THE KEYS TO EXCESS

At Auburn pool I’m seeing a key-ring jangle an arc through the cold night air, its long dark keys in shaggy orbit. When all that metal slams into Talbot’s upheld palm, the departing manager calls, unnecessarily, ‘There, Don, let yourself out.’ The only other person now left at the pool with Talbot is me. I’ve already been in the water an hour since the last swimmer went home, making it three-and-a-half hours since I dived in. And there’s another to go, if I’ve read his mood. This afternoon’s session was apparently a squad record for total distance covered, almost eleven kilometres, and that was before I was kept back. I’ve just passed fifteen kilometres.

Most people have no idea what swimmers do for regular training besides that meaningless term ‘laps’; have no idea that each lap’s a tiny link in a tightly regulated and time-managed set of a repeated distance, the set itself lasting anything from forty-five minutes to over two hours. Sometimes sets are so long that they need breaking up into identical subsets separated by a token break like tonight’s 200-metre kick on a kickboard. We’re often asked how much rest we get after every single repeat of a given distance, as if a guaranteed pause separates each swim. But there’s no standard break: it’s whatever time scraps are left of the fixed interval we have to leave on after we stroke in to the wall. Tonight’s push-off interval of 2 minutes 30 seconds for each 200-metre freestyle left around ten seconds’ break for most of us. It’s not the sort of training the average Joe could ever dream of doing, but when you’ve been swimming since you were six, you know to the very second what time you’ll see at the wall. It’s like the precision of a gymnast working the beam, except that our beam — our exacting plane between execution and failure — is time itself. And our only defences against an undignified landing are fitness and pacing.

None of which fully explains why I’m still here well after dark with just one pole of floodlights left glaring down, long after everyone’s gone home proud of their record session, their eyes now glued to some TV sitcom as they eat dinner. I miscounted, that’s all. I guess it’s pretty hard to lose count when you’re only doing four laps at a time, but there you go; I was falling behind too. I was so far behind I was getting lapped, and thought Talbot mightn’t notice if I got it wrong. Did I mention I was beyond caring? But he must have been watching and counting, and near the end of our third of a designated six cycles of eight by 200 metres, he told me to start over from scratch. So here we are. There’s no way he’ll wait around till I’m finished: that’d be well past nine p.m. At least that’s what I’m counting on.

When Talbot huffs, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ at 8.45, I’ve clocked seventeen kilometres, all rubbish. But he’s made his point, and now there’s a smouldering extra-nothing to talk about on the drive home. It’s been almost five hours since I jumped in, three hours since the sun went down, and when we get home everyone will be asleep, so I’m hoping for some cold leftovers to wolf down.

The following day, it’s our Homebush Boys High swimming carnival at Ashfield pool. I always wonder why they bother with school carnivals, since everyone knows who’s going to win. But you have to admire the kids who turn up in board shorts hoping those few afternoons they trained half their lives back might fluke a medal. Midway through the program, a classmate tells me some boys from the senior drama group at the top of the stands are taking the piss out of my warm-up drills. ‘I don’t mind,’ I tell him. ‘They’re probably bored shitless, so good luck to them.’ In fact, if I were parodying me I’d focus on the single arm swings I’m always doing behind the blocks. I’d spin that arm so fast it’d come clean off, and then I’d have to pretend-dive into the pretend-pool to pretend-retrieve it. Maybe that’s exactly the sort of gag they’re doing up there.

When we’re milling around the buses to be taken back to school afterwards, I’m almost speechless with appreciation when one of my alleged satirists, Neil, approaches me to offer assistance with homework. ‘You’re strapped for time with all the swimming, I guess,’ he says, ‘but if you ever need help, let me know.’ I tell him I’m so far behind that I’ve given up, but thanks just the same.

The following day, Neil and I sit beside each other in English. Our teacher Mr McManus is fielding a question about colloquial usage from Mark, another brilliant drama student known to cheerfully take the piss out of himself for being raised under his mum’s progressive-but-kooky Dr Benjamin Spock methods. Mr McManus has been telling him — and now, seemingly, the rest of us — that there is no such word as poser, in the sense we boys use it, to mean exhibitionist. ‘The correct word, poseur, is of French derivation,’ he insists with a haughty head wiggle of mock snobbery. Even more theatrically, he repeats poseur with the accent firmly on the second syllable: ‘So, boys, it’s actually po-seur, this poser of yours,’ before screwing his lips into an absurdly Gallic pout to torture the seur into a gravelly zyeer. ‘Po-ZYEER, po-ZYEER,’ he suddenly bawls like some frog town-crier, relishing his burlesque.

I’ve had my hand up a while to ask Mr McManus if the e-u sound in ‘seur’ counts as a diphthong, when, from the corner of my eye, I notice Neil’s head turning my way. After I lower my arm self-consciously to return gaze, his anodised bronze bifocal rims stay trained on me. I’ve seen this odd stare when he talks to other students: the focal lock of a prodigy whose prose pieces in the school magazine are almost beyond critique because they’re entirely in Latin. He’s not looking down his nose or anything; there’s just this odd narrowing of the eyes above a tickled mobilising of that vast upper lip. He could be appraising an insect collection, and maybe this is the kind of cataloguing lens you use on everything when you’re one of these genius drama types, because they’re being trained to observe people, not pool lines. It’s like that poem we recently studied by Alexander Pope, where he says, ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’ I normally resent being scrutinised, but because that weird artsy condescension is a cut above your moronic sporty eyeballing, I disengage and zero back in on Mr McManus hamming his way through the language.

Tonight the Talbot kids, Hal, and I are riveted to a current-affairs presenter touting the prospect of a live on-air debate between Shane Gould’s dad and her coach, Forbes Carlile, to settle the current strife between the two men, when Talbot walks in and switches the TV off. (Talbot takes his chief-household-censor role seriously: last week he had his wife remove their daughters’ copy of the new teen magazine Dolly from our room because it led with the article ‘To Bra or Not to Bra’, though our sole interest had been our pride in former swimming champion Ilsa Konrads’ founding editorial role.)

Carlile and Mr Gould are totally at each other’s throats in the media these days over the conflicting demands of swim training and education. Tensions sky-rocketed when Mr Gould told the papers Shane will skip the Munich Olympics if it means missing too much school, a totally unthinkable prospect for Australia now that she’s threatening a new world mark with every swim. And of course, I’m totally on Mr Gould’s side, though I think he’s a bit slow off the mark. I found out as soon as I came to Sydney that school’s indispensable — as a restful cipher between two killer training sessions (the less it intrudes the better!). Last week Jon and I even used a vacant classroom at Homebush High for a kip because we were sick of traipsing to the golf course for a private scrap of shade to snooze in. Dragging some desks together, we fashioned a bed each, wedged a chair-back under the doorknob to block entry, and waited for the zeds. We eventually woke to a class lined up outside with a teacher banging on the window.

Talbot hates all this negative publicity from the bad blood between the Goulds and Carliles. At last weekend’s carnival at Auburn pool, he ordered us not to fill out a questionnaire some university was handing out. But I’d already read the questions and they were pretty pointed, like ‘Does swimming satisfy all your social needs?’ and ‘Are you generally happy, or only when you race well?’ They read like someone from that benign institution was reaching out to us, and I was ready to sound the alarm with the right answers. No wonder Talbot banned them.