Barracuda

by Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘You don’t like tutoring?’

  ‘I don’t like the hours, I don’t like that I’ve been doing it two years and I’m still a fucking casual, I don’t like the whingeing students at Melbourne Uni, and I especially don’t like their sense of entitlement.’ She groans. ‘Listen to me—and I call the students whingers!’

  She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m exhausted, Danny, I think that’s what it is. I’m working on my PhD and I think I’m never going to finish it and I know that every bloody fool out there doing a PhD is saying and thinking the same thing. I’m boring myself, Danny. I’m not good when I’m bored, you know that, I’m terrible. I’m a bitch to my girlfriend, I’m a bitch to my students, I’m a bitch to myself.’ She looks again at her empty glass. ‘I’m going to have another. You want one?’

  I have chugged down the wine the way a baby sucks on a teat. Desperately. But then so has Demet. We can’t settle, can’t find our way back to the easy freedom of our past friendship. Since we sat down she has not referred to prison again. It is as if the apology on the street was all that was needed, and she thinks she is now forgiven. But sitting here opposite her, being reminded of what we had, my shame has been banished by resentment. It did hurt that she didn’t visit, it had crushed me that she had made no effort to find out how I was, hadn’t even written a letter. I’ll never tell her but every visitors’ day it was her I expected to see. She had promised it to me: that we were soul mates. And she had betrayed that. I look down at my empty glass. Do I want another drink with her?

  ‘Yes,’ I answer, and when she is at the bar I am thinking of how loyalty is more often compromised by carelessness than spite; and I am thinking of how good it is to hear the laughter of a good friend: and I am thinking that I also took our friendship for granted—I assumed she would follow me wherever Cunts College and swimming took me. I had been careless as well. We had both been negligent.

  There is music in the courtyard, the untamed noodlings of jazz; light and sprightly, the notes whistle down from the speakers, the melody is purling, it is plashing and rustling through the spindled arms of the naked elm trees. It is hush and it is rhapsody.

  Demet returns and I raise my glass. ‘It’s good to see you, mate,’ and Demet says, ‘You too.’ Then she says, ‘Cheers,’ and I answer with, ‘Şerefe.’ That makes both of us laugh. And so it is through our shared outburst of glee in my customary mangling of that Turkish word that I know we have returned to one another. In the relief of the laughter our bodies uncoil and we are released. We are finally returned to our friendship. And like that leaping, skipping, joyous music above us, we do not need words. I can’t see it but I am sure there is a light dancing between us, touching her, touching me. That light, it sings our shared history, and that we are forgiven.

  Fukuoka, Japan, August 1997

  If you want it, it’s yours, Coach said. You can do it. Coach demanded of him: Do you want it?

  Yes, sir! I want it, sir.

  He barked it out silently, coughed it up from deep within him, spat it out, phlegm and blood, as though he was a recruit in an American war movie, like he was Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise. But he did it silently, so as not to wake Wilco in the next bed.

  He barked it silently from deep in his gut and from the back of his throat: Yes, sir! I want it, sir. But there was that nagging doubt that he tried to ignore, that rising chortle that was itching to get out: You sound like a wanker, who are you kidding, who speaks like that, only frigging Yanks speak like that. He could hear his father: Why are you speaking like a frigging Nike ad? You can’t mean it, seriously, you can’t mean it?

  Yes, sir! I want it, sir.

  This time he said it out loud. As though Coach were there, in front of him, right in his face, demanding, challenging him: Do you really fucking want it?

  Yes, sir! I want it, sir.

  This time he shouted it and there was a groan from the next bed. Wilco turned, twisted, doubled over his pillow. ‘Kelly, you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, mate, sorry. It was just a dream.’

  Danny lay still in his bed. Wilco’s breathing was constant, alert. Danny lay still and waited for him to fall asleep again. He closed his eyes, blotting out the room, the bed, the boy in the next bed. He imagined the pool, the sound of the water slapping the tiles, the heat and the steam, the chill of the change rooms, tried to bring back the image of Coach. He was back in Melbourne, about to hit the water. He was telling Coach how much he wanted it, how it was going to be his.

  There was a snigger from the next bed. ‘You want a wank, do you, Kelly?’ It was followed by a disgusted snort. ‘Not here, mate, that’s filthy. Go do it in the dunny if you have to.’

  Danny forced himself not to think about the room, the moonlight, Japan, bloody Wilco. He wished it were Taylor sharing the room with him, not bloody Wilco.

  Forget him, he told himself, don’t let him get to you. Concentrate. Stay focused. That was the golden rule, they all knew it—swimmers, athletes, sportspeople; anyone who knew the thrill of competition. Concentrate, reject anything that would be a distraction.

  He breathed in slowly, a rattling shiver going down his spine, and a spasm rolled down his back in a wave from the nape of his neck. It took all his will not to move. He breathed out, palms flat against the cool sheets. But Melbourne was gone, Coach was gone, the pool was gone, and he couldn’t bring any of it back; bloody Wilco had fucked that up. Danny breathed in. He lay in the bed, palms flat on the cold sheets, legs apart, wishing Taylor was there with him. There was a rustle from across the room and then the light wheeze of Wilco’s snore. Danny tried to bring back the pool, retrieve the Coach, the race, the solid slew through water and time. But his cock was full, the blood rushing there, it was now his centre of gravity.

  You want a wank, do you, Kelly?

  He flung back the sheet, got up and searched for his t-shirt and trackpants. There was a fumbling from the other bed and the room was filled with blinding light.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  Wilco had half-risen from his bed and the sheet fell down to his hips. Danny looked away but not before he saw the boy’s moon-pale body, a colour whiter than light, white as the cotton of the sheets. So white that Wilco’s stubby pink nipples and perfectly round aureoles were almost obscene, so white that the spray of freckles on the boy’s shoulders and neck flashed like specks of gold. You look like a skinned rabbit, Danny thought, recalling going hunting with his granddad Bill in Mernda, the sound of the shotgun, the animal leaping, twisting, fitting in the air, his grandfather taking the knife and stripping the fur and skin from the meat, the flesh raw and pink and dead beneath. Danny turned, so quickly that he knew the other boy hadn’t seen the outline of his erection under his white briefs, hadn’t glimpsed the ugly shock of black pubes showing through the material. Wilco got waxed from top to bottom, every single bit of him, every month. His bloody daddy paid for him to look like an ugly skinned rabbit.

  Danny stepped into his trackpants, slipped on his t-shirt, sat on the bed and pulled up his socks. ‘I can’t sleep. I’m going for a walk.’

  Wilco looked at the clock on the sideboard. It was just past eleven o’clock. ‘You fucking idiot, mate, your swim is tomorrow.’

  Danny could tell that Wilco was about to lecture him. That was how it was between them; only a year’s difference in age, but Wilco thought that made him superior. Wilco opened his mouth but Danny rushed to speak first.

  ‘I won’t get to sleep. I need some air.’

  Wilco switched off the light and pulled up the sheet. ‘If they catch you, you’re dead.’

  He was tempted to take the stairs, race down them all the way to the ground floor, then saunter through the lobby. He was confident he could say casually to the concierge at the front desk, Konbanwa—that would be the right word, not konichiwa, everyone knew konichiwa but that was hello; he wanted to be more formal. He would say good evening and he would pronounce it correctly, clipped, with the slightest inflection on
the last syllable—those were the instructions that Mr D’Angelo had given him at school. Konbanwa, then push through the revolving doors; he’d be breathing in foreign air, he’d be looking up at a new night sky, with unfamiliar constellations, he’d be stepping into a different world. The buzz began in his belly and spread in sharp bursts of electric energy to every part of his body. He was in another world. He didn’t want to be locked up like the other swimmers, he didn’t want to be trapped behind the windows of the bus that ferried them from airport to hotel to shinkansen to swimming centre to hotel. He didn’t want to be looked after, checked off, observed. He wanted to step off, to fly into that other world.

  If they catch you, you’re dead.

  The buzz was gone. And he knew Wilco was right. He couldn’t give them an excuse to punish him, or a reason to drop him from the team. They didn’t want him. He’d come out of nowhere and he wasn’t one of theirs. He’d beaten a golden boy, and was taking a golden boy’s rightful place at the Pan Pacific competition, and that was why they threw him resentful looks, made him repeat every question and every request. What did you say, Kelly? Speak clearly, kid. Do you always have to mumble, Kelly? They didn’t believe he belonged there. They didn’t want him there.

  Danny hesitated in the narrow, white-walled corridor. A pulse thumped, a dull tattoo from the airconditioner vents. At the end of the passageway was a door with a black kanji and next to it a small diagram of a stick figure descending a staircase. Danny made up his mind and headed for the fire exit.

  It was just a hunch, it might not have led anywhere, but he would try it. He needed to be in the open air, he felt as though he was choking in the artificial mechanical atmosphere; he wanted to escape the suffocating in-betweenness of the accommodation. He ran up three flights of concrete steps and pushed hard on the door at the top of the stairwell. The frame groaned, shuddered, but the heavy door swung open.

  He felt the humidity in the air as he walked over to the railing at the edge of the rooftop. The view was surprisingly dark. He had expected Japan to be all neon bursts of light at night, holograms and screens everywhere. But below and across from him most of the buildings were shrouded in shadow. He could hear the rolling of the surf, he could smell the sea, the fish and salt from the port, and the fetid stench of seaweed rotting on the beach.

  Arigato gozaimasu, he whispered to the city. He inhaled, taking it all into his lungs, wanting the city to be inside him.

  Danny was the only one on the Australian swimming team who had bothered to learn any Japanese. Mr D’Angelo had printed out a list of words and phrases and Danny had memorised them on the plane trip over, how to say please, thank you and you’re welcome, hello and goodbye. That was all he had committed to memory—but they were five phrases more than anyone else had bothered to learn. And not only the swimmers. The coaches and their assistants, the doctors and the physios, the administrators and the child protection officers assigned to look after the under-eighteens: none of them had bothered to learn one Japanese word.

  He looked out over the unknown dark. I’m in Japan, he said to himself, an elated grin on his face. China was just across the sea, Russia up to the north. He’d started to see the world. His parents had never got further than Phuket; they’d made it to Bali twice. He would not be them, he had already seen more than they had. He had beat Demet to the world. Most of the boys at school had got to the world before him. Martin had been to Europe twice, Wilco had been to Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon and Disneyland, Luke had been to Vietnam and Cambodia, Greece and Rome. They had travelled but they had not seen, not like him. Wilco didn’t want to eat Japanese food, complained loudly that he thought more people would speak English there. He had looked startled during a walk through the fish markets of Fukuoka when Danny had pointed excitedly to an old yellow-toothed woman packaging a tray of tiny shoal fish. ‘So? What about it?’ It was then that Danny had realised that Wilco couldn’t see, was walking blindly through it all and not taking in a thing. He couldn’t see the thin translucent beauty of the rice paper, the neat symmetry in the way the old woman laid out the fish, the fine lines of emerald script etched on the thin paper wrapping. Danny hadn’t bothered explaining it; Wilco and the golden boys would never get it. Demet should have been there with him, she’d have got it. The golden boys and the golden girls had no interest in experiencing the world—they wore goggles in the pool and blinkers out of it. Not him. He was going to take in, possess the whole of the world. Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi? Fuck off. He wanted more.

  He breathed in, savouring the unfamiliar scent of the humid air. There was a blinking red light on the horizon where the black ocean met the night sky.

  Alone, high above Fukuoka, Danny allowed himself to speak the words: Yes, sir! I want it, sir. He would beat the golden boys. He was stronger, faster, better.

  On the way to the airport his father had said, ‘Good on you, Danny, I’m proud of you.’ But then he’d had to add, ‘I hope you don’t ever forget how fortunate you are, mate.’

  That was why his father had never been further than bloody Phuket and bloody Bali. Coach knew, it was Coach who said it: ‘There is no such thing as luck. There is only work and discipline and talent and courage.’ Danny was here in Japan because he was the strongest and the fastest. He was the best.

  Danny exhaled.

  Wilco’s bed was empty when Danny crept into the room. There was a light under the bathroom door and he heard a blast of farting and the sound of turds splashing into the toilet bowl. It set him off giggling. He stripped to his jocks and flung himself under the sheets. The toilet flushed and when Wilco returned Danny was holding his nose with one hand.

  ‘Jesus, Wilco, it pongs!’

  ‘Fuck off, Kelly.’ But Wilco too started a fit of giggling. He leapt into bed. ‘Can you sleep?’

  Danny knew that he shouldn’t answer, that he should pretend to snore. He needed to sleep, and mentally he started coaxing his body to unbend, first the muscles in his feet, then moving up to his calves. He was thinking himself towards drowsiness.

  ‘What time do you think it is back home?’

  Danny groaned. The prick was not going to let him sleep. ‘Melbourne is one hour ahead, mate.’ How could Wilco not know that? How could he be so uninterested in the world?

  There was a rustling from the next bed; there was the slow trickle of water into the cistern in the bathroom. Danny couldn’t help it, he shifted around to look across. Wilco was on his side, the sheet only covering him from the waist down, and in the faint beam of moonlight coming through the window the boy’s skin gleamed silver; his eyes were pinpricks of light.

  ‘I hope we both get gold, Danny,’ Wilco whispered. ‘I really want both of us to get gold.’

  Danny held his breath. Did he trust him?

  ‘Dad says that if I win a medal here I’m sorted for a place at the AIS next year. No fees, everything paid for, the best coaches in the world.’

  Danny didn’t need to think about uni for another year at least—of course he’d be going to uni and of course the Australian Institute of Sports would want him. He didn’t need to think about that shit, he needed to sleep. Bloody Wilco, putting it in his head. He couldn’t help it, it burned him that Mr Wilkinson was encouraging his son to go to the AIS. It made Danny think of his own father. ‘This fucking country,’ Neal Kelly would say, with a laugh undercut by sourness. ‘There’s no money for health and education, nothing for the arts, but we shovel a shitload to sports.’

  Danny couldn’t help it; it needled him that Mr Wilkinson, unlike his own father, was encouraging his son. He made his voice sound nonchalant, spoke somewhere between a yawn and a whine. ‘Jesus, bloody Australia, all that money poured into sports. I’m not sure I want to go to the AIS—I don’t think it’s fair that sportspeople get a free education when every other student has to pay.’ He’d made himself sound exactly like Neal Kelly.

  ‘Yeah, you reckon?’ Wilco sounded unconvinced. ‘You got a point, Kelly, but come on,
you know sports is the only area where Australia punches above its weight. If we didn’t fund sports we’d be shit at everything.’ Wilco rolled over. ‘You’ll get there, Kelly, you’re a shoo-in. You got a scholarship to school and you’re going to get a scholarship to uni.’ Wilco let out a long tired yawn. ‘Psycho Kelly, you’re one lucky bastard. We all think that, mate, you’re the luckiest bastard we know. Everything falls into your lap.’

  Danny had been right about Wilco. He should never have trusted him. Wilco was a golden boy, he didn’t believe Danny belonged there. He was outraged to hear a light snore coming from the next bed. He’d got there—Wilco had got under his skin. Danny’s body was rigid, his breathing was out, he had to chase air, otherwise he thought he might choke. The bile was bitter and chemical on his tongue. He had to sleep. He had to sleep.

  He began again at his feet, tensed and relaxed them to rest, then his calves, cajoling the muscles there to yield. From his calves to his thighs, and then he traced a line up the centre of his body, to his buttocks, made a command in the form of a prayer: Let me sleep. Let me sleep. You’re one lucky bastard. Those words ricocheted through him, his body clenched; he had to begin again. He concentrated on his toes, his feet, his calves. Everything falls into your lap. How could that be true? He wasn’t a golden boy, he’d never had what they had. It was envy, a poison, that had made Wilco say those words, it was the poison of jealousy. Why couldn’t it have been Taylor with him? He would never have said any of that, he knew what Danny was. He began again at his feet.

  Danny’s eyes flicked open. The moonlight sliced the room in two. He’d been fighting against acknowledging it, but the force of his hard-on beneath the sheets strained the cotton of his jocks, made concentration impossible, sleep unattainable. He tried again.

  He began at his feet. You’re one lucky bastard. He moved to his calves, his thighs. The head of his penis had come out of his underpants and rubbed against the sheet. Danny had to force himself to ignore it, not to move; he had to call back sleep, to catch it and ensnare it. He could do it, he had control over his body. He tried again.