Henry Hoey Hobson

by Christine Bongers

  I’d gone straight to the library as soon as the bell rang, only to be bowled over by a stampede of enthusiastic preppies. Sebastian was in the thick of it, enjoying his reputation for fearlessness in the face of the school vampire.

  It had ended up being kind of fun. I read them this picture book about a kid called Nicolas Ickle who was a right little cranky-pants about everyone trying to muscle in on his story: ‘Go away,’ he kept yelling at them. ‘You’re in the wrong book!’

  The preppies had loved it, but I’d felt like the poor old confused elephant: stuck in the wrong book, not sure how to deal with everyone wanting to get him out of the picture.

  The breeze swung round and the pungent smell of chlorine billowed into the change room. I filled my lungs and followed it out into the harsh sunlight.

  I loved the smell of chlorine in the afternoons; loved the way it sliced through the fog of a bad day, freshening and reviving me like that eucalyptus stuff Mum made me inhale over a basin every time I caught a cold.

  I sucked it up, happy to be somewhere I belonged for a change.

  ‘You right, mate?’

  The woman behind the counter had a flattened brown face, round and wrinkled like a raisin. She could have been aged anywhere from a sunscorched forty to a pretty sprightly eighty years old. I wasn’t much of a judge of age, but her name badge read ‘Ma Mallory’ so I guessed she wouldn’t be offended by the estimate.

  ‘I just need a time sheet, please, so I can clock my times for the school swimming carnival and Districts.’

  ‘Yeah? Well I guess that makes you Henry. Mr Paulson said to keep an eye out for you.’ She whipped a jaundiced eye round the pool. ‘Where’s your mum? She has to fill it in. If you qualify for Districts, they want to know the times are genuine. There’s no bodgying up times at my pool.’

  I thought fast. ‘She just had to drop something off. She won’t be long. How about I put the form with my stuff while I warm up? Then she can clock my times when she gets back.’

  ‘How about you don’t.’ Her lips formed a wrinkled little cat’s bum. ‘How about I keep it right here.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘But nothing. It’s my last one. I don’t want it getting wet or blowing away while you’re in the pool. Tell your mum to come see me when she gets here.’ She turned away to serve a harassed mother with a screaming toddler on her hip.

  I hung around for a bit, but Ma just ignored me. Clearly our conversation was over. I mooched over to the pool, the air seeping out of my day, and slumped onto the nearest dive block, wondering what to do next.

  Ma Mallory sounded like a bit of a stickler for the rules, so if I didn’t get Mum down here, I was sunk.

  An old lady cruised towards me like a crocodile. Lane One was strictly for non-swimmers. For people who didn’t know enough to keep left when doing laps. People who zigzagged when they swam. People who didn’t wear goggles or caps, shut their eyes when they swam and then punched you in your goggles as they thrashed past.

  The old lady’s flowered bathing cap was pulled tight above eyebrows that had been drawn on in thick red-brown pencil. Her lipsticked smile was a shade brighter, and a good size bigger than her mouth. She had drawn outside the lines, like a kindy kid not used to working with crayons. Her stately breaststroke barely rippled the surface and I couldn’t help but admire her ability to sail through the skin of the water without splashing a drop on her face.

  She froggy-kicked towards me and touched the wall. ‘You look like your dog just died.’ Then she turned and kicked off without waiting for a reply.

  I stared after her. She might be a crazy pool lady, but at least she was doing something, which was more than I could say for myself. Mum always said that if you ever have a choice between doing something and doing nothing, always take the ‘do something’ option; you never know where it might lead you.

  So I put on my goggles, found an empty lane and dived in.

  The water swallowed me in a crystal-cool gulp, then spat me back up to the surface. I rolled onto my back, letting the tension ripple off me.

  Mum says that I’ve always been able to feel the water ... Before I had hair, before I had teeth, before I could walk, I could swim.

  She says the first time she let go of me in a pool, I sank straight to the bottom. She thought I was going to drown, staring up at her from a metre below the surface, eyes round, arms raised, mouth trailing bubbles. But when she reached for me, I pushed away from her and kicked my chubby little legs back up to the surface.

  ‘You felt the water, Triple-H. You reached out with your little fat hands and pulled yourself back up without me. And when you hit the surface, you laughed. You rolled onto your back and you giggled. All the other mothers wanted to know how I did it. How I taught you to float. But I didn’t do anything. You taught yourself. You could feel the water, even back then, and you trusted it to hold you up.’

  Someone was thrashing like an egg beater in the lane next to me. I had opted for one of the middle lanes so I wouldn’t splash the crazy pool lady’s eyebrows. But this kid, he was going to drench her from four lanes away.

  He was flailing at the water, determined to beat it into submission. Meeting it chest-on, skinny arms slapping at the surface, legs dragging like an anchor behind him.

  It hurt to watch him. Throwing himself against it like it was a barrier he had to smash. An enemy he had to vanquish. After a couple of laps, he pulled up, exhausted. He hung over the lane rope, his back to me, blowing hard, shoulders heaving, water running in rivulets from close-cropped dark hair.

  A junior learn-to-swim class had started in the little undercover pool off to the other side. I figured I had about fifteen minutes before the afternoon squads hit the place. Before things hotted up. I planned to do my usual trick and shadow their drills while trying to stay as inconspicuous as possible. Till then, I was happy to chill.

  A huge body flung itself into the lane on the other side of me, hitting the water hard, with a painful, wet slap.

  The kid behind me muttered, ‘That’s gotta hurt.’

  I nodded, my eyes on the belly-flopper, a big bull of a guy who had landed like a slab of meat hitting a chopping board. He reared up out of the water and shook himself off, then put a brave face on it and started ploughing his way to the other end.

  ‘He should’ve made himself a smaller target,’ I said. ‘Water doesn’t hurt if you thread your way through it.’

  ‘You reckon?’ The voice behind me squeaked with interest. ‘It fights me every step of the way. I’d rather run five kilometres than swim one lousy lap.’

  ‘You need to stop fighting the water,’ I said without thinking. ‘Try going at it at an angle, keeping your elbows high–’ I turned to give him a quick demo and stopped dead, one elbow frozen in the air.

  The kid next to me with the terrible swimming action was a Perpetual Sucker. The little Spanish kid, Jironomo, the one they called Hero. And you would have thought from the look on his face that he’d just found himself swimming in the same lane as a turd.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I lowered my arm. Hero’s mouth hung open below teeth that would have made Bugs Bunny proud. His eyes were wide, his lashes stuck to the skin below his eyebrows.

  ‘You can swim,’ he spluttered. ‘Joey said you’d drown if – he said you can’t even go to the swimming carnival – because you’d sink – because you’re, you know, a–’

  I sighed. Joey Castellaro had told him that vampires couldn’t swim.

  ‘That’s witches, Hero. Joey’s an idiot.’ The words spilled out before I could stop them. He looked momentarily confused, and I couldn’t resist backing it up with some hard evidence.

  ‘In the olden days, they’d throw anyone suspected of being a witchin a lake. If she floated, it proved she had evil powers, so they’d fish her out and burn her at the stake. If she drowned, bad luck. She probably wasn’t a witch, after all.’

  Hero’s frown unstuck his wet eyelashes. ‘That’s not ver
y fair.’

  ‘Witch-hunts aren’t usually about being fair,’ I pointed out. ‘They’re about people who think they’re right, victimising someone they think is different.’

  Hero’s eyes widened again and I felt the blood rush to my face.

  The conversation had strayed a little too close to touchy ground and I looked around for some safer conversational territory.

  ‘So ... You training for the swimming carnival?’

  He nodded, eyes skating round me. Fidgety about being caught talking to me, out here in the open, in a pool that, according to Joey Castellaro, was a death sentence for creatures of my kind. But he was still blowing hard from his recent exertions, so he probably wasn’t ready to swim away from me just yet.

  I fiddled with my goggles. ‘Yeah, me too.’

  The silence stretched for so long, I wondered if it was going to snap back and hit me in the face. I carefully pulled my ageing goggles over my head and put us both out of our misery.

  ‘Well, have fun then,’ I said, slipping into the water and pushing off.

  Four laps later, I was heading toward a tumble turn at the shallow end when I saw Hero duck under the lane rope and wave at me under the water.

  I surfaced before I hit him, blew my nose into my hand and rinsed it off in the next lane.

  He squinted down the length of the fifty-metre pool, glanced back at me, and looked away again. He was gagging on something, but just couldn’t spit it out.

  I decided to make it easy for him. ‘Having fun yet?’

  ‘Not really.’ He shook his head, sending a spray of droplets my way, his next words coming out in a rush.

  ‘I’m crap at swimming. I hate the swimming carnival more than anything in the whole world. All the girls are better than me. Even BB can swim faster than me, and he’s blind without his glasses.’

  He wouldn’t meet my eye. But it was a lot to admit to, all in one breath, so I decided I could afford to be charitable.

  ‘Actually, you were doing OK, considering.’

  ‘Considering what?’

  Good question. That’s what you get for trying to be nice. ‘Well ... considering you haven’t been training.’ It was an educated guess, but a good one, as it turned out.

  ‘Training? You gotta be kidding. I’ve never even had a lesson.’ He swaggered a bit when he said it, trying to sound like Joey Castellaro, like it was something to be proud of.

  Though, if you thought about it, it probably was an achievement of sorts that he could swim at all, given that he had never been taught.

  ‘You’re actually not that bad.’ Sheer determination was getting him through fifty metres a damn sight faster than his lousy style could account for. ‘You look pretty fit. A bit of training, and you’d probably be OK.’

  He studied me to see if I was having a go. ‘Seriously?’ His eyes lit up. ‘You reckon you could give me a few pointers?’

  I was so taken aback I actually took a step back, straight into a lane rope.

  Hero surged towards me. ‘You’re an awesome swimmer. I was watching you doing those laps and you weren’t even puffed after swimming two hundred metres.’

  Now probably wasn’t the time to tell him that I usually did a kilometre – that’s twentylaps – most days as a warm-up. No point in pushing it, this early in the friendship. That set me back another step. Were Hero and I actually making friends?

  His face closed over. ‘It’s OK, I can see you don’t want to help me.’ He turned away. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just forget it.’

  He’d taken my silence for something it wasn’t; I really had to stop having conversations in my head when real people were standing there, waiting for an answer.

  ‘No, wait–’ I grabbed his arm. ‘I was just trying to work something out in my head. I don’t mind helping you.’

  He pulled his arm away, shooting a fist into the air. ‘Yes! That BB’s gonna eat my bubbles–’

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ I warned. ‘We haven’t got much time till the swimming carnival, so don’t expect miracles, OK?’

  His front teeth were now all on display. Boy, I hoped his dad was real tall, so he had some hope of growing into those teeth.

  ‘So, what do you want to work on the most?’

  He didn’t hesitate. ‘My freestyle. That way, I won’t let my team down, like I do every year, in the all-age relay. I’m in Burke, which team are you in?’

  ‘Same.’ I remembered Mr Paulson telling me that much.

  ‘Joey’s in Wills. So you’ll be racing against him. He’s a year older than me and BB. He’s going to be peed off when he finds out that you don’t sink.’

  I eyed him warily. ‘You planning to tell him?’

  ‘Nah, he’ll find out soon enough.’

  I was relieved that I didn’t need to butt chests with Joey Castellaro till the swimming carnival. We could sort out our differences there.

  ‘OK, freestyle it is. First thing is your kick. Your legs are trailing too low in the water, dragging you down, like an anchor. If we fix that, and get you turning your body more like this when you’re swimming–’ I showed him what I meant, ‘–the water will slip past you and you’ll meet less resistance. You’ll go faster and not find it as tiring. What do you think? Want to give it a go?’

  He’d been nodding the whole time I was talking, like he was really keen to learn. So I led him through a couple of drills that worked on his kick, then threw in a bit of stroke correction after that.

  He was a quick learner, copying my every movement, his face a mask of concentration. And he was fit. A runner by the look of him, so a bit of technique would go a long way with him.

  ‘Hey, boys.’ It was Ma Mallory, neat in her lifeguard uniform, leaning over the blocks. ‘I’m going to have to get you to move into one of the outside lanes. The centre lanes are reserved for squad training from four to six. OK?’

  I nodded, ducked under the lane rope and headed for the edge of the pool, Jironomo Marquez following in my wake. The crazy pool lady had taken her eyebrows home so we had the lane to ourselves.

  We were practising tumble turns when the squad filed in and started warming up with lazy freestyle laps. I had to turn my back and pretend they weren’t there, or the urge to dump Hero and join in would overpower my good intentions. Instead I concentrated on getting Hero to ride higher in the water, lengthen his stroke and work with the flow, instead of against it.

  By the time we took a breather, the white heat of the day had mellowed into gold and shadows had begun to creep across our lane. A wiry old man wandered in, holding a faded blue towel and a Perpetual Sucker schoolbag. ‘Jironomo, nos vamos!’

  ‘That’s my granddad,’ said Hero. ‘He’s been living with us since Dad died. I gotta go.’

  The likeness was unmistakeable. One front tooth was capped in gold and the other was missing, but dental records alone confirmed a blood relationship.

  ‘Hello, Mr Marquez,’ I said.

  ‘ Hola,’ he said, smiling as he hauled his grandson out of the water. ‘ Lo siento. No hablo inglés.’

  If his granddad was anything to go by, Hero wasn’t ever growing into those incisors. But then again, if he ended up with the same happy grin, he’d get through life just fine.

  Hero swabbed himself down with the towel his granddad handed him. ‘See you back here tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure.’ I looked away to hide my disappointment. He hadn’t said that he’d see me at school. ‘But I have to get my times down for Mr Paulson, so I’ll be doing more swimming and less talking.’

  ‘No problemo,’ he said, flicking the towel in the air. ‘I’ll practise the stuff you showed me today.’

  Hero’s granddad let out a burst of machinegun Spanish that sounded like a question. I heard Hero say my name and a heap of other stuff I couldn’t understand.

  His granddad gave me a cheerful wave. ‘ Adios, Henry.’

  ‘ Adios, Mr Marquez.’

  By the time the pair of them trotted off, squad
training was all but over.

  I slipped into the adjacent lane and shadowed the last couple of drills, not sure whether to be glad or sorry that I’d spent nearly two hours helping Hero.

  Then the timed sprints kicked in, driving everything but the feel of the water out of my brain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My mobile rang in the kitchen as I unlocked the front door. I’d left it on the bench after texting Mum, asking her to meet me at the pool if she finished work before six. I sprinted through the house, but it had rung out by the time I reached it.

  Three missed calls. All from Mum. And two text messages.

  Don’t cook. Eating out. xx

  That could mean one of only two things: celebration or exhaustion. The next text didn’t give me any clues as to which way her day had swung.

  Home at 6. xx

  I glanced at my watch. It was almost half-past. I’d find out soon enough. My phone beeped. Another text.

  On my way. xx

  I texted two xx’s back at her and hit Send. I needed to change. My wet Speedos had soaked the crotch of my shorts and had started to chafe on the walk home. I needed to swap them for something soft and dry, pronto, as Hero would say.

  I wandered out to the enclosed verandah where I slept, stripping off my shirt and shorts. I hung my togs on the doorknob where they sagged like a pair of sad old-man undies. Please, just let them make it through to the carnival, that’s all that I asked.

  Unfamiliar music floated in from next door. Some sort of old-fashioned piano, the kind of thing that court musicians would play for royalty in powdered wigs, white stockings and gold-buckled shoes.

  It stopped as soon as I moved towards the window. The day was pulling down its blinds, hardly bothering with twilight at all. It would be dark soon. Another day over. Another day survived.

  I shook myself. I had been living way too much inside my own head lately; a side effect of spending too much time on my own.

  Normally, missing out on squad training would really knot my hairs. But not today. Talking to Hero had been fun. I was looking forward to seeing him tomorrow. Even if he didn’t talk to me at school, we could still hang out at the pool.