by Tom Lee
The thistle-strewn track zigzagged through another grouping of yellow box trees that marked out a dry gully and provided a sense of refuge in that otherwise bare expanse. The orange-brown clay of the track had become slick in the rain and I was forced to seek out the stable traction afforded by patches of grass running alongside the path, which made collision with a thistle more likely.
The gully represented the lowest point before the last climb up to the hill of Silo Stains, from where I would enjoy a steady downhill to my supplies perched on top of the post, which I had brought to mind often during the run and which I had begun to conceive of as a kind of sacrificial offering to the gods of athletics.
As I descended the hill a sudden and pronounced shift in the weather took place. The rain was hauled upwards into the fattening bright clouds, which spread to reveal decent tracts of blue sky, from which a hot sun beat down upon the wet clay. A buzzing of insect life began, with each of my steps a fraught attempt to pick out a relatively unoccupied patch of earth amid an animated profusion of ants, moths, bees and wasps that were emerging onto the track.
I reached the fence post at the homestead, drained the small bottle of water I had there, ate a peach and a fig on the spot and carried the other peach with me in my pocket. Part of me felt a tug to go back inside for more water but the rain which had accompanied the better part of my run so far had lulled me into a false sense of security and I thought I’d manage the last nine kilometres, the second loop of the circuit, without needing further liquid. I imagined the inadequate substitute of sucking on the cloth of my rain-soaked hat or deviating from the track to lick the fronds of wattle bushes on the hill.
I unwrapped my phone and hooked my earphones into the base, selecting the playlist I’d been compiling specifically for the final stretches of a long run such as this. The effect of the music was immediate and intense. The pain from the aches in my muscles and the blisters on my toes faded out to nothing and for a while I continued on in a pellucid, weightless ambience as though my body had been dissolved in the sound. Buoyed by this change, I increased my speed for what must have been three kilometres before the music lost its efficacy and began to irritate me and I pressed stop. I was now left to complete the final six kilometres, from The Gap to home, in the heavy, hot air, without any water, utterly drained of enthusiasm and forced to conduct a continuing battle with a familiar voice tempting me to walk the last stretch.
The weight of the air, the sense that I was now carrying rather than being transported by a pain-ridden body, the increasing number of thistles embedded in my skin and the maddening amount of insect activity on the ground all combined to make me feel as though I was being harassed out of the landscape like some kind of encroaching villain.
I reached the house, fumbling desperately with gate latches, then shoelaces and clothes once I was inside. I stripped down to my underwear, fixed a large jug of lightly salted water and orange juice, and laid myself out on the carpet where my body seemed to function for a while like a fountain, sweat bubbling up through my skin and trickling in small rivulets down my sides.
Return of the Diary and a Story About a Dead Bird
Shortly after I returned to Sydney I met Morgan in Centennial Park, for a walk rather than a run. I took the unusual step of parking inside the grounds and met him at the corner of the raised playing fields near the underground water reservoir up on Oxford Street. It was twilight and the park a typical cacophony of parrot and bat sounds, the sky beginning to fill with winged creatures migrating against the pink and silver clouds to some secret festival in the direction of the horizon.
Morgan was waiting, facing west towards the sunset, still wearing his black broad-brim hat, fingers in the fence supporting his outstretched arms, hair catching the gusty but light breeze. I remembered Sarah Connor in a scene from Terminator 2, looking at a playground through a fence before everything burns due to a nuclear blast. Connor remained, shaking the fence even as the flesh burns from her body and she transforms into a skeleton.
I was harbouring this thought as I came up the grand old sandstone flight of stairs to the fields above where Morgan waited. I immediately realised that reading Morgan’s journal would have a difficult to express but important influence on the way I perceived him. I had an urge to find a language that would allow me to speak in a way adequate to the writing in his journal. However, my attempts to recall the voice in the writing, and apply this to shared reference points in the landscape and our brief history together, was short-lived. As I handed over the journal I reverted to my preference for the prosaic, which, since reading Morgan’s journal, I had increasingly come to see as mediating my relations with people and the manifestation of my character in their perception.
Was some of this written at a camp? I asked crudely. Some, he said. Some of it is very good, I said. Very alive. It’s the kind of writing that captures how I felt once, though made strange by you. I wanted to add: I’m glad this shared knowledge of your past now exists as a binding force between us. Instead we looked in silence at the flows of birds and bats against the glowing sky. I imagined a soundtrack to our lives playing while the taller buildings in the distance towards Mascot exploded, vanishing into an abyss.
In a way that was barely apparent to me at the time, I substituted the urge to draw Morgan into an intimate dialogue through the shared language of his journal with the form of thought that seemed most immediately available to me: a training plan for the future. The next few months will involve some of our most intense periods of training, I said. First, we will increase the quantity of training and focus on strength, then we must aim to hone this fecund background into a foreground of increasingly high-quality training, before reducing the workload so our muscles can rest and rebuild before the race. Morgan nodded. The future is ours to conquer, he said, and I imagined the words carved into a wooden bench in the desert.
We walked together in the forest of Sydney blue gums just below the field, picking our way through the exposed roots, following a path selected randomly from the network of dirt trails. When we saw a willie wagtail pecking at the grass where the forest opened up to fields, Morgan mentioned that his dad, an avid birdwatcher, told him this species was in decline in the Sydney region and rarely seen in the north-eastern parts of the park anymore.
I observed the bird. It moved in exuberant puffs, swivelling and fanning its tail as though expelling a surplus of energy obtained from some unseen source. I decided to share a shameful story with Morgan, perhaps as a gesture of allegiance provoked by the sharing of the journal. For a period of what must have been two or so years, I began, I took to making slingshots from forked branches, squares of leather and rubber bands. I would usually seek out birds that had been identified as pests, such as sparrows and crows. On one of my missions I must have been feeling particularly belligerent and dispirited so that when I discovered a wagtail and its little spherical nest on a row of metal pipes out the back of the shed, I decided I could assuage my boredom by harassing it. I stood there at a sporting distance and must have fired twenty or more shots. More or less on autopilot, I would retrieve a stone from the ground at my feet, load it into the leather pouch and send the thing whizzing towards the increasingly agitated bird. I remember the details so clearly, I said to Morgan. I even remember the size and shape of the rock that would make the inevitable kill: a flatter stone that I would have rejected in more discriminating moments. The odd shape of the stone resulted in a shot that first swung out, away from the target, before curving back in to strike the bird on its side. It fell from its perch and spasmed in the dirt for a while before lying still.
I suspected Morgan might be taken aback by this admission of violence as we continued to watch the acrobatics of the live wagtail. I reassured him that the death of the bird was something like an apocalypse. As soon as I had made the transgression, everything changed. I was immediately confronted by a surge of regret and a pathetic, belated reverence for the bird. I took its dead body and buried
it beneath a tree, marking the grave with a limestone rock and some of my own blood.
Have you killed any birds since, asked Morgan, to which I found myself having to lie because of one other, similarly shameful occasion in my later adolescence, when I killed a noisy miner which had got caught in a house using a hard-bristled wooden broom.
While we looped back up the gently sloping road to my car, I pondered the centrality of birds to my youth and my current experience of the city. They were everywhere, pervasive enough to become unimportant. They were a reliable enough presence to be something like pets and yet the transience and unpredictability that defined our relationships with them was something pet owners wouldn’t tolerate. Imagine life without them, I said to Morgan, without their song and their endearingly persistent efforts to adapt to the peculiarities of the city.
I asked Morgan whether his dad would be interested in meeting to share some of his knowledge about birds. I’ll ask, he said, before bidding me farewell at the base of the steps near where we’d met. Shall we hit the soft sands on Saturday and then complete our long runs on Sunday? I suggested. Morgan waved back in what I interpreted as agreement, and I wandered along the road above the blue gums to the Odyssey, planning out the week’s training, trying to picture the face of Morgan’s dad within Morgan and Alex, and wondering when I would see my next willie wagtail.
That night, when I returned to my room, I thought I ought to see what Alex was up to on Strava. Since reading Morgan’s journal, and setting in motion the first steps to meet other members of Alex’s family so as to observe their phenotypical relatedness and share in the general effervescence of their group behaviour, I had the lingering feeling my activity was likely to provoke curiosity, even concern, from her perspective. A trait of mine, of which I had only a distant inkling, was a certain obliviousness to distinctions between what was and wasn’t appropriate in making social connections. While deep down I knew Alex would find my networking with her family perverse, I managed to convince myself that it was a natural thing to do and that she might even see it as endearing. In truth I was split by multiple contrasting sentiments: a vicarious urge to surround myself with prosthetic extensions that emerged from the desire of past romance and the romance of the past; an urge to realise my vocational ideal of coaching and improve Morgan’s prospects as a runner and a human being; and one to continue the ongoing project of my own self-improvement by renewing bad memories with more positive, contemporary associations.
Alex had added a new run to her repertoire: a loop including the Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill, two further locations which I reprimanded myself for not having visited during my time in the city. I imagined myself in London in the summer through a combination of references to landscape in a documentary about Amy Winehouse and my own limited memories of parks in the city. I wondered whether I should pre-empt Alex discovering my activities by writing her a short note, but decided this might be interpreted as a gesture consistent with perverse behaviour, and resolved to resist the temptation and wait until Alex inquired about her brother. Based on Morgan’s verbal reticence with me, I thought it likely that Alex’s curiosity in his training, should it exist, would have to be sustained by a diet of ‘good’, ‘it’s going well’, and similar expressions.
Morgan’s Dad and a Picnic at the Bronte Banksias
The plan for our Sunday morning run took the pleasingly predictable form of some repetitions of the Tamarama steps and running on the soft sand down at Bronte, followed by a picnic to meet Morgan’s dad and celebrate the closing down of summer.
I jogged across from my parking spot at Tamarama to Iggy’s bakery on Bronte Road, where the distinctive smell of milled grains baking wafted down the street. I splashed out and added a log of French butter and a wedge of parmesan to my order, complimenting the staff on the service they were offering to the city.
My Bronte days would be based either at the north or south end of the beach, depending on factors often not obvious to me. On south-side days I would lay out a towel on the small but steep grass slope, beneath one of the palm trees. From here I would make my forays into the water, choosing either the protected Bogey Hole if the swell was too messy, or the main part of the surf beach if the swell was more forgiving. On other days I would set up camp in one of the sheltered outdoor tables at the northern end. There were four tables to a shelter, each partitioned by weatherboard walls. I would lay out my goods on the table, depending on the winds and what was available, and eat breakfast or lunch with a vantage out over the beach and the ocean beyond.
After jogging back to my car, I decided it was a north-side day, only for some reason I thought the spattering of banksias on the grass further away from the beach might be the ideal location. I drove my car with its precious cargo of bread, butter and cheese to the two-hour parking at the northern end of Bronte before meeting Morgan down on the sand, where we left our towels for the post-run swim.
We completed twenty gruelling sets along the sand before it got too hot and bright for us to comfortably sustain much more. For the final two repetitions I suggested we run with a deliberately wide gait and lean back to engage our glutes as much as possible.
Morgan and I both agreed sand running placed its own peculiar demands on the body for which shorter steps and good form were essential. While taxing in its own way, I felt that I could sustain running on the soft sand for longer than runs on hard surfaces which required a similar degree of energy. As we jogged to Tamarama I told Morgan about an article I’d read which used the word ‘deep’ to characterise the kind of workout sand running afforded. A couple of other runners accompanied us in our masochistic activities on the stairs, both young women, both with iPods and hats. One was walking up and down the entire set of stairs without intermission. The other was completing sprint repetitions of the top section.
As was the tradition, I frequently commented on the great fortune of the shade provided by large overhanging trees and the variation in the different sections of stairs, which offered a distraction during each repetition.
I felt fleet-footed on the first couple of sections before the lactic acid set in midway through, leaving me doubled over and heaving for breath at the top, looking out over the gully and the ocean beyond, propping up my body on the rails of the white-painted wooden fence. Morgan followed me up each time, not far behind. Five today, I suggested, as we eased our way back down the stairs with the help of the rail, passing the sprinting girl on the first flight who was completing her reps with impressive rapidity, and further down, the walking girl, who while slower was no less relentless in applying herself to the task.
At the conclusion of the final rep Morgan and I shuffled our way along, back to Bronte Beach, barely at a pace you’d call running. A part of me was sad to leave our accomplices on the stairs and hoped that on future visits they might be there again, enjoying the shade, the steep and diverse stairs, and the dose of endorphins supplied by their bodies at the top of each flight.
We returned to our towels for a swim. As soon as I immersed my head in the water I was hit with a blur of barely graspable memories and imaginings, perhaps based on similar occasions when I’d dived into water. I often wondered whether it was my emotional consistency at the time, the temperature of the water, or other yet more obscure factors that determined which memories and imaginings were available to me during that sudden and impossible-to-predict phase change experienced when entering the wet.
After floating about for a sufficient amount of time, completing the twists and body-hugging routines I’d begun to perfect, Morgan and I headed back up the stairs to meet with his father, whom he’d instructed via text message to find us among the banksias at the north end of Bronte. We dawdled, scrupulously assessing the topography’s grass cover, shade and relative flatness. There were a few groupings of people scattered evenly near the trees, roughly one group per tree. It was as though each tree functioned as a kind of house, an instrument of comfort that at once demarcated space and offer
ed some kind of security.
I scanned the area and found an ideal spot on the edge of some shade. Another couple shared the same tree but they were on the other side, largely obscured by the trunk. Not far off a young girl, about four years old and wearing her mother’s sunglasses, sat on a bench singing, while her baby brother dug extensively in the sand, admiring the dirt as it fell through his fingers. We laid out our towels and I thought I’d hold off retrieving the picnic goods from my car until Morgan’s dad came to join us.
Morgan’s dad wore an outfit of different blues and a broad-brim hat. He introduced himself as Graham. I could see more of Alex’s face in his than Morgan’s, particularly when he squinted. However, his shy and eager-to-please demeanour was at odds with that of his daughter. He said he was keen to get some insight into the development of his son, whom he described as remarkably like his great auntie, a comparison I hoped that one day I would have the chance to confirm empirically. Graham had brought along a container of figs, a salad of cabbage and lettuce heavily laden with toasted pine nuts, and some smelly cheeses. The prospect of smearing these over my fresh bread was too much to resist and I excused myself to go to the Odyssey and grab the loaf, the smell of which had permeated the car.
Back on the picnic rug we happily observed the two children still playing near the bench. The girl, having seen us, was playing to the audience, while her brother continued his mission of dirt displacement with dedication and amazement. A short way down the slope, a particularly well-groomed man was posing for what I presumed to be a promotional video for a fitness institute of some sort. I checked out his thighs and calves for signs of his ability and couldn’t come to a conclusion as to whether he’d be a threat over ten kilometres.
