RETREATING LADIES

It seems all Sydney — except for the Talbot household — has been talking about Shane and her challenges balancing her hectic life. Now my Homebush High Indonesian teacher Mrs Thomas stops me in the corridor outside her half-opened staffroom door, just to ask if I know Shane. It’s the teacher who discovered Jon and me asleep in the classroom (I still can’t believe she let us scamper out, scot-free). ‘Shane and I have been friends for years,’ I volley a little too keenly. I like this teacher, with her ski-slope nose, sympathetic eyes, and long platform boots. Her hair is in a fashionably long fringe today, a feathered dovetail fanning the back of a chic reverse collar on her flute-breasted rayon blouse. ‘So, what do you think of her?’ she continues, snapping me out of my fashion reverie, as if Shane’s been the hot-button topic at today’s staff lunch. Feeling suddenly put upon, I need to sound convincing.

‘She’s really … um … quite well-adjusted, and smart,’ I answer in my most clipped tone. Having heard so many adults use ‘well-adjusted’ lately, I’d been busting to give it a spin myself. And Shane really is smart. At the consulate in Bonn, I waited in line for minutes while she and the ambassador chinwagged about rising Australian nationalism; she was barely fourteen! But Mrs Thomas’ indulgent smile hints that these aren’t quite the pickings she’s after, before she reverse-wiggles through the staffroom doorway like a moray eel with its wispy scrap. What I didn’t share with her was my surprise in the Goulds’ car a fortnight ago when Shane had bridled at her mother’s mention of yet another magazine reporter waiting at home for them. They’d only seconds before picked me up for a picnic. (I’m always overjoyed to be interviewed, but evidently there’s a limit.) Shane was so testy about having journalists continually snooping around that I expected to hear a reprimand, but her mother just kept this cool conversational tone to suggest she try some patience. And it worked, because Shane suddenly eased up, and that was surely a clinic in modern parenting.

I begin to think about Shane’s dad and his highly publicised conflict with Carlile. When you look at Mr Gould and Mr Windeatt, it’s hard to imagine two more different stewards for the two best swimmers of their generation. Mr Windeatt is a company man through and through. Seeing his family’s apparent composure (one boy already in America on a swimming scholarship, the other methodically inching his way to seemingly predestined Olympic glory almost from the cot), you’d never guess there was the imminent threat of a hippie and communist takeover on our doorstep. No Vietnam War, no draft dodgers, no anti-war protests, and no drug crisis, just the Australian franchise of the American dream under the watchful eye of the military industrial complex.

A week later when Mrs Talbot shows me an invitation to fly to a country town to address some Rotary sport dinner, I keenly accept. I also accept that it’s incumbent on me to put a shoulder to the wheel in the Goulds’ crusade against coaching tyranny, by taking their message to far-flung parents who are but dimly aware of the perils of choosing their children’s sporting career. NOT SWIMMING IF YOU CAN HELP IT will be the general tone of my polemic. Not that anybody in their right mind should take me seriously, because I gave up on school a year ago, if you don’t count all my hours in the school library pretending to read everything from Shakespeare to the Letters of Pliny the Younger — and isn’t he the pompous one? — while mostly nodding off with my face in my palms. But my audience is not to know.

I give the speech not another moment’s thought until I reflect with blanching unease, resting on chenille bedding in this distant town’s plushest pokey motel room, that it’s only an hour away. Shockingly, until now, I was incapable of seeing myself standing before rows of aftershave-reeking businessmen in some lit-up auditorium, attended by waiters positioning entrees along dazzling linen-clad tables. It wasn’t until twenty minutes ago when two larger-than-life Rotarians met me at the airport, reaching out from their big cattle-auction bellies and monogrammed pockets to crush my hand, that I first attached a human form to their kind. The only thing now is to bolt across to the bottle-o for a stubby or two, then jot down a few bullet points with one hand while pouring Tooheys down my throat with the other.

After being introduced by a diminutive, unassuming life member who is nonetheless perfectly at ease with a microphone in these parts, I stumble through my talk, glancing everywhere but at my audience, blinking idiot-quick to recall the notes I made. (I’d intended slyly referencing these in my cupped hand, but pocketed them when I feared this might be cheating.) Surely no one has ever strained as hard to scrutinise their own words, as mine stagger from my lips like lexical zombies; for entire sentences I seem to speak across my own echoes in a panicked equivalent of blurred vision. But mercifully it’s question time, and it’s as if a Cessna flown upside down and blind in a cyclone has miraculously found itself taxiing on a runway: this answering-questions caper is a million times better than just standing there and saying shit.

‘How many kilometres do you do for training?’

‘Too easy. Good day or bad?’

‘What do swimmers have for breakfast?’

‘Do you have an hour?’

‘Would you recommend swimming as a sport?’

‘As I said in my talk, not as things currently stand.’

A few days later I’m still riding the weirdest high, as if all post-speech existence is some ecstatic reverse orbit of reprieve around that public vivisection. And now, before school, Mrs Talbot beckons me to the foot of the hallway stairs. Guessing the newspaper banners she’s toting are all about my recent Commonwealth backstroke record, I jog over expectantly. If you’ve seen a rococo painting of those bonneted ladies leaning on swings or strolling under parasols in lush Regency gardens, you’ve glimpsed Mrs Talbot. Those cheeks have a permanent boudoir flush, her hair all bouffant and ringlet. She’s a thoroughly sympathetic, though worryingly passive, presence in the Talbot household, and, unlike her husband, has a charmingly self-effacing wit. (‘What’s an actuary, Mum?’ one of her girls asked yesterday. ‘Well, actuary, I don’t know,’ she sweetly parried.)

‘What the hell did you think you were getting at in that speech?’ she demands hotly, shaking those newspapers at me. (Hell? Only her husband says hell.) Rattled by her transformation from demure matron to domestic demagogue, I focus on the fluttering headlines, one of which shouts back, ‘Swim Champ Says School and Pool Poor Mix’.

And now she gets to the point. ‘You’ve been given this incredible opportunity with your swimming, and you — you — go and poison it to good country people who pay your airfare.’ I now see there is no explanation for this outrage that the wife of the enemy could understand, and fall mute until she finishes rattling The Examiner in my face and withdraws up the steps with her ravaged souvenirs. She and Talbot hardly speak to each other these days, I tell myself to somehow discredit her reprimand, before congratulating myself with a smirk of mission accomplished.

But within minutes, I also find myself seething at her use of ‘incredible opportunity’ to describe my barracks-like existence in her home, where I’m expected to simultaneously cope with school and the world’s toughest sports training regime, not to mention my sweatshop Sunday afternoons assembling Ming’s line of exercise equipment with her two boys, whose idea of a regular family holiday is to recall what they’ve heard of their father’s most recent overseas coaching assignment.