Until this moment Werner was just some man who smelled of murder and wood. He was the only man we had in our life who could walk into our house and sit at our table without us thinking anything of it. Werner was not young, he was in his late sixties at least, but what struck me at the creek that afternoon was that he seemed like more of a man with his clothes off than he did with them on. I looked at him through water-soaked eyes and my depth-of-field on him changed as if suddenly he’d been separated from Bobbie. Werner was a battered old diesel engine of a bloke. I thought of an old tractor or a 4WD. He was long and skinny in general but his chest had bulk. He looked like he could plough a field with his sharp bare arms. Bobbie said he made his own salami and I wondered whether he killed his own pigs too. I went to prod Eden then but he was already staring hard at him.
‘I used to sell barbells wholesale,’ Werner said as if we’d asked a question and this somehow explained it. Werner moved further into the water then. This brought him closer to us. His legs were hairless, as if they’d been shaved, and I could see goosebumps rising on his sinewy thighs. ‘Hope this isn’t freaking you out,’ he said. He turned his left arm then so that its inside faced us. A long scar ran from his wrist to higher than his elbow. There were scars stitched down the centre of his chest and on his belly too. ‘The king’s horses and the king’s men put me back together again,’ he said. ‘Though the surgeon was a queen.’ The fine lattice of these scars made me think of my own scars and of Eden’s too. Werner’s, though, were different to ours: his rose like a dividing range down his chest and looked for all the world like muscles.
‘Australians generally underestimate the value of a crisp country stream,’ he said as he strode further into its crystal. He dived straight in as if the water’s cold was nothing; as if he was just like us.
‘You train too fast,’ Werner said as he lifted himself from the water, ‘and not fast enough.’
I realised as his words faded along the creek that Werner talked different without Bobbie there. He seemed to have swollen or filled back out, as if Bobbie dehydrated him. ‘Do you boys know anything about the hydro scheme?’ he asked later. We had towels draped over our shoulders.
We looked at Werner with eyes stretched wide. Late sun blinked out from behind his shoulder. I couldn’t tell whether he was wary or wooed by the sudden fierceness of our attention. ‘Those guys knew about water,’ he said.
*
‘If my mood seems uplifted,’ Bobbie said as we came back in, ‘bought myself a new bra and it’s quite a thing.’
She’d already opened a bottle of wine and was on her couch. Eden sat in the seat with the view, Hemi flat out on top of him. ‘We’ll watch the channel two news together,’ Bobbie said as if it was a bright idea. Werner stood near his keys at the bench but he drifted over to the couch. ‘Today is a moment,’ Bobbie said, reading my mind.
‘It won’t be on yet,’ Werner said.
‘Imagine if Jack walked in now,’ she said, still noting things she wished she could show him.
‘Scrabble then,’ she quickly added. ‘Tea can wait.’
‘I should have brought some salami,’ Werner said. ‘Should I do pasta?’
‘The fat cupboard’s a mess.’ Bobbie kicked the Scrabble board out from under the couch. ‘One day I’ll make the word triangular arbitrage,’ she said as she set up the letters.
‘Two words and too long,’ he said.
‘If you’re going to be half-arsed you might as well not do it,’ she said.
‘Hungry,’ Eden and I said in unison.
‘Three words,’ Bobbie said. ‘Cruskits. Butter. Vegemite.’
‘Dumplings?’ Eden prompted.
‘Oh, okay then,’ she said as if caving in. ‘There’s kai si ming in the freezer,’ she added.
They played Scrabble as we ate Cruskits and dumplings, cheese mixed with pasta. Eden then put the video of Misty Hyman on. She beat Aussie legend Susie O’Neill in the 200-metre butterfly at the 2000 Olympics. Hyman said in the video that she knew she wanted to be an Olympian from when she was nine years old. She broke her state record at the 50-yard butterfly when she was ten.
‘You two Norms ready for bed?’ Bobbie said pulling her slippers from under the couch. She had a world under there.
We hit our beds exhausted. As we lay in bed we could still hear them playing. Werner had his back to our bedroom and so the only words we could make out were Bobbie’s.
‘Super attentive,’ she said.
‘Twitchy bugger but I’m fond.’
‘He’s more heart than brain,’ she said.
‘What happened in the seventies stays in the seventies,’ she said.
I heard the sound of wine being poured. Then Bobbie said, ‘If anything happened to those boys the world would come after me with pitchforks.’
Just before I fell completely asleep I heard her exclaim, ‘You stole my triple!’
*
There was a note again in the letterbox at Newport. Tiny handwriting, written in purple.
When Dawn Fraser was at the peak of her swimming powers she was date-raped at a hotel in Melbourne. She lost her virginity and became pregnant as a result.
When she was thirteen her closest brother died of leukaemia; her father died of cancer when she was mid-career; her mum died in a single-car accident, with Dawn at the wheel, in the lead-up to the Tokyo Olympics, where she became the first person in history to win an Olympic gold medal in the same event at three consecutive Games.
Post career, Dawn Fraser was date-raped a second time, this time at knifepoint, on a cruise ship.
Over her ten years of international swimming Fraser redefined the world record time for her event – a sprint – by almost ten per cent. When she entered the world stage Willy den Ouden of the Netherlands held the world record of 64.9 seconds; Dawn Fraser smashed it down to 58.9.
The only way to stop Dawn Fraser was to change the rules, or to ban her. At the end of the Tokyo Olympics she was banned for ten years for wearing the wrong tracksuit at a medal ceremony, and for souveniring a Japanese flag. Incredibly, had she not been banned, Fraser may have won a fourth straight 100 metres freestyle title, at the 1968 Games, or so her training times suggest.
When Fraser was named the World Female Swimmer of the 20th Century the other winners, in their respective categories, were Muhammed Ali, Carl Lewis and Nadia Comaneci.
Dear Eden and Jon, there is something you should know . . .
Dawn Fraser built her strength by swimming up the White Power aqueduct in Sydney. She chose swimming as her sport because the uniform was cheap. She was unstoppable over 100 metres but won Olympic silver over 400 metres. She swam twelve kilometres every day as training. The 200-metre freestyle was her natural best fit, and her favourite event. Through her entire career though, Dawn Fraser, the female swimmer of the century, never got to swim in her best event at the Olympics, the 200-metre freestyle, because she was a woman. The event was considered too hard.
We read to the end of this letter. We were silent both throughout and after, though our lips kept moving. Our eyes roamed certain sentences a second and third time. Eden said, ‘White Power aqueduct.’ As he did my heart almost stopped. We did all our training upstream too, some of it into the mouth of a power station.
‘Not really a letter for a ten-year-old,’ Bobbie said.
*
We kept on with squad and we kept training at The Warmies. But on weekends at Flowerdale, Werner would now walk by the side of the creek and drill us like we’d never been drilled before. He doubled the length of our sessions. In months our bodies turned from skinny and stringy to hard and wiry. ‘Maximum! More! More!’ he yelled as we thrashed our stretch of water. ‘Fifteen on a scale of one to ten!’ We’d beat furiously up a specific stretch of current then ease back down to our log. It was micro intervals with trees and rapids as markers. We trained like this over months, through winter and spring and then again into summer. We trained through flood and then when the water
dropped low we trained our skin against stones. A clear worn path formed by the creek where Werner strutted and instructed, Hemi always beside him. We grew in size and stature but mostly we grew in style, in that we developed one. Eden was powerful but slippery like a snake. He made speed look easy; the harder he trained the more effortless he looked. Werner reckoned my style was more of a ‘bustle in a hedgerow’. I looked lighter than Eden but I was deceptive. I had a jump and a charge. You had me beat and then I was on you and then I was gone, or I tried to be. I looked nothing like a snake. I ploughed down the lane like I was bounding up stairs.
‘Your brain will pace you, no matter how hard you think you’re going,’ Werner said. ‘You have to reset its clock.’
‘Medium. Everyone trains medium. Medium is lukewarm. If you don’t like it hot then go stone cold. Go slow. Slow is important. Then go fast. Force your body. Trick it. You go faster for longer.’
*
‘Werner knows things,’ I said to Bobbie at Flowerdale one morning. She looked out the kitchen window at the steam blooming off the compost heap.
‘None of his clothes fit properly,’ she replied.
‘Maybe he’s lost weight,’ I said.
‘Or he bought them on special.’
I took a breath before speaking again. I didn’t want to rush. ‘It’s working,’ I said slowly. I’d waited for Eden to be out of the room; I wanted to tell her myself.
‘I’ve seen you two going bananas,’ she said.
‘Werner works,’ I said.
‘You sound like you want to chuck a party,’ she said as she turned to me.
‘We’re fast.’ The word skipped at pace across my tongue. ‘We’re getting so high in the water it’s like we’re skimming.’
‘State Champs?’
‘Saturday before Easter.’
‘Trains you like he’s the Minister for Attack,’ she said, getting back to Werner.
*
It happened after school.
The shortest route home was out the front gate of the school but Eden and I always went the back way, past Dad’s unfinished scoreboard. As we passed the shelter sheds we saw a group of kids gathered in a circle. We looked and in the middle stood a girl and a boy, Rena and Minh, with their arms around each other. They were kissing. It was not a brief kiss. It was open-mouthed and long.
Both Eden and I watched mesmerised, as did a growing group of others. Watching Rena and Minh kiss was like touching an electric fence. It wasn’t so much a thrill as an agitation.
Rena and Minh were in Grade 6 like us. Rena lived in a double-storey house, I knew that; she was the only one of our friends who did. She had a screechy voice when she talked but she could sing. Minh lived in the dressed-up railway house on the corner, the one people went to for washing machine repairs. He had run me out in cricket once. I turned to Eden or to where I thought he’d be but instead Carmelina stood there. Eden had moved from my right side to my left as if he’d switched sides in the back seat of the car. Carmelina was looking at Rena and Minh but almost as soon as I turned she looked straight at me.
I had barely spoken to Carmelina since the night of her father. When she turned to me that afternoon as Rena and Minh kissed it was like seeing her face on a different-sized screen. I could see more of her. I wanted to reach for her hand but I had started to shake as if I was cold. I noticed for the first time then that Carmelina had a pure black dot, tiny in size, on the left side of her face. It sat midway between her cheekbone and her eye. I looked at it and eventually noticed that there was a second dot, tinier still, not so dark, like a shadow, a step closer again to her eye. I followed these dots on her face and eventually found it in me to look straight into her eyes. She did not flinch or waver. I thought to myself once again that she was a rock. Eventually I noticed that she was smiling at me though everything seemed to have blurred, or everything other than those dots and her dark chocolatey eyes. In her eyes I saw a reflection and when it moved I noticed that it was Eden; I could see a reflection of Eden in Carmelina’s eyes and he was looking at us and circling. I turned slightly and he had already stepped towards the oval and home. I followed him. I couldn’t hear the sound of onion grass as my shoes brushed across it but I listened for it as if the sound was a rope and I might need to grab it.
*
We were walking out from school a few days later when Carmelina fell in step with me. Eden was just behind but he sped up like he was attacking in a race and within a few steps he was ahead. I should have kept up with him and I initially tried but then instead I allowed myself to drift. I hadn’t looked at Carmelina but I felt her presence keenly. I waited for Eden, many steps ahead by then, to look behind to see where I was. But he kept walking. I watched Eden push out across the oval of dry grass. When he reached the edge, he stepped onto a beam of the unfinished scoreboard. He climbed to the crossbeam and walked its length before jumping off. He walked out through the vacant lot and on towards Jubilee Street. The playground had been a swarm of kids but by the time Eden was gone almost everyone had left. No one was near Carmelina and me. It was the first time I had been at the school without Eden. This combined with the fact that everyone else was gone made me feel hollow and nervous. Carmelina said, ‘Eden was quiet,’ and after she said this she looked at me in the way that Mum might have, in that she looked interested in my answer.
‘I’ll see him at home,’ I said so serious I almost sounded grave.
‘“I’ll see him at home”,’ Carmelina mocked in a slightly deeper-than-usual voice. She didn’t touch me or move closer but the fact that she was relaxed enough to joke around seemed to inject us both with air. I breathed in and then quickly breathed in again as though I’d not been doing so properly. ‘Okay,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was saying okay to.
‘You are,’ she said reassuringly.
We walked past the kitchen garden, through the play fort and onto the dry oval. It felt big and exposed. The day was still sunny and warm. The edges of the grass as I looked out across the oval were so dry they were white. A bare concrete cricket pitch sat roughly in the centre. When we reached it Carmelina slowed and I did too. We didn’t know what to do. Carmelina kicked stones from the cricket pitch and then sat down cross-legged on it. She closed her eyes and angled her brown face at the sun. She did this for a minute or two before lying down flat on her back. She squinted at me. ‘Come on,’ she said. She closed her eyes again and once she had I noticed that she had bright pink shoelaces threaded into her runners. I’d never seen her wear anything so bright before. They reminded me of the green tips of trees in spring.
There was no one around. If I lay down flat it would be as if we weren’t even there. I stepped a swimming lane distance from her and lay down beside Carmelina on the concrete pitch.
As soon as I lay down I thought of Eden and of how we’d lie in the sun on the banks of the creek at Flowerdale. I was at Newport and it was home though my concept of home now had film over it, as if it wasn’t as clear as it had been. Lying there on the pitch with the bright light in the sky and with someone breathing close by felt like a kind of home or that it could be. I opened my eyes and saw a flock of white pigeons or doves returning from a flight. I knew that this flock belonged to the solid brick house by the side of the vacant block, not the one with the olive trees and the cacti but the one on the other side with a fig tree with white plastic bags tied in it. I always liked seeing this flock of birds, some of which would return to their backyard by tumbling down from the sky, though at that moment I liked them especially, the fluttering white on blue, their grouping.
‘Eden will be having toast and honey now,’ I said.
‘Mum will pick me up soon,’ she said.
We lay there silent and I tried to think of what I’d say to Bobbie when I got home. Carmelina said, ‘It’s Easter soon.’
‘Eden and me are racing,’ I said.
‘I’ll get you an egg from the shop.’
‘An Easter egg?’ I said.
I wondered if I should say something about her dad or ask how her mum was but before I could think of the right thing to say Carmelina said, ‘Do you want to kiss me one day?’
I knew she was thinking of Rena and Minh and I wondered if we were flat out on this cricket pitch in the sun because of them. I said, clearer but softer, ‘Kiss you?’ It was a question just like the one I had asked about the Easter egg but my tone of voice now was different.
Carmelina said, even softer than I had spoken, ‘Yes.’
I heard her voice as if she was a tree and I had my ear to her. I heard the breath in her voice. I had not yet thought of kissing her. What I had thought of in bed at night both at Newport and at Flowerdale was that one day I’d like to marry Carmelina. I’d thought of this before I’d thought of what it might be like to kiss her. I was so desperate to be a son and a brother and in turn a man that I’d turned attachment into a fantasy.
‘Kiss,’ she repeated, ‘me.’
And Carmelina half-smiled or the snap of spit about her lips made it sound as though she had.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Have you thought of it?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Honestly?’
There was a stone pressing into my back. ‘Honestly,’ I replied.
And I heard her roll away.
*
Bobbie was on the computer when I walked in off Jubilee Street. I acted as if I always came in at that time and she didn’t raise her eyebrows, look at me funny or reach suddenly for advice. In fact she barely looked up. I put bread in the toaster and waited. I needed to go to the toilet but I liked to be there when the toast popped so that I could melt the butter straight in. As I waited for the toast I worked on an answer for Bobbie.
‘Is it working okay?’ I asked her, aware that I sounded nervous. From down the hall came the sound of the toilet being flushed. Bobbie spoke then but she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the computer. ‘Any dumb bunny can get their password right,’ she pointed at the screen. ‘I did it wrong to see if you knew.’ Then without looking at me she asked if it was still hot outside.
We Were Not Men Page 12
