HEARTS

On Monday I discover Talbot’s found a new training billet for Bobo and me to stay with — together this time — and barely a minute’s stroll to Hurstville pool. We’re guests of the Halls in St Georges Parade. The squad returns from Auburn next week for winter, so the timing couldn’t be better with Munich just four months off and Queensland training camp in three months. At long last, we’re in the home straight!

Because her only child, Kevin, once trained under Talbot, Mrs Hall says she knows all about swimmers, and Talbot, hinting nothing could surprise her. Bobo and I are given parallel adjacent beds in Kevin’s old front room, now that he’s baching with mates around the corner. I’d heard the word matriarch but, until I met this Mrs Hall, could never picture one. Tall and brassy, she’d have ordered the family car in a floral print if they were available. She’s jolly, rules the roost, and ploughs along with a slight tilt because downhill’s her preferred speed. The control tower for all that order and sprightliness is a tightly braided bun perched on top of her head. Her husband’s fine-boned and barely half of her, but their three halves seem one big pin-up for marital contentment.

In my third training session back, Talbot accuses me of having ‘done something to my backstroke’ while away. I don’t let on about my new six-beat kick, which has me feeling stronger and more balanced with each swim, and reply cannily, ‘Haven’t changed a thing — just tried not to do anything wrong.’

‘I’m not saying there’s something wrong,’ he insists. ‘In fact, whatever you’ve done looks far more even, more powerful.’ And on that upbeat note, I’m sorely tempted to admit I really did tamper with my backstroke kick, but can smell an old rat and stick to my guns because he set me up like this once before and I paid for it, big time! (He was timing 25-metre walk-back sprints in our warm-up for this year’s Nationals when he angrily demanded to know if I was going my fastest. Of course, only an imbecile goes flat out in a warm-up, even in short sprints, because you want to save it for your race. But just to get him off my back, I said I was going my absolute hardest. Then he completely lost it in front of everyone and barked I should never, ever go flat out in a warm-up.) And this is why I’m not letting on about my backstroke kick today, especially if he can’t even tell the difference between a six-beat and a unilateral crossover.

Within a week, Bobo’s warmed to Mrs Hall’s earthiness. Out comes his working-class rhyming slang (despite a middle-class childhood) and his jerky, sneering over-familiarity, his ‘sweets’, ‘spewins’, and ‘filthies’. Kevin and his girlfriend sometimes drop in to watch TV, as they have again tonight, when we’re all settled in to watch Number 96; after Mrs Hall kills the lights, only popcorn could make it more like a cinema. In the first ad break, she demands to know which character Bobo and I prefer, out of the ludicrously pouting Bev and a tamer yet no less alluring brunette neighbour. ‘Abigail, of course,’ Bobo scoffs as if slurred by the question. When I plump for the other lady, Bobo and Kevin break out in cackles before Mrs Hall leaps to my defence: ‘I can see Brad likes the mature, subtle ones.’ And with her endorsement, the snorting tops the Richter scale, with even Mr Hall joining in.

At a loose end on our second Saturday at the Halls’, and with no training on Sundays, Bobo and I take the train to his parents’ place for the rest of the weekend. Near the Hurstville ticket office, a feisty old guy in a battered pinstripe suit steps into our path. Ruddy, short, likely with a nickname of Nugget from his footy days, he seems a booze ’n’ snooze regular from the local park. He’s got a slight stoop today, but when a growl hits the air with a shocking resonance, it hints he’s not much past fifty. ‘Let’s have a good fucken squiz at youse two young turks,’ he cranks, with a big show of studying our eyes for character, starting with me. ‘Yeah, well you …’ he begins, a metho reek almost flensing my face. ‘Sorry to have to fucken say this, but straight-up I see you’re weak as piss.’ Turning to Bobo and tapping the point of his shoulder so hard he almost spins — ‘But this cunt over here, now you’ve got something inside. You’ve got it!’

We snigger nervously and step around him. ‘Dumb prick,’ Bobo hisses as our assessor calls after us. When our train banks on a breathtaking escarpment thirty minutes later, I’m still thinking about the old tosser, astonished someone smelling of moss and cat piss can’t see he’s forfeited all right to judgement. Ticked off, too, that he’d found Bobo the more worthy.

When we start at Blakehurst High on Monday, I feel as much on the outer as at Hardwick and Homebush; all I can do to stick it out is number the days to the Olympics. Neither of us is sure which class to attend, so we check at the principal’s office. When the secretary finally notices us and hauls a hefty timetable to the reception desk, Bobo seems to recognise the young woman teacher hurrying from the staffroom. ‘I’m pretty sure we’re with that piece,’ he calls to no one in particular, as we dive off in pursuit before the secretary can verify Bobo’s intel.

At dinner a fortnight later, Mrs Hall asks how I’m doing at our new school. To fob her off, I quip that my maths is still hopeless, and I’m glad when she leaves it at that. But the following Monday night, I find a maths tutor sitting at a desk beside me, a tall redheaded uni student in a jaffa V-neck jumper and fetching ink-blue corduroy slacks. But whenever the equations I’m meant to be following tumble from her mouth, they’re lost in the soft sounds and breath carrying them, and I can’t tell a number from a noun. I’m numerate enough, however, by our next weekly rendezvous, not to be mistaken about the scores of red biro hearts she’s suddenly cramming the margins with. Of course, hearts are a sign of amore. Or am I drawing an impossibly long cupid’s bow when she’s only doodling in boredom? (Could she really be keen on such a maths clod?) Let’s see if she’s still drawing these hearts next week, I tell myself, seeing her to the door.

Sundays are normally our sleep-in, but Bobo’s picked up a five a.m. penalty session to face Talbot alone. By the time our room’s in full sunlight, I’m stirring through crazy dreams of faces and eyes catching fire. When my hand breaches a dream and explores my real eyes to find them damp and slimy, I leap up to discover Dencorub smeared on my face and pillow, eyes suddenly searing with pain: Bobo must have unloaded an entire tube on my pillow when he left, because of the ribbing I gave him last night about losing his sleep-in. Virtually blinded, I lurch through the house to wash my eyes in the bathroom, but collect a chair on my way and hit the floorboards. Mrs Hall, who’s been camped with her usual early cuppa in the kitchen, scurries in and helps me to the nearest tap. Soon we’re seeing a doctor, or at least she is, and he writes me a prescription for a rinse and an ointment. It takes all morning for 20/20 vision to return.

The next day Talbot announces he’s separating Bobo and me. But I’m only moving next door to the Powers’, who, according to Talbot, also had kids who trained with him. When Mrs Hall finds out, she’s crestfallen. Yet oddly her loudest complaint is that I won’t be able to continue my maths tutoring. (It’s a concern of mine too, but not for her reasons. Or is it?) When she unexpectedly lets on that she’d been paying the tutor from her own pocket, I’m struck both by her generosity and by her tactlessness in letting on. I’m also curious about my own blindness to the issue of fees. Had I thought the girl was doing it for nothing? I don’t know. Or that Talbot was forking out? Not on your life. It’s a pretty safe guess my tutor won’t be following me to the Powers’.

After the Dencorub incident, Bobo’s on his last caution from Talbot. (He was kicked off last year’s state team for squirting Dencorub through a girl’s swim bag.) I suspect he’s also been warned off me, because he keeps a low neighbourhood profile for a week; I now see him ‘only’ at school and training. But his love of cartoon-grade pranks soon kicks back in with a vengeance when he makes a foray into Powers territory. I’m on my new hosts’ outside toilet when the door’s pushed open and the last thing I see as Bobo’s head pulls away is a bucket of water sloshing over me. I can’t get up to close the door because I’m tailing, and can hear his cackle trail into the safe distance anyway. But a minute later when I’m wiping, there’s another bucketful. This time I hear his retreating hyena hysterics accompanied by creaks of the old paling fence being scaled, so I’m certain there’ll be no third drenching.

I usually don’t mind playing hapless Wile E. Coyote to Bobo’s Road Runner; I’d be a hypocrite to be too precious. I went too far myself at last year’s Nationals in Hobart, totally blind to any outcome but the fun of the prank itself. Five interstate swimmers were setting up for another game of Flushin’ Roulette, where someone relieves himself into one of their half-dozen or so stubbies for blindfolded players to take their chances. But the moment the blindfolds went on in Hobart, they were called to an urgent team meeting and shot through, telling me over their shoulders to put the stubbies in the fridge. ‘We won’t be long,’ was the garbled call. As I stood at the fridge door admiring my circular revolver-homage arrangement, I pondered the male urge to play risky games. I’d heard it was common for Flushin’ Roulette players to swallow with a poker face if they received the loaded stubby, intent on taking at least one other player with them and knowing they’d be washing the taste down with the next stubby. Likewise the next player, and the next, meaning a game might end with everyone swallowing a bit more than their pride — but with no losers. By the time I’d left, the chance of washing the taste down with an unadulterated beer was zero, and I wondered how all those poker faces would look by the third turn.

Earlier that day during my nap, someone had turned my electric blanket up to max. Waking in that hot prickly swamp, I leaped across the room in fear of electrocution. I’d also been getting to know a tall, pale, highborn Carlile girl whose angelic half-smile had nothing to do with you. As we two smooched on her bed that evening, I overheard a familiar voice lecturing on kissing technique from another bed. It was Talkback, stuck with another dud kisser! But her tone was more sympathetic this time, because recent nasal surgery had evidently given her shock-haired Carlile boyfriend trouble synchronising smooching and snorting. And if all this wasn’t enough, I was on red alert the whole time in Hobart, avoiding a loudmouth Laurie Lawrence girl who could silence a room by bellowing, ‘Get real!’ at anyone in need of rescuing from anonymity, pretence, or poor fashion taste.

When the Blakehurst first-period bell sounds on Monday, I can’t find my bag. I know where I left it, so someone’s mistakenly picked it up or Bobo’s playing a joke. As I scan the corridor, Bobo erupts in euphoric gasps the moment we make eye contact. ‘Where is it?’ I ask hotly, the passageway deserted and classroom doors closing. ‘We’re already meant to be in class,’ I bark at him, ‘so fucken tell me!’ But my exasperation’s fuel to the fire, his guffaws increasingly tipped with mockery as he writhes against the rail, barely hanging on. I take three rigid steps and hook him in the jaw. In the movies he’d either crumple to the floor or go tumbling backwards, but neither happens. Instead, he rocks with a hideous wobble before dropping on one knee to spit shards of tooth enamel and amalgam crumbs into a cupped hand before looking up in disbelief. I brace for retaliation, expecting him to fly at me, but he straightens up and storms along the balcony to gesture furiously to a garden one floor below, where my bag sits in a crater of bark chip.

After school when I phone his dad and offer to pay for dental work, he laughs it off, his shit-happens laugh. I’m relieved Bobo’s dad’s not angry with me, but for the rest of the day I feel terrible about doing my cruet with Bobo: there’s no pride winning a fight with someone who won’t hit back. And it wasn’t cowardice — he was just too shocked. I could see in his eyes that he hadn’t a clue I’d be so upset. The angrier I’d become, the funnier it was for him. I get it now, because it was hilarious to see me fretting like a five-year-old about being late for class. And now I’m sure I could never hit anyone again.

After dinner, I can’t help remembering the first story I’d ever heard about Bobo, from Hal, the occasional Ming boarder who’d grown up with him. They were wrestling on the beach at a surf carnival in their early teens when Hal lost it and took a swipe at Bobo, glancing his cheek. Hal wasn’t even sure he’d connected, but when Bobo went limp and couldn’t be shaken or shouted back to consciousness, he ran off for help in panic. Barely a minute later when Hal returned with a first-aid officer, the body was gone. Bobo, no doubt sniggering maniacally from a hidden vantage point, had made a complete fool of his friend. In another beach grapple, Bobo managed to remove Hal’s tracksuit top before running the entire beach length waving the trophy triumphantly above his head. For all his crazy antics, Bobo’s a card-carrying pacifist.