Body Lengths

by Leisel Jones

  Rohan and his wife, Jodie, have two small girls, and the door to their home is always open to anyone in the squad. Marty and I have dinners there, chatting with Jodie in the kitchen and playing with the kids before bedtime. It’s unlike any relationship I’ve had with a coach before. Rohan is very professional, but also very welcoming too. I feel like I can say anything to him, tell him anything about how I’m feeling or what’s going on in my life. He really cares. And it’s not long before his family becomes my family in Melbourne too.

  By now, Marty’s training in Footscray, while I’m out at my mini-pool in Bulleen. We’re still living in our apartment in Moonee Ponds, which is at least forty-five minutes’ drive from the pool, so by the time we both get to and from training each day we only see one another in the evening for dinner. And yet we are so close. We totally get one another, Marty and I. He is incredibly supportive of my swimming, my crazy hours, my heavy training, my strict eating and my deep sleeping.

  Marty does all the cooking and makes sure my meals are super healthy (and super delicious). He is going to cook our way to Olympic gold. And after four hours in the pool each day, and a couple more in the gym after that, there is nothing more special he could do for me than cook. Am I the luckiest girl in the world, or what? I wonder as I eat another amazing casserole, another steak, another chargrilled lamb chop. What did I do to deserve this?

  Then one day my friend Louise calls me to tell me she thinks Marty is cheating on me. Twenty seconds into Louise’s phonecall, I am slumped on my bedroom floor, phone in one hand, head resting in the other. I feel as if someone has punched me in the stomach.

  There are stories going around. Rumours. Someone says he’s sleeping with this girl. He was seen kissing another. Someone else heard he gave some woman his number. What did I do to deserve this? It’s lies, all of it. It must be.

  Even so, it’s weird. Why would Louise say all these things about Marty when she and Marty have been friends for such a long time? It was Louise who introduced us in the first place. Now here she is, bad-mouthing him? I can’t think why she would make any of this stuff up.

  I am on the floor bawling my eyes out when Marty comes home.

  ‘LJ? What’s happened?’ He drops his footy bag and rushes to my side.

  I sob and hiccup and bury my face into his chest. ‘Louise told me … It’s just that she said …’ I give him an abbreviated version of what I have heard.

  ‘That’s absolute shit! That’s horseshit!’ Marty is furious. He flares up in an instant. ‘Do you believe her? Do you? Do you? Answer me!’ He is ranting again before I can answer, shouting and slamming his fist on the floor. ‘I can’t believe you would trust her word over mine. Why would you believe her? She’s making up stories. It’s bullshit! All of it!’ He stands and kicks his footy bag across the room. Then he storms back out into the corridor, shouting over his shoulder as he goes. ‘Don’t you talk to that girl ever again!’

  When he’s gone, when the apartment is quiet again, I sit in the fading light and pick at the threads of the bedspread.

  Winston, our dog, will be scratching at the door for his dinner soon. I should go and defrost something for him. I don’t feel like eating anything – don’t want to eat ever again. I’d rather just sit here in the gloom. Louise is such a good friend to me – she’s always had my back – so I can’t understand why she’s making up stuff now.

  I don’t blame Marty for being so furious. I would be too, if someone accused me of cheating. But doesn’t he know that I trust him? That I always believe him?

  I sit and wait for him to come home. I sit and wait in the purple dark.

  I later learn that what Louise had heard was made up by someone else spreading rumours.

  18

  Crashing

  It is spring 2007 and Melbourne is thawing out. Slowly uncoiling. Freesias push through the grass in gardens and on kerbsides. Spring Racing Carnival fever has taken over the city, and there are flags flying on every council flagpole, and posters and pictures in all the stores.

  I am cruising down Bridge Road, past the Epworth Hospital, past Schnitz restaurant (‘You love Schnitz, we love Schnitz, we all love Schnitz!’), to my training at the Richmond Recreation Centre. We’ve been training here a lot lately. Maybe Rohan is finally taking my hints about a 50-metre pool. It’s handier to home, a bit less of a commute, which gives me more time to spend with Marty, of course. We’ve been trying to make a real effort lately, trying to see one another as much as our schedules allow. Louise’s accusations have shaken him, I think. They have shaken us both, although I don’t believe a word.

  The traffic is slow today but I don’t mind, because I’m in my beautiful Holden Astra convertible – a sponsor car – with the top down and the windows low, so the light breeze ruffles my hair. I could sit in this traffic all day long. Up ahead, the light is green, but I go slowly. I know this intersection and I know there is a speed bump ahead of the traffic lights. My car is low-slung, the bump is high, and the combination needs careful negotiation.

  I must be going about 40 kilometres an hour when I enter the intersection, but then somehow – suddenly – I am stopped. It’s as if a giant hand reached down and pushed me with its palm. Stop. There is a crunch. A terrible noise. And a car has materialised in front of me. A metal speed bump, crumpled and groaning.

  I have T-boned another car. Across my smashed bonnet, I watch as the car shudders, reverses and tries to get through the intersection for a second time. The guy I’ve pranged is driving away. He’s driving away? But there’s traffic, there’s a mess. There is glass and dangling bumpers. He can’t get through.

  A face appears where my window used to be. A girl. She is talking to me. Someone else has pulled out a phone.

  ‘What the hell was that guy thinking?’ I shout out to them.

  Back when I first met Rohan, just about the only thing I knew about him was the name ‘Lori Munz’. Lori was a Commonwealth Games gold medallist who swam with Rohan, and she was on track to make the Sydney Olympic team – his first Olympian – when she had a terrible car accident just two months out from trials. She had her legs pinned in the wreckage and broke both knees: the accident ended her career.

  Now, eight months out from the Beijing Games, I phone Rohan with the news he never wanted to hear again.

  ‘I’ve had a car accident,’ I sob down the line. His golden girl. His Olympian.

  For a split second there is silence. There is nothing coming through.

  Then: ‘Holy shit! Where are you? What’s happened? Are you okay?’

  I sob and ball my fist into one eye. My nose is running. ‘My car’s broken, Rohan! I broke my car!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I broke my car and it doesn’t belong to me. It’s Holden’s and now I’ve broken it and I don’t know what to do, Rohan!’

  ‘Leisel, where are you?’ he shouts.

  I pause and look up stupidly. ‘I’m outside.’

  And I am. Having wound my way through peak-hour Melbourne, I have had an accident less than 100 metres from the pool. I can see the car park from here. I laugh, and this unnerves poor Rohan even more.

  ‘Don’t move!’ he tells me. ‘I’m on my way!’

  When Rohan arrives at the scene, he finds me sitting on the grass on the side of the road, still in tears, still worried about Holden. From the rear, my car looks pristine, but when you walk around and view it from the front there is only thin air where the engine and the bonnet used to be. ‘You were bloody lucky,’ Rohan says grimly to me later. For once he says ‘you’, when he usually always says ‘we’. But I know that he still means ‘we’. We were bloody lucky.

  The other driver – an unlicensed driver – ran the red light. There was a witness: the girl who tapped on my window. And the Richmond police station, like the pool, is nearby, handily placed for her to give a statement.

  I feel so scared to tell Holden that I’ve messed up their car, the beautiful convertible they loaned me. I’m norm
ally so good about looking after things. It’s still a novelty for me to have expensive things, so I have kept the car spotless. I have taken it to get detailed every second week and made sure it’s always garaged. And now I am ringing Holden to tell them I’ve written it off. I had to leave it in two pieces, abandoned at an intersection. ‘They’re probably used to their footballers doing that. Not their swimmers,’ Marty jokes.

  But if I feel bad about Holden, I feel worse about Rohan. I’ve clearly scared him so much. He is in shock all morning, I can tell, even though he pretends it’s business as usual. I still train the morning after the accident, still get straight in the pool. I’m sore. I have some whiplash that feels like it will hurt in the morning. But it never occurs to me not to train. Just like it never occurs to me that my Olympic-grade legs might me more valuable than a Holden car.

  Besides, if I don’t go swimming, what else will I do?

  Several days after my accident, I am back in a car again, but this time Marty is behind the wheel. We are off to the Yarra Valley for a little wine tasting. A surprise romantic weekend. I could not be more uncomfortable if I tried.

  ‘You’re sure Rohan said it’s okay if I miss training this morning?’ I ask. It is Saturday morning and I’m not in the pool.

  ‘Yes, already. I asked him the other night when we were round there for dinner.’

  I want to say: Yes, but why were you asking my coach if I could have time off – without telling me, but I don’t. He’s being romantic. Suck it up. Enjoy it, I tell myself.

  ‘So, wine tasting, huh?’ I say for the umpteenth time in our short car trip. We are not usually wine tasters. I drink about one glass of wine a year.

  But we go and it’s fun. We taste a few wines, matching them with cheeses. It’s cool-climate wine country down here in the Yarra, and yet things with Marty seem hotter than ever this weekend. He is sweet and romantic, and more affectionate than usual. Was it really just a few weeks ago that Louise thought he was cheating on me?

  There are forty or so cellar doors in the region and by the end of the day my head feels as though I have drunk at every one. We have dinner at a fancy-pants restaurant on one of the rolling estates (more wine), then drag ourselves back to our B&B. We are staying near the Dandenong Ranges and the view from our cottage, stretching all the way down the Mornington Peninsula and towards the bays, is pretty spectacular. This morning I could have looked at it all day long. But right now? I’d settle for a couple of Gaviscon and a good night’s sleep. That last pinot noir and the chocolate mousse for dessert finished me off. I am rifling through my bag looking for something to take for my groaning stomach, when Marty emerges from the bathroom.

  He doesn’t say a word, just walks dramatically to the centre of the room, gets down on one knee and with a flourish produces a small black box from behind his back.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asks.

  Wha– marry him? My eyes widen. Blood pumps loudly in my ears. I can feel my pulse race. Then I break into a big silly grin. ‘Of course!’ I cry. ‘Of course I will!’

  I stoop down to kiss him just as he is getting up, and we bump into one another awkwardly halfway. Marty asks, ‘So, was that a yes?’

  ‘Yes!’ I shout. ‘Yes, I will!’

  He pulls out a ring and slips it onto my finger.

  ‘Oh,’ I say in surprise. ‘It’s yellow gold?’ Then I immediately curse myself for having said it. Idiot, I think. Who says that? You’re supposed to say ‘thank you’ or ‘I love it’. Not ‘Oh, it’s the wrong colour’.

  But it is the wrong colour. I hate yellow gold; I only ever wear white. And Marty knows this, because he asked me months ago what sort of ring I would like if we were ever to get engaged. I said white gold, and something simple. Those were my only criteria. And now he’s here with a yellow-gold extravaganza.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marty says. ‘My mum thinks white gold looks cheap so I got you yellow instead.’

  Oh? Cheap? And so you bought what your Mum wanted and not what I like? I try not to show how insulted I am.

  ‘Cool. That’s really nice. Thanks, babe.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ he agrees.

  Later, we are lying in bed. The chocolate mousse in my stomach weighs heavily, the ring on my finger even more so. You’re engaged, I tell myself sternly, to the man you love! Stop acting like the colour of the stupid ring matters. Why do you even care about this now?

  But it’s not the colour, or the style, or any of that. It’s that Marty asked what I wanted and then decided he knew better. Worse than that, he decided his mum knew better.

  ‘Hey, babe, we should tell people that we got engaged,’ Marty suggests and I realise that I am actually embarrassed.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yeah, why not?’

  Because I am twenty-two years old and I’m not sure I’m ready for this.

  Because my stomach is churning and it’s not just the mousse.

  ‘Okay, sure.’

  Marty reaches over and takes my mobile phone from the bedside table.

  ‘You’re using my phone?’ I ask.

  He doesn’t reply. Instead, he types out a message on my behalf, then sends it to everyone in my address book. It’s not long before my phone starts pinging in reply.

  ‘No way!’ replies Sarah Katsoulis, my friend from swimming.

  ‘Oh, congratulations!’ replies my cousin. ‘BTW that’s the weirdest message I’ve ever got from you.’

  I scroll up to see what Marty wrote – then I cringe – from embarrassment. ‘A romantic thing happened to me today in the Yarra Valley,’ the message gushes. ‘Marty asked me to marry him and I said yes!’

  This is so not what I would write. To my friends, I would say, ‘Suckers! Guess what? I got engaged!’ Something like that. Never: ‘A romantic thing happened to me today …’

  I feel embarrassed, and then I worry about feeling embarrassed. It is not a good sign to be starting this way, I think.

  I phone my Nanna and she is underwhelmed. ‘You did what?’ she asks from back in Woy Woy.

  My mum, I learn from Marty, already knows. He asked her permission and she said it was ‘fine’. But ‘fine’ is hardly the joy I hoped she might feel. Or I might feel for that matter. I re-read Marty’s text message and feel awkward again. I can’t shake the sense this is all about him. Like he’s tied me down. He’s got bragging rights now. To what, I’m not sure. But already I feel like this engagement is nothing to do with me.

  I think about the slip of paper with some girl’s number on it that I found tucked carefully in Marty’s jacket once, after he’d come home from clubbing. We were living back in Brisbane at the time, and he promised me it was an old number. One from ages ago, before we’d met. But even that small slip of paper seems enlarged in my mind tonight.

  Marty is still lying beside me, propped up on one strong arm, his eyes closed as he lazily rubs his free hand back and forth across the base of his head. I love this man, I really do. I love him so much I wouldn’t change a thing. But that’s the problem: I wouldn’t change a thing. I’m not ready to be engaged. Not ready at all. At twenty-two I’m certainly not ready to start planning a wedding. In any case, I have never been the kind of girl who dreams of white dresses and a lavish wedding. Even the thought of ‘announcing’ I’m engaged makes me want to puke. But how do I say that? How do I press pause on our relationship? Could it survive if I put it on ice? I shouldn’t have said ‘yes’, but then, I could never have said ‘no’. If I lost Marty I don’t know what I’d do.

  And on some level, though I don’t admit it to myself, what I really fear is screwing things up ahead of the Olympics. Beijing is the biggest campaign of my life. It’s only five months now till trials and the last thing I want is to go through a messy break-up, to have to move out of home, to have to change things. I am happy and settled and more focused than ever, and I’m not going to throw that away in a hurry. It’s ironic, after all the bad press I received over Marty. ‘He’s a distractio
n’, ‘she’s lost her focus’, the papers all accused. Yet now here I am, getting engaged to him – at least in some small way – in order to keep my Olympic campaign on track.

  I glance back down at my yellow-gold ring, then across to Marty again. And like the whiplash I felt after my car accident, I am nervous this engagement will hurt in the morning.

  19

  Beijing Blues

  On Monday morning at 4 a.m., I am back in the pool. Six and a half kilometres. Up and down, up and down. The repetition is good. It’s soothing, all this blue.

  My yellow-gold engagement ring is tucked carefully away inside a cotton purse, which is hidden inside my sports bag, inside my locker, inside the change rooms at the far end of the pool. A babushka doll of security. I feel lighter when I’m not wearing it, more able to concentrate on my swimming, as if shedding that 3/4 carat will shave microseconds from my times.

  As I swim, I do the maths in my head. I have five months till trials, then another five after that until the Beijing Games begin in August. I’m training six hours a day, for six days a week. That’s thirty-six hours per week, and it gives me roughly 1560 pool hours until I have to be ready. 1560 hours. Ten months.

  Up and down. I count strokes, breaths, laps, time. Ten months to get ready. Ten months to be perfect. Then the rest of my life to dwell on the results. This is what my whole career has been for. My self-worth depends on it.

  I am training like a demon; I am sleeping like the dead. I have never worked so hard in my entire life. Rohan has me doing lots of dry-land training, in addition to my work in the pool. ‘Very experimental,’ I say. ‘It’s what all the Americans are doing,’ he explains. And so my gym coach, Jeremy Oliver, gets me working up a sweat in the weights room. Or doing bike training at the velodrome. It’s cool: I’ve never done anything like velodrome work before and I enjoy the challenge of trying new things. Most of the time it’s just me and Jeremy. Sometimes swimmer Shayne Reese comes along too. We cycle for hours and, to lose weight, I also wear a 10-kilogram vest. Or we pull metal sleds. I watch Jeremy stack my sled with 40-kilogram weights. ‘Forty?’ I ask. There will be gymnasts on the Olympic team who weigh no more than this. ‘Forty,’ he says. And so I wobble away on my bike, hauling my sled across the grass behind me.