern under the circumstances. When he handed them back, his mother left and closed the door as if privacy mattered.

The crunch came at the dinner table. Rupert’s younger brother had never liked me, and I couldn’t blame him. I’d been given his bunk with Rupert, forcing him to room with teenage sisters (was this a twelve-year-old boy’s version of hell?). We were seated opposite when he began kicking my shins under the table: just casual, swinging pot-shots. I took these with good grace until he found his range and let go a hard one. When I growled, ‘Don’t!’, his parents glowered in my direction, though I was confident they’d tell him to stop because blind Freddy could have seen that he’d slid down his chair for reach, his shoulders still dancing in counterbalance. But when they said nothing, the boy smiled like a Cheshire cat. After another direct hit, I croaked, ‘Fuck off’, and now I’m with the Talbots, and Rupert no longer swims.

The day I collected my things, Talbot said I should offer an apology to Rupert’s dad. But there was no way he deserved one after sitting back while I became the family pinata, so I merely told him Talbot said I had to apologise. ‘It’s not a case of having to,’ he volleyed testily.

‘Okay, fine,’ I replied, facetiously taking his counsel for a pardon: he didn’t have to tell his son to stop kicking me either, and he hadn’t, so now we were even. I walked out as bitter as on the night in question, biting my lip so as not to let go another serve.

By the next day, I knew I’d been in the wrong to swear, and felt terrible. How did I manage to start the victim and come out the villain? I kept pondering. Here I was, a thousand kilometres from home and taking a big punt in life, and some little so-and-so was allowed to get one of his first big thrills by kicking and baiting a genuine trier, like a hunting pup being blooded on tethered game. At least, this was how I’d felt. I should have calmly told his parents, ‘If you won’t tell your son to stop kicking me, I’ll ask for somewhere else to stay.’ And then it would have been them doing the explaining! How easily the world turns on the right response, I marvelled, particularly if you’re not in your own home. And if that’s the way the world works, I told myself, I’ll come out on top next time.

A few days later, I realised I’d left my barbells behind. But I’d never gone down to their tiny garage to exercise anyway, so I left them as a sacrifice, too proud to waste another word on them.