by Tom Lee
For a while my only company was at the drink stations. Some of the firefighters had gotten bored enough to compose elaborate spruiking routines aimed to inform and entice runners into drinking the various beverages and food. I heard them cheer ‘A banana!’ as I picked half a banana and ran past. My stops at the stations became longer and my ability to expend energy decoding the sentiment in their manner decreased. Rather than distinguish between the different drinks I simply drank one of each, which by this stage included cola and green tea in addition to water and sports drink.
I decided it was time for music, my last resort. I had composed a playlist mainly featuring Carly Rae Jepsen and a group called Chvrches. I hoped the music, as it had done on occasions before, would replace the sensory atmosphere of debilitating soreness and fatigue with something lighter and more uplifting. To begin with it had a mild influence. I focused my energies inward and the frenetic cycles of doubt-filled analysis dissolved into a hazy narrative given coherence by the mood of each song. I was now running through a forest of native cypress. A man with impossibly thin calves jogged past, then another who looked almost fifty, then a woman in a bright two-piece lycra running outfit and visor. Insulated in the weak fantasy afforded by my music, I watched them edge ahead ,then disappear.
Soon the effect of the music wore off and its bubbly vitality became incongruous and irritating, grating on my need to suffer in peace. I put the earphones back in my pocket and drudged on, maybe only ten kilometres to go. Runners passed more frequently now. One brushed past quite close and held out a hand as they did for a high five. It was Morgan. I responded with a reflex slap and said, Go Morgan, catch Coach! I caught a look of determined joyousness in his eyes. Almost the polar opposite of the grimace I imagined expressed my own sense of vulnerability and despair. I watched Morgan’s stride: how was it that his body was able to sustain the jolts of the steepening downhill and the loose stones as though the run was just beginning? How was it possible for him to move with such lightness and speed after more than thirty kilometres?
I drew on my ability to imagine and commit to a new self-conception. I was now the ageing warrior. Doing the rounds just for the hell of it, to be out there in the bush, suffering through the task we had set ourselves with no aspirations or need for a measure of success. I was visited by darker thoughts too, about how my lack of zest in the race was due to a deeper, internal awareness that the adventure I had started with Morgan was a fraud, and that at some point, the story would become a legend told within the family where I played the role of pervert and fool.
On the final descent the track thinned to a scree-ridden trail cut into the side of the mountain. I cursed every loose rock and imagined an agent conspiring against me whenever I stumbled. The pain was enough to provoke uninhibited groans and cursing. My only respite was the thought that with every step the end edged closer and I was now within five kilometres of it. I was continually passed by other runners whom I accommodated by edging over to the side of the trail in an exaggeratedly hospitable fashion. I was at the stage of the fight where I wanted to be put out of my misery.
The view out over the treetops was spectacular. Large boulders and raw cliff faces cut into the hazy blue-grey-green foliage. Birds sang and mixed with the rattle of cowbells and the distant, continuous cheer at the finish line. Yet I felt none of the uplift familiar to me from looking into the distance from the top of Tamarama steps, or on any of my other spectacular training runs. I wondered whether this was what it would be like to die in a beautiful landscape: an environment of unsurpassed splendour, utterly indifferent to the great pathos of human experience.
By the time I began the stretch along the cement path to Caves House and the race’s finish, my range of movement had narrowed to little more than a shuffle. I dragged myself along, caught in a web of my own pain. My thoughts were skittish and incoherent. I felt a great craving that lacked an object. More runners went past and even on the final stretch of the race, where I might usually muster a challenge no matter how wretched my state, I merely slowed to let a runner pass, to get it over with and make explicit that there would be no resistance from this ruined competitor.
I saw Morgan and Graham at the line, ran through to receive my obligatory medal and gift bag in a daze, then relied on Morgan and Graham to usher me to a secluded spot near one of the cool rooms at the barbecue area. I haphazardly spread my paraphernalia about on the wood chips and dirt and put my distorted form to rest under a veil of autonomous blackness. I lay there not quite asleep, mumbling to my company to reassure them of my consciousness.
Slowly, with no more new pain to undergo, the post-race endorphins began to do their work and a gradually building sense of elation began. This feeling continued, helped by the supplementary influence of caffeine, for the entire three-hour car trip back to Sydney with Morgan and Graham, and well into the evening, where the few drinks shared with my housemates in the backyard had such a profound effect on my renewed metabolism that I felt as though I was a young boy again, intoxicating myself with great ease at the teat of a warm Tooheys Red in a paddock by the light of the moon.
Of course we talked often of the moment Morgan overtook Coach, within a kilometre of the finish line. The final downhill got the better of her, as it did for many runners. Her quads were gone. I liked to imagine she tried to trip Morgan or reached out to grab his shirt as he ran past and Morgan slapped her hand away and ran on strongly. Coach, you pathetic fool. But no, in reality the run invites acquiescence, not trickery, and Coach would have seen many a Morgan run past in her time.
Where water meets land and day meets night they swim with their dogs. Little pools of ocean in rock, orphaned jewels from anonymous mass. Fringes of pellucid green brush against bodies as they explore the underwater world. Maps of moss and lichen in yellow, pink and purple. Beards of open barnacles and stray crabs on latitudinal shuffles into and out of apertures of rock.
They play at this level platform, this midpoint, terrain and marine. They survey and swim. They plunge their bodies. The repetition of a profane baptism where the swelling water is pierced by and carries the fleshy, breathing bodies.
They come to participate in its abundance. The loose mould that lubricates our minds with ill-formed memories of the warm matrix where we were carried. We are carried again.
I prepare my picnic, my rustic delights. I tear the nub from my loaf and inspect the catacombs inside, air fossils in a fluffy white explosion obscured by caramel crust. I dip the bread in oil, its newly broken surfaces mapped by a slick layer of mineral green. Immersed in my eating I survey the bodies of this outcrop. All gymnasts, all practitioners of bathing, of floating, of atmospheric transformation.
I watch the surface waiting for it to be disturbed by a particular body. A body will come from the water and walk towards me.
The nucleus of this novel was formed during a period of travel in 2014 made possible by the Marten Bequest Scholarship.
The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.