It couldn’t be gradual. I had to shoot past. I knew I had momentum but it wasn’t obvious, not yet. It was slippery speed, not blinding speed. I didn’t thrash. I rated higher, pulled long, kicked. Eden would have known I was there and that I was charging but if I did it right he wouldn’t know the extent, not until late. I didn’t want to be left behind. I held on for dear life. The wall was home. I kept thinking of Mum. We were racing to her.
Eden came with me. We were far out in front now. We were not your average nine-year-old racers. We were twins in water. The muffled sound. The weightless underwater world. I took a half-length or more but I was running out and I knew it. My shot was fired. I thought of Eden. He was coming, powering on, relentless. We might touch together. I was born first. We were in it together but I wanted to win. Life is counterintuitive. I felt him there, Eden. We’d shared Mum’s womb. We both reached for Mum and for home and the water washed over us and I hoped he wouldn’t mind but I touched the wall first.
Head out of the water, goggles lifted, eyes wiped. I looked for Mum, for Eden, for Bobbie, for the clock. The field floated in, spent. The next race stepped forward, the schedule tight. I ducked under the rope and headed for the side, the way out. Eden put his arm around me all slippery and wet. ‘You good,’ he said. It might have been a question but it wasn’t. It was a statement. His chest rose and fell against mine. ‘You too,’ I said.
‘Boy with a curl once the gun goes off,’ Bobbie said as we made it back from the pool. She looked pleased. ‘I think that’s called working the angles,’ she continued as if slowly calculating respect. ‘You boys are definitely twins.’
Then a woman I didn’t know but who was a bigwig of the Altona Swimming Club shuffled me forward. ‘Did your mum proud,’ she said as if it was nothing. ‘New club record.’
*
The butterfly was different. Fifty-metre-long course, one lap. I had trained butterfly at squad and I had the strength, the technique. But it was not my territory and it never would be. Straight out of hospital, freestyle had hurt Eden’s back but butterfly hadn’t. The world was in luck. He was beautiful at it.
My feet left the block. I was fresh from winning. My arms swung free. Now for Eden.
I hit the water, remained submerged, surged out into the air. Within a stroke or two I felt myself ahead. I often started faster; he always ground me down. But this was butterfly. His cruise pace was so high. I was surprised even at the start. A few more strokes and he didn’t overtake. I beat faster and didn’t hold back, I went as fast I could. I’d set the pace. And so I beat on. I did not think of winning. He was there, I could feel him. But he wasn’t passing. I rose and looked out at the water. It was all glass ahead of me, the race in my wake. I could hear noise. I could see the wall, becoming clearer. My ankles. I concentrated on my ankles. I pulled long with my arms, flicked my body, made sure my ankles flipped the water away. I stayed ahead. I didn’t tire, not yet. Thirty metres. Thirty-five. Down, down and up again. Forty. It felt clear, the air, the water. The wall was Mum, it always would be. I was flabbergasted. I should not be leading, not this close. I could have shaken my head and wondered. I didn’t.
We were sons, we were brothers, I didn’t know how to be either. I had not expected to be in front of Eden in a butterfly race. I could have hesitated. Instead, I soared. I was the first mover. The win was there and I drove for it. I hit the wall, spun and waited. The field came to me.
The field came to me.
‘Confidence is the best vaccine,’ Bobbie said later, smiling at me. Eden stood on the deck a few steps away, staring back at the pool. ‘You have it now,’ she said. ‘Eden,’ and she flicked her head in his direction, ‘is headed back to the lab.’
I didn’t want it to be Bobbie. I wanted it to be me. But Bobbie got to Eden first and said, ‘You don’t need dreams. You need behaviours.’ I pushed then. I got up close to Eden. I said to him, ‘You’re faster than this.’
*
Eden had aimed to beat the club 50-metre butterfly record for a nine-year-old boy. The record was 38.60 set in 1980. At Nunawading that day he swam 37.2. I touched the wall in 36.3. ‘BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT’ announced our local Western Star paper on hearing of our unusual training methods. There was a picture of us with our hair wet, ribbons in hand, the photo stretched across the top of the front page, the light artificial.
‘You’re world famous,’ Eden said. We stood by our letterbox off Jubilee Street.
Bobbie came out. ‘Who’s famous?’ she asked. I thought she might place her hand on my shoulder but she didn’t. ‘I don’t like having too much hope,’ she said. ‘But I’m getting my hopes up.’
*
Two days later we found a note in our letterbox. It was written in tiny print. It was only readable because the handwriting was so neat. I’d never seen purple ink before. The note said:
The youngest man to win an Olympic swimming gold medal was just a boy. He was fourteen years old; he swam one event at one Olympics; he never competed internationally again. The event he won was the longest and most gruelling swimming event of the Olympics, the 1500-metre freestyle. He was behind at the 500-metre mark but he finished so strongly that he’d already climbed from the pool and headed to the change-room as the other competitors swam to the finish. His name was Kusuo Kitamura. He was Japanese. He competed at the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. His record as the youngest male to win an Olympic gold swimming medal still stands. He was a little man, five feet high, less than fifty kilograms. At fourteen, he already wore glasses. In 1965, when the International Swimming Hall of Fame was established, Kitamura was in the first class of inductees.
The note was not signed or stamped. It was just a loose sheet of paper. We each read it carefully and in silence. ‘Someone reads the local paper,’ Bobbie said.
‘I think Bobbie’s discovered the internet,’ Eden said later, in the bathroom, brushing our teeth.
‘Not her handwriting,’ I said.
‘Sounded like Bobbie.’
‘Sounded official.’
‘Fourteen,’ he said.
‘How much do you weigh?’ I asked.
‘Bobbie,’ Eden called out. ‘Do we have scales?’
*
Every day at school we walked past things Dad had done at parent working bees: a row of vegie boxes on the Maddox Road side, boulders in the new playground on Woods Street, tanbark everywhere. He was most excited though about a scoreboard they’d started building out of telegraph poles and railway sleepers. It was at the back of the oval. This scoreboard was just an open frame but it was strong enough for us to walk up its supporting arms and along its main beam. No work had been done on it since Mum and Dad died. Eden and I walked past it each day on our way to and from school. Sometimes we’d stop and lie beneath it on the onion grass there.
One day just after that first weekend of racing Eden pulled his ruler from his school bag and scratched an E and a J beneath the scoreboard’s main beam. He put a line between the two and marked two scratches beneath my name. 2-0.
‘For Dad,’ he said.
*
One Sunday in December we pulled out of the Flowerdale garage with bush smoke on the air as dry storms swept the hills. Bobbie tuned the radio to the ABC. ‘A whiff of trouble and I’ll shoot back here,’ she said. ‘That’s the house Jack built,’ she added as if we didn’t already know.
‘He did,’ she emphasised again. ‘Cut most of the wood himself. Out of trees.’
Bobbie turned to look at the house as we headed out the driveway. The car swung into the branches of the Claret Ash at the front. A branch stuck to the aerial. ‘Houses have feelings too,’ she said as if it was trying to stop us.
Nights come and nights go but this one sits in my mind like a compact mirror.
Bushfires had lit up the state the Friday night before and more had started Saturday. Scores of small fires had now teamed into a front. We had to get back to Newport because we had school the next day. Normally we just gra
bbed bags and left but Bobbie ordered us at the last minute to wash the dishes and then she snapped at Eden to do the job properly. A minute or two later, half the dishes still dirty, she ordered us to get in the car, to just get in the car. Eden still had suds on his fingers.
‘If you swallowed dishwashing liquid would you blow bubbles when you talked?’ he asked, misreading the moment.
‘They’d start popping out of your bum,’ I said.
‘Listen,’ Bobbie snapped, turning the radio louder. That branch from the Claret Ash still flapped on the windscreen. ‘Over seventy fires,’ I heard the announcer say. ‘The Great Divide Fire Complex has broken containment lines and is now running uncontrolled in a north-east direction. Residents of Raspberry Creek and the A1 Mine Settlement are advised to activate their emergency plans.’
‘Are we near Raspberry Creek?’ Eden asked.
‘I can smell fire,’ Bobbie said.
‘I forgot my Deltora books,’ I said to Bobbie.
‘Quiet,’ she said.
‘I got them for my birthday,’ I said. That morning only a year ago when we opened presents with our pyjamas still on seemed like a galaxy away.
We were heading out of the bush and into the suburbs but even as we did the smoke got thicker. Everything was coloured orange-brown. Bobbie put her headlights on, which only seemed to make it worse. ‘It’s drifting on the wind,’ Bobbie said to herself. ‘If that house burns. Or that vineyard,’ she said, ‘I will die of natural causes.’ She glanced in the rear-view mirror, ‘No I won’t. But I wouldn’t have much left.’
And then after a silence she said, ‘I hate leaving the house.’ Something about the way she said this made me wonder if she thought something was our fault.
I remembered then as we sat in silence how Bobbie had once said that life was like fake tan, in that it was all in the execution.
I knew that I should respond, that I should say something. But I couldn’t think of anything. And then we pulled off Jubilee Street.
‘Here we go,’ Bobbie said.
Our neighbour Fuzzy was in his car, Nectar beside him. Nectar never said anything without looking up at his dad first. They’d stopped half-way out their driveway. There was a black cat in front of them.
‘That dog of yours needs to go on Lite n’ Easy,’ Bobbie said.
‘She’s a cat,’ Fuzzy said.
‘Fat for a cat.’
‘She’s not ours.’
‘That too,’ Bobbie said.
‘Going spearing,’ Fuzzy said then. ‘Boys are welcome.’ He spoke directly to us but he seemed distracted.
‘Godsend,’ Bobbie said. ‘The farm’s calling me like an old boyfriend.’ She didn’t turn to ask us, she jumped straight on. ‘If I give you some money can you get them a souvlaki or something?’
And so on a Sunday evening with bush smoke in the air we climbed into the back of Fuzzy’s car, the smell of a man and the smell of honey, and headed to the Altona shore. We went to an area Fuzzy called the Pines but when he saw the number of cars there he kept driving.
‘When I was a kid,’ he said, pulling back out onto the main shoreline road, ‘I used to put the targets back up on the old rifle range. Good pay. OHS nightmare. Townhouses now.
‘Good crabbing behind there though,’ he continued. ‘Or used to be. Bastards take the jennies. If you ever go crabbing, never take the jennies.’
‘What are the jennies?’ Eden asked.
‘I’m an idiot. Sorry,’ he said.
‘What are they?’ we both said.
Nectar spoke up. ‘The mums,’ he said.
Soon we waded out into the long shallows at the far end of Altona beach. There was smoke there too; it settled like mist, except warm. It was unusually still, the air drifting out rather than in, the water a mirror. As we waded I began to feel heady in a jumbled way: the stench of rotting seaweed, the freshness of brine, the smoke, the squelch and splash to each step. We each had a spear, three prongs on its end, and a flashlight. Fuzzy said that flathead would rest down near the sand. We could spot them with our lights. We read our way through the smoke and the water as if it was some kind of script, deciphering flathead, though in a kid way. When Eden held his spear and his flashlight out to me and I took them from him I knew what he would do. He would slide into the dark shallow water and swim.
And that’s what he did, a slow crawl until he reached deeper water and then the full fly, a boy and the bay, into the smoke-mist. Swimming bubbled out of Eden like joy, like something he couldn’t resist.
Off to our right, horses were being worked in the shallows. Way off to our left, the hazy silhouette of a pier. Fuzzy hunted and Nectar followed and Eden burst out towards the slipping sun with his arms flapping wide like a seabird. Before long the sight of him became hazy and blurred, covered in dark, though still he beat, still he ploughed, I could hear him out there carving the water, putting it all behind. The light faded yet more. The darkness wrapped closer, the smoke. I could feel fish or weeds feathering my toes and my ankles. I was holding two spears and two flashlights. I started swinging the flashlights around as though panic was out there just beyond reach and light was the only thing that could keep it at bay.
I can smell Flowerdale, I thought, breathing in the smoke.
And then of a sudden I couldn’t see anyone. I could hear plenty but I couldn’t see. There were car motor sounds and lights, white and orange, green lights out in the bay itself, squeals and calls, birds, all manner of things. I trembled. I wanted to call out but I didn’t. I walked slowly but as soon as it started to get deep I angled back towards shore. I didn’t have the stomach for the deeper water, not in the dark and not by myself, even if I was armed. Eden would walk into a field of seaweed without hardly noticing. I wanted then to be home in our warm loungeroom with the TV on, a glass with ice in it, us all looking at each other when something funny happened, the smell of a Sara Lee.
‘Are you out there?’ a voice came in from the smoke.
‘I’m in here,’ I called back as if I was in a room instead of the great outside, dark turning the smoke into a substance like canvas, one big teepee.
‘Call again,’ he said. Fuzzy.
‘Here!’ I said. And my voice sounded so high that I winced at the sound of myself.
‘Best I get you boys something to eat,’ Fuzzy said, reappearing. And then I saw Eden return as if he’d been out hunting too, flying through smoke, like a sea animal coming in with his bounty. I was still shaking but less so, suddenly. We’d go home now. It would soon be over.
Except that it wasn’t. Fuzzy took us to the strip we called the Sixteen Shops. We ordered souvlakis at the shop near the corner. Neither Eden nor I had been to this shop before. Fuzzy stayed in the car and listened to the radio. A generation of young men had just been drafted into the AFL system and Fuzzy wanted to know who was headed for the Western Bulldogs. Nectar, Eden and I waited in the shop. There was a TV on in there. A scrub-fire in Beaumaris, wherever that was, was being treated as suspicious.
Just as we took our meals and turned to leave though, a fight broke out, or what sounded like a fight, at the back of the shop. It was brutal, whatever it was. The air snapped tight as the violence began, just like meat does when it hits hot iron. We heard glass or crockery smash. The splinter of a door as it was slammed. More than one person was involved and more than two. We couldn’t see anything because it was happening in a living area behind a screen but the noise was dynamite. The three of us froze and listened and then we looked at the boy who had just served us. He picked up a remote control and turned the TV off as though he needed to listen. We hurried out to the car. We didn’t talk through the car windows; we hopped in and closed our doors. I could smell dead fish. Fuzzy straightened. His hand moved to the ignition. Eden spoke up.
‘They’re fighting in there,’ he said.
‘Who’s fighting?’ Fuzzy stopped turning the key. He swung towards Eden.
‘In the shop,’ Eden said.
�
��Fighting fighting?’ he asked.
‘A man. And a woman,’ Eden said. We were in the back seat, the seats of vinyl, a pattern on them, cracked, like a dry creek, like tortoise shell. When you traced your fingers along the vinyl’s grooves they felt waxy, like honeycomb.
‘And a girl,’ I said.
‘Are they okay?’ Fuzzy said.
‘It’s scary,’ Nectar said.
‘I better go in,’ Fuzzy said.
‘Dad,’ Nectar said.
‘It sounded like a girl,’ I said. And what I didn’t add because I couldn’t cope to think it, was that the girl’s voice was familiar.
‘I don’t want to go in,’ Fuzzy said. But he opened his door anyway. ‘Stay here,’ he said.
And we did. We stayed in the car. It was silent for a short while and then out of nowhere Eden said, ‘I wish Bobbie would tell us what happened to Hemi.’ His words were hardly out though when Nectar opened his door. It triggered all of us. We followed Fuzzy in.
‘The police,’ I said but not loud and not with conviction. We should call them.
Fuzzy was near the front counter but on seeing us he marched towards the back of the shop. As he did I saw him look around at the tables, empty of customers, and grab a pepper shaker, a small one. It was white.
I remember every second. ‘The police,’ I said again. And I took my eye from Fuzzy and looked at the boy behind the counter, who had just served us. He was young but older than us. I had seen him before. He had a metal tray in his hands, for holding lettuce, though he now shoved the lettuce onto the bench with both hands. He held the metal tray in front of his chest as a shield. Shreds of lettuce fell to the floor. The boy’s head was shaking, because he was frightened, but also by way of warning. I didn’t know Fuzzy’s real name. He was the Stunt Driver’s husband. The bee bloke. Nectar’s family name was Buttigieg. None of these names seemed enough. I wanted to call out or to stop Fuzzy somehow. I turned away from the boy and looked towards the back. There was a blue insect light on the wall near the ceiling. Fuzzy called out, ‘Hey.’ That’s all. ‘Hey.’ I would repeat this word later to the police for them to write down.
We Were Not Men Page 9
