The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  At twilight the Art Deco cornices of the stands and change rooms, built when the North Sydney Pool had proudly hosted the 1938 British Empire Games events, seemed more gloomily ornamental to the swim squad than they did to their sleepy eyes at dawn training.

  Ever since Alf had moved his team from the Drummoyne pool to North Sydney’s superior facilities two years before, Brian had been a little in awe of this place, the venue for an extraordinary eighty-six world-record-breaking swims. As he recovered his breath, his eyes followed a flight of swallows to their nests above the topmost stands.

  Sitting in the back row was Dulcie, staring down at him.

  *

  When he arrived home an hour later, she met him at the door. Oddly, for this hour, and the cool evening temperature, and being indoors, she was wearing her satiny blue strapless swimsuit.

  She pulled him towards the stairs. She’d applied fresh make-up and her body was shiny with perfumed lotion.

  He noticed her eyes had that eerie gleam. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Not any more. Why were you spying on me?’

  ‘In order to check on you with your young girlfriends, you cruel bastard. You’d better come with me so I can punish you.’

  He was speechless. Her urgent tugging released the now familiar warm scent of womanly flesh, and the satiny fabric of the blue swimsuit brushed against his face with its own erotic smell, and his anger, bewilderment and weakened resolve had no resistance. Afterwards, because of her wild fingernails, his back was scratched even more painfully than usual.

  *

  When Dulcie greeted him at the door the next evening, he managed to avoid her embrace. He found it alarming that she was wearing her swimsuit again.

  ‘I saw you watching me at the pool again,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this any more. Seriously, it has to end now.’

  She smiled coquettishly. ‘I have to make sure Johnny Weissmuller is behaving.’

  ‘Everything is peculiar about this,’ he said. ‘Being shadowed by my mother-in-law is very weird behaviour. I’m twenty-three. I’ve got a marriage to think of, not to mention the Olympics.’

  ‘I’m too old for you now, is that it? And I’m weird!’ She began to weep. ‘You lead me on, and now you prefer your teenage sluts.’

  He groaned. ‘They’re not. I don’t. Jesus Christ, I’m calling a halt for the good of everyone.’

  Dulcie wiped her eyes and sighed theatrically. ‘Sure you are, you monster. Come and sit down for your dinner then.’

  She spun on her heel and he watched her swimsuited thighs sway towards the kitchen. In the doorway she turned abruptly and kissed him hard, and pressed her body against him, and he followed her upstairs once more. Afterwards, she said to him, smugly, ‘I bet those girls aren’t as good at this as I am.’

  Speechless, he just shook his head. His shoulderblades had left spots of blood on the sheets.

  *

  Brian and Judy walked hand in hand through Old King Cole’s monstrous mouth at the entrance of Luna Park. Sydney’s traditional weekend entertainment spot was so close to home yet this was their first visit since moving to Lavender Bay.

  It was Brian’s idea. So was leaving the house quietly, without involving Dulcie. ‘We need some time alone,’ he said.

  They strolled along the boardwalk, past the merry-go-round, the Spider and Dodgem City. They rode the Wild Mouse and bought milkshakes and chips and fairy floss. The roller-coaster rumbled overhead and the night was punctuated by customers’ screams. A breeze from the bay ruffled Judy’s skirt and blew ice-cream wrappers across their path.

  Outside Dodgem City four young sailors were chatting to three older women. The sailors were egging each other on with nudges and winks, and smoking flashily, with tough-guy hand gestures. They looked no more than seventeen and wore their caps so jauntily far back on their heads, behind waves of pomaded hair, that the caps seemed to defy gravity.

  ‘Come on, girls,’ one of the sailors said. The women looked bored. Sparks flew over the dodgem cars and the air smelled of electricity.

  Brian felt Judy’s grip tighten and her shoulders stiffen as she urged him away.

  ‘What ride would you like now?’ he asked her. ‘The Big Dipper? The Ghost Train?’

  She shook her head. ‘Did you see those girls?’

  ‘The ones with the sailors? Yes, why?’

  ‘What did you think of them?’

  ‘Prostitutes maybe.’

  ‘Attractive? Your type?’

  ‘Hardly! What’s this about?’

  ‘I’m trying to work out what sort of women you go for.’

  ‘Your sort. Jesus, Judy!’

  Her smile was tight and her eyes seemed shiny and unfamiliar. ‘Come home then, and show me how much that is.’

  As they walked back through Old King Cole’s mouth, two incoming teenage girls, heavily made-up and tottering on high heels, elbowed each other and giggled. The bolder one called out, ‘Hey, aren’t you Brian Tasker?’

  He nodded in polite acknowledgement, but Judy glowered at them. Her mood worsened when she heard the girl mutter, ‘What’s up with that titless bitch?’

  ‘Lucky slut,’ said the other one.

  At home, Dulcie was sitting in the dark garden. She looked pale and jumpy and her hair was awry, as if she’d been pacing in the wind. She was underdressed for the night temperature and she had a frangipani flower stuck behind her ear.

  ‘There you are!’ she said, over-brightly. ‘The two lovebirds!’ She raised her voice over the rumble and screams of the roller-coaster. ‘I’m having a sherry. Will you join me?’

  ‘Not in the mood, thanks Mum,’ said Judy. ‘We’re off to bed.’

  *

  When Judy returned from Mass next morning, Brian was sitting in his bathrobe in the garden again, sipping a cup of cocoa and staring sleepily across the bay.

  She pulled open his robe. ‘So you’ve shaved down again!’ she said, and slowly shook her head.

  ‘I need to be transformed,’ he said. He reached a languid hand out for his cup but misjudged the distance and his hand fell short. ‘Sit down and have some cocoa.’

  Dulcie was watching from the kitchen window. ‘There’s no more cocoa, Judy,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make a pot of coffee,’ Judy said. ‘Brian looks as if needs a coffee.’

  Brian gazed around the garden. ‘Yes, I’d like a coffee now. Everything’s a bit blurry this morning.’

  Judy said, ‘I’ve been worried about your cuts and scratches. Sitting out here among the oleanders. They’re so poisonous, you know.’

  *

  It was during his next 1500 metres time trial on Monday that Brian Tasker collapsed at the 1350 metres turn and became tangled in the lane ropes.

  Still holding his stopwatch, Alf Wilmott, Brian’s coach since Junior Dolphins, jumped fully clothed into the pool, disentangled him from the ropes, and held his head above water. But by the time Brian was hauled from the water, laid on the pool deck and resuscitation was attempted, he was dead.

  At the inquest the city coroner found that, tragically, repeated severe exertion had further damaged the clearly genetically- defective heart of an otherwise gifted athlete.

  His grieving widow attracted wide public sympathy after the Telegraph’s pictorial coverage of the funeral service at St Francis Xavier, attended by top sportspeople from a wide range of activities, including the up-and-coming swimming star Murray Rose.

  Two years later, Judy Tasker, still only twenty-three, married the Telegraph’s young police reporter, Steve McNamara. By this time, after winning three gold medals at the 1956 Melbourne Games at the age of seventeen, Murray Rose was a national hero.

  In April 1958 when CPO Eric Kroger and the Warramunga left for six months’ exercises with the Far East Strategic Reserve, it was convenient for all concerned for Dulcie Kroger to move in with her daughter and her new husband.

  Russell Garrett and Mike Hodder had been friends ever since primar
y school. They’d made speeches at one another’s twenty-first birthday parties and as best man at each other’s weddings, Russell doing the honours at both Mike’s weddings, the big Anglican ceremony at St. Mark’s and the marriage celebrant’s more relaxed affair held at low tide between Tibetan prayer flags on the sands of Cape Byron.

  Now, over New Year’s Day pre-lunch beers, while the meat sizzled on the barbecue and Mike’s second wife Sophie prepared the salad indoors, Russell winced at the knowledge that this year they’d both turn fifty. So they’d known each other forty-five years. ‘Food for thought, eh?’ he said, as he allowed the shiraz to breathe.

  Their youthful bond had been tight, never more so than one icy August morning when Mike dragged the heavier Russell, concussed by a tourist’s errant surfboard, first to the surface and then ashore. And of course Russell’s occasional physical backup to Mike’s teenage braggadocio. Other than those forty-five years, however, Russell and Mike had little in common nowadays.

  Now they were friends simply because they’d always been friends. They’d stayed in touch despite their lives taking different paths, maybe because their lives had taken different paths. And because they lived nine hundred kilometres apart and only saw each other three or four times annually, including every New Year at the Hodders’ house.

  Since their North Coast surfing adolescence Mike Hodder had dropped out of engineering at UNSW, married his high-school girlfriend, leapt into Northern Rivers real estate, made a pile in the sea-change boom of the nineties, divorced and remarried, and retired early to Byron Bay, to a three-story Wategos Beach cliff-house, a vertical engineering feat poised dramatically above the humpback whales’ migration route.

  Over recent visits Russell had perceived a gradual change in his friend. The wit and imagination Mike had shown in snapping up both the striking Sophie Howson and that prized white-water view – of the same exposed point break and north-east swells they’d surfed endlessly at sixteen – were no longer evident.

  Drastically, in Russell’s mind (he still kept his old boards ready for action in the Hodders’ garage), Mike seemed to have wearied of surfing. In his premature retirement, having attained the woman and house he wanted, Mike appeared to be letting life pass him by. He was taking it easy. Comfortably and purposefully ageing, he spent his days in his shuttered study, forgoing the vista, the beach, the health-giving ocean, for his wine cellar and cable television’s endless spool of sports.

  Russell Garrett, on the other hand, living and working far from the ocean, was running the same old race year after year. He’d emerged from veterinary science at Queensland Uni to take over an old-established horse practice at Rock Forest, outside Bathurst in the central west. Eschewing sick cats, dogs and canaries for horses meant worse hours and considerable travel and inconvenience (horses had a habit of falling ill on public holidays), and he couldn’t afford to retire. Garrett Equine Services had seen both ends of thousands of those surprisingly frail, nervy and accident-prone creatures, with no doubt hundreds more extremities to come, and lately Russell’s life was the most exhausting it had ever been. His marriage had broken up twelve months before, at the start of the equine flu epidemic. It had been a rough year for a country vet.

  So while the atmosphere at the home of his longtime friend was initially more awkward without Estelle present, and with Mike oddly engrossed in TV sports round-ups, Russell’s first two beers of the year didn’t touch the sides. New Year’s Eve had been taxing, unexpected and, finally, sleepless. But January 1 was supposed to be a day of optimism. Although slightly rusty in the joints, he’d already hit the beach and the early-morning swells curling past the cape. The surf had worked its old magic and he was on holidays in familiar company on the coast he loved. The dead year was over and done with, and now lunch was fragrantly grilling on the barbecue.

  Reclining in a deckchair on the Hodders’ terrace, Russell was surrendering to the sunny breeze and the sweeping panorama of the bay and the Nightcap Range. For the first time ever he was searching for another conversational opening when Mike, lowering his voice as he flipped the steaks, murmured, ‘I had enough of those bloody spam emails pestering me. So I gave Viagra a whirl.’

  ‘Really?’ Russell felt his left eyelid twitch. When it kept fluttering he turned his attention to the view. As always, his eyes sought out the tallest peak, rising through the mauve clouds today like a holy Shangri-la mountain. Mt Warning, named by Captain Cook as he sailed north on the Endeavour in 1770, and steeped in Aboriginal spirituality for many millennia before that. How many school projects had he prepared on Mt Warning? How many mountain ranges had he built out of egg cartons?

  His eyelid still fluttered involuntarily. Understandably in the circumstances, his nerves could still take him by surprise. For at least ten years – in fact, ever since the day of their marriage – he’d been enraptured by his oldest friend’s wife.

  ‘Well, it definitely works,’ said Mike. ‘What with that and the coke, I was like a bloody eighteen-year-old again. I felt like I was in a porn movie.’

  At no level did Russell want to hear this. He could bear the idea of Sophie and Mike Hodder’s physical relationship only if it was conducted as he observed it: vertical and fully clothed. His was a melancholy and insurmountable jealousy, compounded by guilt. Of course his feelings for Sophie were unrequited, but even if she’d been aware of them and magically, enthusiastically reciprocated, she was the wife of his boyhood friend – Mike’s second and sixteen-years-younger wife – and therefore out of bounds, now and forever.

  Such was the nature of his infatuation, however, that even as he tussled with guilt one moment, deliberately avoiding her presence, the next minute he’d be torturing himself with the smallest hints and snatched glances. She’d bustle and bend and flip her hair from her forehead and he’d have to tear his eyes from the thrilling sight of her rinsing dishes at the kitchen sink, arranging flowers, making coffee. This woman’s actions were never mundane.

  It was obvious she liked talking to him, and often seemed to sparkle in his company. She must have noticed that at any party, after several drinks, he self-consciously drifted to her side. Indeed, she often blithely joined him, too. Sometimes she even flirted with him, and his blood pounded with the excitement of possibilities. But then she’d cheerily turn elsewhere, and behave the same way with Mike’s other friends, and he’d feel like a sulking fifteen-year-old. Sophie was a friendly person.

  In saner moments back in the Bathurst district, bouncing along a gravel road on his way to deal with some Shetland’s or Arab’s hoof-thrush or rain scald, or an old thoroughbred’s well-earned arthritis, he reasoned that her public squeeze of his arm, the chest prod or cheek pat, was merely her tactile nature. Or was she subtly testing him? Was Sophie a tease? No, she was a decent, straightforward person. But at night before sleep he was at his least realistic. How could he not dwell on the perhaps and the maybe and the delicious what if? As he had last night, of all nights.

  Whenever he saw her she had him in a flurry of confusion. In her presence, aching for her trailing hostessy fingers, the accidentally brushed knees, the casual touch, he always felt like a teenager. As she passed by his chair he’d clench his stomach muscles and surreptitiously flex his biceps. Willing her, touch me. Then he felt like a fool.

  As time passed and Russell tossed these conflicting daydreams back and forth after every get-together, he still managed to keep his feelings hidden. He was doomed to silently adore everything about her, from her generous spirit and quick humour to that slight overbite and mole on her upper lip. Of course he noticed these small flaws; every imperfection was a sensual asset.

  It wasn’t just physical attraction, he convinced himself. He genuinely admired her. While he envied her loyalty to her husband, he also respected it; the way she dutifully waited on Mike with drinks and food. Sophie attended to him. The thing was, he, Russell, also liked her – and of course phlegmatic Hodder, entrenched in front of Fox Sports all day watching lacrosse
and snooker and Japanese rugby, a mid-morning jug of bloody marys by his elbow, a sequence of afternoon and evening wine bottles, didn’t deserve or appreciate her at all.

  When Russell thought about it, not since the moment he fell for her, at their windy wedding on the Cape, with the northerly whipping the Tibetan prayer flags and exposing the laughing bride’s thighs, had he seen Mike embrace her. Or even touch her. On Sophie’s behalf, Russell was offended. And gladdened. It was bewildering how Mike could treat her so neglectfully when he, Russell, was so overwhelmed by her creamy limbs and cleavage and careless dark hair – the whole sexual package – that he fell into a brief catatonic state whenever they hugged hello and goodbye.

  While he dwelt regularly on the look and feel of Sophie, recalling the lively pressure of her body in those jolly public embraces, as time passed after each contact he’d momentarily come to his senses. He’d be standing in some urinous country stable or faecal paddock, shin-deep in mud and cow pats, crows gagging overhead and the whiff of something decomposing nearby, and he’d say it aloud: ‘It’s a dream.’

  It would never come to anything. In his marriage to Estelle there was a bond, and three grown children, and a long rapport he wasn’t willing to deny. Stamping back to the Land Cruiser, full of sad determination, he’d once again place the possibility of a romance with Sophie in fantasy territory, in the bittersweet category of never-to-be. A sweetly carnal version of winning lotto.

  Then, quite abruptly, these overlapping quandaries produced some new dilemmas to both confuse him and rekindle his hopes. The first, a surprise to him, if not to Estelle, was that their marriage of twenty-four years suddenly disintegrated. Nothing to do with his longing for a fantasy woman whom he’d never even kissed. One summer afternoon she left.