Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  During my confession to Coach the late afternoon had become that time just before night where the sky bears the last traces of daylight and the solid forms of things became dark, vague, silhouetted shapes. Coach was standing somewhere just beyond my field of vision and as I turned to face her I discovered she was tossing the baseball from hand to hand in a fashion so gentle it barely generated a sound. She disappeared inside the house and returned with a bottle of gin, two bottles of soda and some lemons. I hoped Coach might at this point have some wisdom to offer as to whether my analysis of this situation seemed accurate and what might be the best plan of action for me to take regarding my romantic life in the future. But her eyes were glazed over.

  Feeling my inhibitions lessened by the drink, and sensing I wasn’t going to get any deep insights relating to my own romantic troubles, I thought it might be a good opportunity to inquire about some of the discrepancies between theory and practice in Coach’s approach to training and living more broadly. I asked her pointedly whether she saw some value in occasional Dionysian displays of excess and the reversal or abandonment of normal forms of order. She looked at me, eyes somehow suggesting a different being was now pulling the levers. You must have been…you must have been a dud root, she said, grinning maliciously over her glass. We need to get you into the bedroom. Need to get you a little bit more loose. She picked up the bottle of gin and waved it side to side. I was stung and perplexed by this brutal, difficult-to-interpret joke, which hit me as exactly the kind of response Coach had critiqued so passionately during our previous discussions. I was struck by the sense that she and I both were imposters, drunken strangers rehearsing a routine that had lost its meaning long ago.

  Coach stood up abruptly and disappeared inside again. I wondered whether now was my chance to leave but my initial offence at her response had settled, and something in me wanted to escalate the situation, to have it out. I looked up at the yellowy-grey clouds and the fragments of browny-black sky behind them, the ghostly washing on the small clothesline near the wooden fence, which was covered with a thick topping of unruly jasmine, and an upturned wooden chair on the lawn, which though motionless gave off a definite impression of having just been thrown there.

  I waited until my anxiety at Coach’s absence and at not doing anything overtook my anxiety at the thought of what I might discover inside.

  The kitchen opened onto a tight dining room almost entirely taken up by a long, cloth-covered table, the centrepiece of which was a vase filled with dried banksia and a stack of running magazines. Most of the kitchen goods, apparatus and produce were displayed on a series of open wooden shelves above the sink, a few items stashed in doorless cupboards below.

  All the lights in the house seemed to be off, but enough light filtered in from the relatively bright night to ensure I could get a decent enough mapping of the surrounds.

  I looked through the open doorway into a dimly lit lounge room. There was a three-tiered shelf ornamented with rocks, and an old radio cut into the wall that separated the lounge and dining rooms.

  As I hesitated before crossing the threshold into the dim space, I heard a scraping noise from behind me, and noticed a thin strip of light at the base of an inconspicuous sliding door just off the side of the kitchen. I walked over to the door.

  The fridge which stood by the door was covered in poem-fragments configured from those magnetised strips of words: the unfinished pole hyperventilates / each rancid memory and miracle glows / festoon gigabyte banana / pouring out the olives and broken glass…

  I stood for a while outside the door, my breathing becoming increasingly apparent. Coach, I called softy, Co-oach.

  I stood for a while longer. Then before thinking about it I found myself sliding open the door.

  Coach was hunched over on the toilet, naked, a hand-rolled cigarette flattened on the tiles under her bare foot. She looked up at me and stood in the same movement and before I could flinch I was part of an embrace: Ah, you’ve come, she said, half relieved, half indicating that I was fulfilling a prophecy, you’ve come.

  As she tightened her hug I felt the coiled electricity of her abdomen and the two softer lugs of her breasts. My heels lifted ever so slightly off the ground and as she released I gathered my senses and backed quickly away, through the open sliding door, which I hit with my elbow, then through the door from the kitchen into the yard and back down the alleyway along the side of the house, hallucinating moans as I imagined Coach crumbling in a heap back on top of the toilet, folding her body back into the pose of slumber from which I now wished I hadn’t had the opportunity to wake her.

  Daceyville and Astrolabe Park

  The next morning I peeled myself off the Odyssey floor and in the blur of the new day found myself on a trajectory to Astrolabe Park and the suburb of Daceyville.

  The morning was already hot but I chose to ride with the windows up and the air conditioning off to sweat out some of the previous night’s toxins. The heat, the residual feeling of tipsiness, and a melancholic, synth-heavy song on the radio formed a background for the beginning of my efforts to think through Coach’s transgressions and my feelings towards her. Of one thing I was sure: our relationship had been profoundly altered. While I was resolved to cut off contact in the immediate future, I still needed to discover how to integrate her teachings into my own running practice and philosophy without forgoing all the progress I had made.

  I lost myself in speculation about whether the compulsion to immediately visit a sacred site of Coach’s in such a state, while my emotions were still raw, was the product of masochism, or a desire to take ownership of the knowledge she’d imparted to me by transforming it into something new. Based on previous experience, I knew it was unlikely that I would completely turn away from a figure to whom I’d shown affection in the past, and seemed probable that I would find a way to preserve an impotent yet expressive version of Coach in my mind, a character upon whom I could still depend to make sense of a particular kind of attitude that was undoubtedly an obscure part of my own psyche.

  As the Odyssey lurched around the roundabout which marked the apex of Daceyville I immediately saw the building Coach had identified as the maintenance shed. As she had said, its form was at once menacing and whimsical, appearing as though it were a larger, bulkier version of a smaller building.

  I turned off the main drag to the right, and into the sudden sleepiness of Daceyville’s curving, difficult-to-navigate backstreets. I noticed two girls sitting at either end of a concrete balustrade in one of the sheltered porches common to many of the suburb’s houses. On the ledge between them rested a bottle of tomato sauce, which led me to hypothesise that the object one of the girls was picking at with her fingers was a sausage roll or a pie. I felt pleased that they were in such a well-shaded area, with casuarinas and eucalypts as well as the roof offering ample protection from the sun.

  I parked on Cook Avenue with the intention of exploring first the internal reserve Coach had mentioned and then the maintenance shed, before returning to Astrolabe Park where I aimed to do a short jog to promote further sweating.

  As Coach had suggested, Daceyville was an instructive example of how certain landscaping limitations produced unmistakeable changes in the atmosphere of a place. The absence of front fences in the suburb provoked me to consider how strange their seeming inevitability was elsewhere in the city. I wondered how I might put into words the magnitude of the feelings produced from what might appear an inconsequential difference.

  Some yards offered displays of statues and plants clearly meant to attract the admiration of passers-by, while others stirred unaccountably strong feelings of pleasure simply due to the fact that they weren’t demarcated from the footpath, so that I might step into them with ease. Some of the open front yards were almost entirely taken up by large fig trees, and there was a general sense of the suburb being well shaded. Occasionally the footpath would lead to an open space behind a cluster of houses where chairs, raised beds of grass an
d pergolas were sheltered beneath the greater canopy of figs or eucalypts.

  There was a general though emphatic sense of sleepiness about the place. Daceyville seemed neither prim nor neglected but somewhere happily in-between. There was charm here, with nothing smug about it. Much of the grass on the verges hadn’t been mown and there was an air of messiness about the houses and the front yards, but still a distinct sense of pride. Some of the houses seemed like conglomerations of multiple dwellings, as though the terracotta roof of one had grown to incorporate surrounding structures.

  All around, strewn across the sidewalk, visible through the ratty lawns and grinding in-between my feet and sandals, was the whitish sand which at once echoed the long history of the site and suggested some yet to be realised continuity with the future.

  I located the paved path that led between two weatherboard fences pleasingly free from paint aside from one or two washed-out green or pink slats. Visible above the fence line was a teasingly low-pitched roof, almost horizontal, with bricks painted pink and powder blue.

  The reserve nested by the surrounding dwellings was empty apart from a man dumping a small pile of rubbish at its fringes. A slight wind stirred the congregation of casuarinas at one edge into song and I strode out into the centre, turning slowly as I walked to achieve some approximation of a 360-degree view. I was moved to begin a light jog that was almost immediately halted by a cathead prickle finding its way into the region between my foot and my sandal and embedding itself in my skin. After this brief hiccup I continued, emerging out the other side of the internal reserve. The pain of the burr gradually deepened as I crossed the crescent into the park at the axis of the suburb. I wondered whether this was the most forceful realisation of an axial layout in Sydney, and like Coach had done I imagined the boulevards fanning out all the way down to the shores of Botany Bay and La Perouse.

  I sought out the maintenance shed, my perceptual faculties readied by Coach’s ecstatic description. The building I found stood rooted to the ground like the evidence of some remote aesthetic order, a startling combination of sweetness and hostility.

  When searching the internet later I expected at least a few pages of tribute to the shed, maybe even an unpublished thesis about the implications of the building for the notion of an idiomatic Australian ugliness or how, in appearing at once cruel and kind, it might reflect something of the Australian character more generally, if such a thing can be said to exist. After all, I thought, there are fan pages for things as unlikely as Bubble O’Bill ice creams, sneakers and various obscure pieces of electrical equipment. But my efforts turned up nothing, only a few scattered photos on pages detailing examples of the Federation style.

  I removed my sandals and ran shoeless along the tree-lined boulevard, stopping at the Odyssey to retrieve my lunch-making apparatus, then continuing barefoot to Astrolabe Park at the south-western edge of the suburb, where I sat in the limited shade of some casuarinas and set out my picnic.

  I had my usual olive oil and a wedge of slightly stale sourdough, accompanied by almonds, dates, hard sheep cheese beginning to look a bit worse for wear after two days in the cool bag, fresh tomatoes, and a Tupperware container of tabouli.

  I sat down to enjoy my lunch in the shade of the trees, looking out over the bare hills of the park, thinking that it looked like an abandoned fairway from the nearby golf course.

  Due to my lack of cutlery my hands quickly became covered in a film of oil, with flecks of tabouli and breadcrumbs adhering to the sides. I periodically licked my fingers, glad that no one else was dining with me to observe the spectacle.

  A tall man with a smallish bulging belly in high-vis gear emerged in my peripheral vision and four dogs – two fat kelpies and two other barrel-shaped things slightly lower to the ground – began to scan the grass in front of him with their noses. Soon enough the little horde was over to inspect my lunch, and as the more adventurous barrel dogs came closer I was horrified to see that their skin-to-hair ratio was roughly the same as a scrotum’s. They came close enough to warrant a stern warning and as they did so I noticed one had a distinctively asymmetrical face, with one eye bulging out to the side as if to obey autonomous desires while the other looked square ahead. Their skin was mottled pink and brown and the sum of their appearance and proximity became too much for me as I looked to their owner or minder in the hope that he’d call them off. He turned his head to face me, a silhouette in the bright light of day, and lit a cigarette, turning again to face outwards across the park. My disgust at the dogs was compounded by the sense of injustice that he was not only permitting his animals to harass me but also seeming to take pleasure in it.

  I finished the half-sandwich that I’d put together and packed up my things, jogging back to the car with the implements rattling around in my carry bag. Despite this encounter I was resolved to see what the view was like from the top of the hill in Astrolabe and maybe inspect some of the vegetation clustered at the fringes of The Lakes golf course that I knew to be a rare example of surviving eastern-suburbs banksia scrub.

  When I returned to the park the man was making his way back to his car, his dogs performing the last of their rituals against the temporary fence that bordered an asbestos removal operation at the eastern edge of the park. I skittered across the grass noting what seemed like the overgrown contours of sand banks or water features. The top of the rise afforded a view south-west to Botany Bay and the airport. The landscape was strikingly flat. The features of the golf course networked through the swampy vegetation that included thick stands of reeds, other water grasses and the twisted forms of low-lying shrubs, evidently battered by the strong southerly winds that would no doubt make their presence felt through this exposed region.

  I returned to the Odyssey happy with the visions I’d captured on this expedition, though perhaps not yet feeling their full emotional impact.

  That evening, I parked the car in a favoured cul-de-sac in Tamarama and settled down to sleep. I dreamt of unfamiliar dogs, ones neither from the park at Daceyville nor the farm at Molong where I grew up. But the setting was the cool of the back veranda at the farm. My cousin or uncle had died and my mum was forced to take these dogs on. I looked at them through the flyscreen window from inside the house, clustered on the veranda, one sitting on a wooden chair, its body facing away from me, its head twisted back, tongue out, panting with that vacant, expectant, but somehow gleeful look common to certain dogs. As I looked I wondered whether I might shoot them from my vantage inside the house or whether there was some less conspicuous way to get rid of them, maybe a curse orchestrated by nominating two rocks as avatars, placing them in the grass and burying glowing embers in the soil before each stone.

  Solo Bowling: Cooper Park Nets

  Over the late spring and early summer I sought to fill the absence left by Coach Fitz by attempting to perfect her plan for my practice. I became committed to the idea that through exceeding her ambitions, I could transcend the position of mentee in which her coaching efforts had left me.

  This began with what I would come to remember as a particularly aggressive and successful athletic display at the Cooper Park nets, where on one of my earlier runs with Coach I’d spied the outstretched limbs of a leafless jacaranda. This image lay dormant in my memory only to be activated when I noticed that the jacarandas around Sydney had begun to flower. I knew immediately that it was time to go back and revisit the nets with my leather cricket ball, which I typically stored in a cup holder in the Odyssey. I waited until a particularly hot spring day so I could be sure that the drying vegetable matter beneath the nearby trees would begin to give off the sharp, vaguely sour smells I associated with the coming of the Sydney summer. In such an atmosphere I hoped I might reach a state of calculated delirium which exercising under heat duress could induce.

  I parked the Odyssey on Edgecliff Road and picked my way through the gradually climbing backstreets of Woollahra, noting the numerous revival styles and ample gardens, including a massive, l
avender-coloured house on a corner block in the Spanish Mission style, and a less commanding mashup nearby of Sydney sandstone, red brick, and the dark exposed beams against white plaster characteristic of faux-Tudor style.

  As I reached the flat grass playing fields that stretched up the gully to the nets I felt a spring return to my step. From past impressions of Coach’s running style and from the metaphoric work of my imagination I had taken up the image of a coil or spring, as well as related forms, affects and sensations to do with tension and potential, which seemed to contribute to the ease and delight that I experienced eating up the distance between myself and my destination. At the nets I flung off my shirt and laid it down at an appropriate spot on the pitch so I’d have a target to aim at. I began slowly, going through the motions like a ballerina, completing my bowling sequence without letting go of the ball. Then I bowled some gentle deliveries, spraying the odd one down the leg side without worrying too much at this stage about accuracy.

  I focused on integrating stretches and stability into the bending and folding of my body as I stooped down and picked up the ball. After each delivery I would jog to the back of the net where the ball had ended up, sometimes lying for a while on the turf and pulling my knees into my chest, or, as I began to work up some steam, exchanging a few playful jabs with the black rubber that covered the lower part of the mesh net.

  At the top of my run-up my entire being gathered around the rough leather ball resting between my index and middle fingers. My duty was not simply to bowl the ball at the stumps but to give it its best chance to be a difficult delivery for the hypothetical batsman at the end of the wicket. I am capacity-building for the ball, I said to myself, with more sincerity than sarcasm. This meant not overextending myself, which would cause me to depend too much on arm speed. Instead I thought of the action as the sum of the entire sequence of movements, beginning from the moment I looked down the wicket before my run-up and ending when I halted to a shuffle well after I’d released the ball. I grew more sweaty and everything seemed very involved with breathing and heat. The ground at the end of the synthetic wicket had worn down to sandy earth, busted-up rhizomes and small rocks. My stamping or scraping this ground in the manner of a bullock took on the air of an ablution, contributing to the overall rightness of my enterprise. After about twenty minutes two English tourists arrived to practise in the net nestled against the slope on the other side of the field. I bowled for a while before plucking up the courage to go and join their session.