DOLPHINESE

Hi Nickname. I thought it about time I dropped you a line. Hope all’s well. You’re so lucky you’re still up there in that constant 26 degree Valley Pool water: when we left the indoor pool last September for the outdoor (unheated) pool at Auburn, the water was 17 degrees. So, one day we’re in a wilting 33 degrees in Talbot’s indoor Hurstville pool (apparently they need it that hot for babies’ classes) and the next we’re in those freezing outdoor lanes at Auburn. Now that was a shock and a half.

You can’t throw your body into such cold water without feeling you’ve seriously betrayed it, particularly when you know there’s two hours to go! And this Talbot doesn’t put up with ‘namby pambies’ slinking in via the steps with a squeal for every inch: it has to be a running jump. And after hitting the water, we’re all bouncing around on tiptoes with arms above heads, blowing quick half breaths and shouting ‘phwa, shit, Christ!’ As long as we don’t take this show too far, Talbot says everything will be ‘hunky dory’. If you haven’t guessed, two of his favourite expressions are namby pamby and hunky dory. Oh, and I almost forgot Creeping Jesus. You’re definitely a Creeping Jesus if you always tag on the end of the line, hoping he won’t notice you draughting on everyone. (When my friend Hal finished a 1500-metre yesterday, Talbot reached down, grabbed his skinny wrist, hauled him out of the pool like an underfed seal pup he was about to club to death and barked, ‘Listen, you little Creeping Jesus.’ Hal’s always going last.)

Your body never warms up in 17 degrees. After morning training I was still shivering through breakfast 20 minutes later, losing cereal off every shaky spoonful. On a sunny day the water picked up a tad, but overnight it dropped again.

In my first week in the outdoor pool I kept hearing the high pitched whine of an outboard motor. Either this, I thought, or my usual tinnitus had hit a new frequency from some sort of eardrum frost bite. Then one day a lane-mate asked why I never replied to their cheerios. ‘What cheerios?’ I asked.

‘The ones we give when we’re passing each other,’ he said (and I was getting passed a lot in my first few weeks).

‘Dolphinese!’ one girl laughed. ‘Surely you’ve heard our underwater dolphin squeals.’ And that was my outboard motor whine. Now I speak fluent Dolphinese!

Talbot and Gordon are dead opposites. Both get angry, of course, though Gordon’s age made him a kind of lovable ‘C man’: crotchety, crabby, cranky. But Talbot’s definitely your ‘A man’ — adversarial, abrupt, authoritarian — and he’s decades younger than Gordon. He’s built like the nuggetty drill instructor in Gomer Pyle, with the same flat-top crewcut but minus Sergeant Carter’s man-boobs and conflicted lapses into pastoral concern. And he’s always saying ‘hell’: ‘That was a hell of a swim — you’ll have hell to pay — you can go to hell.’ If it’s not hell, it’s backsides. ‘He needs a kick in the backside — my backside you’re getting out — as long as your backside points to the ground you’ll never …’

When you’re in trouble with Talbot he’ll order you out of the pool for a good chest poking, though some new recruits oddly look forward to this. After their first taste of it, they turn up the next day proud of the bruise rosette on their chest, but after it yellows out they never want another. (And get this. A kid in my lane, my old Maroubra club mate Jim Findlay, developed a crush on one of Talbot’s daughters. But Talbot was onto it and told him in front of everyone, ‘If I see you anywhere near my place I’ll break both your legs.’)

Now, prepare to be amazed: I’m known as a bit of a maths genius down here. Stop laughing. It just so happens that one of our regular longer swims is a kind of pyramid where we do one lap fast, one slow, then two fast, two slow, and so on, non-stop, right up to wherever Talbot wants it to stop; it can go as high as 13, and that’s a 9km continuous swim. To calculate the total, everyone would stand around adding up the numbers (you know, plus 6, carry the one!) Then one day I thought there had to be a short cut, and began multiplying and squaring numbers at random until I found that by multiplying the set’s top number by the number above, I got the right total each time. Even Talbot was impressed, and he was a maths teacher!

If you want revenge on Talbot, you have to wait for Christmas eve. Apparently he’ll be halfway through telling us he’s going to do something ridiculous, like keep us in till midnight, before spinning on his heel to take off onto the spectator hill. Almost instantly, all the boys know to jump out and give chase, eventually tackling him onto the grass before laying into him with fists and kicks. Apparently that’s his Christmas present to us. Two years ago he picked up a broken rib in that scramble. Crazy, isn’t it? (I can’t wait — NOT.)

As I expected, Windeatt’s treated like a god here. But oddly, his nickname’s Grub! It must be some sort of ironic nod to his decidedly un-grubby demeanour. And there is actually a weird gravitas to him that gets everyone’s respect. He’s pretty straight; a tad aloof too, but no one minds because he can take a ribbing.

Shane and I keep in touch. I’ve even had a sleepover, training with her coach Forbes Carlile the next morning. (I’m surprised Talbot approved, because coaches are always stealing swimmers off each other down here. At carnivals, they greet boys from other squads with compliments like ‘Hi, muscles,’ and the girls with ‘Cute cossies, luv,’ though Carlile himself seems a cut above all that.)

Most Talbot swimmers call Carlile a ‘girls’ coach’, and the boys who train under him ‘mummy’s boys’. They could be right, because the lane I swam in had an Alastair, Jonathon, James, Roger, and Buddy, while in Talbot’s alpha lane there’s just this monosyllable proletariat of Dave, Hal, Mike, Greg, Rick, Jim, Rob, Grub, and me. (I was actually christened Bradford, but Brad will do for now!)

It’s weird: Carlile and Talbot have these really striking voices, so maybe that’s what’s needed to be a top coach down here. Carlile’s is what your dad might call donnish — he was a physiology professor before coaching — and it resonates like it’s knocked on every skull cavity on its way out. Talbot’s is part bull’s roar, part Satchmo, part exhaust note. And it’s the first voice I’ve heard to make that supposed female fascination with the male larynx almost believable.

If you don’t train with either of these coaches, you’re just not serious about the Olympics. And if you’re any good and live north of the Harbour Bridge, you’ll train with Carlile, but in the south or west you’re with Talbot. (Nothing happens at all in the east unless you count a couple of private schools where stodgy old-boys mentor relay sides for their full blue, or a few hired lanes here and there where oddballs in cravats coach a handful of rich kids.)

It’s all about the big k’s down here now. As you know, Gordon never gave us more than 4km, except for Saturdays when it trickled to a ‘heroic’ 5km. But with Talbot, the bare minimum’s 8. (I still wonder why Gordon didn’t bump us up to 8 when so many were thinking of heading south. He must have known he’d lose them. Has he increased the k’s yet? Please let me know.)

I’m usually in Talbot’s bad books because of my erratic training, so that’s a turnaround from Brisbane (whenever Gordon was quoted in the papers, he’d say, ‘There’s no better lad!’) Of course, I wasn’t such an up-and-down trainer back then because of the easy work, but you’ve no idea how tired this training makes you: last week we clocked 100km in our 11 sessions. That’s 24 hours in the water! When Talbot gets sick of me being lapped by swimmers I beat in races, he boots me over to the junior lanes for a day or three. This is on a fortnightly basis! But I don’t fudge deliberately. I just get this deep fatigue in my gut and it soon radiates into my neck and limbs, like it’s taunting me with ‘quitter, quitter!’ and after fifteen minutes of that, I stop caring. The only thing that makes me smile sometimes if I’m going up and back like a zombie is that old joke — ‘Mummy, Mummy, I don’t want to go to New Zealand,’ when the mum says, ‘Shut up and keep swimming.’ (A month of Talbot’s training could actually get you to Auckland!) But every now and then I strike a good day, and that’s when I’ll train near race speed for as long as I hear those trumpets, to make up for all my crappy laps.)

But one day — get this — Talbot’s assistant Ruth has a quiet word with me and says not to worry about my inconsistency. ‘It pisses Donny right off,’ she quipped, (Donny??) before suggesting my topsy-turvy laps might be a blessing in disguise. She says they mimic recent research on energy cycling. Apparently the body adapts better with varied training stress (she listed half a dozen metabolic processes enhanced by this cycling — things like enzyme reactions, glycogen and lipid fat metabolism, blah-blah aerobic and blah-blah anaerobic — the sort of stuff you know about.) I’m still not totally convinced my fecklessness is exactly what those exercise boffins had in mind, but our little chat made me feel better.

This Ruth’s actually a bit of a card. Doesn’t care much for appearances and never wears a dress — just these old navy gabardine flares and a plain old button-and-collar shirt. And there’s always a little tongue of tucked-in shirt poking through the top of her trouser zipper. She has a kind of slow-talking, coy manner with us, but if any of the parents are getting on Talbot’s goat, he’ll send in Ruthy (that’s what the Talbot kids call her) to sort them out.

Talbot himself is a ‘hands-on’ coach. If he’s not poking you in the chest, he’s got a very firm clasp of your wrist in a pep talk, and that’s creepy. The older boys say he’s got a Napoleon complex, though his shortness had completely escaped me till now (I guess I was too busy reading the warning on the overall package: ‘Beware!’) But there’s definitely something gratuitous in his endless rebukes. On tour with him recently, our bus stopped at Rome’s famous Trevi fountain where the kitschy tourist thing to do was to throw a coin in. Later, back on the bus, Talbot asked if I’d tossed one in for myself, and when I said no, you should have heard him tear strips off me. It was embarrassing for the whole bus. What a turd! You could understand it if I’d missed seeing a famous Titian or Breughel, but not some bogan make-a-wish community piggy-bank fountain. Now get this: after Talbot’s rant, the first motel we passed was the ‘Hotel Napoleon’. I rest my case!

And something whacky happened when I got home from that tour. I went back to Talbot’s with him from the plane at 9am, had a bite to eat, then a nap. I woke in the afternoon starving, and after going downstairs to cook a jaffle I noticed the Talbot kids gawking like they were playing a joke. ‘Do you know what time it is?’ Jon finally asked. I looked at the wall clock, replied, ‘5pm obviously,’ and shrugged, ‘I must have been tired, hey?’ Then he said I must have been more than tired, because it was the following day. I’d slept 30 hours!

The girl I’m seeing at the moment is Esther, a tall blonde. That is, I ‘see’ her twice daily in squad, but at carnivals we actually hang together. And if Talbot’s son Jon can steal or con the Kombi keys off his dad, some of us pair up and head out for a serious discourse on race strategy on the Kombi benches, nudge-wink!

Esther’s cool, but I’ll let you in on something odd. She surprised me yesterday when she said a few of the girls think Talbot’s ‘a bit of a sexy beast’.

‘Sexy beast??’ I laughed and laughed. That’s when she told me one of her friends dropped a tampon onto the end of the pool last week. Anyway, Talbot snapped it up and asked if it had an owner. When it went unclaimed (surely the owner should have jumped up and down, shouting … ME ME … I’ve just checked and it’s definitely my spare!) he announced it’d be in his pocket if required. So there you go. Don’t tell me I never give you tips on how to be a sexy beast.

I don’t know what’s on the English syllabus up there, but at Homebush High we’re studying the Auden poem ‘Musee De Beaux Arts’, which basically says that if you’ve high aspirations you’ll fly too close to the sun and melt your wings before plopping into the ocean unnoticed (based on the Icarus myth, apparently, as illustrated by Breughel). And then there’s Shelley’s Ozymandias, which says that no matter how important you become, all your monuments will end up old stones buried under sand.

So, how are they for a couple of inspiring poems? Don’t you think it’s a bit rich for two famous writers to be telling us not to be try-hards? I mean, how much time and effort must they have put into learning their craft? (Maybe the education system really has been overrun by Marxists, like you used to say.)

Got to hit the sack now. Write back! Bye and good luck, Brad.

P.S. I forgot to mention this new kid in squad, Bobo. You’d find him an absolute scream. He’s actually some sort of budding surf ironman, but when he started beating pool swimmers in his home town, his coach suggested he give the pool a good crack under Talbot. (Apparently that coach also once trained under Talbot, and she and Talbot now run clinics together.) Bobo walks — waddles — like a penguin with a dislocated neck, and wears the shittiest old sloppy-joes full of holes. He only joined us a month ago, so I’ll keep you posted.

P.P.S. What’s an ulcer supposed to feel like? You always seemed to know lots of medical stuff, so I thought I’d run this past you. When I was staying with my first boarding family down here, I’d get a kind of stinging sensation high in the right side of my stomach after breakfast. It usually went away by midmorning, but the rest of the day there was a queasy discomfort. Now that I’m with the Talbots, the stinging’s gone, but it’s still uncomfortable in there.

P.P.P.S. Do you remember me saying I liked swimming because it was one of the few sports where you could actually lie down on the job? Well, cancel that, ’cos down here with Talbot cracking the whip, it’s more like we’re prostrating ourselves to our stalag guard.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. (Just kidding.)