We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  Eden went to the toilet and Bobbie said, ‘Graph it and it will happen.’ I didn’t react and she added, ‘Graphs make everything feel better.’ The phone rang then. Bobbie ignored it but I thought of Carmelina and so I stepped up and answered. It was Werner. He wanted to know about our races. Before I answered I breathed deep and the smell came to me of a creek at dawn even though I was in Newport at night. I said, ‘I swam heavy,’ and was about to hand the phone to Bobbie but before I did I added, ‘Eden had the whole pool on the end of his finger.’ Bobbie took the phone and listened but almost immediately she said, ‘Beats tomato juice,’ and then quickly added, ‘I’m not getting pie-eyed.’ She pressed her lips together as if trying hard not to keep speaking. ‘We’ll fast forward it backwards,’ she then said hurriedly. Eden came back into the living room just as Bobbie said, ‘There’s winning. And there’s not winning.’

  Eden sat back down and grabbed a Jatz biscuit from the table. Bobbie kept talking to Werner. I said, ‘You beat me.’ I said this plainly, clearly, as if speaking in my neatest handwriting. I felt a rush then or a swell to my chest as if a window had opened and a wave of fresh air had gushed in.

  ‘I’m following you,’ he said. He did not say this as a joke or a tease, he said it like I was important.

  ‘Run,’ I said. I felt all that sun and all that air. Now that he’d beaten me I wanted him to take off and to beat the world.

  Bobbie sat down and lifted her wine glass. Her throat swallowed twice before she put it back down. She said, ‘Get up, get jealous, get drunk, go to bed.’

  ‘Facebook again,’ Eden explained.

  ‘You had,’ I said out loud, to the table, for the record, ‘lane four all lit up.’

  ‘You had the front row view,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘He was burning,’ I said,

  ‘You don’t have to be nice,’ Bobbie said as if rivalry had something to do with us.

  Eden then put the word FOX on the Scrabble board. The ladder was shiny like silver and it fired from the roof of the ute at speed. Dad had put his hand on Mum’s leg. I turned to Bobbie and said, ‘I’m not nice.’ I heard my teeth grind in my mouth. ‘I’m protective,’ I said.

  Bobbie looked at me across the letters and words. There was a triple open that I knew I could reach. She paused, as she looked at me, and then her voice sounded completely different – not just in tone, but in where it seemed to come from. ‘Tooth and nail,’ she simply said, though she made it sound as though there was a whole other world in those three words. She moved her hands then and put TROT on the end of FOX and the triple was gone.

  *

  I kept losing. I did not snap out of it. I swam as if my waters were troubled. I was fast enough but not fast enough. I did not increase my speed while all around me did. Werner trained me harder and then faster and then he tried to rebuild me up by doing less but at higher revs. No matter what we did though, I did not progress. When I was in primary school I’d swum faster than most high school kids but we turned thirteen and then fourteen and I remained stuck where I’d been at the end of Grade 6. Eden though, grew bigger, stronger and faster. His chest and his stomach were like wooden chopping boards, all flat lines of muscle, carved, like rivers of bark. We were twins but we were different and as we got older the cracks between us widened. No matter what I did or didn’t eat I still felt as though I swam heavy. One weekend I raced to qualify for the State Championships and my times were too slow in both freestyle and butterfly and so I didn’t. Eden qualified in both. All that weekend I hung beside Eden and as we walked past other groups of swimmers I’d hear them whisper ‘That’s Eden’ as if my twin was somebody and as if I wasn’t.

  *

  Eden swam the State Champs late on a Sunday. Afterwards we ordered Indian from a shop in Mason Street in Newport. The sun was still up but it was low and dirty and as we waited for our order it bled choc-orange light through the curtains. I felt clammy again as if I was coming down with something except that I wasn’t. Eden went to buy bananas from the Lebanese grocer across the road. I stayed with Bobbie.

  I said to her, ‘I feel like I’ve been robbed.’

  ‘We all do,’ she said immediately and then quickly added, ‘I’m not going to be dovish,’ as if she would not indulge me.

  ‘It’s not the losing,’ I said. ‘It’s when I should go fast and I don’t.’

  ‘You say tomato, I say potato,’ she said.

  We sat there waiting for our Indian takeaway. We breathed in air drenched in hot spice. I said to Bobbie, ‘I saw more.’

  ‘I know she hasn’t,’ she replied.

  I was referring to Mum and to the accident but Bobbie was talking about Carmelina.

  ‘I want to be a hawk,’ I said. Bobbie had reminded me of that first night at Flowerdale when she’d told me to take life by the neck.

  ‘Do you have a photo of her?’ Bobbie asked.

  The only photo I had of Carmelina was one with her standing beside a friend. She was eating an apple in summer. She was only small in the photo so I’d cropped it to make her bigger. The cropping made her look slightly blurred. I brought the photo up on my phone and handed it to Bobbie. She studied it for longer than I thought she would. When she handed it back all she said was, ‘Jazz ballet arms.’

  I spoke then and the words came out as a whisper but as an urgent one, ‘She just went away. She did.’

  ‘Good people over good looks every time,’ Bobbie said. And then added, ‘You’re full-on.’

  ‘She slipped away. And now I am,’ I said.

  ‘Take control. Like you would a race.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then you can’t win,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  There was an impatience to her voice that made me wonder if she was cross.

  She looked at me at length then. The wrinkles around her eyes looked like the undersides of the mushrooms we sometimes picked from the Flowerdale fields after rain. These wrinkles though seemed fewer now than they had when we’d first come to stay, as if Eden and I had made Bobbie younger. ‘Tell me something that you like about her,’ she said. Bobbie wasn’t cross, she was frustrated.

  ‘I love her haircut,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t seen her in ages,’ she said.

  ‘I love her hair,’ I said.

  ‘You’re still covered in her,’ she assessed, as if I was a bee and Carmelina was pollen.

  I crossed my arms and then unfolded them. We sat in the waiting chairs at the Indian takeaway, we weren’t even at home, and Hemi was gone from us anyway. But I tapped at my leg then out of habit as if I really wanted her to come. Bobbie said, ‘That girl’s like a piece of land to you. It’s like she’s your territory.’

  She lifted an arm then. For a second I thought she might put it around me. I shivered; not out of cold or horror or discomfort, but out of longing. I was fourteen and way too old but I would have loved to snuggle into Bobbie’s shoulder just as we had all those years ago with Mum and Dad when Eden and I would jump into their bed. I heard the sound of an aeroplane then, there must have been one circling around to land. Bobbie took her car keys from her pocket and put them on the table. She chose this moment to say it. It was obvious but I had never thought of it before.

  ‘If it wasn’t for you,’ Bobbie said, ‘I’d never have had kids. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I gave birth to you in the car crash.’

  ‘You were our grandma,’ I said so fast it was like I was charging back down the channel of The Warmies.

  Naan bread, hot naan bread, slathered in melted butter. A door to the restaurant’s kitchen opened and the smell of baking hot naan bread rushed at us as if inviting us into its home.

  ‘If any of us watched a film of our own lives,’ Bobbie said, ‘we’d bawl our eyes out.’

  I turned towards the front window of the restaurant. Dirty white curtains hung there save for the edge, where I could see the bare window itself, and through it to the cars out there in the stree
t. I looked for Eden and he was coming, his arms loaded with bananas and other fruits. I tried then to focus on the window itself, to see reflections, as if I needed to check them now.

  ‘Did you know,’ Bobbie said, ‘that Jack used to tie my shoelaces for me?’

  I said, ‘Is that what husbands do?’

  ‘Some people,’ Bobbie said, standing to get our takeaway, ‘think that’s all boyfriends are good for.’

  *

  Eden and I had history but he’d turned it to his advantage. The 200-metre freestyle was my pet event but in Grade 9, I again did not make the State Final. It was not Eden’s best event but he did. I sat in the stands with Bobbie as Eden lined up to race and I was nearly fifteen and Ian Thorpe had been world champion at fourteen. My time was running out. Bobbie turned to me and said, ‘Am I buying or selling?’

  ‘Holding.’

  Eden was about to step onto the blocks. Bobbie reached into her bag and pulled out a knife, a piece of bread and a jar of honey. The jar had no label which meant that it was one of Fuzzy’s. She smeared some on the bread and lifted it to my nose and made me smell it.

  ‘You’re hungry,’ she said.

  I bit into the bread and the honey had crystallised. It was an old batch; it could have been from years ago.

  ‘You’ll either believe this or you won’t,’ she said, ‘but I have enjoyed feeding you.’

  I chewed on the bread with the pink-flower honey and realised that I was hungry, she was right, I was very hungry.

  ‘We’re worried about your momentum,’ Bobbie said.

  The sweetness in my mouth had a sting to it but I sucked on it as if I needed it. The sound of people banging and barracking from the stands made me think of truck brakes, loud and heavy. I wondered if I had plenty of momentum but that it was in the wrong direction.

  ‘We’re going to spell you,’ Bobbie said then, as if I was a horse, as if I’d missed out on conversations. She said this right there in the stands as we waited for Eden to race.

  ‘I’m trying,’ I said. I still had bread and honey in my mouth.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  I thought of the black line on the bottom of the pool. I thought of Mum in the water with us, pretending to race. I thought of all those mornings in the creek with Eden, his legs like snakes. I said, ‘I have to swim.’

  ‘We’ll call a trading halt,’ she said. ‘That’s all. You’ll be back and racing when you’re ready.’

  ‘He doesn’t even look nervous,’ I said, looking at Eden.

  ‘It’s just a spell,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not an animal,’ I said.

  ‘Lie fallow then,’ she said. ‘Everyone has to at some stage.’

  I looked down at the half-eaten sandwich and then I looked out at the pool. The gun fired and Eden hit the water and he was away.

  ‘I just want to swim fast,’ I said.

  ‘Not just,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  She turned to me. As Eden raced.

  ‘Your mum and dad got your name wrong,’ she said. ‘You don’t act like a Jon. You’re more of an Elliot. Or a Raph.’

  ‘Or an Eden,’ I said. It had just come out.

  She flinched as if I’d surprised her but then she looked away. When she turned back she said, ‘Sometimes I look at you and think, you’re undiscovered.’

  ‘Should I give up thinking about her?’ I asked. ‘Is that what I should do?’

  ‘Eden’s going to win,’ Bobbie said, half-standing.

  ‘Have I hung on too long?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve known many days,’ she said as if repeating what I’d said, but not.

  ‘Hold,’ I called out to Eden. ‘Come on,’ I cheered. ‘Now,’ I yelled. ‘Hold your breath,’ I said. Like I would. Like I used to.

  Eden had been in control for most of the race but a couple of swimmers now edged onto his shoulder. His kick seemed weak and his rating was not high and I thought he was slowing. But then without seeming to do anything different he pulled back out and clear. He slipped along on top of the water as if he wasn’t so much swimming as skating.

  ‘It’s all just paper losses at your age,’ Bobbie said without fuss.

  *

  We got home from school one day and Bobbie wasn’t yet back from Flowerdale and we’d forgotten our keys. I climbed the brown gate at the side of our house, rocked the bolt back and jumped to the other side. I opened the gate and Eden was there, the sun over his shoulder, his dark hair shining. ‘You’re my best friend,’ he said, out of nowhere.

  ‘You’re my best friend too,’ I rushed. I said this like dizziness, like I’d suddenly been caught in his whirl. I looked at the sun behind him, at the blue, at my brother.

  *

  Early morning in bed at Newport. We’d get up at 4.30 am and jump on our bikes and ride to The Warmies. We’d train against the warm strong arms of the current for two or more hours and then we’d ride home and eat breakfast and walk to school. But before it was time to get up I heard Eden turn and sensed his breathing change and I thought he might be awake. I turned onto my side and huddled the doona close. I said to the bedroom air, ‘I’m not a keeper,’ as if I wasn’t enough to be. My twin brother didn’t respond and he probably hadn’t heard and soon we rose and headed out.

  *

  Some days served up a few precious seconds. We’d get home from school and Eden would go to the clothesline to get togs or our towels and Bobbie would be late back from the farm at Flowerdale. For a few seconds the house would be empty. This freedom would be fleeting but it would excite me and I would cherish it. I’d feel exultant. I would smile to myself as I walked around the house and laugh out loud even though I was the only one there.

  And then almost straight away the emptiness of the house would smash this happiness away and I’d look around as though for Mum and Dad and I’d feel the great yawning chasm of their absence as if for the first time. I’d listen then for Eden and if he wasn’t yet coming I’d race out and go to him as if I needed to cling.

  It was on one of these days when we didn’t have training that Eden urged me to change and get on my bike. We always swam The Warmies in the first light of morning but on this day we headed past the cemetery and along Champion Road straight after school. There were fishermen all down the banks when we got there. They wouldn’t like us swimming in among their lines but Eden steered me to the other side of the channel anyway, to the open side, to the shipping lane where red, green and blue steel containers sailed in from the world. We moved past a section of fenced-off bush that was being conserved or regenerated. We laid our bikes down and Eden ambled towards the open channel and he knew that I would follow and I did. The sun was low and behind me which meant it was bright and directed on him. There was sun on the water but it still looked deep grey and cold. He said to me then as we stood by the channel, ‘If you were going to give up then now would be a good time.’ He looked me so straight in the eye that it was like there was a stone country road connecting his eyes to mine.

  He said some things, my brother. He always spoke as if he meant me, as if there was nothing but me on his mind, as if he saw things in me before I even had.

  I thought then that everything I did was judged by the reflection in someone else’s eyes. I felt confidence seep from me as if I had a puncture. I had won many races but I had lost many more and the winning had made the losing worse. I hadn’t won in ages but hearing that sentence from my twin brother made me feel for the first time that not only was I defeated but that I was lost.

  Eden took a step towards me and grabbed at the bottom of my t-shirt. ‘Come on,’ he said. He stripped down to his togs and we were fifteen now and I was older than him but his body had the magnificence of winning.

  ‘Come on,’ he said again.

  He climbed over the black rocks down to the channel of deep grey water and there were ships and I followed him, I stripped off too, but I did not want to.

  He dived i
n and started swimming, out towards the ships, out to where the bottom was fathomless or as good as.

  I stood and breathed air deep into my lungs. I felt the late sun on my back. I reached down and splashed water onto my chest and it was freezing compared with the hot water of The Warmies only a few steps away. In the water were cockles or mussels or sharp empty shells. I did not have a raised scar on my chest like Werner did but as I smeared the cold water across me I felt for one as if I needed to make sure.

  And then I closed my eyes and moved forward. Instead of diving headlong into the water I lowered slowly into it. As the water came over me I suddenly felt like screaming but not slowly and instead at high speed like a screech or something out of control like a skid. I went fully under then and as I did this need to scream stopped almost instantly. I felt as the rank grey water swept over me that I had been born into it. I felt the openness of it. It was ugly water, cold and polluted, but to me the water had energy, dark. Eden was out ahead but in those first moments it was just me and this different world of water. This water had a particular temperature but it also tasted of iron and smelled of fuel and it felt strange on my body, like I’d skipped a few years, like being in it made me feel older. I thought quite deliberately of Carmelina then to see if this water might alter my perspective but as soon as I did the spell broke and suddenly instead of swimming or even sinking I was clawing at the water as if I was terrified. When I reached Eden then I did not tread water but instead I crushed up to him as if he was a buoy. He was my twin and I felt less than half without him. A tugboat moved past and it was painted a milk-coffee colour and then another tugboat followed straight after, dark chocolate in colour. I held on to Eden. Our legs moved and bumped against each other and we were side-on to the sun and the cold charcoal of the water caught a glimmer. He said, ‘You can’t fake speed,’ as if I’d once had it and it was real and I could have it again.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said.

  ‘Get there,’ he urged. He had a way of saying simple or mundane things as if they mattered and as if I did.