Coach Fitz

by Tom Lee

  After washing up I spent close to an hour on my back in the sunroom looking at the ceiling fan while Mum and Dad watched a picturesque murder mystery on the television. I took a cup of tea to my bedroom on the other side of the house and prepared an environment appropriate for focused reading, lighting a few candles, getting into comfortable clothes, and ensuring my phone was beyond reach.

  There was still a little light left outside. I could hear a sprinkler and the ricocheting sounds of crickets and frogs around the garden. I began reading. In addition to making sense of the content, my mind worked to assess the particular qualities of the writing. While resoundingly peculiar, unlike in my own cringe-worthy adolescent writing there was little to be embarrassed about in Morgan’s journal. A combination of mild trepidation at my own comparatively limited intellectual abilities and a deeper sense of pride at having a subject of such quality were the dominant feelings that coloured my experience of reading.

  Sometimes I was convinced the prose was exemplary of a stereotypical late-adolescent mind. However, after lulling me into a sense of knowing, it would offer a profound surprise, some insight of magnitude or flexing of the imagination that made me question the powers of my own mind.

  Often the entries would begin by tracing over a piece of mundane information, about the weather or a daily event for instance, which would then be immediately shattered and rearranged by the use of a peculiar metaphor: ‘Why did it nearly bring me to tears when I heard how a seventeen-year-old boy punched out a man for pushing his father through glass? It’s not something I’d expect myself to be emotional about. But that’s it, we can’t second-guess the directions of our feelings accurately, and when we do it’s a very lukewarm form of achievement, decomplicating oneself, kind of like buying a meal and heating it up.’

  I composed my own lines of review in response to Morgan’s entries, noting that his writing featured sporadic efforts to sabotage the banal with imaginative exuberance, bathos, whimsy and random fictionalisation. I told him that what sometimes seemed like the awkward, hopped-up, pop-philosophical acrobatics of an undergraduate morphed into third-person perspectives on scenes that evolved a new way of looking at things. I would be sure to provide an example: ‘A day of patchy winds and white grease-stained paper bags. A group of sparrows have just descended on the elm and I immediately thought of the fungi I had been thinking about earlier. Just as a piano key is struck, the china cups are collected and the breakfast things are put away, it is now time for lunch, or will be after a short break, where we might discuss things such as relationship status, dirty laundry, group politics, etc. Women walk across the square, a child waves his red sleeve and from above we see water burst from the fountain. I restore my gloves and continue to scratch the arch of my foot, it’s white like wet meat on a rock. It felt like rain all day but the tables remain clear and dry. Why do I visit the exhibition so I can go to the bathroom? Why does my hand now feel like glass?’

  Other entries tempted me to place the location: ‘Slate gravestones, leaning pines, stone-fruit trees, zebra crossings, garden beds filled with pebbles, a red car, wooden window shutter, rust on white paint, the sound of the bus changing gears, an almost erotic type of empathy arises.’ Meditations of this kind were interspersed with occasional quips of resounding insight, such as, ‘Losing one sandal is as good as losing two,’ ‘So often it is a replenishing gesture to pretend you are crucified to the lawn,’ or a particular observation that opened up a new way of regarding a familiar scene: ‘Stop wearing my shorts, yells a man from his car. Kites hollow out invisible tubes in the air. The grass shakes. People carry chairs along the concrete path.’

  Some entries featured an effort to plumb the depths of perceptual experience. For example, starting out by noting a blister on his lip and a perverse sense of contentment, Morgan would then confess how profoundly bored he was, ‘so sick of the patterns of my mind’, and then follow this internal observation of mood with a speculative account about the relationship between the potential and the actual, framed, as was often the case, by a meteorological observation: ‘It’s been a muggy day but the sun seems about to burst through the clouds. There is always an alternative on the horizon, or even just next to you, but the alternative never exists, it haunts our existence. What we come to remember as our existence is also an alternative, its privilege is only provisional. We sparkle with the pressure of near alternatives. Not to forget that our existence as it is, is no less privileged because of its provisional nature, and herein lies the difficulty.’

  Here and there I would get the sense of romantic sentiments. However, these seemed to unearth fantasies that were at once eccentric and yet somehow more truthful than what is expressed in the familiar grinding of narrative. ‘Just another day. Drizzle during what I saw of the morning, then, after a massive shopping trip, sun! Have found a nice patch of grass to sit on and my gut is full of baguette. Oh, a little green bug has landed on my page and I’ve decided not to squash it. I live in the forest with people who think themselves ninjas, but I don’t talk to them, to me they sound like a power drill. One day I will be having cordial under the elm tree with the woman of my dreams and I will think directly back to this moment as if it were a coin I’d happened upon in the grass. She will wear a tasselled cloak and give me chronic gut pains from laughter. She will like snacks and will be mature only to the extent that I’m comforted by her during sickness.’ Or, ‘So desperately do I want to follow boys around and dress them up as wizards, to see which ones look the best, see which ones dig their elbows into their sides as they sip on cocktails and scoff shoestring potato chips. Where is your wetsuit? one might say, to which I’d reply, I left it in the car park with my slippers.’

  In addition to this youthful imaginative flair, Morgan would include laconic snapshots of closely observed detail, of public life and character as suggested by dress, posture and facial features, ‘A light shower. A café courtyard. Broken pieces of glass wedged in bricks. Bent thatch fences. Old blonde woman.’ Or, ‘Man fixing camera, woman talking about holiday.’ On other occasions these observations would be warped through subtle perspectival trickery, ‘Man in a pink polo shirt attempts the listening test supported by a delicate hand. Meanwhile, a jealous onlooker is created.’

  He seemed to have a deep sensitivity to the expressive possibility of forms, as though sometimes bodies and thoughts were characterised by a similar mutability and dynamism: ‘When we detach our bodies wobble.’ ‘My face melts into a frown and then freezes. Waves play games with the shore.’

  Among my favourite sections were a series of observations I couldn’t help imagining took place at a campsite or on a holiday of some sort: ‘Six more tins of tuna hidden behind the toy trains. We can’t profit off it, seeing a fence-post glitch underwater in the credits. Cool ham on your dinner plate, jars of ketchup on the table. Everybody comes in different shapes and sizes, some with dreadies n’stuff, some really smart guys. I’m already looking forward to the stories, Wednesday’s carbonara on the front of my t-shirt, shoes filled with dust all over the mat, showers at odd times to get the best of the hot water. A half-full bottle of cordial is next to the tent. Tonight we’ll do dinner early, it might be my last night here. I rub the balls of my feet on the coarse surface of a skateboard, think about tearing strips of cloth from a sheet and draping it over a brown collarbone. Where is the mustard? Wind in the bamboo makes everybody’s teeth appear white.’

  Much of the writing was animated by a desire and a sense of play, as though Morgan were scrupulously observing the way his body and the environment became the material for feelings: ‘The question is of where, at certain moments, my desire is directed: not directly at you, not quite at what it is you lie on either, but at both. At the chipped white and grey stones that are scattered underneath your chest and your elbows, at the cold leaking clouds, at the melted plastic on which you rest your skull. A blue triangular flag points to nowhere, someone’s voice arrives slowly but loudly as if it were edging its
way out of a packet. The tips of my fingers taste sour. I’ve been cutting lemon and rubbing chicken with lemon and oil. There is a square with another square cut from its middle. It’s a table and we all sit around it with our hats on. I take an ant from my finger and throw it to the clay surface of the tennis court. We each take a sip from our glasses at the same time and agree that we must stay here in the corner, underneath the shade of the oak tree. Gumnuts crackle under our feet as we shift them with excitement. A group between the bushes walks down a grassy slope, disappears, then traces the same path back upwards. Behind them blue sky brings the smell and taste of soggy chips and Sunday radio.’

  I read Morgan’s journal every night in the silence of my room, each night lifting it from its resting position on the old piano stool I used as a bedside table. I heard his voice bubble with exuberance, awkwardness and surprise. I amused myself copying out random fragments and letting them form scenes in my mind: ‘Cold spirals of tomato pasta, half-eaten packets of corn chips, the folding and smoothing out of water. Stray arms of blackberry bushes, ornamental olive trees. Three men talk energetically beside me. I see myself disfigured in their eyes…A small woman in a pressed brown dress…I have once again found myself in a very close and perhaps restricting relationship with a park, feeling great about the word “tract”…Calm blocks of understanding. A coffee cup filled with orange peel.’

  Certain parts provoked an irresistible forensic urge because they seemed more obviously autobiographical: ‘As the diary reaches its closing stages I feel a pervasive sense of illness incorporated into all that I’m connected to. I feel wretched and parasitic, but at the same time extraordinary, decisive and vague. In short I feel nothing but contradictory impulses as though my moods were scanned into language.’

  Each time Morgan tempted me to feel pity for him, some insight or sense that he had an excellent grip on his own feelings would reassure me that my worries were misplaced. In fact, reading his journal left me with a kind of ideal image, not unlike the one I had initially formed of Coach Fitz, but in this instance, perhaps because of the form through which the exchange of character had taken place, there was a sense of vulnerability built into my conception of his character that I felt confident would, paradoxically, make it more enduring.

  I thought it unlikely that anyone else in Morgan’s family had seen the journal, and became convinced that my role as a coach was to provide an additional modicum of security, so that the voice which became manifest in the writing would come into its own in the world. My feelings for Morgan were complicated by a growing sense of esteem and what I had started to admit to myself was a not entirely charitable curiosity, sustained from and hungering for more privileged information, greater access to his inner life and family.

  Farm Run

  After completing what I now saw as a relatively unambitious warm-up run on a Wednesday morning of around twelve kilometres, on the following Friday I decided to attempt a route I now called Pye’s Track and Double Circuit, the combination of a new route (Pye’s Track) and the doubling of the laneway circuit that had previously sated my desires for distance. In total the run would be around twenty-six kilometres.

  On most days during summer on the farm, the period from six to eight in the early morning is the best time to run. At that stage of the day, a blanket of cool from the night still rests upon the paddocks, and the orange, yellow, purple and grey gravels that line the roads melt softly with the morning sky. At many stages of the run gauntlets of chatty birds perform their morning song and herds of curious young cattle bundle alongside before peeling off due to some unknown agency, tossing their heads and returning to the middle of the herd to seek out water or the shade of a tree.

  The day I’d marked out for my longer run was overcast, relatively cool and threatening to rain. I delayed my starting time until much later than usual, around ten, and set off, placing a fig, two peaches and a bottle of water on a fence post near the homestead that I would pass after completing Pye’s Track and the first of the two circuits.

  Most of the run was on gravel roads, crossing private or public land. The first leg took me through the sparse hills near the farm, past an old quarry and a peculiarly shaped dam nestled in a valley on the land that once belonged to a man named Pye. Occasional groupings of foreign trees, such as quinces, figs and poplars, suggested some prior settlement or place of rest for drovers on horseback.

  I hopped across a dry creek littered with saffron thistles and spinifex-like tufts of sharp grass that spiked my shins. I followed the creek down to the Bell River and took the tight road that fed between it and a steeply sloping hill, with the occasional sheer sandstone cliff to my left. This road led to a corrugated-iron pump house built by my grandfather. I recalled trips down to the river in my youth to observe Dad or my grandfather battling with the thing, a great, spluttering oily engine sitting a couple of metres below ground level, with violently spinning belts and nests of disturbed hornets and swallows usually making an escape or mounting an attack. Occasionally there’d be a snake coiled quietly among the pipes. The pump dragged water from the river to a couple of dams closer to our house, where another pair of pumps now sat distributing the water to other dams, troughs and tanks around the property.

  At the pump house I used the stile made of bent metal piping to clear the barbed-wire fence, and met with the more regularly serviced gravel road for a steady climb back up the hill line leading down to the river, a stretch that from a vehicle had always struck me as perilous, and then carried onwards to the public road. It started to rain lightly and I felt refreshed. I observed the hazy curtains of rain and the different fronts of cloud making their way above the undulations of dampened blond straw and patches of clustered gums in the distance. The feeling of extreme openness and shifting dynamics of the landscape had a paradoxical effect of focusing my energies inwards.

  I thought about cutting back up to the homestead for some supplies as I passed the driveway but as I felt reasonably spritely decided against it, and due to the cooling effect of the rain didn’t imagine I was losing much fluid. It would be nine kilometres before I reached the fence post with my fruit and water, and with eight kilometres under my belt I guessed that I should be able to manage.

  The rain became heavier on this stint of the run so I removed my floppy blue hat and wrapped it around my phone, which was already partially protected by the sheath of wetsuit material that I had used to fasten it to my upper arm. For the rest of the run I carried this increasingly wet package in my hand, continually speculating on whether the phone inside remained dry.

  I crossed the still mostly dry Red Creek at the concrete crossing and followed the road through a flaking huddle of impressive yellow box eucalypts that bordered the road as it led up to the old railway crossing and onwards to the junction with Larras Lee Road. At the junction I took a right and continued along the gravel as it cut through a densely treed sandstone ridge, a place known as The Gap. On the other side of the ridge, the roadside verges transitioned into expansive paddock-like fields studded with dense tufts of grass, among them phalaris, kangaroo grass, and what looked to be a kind of sedge or rush. A few willows attended the banks of a steep but usually dry creek that cut through the open, fenceless stretch of roadside land, and wooden beehives in faded green, pink and yellow were scattered through a thick stand of yellow box trees on its far slope. As was often the case a small herd of cattle was grazing there, and as I passed they briefly abandoned their continual munching to move in parallel with me for a while.

  The road climbed and then plateaued to an exposed stretch that I was glad to leave via a double gate back onto the private laneway that traversed our property. Here the road was less established, with much of the bare ground partially obscured by yellow burr and saffron thistle. I felt my spirits replenished as I was once again taken up into the land our family had grown accustomed to calling our own.

  I recalled a snake I’d seen coiled near the cracked concrete crossing at the base o
f a dead yellow box tree and the time I’d collected the tips of several Bathurst burrs in my legs while I was sprinting along trying to set a record for the laneway circuit. These had busied me for as long as a month after I had returned to Sydney and taken up residence in a temporarily vacant room at the bottom level of a terrace where my brother lived. One burr in particular, just above my right knee, proved particularly stubborn and resisted many of my attempts to coax it out with pressure or pin. It gradually reddened to a hard, aching lump before I resorted to a blade from my window-washing kit that we used to scrape paint from the glass. Whether it was the sharpness of the blade or the burr’s readiness to leave my flesh, it seemingly leapt out the moment I pressed the metal to my skin, surprising me in its length and leaving me with a deep sense of relief that I turned over and over in my mind for many days.