Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  ‘Does all that sound good to you?’

  ‘Sure, Dad.’

  ‘You’ll have to work at it. Are you ready to work?’

  The anemone started to unravel, and Connor jammed his finger into it, a little firmer this time. ‘Yeah, Dad. Of course.’

  This downturn wasn’t temporary – the primary industry had left town, and so had anyone who’d read the writing on the wall. Too late, Connor’s dad suggested moving to the city, where he might find work. He contacted a broker to talk about selling his home, only to find the market has collapsed. The irresistible creep of social mobility, which had scaffolded their home and sent property prices up year after year, had collapsed. Their house was now worth a fraction of the mortgage. They couldn’t afford to leave town.

  The longer Dad went without work, the more invested he became in Connor. He put pictures of Kieren Perkins up around the house wherever Connor’s eyes might rest. A framed poster of Perkins hung from Connor’s bedroom wall, the photo of him seconds after winning Olympic gold, water streaming down his chest, fist shooting up in victory. Another on the toilet wall where Perkins stared moodily into the camera, a brace of medals around his neck, his muscles lost in the bulky kitsch of his Team Australia tracksuit.

  On the wall of Connor’s bedroom, Dad had taped up a cutout growth chart of Perkins, and on the first day of each month Connor would patiently line up against it while Dad recorded his height.

  Dad spent more and more time at the RSL, where a bank of TVs showed horseracing, cricket, two types of rugby, and the betting odds on all of them. He found he had a knack for picking winners, and could spend a whole day nursing one or two beers, tuning out the mechanical gibbering of the pokies, concentrating on the warp and weft of luck. He bet conservatively – he might wait for days before making a choice, carefully laying down money on a spread calculated to bring a windfall, or at least cover his losses.

  On the days he landed a big win he came home happy, tipsy and giddy, kicking open the front door with armfuls of flowers for the missus, toys for the kid, a plastic bag of fluorescent takeaway from the pan-Asian restaurant that had sprung up through the cracks on the high street.

  On the day of the Melbourne Cup, with Connor in tow, he got festive, drank too much, and was goaded into taking a tip from one of the old men rusted onto the bar. He lay down money, far too much money – Connor knew it, knew that Dad knew it too, the second he walked away from the counter where he had placed the bet.

  As the horses took off, Connor felt the plunge of his stomach, the adrenaline shooting down his spine, right down into his bone marrow he felt the thrill of all that money being held in escrow by fate. He loved this feeling, felt he and Dad could have been the same person, an island of stillness in the middle of the RSL, this feeling of freefall, the anticipation of the win, the glory, the dread possibility of loss, and the troubling prospect that even that might feel good. Part of him wanted the loss, the purity of having nothing left to lose. Connor watched, felt the contact high of Dad pissing in the wind of fate.

  Dad went home that day with his sportscoat stuffed with handfuls of green and gold banknotes, and drunkenly showered them on his family like a ticker-tape parade. It was more money than he’d ever had at once in his life, enough to give up the mowing franchise, sell the house, start over again in a new town. A holiday was planned, on the spot – Bali, they’d never been, had always wanted to go. Now there was nothing holding them back. The next day the three of them applied for passports, neatly filled out the forms on the bench at the post office, used a gluestick to paste in the tiny photos they’d had taken at the chemist.

  It took three weeks for the passports to arrive, and by then all the money was gone, and more. There was a late payment on the mortgage, then another. To cover them, they sold Mum’s Barina, leaving only Dad’s ute, which he was adamant was more than enough for the family, although he was gone all day in it, leaving Mum trapped at home, watching television, smoking rollies.

  His parents fought bitterly, over money, over him. Connor hid in his room, headphones in, volume up to drown out the yelling, turning over the pristine blank pages of his passport, imagining what it would look like packed with stamps. All those pages, austere with potential, and the first page, all business. Place of birth: Newcastle. Date of expiry: five years in the future.

  Dad picked him after school, told him he had a surprise for him, wanted him to meet a friend of his. They drove to the pool, where his dad introduced him to a man, tall, beefy, muscles just starting to soften. He wore jeans and a sportscoat, the jacket hanging on him the way it does on a man who spends most of his time in a tracksuit. Around his neck dangled a stopwatch on a thick black cord. He introduced himself as Mr Arnold, a talent-search coordinator for the sports institute.

  ‘Your dad told me you like to swim?’ Mr Arnold’s voice was cheerful and sonorous, vowels as round and deep as a crater. Connor shook his hand, found it warm, dry and worn.

  All at once, he got it; his life had been building to this moment; the sun ricocheting off the pool, the Nirvana song echoing through the rec centre, the chlorine tang in the air, the hint of sea breeze under it. As he searched for the right thing to say his ears picked up every detail, the cry of the seagulls wheeling overhead, the lapping of waves from where a solitary swimmer turned laps in the slow lane. He caught his father’s eye, who gave him an encouraging nod.

  ‘Yes,’ Connor said, finally. ‘I like to swim.’

  ‘Your dad says you’re good.’

  Connor shrugged, and the man laughed, a good-natured, startling boom. ‘Modesty! Good man. I never was any good at modesty, if I do say so myself.’ He winked conspiratorially at Connor, clapped a hand on his shoulder that nearly sent him sprawling. ‘Let’s have a look and see just how good. Normally we’d want to watch you in a competition, but hell, we can do this right now, if you like?’

  From the diving block Connor measured the length of the pool, visualised the swim, breaststroke, fast as he could to the end of the lane. He was surprised to find he was not nervous, although Dad was, he could see him fidgeting in his peripheral vision. Connor put him out of his mind. Swimming was what he did, twice a day, every day. There was nobody he knew who was better than him. He had this in the bag.

  He crossed the length of pool in seconds – a broad breaststroke, carving the water beneath him like a slaughtered beast. He hit the far side even faster than he’d anticipated. When his fingers brushed the wall, he flipped onto his back, returned to the starting block with a leisurely backstroke.

  It was his worst stroke, one he never competed in, using it only to warm up and cool down, but he felt in his bones that this race was won. Overhead, the little flags fluttered from ropes strung over the pool, the same ones you saw at used car dealerships. He was still on his back when the window of sky above him was eclipsed by the pool wall, and he saw Dad grinning down, proud, and Mr Arnold, frowning at his stopwatch.

  There was silence on the car ride home. A storm was brewing, black clouds rolling in over the water, but the air was thicker than the humidity could explain. For the whole ride home there was no sound but the soft purr of the V6. The way Dad was driving terrified Connor – very carefully, with exaggerated consideration, giving way to every driver, shifting up and down gears gently, without the usual gleeful dumping of the clutch as he revved from first to third.

  Connor reached out to turn on the radio, but Dad switched it off again without a word, without a glance at him. The hot silence was unbearable, but something in Connor knew that breaking it would be even worse, so he waited, until they turned into their driveway.

  ‘You know what the problem with you is?’ Dad said. ‘You don’t understand what it means to work. Any of you kids. You don’t give a shit about anyone but yourselves.’

  Connor said nothing, just waited until Dad made a disgusted noise.

  ‘After everything I’ve sacrificed for you. You just had to fucking show off, didn’t you? You had to
do your fucking backstroke. What the fuck is wrong with you?’ He opened the door, slammed it behind him, stormed up to the front door. Connor followed and found him at the fridge, getting out a beer. He skolled one, tossed it into the bin, took another and skolled half again, then stalked past Connor into the lounge room.

  Later that evening, he apologised, sort of. ‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ he said, the vowels soft with booze. ‘Those AIS guys are kiddie-fiddlers, down to the last one. You’re better off without them.’

  The storm was a sullen, late summer one – the kind that brought the promise of winter with it. Dark and low, the cloud cover ushered twilight in early and hung on all through the night, finally breaking just before dawn. Connor slept with the window open against the heat and, when the storm front arrived, the wind and lightning woke him, rattled the venetians and his eyelids, and he was wide awake before the first rumble of thunder came, seconds later.

  He sat up groggily, gathered himself, dressed for the pool with his Speedos under his fleece tracksuit. The kitchen – where Dad would usually be, making instant coffee by the light of the open fridge – was dark. Connor found him on the couch, curled up under a blanket, and shook him gently.

  ‘Connor!’ Dad rasped. His eyes came into focus from a great distance, rolled about the room, unseeing. ‘No swimming this morning, buddy. The lightning. Jump in the pool and you’ll be deep fried, mate.’ He rolled over and went back to sleep.

  By afternoon, the lightning had stopped. The sticky tropical storm had retired into a steady downpour, and Dad judged it safe to swim. The water fell in sheets, whipped sideways and into his eyes by icy winds from the sea. Standing poolside, Connor shimmied out of his tracksuit, handed it to his dad, who stashed it safely in his backpack.

  He dived in with relish; had always loved the feeling of swimming while rain poured overhead, the chicanery of warm pool water against the skin while the air above was cruel. Connor drew great pleasure from it, and no small amount of self-satisfaction from seeing his dad slumped miserably in the kiosk, hungover and only half-protected by a flimsy shade-cloth. Dad had forgotten to bring a coat, or an umbrella, and after twenty minutes of stamping his feet and rubbing his hands together, he walked over to the pool and called out to Connor that he was ducking out for a minute.

  ‘You keep swimming, buddy!’ he called out. ‘I’ve got to see a man about a dog.’

  Connor rested by the side of the pool and watched Dad’s ute as it whipped around the carpark, headlights on against the gloom, and headed back towards town.

  The weather meant the pool was empty, not even a lifeguard on duty. Connor abandoned his regimen of sprint training in favour of leisurely laps – kicking back with a pace that was, almost, but not quite, a rebellion. He grew bored and started to amuse himself by trying to navigate the length of the pool underwater. After bombing out a couple of times and coming up gasping, he made it on his third try and came to a rest, satisfied. Dad had not returned. He went back and did another set, timing himself with one-mickey-mouses.

  An hour passed, then another. His fingers and toes grew wrinkled, then so pruned that Connor felt a little ill when he looked at them.

  The pleasant ache in his muscles built, faded, and he started to cramp. There was too much lactic acid built up for him to keep swimming, he knew, and he didn’t want to damage his muscles, but at the same time, moments after he’d come out of the water, the chill had crept in. He hadn’t noticed while he’d been in the water, but it had grown a lot colder. He thought of a trip to Queensland years back, how his uncle killed cane toads by wrapping them in plastic and putting them in the freezer: ‘They just go right to sleep. They don’t even know they’re dead!’ He started to shiver.

  The manager escorted him to the front gate and locked it behind them. They stood together for a moment under the concrete awning, watching the rain coming down. She looked at her watch, looked at Connor, frowned.

  ‘Your dad’s coming right back, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. He’ll just be a minute.’

  ‘You sure? You need to use my phone or anything?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Connor said. ‘Nah. Ta, but. He’s just at the store or something.’

  He watched her Pintara wagon trundle out of the carpark and felt a pang, regretted his lie. He didn’t have a clue where Dad was. His shoes and tracksuit were safe at the bottom of Dad’s bag, so he was naked but for Speedos, shivering until his teeth started chattering.

  It dawned on him that Dad was not coming back. He was torn; the only way home was on foot, but that would be impossible. He knew the route well enough, but the walk was long and would take him down the high street. That would be suicide – he had few friends at school already, and had only managed to survive by staying under the radar of bullies. To parade through the middle of town basically naked, crying – as he was appalled to find himself doing – would humiliate him, and, worse, his dad. He understood enough of the world to know the kind of talk it would inspire, the questions that people would ask about Dad behind his back. The recrimination of the town would be funnelled through Dad, into pure invective, and finally into Connor. In the end, this would be Connor’s fault.

  He decided on another route, one which took him through the park and along unsealed paths he was certain would be deserted in the downpour. It was a longer walk, but it would save him the judgement of the town. Shivering, naked, he set off.

  It was a mistake. The gravel paths – delightful when being crunched on in a pair of sneakers – chewed up his feet, already tender from the pool. When the first blood appeared he gritted his teeth and continued; soon his soles were shredded. Every so often he stopped to check his feet, growing more and more dismayed. He had stopped shivering and his head felt heavy. Both were bad signs, he knew. Several times he forgot where was going, had to stop and concentrate to remember the way home.

  He made it onto a paved road, luxurious under his minced feet. He was not far from home now, just around the bend and then a straight shot for a kilometre or so. The rain was coming down so hard he could almost swim home, wished he could. He would be able to close the distance in minutes. He laughed at the idea and then blanched – headlights flooded the road ahead of him, rounding the bend.

  He turned, away from home and the oncoming lights, broke into a panicked run, made it only a few steps before a new dread hit him with painful clarity, realising what it would look like to whoever was driving, to be running practically naked and barefoot through the suburbs in the rain. With as much dignity as he could muster through heaving sobs, he turned back. The headlights kept the car in silhouette as they raked over him, dazzled him, so he heard, rather than saw, the car pull up next to him. The window rolled down.

  ‘Connor? Is that you, mate?’

  Skippy was climbing out of the car, jaw tight with concern, eyes so wide Connor could see the whites all the way around, even in the dark. He wanted to know what happened and Connor was scrambling, stuttering, fighting through the tears to deliver an excuse that would make sense, one that could not be easily seen through or fact checked – that Dad was called away for a job at the last minute, had been in a car accident, whatever. He got halfway through the first story, which changed into the second midstream, and finally hacked out something about his bag being stolen at the pool.

  He saw that he had convinced nobody. Skippy grimaced and his wife, Anna, leaned across the steering wheel from the passenger seat, her face softened by the dashboard lights, wincing as though someone had pricked her. She opened her own door, emerged holding a picnic blanket. In three steps she was next to him and wrapped the blanket around him, her arms brushing his shoulders. Connor surprised her, and himself, by clutching tight to her, the feeling of her bare arms around his frozen shoulders bright as matchheads catching.

  Anna had come from work, a little cafe she just barely kept afloat, and smelled of icing sugar and bacon and a hint of cloying sweat under her deodorant. It was a comforting smell, and the niceness of it
gutted Connor so he couldn’t stop weeping, out of control, just for a moment. Then he pulled back, mortified, but she smiled kindly, and ushered him to the back seat.

  The drive to Connor’s house was short, but long enough for an excruciating silence to burn his self-respect away. In the back seat, Connor wiped away his tears, gulped to get his breathing under control. Several times Skippy caught Connor’s eye in the rear-view mirror, opened his mouth to speak, looked away. Connor knew that Skippy knew, that he had seen his father at the RSL, had driven Dad home many times when he was three sheets.

  Skippy was a smart guy, had joined all the dots on what had happened, probably faster than Connor had. But there were fine lines between what he could say, what he could do, what he should do; what constituted being helpful and what would be betraying his old friend. In a town like this there were few things worse than sticking his nose into another man’s business.

  ‘You know your dad’s having a bit of a tough time right now, mate,’ he said finally. ‘A lot of us are. But all he wants is the best for you. That’s all.’

  Connor nodded. He didn’t know what to say, and didn’t trust himself to speak even if he did. Anna looked to her husband and back at Connor and reassured him.

  ‘Connor, you know you’re always welcome at our place.’

  Skippy grunted his assent, caught Connor’s eye in the mirror, the measured concern in his voice replaced by cheer. ‘Abso-fucking-lutely. Anytime. Come over, we can watch a game, or just have a bite to eat. Anytime. Get a change of scene, and get out of your dad’s hair. Take a break from all that fucking swimming! Sound good?’

  Connor nodded again, and Anna reached back to squeeze his hands. His frozen fingers sang with the feeling of it.