The Origin of Me

by Bernard Gallate

  Beneath was an 1890s shot of American performer Hilda Groot swimming with a mermaid tail in a tank at Coney Island in New York. Standing outside the tank on either side were two men poised to spear each other with tridents. One had virtually no limbs, with his hands and feet appearing to be attached directly to his torso, making him very short. The other was tall and well built. Their names, according to the caption, were Paulo Esposito and Edwin Stroud.

  Holy smoke! Edwin Stroud: he was the author of My One Redeeming Affliction. I googled him on my phone, but the only relevant results I found directed me back to his biography, which I had at home, and the website for the EXPOSED! exhibition. My curiosity about this Stroud guy was off the charts.

  The bottom photo had been taken a few years earlier than the second at Pyrmont Baths, which were once not far from the museum. Ten scrawny boys in old-fashioned vested swimming costumes are sitting on the edge of the tidal pool, arms around each other’s shoulders. Another boy is sitting apart from them, and not looking at the camera. He is Edwin Stroud at sixteen. His stark isolation caused a lump of sadness to rise in my throat. I glanced back at the photo above, of him with Paulo and the mermaid. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Things get better for you.’

  At home, I went straight to the book and flicked through the pages, looking for images, but there were none. The thrilling coincidence of seeing those two photographs was still buzzing in my head, and I was impatient to discover exactly what Edwin’s affliction was now that I knew he’d become some sort of aquatic performer. I wanted to jump ahead to the point where he makes an appearance in his own biography. But then I recalled Pop Locke telling me that, ‘Once a person connects with their ancestry, they’ll never be alone again.’ Learning about Edwin’s parents would help me understand him better. I would allow the story to unfold as the author had intended.

  There was no time for reading, anyway. I had to write a report about what I’d learnt today at the museum, and Mum, Venn and Nana Locke were meeting us soon in the city for my birthday dinner. The first full family meeting since the separation. With Venn having spilt the beans on Dad’s fateful ‘indiscretion’ and nobody else knowing that I knew, the awkwardness indicator was nudging catastrophic.

  Dad changed his shirt twice before I got him out of the apartment. William Street was warm and sticky, heavy with the smell of an approaching storm. We walked past three campervan rentals, a pawn shop and two prestige car dealerships before stopping at a small alcove, stale with piss. There was a door with no handle, covered with scabby poster remnants advertising festivals and bands I’d never heard of. Stencilled on the manky collage was the word V e n e e R.

  The door opened before we’d knocked, revealing a slender woman in a miniskirt almost as wide as a bandaid, holding a metal clipboard.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Locke. The other members of your party haven’t arrived yet. Perhaps you’d like to wait at the bar?’

  The bar was schmick. The counter and tabletops were printed with vintage Kings Cross images embedded with twinkling LEDs. Checking out the other patrons, I realised we were the uncoolest people in one of the coolest bars in Sydney.

  ‘Name your poison,’ Dad said. ‘It’s your sixteenth birthday and we’re toasting your grandfather tonight.’

  I looked at the drinks list and chose the ale with the best name. ‘Lampwick’s Cigar.’

  ‘Two Lampwick’s IPAs,’ Dad said to the barman, who winked and pulled the beers. We carried them to a corner table.

  ‘To Pop Locke,’ Dad said. We chinked glasses, and the first sip of a frothy cold beer with my Dad was bitterly magic. I shared a story from a couple of years ago, when Pop took me night-fishing on Pittwater. Venn’s boyfriend, Elliot, had taken the tinnie out for a spin the day before without telling him, and left it almost empty of fuel. So Pop and I became stranded in the middle of the bay at midnight and started rowing back. Pop prayed that God would have mercy and rescue us and, sure enough, ten minutes later a fishing boat came by and picked us up. Pop bemoaned the diminishing number of fish in his favourite spot to the skipper, who, upon dropping us off at the wharf, appeased him with an enormous kingfish. Pop used to joke that it was the biggest fish he’d ever caught.

  Tonight the beer started making me feel pretty damn fine about getting melancholic, as Dad began telling a story from when he was my age and helped Pop build an extension on their tiny fibro cottage in Blacktown. Before he could finish, three women appeared on a monitor above the bar. Nana Locke was fanning herself, Mum was checking her make-up and Venn was looking incredulous at the deceptively low-rent façade – the grungy veneer of V e n e e R. I skolled my beer before the miniskirted lady let them in.

  ‘Here’s a sight for sore eyes,’ Dad said, and gave Venn a kiss on the cheek, which she appeared to accept with suprising equanimity. He then went for Mum but she air-kissed him as she would a colleague. Nana Locke had earlier stipulated that the evening was to be a celebration and that nobody was to become maudlin – and she’d dressed accordingly, in a floral smock and trousers. But when we hugged, I sensed the hidden depth of her grief in the tightness of her grip.

  We all sat, and Venn pulled a silver package from a paper shopping bag and gave it to me. ‘Joyeux anniversaire, mon frère. It’s just a book.’ She beamed with anticipation as I tore off the foil.

  ‘Brilliant. The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s on my reading list.’

  ‘That’s why I got it,’ she said. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Of course he likes it,’ Dad said. ‘Tell your sister you like it.’

  ‘I already said brilliant.’

  ‘I’ve written a birthday message on the inside cover, so it can’t be returned.’

  I opened the book to read the message and a green bill fluttered out. ‘A hundgy!’ I sniffed it. ‘Fresh mint – mighty generous of you.’

  ‘Actually, Nana slipped that one in.’

  Nana winked at me. ‘It’s from Pop as well,’ she said. ‘And so is this.’ She handed me a small box wrapped in red paper, which I removed intact. Inside the box was a mint-green jar of Swiss Valley Hair Pomade™. ‘I finally began going through Pop’s belongings,’ Nana said. ‘But I just couldn’t bear to throw anything away. And I know how much you two loved your visits to the barber.’

  ‘Thank you for the best present ever,’ I said and then without warning, hiccupped.

  Mum’s face darkened as she examined, then sniffed, my schooner. ‘You’ve been drinking beer?’

  ‘It would seem that way,’ Dad said.

  ‘Have you seen the ad with the drunk teenager wobbling on a tightrope? One in three hospitalisations of young people results from alcohol consumption.’

  ‘That PSA was one of ours. It’s one in four.’

  ‘I concede,’ Mum said. ‘Wrong yet again.’

  ‘Concession noted and accepted.’ Dad lifted his empty glass. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Don’t be smug, Lance. Buying alcohol for your underage son is the giddy limit of hypocrisy. Especially considering his test drive into oblivion last year. What were you thinking?’

  ‘We were just toasting my father on the anniversary of his passing.’

  ‘Don’t use your father as a scapegoat – it’s undignified. He was a lifelong teetotaller and wouldn’t be at all impressed.’

  Nana Locke caught my eye and gave a little shrug. Well acquainted with Bombay Sapphire and fond of an after-dinner sherry, she stayed out of the quarrel. The miniskirted woman arrived in the nick of time and escorted us by tiny elevator to an elegant underground cavern – soft, with rounded edges and dark-chocolate walls – and seated us in a booth that had a glowing orange teardrop suspended from the ceiling.

  Pre–family crisis, dining had always been a communal affair, with a lot of plate-sharing. Tonight, when Mum refused to try Dad’s entrée, he twirled some squid ink spaghetti on his fork and held it to her mouth. She pushed his hand away, causing three slick worms to drop onto her cream silk top. Dad dipped a napkin in w
ater.

  ‘Don’t even,’ Mum said and went to the ladies, Venn in tow.

  Things settled during the mains until Dad asked if Mum had ‘any interesting little projects on the boil?’

  ‘That’s a teenie bit patronising,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve always spoken like that.’

  ‘The dawn of self-awareness.’ Mum lifted her glass for the waitress to fill. ‘I’m producing a big launch for a prestige client. But it’s all a bit hush-hush right now.’

  Dad touched the side of his nose. ‘Mum’s the word.’ He steered the conversation to Venn, and she revealed that she’d chosen to study naturopathy instead of law. Dad’s brow furrowed in an expression of subdued disappointment. He asked Venn a few loaded questions, which she answered with the deftness and conviction of somebody who’d practised their response.

  Defeated by the rhetoric he’d trained her to use, Dad relented. ‘Whatever you think’s best.’

  Nobody ordered dessert. There was no cake. Nobody even suggested singing ‘Happy Birthday’, which was a massive relief. Nana Locke looked at her wristwatch and brought proceedings to an end by announcing that it was almost ten, and that she should get home because her neighbour Glenda was dogsitting Tippi.

  On the way out Mum said, ‘Oh I almost forgot,’ and gave me a Westfield gift card, which must’ve required a lot of thought.

  ‘Wow! Thank you. I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  Despite the friction and occasional snide jabs, I wished the whole family had been walking home together. Instead, Dad and I said our awkward goodbyes to the ladies outside the restaurant and began walking up William Street. Halfway up, the storm broke, so I shoved the paper bag holding my presents under my shirt and we ran.

  Back at the apartment, showered and dried off, I began reading Dorian Gray. He’s a handsome rooster who’s so full of himself and afraid of his looks fading that he sells his soul, committing his life to total pleasure-seeking without physical consequence. A portrait of him, painted by an artist called Basil, starts to bear the signs of his ageing instead, and becomes increasingly grotesque. Mr Field asked us in class to make note of how Oscar Wilde treats the notion of living a double life, and compare it with Robert Louis Stevenson’s treatment in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  ‘Shouldn’t be a stretch,’ Homunculus said. ‘You’re a bit of an expert on the double life.’

  ‘Please be quiet,’ I said.

  But Homunculus wouldn’t shut up. ‘You’ll be making your screen debut on Friday the thirteenth.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Deb Gelber is filming you for stroke correction in swim clinic tomorrow. Good luck with that.’

  A new level of dread gripped me at the thought of the nub not only being exposed, but also recorded and shown to the rest of the squad. Hoping that a sniff of the Swiss Valley Hair Pomade™ might alleviate my panic by transporting me to happier times, I jumped out of bed and looked for it in the paper bag. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in my room, or the kitchen or the bathroom. I called the restaurant to find out if I’d left it there. Nobody answered – there was only a recorded message directing the caller to book on their website.

  I returned to bed, distraught and furious at myself for losing something so precious to me. Sleep eventually arrived in the form of a tiny elevator cabin with carpeted walls like the one at V e n e e R. I asked the operator, a shadowy figure with his back to me, to take me down to the restaurant. He pushed a button and the cabin descended. But it continued down past that level. Deaf to my pleas, the operator kept pushing buttons, taking us lower and lower underground, faster and faster, until I shouted, ‘WHO ARE YOU?’

  The lift stopped with a spine-cracking thud. The operator turned around and I looked into his terrified eyes. The operator was me. The door opened and somehow it was already Friday morning.

  At the start of clinic, Simmons told us that the swimming carnival was fast approaching and that focusing on technique would give us the winning edge in the pool. He separated us into the four stroke groups to be filmed by overhead and underwater tracking cameras. Butterfly was first. My fear of the nub being caught on film was so intense it induced vertigo and high-frequency tinnitus simultaneously. I told Deb Gelber I felt sick.

  ‘You’re still doing it,’ she said.

  One by one we swam a lap of fly, then returned to have our technique scrutinised. Everybody else looked natural and fluid – born to swim. I appeared to be swimming a stroke of my own invention.

  ‘Jerky and spasmodic,’ Gelber said. ‘Next time focus on minimising resistance, gliding not churning. Soften your hand entry. And stop looking for the camera.’

  On our way down for a second attempt, Pericles asked where I thought my centre of energy was.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe here?’ I pointed to my sternum. He pressed his palm against my chest.

  ‘Okay, this time imagine it’s a furnace, and focus on releasing a blast of fire out through your back, shoulders and arms every time you launch.’ He swept his hands across my upper back then down, a little close to the nub for comfort. ‘Allow the burst of power to travel down your spine and through your torso, keeping it strong all the way down your legs and out the tips of your toes. It should be a perpetual wave of energy moving through you, a cycle of tension and release – not separate stroke and kick.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip. I’ll give it a try.’ I held up his goggles. ‘I’ve still got these, by the way.’

  ‘Keep them.’

  We repeated the exercise and I followed Pericles’ advice, visualising my core as a blasting furnace. I ignored the black line and the lane markers and the camera and felt no resistance or struggle, only slickness and buoyancy, as if I was swimming butterfly for the first time ever – almost like a dolphin.

  Gelber and the other swimmers were astonished by the obvious difference between playbacks. I was almost feeling proud until she froze a frame in the aerial footage to talk about my alignment. My arse was sticking up out of the water, and there it was, visible even beneath my black Speedos – a bump in the topography casting a tiny crescent of shadow, vague but still damning evidence of my nub for anybody who was looking hard enough. But nobody was because they were all doubled over, laughing at my butt in the air . . . I think.

  On the way to Mum’s office I called the restaurant again to ask if they’d found a mint-green jar. The lady said nothing was handed in last night, which made me gloomy. And walking into NOW BE TIGERS! and seeing Penny slumped behind the reception counter failed to lift my mood. She was in a bummed-out torpor because Curtis now wanted an open relationship.

  ‘We broke up,’ she said. ‘And tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Curtis is the only guy who’s given me flowers, and I threw them out when they died. I don’t have anything to remember him by except the seven thousand happy-couple photos I made him pose for, and the little cupid I gave you. Sorry for asking, but could I have him back?’

  ‘Not a problem,’ I lied, because last week I’d transformed him from cherub to satyr with a goatee, XXL dick and balls.

  Emma and Jules came into reception, followed by Morgan. ‘Your mother!’ he said, making devil horns, and invited Penny to join them for a ‘soothing elixir’.

  Before they could escape, Mum poked her head through the door and said, ‘Remember, Morgan. The word “can’t” isn’t in our vocabulary.’ I think that’s what she said.

  On the trip home, Mum told me that the cost of having the Venus shell move through the sea was beyond their budget, so they’d settled for a stationary shell. But Morgan had failed to get approval to stage anything in the water. ‘There’ll be no wow factor without water,’ she said.

  ‘I thought “can’t” wasn’t in your vocabulary?’

  ‘Don’t throw my words back in my face.’ She put music on and neither of us spoke till the Wakehurst Parkway.

  ‘I’ve got an idea, but it might be a bit gay.’

  ‘That’s per
fect for a cosmetic launch, because every single man there will be homosexual.’

  ‘You know what I meant.’

  ‘No, I don’t, actually. Did you mean “excessively flamboyant” or “feeble and insipid”? You know I don’t like the word being used in a pejorative fashion.’

  ‘Have you just figured out that you’re a lesbian or something? Because if you are, I don’t have a problem with it.’

  ‘I won’t legitimise that with a response.’ Mum turned the music off and we drove through Oxford Falls, both simmering in silence. I apologised at Mona Vale.

  ‘Apology accepted,’ Mum said. ‘Now tell me your idea. Anything would be appreciated.’

  ‘Well, you could still have the launch beside the sea, but have the shell floating in a giant inflatable pool on the grass.’

  ‘Interesting . . . We could have a bar in the pool that the guests wade out to. Perfect for social media. Hashtag wetbar. Hashtag bottomsup. Yes, and inflated balls with the product inside, like bubbles floating on the surface. Yes, yes. I have to call Morgan right now.’ She pulled the car over and told him my idea over speakerphone.

  ‘Love, love, love!’ Morgan gushed. ‘That son of yours is an absolute genius!’

  ‘Careful, he can hear you.’

  ‘It’s obviously genetic.’

  ‘You don’t think the idea’s a bit gay, do you?’ She winked at me.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Morgan said. ‘Beyond fabulous!’

  ‘Maintain your enthusiasm. We need to nut this thing out ASAP. Are you available tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Of course, El Capitane.’

  On Saturday morning, Mum left for the office before seven. I was sitting in the kitchen considering an early surf when Venn came in, took a peach and scored the furry skin with a knife. ‘Happy Valentine’s Day,’ she said. ‘Four months without Elliot.’

  ‘You’re way better off without him.’