by John Dale
By now the breeze felt overly intimate on his exposed skin. His whole body seemed disconcertingly sensitive and electrified and he was light-headed from the female smell of her olive skin and her satiny swimsuit, giddy with his intimate proximity to a semi-naked, mature woman on a summer’s day.
Dulcie took up his right wrist again, held it steady, and swept the razor up his forearm to his elbow, then along the triceps to the shoulder. She paused there and put her free hand on his right shoulder and clasped it for a few seconds, and closed her eyes as if considering its muscles and tendons, reflecting on the hard exercise that had gone into its formation: the hundreds of miles it had swum.
Time stopped. Then she shaved the other arm, and for a moment she closed her eyes and squeezed this shoulder too.
“All done, Johnny Weissmuller.” She dropped the razor in the pot of water and ran both hands over his chest. “Smooth as a baby’s bottom.”
* * *
When her second husband and Judy’s stepfather, Chief Petty Officer Eric Kruger, had shipped out for nine months’ duty on the destroyer HMAS Warramunga, a month before, Dulcie had moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. The Australian navy, the Warramunga, and, by extension, CPO Kruger, were assisting the British navy in maintaining the security of the Federation of Malaya against Communist insurgents.
The arrangement suited both households. Dulcie gained company while Eric was away, and the young couple benefited from her help around the house, and especially from her assistance with Brian’s Olympic preparation.
Soon after their marriage, Brian and Judy were delighted
to find and rent the terrace house above Luna Park. A two-bedroom, nineteenth-century workman’s cottage, its sandstone walls and narrow back garden surrounded by oleanders and frangipanis, it suited the newlyweds’ romantic mood. Importantly, it was a mere hundred yards from Don Wilmott’s coaching headquarters at the North Sydney Olympic Pool, and only two train stations across the harbor from Judy’s nightshift copytaker job at the Daily Telegraph.
Brian, meanwhile, worked as a phys ed teacher at North Sydney Boys High, a welcome job for an amateur athlete. The pay wasn’t great, but the school was just a mile from their house, easy jogging distance, he had use of the gym, and the hours suited his early-morning and afternoon training sessions.
What he most welcomed about his mother-in-law’s presence was her cooking. His fuel requirements were huge; five miles twice a day in the pool, plus his weight training, burned up mountains of protein, carbohydrates, and calories. And frankly, Dulcie was a better cook than his twenty-one-year-old wife.
In any case, Judy’s new nighttime job absented her at dinnertime during the week, so Dulcie’s cooking had become crucial. Only on weekends did Brian and Judy get to eat meals together. Or, for that matter, retire to bed at the same time.
Their clashing personal schedules were the only impediment to marriage harmony. While Brian rose at four thirty for his five a.m. laps, and usually fell asleep by eight thirty at night, Judy’s shift at the Telegraph ran from four p.m. to midnight, the newspaper’s busiest hours. When Brian arrived home from school she was going to work, and he had to immediately leave for the pool. And after catching the last night train home from Town Hall station, Judy invariably fell exhausted into bed around one a.m.—her head ringing with domestic crimes and gang stabbings and gambling-den raids.
From Monday to Friday, Dulcie prepared Brian’s evening meal. After dinner, in deference to her excellent cooking, her role as Judy’s mother, and her status as an elder relative (she was forty-four), he’d chat politely with her over a cup of cocoa. Then, as his eyelids began to droop, he’d stretch his weary limbs, say good night, climb the stairs, and hit the sack.
* * *
On Sunday mornings, Judy hurried home from Mass so the young couple could make up for their love drought during the week. As Sunday was his only break from a four thirty rising, Brian was excused from church, allowed to linger in bed, catch up on sleep, and wake refreshed for her return to bed at eleven.
On this particular rest day when she returned home from church, Judy was puzzled to find Brian not in bed as usual but sitting in his bathrobe in the backyard, drinking coffe and reading the Sunday Telegraph. Recalling the shaving-down conversation of the night before, she peeled back his bathrobe to inspect the transformation. His hairless chest looked strangely pale and vulnerable, and his back was striated with scratches.
Shamefaced, he said, “My first try at shaving myself.”
“Idiot. I would’ve done that for you.” She stroked his wounded shoulder blades. “Poor baby.”
In the kitchen, her mother was making a din with pots and crockery, noisily preparing food and impatiently switching radio stations back and forth: from a haranguing evangelist on the Worldwide Church of God to a country-and-western couple yodeling competitively. The radio was hopeless on Sunday mornings.
“What’s up with her?” Judy murmured. She picked a pink frangipani blossom and put it behind her ear. “Back to bed, smooth fish,” she whispered.
As he trudged upstairs behind his frisky wife, she continued to scold him. “Fancy trying to shave your own back. You don’t grow any hair there, thank goodness.”
* * *
It wasn’t only the lazy mornings that Brian relished on Sundays. At around one thirty, the couple would rise languidly, put on their swimsuits, and head to Bondi Beach. Dulcie sometimes joined them, and this particular afternoon she was keen to do so.
After his hundreds of pool laps during the week, it was a luxury for Brian to swim purely for pleasure, to catch waves, enjoy the ocean. Today the salt water made his shaved limbs tingle and his back sting in an unfamiliar, sensual way.
Indeed, after a surf, a milkshake, a meat pie, and a hamburger, sunbaking on the sand with Judy and Dulcie stretched out on either side of him, Brian felt sated, pampered. Like a sultan. Judy’s hand rested openly on his newly sensitive left thigh. And as Dulcie turned on her back and wriggled and adjusted her swimsuit to expose a fraction more chest to the sun, her knee or foot kept brushing his right calf.
The sea, the warm rays, and the tasty takeaways were such great revivers of a top young athlete’s body and spirits that the sultan was soon speculating on the week ahead, suddenly a bewilderingly different and arousing week, beginning with this evening when he and this slender blond girl presently stroking his left leg would be in bed again.
When this did occur several hours later, however, a loud knock on the bedroom door interrupted them. Judy groaned. How long had Dulcie been standing there, within earshot?
“What’s the matter, Mother?” Judy called out. “We were fast asleep!” Clearly false, but difficult for an eavesdropper to contradict.
“I’ve brought you some cocoa.”
“We don’t need cocoa!”
“Brian always has a cup of cocoa at this time. It’s part of his training diet.”
“God! Leave the cups outside the door then.”
“I can’t. I’ll spill them.”
Brian’s back was smarting. He was suddenly exhausted.
Judy rose, strode naked across the room, and opened the door. The women faced each other. Neither was smiling.
Judy took the cups of cocoa. “Thank you,” she muttered.
“Put something on,” her mother said.
Judy shut the door on her and returned to bed. Brian’s eyelids were drooping as the couple lay waiting for Dulcie’s footsteps to go downstairs. In the long silence, Judy thought she could hear her mother breathing outside the door. Eventually the stairs creaked and shortly afterward plates and cutlery were clattering and cupboard doors were banging in the kitchen.
“Where were we?” Judy whispered to Brian. He was nearly asleep but he rallied valiantly to the cause.
* * *
On Monday afternoon, when Don Wilmott put his 1,500-meter specialist through a time trial, the newly shaved-down Brian Tasker swam the distance 3.5 seconds slower than in his na
tural hirsute state the month before.
“Heavy weekend, boyo?” Don asked, shaking his head. “What happened to your back?”
Brian shrugged. “Shaving-down,” he said.
For punishment, Don made him swim an extra three miles, made up of ten 400-meter swims within an hour, with an average time of four minutes and forty-five seconds, representing about 90 percent effort.
* * *
As if the shaving-down and its sexual aftermath had never happened, the week passed as it had before Dulcie’s Sundaymorning razor work.
There was no real reason for Brian to shave down the following Sunday; the point was to shave just before a big race, so your body felt the difference—the physical transformation—and reacted accordingly. But as soon as Judy left for church, Brian was in the back garden with the shaving cream and razor.
Under low humid clouds the day headed sullenly toward a thunderstorm. Cicadas buzzed a monotone refrain in the trees and a mirage already juddered across the water. Brian watched the tiny Lavender Bay ferry steaming through the harbor: the illusion was of two mysteriously joined boats, the regular ferry and, over it, another ferry that churned boldly through the air, above the water’s surface. For some reason Brian thought of his nemesis, the up-and-coming young harbor swimmer Murray Rose.
Soon Dulcie joined him. She’d changed into her blue satiny swimsuit and heat seemed to radiate off her flesh. With a frown, she examined him. Only a shadowy stubble showed on his limbs and chest but she lathered his body and shaved him anyway.
Although the westerly breeze from the harbor was warm and humid and carried smoke from a far-off bushfire in the Blue Mountains, Brian shivered. The air was pungent with the smell of burning eucalyptus and the drone of the cicadas was almost deafening. As the two conjoined Lavender Bay ferries approached Circular Quay, they slowed, then docked, and their images merged back into one small boat.
“I need to be thorough,” Dulcie said. When she finished, she ran her fingertips slowly over his body. Neither of them had spoken until that moment.
As she drew him into the house and upstairs, he asked, “Have you trimmed your fingernails?”
Her glistening eyes aroused and slightly unnerved him. She didn’t answer.
* * *
There was an abrupt change in Brian’s weekday routine. Now when he got home from his afternoon pool laps, still damp-headed and smelling of chlorine, Dulcie was waiting by the door to take him directly upstairs to her bed. Afterward, she served him his customary big dinner and bedtime cocoa.
Once only, starving after training, Brian suggested dinner before bed, but then fell deeply asleep the instant they’d finished having sex. It was difficult for Dulcie to wake him, drag his heavy body out of her bed, across the landing, and into his own.
“Come on, Ross!” she’d urged him. It was nearly midnight and she was beginning to panic. “Christ, Ross, wake up!”
“Ross?” Brian had mumbled sleepily. Ross Gooch had been Dulcie’s first husband. A front-rower for Randwick Rugby Club, and Judy’s father, big Ross had died of a heart attack at thirty-one.
As for Sundays, Judy was slightly mystified that Brian now waited in the shade of the frangipanis and oleanders for her return from church. And that he’d always shaved himself again—even attempted to shave his back. They’d head upstairs of course, but Brian seemed wearier these days.
“Poor boy, has Don increased your training load?” she asked one Sunday.
He shrugged. “We’ve had to step it up. The Games are getting closer.”
Her heart went out to him: her champion. Usually he thrived on tough training, and he’d worked so hard for this. Ever since she was sixteen and he was eighteen, high school sweethearts, he’d had this grand ambition of the Olympic Games. As the Games drew closer it was understandable that he was feeling stressed.
He’d even lost interest in their Sunday-morning pillow talk. After they’d celebrated her return from Mass—although not as playfully and energetically as they used to—Brian just wanted to go back to sleep, whereas in the past they’d lie there chatting about the past week’s newspaper gossip.
As a Telegraph copytaker, she was well up on the local news. When deadlines drew closer, reporters out on the road would phone in their stories to the copytakers. Sitting there with her headphones, or typing up the paragraphs they dictated from the nearest public phone, she’d get the latest news from the law courts, police beats, and crime scenes even before the editors did.
A recent story she’d wanted to cheerily discuss with Brian was a case of thallium poisoning on the North Shore. On discovering her husband Keith’s extramarital affairs, Thelma Teasdale, in the Telegraph’s words “a respectable Roseville housewife and a regular finalist in the Royal Easter Show’s cake-baking competition,” had put rat poison in his breakfast cup of tea.
As the paper’s science reporter, Warren Baxter, a lugubrious fellow known in the newsroom as the “Undertaker,” wrote in a rider to the Teasdale murder trial, “Known to the police as ‘inheritance powder,’ ‘wives’ revenge,’ and ‘the poisoner’s poison,’ one gram of odorless and tasteless Thallium sulfate in cakes or scones, or mixed in hot drinks, can slowly and subtly kill an unsuspecting victim.”
The Undertaker added helpfully: “Thall-Rat, the brand favored by Thelma Teasdale for poisoning her husband, is freely sold in hardware stores nationwide.”
Thelma Teasdale’s crime was only discovered because her husband’s brother Raymond was a chemist. Keith’s dizziness, stomach pain, and nausea were at first put down to Christmas and New Year’s overindulgence. But when followed a few days later by pains in the hands and feet, agonizing leg cramps, and complete hair loss, Raymond looked up his old pharmacology textbooks. When Keith died at only forty-two, Raymond declined Thelma’s offer of tea and cake at his brother’s wake and went to the police.
It was the sort of juicy crime news Brian usually enjoyed. But he showed no interest in the Thelma Teasdale story so Judy didn’t pursue it.
However, when she arrived home from her next shift, she called his attention to another news story, waking him with tearful ferocity at one o’clock. Bursting into the bedroom, she smacked a first-edition Telegraph on the bed and pushed the offending page, smelling of fresh ink and still warm from the presses, into his sleepy face.
With the copytakers’ room envious of Judy’s marriage to a handsome swimming champion, an older unmarried colleague, Cynthia Jackson, had hastened to point out the story to her. “Look at these bitches cuddling up to your hubby!” Cynthia said, frowning sympathetically. “He doesn’t look too upset about it, though.”
The photograph and accompanying caption in the sports pages showed three grinning female swimmers, slippery as seals in their wet racing costumes, stroking Brian’s muscular bare chest and shoulders. Brian was flexing his right bicep and beaming back at them.
* * *
Super-smooth Olympic 1,500-meter hopeful Brian Tasker proves popular with the girls as he displays his new shaved-down physique at North Sydney Olympic Pool.
Coach Don Wilmott is recommending this innovative trend from America for his entire male swim squad. “For extra speed, even a fraction of a second, my boys will be shaving down before big events,” Wilmott says. And distance specialist Tasker looks enthusiastic. “I’ll try anything to give me an edge,” he says.
The girls (from left)—backstroker Rowena Flynn, 18; breaststroker Maxine Vanderhaag, 19; and up-and-coming freestyler Carole Sinnott, 17—certainly endorse Brian’s sleek new look!
Dazed and defensive, Brian sat up in bed. “It was a posed picture, a setup by the photographer,” he protested. But his heart was racing. He didn’t recognize Judy’s fierce tortured face, the bared teeth and projectile tears. “Just a bit of fun. Some girls in the squad fooling about for the camera.”
“You’re a married man,” she sobbed. “It’s awful and too intimate. And I suppose you’re sleeping with them?”
It was his turn to
be indignant. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
She ran out of the room, crying, “I never want to see this disgusting sort of thing again,” and slept on the couch downstairs.
* * *
When Brian returned from his early-morning training at seven, Judy was sitting with Dulcie at the kitchen table with the offending sports page in front of them. Both women were smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, and they fell silent and glowered at him as he entered.
“You’re up early, love,” he ventured to Judy. He was exhausted from exercise, sleeplessness, and emotion. “What about your sleep?”
She drew on her cigarette, said nothing, and stared at him with tragic possum eyes.
“Popular with the girls,” Dulcie quoted. She gave the newspaper a disdainful backhand slap. “Surely you can’t expect your poor wife to be able to sleep after that?” Her eyes were glistening.
* * *
That afternoon at training, the swim squad passed around the paper, laughing and teasing each other over smooth Brian and his “fans,” and the girls all complaining, ridiculously, that they looked fat in the photo. Shortly after, Brian’s next 1,500-meter time trial did not go well. He’d lost another 6.08 seconds.
Don frowned and looked anxious. “What’s the matter, son?” he wanted to know. “You look buggered. Everything alright at home?”
“Sure.”
“Well, take ten minutes to rest, you bloody slowcoach, then I want another 800 at 90 percent effort.” And Don stamped off.
Dusk was falling and dozens of nesting swallows flitted about the pool’s cornices and skimmed over the water’s surface. On one side of the pool, commuter trains rumbled home over the Harbour Bridge; on the other, the eyes, teeth, and lips of Old King Cole, the giant grinning face at Luna Park’s entrance, suddenly lit up, scaring the swallows perched on King Cole’s eyelashes. Little ferries steamed back and forth across Lavender Bay.