We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  ‘Over here,’ Eden said. ‘In lane eight.’

  ‘I know about you,’ the boy said. ‘My sister does squad.’

  As we looked at Eden he seemed to become clearer and larger as if our eyes adjusted to him as he spoke. ‘This guy,’ the boy said, ‘is a beast.’

  ‘I’ve heard about you too,’ someone else said.

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ Eden said as he cruised over and shook the boy’s hand. They all shook hands then and I stood and shook them too. Carmelina sat on the low rock with five guys standing around her as if we were bees and she was our queen.

  ‘You gonna make the Olympics?’ the boy asked.

  ‘Training for it,’ Eden said.

  ‘How amazing would that be?’ he said.

  ‘Jon’ – Eden nodded towards me – ‘could make it too.’

  I thought people would ask me questions then but they all turned straight back to Eden. They asked him what he had to do to make the Olympics and he mentioned times and qualifying and they looked at him in the way that they might a fast car.

  Eden then looked at Carmelina. ‘Haven’t seen you since primary school.’

  ‘I’m Carm now,’ she said.

  Eden turned more directly to Carmelina. ‘Don’t,’ he said straight out, ‘stuff my brother around.’ He could have been ordering dim sims from a bain-marie, he said it so casual.

  ‘Let’s get a drink,’ Carmelina said. She dragged me inside and said that she wouldn’t drink much but that she planned to drink a little.

  ‘You’re drinking?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not training for the Olympics,’ she said.

  As we moved through the house people commented on her clown suit and she kept using the word embarrassed but by the time we’d reached the bath with the ice and drinks in it she looked as though the attention had flushed her. Instead of shrivelling she seemed up and alive. I knew even before she pulled me into the toilet and started kissing me that she’d worn the clown suit without double-checking, not just because her brother had said but because she’d wanted it to be fancy dress or at least she’d wanted to wear that suit. This was the first time I suspected that she was going to outgrow me or that if I wasn’t careful I would end up not being enough. She pushed the door of the toilet shut with her foot and put her hands straight up my t-shirt. ‘You taste like filet-o-fish,’ she said.

  ‘You smell like citrus,’ I said, though she also smelled of lavender and musk and soap.

  She bent down and licked my chest as if I was a drink. When she rose back up I reached behind her and pulled her closer. She kissed me like that and my eyes were closed and I didn’t even know if the light in that toilet was on because all I knew was Carmelina. She had me up against the side wall of the toilet and not near or on the cistern itself. After a long while she broke from kissing though she remained close, her lips still almost touching. ‘Look,’ she said. Both her clown suit bottom and her clown suit top were gathered with elastic and she grabbed my hands and put them straight up her top and it lifted up as if automatically so that her stomach and breasts were open. I touched her then and we kept kissing and someone went to open the door and the lyrics of a song, something about make-up in someone else’s car, entered the toilet room and the person apologised and pulled the door back closed. We returned to kissing and as we did I realised that our cheeks were touching and that our foreheads were too. I began to concentrate on the feeling of her forehead against mine. I couldn’t help it. I thought of Mum and how her forehead had kissed mine as it flew past and had left a line there. This thought did not kill the moment because the moment was too great but it meant that this was the extent of it.

  ‘You’ve grown big,’ Carmelina said.

  I thought until this moment that the history of Eden and me meant that we could never be naïve. I said, ‘Eden’s bigger.’ I meant this reply as if she’d said that my voice was deeper or that my legs were longer now that we were older and not in primary school. I said these words but even before I finished them I felt stupid.

  Carmelina did not laugh but I felt her cheek flex against mine and I knew in the dark that she’d smiled.

  ‘He’s taller, just,’ she said. I thought this was all she’d say but then she added, ‘But you’ve got a bigger heart.’

  *

  Eden and I did not stay long at the party but before we left Carmelina put her hand on my neck and pulled me to her and again her forehead was on mine. She said, ‘You’re going to grow up and be someone special.’ She said this as if I wasn’t the past but instead I was the future. I said to her, ‘I love you now,’ and she didn’t respond directly but then she never did. ‘I want to protect you,’ she said. Later I wondered if what she meant was that she wanted not to hurt me.

  *

  The next day I did not swim as fast as I wanted to but I swam faster than I had been and I won the 200-metre free again.

  *

  ‘He’s grown an extra leg,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘I can breathe again,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve qualified for State.’

  ‘Not drowning, swimming,’ I said.

  *

  Two weeks later, the State Champs, the MS Aquatic Centre. I dived in and did not race straight for the lead because Eden had spoken and I’d listened. I rode the pack and the water was choppy and we got to half-way down the first lap and then to three-quarters and instead of racing them I nursed them. I pushed up just as we hit the turn but they were distracted and we rose to the second lap and I wasn’t in the lead but I was almost. I cruised like this or it felt like cruising. I turned to take a breath and glimpsed a bright light from behind and I thought to myself that it was like the clear white light of a sunrise at the creek at Flowerdale. I felt energetic and eager and it wasn’t to plan but bugger it, I took off. I pounced on that second wall and flung off and the third lap was a dream and then I was on the fourth. That day on the scoreboard when Carmelina’s mum picked her up in their red car and left me alone there was a long time ago and vanishing. I swam as if I was sixteen and in the middle of kissing Carmelina with an open mouth. I felt everything and nothing and time was blurred and there was the moment and that was all there was. I roared down that final lap as if I was a train and I was late. I didn’t know where the other swimmers were but I knew that they were gone. I stretched in search of the wall. It never was about racing them, it was about racing me. I hit the wall and a wave of water rushed up from behind and I slipped inside its envelope and opened my eyes and bobbed back up as the water swept away. Only then did another swimmer reach me. I knew I’d swum faster than my skin and not just light but untangled. I wanted to turn around then and swim it all again, but even faster.

  I ducked under the ropes and swam to the side and climbed out. I walked as if I’d done nothing. In these few moments I felt separate. For once I didn’t look for Mum, or Dad, or Bobbie, or Carmelina, or for the clock. I looked for no one until I looked for Eden. As I walked I heard someone say the word scorching and someone else said, ‘That wasn’t Eden.’ I saw Eden’s face then and it was real. He moved out of the chlorine haze. He clubbed his arms around me and I was wet and I was his. He spoke into my ear. The next Olympics were in Rio and it was too early for team selection but I knew before he spoke that I had beat the Olympic qualifying time. I was back in a big way. My brother Eden Hardacre said, ‘You’re coming with me.’ He said this as if I was the other half of him and he was right because I was.

  *

  I walked out of the aquatic centre and the air smelled of spring lawn and I looked and a man was bagging clippings from a lawnmower. The air was cold but my body was warm. ‘Thunderbirds,’ Bobbie said as if I was Go.

  Toast. Burned toast. I craved it so bad, suddenly, I felt as though I could smell it even over the chlorine and the lawn.

  ‘Jack’d be happy,’ Bobbie said and she seemed to enjoy saying this. Still buoyed, she then asked, ‘Is she sustainable?’

  Eden was taller than me but in that moment I w
alked so upright I felt as though I was up with him. I looked up and rain brewed and I thought of the farm and how our creek would likely swell. I said, ‘We’re hotting up.’ I looked at my phone as we walked and there was a text from Carmelina to congratulate me and I wondered for a second how she already knew.

  ‘There’s money in thinking that you’re shit hot,’ Bobbie said.

  *

  Soon after I would look at this day and think how the storms were wetter and the light was brighter and the war hadn’t yet then started in me.

  *

  A few weeks later we went to another party and Eden and I would leave early again but we stayed because Carmelina had an edge she didn’t normally have. I wanted her to say something to ease me but she didn’t. This party was in a hall in Altona with jujitsu pictures on the walls. Just before it was time for Eden and me to go she led me outside. I thought that she would turn to kiss me but she hadn’t touched me much that night and suddenly things felt different. We got outside and it was dark and people hovered and she led me away from them. She looked around a few times as if checking to see if anyone had followed. I checked too. We turned just past the tennis courts. Cars formed a solid line all the way along the road. Out to our left was the expanse of Cherry Lake and beyond that the red and orange lights of the oil tanks and the refinery. ‘Carmelina,’ I finally said.

  ‘I’m Carm now,’ she said.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I feel crazy,’ she said.

  She was a half-step ahead. She didn’t look at me as we spoke. She skipped ahead and said, ‘Can we do something illegal?’

  I hurried after her and said, ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  I looked at her, there wasn’t time to think, she wasn’t quite running, she’d reached out and started trailing a hand along the sides of the parked cars. She’d never told me that she loved me but I knew that she did. The road was black like the line on the bottom of a swimming pool. I scurried along it in the dark as I tried to keep up. She turned and said, ‘You must feel good.’

  ‘I do,’ I said though I didn’t.

  ‘You’re fast again,’ she said.

  ‘I was building,’ I said.

  ‘It seemed sudden,’ she said.

  There were more parked cars ahead. She said, ‘Let’s set them off,’ and before I knew what she meant she’d started running along and banging on the cars. This set many of their alarms off. I ran behind her as if in cahoots and she called out and even screamed and I copied her and from afar it must have looked as if we’d gone wild. She reached the end of the line of cars and kept running and I chased after her. We ran over a hill, across a small bridge, through a playground with swings and then by the edge of the lake. We ran all the way to Millers Road and crossed over. We got to the wide-open grassed area that could be a wetland and then she slowed and stopped. We were a long way from everyone now. We both stood and panted and a train rattled by and she said, ‘You’re better at swimming than running.’

  ‘I can run too,’ I said.

  I started to text Eden because he’d never find me here but before I could finish Carmelina came to me and put her arms around me and then finally she was with me proper. We kissed and it was warm but then she broke off and said, ‘Do you have to go?’ I didn’t want to but I said, ‘I should text Eden.’ I looked across the grasslands to the oil tanks. If I took Carmelina’s hand and we went via the refinery then it wouldn’t take long for us to walk to Jubilee Street. From there we could walk to the scoreboard and the grounds of our old primary school. I’d never until that moment considered my virginity but I thought that I wanted to lose it there, late at night some time, under the scoreboard even, on that ground.

  Carmelina took her arms from me then and I wondered for the first time if maybe her love had a flicker to it. ‘Go on then,’ she said.

  As I texted she pulled out her phone too and soon she looked up and said that her brother was coming to pick her up. We walked down Millers Road to the corner of Civic Parade. We headed for the hall but not via the road where we’d set off the alarms. When we reached the hall, Eden was out front and he’d grabbed hold of a bar and was doing pull-ups. He only had a t-shirt on and it was tight and people had stopped to watch. ‘Can you do that?’ Carmelina asked. She meant the pull-ups but when I looked at Eden I saw the perfection of his dead-straight spine and his core of iron and how he moved up and down with the smoothness of a gimbal.

  ‘You want to see him do dead lifts,’ I said.

  Her brother pulled up and I’d never before seen his car. It was beefy, black and loud, its windows deeper than Nescafé brown. For all the things that I’d felt that night, all the sweep and the rush, I looked at the darkness of those windows and the rumble of that car’s engine and it was then that I felt the most uneasy. I was frightened by that car. It reminded me of a ute with a silver ladder on top.

  ‘Sunny Boy,’ Eden said, the car moving away, Carmelina in it. I never thought I’d hear this name again; he’d picked this moment.

  ‘Eden,’ I said.

  Bobbie said she’d pick us up from near the eternal flame at the Civic Centre. We walked there via the oval because there was moonlight and a cricket pitch and it was just us.

  *

  ‘At some point,’ Bobbie said as we stepped into the car, as much to the radio as to us, ‘this country lost its confidence.’

  *

  When I finally fell asleep that night, I dreamed of our old family car with all of us in it and of that ute with a ladder on its roof hurtling through the bend. Instead, though, of Mum in the front seat, Carmelina was there. She turned to me and she held a baby in each arm and their eyes were wide and big and when I looked for Dad in the driver’s seat it wasn’t him, it was Eden. He held a baby too, the same big dark eyes. I couldn’t tell if the babies in this dream were identical but they were triplets and my reaction to them was that they were beautiful. When I woke from this dream I was sweating and weirded and I thought again that when I dreamed of Carmelina it was about babies and weddings. I got out of bed and went looking for the kittens. It was early and I was the only one up. I collected all three in my arms and carried them out to the backyard. Mum’s beloved old patch had weeds again. I wanted more than ever to be a good son. I pulled at the weeds as the kittens played in the roots of them. The sun rose. I wondered what time Fuzzy’s bees got up.

  *

  I was hotter property than I had been and the Australian Institute of Sport called and I already trained as hard as I could but they pushed me harder. We went on camps and weekends away and more than once a coach looked at me and called me Eden and I had to correct him. ‘I’ve only just got used to the Campbell sisters,’ he said.

  ‘We’re different,’ I said.

  ‘So are they,’ he said.

  This time away and extra training and the fact that we went to different schools meant that I did not get much chance to be with Carmelina.

  *

  Eden and I walked into our street after a weekend away on a swim camp. It was a Monday and Bobbie was at Flowerdale and so there wasn’t a car in our driveway. As we came into our street there was someone standing near the front of our house. Eden didn’t notice or comment. From a distance this person looked miniature. I knew it was Geri, the Stunt Driver. She hurried away and we went into our house without checking the box. When Eden went for a shower though I went back out and there was a note in the letterbox and it was in tiny purple handwriting and I had solved the mystery of who the letter writer was.

  If I’d been given twenty guesses I would never have used one on her but then as I held the new note I thought of that afternoon when we’d gone to their front door hoping for a Golden Rough and she’d given us both one and I’d been confronted by the goodness in her. I unfolded the letter and read the first few lines but I’d started thinking again of that Golden Rough and that golden afternoon and the eyes of the Stunt Driver and how desperate she’d been to make
us feel happy.

  *

  Then I read the note:

  When Australian swimmer Susie O’Neill stepped up to race the 200-metre butterfly final at the 2000 Sydney Olympics she didn’t hope to win, she expected it. She was Madame Butterfly. She had not been beaten at butterfly in six years. She was the reigning Olympic champion and she’d won that title not by fractions but by two seconds and change. American Mary T. Meagher’s world record had stood for an incredible nineteen years and only weeks earlier O’Neill had beaten it. O’Neill was not just in brilliant shape, she was a great of her sport. The night before her main event she’d won gold in the 200-metre freestyle, not even her main focus.

  O’Neill was on form, she was at her third Olympics, she was on home turf, she was in lane four. Beside her in lane five was Petria Thomas, a compatriot. On the other side was Otylia Jędrzejczak, a potential threat but young; she’d win the event at the next Olympics. Hyman, Misty Hyman, little known, was in six.

  When O’Neill acknowledged the crowd and stepped onto the blocks she didn’t look cocky, she looked nervous and ready. She had drilled herself to be a back-end racer. They could try but in the end she would crush them.

  Petria Thomas, swimming beside O’Neill, led at the end of the first lap. Hyman was second, not that O’Neill could have known; Thomas would have obscured her. O’Neill was thereabouts, where she always was early. In the second lap, gradually, Hyman took over and led at half-way. O’Neill might have known now where Hyman was, but there was no reason to panic; Hyman was on a flier but O’Neill’s race was going to plan.

  Hyman kept in front down the third lap but now O’Neill was coming. This is how she did it. Her home crowd roared. It was the final race of O’Neill’s career. One trademark lap and she’d done it.

  At the end of that third lap though, Hyman did what no one expected. She did the turn of her career on the final turn of O’Neill’s. She was a half-body in front going into the wall but a full body length ahead coming out. Suddenly, in an underwater blink, ten metres into the final lap, the reigning six-year-undefeated-world-record champion had been handed a script to a completely different play. She’d done nothing wrong; someone else had done something more right. O’Neill only knew she was in trouble once it was too late. She gained half a body down that final desperate lap but that was it. O’Neill was done. She was beaten.