BELIEVERS

Do buzz-cut Talbot, crew-cut Carlile, and any-cut Lawrence even know hippies exist? I don’t get it: Talbot lets his boys play their hippie albums by Country Joe, Blind Faith, Cream, Santana, and Jimi Hendrix, but every month he marches them to his carport to clip their hair to a stubble with electric shears. Doesn’t he read the papers? — everyone at school has hair well past their collars, even the prefects. But not his boys, who turn up looking like kids from the migrant hostels. And a music teacher in a band called Blackfeather even has hair to his backside.

I’d never so much as listened to an album in Brisbane, and gave record shops a wide berth because they made me nervous, especially if I smelled incense — my only songs courtesy of our battered Hitachi on sink or bedhead. Playing records still seems such a decadent thing to do, but at least I’ve learned some great new songs. The big radio hits right now are ‘Maggie May’ by Rod Stewart and ‘Your Song’ by Elton John. (There’s no separating these for favourites, making it the first time I’ve had to award a tie since ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Guantanamera’, way back in Kenmore.)

Hippies reject competition because it’s toxic to the flowering of human potential. They wouldn’t know what a sporting trophy was, and if they found one would probably melt it down into charming trinkets for their womenfolk. To get by, they fish from streams and harvest their own produce, which grows more wholesomely when sown by harmonious hippie hands. They also reject possessions because ownership is anathema to the spirit, and live mostly in teepees or log cabins erected by communal labour. At the end of each day, wrapped in Indian shawls by a fire, they compose haikus into the night. Hippie mums breastfeed on demand in open sight without the slightest hesitation, so that their toddlers grow up without the hang-ups of our uptight world.

That’s American hippies, at least; I’m not sure Australia even has any yet. I can’t imagine it. And to be honest, I’m hoping the inevitable counterculture takeover is still a few years off because I’d hate to miss my chance to swim at the Olympics and beyond. Can you imagine hippies hanging on to the Olympics once they’re in charge? They’d die laughing.

And what would any swimming coach know, for that matter, about flower power and escaping the slavery of the military industrial complex? They’re far too busy inviting themselves into motel rooms and ingratiating themselves to swimmers some other coach has put a lifetime of work into, knowing that sooner or later they’ll hit the jackpot when some pissed-off pimple pole dumps his own coach and gives them a try.

Some nights my eyes are so itchy from the chlorine, I can’t sleep. Swimmers in other squads use goggles all the time now, but Talbot says there’s still too much fiddling around for them to seal properly. ‘Next season, when the technology’s better,’ is his usual comeback if anyone dares ask (though Jon says he let swimmers trial them last season until some boy disappeared to the medley lane to check out girl breaststrokers from behind for an hour). My eyes are so sore tonight I haven’t stopped rubbing them. If I keep it up they’ll bleed for sure, so I’m putting clothes on and sneaking out the back door for a stroll. I’ll pretend it’s a practice walk for when I run away to live in San Francisco and pitch a tent at The Hate Ashbury, whatever that is. (Strange name for the supposed global nerve centre of free love, The Hate!)

I head south to the end of Abbotsford Road and take a right until I find a highway, which I follow, and follow. At midnight I’m passing a cemetery that goes on forever. If this is the famous Rookwood, I think it’s where my grandmother is buried, though I’ve never visited her there and wasn’t aware she’d died until months later. I’m still headed south or south-east, though my direction’s irrelevant because it’s only a dry run for The Hate. Now that I’ve hit my stride, I feel like walking forever, just to see what it would take to make me stop. (And that would be a very hip and natural thing to do.)

Another hour, and it’s good news: my eyes are better, so I turn back. I should hit Talbot’s by three, leaving plenty of time before anyone stirs for training. At two, I haven’t seen a car for ages: it must be the quietest hour on the roads, deader than the Augathella morgue at dawn, as they say. Any cars that do come along now, I hear them so far off there’s time to look over my shoulder in case it’s a sinister one up to no good. Truth be known, it’s creepy being out at this hour. Now a car’s whistling up the last hill and I glance back to see a roofline inching above the apex; it’s almost the beige of Talbot’s. Seconds later the entire car’s visible, though still a hundred metres off. Coincidentally, it’s a Beamer, and it slows behind me; the cemetery’s alongside again for me to scramble through the headstones if anyone from the car tries to jump me. Now it eases to the kerb, the driver straining across for a closer peek at this halfwit walking the streets. Shit, it’s Talbot. I’ve got my parka hood on, but surely he recognises me and the game’s up. I keep my head down and affect a homeless person’s shuffle, though I’m also thinking up fantastic excuses, ready to hop in if he calls. But after he heaves back to the wheel and roars off, I’m almost disappointed. God knows where he’s been at this hour: apart from his coaching commitments, he’s never at home these days, but I still wonder why he didn’t stop. Maybe he thought to himself, That looks like Cooper, but it can’t be; I’m just tired. An hour later I’m tiptoeing through the back door, and as soon as I put my head on the pillow I know I’ll be asleep in one minute.

According to Talbot, our swimming fates are limited only by the strength of our self-belief. After hearing this mantra all season, it’s only after our latest pep talk that I suddenly grasp self-belief’s absolute primacy in Talbot’s universe. How have I been so dumb for so long? By insisting it’s our self-belief always on the line, Talbot totally excuses himself from the liability loop. It’s pure genius: if we swimmers make a small gain, it’s but a glimpse of what’s possible with truckloads of the stuff, while any setback is a sign we’re wallowing in self-doubt again. And guess the identity of the grand wizard of self-belief, whose reputation stays unsullied by our crappy racing? No prizes. It’s also pure evil, of course. But then I remember a Brisbane coach who nobly conceded a mistake he might have made in his team’s doomed state-championship preparation. Within days of that gesture, his top girl left him. Then the girl who’d relied on her for pacing jumped ship too. Within a month, that domino nudge had emptied his entire top lane. The coach then had a breakdown and was last seen selling cars for a living. Talbot lives for cars, but he’ll never have to work in a car yard, because he has too much self-belief.

Friday afternoon there’s a new swimmer to pick up on the way to training. Jon’s given me all the goss on this kid, who’s trained before under Talbot and lives only a few blocks away. The father’s some transport magnate, who, after tiring of his teenager arriving home each night bitching about Talbot, decided to build him his own backyard heated pool. But after a few months shuttling up and down those brand-new lanes under his dad’s proud gaze, the kid shot through. A few days later, with police only hours away from giving the sensational story to the papers, he turned up again, and today’s his first day back in squad. When Talbot pulls up outside their home’s surprisingly modest exterior, we slide the Kombi door open and the kid hops in with a sly grin to share a joke with Jon, as if his long absence was just a pause for breath. The dad, in his home-office casuals and olive cardigan, saunters to the front of the Kombi, where Talbot’s arm hangs over the door. He murmurs a barely audible greeting through a tight smile as he clasps Talbot’s arm. ‘Don’t know how to thank you, Don,’ he says firmly, when for a split second his face is a sucky, blubbery sump before flexing back to a damp moon-face. He turns away and gives Talbot’s shoulder a squeeze, and we’re off.

We’re waiting for Talbot to announce the next set on Monday afternoon when word gets round of ‘a lifter’. Lifters are totally clueless on how to react when getting poked in the chest by Talbot. Instead of their heads bowing and chests sinking, lifters’ chins jut in defiance and chests rise as if Talbot’s index finger’s a bike pump (it’s that thick). You see those chests puff higher on every pump-stab, and just when you think there’s no more lift left, something’s sucked from deep in the gut and up it goes again. Sooner or later there must be an explosion. They’re in the middle of this crazy brinkmanship right now, and it’s why we’re still waiting for the next set; Ruth would normally step in to tell us, but she must have gone to the loo. Talbot has his lifter boxed into a shady corner of the louvre-brick wall at the end of the pool and looks unfazed, his head at this relaxed cocky angle showing he’s very, very interested in the psychology of his victim’s next move, but not the least in how this ends.

Real swimmers never, ever lift. We know to keep humble, and we’re all super-flat-chested anyway. In fact, we’re flat and wide right through, the paper cut-outs of the sporting world: we don’t even have proper bottoms, just a hole in the lower back. But this lifter’s a chunky footballer, chunkier than even Talbot, and three inches taller. (He’s only here because his footy coach told him to swim in his off-season for discipline. He’s not good enough to train anywhere near the top lane, and I’m sure I noticed his boxy hull floundering among twelve-year-olds in my last stint in the shame lanes.)

At long last, Ruthy’s headed back, tucking her shirt into her flares as if appearances matter. She stops for a brief word with ‘Donny’, stays another moment to look the lifter up and down like he’s some agricultural exhibit, and strolls over to tell us what’s next.

When we finish our set, the lifter’s nowhere in sight: not in the pool, and nowhere near Talbot, who’s scribbling on a notebook resting on his thigh. But there he is now — in his car on the other side of the louvre-bricks, where he drops the clutch to smoke all the way down the street, never to lift again.

Another day, another two sessions — and this afternoon, Talbot’s complaining that we might as well give our routine set of training 50s the big flick from now on. They’re too easy; we get too much rest. Doing 50s leaving every 40 seconds is apparently ‘a hell of a waste of time’.

We don’t refer to our training as laps. Lap swimmers call their laps laps because they lap non-stop up and back for half an hour. No, we do 50s, or 100s, or 200s, or 400s, or 800s, or 1600s, or 3200s, and without ever saying the ‘metres’ afterwards, because it’s understood that it is metres and not ants, galaxies, or cashews. And all those saved metric syllables will obviously go into some energy store to make life fractionally easier or more productive somewhere down the track. Even more economically, from 200 up we don’t even say the ‘hundred’. They’re just 2s, 4s, 8s, etc. If we have to do six 800s, for example, it’s ‘six eights’. Neither do we say ‘seconds’ or ‘minutes’ to describe the push-off interval. So it’s never so-many 50 metres leaving on 40 seconds, just 50s on 40. Likewise, it’s 2s on 2,30, 4s on 5, 8s on 10. If syllables were an endangered species, we’d be up for a team knighthood.

These are all race distances, of course, these noun-denuded and syllable-shaved 50s, 100s, 200s, doubling with each ascending distance (except for the 1600, of course, which was cut to 1500 for some arcane historical reason to do with the difference between metre and yard pools). When Talbot orders us to do any of these distances in training, it’s at a slower pace than races because we repeat them many times over, not just once. The greatest number of repeats, of course, belongs to the shortest distance, the 50s. We usually do sixty of these, though we’ve been known to do as many as a hundred — always pushing off every 40 seconds on the clock.

But it’s this 40 interval that’s begun to fiercely exercise Talbot today, because almost everyone in our top lane will average 33 seconds, giving us a whopping seven seconds’ rest. And because we depart five seconds apart, this 33 seconds gets you to the wall two seconds before the swimmer ahead leaves; and then the swimmer behind you strokes in two seconds before you go, leaving you only one second alone at the wall. In that brief overlap with each, you might get a few words out. Not a sentence, mind you, let alone a proper conversation, but the odd snatched phrase and a grunt for okay or really? If there was something of riveting importance you had to tell someone, say, Hal, who’s always at the very end of the line — maybe something about a girl — you might use this wall overlap to quickly tell the swimmer behind you, ‘Ask Hal what her name is, pass it on.’ So it’ll be sent down from swimmer to swimmer, and twenty or so 50s later, you’ll have your reply back up the chain from Hal saying ‘Huh?’ or whatever response he’s given.

But tiny embers of conversation kept alive by heavy breathing aren’t Talbot’s main concern about these 50s. It’s only the disproportionate rest. He thinks the whole idea of ‘interval training’ (where you break up really long distances into really small units for ‘an anaerobic threshold effect’ — but that’s another story) is effective only when you’re getting five seconds’ rest or less. So seven’s obviously way too much — a ‘namby-pamby holiday’, as he calls it.

So today he has a bright idea. He’s going to fix things. Apparently we’re to have a go at leaving on the 35 seconds instead of 40. It has to be this jump of exactly five seconds because the clock is marked in five-second numerical indices. You can’t just leave on, say, every 38 seconds (though this two-second interval reduction would be the most logical and humane adjustment) because the 38 won’t ‘cycle’ on the fives or zeros required to follow the clock.

It’s not too hard to grasp what a challenge this is going to be, if only because all those 33s were made possible only because of that huge rest. Therefore, if we’ll be getting less than seven seconds’ rest — in this case, a whopping five seconds less — it’s more than a fair bet that we won’t maintain our 33s for long. It would be no exaggeration at all to suggest that very soon after we start, our speed will rapidly fall off to two seconds slower, and two seconds slower will be 35, meaning we’ll have no rest at all. Then meaning we won’t actually be doing 50s, but a continuous swim. And if we know there’ll be no rest at the wall, why wouldn’t we tumble and keep going? Which is precisely what happens in our longer distances — say 400s — where we actually do repeat continuous 35-second laps with tumbles and no rest, though nobody pretends that those 400s are 50s leaving on the 35 because they are 400s. In other words, Talbot’s gone crazy.

A short while later, if Talbot had longer hair, he’d have pulled it all out by now, because our first attempt at doing these wildly optimistic 50s on the 35 lasts barely three minutes. Windeatt led off. He’ll always lead for Talbot. The first 50 went well. Very well. Everyone in 31 seconds: four seconds’ rest — enough time to think but not say, ‘Great start, Brad’ (or Grub, or Jim, or Rick, or Greg, or Mike). The next one in 32 — enough break to check the clock, note the time, savour three breaths, and go. Then 33 — the old standard — but only enough rest to touch the wall, lean back, and set yourself up to go. Then bingo — 35, and we started missing the interval. Half a second over, then one over, two, and so on, and Talbot was dancing about at the far end under the clock like some wild buzz-cut, mohair-clad leprechaun ranting, ‘Stop. Stop. Come back, stop.’

Now peace is restored and we’re to have another go, because Talbot’s a believer in mental preparation, and suspects we weren’t fully focused for the first attempt. It could be that simple. Our failure could have been ‘all in the mind’ because the mind’s such a powerful thing when you’re up there calling the shots and not doing the actual failing. We have to believe we can do it this time because nobody achieves anything without believing it first, and we’re all okay with this. ‘Okay,’ ‘Righto,’ ‘Sure,’ ‘Yep,’ ‘Fine’, and no dissenters. We put on a show that we’re in the mood this time when we mimic strapping ourselves in and buckling up for a white-knuckle seat on the believers’ express, and here goes. But it’s exactly the same train wreck all over again, and now Talbot’s become very dark — telling us that the twenty minutes of our lives we’ve wasted on our hopeless attempts at his new interval has just cost us each a state championship. It’s that simple.

Of course, there are other things Talbot could have done if he thought swimming 33 seconds on the 40 wasn’t challenging enough. He could simply have insisted that we swim 32 instead. One second faster doesn’t sound much, but when you think it’s a second faster than the old 33s that even Windeatt thought had its challenges, well, it’s a bit like instantly improving your best race time by one second for every lap. And nobody ever does that. (In fact, it’s common knowledge that for every second of reduction, there’s an algebraic fatigue penalty — meaning you need far more than that additional second’s rest to compensate. Taken to its logical extreme, the penalty for doing, say, seven seconds faster — in other words, your best 50 time of 25 seconds — would be to have to lie down on the side of the pool gasping for air and not being able to swim another stroke for ten minutes.)

Talbot could even enforce this new 32 standard with stiff sanctions for anyone randomly caught going slower, but this would involve someone — namely me — suggesting it to him in the first place. Also, if he accepted it, there would need to be monitoring, and maybe even informing on each other, and then someone might dispute their time and there’d have to be another poolside poking or someone storming out or quitting for good. So for the rest of the afternoon it’s back to doing 100s on 1,15, which is about the closest you can get to doing 50s on the 35, because it’s double 37.5 to do both 50s. And 1,15 cycles very simply on the clock, like points on the compass: depart the first on the 0 for north; leave for the second on the 15 for east; the 30 for south; 45 for west; and so on, repeating and repeating the quadrant. And because we rarely have much more than five seconds’ rest in these, Talbot’s almost happy.