by Tom Lee
I was happy with the elaboration of my anecdote, despite Morgan not responding and continuing to tap the rock. I speculated hopefully that a silent bond was building between us, supported by shared experiences of skin affliction, exercise routines and a growing interest in space and aesthetics, in particular our shared appreciation of public green spaces in suburbs.
We continued on through the last of the forest and up a set of stairs that though smaller than I’d hoped appeared to be the closest thing to an adequate setting for our training session. I didn’t mention this to Morgan, in the hope we would find a larger set later on our tour.
Morgan led us to yet another hidden walkway which trailed up between two Griffin-designed houses that appeared at once unimposing, in the sense that their low roofs and sandstone walls made them seem like bunkers formed out of the materials common to the site, and assertive, with the thick sandstone shaped into peculiar, vaguely threatening crystalline forms. The path functioned as a viewing platform, twisting and turning between houses, strips of bush and rock outcrop. It fed around the side of one of the houses, offering a relatively direct view of its backyard and of a bulging three-peaked ornament like a tiara suspended above the back door. Morgan and I agreed the contrasting effects of the Griffin designs seemed appropriate to the gnarled, spiky, bulbous, sinuous and spiny harmony of the surrounding vegetation.
The path transitioned into a driveway before becoming a path again, which then led to a reserve which appeared to be the highest in the suburb. Unlike the other reserves, here two tennis courts were built in the centre, in one of which a man and boy were engaged in a tennis match. We found a tap that formed part of the steel piping in the tennis court fence and refilled our bottles, admiring that it functioned as a system for the distribution of water and a fence at the same time.
We sat on the bench for a while drinking under our hats. I couldn’t resist offering an aside to Morgan about how I found tennis courts a source of great romance, and suggested we should one day visit Woollahra Library to appreciate the vantage out over the fenceless, grassy court at Elaine. Tennis courts also had a privileged spot in his own past, Morgan said, due to an oath he’d pledged on the periphery of one with a girl he had liked who wore the coolest sunglasses he’d ever seen. They’d conduct mock battles with plane-tree seedpods and he’d have cordial at her house afterwards.
This more or less perfect scene took shape and faded into the static throb of cicadas and the regular volleys of the two tennis players. We both looked ahead at the game and the fringes of bush at the edges of the court.
I saw there were two spare racquets that the duo must have brought with them leaning against the side of the fence, and tentatively suggested to Morgan that instead of our run today we propose a game of doubles. He looked at me with raised eyebrows, an expression that reminded me of Alex, the likely meaning of which I ignored and, thinking of the better side to Coach Fitz, called out to the pair to ask whether they’d be interested in a game. Yah, said the man, sure. I’m Guy, this is my son Jonty. I introduced myself and Morgan. We don’t have racquets, I said, would you mind if we borrowed? Yah, no problems, one of you will have to make do with that small one. Do you also mind if I also borrow some sunscreen, I said? Yah, sure, said Guy, coming over to the fence to introduce himself formally. We’re on a tour of the suburb, I told him. You don’t live here, do you? he said. A tour, what kind of tour? An architectural tour, I said, we’re interested in the Griffins and the history of the garden suburb. Are you residents? Yah, said Guy, I’ve heard of this Griffin, we aren’t in one of his houses though. It must be fantastic living in a place that seems as much designed for the foot-traveller as the car, I said. It makes me think how the convenience required for cars has locked off so many other affordances and moods offered by the landscape. I saw Guy’s eyes begin to glaze over and knew from past experiences in which I had spent too much energy explaining my activities to uninitiated randoms that it would be best if I quickly put a halt to any emotional labour I was planning to invest in the exchange and instead direct my ambitions towards the game of tennis. Us versus you, I suggested? Sure, said Guy, before yelling at Jonty: Come meet the tourists.
Morgan was a far better player than I’d imagined and the game took shape around a steadily increasing competitiveness between him and Guy, who twice smashed forehands into the back of his son and blamed him for not getting out of the way. I made an effort to set a contrasting example and stifled my typical urges to blame contingencies or abuse my racquet, instead moving diligently between points in a manner I hoped was reminiscent of Andre Agassi. We played out two sets, winning one a piece, before Guy and Jonty had to go. We shook hands across the net in the customary fashion and handed back the kit.
Not quite feeling we’d completed enough of a session, I suggested we do a few strides up and down the court, the benefits of which I outlined to Morgan, who nodded with dazed but seemingly not indifferent agreement. We strode along in unison down opposite sides of the court, knocking out fifteen repetitions. Afterwards we more or less showered ourselves under the tap in the fence and sheltered for a while in the shade, where I attempted to finish the discourse I’d begun in the presence of Guy. I love how the materials for the Griffin houses are a perfect fit for the surrounding bush, which seems a combination of the threatening and the soft. Morgan had adopted his customary gesture of tapping the ground, this time with a small sandstone rock he’d picked up. How would you feel about completing a small writing task on the place, I said. Nothing major, just a few sentences, and I’ll do the same? Sure, said Morgan, dropping the rock, sure. I hoped my boldness in requesting the game of tennis hadn’t produced the same trepidation that Coach’s antics had inspired in me. But I figured there was a point at which the desire to avoid any association with Coach Fitz might in itself become a maladaptive goal to which I could become enthralled. I reassured Morgan that we would make up for the absence of stair sprints in our next session, thanked him for the nectarine and asked whether he needed a lift anywhere. I might retrace our steps for the writing task, and then get Dad to come get me, he said, a response that provoked further speculation about how I could arrange a meeting with more members of the family.
Morgan Opens Up
After our next morning run in Centennial Park Morgan suggested we stop for a quick coffee in the café there. He insisted on taking a short detour past a large, sinewy Moreton Bay fig with particularly cavernous buttress roots. When we got to the tree Morgan reached his hand up into one of the recesses in the truck and pulled out a small, slightly roughed-up black leather book. He made no reference to it at all and we continued on to the café.
Morgan ordered an apple crumble and a black coffee with milk on the side, and I had a flat white with a slice of banana bread. I made an effort to ensure I was particularly friendly, perhaps even to the degree of subservience, when engaging with the waitstaff, due to my paranoia that I show any resemblance to Coach Fitz.
We perched ourselves on the bar stools at the ledge window next to a stack of old magazines, which Morgan kept leafing through distractedly. For some reason I found this oddly unsettling and I felt compelled to change the ambience between us by engaging him in some kind of game. I began to read out the headlines, hoping to relax us both: ‘The End: Nicole’s Heartache Over Claims Keith Has Secrets’, ‘Double Joy’, ‘The Miracle Baby Healing My Heart’, ‘Grecian Heights’, ‘Wild Pets’, ‘Yes, We’re in Love Again’, ‘The New Food Revolution’. It feels like we’re in the bow of a ship, said Morgan, rocking back on his stool. There’ll be fog on the shore tonight, boatswain, I said, adopting an antiquated intonation and saluting the view from our perch.
Together we looked out over the park, where the characteristic mixture of kinetic activity settled the mood somewhat. A gust of wind caught one of the newspapers and I leapt up from my seat to chase it out into the park. When I returned I saw that Morgan had left his diary on the bench in front of my seat. I looked at him and wondere
d whether he looked more like his mother or father, both of whom were coming to occupy increasingly large places in my imaginings, despite having no clear and distinct visual information regarding their appearance. I tried to convey to Morgan that I had seen the journal but remained unsure of what it was or what to do with it. As I was about to ask, he said, Okay, sorry, look, I’ve got to go. You can have my food. Sorry, but let’s run again next week. He picked up his hat, pulled it down hard over his head, and began his jog home while still in the café.
I sat there in his absence, mind racing due to the double dose of caffeine, and imagined myself at once an important and yet still illegitimate consul adopted by the family. I picked up Morgan’s journal and gauged its weight in my hand. I felt I needed to be in its presence for a while before I could open it up.
At the Farm
In late January every year I observed the tradition of returning to my family’s farm in the central west of New South Wales. I had two weeks before school went back and the window-washing season began. During that time of year my mum’s vegetable patch was particularly fecund, producing an almost burdensome harvest of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis and melons, while in the orchard figs, grapes, and white and yellow peaches were usually in abundance. I was sure to live out the image that I had nurtured in my mind throughout the year, of picking a warm peach or fig from the tree and eating it in the sunshine. This extended period of feasting and recollection would, I hoped, restore any mineral and emotional resources that may have been taxed while I went about my activities in the city.
Next to me in the car while I drove to the farm was Morgan’s black diary, an item of greater promise than the Best Bets or Tuesday’s Good Living liftout. I had vague but unshakeable intentions about the appropriate atmospheric conditions for reading the book and decided there would be no better place than the bedroom in my family home, a place where I had undergone my own inner battles with the way I imagined myself to appear to others, and with what I felt I needed to do to alter and transcend such conceptions. I speculated about whether it would contain similar prose to that in my own adolescent journals, which, upon reviewing them in later years, seemed typified by the pervasive sense both of anxiety and hope, and I wondered about the extent to which Morgan’s writing would allow me to melancholically reinhabit my time with Alex or, by contrast, whether it would offer an unforeseen perspective on the world, mediated through language.
As well as taking Morgan’s journal with me, this trip would be different due to my new and more expansive approach to distance running. Where previously my runs on the farm were confined to a nine-kilometre track known as the laneway circuit, now, due to my hunger for kilometres, I would need to run the same route repeatedly, seek out additions to the existing circuit, or create an entirely new route.
I left Sydney very early so I would beat peak-hour traffic and drive with the sun at my back. The route through the Blue Mountains typically involved a short pit stop in Blackheath where I would refuel with a treat from a bakery I liked and a strong coffee.
Blackheath was a cold and miserable little island of winter, despite Sydney being muggy and hot when I left. I spent some time leafing through a Good Living I’d saved from late last year to tide me over during the summer months, when an inadequate holiday feature replaced it. Durack was in Bondi, mincing it up in a new Italian-Japanese-Nordic fusion restaurant. It was one of his better reviews. A nice through-line in the piece created a sense of humour and coherence. Sadly, the Kitchen Spy section was missing – it seemed to be less of a regular feature these days – but Richard Cornish was still responding to ‘vexing culinary questions’ in his informative, often funny column, and Huon Hooke identified various wines in bottle shops around the city, some of which I hoped to locate on my return. The Bargain of the Week, identified as being for sale in the Summer Hill Wine Shop, looked well within my grasp. Perhaps in the near future I would go there to buy it for a picnic on a grassy slope overlooking part of the harbour or a beach. I would pair the wine with some sharp yet creamy, complex-smelling cheese, grassy olive oil and moist, fluffy bread.
The heat and blue sky returned as I descended the mountains to Lithgow, then to Bathurst and Orange. The grass this year was longer and despite the dry weather seemingly more robust than in recent summers. Water had pooled to form light-catching dams in hollows that typically remained hidden. I pulled over at a service station just outside Bathurst to refuel, and endured an internal debate over whether I should get cola and chips to really make it feel like a road trip. My concession to the temptation was a mineral water and mixed nuts which I’d almost finished before pulling out onto the highway.
As I entered the home stretch of my trip from Orange to Molong, I fished out a CD from deep within the glove box of the Odyssey, a greasy, smudged, heavily scratched thing marked with my own scrawled hand: CD God put in my car to remind me of the embarrassments of my youth. I had a rough idea of the track list and after persisting through some of the skipping in the earlier songs, settled on the soundtrack to Gladiator, which immediately stirred a series of composite yet seamlessly interwoven visions sculpted in part from the movie, in part from my own re-imaginings of the movie as a youth, and the adaptation of those older imaginings to my current emotional states. The important parts of the scene were a field of blond grass of roughly waist height, and a hand, my hand, brushing through this grass: there was a party coming up, a party on the horizon, and my wanderings were in some nearby but connected time or space. I remembered the other times I’d driven this route, either returning home filled with romantic possibilities freshly scraped from late evenings with friends and night wanderers, or travelling in the other direction, on my return to Sydney, restored and with certain visions nurtured to such a degree that they no longer resembled anything that would mesh with the reality that awaited me in the city.
The process of arriving at my family home followed a rhythm of intricate sensory triggers and reassurances. There was the slowing of the car along the drive and my apprehensive inspection from a distance of the garden, a landmark of clustered green amid the dry paddocks. I felt the shudder of the vehicle as it crossed the cattle ramp and the gentle sweep of the road as it curved past the carob bushes and deodars, where I’d constructed elaborate cubby houses as a child, where piles of limestone rocks lay to denote the graves of dead sheepdogs and where I’d hidden precious bottles of stolen beer in the dirt to drink with high school friends on moonlit walks through the paddocks. As the vehicle rounded the final bend, I would look to see if any dogs had been alerted by the sound of the vehicle, in which case they would appear, at first concerned, then excited by the presence of familiar company.
I parked the car and as soon as I opened the door our pet labrador Larras flooded the interior with his exuberance. I made a knowingly feeble attempt to placate him as I collected my various possessions from the vehicle and entered the house through the creaking flyscreen door. It wasn’t until I left home that its smell had become explicit to me, like an elusive signature as immersive and emotional in its impact as a favoured song.
I shed my shoes and bags before entering the relative cool and dark of the kitchen, where Mum and Dad were waiting at the table to greet me. We chatted about the length of the journey, traffic in certain segments, weather transitions and pit stops. After tea and cake, my mum told me I was like a cat on a hot tin roof, unable to sit still and eat, preferring to repeatedly inspect the contents of fridge and pantry as I had done since my adolescent days. I knew a dose of vigorous exercise with my favourite ‘squat rock’ down on the tennis court would be required to settle my restlessness. I put the finishing touches on the unpacking process, changed into lighter clothes and made my way down to the far corner of the yard, to the entrance of the court, enjoying the gentle pop of scattered acorns in the lawn under my feet.
The tennis court had been a multipurpose recreational space throughout my growing up. Its flat, hard surface provided the rare predictability requ
ired to generate equitability in ball games like cricket, tennis and basketball. Years of neglect had done little to reduce the performative energy of the place. Although the clay surface was now scabbed over with dark mosses, stray dents and tufts of weed, I still experienced a sense of occasion as I surveyed the open, level space. My rock lay in a shaded area off to the side of the court. A large limestone lump I’d poached from a stack Dad had collected from the paddocks and stowed near the house for his various projects building dry-stone walls and paths. Its surface had been warmed by the sun and as I turned it over with a foot, spiders and ants scurried for cover among cracks and nearby leaves. When I picked it up and clutched it to my chest the heat was just on the verge of burning and its rougher parts grazed the softer skin underneath my arms. I used the horizontal wires in the fence as a line of sight and began the first of four circuits built around squats, with the rock as the key fatigue-inducing element.
At the end of the session I lay on the ground and followed the veining of the oak tree branches that extended out over the court. I reflected on my studious efforts over the years perfecting the accuracy of various projectiles or channelling blood flow to particular muscles so my body took the form I desired. I found the time to subject my body to the rigours of push-ups, chin-ups and abdominal exercises even on days when farm work extended from dawn to dusk and when the cold, wet winter evenings gave the warm fire in the lounge room immense appeal. The exercises had become an end in themselves, but an end which built resilience and allowed me to experience for the first time the delights of outdoor gyms, and to flex with a sense of pride and restrained grace like a large cat might in the sun before a hunt on the savannah.
The night of my return my mum made a salad filled with zesty dark-green leaves, some of which were hardy and rough enough to graze my tongue, others soft and fat, things that exuded a silky, clear sap when they tore; others made a crunching sound so loud it was difficult eat without being self-conscious. All of it was delicious. This was paired with a generous helping of chilli-and-garlic pasta I made with oily, fragrant garlic, early-season tomatoes, generous glugs of olive oil, shaved parmesan, herbs and fresh chillies. We retold shared stories about visitors finding slugs in their salad, the time my paternal grandfather happily ate a maggot-riddled peach, and the slippery, moist shock of a banjo frog nestled underground that Mum experienced when digging potatoes. Then came stories about the dogs, an entire archive of memories about our lives with these beings, both clearly recollected and vague, in tones of nostalgia and amusement. Stories of dogs eating socks, entire flocks of chickens, of the dogs who were best for the paddock and best for the yard, of the progress of young dogs, of lazy, stubborn and disobedient dogs, of brave, tireless and greedy dogs, of Dad’s catastrophic failure at the sheepdog trials, of Jack, Blister, Spark, Coke, Tup, Hellie, Cyril, Frank, Patch, Larras, Slim, Percy, Pikelet, Noodle, Monty, Zac, and how their lives measured our own.
