I don’t know why we’d wanted to do this, or why we’d both been so sure. We were desperate for a say, I think, when something bad happened. I think that’s what it was. Though we might just have wanted to be the ones holding Hemi when it was her time to suffer.
Eden then let go of Hemi and strode further into the water, like he was in some kind of daze, like there was no one there but him. He said nothing. He shed nothing. He walked into the water and the fog had lifted but steam or mist still wafted about the surface. Sunlight shot between the trees in shafts of yellow and white. Eden made it to deeper water and then spread himself flat on the surface and then when he was settled and at one with it he started to swim. His stroke was so long and languid it was as if there was a sadness to it. I watched him and I still had Hemi held at my feet but I could easily have laid her on the bank and followed him, just like I had that time when he’d tipped himself out of the wheelchair when he’d first returned from the hospital. This time though I watched him swim that sad slow stroke but I did not follow him in. Somewhere along the way the part of me that jumped straight after Eden had been shelled. I kept Hemi held beneath the water and when I looked up there was so much mist and sunlight mixed into the trees and leaves that it was hard to tell which was which.
‘I’m buying new jackets for all of us.’ Bobbie said as if it was important, as if the death of Hemi meant that we would need to find a new coat or source of heat.
It was then that Bobbie took a few steps into the water. I’d never seen her even touch the creek water before. Bobbie fed us and did everything. The water was cold. Her legs shook. She stared down into the water, into where my hands held Hemi under. Now that it was done she almost looked disbelieving. The water was dark brown like whisky but with sun cutting into it. ‘This isn’t going to make it any easier,’ she said, to herself I think, or to the water, or to Hemi.
I thought Bobbie would move back then but she didn’t. She stood there in the cold, more or less unmoving, her eyes following the water as it moved away from Hemi, to and fro, as if she’d lost something that she loved or had loved in the cold water there.
*
I first heard the sentence I say to myself every night when I was still in hospital, immediately after the accident. It was not meant for my ears; my eyes had been closed when the nurse said it, but still it engraved itself into me. I repeat this sentence even though I know that it is a stupid sentence and that I shouldn’t. The sentence is actually a question. ‘Who’s going to smack their bottoms?’ is what I heard, and what I repeat to myself, every night.
*
‘They’ve got one pinot and it’s from Tumbarumba,’ Bobbie said in disgust. We were in a Thai restaurant the night we buried Hemi. We’d trained and worked the farm but we were only hungry because we should be. Bobbie picked up the menu but before she looked at it she stared at us and said, ‘The will to live,’ as if it was a phrase that pawed at the door of her. Neither Eden nor I replied but this phrase pawed at us too. ‘That’s a menu written by a grump,’ Bobbie said as she put it down.
She called a waiter. ‘One red curry, one green curry, chicken or fish, surprise me. Rice for three.’ She spoke as though she’d spent half her life in restaurants. The woman taking the order held a notepad but she didn’t write anything and instead just stared at us. I noticed that she had dark lines of ink scrawled over her hands and fingers. Bobbie looked at us as if the waiter was loopy but then the inked hands lifted and the waiter spoke.
‘I don’t usually chase ambos,’ she said to us. ‘But I did that night.
‘You don’t know me,’ she continued. ‘But I was there.’ I looked at the lines on her hands and thought how they looked like strings. ‘You’ve grown,’ she said and looked at me. ‘I have photos of you. I worked for Leader.’
She was a press photographer or had been that night. ‘Would you mind’ – she turned to Bobbie – ‘if I took a photo of them?’
‘A what?’
‘They look so healthy,’ she said, as if Eden and I should be framed and hung on a wall.
Bobbie didn’t answer properly but she said ‘I love the suburbs’ as she moved out of the way. Eden and I remained where we were against the wall. The waiter pulled a phone from her pocket and asked us to turn our faces towards the light coming from the front window. She took a picture and then several more and when she had one she was happy with she turned the screen to us. The restaurant had a neon light on its front window and it had fired as the photo was taken. Eden’s face looked bright neon blue. The glow reminded me of the blue insect trap at the souvlaki shop that night. The waitress held her phone as we stared at the photo and I noticed then that beneath the ink on her hands she had scars that looked like slashes.
‘Nothing digs so deep as our past,’ Bobbie said, coming up to see.
‘I have wide-angle shots from the night,’ the waiter said.
Eden spoke seriously then but even so his voice was whispered. ‘Photos?’ he said.
‘They’re grainy as hell,’ the waiter said. She flicked the photo she’d taken of us from the phone screen and started flipping through a different catalogue. ‘Here,’ she said.
And then in front of us instead of rice and curries there was a picture of the road at night with cars, lights and people splattered across it. Our lives looked like globes that had been smashed against a wall. Papers blew and the rain looked amber and people were on stretchers with teams around them. The road was like one big shattered windscreen except that it was metal and rubber and plastic too. Everyone in the picture though was alive and not dead and I thought then that the photographer must have moved and taken this angle deliberately. Eden and I took the phone from her and huddled close just like we had that night when we’d got out of bed to look at Mum and Dad’s watches. Our family car was in the photo and in fact it was close to where the photographer had been standing. We stared at our car and I thought of the CD still in the player. After a while I noticed a reflection in our car’s rear window and there was water on the glass which made the reflection indistinct but I could see enough to notice that there was a body wrapped in white and lying on the ground. I stared at this white hazy reflected shape and I did not breathe. I lifted my hand because I wanted to wipe at the phone screen and to polish it but I didn’t want what I had noticed to be obvious and so I put my hand back down. I did not jiggle my legs beneath the table but I wanted to. I still had not drawn a breath when Eden tapped the screen to point at the very spot I had found. He said, ‘Mum.’
I said, ‘I know.’
He said, ‘Mum.’
I said, ‘I think so.’
I had breathed to speak but then I held it again. I expected Eden to mouth the word Mum again and I wanted him to because just the sound of that word was soothing like music. The longer I stared at the white shape on the screen though the more it seemed to blur.
Eden said, ‘I’ve looked everywhere.’
I thought of Mum every time I climbed from the water and sometimes in my mind I swam mock races against her. But I tried to keep my thoughts of Mum and how I missed her in a box or in a rectangle where I had a chance to keep these thoughts controlled.
I said, ‘Maybe it’s a sheep or an animal.’
‘Wool,’ Eden said.
‘White,’ I said.
Eden paused then and I knew what he was going to say and then he did.
‘It’s Mum,’ he reconfirmed.
‘I know,’ I said.
We had nothing more to say but we kept looking at the screen anyway and it wasn’t to break the silence, it was from somewhere else.
‘Mum,’ he whispered directly to her image and this time almost as a question.
*
By the time we handed the phone back to the waiter another waiter had come over. Bobbie babbled away at them both. ‘You take on a lot of shit from the people who were never going to vote for you anyway,’ she said. The waiter with the ink-stained hands took no notice of Bobbie and instead stare
d at Eden and me. She said to us, ‘Every time you two jump in the pool I’m rooting for you like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘The problem is,’ Bobbie said as if she craved adult company, ‘we’re all disenfranchised. They privatised everything but kept the tax take the same. So now they’ve got a hand in both our pockets.’
Ignoring Bobbie, Eden looked at the waiter and said, ‘I want a copy.’ Both Eden’s hands and mine crept forward on the table as though we itched to snatch her phone back.
The waiter moved away and Bobbie picked up the drinks menu again. As she looked at the menu she asked, ‘Did that skinny bitch take our order in the end?’ We must have reacted because Bobbie quickly added, ‘They used to pay me to bite my tongue.’
*
That night I lay in bed and pictured the colours of my life. There was the blue of the pools we raced in and the red-white rings of the tower at the top of the power station and the orange dirt of Flowerdale. There was the creamy yellow fur of Hemi and the long dark red of the scar on Werner’s chest and the splashed purple stains on the wine barrels in Bobbie’s cellar. There was the milk chocolate of Dad and the dark chocolate of Carmelina and the neon blue of the mosquito zapper at the souvlaki shop. There was the brown hessian of the potato bags and the silver and gold of Mum and Dad’s watches and the white of that blanket or sheet we had seen reflected in the window and that honey like sun, like bees, like russet-brown, always that russet-brown; it was there even in the picture on the wall where the sun comes from.
These colours ran through my mind and then at the end of them I felt so cold that I rolled out of bed and climbed in with Eden and he did not question me and instead rolled to make space.
‘It flashed,’ he said to me. He sounded so clearVnd awake it was if he’d been waiting.
I did not need to ask because I knew he was referring to Hemi and of her last breath and how the bubbles had caught the sun as they rose.
Part IV
High school started and we kept training. Morning and night, six days a week, weights, water, farm work, core on the floor, a deep tunnel of tiredness. I had not seen Carmelina since the day on the scoreboard though I had messaged her many times, but now even this messaging had stopped. We had a new life now and this was its way.
The increase to our training meant that Eden and I didn’t race for six months. As soon as the gun fired and I hit the pool in our first race back though, I knew or at least I suspected. I felt different. I hit the front and thrashed hard and my speed was fast but Eden stayed closer than usual. And then almost immediately he did what he had never done before and pressed straight onto and over me. I had not known that the start would be so decisive but I saw it happen and yet still I was slow to respond. If you threw Eden into a toddler pool and told him to swim a lap he would back-end it, he always did. I had to manage Eden’s early speed but I did not want to blow up and I had to trust my fitness and these were my thoughts as I swam. I thrashed for half a lap more but then I eased or at least slid and gathered into the turn. My speed was on track but maybe I was blowing too hard. The problem was not the clock but the race. I kept my rating high and my speed fast for the entire second lap but I was spinning. The water out ahead had begun to smooth and I liked to own the clear water, but in this case clear water made me anxious. I pulled into the third lap and if Eden was a thread, I had already lost hold. I swam then as if feeling in the dark. The eye of a race is all-encompassing and yet suddenly I felt lost and alone. I hoped that Eden had gone out too hard and that I still might reel him in. I knew this was nonsense and that he would push the sword in deeper but I swam hard anyway. I wondered at what point I would feel proud of him. I kept on like this and the water ahead remained clear and it was blasphemy and not deliberate but I was glad when I felt other swimmers come up from behind. I should have felt light and loose because I was hard and drilled. The more I swam though, the worse I felt. I pushed hard again and it worked and I tried to dig even harder but I had nothing or that’s how it felt. I was not half-way down this third lap when I felt Eden loop past and he was on the last lap and he would win. I felt his water flutter by in swift tight flurries. I did not slow then or not on purpose but I was tired and so I must have. I wondered what time Eden would record. I felt the air go out of me as if I was a li-lo and I was no longer needed. Suddenly there were swimmers all around again and some were ahead. I thought then that this was freestyle and that Eden was even better at butterfly. I swam in among the other swimmers and it felt good to be in company and not caught out between. I turned into the final lap and kept pace but now I just wanted it to be over. Bobbie always said that we look at ourselves differently when we’re tired. I ploughed towards the finish and the water was all messed and Mum wasn’t in the stands and nor was Carmelina and my heart was heavy and that’s how I had swum.
*
That feeling when the race is done and your hand is on the wall. When you’re knackered but you have another race soon. When the party swoops in to celebrate someone else; when analysis is at its harshest; when disappointment roars straight up out of the chlorine fog.
The start of the race had been decisive and I had known it even at the time and yet I’d let him go too easy. I should have buried myself and gone with him and risked dying for the chance to win. The next race jumped in over my head and I held at the end of the pool and put my head under. I looked for the black line and it was there. I had to believe in that line but all I could think then was that I felt empty.
*
‘Zadok the priest,’ Bobbie said, I don’t know why. She headed straight for Eden.
The commotion was about my twin but he broke away and looked at me and asked, ‘You good?’
I said, ‘Every last ounce,’ because his win was real and he should know.
I didn’t feel sick but I wanted to be, it would be a reason. Eden turned back as if I needed him. He said, ‘Mum’s name is on the board in the foyer’ and turned back away.
Eden stood among other swimmers. I heard him say, ‘Thanks fucking much’ and I thought how we were not in primary school anymore.
Later on the way out of the centre I looked for Mum’s name on the board. She was listed multiple times because she’d been a champion through her ages. She had long fingers and arms and so too now did Eden. The honour board was made of brown-stained wood with a shiny veneer. The gold lettering had a black shadow behind to make the names stand out. Mum’s name on the board looked like it had been made in bands of black and gold.
‘It’s like swimming towards yesterday,’ Eden said as we looked up at the board.
*
We pulled off Jubilee Street and Fuzzy was on the road kicking a footy with Nectar. We stepped out of the car and he asked, ‘Who won the battle?’
‘Eden did,’ Bobbie said.
‘Who won the war?’ he asked brightly.
‘Eden did,’ Bobbie said.
‘Empire strikes back,’ he said.
‘Nothing wins forever,’ Bobbie said.
‘Out of the shadows,’ he said.
Fuzzy turned to Eden and they spoke and as they did Bobbie turned to me and said, ‘Shadows are our friends.’
‘Everyone has off days,’ Fuzzy said looking back at me.
‘Sun can stream through rain,’ Bobbie said.
Hemi didn’t greet us anymore. I took our towels and swimmers to the laundry. When I returned Bobbie said, ‘It’s not what you do, it’s what you don’t do.’
I wondered if I’d over-trained and it was impossible to tell but I decided that I would train even harder and that would settle it. I thought of weights and a swimming pool and of diving in, heavy. I looked out the side window and Fuzzy had wedged a pumpkin on the top of the fence again. There was a crack in the top half of the pumpkin so that from a distance the glimpse of orange made the pumpkin look like a head.
*
There was a note in the letterbox that afternoon. That tiny, meticulous handwriting. It said:
Ian
Thorpe was the youngest world swimming champion ever. He won his first world title when he was fourteen. He was renowned from the start for his huge feet but even as a junior he was a giant all over. When he won the gold medal in the 400-metre freestyle at the Athens Olympics he was the heaviest Olympic swimmer in history. He weighed 105 kilograms. In his career he won five Olympic gold medals, the most by any Australian. They called him the Thorpedo. He didn’t beat his opponents, he left them dead in the water.
Ian Thorpe’s father could have been a household name as a cricketer. He debuted in first grade as a seventeen-year-old. He retired at eighteen because of anxiety. He went on to coach Mark and Steve Waugh, who then took lead roles in a dominant era of Australian cricket. Ian Thorpe suffered from anxiety and depression just as his dad had. He retired too early, though not before he had become the best Australian male swimmer there ever was. He tried to come back but the magic had moved.
*
We relented to Scrabble. Bobbie went easy on us and Eden got ahead at that too. Bobbie looked at me and said, ‘You think you’ve got problems. I’ve got seven consonants.’ She said this as if it should comfort me. Out of nowhere then Bobbie said, ‘They used the wrong word.’ We thought she was talking about Scrabble but then she said, ‘Like.’
Eden looked at me and said, ‘Bobbie’s discovered Facebook.’
‘You could get a million likes and it wouldn’t mean a thing,’ she said. ‘But if just one person said they understood you.’
We Were Not Men Page 19
