by Tom Lee
To evade Coach’s looming shadow I added my own layer of insight to the dialogue, describing the conceit for today’s session as informed by the desire to experience a connection between the now detached vegetation areas of Fletchers Gully where we stood, and the park, which was the site of the proposed stair-sprint session. I wanted to suggest I’d created this route in part as a continuation of a theme to do with the forgotten connectedness of landscapes, but I resisted appearing too deliberate and instead reminded Morgan to let the rhythm of the landscape dictate the pace rather than going out too hard.
Morgan still started out too fast for my liking, so I yelled out a reminder: It’s important that the run feels as effortless as possible in these early stages, otherwise your running spirit might retreat into its shell. He responded diligently and cut back the pace so we ran together.
Unfortunately a game of cricket was being played on Waverley Oval, so we were forced to content ourselves solely with a session of stair sprints. It was eleven o’clock by this stage and already quite hot, with the usual small patch of sweat darkening the blue cloth of my t-shirt right in the centre of my chest and crescents of sweat beginning to edge their way along the edges of Morgan’s singlet. I felt the much-desired spring arrive in my step as we followed the path through the grove of pine trees that formed a barrier on the eastern side of the slope, and began to develop some high hopes for the session.
Before the first repetition we stopped to admire the sense of symmetry expressed by the stairs which led directly to the centre of the large circular water reservoir on top of the hill. Its playful peach-and-cream colouring contrasted with its authoritative position at the peak of the hill. It looks like a tomb, Morgan suggested, and I agreed that the atmosphere of the place seemed oddly energised by some non-living agency. Fortunate to our plans, there was a bubbler placed not far from the base of the steps and some patchy shade provided by the pines.
I suggested we belt out each rep close to our maximum capacity. Morgan took this as an invitation to really flog himself and I couldn’t resist trying to apply myself with the same level of ferocity. Despite feeling breezy for the first four repetitions and very much enjoying myself, I soon began to experience heat duress. Without thinking about it too much I found myself sneaking off to the shade between each repetition and walking in aimless spirals, tipping large quantities of water on my face and in my hair, grabbing the branch of a nearby tree and swinging my chest forward so my arms took my weight, opening up my chest and relieving my legs for a short while. Talking in such a state was impossible, beyond the occasional expletive about the difficulty of the situation. My entire being was mustered in minimising and enduring the impact of the heat. Any respite, no matter how miserly, seemed worthwhile: an extra second or two in the shade, running with a wet hat, a trip to the tap to refill our bottles and soak our heads.
Standing at the tap after the eighth repetition I felt such a deep physical need for water, and gratitude at its presence, that it seemed almost to assume the nature of a being to whom I might offer thanks or on whose care I depended not just for physical but even emotional nourishment. My experience was informed by a binding sense of camaraderie with Morgan, who had like me chosen to undergo the test forced upon us by the heat.
We waited at the base of the steps a little longer before the ninth rep, and two shirtless men joined us after leaving their bikes in the shade. Both had military-style haircuts, camouflage shorts and delicate silver necklaces. They immediately began ascending the stairs in a series of unique hopping movements, the slimmer of the two showing superior ability. They were completing their second repetition as Morgan and I descended from our ninth. I encouraged them with a thumbs-up gesture and one responded with a muffled ‘Is good’ in an accent I stereotyped as Russian.
Morgan and I agreed that we were glad to have some company and we completed the final three reps with the kind of dedication difficult to manufacture without an audience. At the conclusion of the twelfth repetition we could do nothing more than throw ourselves on the ground under the tree and pour water on our faces. I looked across to Morgan, whose chest was heaving up and down, arms stretched back behind his head, stroking and patting the lower trunk of the tree in the kind of undirected but entirely efficient manner necessary to incorporate that branched being into our elaborations of stress and relief.
After an extended recovery and further dousing of ourselves we decided to make our way back to the beach. The first stop was a closer inspection of the peculiar plateau upon which the water reservoir stood. This meant making our way up the stairs yet again, this time very slowly. The Russians were still punishing themselves with unconventional routines, sometimes leaping as many as four or five steps at once on one leg. Morgan and I called out numerous encouragements in our post-exertional bliss.
The plateau featured a bizarre confluence of elements, including the remnants of a circular sandstone structure beneath the turf that resembled a set of worn-down molars. Like the vaguely radial forms employed in the arrangement of the houses and internal reserves in Killara, this barely visible circle of sandstone blocks seemed to express some ancient purpose, and I felt a weak though agreeable desire to perform some ritual gesture involving water to manifest my feelings to Morgan.
Three, maybe four structures that looked like orphaned gateposts were scattered over the hilltop, conforming to the same jaunty colour scheme as the larger above-ground reservoir. On closer inspection I could see their decorative tops were made from a steel-latticed screen, which led me to conclude they were vents for the structures below the ground. Like the circle of sandstone, these apparently choreographed particulars left me feeling as though I’d wandered into some kind of charged performative zone, the exact powers of which were invisible to my consciousness while successfully going to work in subtle though profound ways on my inner being.
In addition to the vent posts, the large above-ground reservoir was accompanied by what looked to be an antechamber of some sort, again in peach and cream and complete with the same recessed, curved archways cut into its walls, featuring decorative pilasters, cornices and parapets. This structure took a rectangular form and was much smaller.
Morgan and I stood by one of the vents at the far edge of the plateau looking south-east across the pine grove and the playing fields below to the strip of ocean and the horizon blurred in the distance. We were both sweating profusely. Morgan removed his hat, wiped his brow and, before returning it to his head, splashed the inside with water from his bottle. I’ve never been up here, he said, and his voice suggested a feeling I shared, that the discovery of such a strange place makes you feel as though it has been calling you for some time.
As we took a steady route down the slope, I was sure to exclaim once or twice on the quality of the sandy turf and my delight at seeing the beds of orange-brown pine needles on the floor of the grove.
When we hit a perfectly rectangular pitch with bright, almost blindingly white gravel cut into the grass, I wondered whether I’d be able to cope with any more perplexing and commendable pieces of public infrastructure. Morgan said it was a bocce or boules pitch, since bowls is on grass, and that the two hefty wooden sleepers at either end functioned as buffers for the stray balls. It was hard to imagine it getting much use, nestled away down the back side of the park, but I enjoyed the idea of an entire community of users lurked somewhere in the surrounding dwellings, deeply committed to their esoteric vocation. The flat, white surface vibrated with potential and I conceived a game of cricket that might be held there at some point in the future. Morgan was pressing his fingers into his neck, no doubt to gauge the seriousness of a pimple. I looked back up to the hill we’d jogged down and again at the pitch, attempting to hold together in my head the eccentric elements that littered this park, which until now had remained anonymous to me.
We continued along a path past the high concrete wall of another reservoir, much larger than the others, so large it was difficult to get an idea of e
xactly how big it was. All these structures must be capitalising on the gravity afforded by the hilltop, I said to Morgan, resisting the temptation to stretch an analogy to the religious buildings of the Kensington peak, which were similarly gathered there for a less substantial but perhaps no less efficacious sense of gravity.
We followed Birrell Street back down to Bronte Beach and plunged our sizzling bodies into the water before sheltering under the rock face to cool down further and to elaborate plans for our next session. I noticed the two Russian men we’d met on the stairs doing some stretches in the soft sand. They were writhing around on their backs, battering themselves in sand. After arching and contorting their bodies both men rose and walked towards the breakers. They expressed an infectious sense of conviviality and I found myself resisting a desire to jokingly ruffle Morgan’s hair, throw a few dummy punches into his ribs or tackle him into the sand and raise both my arms in the air, shouting: Roman victor! Instead we stood there quietly in the damp, quickly fading cool of the rock ledge looking out at the near-catastrophic brightness of sun, sand and water.
I thought about the trials of adolescence and wondered whether the basic forms of my own difficulties during that period were being recreated through different content inside Morgan’s steadily churning mind: feelings of impotence, frustration, destructive yearning, awkwardness concerning a sense of personal style or character. I wondered whether Alex had to accommodate the splitting of self that the genetic misfortune of something like acne often provokes during adolescence, whether her seeming invulnerability and self-assuredness was due to overcoming prior trials of this kind, or to the luck of never having had to face them in the first place. I wondered whether, like me, Morgan had retreated to an inner world during adolescence: the pain of self-awareness and uncontrollable bodily transformations demanding the elaboration of what Coach had described as an immunity-granting inner mythology. I looked at Morgan’s peculiar hat and thought about the various hopes I had for items of clothing that would either allow me to hide or transcend my present identity.
The Russian men returned, picked up their belongings and walked along the sand, back towards the gully. I pointed to them as they walked away, shoulders knocking occasionally. Morgan squinted under the brim of his hat and took a long slug of water from his bottle.
Castlecrag
The pretext for our Castlecrag run was a set of stair sprints, even though I was yet to complete a reconnaissance mission to see whether an adequate set of stairs for our purposes existed in the suburb. When broaching the idea with Morgan on our prior run, he let on that he knew a little of the area because his uncle and aunt had for a number of years rented a house there. As a result he also knew that its original master planners were Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, the designers of the nation’s capital, though it was hard to say whether this detail provided him the same excitement as such knowledge brought me. The mention of a further set of blood relatives, my speculation as to the extent to which they were different from and similar to Alex, and the shred of interest expressed by Morgan in architectural history, all combined to buoy my spirits to such a degree that even after a gruelling day of window-washing in the heat I was compelled to exhaust my energies with the challenge of completing one hundred burpees in under seven minutes.
My excitement was further intensified by what I read online about the suburb later that day. I discovered Castlecrag was meant to be an exemplary if not entirely viable realisation of a garden suburb, where the built environment worked in harmony with nature rather than against it. The fifteen Griffin houses in the suburb were sculpted from local sandstone and sat unobtrusively in the landscape. The aesthetic principles the Griffins had imagined would long govern the feel of the place had not always been sympathetically observed, but the general consensus was that Castlecrag was a distinctive suburb deserving of mention in any catalogue of visionary architecture and planning.
We began our tour on Edinburgh Road. I hoped that in our travels we would find an appropriate set of stairs for our training session. Morgan wore the same black wide-brimmed hat, large glasses and a decent coat of tinted sunscreen that I took to be in part sun protection and in part an effort to obscure his skin for cosmetic reasons. He had two nectarines from a tree in his yard, and he insisted I try one immediately. As I ate, he observed, awaiting a response. The nectarines were unlike any I’d sunk my teeth into that summer. They weren’t floury like the kind refrigerated for lengthy periods, nor overly sinuous and juicy. Instead the flesh fell off the seed, with the abundant juiciness retained largely within the rich yellow pulp. They had a sharp, floral fragrance which moved me to imagine the bare slope where a nectarine tree grew on my family’s farm, the foreground dotted by occasional fringes of blond grass and a few scattered limestone rocks, and in the background a row of ironbarks along a barbed-wire fence. As I ate I imagined there was something in the relationship between this setting, the nectarine I was eating, and Morgan, Alex and their extended family, which all contributed to what I felt to be the best experience of eating stone fruit, perhaps any fruit, in my life, providing optimal hydration before a taxing session in the hottest point of a summer day and at the same time healing the damage to my soul.
From Edinburgh Road we followed a small laneway up over the rise of the hill. The road thinned to a footpath that threaded through bushland at the back of various houses. Occasionally we’d glimpse views across to neighbouring hillsides in Middle Harbour, before the path would turn us back into a small portion of bush or a bulging lump of the sandstone escarpment that seemed as much a feature of the landscape as any human dwelling.
We emerged from the bush to meet with another road, taking a left down to a small roundabout from which a thick stand of native scrub, featuring banksia, casuarina, wattle, grevillea and small eucalyptus, had sprung. Morgan led the way around to the other side of the roundabout and we plunged again into the bush, this time down a steeper, narrower path to meet with a lower layer of vegetation: floppy-leafed palms, grasses and ferns.
The path continued along the side of the steeply sloping hillside, occasionally opening out into landscaped areas where the wet sandstone showed through the vegetation, and rustic steps cut out of rock led the way.
This is entirely unique, I said to Morgan, who had now removed his sandals and was picking a drier route through the undergrowth with his bare feet.
The path emerged from the bushland and stuck close to the fence line, which bordered the sometimes unassuming, sometimes grand backyards of the houses below. One house was an almost classic realisation of the vernacular red-brick terracotta-roofed suburban type, complete with Hills hoist and wedge of couch grass. We peered around to see the extent of the thing stretching forward to the street front. It revealed a massive multistorey construction supported by concrete pillars as the slope dropped away. The tip of the iceberg, I said, thinking of the time I saw my pulled wisdom teeth.
Aside from one woman washing her dog, the yards were largely empty, though we often heard the excited yells of children some way off down the slope.
Prior to the walk I’d been working out ways to offer Morgan advice on his skin condition. I suffered from a mild case of seborrhoeic dermatitis that tended to flare up in response to stress, and I decided a discussion of my trials managing this condition might help normalise the feelings of disappointment and shame which I assumed characterised Morgan’s experience of acne. My speculations about whether my observing these imperfections somehow evened the ledger between Alex and me were deactivated by a feeling of sympathy, and the instinct that shared knowledge of my own difficulties would have greater redemptive power.
I pulled out my little flask of apple cider vinegar in a deliberately conspicuous fashion when we sat to rest on a rock, and as was my habit applied this liberally to the regions of my face punctuated by hair follicles and across the bridge of my nose where the dermatitis outbreaks usually occurred. Despite the conspicuousness of my actions, Morgan
remained silent, tapping a stick he’d picked up on a rock in front of us as though sounding out its core.
Cutting my losses I began: I have always had a deep affection for apple cider vinegar, since it rescued me from a period of persistent anguish. I held the bottle out to Morgan and shifted it to a patch where the sunlight cut through the canopy to illuminate the browny-orange liquid inside. After I returned from my overseas travels I shaved off my beard to find a virulent network of rash, with red skin fringed by dried flakes spreading across my chin and underneath my jaw. I identified this as the same condition that had previously been limited to my eyebrows and scalp. It seemed to worsen after hot drinks, dry weather, alcohol and stress. My window-washing job left me in the unfortunate position of being able throughout the day to catch my face in a reflective surface and inspect it more or less continuously, so the presence of the rash came more and more to saturate every element of my consciousness.
I had tried a number of solutions, I continued to Morgan, fish-oil supplements advised by a naturopath, letting dandruff shampoo dry for long periods on my face before washing it off, applying abundant quantities of moisturiser, various mild steroids and other useless ointments in metal tubes offered by overpaid, insensitive dermatologists. Not to mention a solution of olive oil and honey that made me particularly attractive to flies. My brother had begun to suffer from a similar condition at around the same time, which led him to investigations on the internet for possible remedies. Apple cider vinegar was one of the potential solutions he unearthed, and its efficacy was striking. With careful management my outbreaks are now kept to a minimum.
