It’s 4.32 p.m. and the crowd has swelled with all the parents who’ve started to arrive. There are two more relays to go, and the house scoreboard looks like this:
Ned Kelly House: 85
Joe Byrne House: 81
Steve Hart House: 57
It seems close but it’s not. All that’s left are the relays for the Year Nine/Ten boys and the Year Eleven/Twelve girls. We will win the senior one easily—those girls are serious about this pretending-to-not-have-evolved-from-fish-yet business; two of the Year Twelves go to Melbourne regularly to swim in a squad. My year is a bit trickier. My relay teammates Dwayne and Jeff are good, but Marcus’s starts are always bad. I think the Byrne boys could be faster.
Really though, none of what happens in my race matters, because even if we come second or last, we’ll still get five or three points. That, plus the win in the girls seniors, will give us the House Cup.
But I want to beat Shitty.
We’re up near the blocks and Dwayne and Jeff are trying to strategise with me. I pretend to listen. A plan in this race is pointless—you swim a hundred metres as fast as you can, that’s all there is to it.
I feel a flick on my back. I turn around. It’s Shitty. I kind of get why some girls like him. He’s tall, has straight shoulders, dark hair, symmetrical face, all that obvious shit. But he’s deteriorating too—girls will wake up to that soon. The acne on his neck is getting worse, he has small scars and scratches all over on his cheeks and forehead, and his hair is slimy. Or maybe it’s still wet. Either way, he’s in decay.
‘Boner, I want you to know that I’ll never get in the way of what you and Naya have,’ he says, faking sincerity. ‘She really misses her fag friends from back home, so it’s good she’s got you.’ He smirks, slaps his goggles on and starts limbering up.
I swallow my comebacks. My actions will speak louder.
‘Convene on your diving plinths!’ Catling bellows.
‘He means get on the blocks,’ I shout at Marcus, and the other teams follow.
‘Get set…’ Catling secures his red earmuffs and raises his pistol in the air.
Marcus leaps the furthest but lands flat on his stomach in a monumental belly whack. The echo of the slap on the water bounces across the pool like a skimmed stone.
Somehow, Hart are in front by an arm’s length when they flip at the other end, with Byrne next then us last. But Marcus powers home, and we’re neck-and-neck with Hart when Jeff dives in. The kids on the grass are getting to their feet, clapping and yelling and chanting, and it all becomes a big blurry mess of sound.
Jeff does the swim of his life and by the time Dwayne dives in, we’re a whole body in front of Byrne, with Hart now way back in their familiar third place. Dwayne blasts out on his first few strokes and increases our lead even more.
I step up on the starting block and slide my goggles over my eyes. I find Naya in the crowd. She’s standing by the side of the pool with the crew, watching the water. She seems disinterested in it all, which is weird.
Dwayne flips and heads back towards us at the blocks. I’m next. Shitty is sniggering. He clutches his own throat and says, ‘Yours to lose, Lil Boner. I know you’re gonna cough.’
What?
Oh. He means choke.
He’s a moron. Plus, he’s the one who choked at footy two years in a row.
I stare down into the blue in front of me and exhale. The water surface is shivering, turning the straight black lines painted on the bottom fuzzy. Am I really standing centimetres above a tepid blue soup of saliva and piss that has stewed in the sun for three weeks? Am I really about to jump into it?
I can’t.
I can’t dive into this.
I think of Naya in the park. If I kissed a girl, I can swim in a pool. I’m not going to swallow anything. I’ll be fine. I will. Stop thinking about this. You owe Shitty. You owe it to the world to prove how pitiful he is.
Try to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Rhythmic. Relaxed.
The waves below fold into the wall. I hear the splashes from Dwayne’s arms and feet and watch his yellow cap crawl closer.
Actually, I can’t.
I can’t do this.
The wall has come down between my nose and the rest of my respiratory system. There is no guarantee my throat won’t close up forever.
I can’t jump into the murk below. No way.
‘Fucking go already!’ Dwayne spits out waterlogged words beneath me. I look to my friends. Leon is looping his hand over in a dive motion.
‘Jump, wigga!’ Jimmy shouts.
I tumble into the pool, knees then head. My feet scrape the bottom. It would have looked ugly. Real ugly. I shoot straight up and gasp for breath. No water gets in my mouth. I steady myself into the stroke.
I try to find my old flow.
I do find my old flow. Swimming with the water, not through it. Shitty swims like he’s fighting the water. I swim like I am the water.
When I come up for air, I can see Shitty’s stretched fingertips in the next lane. Thanks to my bad dive, he’s made up the time and is behind me by only a body length.
I kick ahead and slice through the water. My feet feel like flippers. Just like they used to.
I come up from the tumble roll into my second lap just as Shitty is getting to the wall. I must have two body lengths on him now.
From underwater I can hear the dull roar of spectators. They’re supporting me, I’m sure of it.
I might actually be enjoying this.
When I roll my head over for air, I see Naya. It’s definitely her but I can’t make out her features clearly. She’s an abstract painting, a gorgeous swirl of brown and yellow.
I can see Trav clearer: he’s walking along the pool in line with me. He’s only doing it because he’s the Kelly House captain, but it still gives me a surge of energy.
I can’t hear Shitty’s hand smacking the water anymore. I look ahead to the starter’s block, where my teammates are giving each other high-fives and fist bumps. I’m twenty-five metres away at most. We’ve got it in the bag.
It’s time for payback. Time to make him feel as pathetic as he’s made me feel.
I initiate my self-devised ‘free-style’ barrel-roll stroke. I did it once in Jimmy’s pool and he said I’d still beat everyone else if I did it in a comp. I’m about to prove him right.
In one languid motion, I push my right arm forward, like a traditional freestyle stroke, and when it hits the water I twist over onto my back, pulling my right arm down across my chest as my left arm curls up into the air and over in a backstroke movement. That returns me to my original position, and I repeat. It would be beautiful to watch, this artful body oscillation, and far more fascinating than the normal bore of arm-up-down-up-down.
My ‘free-style’ isn’t particularly fast, so I can see all the faces along the side of the pool now. I take breaths on the backstroke part of it and catch Jimmy and Tyson laughing and clapping.
But Naya is compacting her face into a little ball of mashed features—and so is Trav. They must be afraid I’ll lose. They don’t need to worry, I’ve got this. I bet Naya’s laughing inside because she has clocked the ingenious wordplay on ‘free-style’—I am choosing my style freely. I’m going to win on a grammatical technicality. A joke stroke.
It will be humiliating for Shitty, but I’m going to be gracious about it. I’ll be the good guy. That’s what Naya wants now, it seems—a humble champion. A boy with some rough edges but sweet in the middle.
The blocks are getting close. After one final ‘freestyle’ roll, I stretch out and touch the pool’s edge a body length in front of Shitty. I did it! I have my goggles off by the time he taps the blocks. I’m grinning huge. I look the bastard in the eyes for the first time all year.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘I don’t cough.’
He blows bubbles into the water. Like a baby. Bubbles are for scared people. He fears me, so he can’t even speak.
‘Carter!’ I look up at Catling’s beetroot face above me. ‘What was that display of dissent? Explain yourself.’
Murray trots up behind him. He’s finally put a shirt on, but his shaggy-carpet legs are still out.
‘It was free-style,’ I say. I’m surprised. Catling fancies himself as a master of the English language, so he should have got it. ‘Look up the definition.’
‘Don’t dare speak to me like that, Carter.’
Catling steps aside and whispers with Murray. I grab onto the starter’s blocks and heave myself out of the pool. I sit down and catch my breath. I feel weirdly exhilarated from the swim. I swam in a pool. I survived. I thrived, even. I won.
Catling and Murray march back over.
‘Carter, we’re imposing disqualification for this,’ Catling says. ‘It’s not in the spirit of the event.’
‘What?’ My voice skips up three octaves into a screech. ‘Look it up. Any competition—nationals, Olympics, you can swim whatever stroke you want in freestyle. I triple checked!’
‘I’m afraid this isn’t the Olympics, mate,’ Murray says. ‘Not even close.’ He turns away and shouts at Mrs Rafeek. ‘Riya, disqualification on Kelly House for that one. No points for them. Ten points to Byrne and five to Hart. Thanks, love.’
Trav tries to contest it with Mrs Rafeek but she won’t hear it. I walk off, my wet feet slapping the scorching concrete, leaving prints that won’t last more than a minute.
You win some, you lose most. You mostly lose.
‘Oy,’ Trav calls, jogging up to me. ‘You’re better than that shit.’
I stare dumbfounded at him. ‘Better’ implies that he thinks I actually carry some value at all. This is a revelation. He shakes his head and drifts off.
I’ve got to keep my eyes on the real prize: Naya. I beat Shitty, I got a better time, that’s all that matters. The right guy is going to get the girl. Surely?
I go back to the crew. I collect a fist bump from Jimmy, take my hat out of my bag and slap it on my damp head.
‘Muthafuckin’ legend!’ Jimmy applauds. ‘One for the ages.’
Leon is grimacing. I can’t look at him.
I scan the poolside for Naya but can’t find her anywhere. I feel hot and cold at the same time. I’m sweating, though, that’s for sure. And my throat is dry. I need a drink.
I walk over to the yellow Esky. A younger student gets to it first and snaps up five bottles of water, scowls at me and runs away. I peer in: there’s only ice left.
‘Unlucky, Lil Boner,’ Kelsey croaks as she walks past. ‘That’s what ya get for taking the piss.’
Her stomach is now bright pink except for a stark white smiley face in the middle of the sunburn. I look at my toes and pace back to the guys. I want to self-combust again.
I can’t watch the last race. I sit down and put my head in my knees. I need to make myself as small as possible. I hear all the shouts and cheers, and when I finally look up there are blue streamers being thrown everywhere.
Kelly House won, but Byrne came second.
‘Wow,’ Tyson says, patting me on the back. ‘Carnival’s never that close, you made Blues win by one point!’
‘Yes, thanks Bones, my team is best now.’ Aaleyah smiles. Is she teasing me? She learns quickly.
The Byrne house captains receive the Banarang House Sports Cup from Murray. They raise the bronze bushranger helmet-shaped trophy and ‘Disco Inferno’ kicks in on the PA. It’s just the chorus over and over, ‘Burn baby burn’, as blue kids clap and dance and chant about being the best.
I reach for my shirt from my bag, but I’m struck in the chest by something mushy and wet and lukewarm. There’s redness dabbed across my stomach. Blood? It doesn’t feel like it. But I may still be in shock.
No.
Tomato sauce.
A chewed-up burnt sausage has landed in my lap. I spring up and shake it off my shorts like it’s a snake.
There’s a blonde boy in a yellow shirt in front of us. He can’t be older than Year Eight at most. He sticks his middle finger up and yells, ‘Fuck you, Lil Boner!’
‘Fuck outta here, little bitch,’ Jimmy barks back. He stands up and the kid bolts away.
‘Don’t worry about these suckers, bruh,’ Jimmy says. ‘We all gotta have haters. If you don’t have haters, you doing something wrong. Know that.’
My phone buzzes in my bag.
Naya: Meet me at the spot
Awesome. This can only be good. She is proud of my victory and left early to get herself prepared. That explains it. She must want a repeat of our park exploits from the other night. Maybe that’s why she pretended it didn’t mean anything, so we can roleplay it out again. Jimmy once told me girls love that kind of thing.
I whip my shirt on and get the hell out of there.
I slalom through the other leaving students on my skateboard, trying to block out every shout of ‘Lil Boner’ and ‘You lost us the sports!’
I don’t look back. I kick-push across the bridge. I don’t pause to coast once.
I chug past the park and catch a flash of yellow in the distance. Naya has her shoes off and is writing in her yellow book.
I hop off my board and dash across the grass.
‘Hey hey,’ I say.
She puts her pen down and claps her book shut.
‘Err, happy beating Shitty?’
‘No, happy that you lost your whole house the swimming carnival.’
‘What? I did the race, like I said I would. I won.’
She didn’t even know what a sports house was a week ago and now she thinks they actually mean something.
‘That wasn’t you doing the race,’ she says. ‘That was you making fun of the race.’
‘Look, school sports are a joke anyway. Everyone knows—’
‘No, they’re not. It’s just you. Everything’s a joke to you.’
There’s a stream of kids walking home thirty-odd metres away. I sense this situation could get a little embarrassing. I step to the left so the tree blocks me from their view.
‘Well, is it?’ She gets to her feet.
‘Is what?’
‘Is life really a joke to you?’
‘Well…’
She throws her head back and kisses her teeth loud and long, on a new frequency that hurts my ears.
‘It is, Naya.’ Maybe she needs to hear the truth. ‘You can try to be good all you want, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get a good life. And then on top of that, we all have to watch some of the shittiest people get all the good luck. Life’s not fair, so why pretend?’
Naya drops her head. ‘Oh my god, you’re hopeless.’
‘Nah. Your hope is hopeless. You’re never going to do enough good to feel satisfied—there’s always going to be someone else to save. It just goes round and round and round forever. Why would you want to live like that?’
I don’t want to hurt her, I want to free her. She shakes her head, starts to speak, stops, bites her lip and shakes her head again.
I guess I am a bad boy.
‘Don’t you think it’s ironic,’ she says calmly, ‘that underneath all your bullshit you actually think your thoughts are unique? You’re telling me the most basic philosophy shit ever. Do you think I don’t know about the hedonic treadmill too?’
I can’t stop my face from screwing up in confusion, but I won’t admit that I don’t know what she’s talking about.
‘You might think you can jump off it, but at least people on it get exercise—at least they’re doing something. You’re just sitting on the couch, moaning at the TV. You’re a grumpy old man and you’re only sixteen.’
This is getting too serious. She’s overreacting. It was just a stupid swimming carnival. There must be something else going on here. Jimmy might be right about her hormonal cycle.
‘So much hatred,’ she continues. Her finger prods at my chest. ‘Hatred of the world, hatred of people who want to make it better, hatred of people who hurt you. You’ve got it all.’ Her voice breaks, like mine does, but sadder. ‘The video Chase sent around of you wasn’t right, and he regrets it and he wants to apologise. But the day after the party he explained to me why he was upset at you. You knew who the owner of that car was, didn’t you? The one we slashed the tyres of.’
He fucking snitched. What a hypocrite.
‘It’s the guy who’s seeing your mom. Isn’t it?’
‘I slashed the tyres,’ I say. ‘You didn’t do it.’
‘I don’t pass blame, I was there too.’ She packs her notebook into her bag and zips it up. ‘I thought you were a good person who just needed a nudge in the right direction. But you’re no different from the people you hate. Maybe you need even more work.’
She’s making some points that sting a little, which suggests they might be valid, but the hysterics are excessive. I’ve never seen her this worked up. I’ve got to know if Jimmy was right, so I ask.
‘Are you on your period?’
Her eyes blaze, her palm is fast, and the slap shifts my cheek to the side.
‘Fuck you!’ She turns away and covers her face with her hands. ‘Shit, sorry. That was wrong.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it’s not okay. I’m sorry.’
She leans down and straps on her shoes and says ‘sorry’ again. ‘I’ve got problems too, but I’m working on them.’
‘This really doesn’t have to be so dramatic, Naya. This isn’t a movie, this isn’t one of the Destiny books.’
‘No, it’s not,’ she says, composed now. ‘Because if it was, you would snap out of your selective amnesia. You’d leave your fantasy land, your Bones-land, where you think you can control everything. It’s a black-and-white world with only good and bad, and it’s boring. And you’re a weak character, Ben. The weakest. Cos you’ve got nothing to fight for and nothing to lose.’
My stomach drops. Who told her my name? I suppose she knew. Like everyone else, just playing along for me. My chest starts to constrict. I need to think about something else. There are green clovers all around her feet. I wonder if there’s one with four leaves in there. I’ve only found one in my life, but Trav used to pull up one every time we went picking on our beach holidays.
She grabs her backpack and slings it onto her shoulders.
‘You’re not the first person whose parents have broken up, Ben. And not even Chase believes it’s your fault. It’s time you got over yourself. You need some delusions that’ll actually do you some good, cos killing time isn’t being alive.’
I’m still locked on those clovers even after her shoes disappear. How long would I have to look to find a four-leafer? Trav would always look longer than me—maybe that’s why he found them. I search the patch for a minute then give up. Like I always do. And there, between the trees where the clover patch ends, is old statue man Nigel Longhorn. He’s staring at me like one of those paintings with the eyes that follow you around the room.
It’s obvious and it’s lame, but maybe it means something.