Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  The oval was looking a picture. After suggesting that the day had been carefully conceived in the mind of a benevolent being and offered to us as a reward for our commitment, Coach revealed that the session would be six four-hundred-metre repetitions, followed by five kilometres at a pace that I could imagine myself running for a marathon.

  Like many of the great ovals we visited, Trumper Park was nestled at the base of a sloping hillside, giving it the effect of a natural amphitheatre and the sense of drama Coach thought desirable in training venues. Among the city parks, Trumper Park stood out because this sloping area was in good part made from bushland, with large trees and thick understorey comprising roughly half of the oval’s eastern side.

  Above the bushland, the flags atop the Edgecliff Centre flapped lightly in the breeze and for a while I pondered the ecology peculiar to that building’s interior: a clientele of a distinctively elderly and well-moneyed variety, the wood panelling and old diner that recalled the shopping centres of rural NSW, the crinkle-cut chips from the takeaway shop that I occasionally favoured on my lunch breaks between window-washing and after-school care, the sample portions of sausage sizzling in the electric pan out the front of the butcher, the cubes of ciabatta and olive oil at the front of the deli.

  The oval was marked out in black lines for a school athletics carnival and these spurred me on as I rounded the bends of my 400s in the exuberant and joyful fashion I hoped would characterise all my displays of physical effort. Coach completed a few herself alongside me, while the rest of the time she egged me on with her favourite encouragements: run like the wind and run to make the day your own.

  After the session Coach and I lay in the middle of the oval and stretched where the sun still shone. We saw the bright clothing and distant chatter of figures flitting in and out of obscurity up on the track in the bushland. I lay on my back and arched my head so I could see the upside-down horizon towards Rushcutters Bay. The sky faded from blue to white towards the horizon and as I filled my gaze I recalled a paradigmatic sky-gazing experience when just like today I lay in the middle of a grass oval and felt a rare sense of being contained and insulated by the great blue above.

  On many similar occasions I had looked to the sky for similar feelings of sustenance but had merely felt exposed and disappointed or at best awed and excited. There wasn’t that feeling of protection and sustaining intimacy.

  As I lay there with Coach Fitz these elevated feelings returned, the sky at once massively distant and so close it was like a pod or blanket I could draw over myself.

  I may have been right to presume Coach was feeling similar things as she lay there in the grass, head arched back and hands propped up by elbows, dangling just above her chest as though they were the redundant appendages of an ancient reptile.

  We hydrated ourselves and performed pre-pub ablutions in the change rooms of the oval, noting the decorative ironwork in the small grandstand where the letter T was represented in a series of circles just underneath the awning. The corrugated-iron roof sloped downwards in a gentle curve I could imagine sliding down, the lip generously lifting me out into the air above the oval, where I would land sprawling in the soft grass.

  Coach had replaced her training outfit with a pair of stonewash denim jeans and her blue blazer. We walked the backstreets behind the oval in the last of the daylight, noting the large number of art galleries still illuminated, and the sense that the area was cut out of the large sandstone hill that rose up behind it. The Moreton Bays and the looming blond cliff seemed to engulf the diminutive rows of houses, and both Coach and I agreed that the place was characterised by a gritty dampness, which she expressed by rubbing her thumb and forefinger together.

  We found a set of inconspicuous stairs that led us to an elevated alleyway from which we inspected the roofs and backyards of the houses below. This slightly raised vantage, where houses ate into the still-abundant bush, seemed like the perfect spot to set up camp and I wondered whether in the future I might have the means to lay claim to a small patch of land in the area, settle there with the love of my life and raise a number of virile and sensitive children who might make their own forays into the bushland during the day and have it enter their dreams during the night.

  We arrived at the bottom of a quiet street with a pub on the corner. Upon entry it felt as though we had been transported from the empty, dreamy, gradually darkening backstage of the suburb to a focal point of conviviality and warmth.

  The establishment appeared to attract the polite and generous patronage of the local inhabitants. A group of middle-aged men sat at the bar, one of whom had a parrot perched on his shoulder. Everyone was excessively apologetic as we shuffled through the crowd to a free table and stools by the window.

  After we bagsed our table, Coach shot off to the bar to order some beer. I looked excitedly through the menu in her absence, immediately singling out the salt cod brandade and a side of vegetables with miso butter as my likely orders. When Coach returned she spoke effusively of the onion and liver jaffle she liked to have without the onion. Since our last meeting, I had started to suspect Coach’s judgement about food to be less well honed than I originally imagined. It wasn’t that she always misfired – this pub was clearly a gem – but her enthusiasm about the specificities left me perplexed. Perhaps I could rely on her to do the initial groundwork, to find a decent spot, but once inside it was necessary for me to go my own way. I ordered the salt cod and Coach proposed a toast to a well-earned meal.

  I asked Coach about her favourite buildings around Sydney, wondering whether there were any in particular that catapulted her into the fervid displays of architecture-spotting that she now asserted as one of the great advantages of living in a city.

  Well, she began, the exemplary architectural substance of Sydney, if it can be called such a thing, is perhaps to be found in the suburbs. Many have been realised in a far from ideal fashion, guided often by entrepreneurial demands, which are at their best when mixed with other sentiments, broader in scope and with the intention of more lasting benefit. The suburb allows the staging of bush and city, or at least it ought to, and in that combination the experience of dwelling expresses itself most vividly. The true suburbs of Australia, said Coach, are in Canberra, but Sydney too possesses some praiseworthy examples.

  One day, after a run down to Botany to retrieve some bread rolls from a bakery I like there, she continued, taking a sip from her drink, I decided for some unaccountable reason to run back via a different route. Clutching my bag of rolls, I took a random, relatively unflattering track past industrial estates and across the railway line.

  After some time I ended up in an area that struck me as distinctive, subtly so at first but then I had a dawning realisation that something persisted there that was lacking in the previous streets through which I had run. For one, there were more trees: large casuarinas and eucalypts shaded the streets in long avenues and haphazard clusters. The roofs adopted a form that seemed vaguely expressionistic, a slightly more adventurous yet at the same time unpretentious realisation of the Arts and Crafts principles that characterise many Sydney suburbs. The roofs jutted and spanned, creating areas of cool that were further augmented by spilling plants. There were the colours too: subtle lashings of gelato pinks, yellows and greens were applied with a recognisable degree of uniformity across the suburb. There were no front fences, which had the effect of highlighting the presence of the mailboxes that seemed to spring up out of the dirt and decaying tree matter. The lack of fences also meant that in some instances the contents of the front yards encroached on the pedestrian area, creating a happy confusion between the public and the private. Looking at the front yards, I got the sense of long-term occupation, with some featuring elaborate stacks of statues, pot plants, cacti, homemade signage and other ephemera.

  I could tell that a couple at the table next to us had begun to listen to Coach. She spoke with increasing boldness and looked around as though performing for the crowd.

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bsp; As I walked around the suburb I discovered hidden pockets of green, Coach continued. One internal reserve in particular awakened something profound within me, and I found myself pouring my time into wide-ranging and focused research on the idea of internal reserves and where the best ones crop up. This would soon lead me on trips to Canberra to admire the exemplary pockets of green in the suburbs of Reid, Forrest and Griffith, and then on further investigations into what I saw as the vaguely analogous though distinctive feature of the informal recreation areas at the fringes of sporting ovals, commendable models of which can be found at Alexandria Park or Waverley Oval in Sydney, or at Queanbeyan Oval not far from Canberra.

  I followed one of the straight, long central streets to a park that functioned as a kind of apex from which several other boulevards fanned out, southwards to Botany Bay. From this view I was able to appreciate the sense of symmetry that informed the layout of the suburb and its pleasing contrast with the smaller, curved streets and the irregular forms of the houses and plant life.

  I had the sense of something occupying my left periphery, and as I turned I almost jumped at the sight of a hulking, squat building that seemed to shoot straight up out of the neatly mown lawn. It was painted in the pastels common to the other buildings in the area, its slate roof partially colonised by patches of lichen. The softness of the colouring, the fancy roof vent and the mix of brick, sandstone and stucco, might evoke whimsy. However, in this instance, the almost aggressive solidness of the structure nullified any sense of the quaint. The four gables were brought together in a relatively tight form, creating a clash of different diagonal planes. An utterly unique sight. A prop forward of a house, said Coach, nodding towards me and the listening couple as though she’d composed this athletic metaphor after a good deal of mulling on the nature of the

  building and was pleased with her rumination’s outcome.

  As she talked, Coach had begun to peer over my shoulder in the hope that our food would manifest itself, and sure enough a young waiter strolled up to our table with our meals, thankfully resilient enough to shrug off a confusing remark Coach made about his accent and her great admiration for the Portuguese people.

  I went to the bar to order another beer, and then we both set to work on our food, Coach making a good use of her fingers to prod and probe the jaffle, flipping it over on the plate after realising it was too hot, then taking a rushed bite anyway, chewing and looking at me with widening eyes of agreement while mine narrowed with suspicion.

  The suburb I’d discovered was Daceyville, she continued, Australia’s first public housing scheme. Its Parisian-inspired boulevards were once envisaged to extend all the way down to Botany Bay, an aspiration which has often brought me a good deal of comfort, despite its not being realised. Funding issues and World War I got in the way and only a small portion of the 1473 cottages planned were built. A publication at my local library and scattered documents on the internet give an indication of the difficulties builders must have faced erecting houses on what were essentially sand dunes. The sense of the landscape expressed in those images still persists to some degree if you look across the rolling treeless hills of Astrolabe Park and the Eastlake golf course at the south-western edge of the suburb. Part of me is transported to the stretches of sand that emerge through the grass and begin to dominate certain areas of Centennial Park.

  These features enable me to feel I know where I live, said Coach Fitz. You need to seek a sense of continuity among otherwise disconnected regions of a city like this. Whole segments lie forgotten, never to be discovered, and the usual routes we travel can leave a meagre and often not very lively sense of the landscape as a whole.

  From enclosure to enclosure we tread our routes, said Coach, sheltering from the sky in little burrows in the side of a hill. What we are left with, in terms of the landscape that exists inside, is inadequately fragmented and arrhythmic – a diagram of nodes or islands without animating force, without that fleeting though profound sense of the outside becoming a greater enclosure, built from partially stable though continually updated perspectives of the distant and recent past. My aim is to make the city my garden.

  Coach was now talking as though she were addressing an invisible form taking shape above the table between us. I stand looking out over the scabby grass on the sand dunes of Astrolabe, I jog down that outer rim of Centennial Park, I cut through the remnant bushland of Fred Hollows Reserve in Randwick, or up through the moist gullies of Cooper Park and Tamarama. I hurl myself into a headwind on the soft sands of Bronte Beach, I witness my quads buckle with fatigue at the top of Waverley Cemetery, and as I continue to run I feel my body do what my mind tempts me to believe it cannot, and then I feel my mind in turn telling my body that it must simply get moving, stay moving.

  Coach was tapping the outside of her almost empty schooner glass. We don’t need chips do we? she asked, looking back over her shoulder at the bar.

  I detected a restlessness in her that I speculated would only be quelled by a sustained session of drinking, a period of sexual intercourse defined by rigour and experimentation or, more agreeably, a night-time jog through the streets to some of the places she had just mentioned. She insisted I visit Daceyville for myself and meditate for a while on the degree to which it is a successful realisation of a garden suburb and compare it with other examples of its kind, such as Castlecrag or many of the suburbs in Canberra, and make a detailed account of my feelings regarding the lack of fences, the spilling front gardens and whether it seems appropriate to judge the maintenance shed as beautiful or ugly.

  Despite the cool, welcoming atmosphere of the pub and the sense that the evening could, with the help of more schooners and snacks, be prolonged indefinitely and include a full session examining my romantic life, I thought it wise at that point to put a dampener on things and excuse myself, so Coach could be allowed to exercise whatever internal energies had stirred during this discourse on Daceyville.

  I took note of this not infrequent desire within me to devise an escape route, a get-out clause, as though Coach was a bomb waiting to go off – or was it me, my nature, that dictated for every meeting I must have a ready-to-hand excuse for my imminent departure? Were my unfounded imaginings about her sexual being inducing me to read her gestures through the wrong interpretive frame? Was I guided by archetypes of desire and its realisation I’d gleaned from the entertainment culture that Coach so regularly critiqued? Did she want to have sex with me? Lay me out on the grass and stimulate my body with caresses and firmer gestures and then exploit this blood flow for her own satisfactions under the brown haze of the Sydney night sky? Would she sacrifice our functional, platonic relationship through a booze-induced display of uninhibited passion?

  Either way, I was grateful that we were in a pub, so we’d already paid for the meal. I left Coach at the table, looking vaguely deflated and no doubt pondering another ale, or perhaps thinking to follow me out the door for a run in the night air.

  For me, it was a reflective walk back to the Odyssey, to roll out the swag and sleep amongst the distinctive smell of Windex, citrus peel and damp towels.

  During the night I heard a soft rapping on the window of the car. At first I tried to ignore it, burying my dehydrated head in a mass of clothes and balled-up bedding. But the noise persisted. I looked at the window and the shadowy outline of a face peered towards me. I wanted to yell but couldn’t. I just stared at the outline with gradually building horror. The door opened. Coach’s head snaked its way into the vehicle, a wisp of smoke, collecting above me and pinning me to the floor as it expanded against the roof. She clenched her jaw and frowned. I couldn’t move my arms, couldn’t speak. The fluid figure began to remove its clothes, revealing a set of breasts which appeared like two light bulbs glowing softly through matte flesh, and I found myself with my face pressed into them, sucking nipples sporadically and moaning as Coach inserted her fingers into my anus. A slick of sweat built quickly between us and I seemed to be in multiple positions
at once: on the floor beneath her weight, my face in her chest and outside the car looking in as the fogged windows made our movements of pleasure legible in the glass.

  I woke in a film of sweat, feeling as though I’d undergone an aneurysm in my sleep. The first of the day’s light revealed thick white cloud, striated by the shafts of rising sun. I peeled off my clothes and got into my board shorts. It was with surprise and regret that I noticed a pale substance plastered through my pubic hair. I picked a path through the scattered boulders which led down to the waves crashing onto the beach. Warrigal greens and pigface filled the gaps between the sandstone and I could hear the sound of some wrens in the dense bitou bush up on the headland.

  Walking down to the water, I began to give myself a hard time about my sex life. I hadn’t slept with anyone since my experiment living overseas, and the expectation among my contemporaries was that sex, if it did not define your mental stability and worth, at least gave some indication as to whether you were making the right choices. Perhaps the path I had begun to tread led me to the same place as Coach Fitz: a solitary eccentric whose erotic life had been inhibited for whatever reason and then transformed into filial relations with various would-be athletes? My sexual desire was weak and irregular. I nonetheless harboured powerful and detailed narratives about a long-term partnership and the idea of a significant other borne along out there in the crowds of anonymous people, someone who also enjoyed the minor ecstasies woven through the routines of an ordinary day.