The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Now the left one.’ Unhindered now by hair, a trickle of suds ran down his chest and stomach. Eyes still firmly shut, he heard the cockatoos continuing to squawk and eat, and half-gnawed figs plopping on the ground, and a train clattering across the Harbour Bridge towards the city.

  By now the breeze felt overly intimate on his exposed skin. His body was disconcertingly sensitive – electrified – and the female smell of her olive skin and her satiny swimsuit made him light-headed, giddy with his intimate proximity to a semi-naked, mature woman on a summer’s day.

  Dulcie took up his right wrist again, held it steady, and swept the razor up his forearm to his elbow, then along the triceps to the shoulder. She paused there and put her free hand on his right shoulder and clasped it for a few seconds, and closed her eyes as if considering its muscles and tendons and reflecting on the exercise that had gone into its formation. The hundreds of miles it had swum.

  Time stopped. Then she shaved the other arm, and for a moment she closed her eyes and squeezed this shoulder, too.

  ‘All done, Johnny Weissmuller.’ She dropped the razor in the pot of water and ran both hands over his chest. ‘Smooth as a baby’s bottom.’

  *

  When her second husband and Judy’s stepfather, Chief Petty Officer Eric Kroger, shipped out for nine months on the destroyer HMAS Warramunga a month before, Dulcie had moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. The Australian navy, the Warramunga and, by extension, CPO Kroger, were assisting the British in maintaining the security of the Federation of Malaya against Communist insurgents.

  The arrangement suited both households. Dulcie had company while Eric was away, and though Brian was doubtful at first, the young couple found they benefited from her help around the house, and especially with his Olympic preparation.

  Soon after their marriage, Brian and Judy had been delighted to find the house for rent above Luna Park. A two-bedroomed nineteenth-century shipbuilder’s cottage, its sandstone walls and narrow back garden bordered by oleanders and frangipanis, it suited the newlyweds’ romantic mood. Importantly, it was only a hundred yards from Alf Wilmott’s coaching headquarters at the North Sydney pool, and only two train stations across the harbour from Judy’s night-shift copytaker’s job at the Daily Telegraph.

  Brian, meanwhile, was working as a phys. ed. teacher at North Sydney Boys High, a welcome job for an amateur athlete. The pay was only Education Department standard rate but the school was just a mile from their house, easy jogging distance, he had use of the gym, and the hours suited his early-morning and afternoon training sessions.

  Unlike most new husbands, Brian soon welcomed his mother-in-law’s presence. This was because of her cooking and his huge fuel requirements. Five miles twice a day in the pool, plus his weight training, burned up mountains of calories. And, frankly, Dulcie was a superior cook to his 21-year-old wife.

  In any case, Judy’s new night-time job absented her at dinnertime during the week, so Dulcie’s cooking was crucial. Only at weekends did Brian and Judy get to eat meals together. Or, for that matter, go to bed at the same time.

  Their clashing schedules was the only impediment to marriage harmony. While Brian rose at four-thirty for his five a.m. laps, and was asleep by eight-thirty at night, Judy’s shift on the Telegraph ran from four p.m. to midnight, the newspaper’s busiest hours. When Brian arrived home from school she was off to work, and he had to immediately leave for the pool. And after catching the last night train home from Town Hall station, Judy fell exhausted into bed – her head ringing with domestic crimes and gang stabbings and gambling-den raids – around one a.m.

  From Monday to Friday, Dulcie prepared Brian’s evening meal. After dinner, in deference to her excellent cooking, her role as Judy’s mother and her status as an elder relative (she was forty-four), he’d chat politely with her over a cup of cocoa. Then as his eyelids began to droop, he‘d stretch his weary limbs, say goodnight, climb the stairs and hit the sack.

  *

  On Sunday mornings Judy hurried home from Mass so the young couple could make up for their love drought during the week. As Sunday was his only break from four-thirty rising, Brian was excused from church, allowed to linger in bed, catch up on sleep, and wake refreshed for her return to bed at eleven.

  On this particular rest day when she returned home from church, Judy was puzzled to find Brian wasn’t in bed as usual but sitting in his bathrobe in the backyard. He was drinking coffee and reading the Sunday Telegraph. Recalling the shaving-down conversation of the night before, she peeled back his bathrobe.

  A transformation. His hairless chest looked strangely pale and vulnerable. His back was striated with scratches. Shamefaced, he said, ‘My first try at shaving myself.’

  ‘Idiot. I would’ve done that for you.’ She stroked his wounded shoulderblades. ‘Poor baby.’

  In the kitchen her mother was making a clatter with pots and crockery and impatiently switching radio stations back and forth from a haranguing evangelist on the Worldwide Church of God to a country and western couple yodelling competitively. The radio was hopeless on Sunday mornings.

  ‘What’s up with her?’ Judy murmured. She picked a pink frangipani blossom and put it behind her ear. ‘Back to bed, smooth fish,’ she whispered.

  As he trudged upstairs behind his frisky adorable wife, she continued to scold him. ‘Fancy trying to shave your own back. You don’t grow any fur there, thank goodness.’

  *

  It wasn’t only the lazy mornings that Brian relished on Sundays. At around one-thirty the couple would rise languidly, put on their swimsuits, and head to Bondi Beach. This afternoon Dulcie was keen to join them.

  After his hundreds of pool laps during the week, it was a luxury for Brian to swim purely for pleasure, to catch waves, to enjoy the ocean. Today the salt water made his shaved limbs tingle and stung his back in an unfamiliar but sensual way. Indeed, after a surf, a milkshake, a meat pie and a hamburger, sunbaking on the sand with Judy and Dulcie stretched out on either side of him, Brian felt sated, as pampered as a sultan.

  Judy’s hand openly stroked his newly sensitive left thigh. And as Dulcie turned on her back and adjusted her swimsuit to expose a fraction more chest to the sun, her knee or foot surreptitiously brushed his smooth right calf.

  The sea, the warm rays and the tasty takeaways were such great revivers of a young athlete’s body and spirits that the sultan was soon speculating on the week ahead, suddenly a bewilderingly different and arousing vision, beginning with this evening when he and this slender blonde girl presently wriggling against him would be in bed again.

  When this did occur several hours later, however, a loud knock on the bedroom door interrupted them. Judy groaned. How long had Dulcie been standing there, within earshot?

  ‘What’s the matter, Mother?’ Judy called out. ‘We were fast asleep!’ Clearly false, but difficult for an eavesdropper to contradict.

  ‘I’ve brought you some cocoa.’

  ‘We don’t need cocoa!’

  ‘Brian always has a cup of cocoa at this time. It’s part of his training diet.’

  ‘God! Leave the cups outside the door then.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ll spill them.’

  Brian’s back was smarting. He was suddenly exhausted.

  Judy rose, strode naked across the room and opened the door. The women faced each other. Neither was smiling. Judy took the cups of cocoa.

  ‘Thank you,’ she muttered.

  ‘Put something on,’ her mother said.

  Judy shut the door on her and returned to bed. Brian’s eyelids were drooping as the couple lay waiting for Dulcie’s footsteps to go downstairs. In the long silence Judy thought she could hear her mother breathing outside the door. Eventually the stairs creaked and shortly afterwards plates and cutlery were rattling and cupboard doors banged in the kitchen.

  ‘Where were we?’ Judy whispered to Brian. He was nearly asleep but he rallied valiantly to the cause.

  *

/>   On Monday afternoon when Alf Wilmott put his 1500 metres specialist through a time trial, the newly shaved-down Brian Tasker swam the distance 3.5 seconds slower than in his natural hirsute state the month before.

  ‘Heavy weekend, boyo?’ Alf asked, shaking his head. ‘What happened to your back?’

  Brian shrugged. ‘Shaving-down,’ he said.

  As punishment, Alf made him swim an extra three miles, made up of ten 400-metre swims within an hour, with an average time of four minutes forty-five seconds, representing about ninety per cent effort.

  *

  There was no reason for Brian to shave down the following Sunday; the whole point was to shave just before a big race, so your body felt the difference – the transformation – and reacted accordingly. But as soon as Judy left for church, Brian was in the garden with the shaving cream and razor.

  Under low humid clouds the day headed sullenly towards a thunderstorm. Cicadas buzzed a monotone refrain in the trees. A mirage juddered across the bay. While he waited, Brian watched the tiny Lavender Bay ferry steaming across the harbour and the illusion was of two mysteriously conjoined boats, the regular ferry and, above it, another misty ferry that churned boldly over the water’s surface and through the air. For some reason he thought of his nemesis, the up-and-coming young harbour swimmer Murray Rose.

  Soon Dulcie joined him. She’d changed into her blue satiny swimsuit and heat radiated off her flesh. With a frown, she examined him. Only a shadowy stubble showed on his limbs and chest but she lathered his body and began shaving him anyway.

  The westerly breeze from the harbour was warm and humid and carried smoke from a bushfire in the Blue Mountains. But Brian shivered. The air was pungent with the smell of burning eucalypts and the drone of the cicadas was deafening. As the two twinned Lavender Bay ferries approached Circular Quay, they slowed, then docked, and their images merged back into a single small boat.

  ‘I need to be thorough,’ Dulcie said. When she finished, she ran her fingertips slowly over his body. Neither of them had spoken until that moment. As she drew him into the house and upstairs, he asked, ‘Have you trimmed your fingernails?’

  Her glistening eyes aroused and unnerved him. She didn’t answer.

  *

  There was an abrupt change in Brian’s weekday routine. Now when he got home from his afternoon pool laps, damp-headed and smelling of chlorine, Dulcie was waiting by the door to take him directly upstairs to her bed. Afterwards, she served him his customary big dinner and bedtime cocoa.

  One time only, feeling more ravenous than usual after training, Brian suggested dinner before bed. But the instant they’d had sex he fell deeply asleep. It was difficult for Dulcie to wake him.

  ‘Come on!’ she urged him. He’d fallen into a noisy dream, thrashing and breathing heavily, as if he was swimming in his sleep. Maybe he was racing in the Olympics and took her urging for a cheer squad’s encouragement, for he began to flail even more and breathe faster and faster.

  ‘Ross!’ His arms and feet were striking her. The bed was about to collapse. The floor as well. It was after midnight and she started to panic. ‘Oh, Ross, wake up!’

  ‘Ross?’ Brian mumbled. Ross Gooch had been Dulcie’s first husband. A rugby front-rower for Randwick, big Ross had died in bed of a heart attack at thirty-one.

  ‘Judy’s dad,’ said Dulcie, the word ‘Judy’ rousing him enough for her to coax his body out of her bed, across the landing, and into his own.

  *

  From then on, Dulcie insisted on bed before dinner only. As for Sundays now, Judy was slightly mystified that Brian waited in the shade of the frangipanis and oleanders for her return from church. And that he’d always shaved himself again – even attempted to shave his back. They headed upstairs of course, but Brian seemed wearier these days.

  ‘Poor boy, has Alf increased your training load?’

  He shrugged. ‘We’ve had to step it up. The Games are getting closer.’

  Her heart went out to him: her champion. Usually he thrived on tough training, and he’d worked so hard for this. Ever since he was seventeen and she was fifteen, high school sweethearts, he’d had this grand ambition: the Olympics. As the Games drew closer it was understandable he was feeling stressed.

  He’d even lost interest in their Sunday morning pillow talk. After they’d celebrated her return from Mass – although not as playfully and energetically as they used to – Brian just wanted to go back to sleep, whereas in the past they’d lie there chatting about the past week’s newspaper gossip.

  As a copytaker, she was well up on the news. As deadlines drew closer, reporters out on the road would phone in their stories to the copytakers. Sitting there in her headphones, typing up the paragraphs they dictated from the nearest public phone, she’d get the news from the courts, police beats and crime scenes even before the editors did.

  A recent juicy story she’d planned to discuss with Brian was a case of thallium poisoning on the North Shore. On discovering her husband Keith’s numerous extramarital affairs, Thelma Teasdale, in the Telegraph’s words ‘a respectable Roseville housewife and a regular finalist in the Royal Easter Show’s cake-baking competition’, had put rat poison in his breakfast cup of tea.

  As the paper’s science reporter, Warren Baxter, a lugubrious fellow known in the newsroom as the Undertaker, wrote in a rider to the Teasdale murder trial, ‘Known to the police as “inheritance powder”, “wives’ revenge” and “the poisoner’s poison”, one gram of odourless and tasteless thallium sulphate in cakes or scones, or mixed in hot drinks, can slowly and subtly kill an unsuspecting victim.’

  The Undertaker added helpfully: ‘Thall-Rat, the brand favoured by Thelma Teasdale for poisoning her husband, is freely sold in hardware stores nationwide.’

  Thelma Teasdale’s crime was only discovered because her husband’s brother Raymond was a chemist. Keith’s dizziness, stomach pain and nausea were at first put down to New Year’s overindulgence. But when followed by pains in the hands and feet, agonising leg cramps and total hair loss, Raymond looked up his old pharmacology books. When Keith died at only forty-two, Raymond declined Thelma’s offer of tea and cake at the wake and went to the police.

  Just the sort of juicy crime news Brian usually enjoyed. But he showed no interest in the Thelma Teasdale story so Judy didn’t pursue it.

  However, when she arrived home from her next shift she definitely called his attention to another news story, waking him with tearful ferocity at one a.m. Bursting into the bedroom, she smacked a first-edition Telegraph on the bed and pushed the offending page, smelling of fresh ink and still warm from the presses, into his sleepy face.

  The copytakers’ room was envious enough of Judy’s marriage to a handsome swimming champion for an older unmarried colleague, Thelma Jackson, to hasten to point out the story to her. ‘Look at these bitches cuddling up to your hubby!’ Thelma frowned sympathetically, adjusting her glasses to better perceive the girls’ guile. ‘Mind you, he doesn’t look too upset about it.’

  The photograph in the sports pages showed three grinning female swimmers, slippery as seals in their wet racing costumes, stroking Brian’s muscular bare chest and shoulders. Brian was flexing his right biceps and beaming back at them. An accompanying caption said:

  Super-smooth Olympic 1500-metres hopeful Brian Tasker proves popular with the girls as he displays his new shaved-down physique at North Sydney Pool.

  Coach Alf Wilmott is recommending this innovative American trend for his entire male swim squad. ‘For extra speed, even a fraction of a second, my boys will be shaving down before big events,’ Wilmott says. And long-distance specialist Tasker looks enthusiastic. ‘I’ll try anything to give me an edge,’ he says.

  The girls (from left), backstroker Rowena Flynn, 18; breaststroker Maxine Vanderhaag, 19; and up-and-coming freestyler Carole Sinnott, 17; certainly endorse Brian’s sleek new look!

  Dazed and defensive, Brian sat up in bed. ‘It was a posed picture, a set-up
by the photographer,’ he protested. He didn’t recognise Judy’s fierce tortured face, the bared teeth and projectile tears. ‘Just a bit of fun. Some girls in the squad fooling about for the camera.’

  ‘You’re a married man,’ she sobbed. ‘I suppose you’re sleeping with them all?’

  It was his turn to be indignant. ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  She ran out of the room, crying, ‘I never want to see this disgusting sort of thing again,’ and left for the couch downstairs.

  *

  When Brian returned from his early-morning training at seven, Judy was sitting with Dulcie at the kitchen table with the offending sports page in front of them. Both women were smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, and they fell silent and glowered at him as he entered.

  ‘You’re up early, love,’ he ventured to Judy. He was exhausted from exercise, sleeplessness and emotion.

  She drew on her cigarette, said nothing, and stared at him with tragic possum eyes.

  ‘Popular with the girls,’ Dulcie quoted. She gave the newspaper a disdainful backhand slap. Her eyes were glistening. ‘Surely you can’t expect your poor wife to be able to sleep after that?’

  *

  That afternoon at training the swim squad passed around the paper, laughing and teasing each other about smooth Brian and his ‘fans’, and the girls all complaining, ridiculously, that they looked fat in the photo. Shortly after, Brian’s next 1500 time trial did not go well. He’d lost another 6.08 seconds.

  Alf frowned and looked anxious. ‘What’s the matter, son?’ he wanted to know. ‘You look buggered. Everything all right at home?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, take ten minutes rest, you bloody slowcoach, then I want another 800 at ninety per cent effort.’ And Alf stamped off.

  Dusk was falling and little commuter ferries steamed back and forth across Lavender Bay. Above the pool, dozens of nesting swallows flitted about the stands and skimmed over the water’s surface. To one side of the pool, trains rumbled home over the Harbour Bridge; on the other, the eyes, teeth and lips of Old King Cole, the giant grinning face at the entrance to Luna Park, suddenly lit up, startling the swallows perched on King Cole’s eyelashes.