Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

Danny froze. Tsitsas took up the call, and so did Wilco, so did Scooter, and now they were all yelling, Barracuda! Danny wondered, was this an insult? Had it all been planned? He felt helpless, standing there next to Principal Canning. There was no way possible for him to give it back.

‘You psycho .’ Taylor’s voice again carried above the din. ‘You dangerous crazy psycho! You barracuda! ’

And Tsitsas and Wilco, Scooter and Fraser, they took up the chant.

Barracuda. Barracuda.

And the rest of the boys joined in.

Barracuda.

And even Coach, even Frank Torma was calling it out.

Barracuda.

Calling it out, clapping, stamping, cheering. All cheering for him.

‘Barracuda!’

‘Danny Kelly!’

‘Barracuda!’

‘Danny Kelly!’

Then he felt it. Then it really meant something.

That afternoon, as Danny was getting ready for training, Frank Torma came into the locker room. He walked past the others and went straight up to Danny, who held out his hand, grinning.

Torma just looked at it. ‘Where were you this morning?’

Danny’s hand hung limply, just hung in nothingness.

The Coach didn’t give him time to answer. ‘There are no excuses for missing training. Got it?’

‘I got it,’ mumbled Danny, letting his arm fall.

‘And what happened in the relay yesterday? Did you give it your best effort? Did you give your team your all?’

The blood rushed to Danny’s face. He’d been feeling so good, he’d been feeling so high, and now his skin was on fire and his body was ice. Coach had made him ashamed.

That shame made him look up, made him stare Frank Torma right in the face. Give it back, send it back a thousand times stronger.

No more ice, then, just the fire, but it no longer burned. ‘I think I did good,’ he answered, slipping out of his jocks. ‘Yeah, I reckon I gave it my all — it was the others who weren’t any good.’

Come on, hit me.

Hit me.

Come on.

Then Coach made a sound, deep and dirty, right from the very centre of his body, the sound of spitting. It was so full of disgust and so repellent that Danny flinched. He hadn’t spat, but Frank Torma had made his point.

The Coach snarled at all the boys as though he detested them, ‘Get in the pool. Now !’

He was kicking. Barracuda. Breathing in. Fury. The water parted for him. Barracuda. Breathing out. Fast. The water shifted for him. He breathed in. Barracuda. The water obeyed him.

Dangerous. He breathed out.

I HAVE COMPLETED THREE CONSECUTIVE NIGHT shifts, two I was rostered on for, one that I filled in as a favour to Barry. I am looking forward to the long weekend, or rather my version of a weekend. It is Tuesday morning, dawn has just been overwhelmed by the fierce sun rising in the east, and Hassan, the old Sudanese gentleman who runs the Half Moon Cafe in the mall, is hosing down the footpath outside. He hasn't opened up yet but he's brewed me a coffee anyway, and I sip it gratefully, huddled under the shop awning, the mug keeping my hands warm. It is the final week of the semester break and I don't have a shift at the halfway house till Saturday afternoon. For the next three days there are no assignments due, no one I have to feed, no one I have to bathe or clean up after. It feels like freedom.

But then my gut plummets. I remember: I am catching up with Luke's friend tomorrow. The cocoon of stillness has gone. My joy evaporates, instantly.

It was an email, out of the blue. The subject heading read: Danny, is that you?

I had to make concessions to the twenty-first century when I started college, when I began the diploma in community services. I still don't have internet at home. If I am honest, I am fearful of what I would do if I had the leisure to roam that still-uncharted territory on my own. If I am honest and accurate, it is the world of pornography and anonymity that compels me and terrifies me. It is just a hunch I have, that, lured into the world of the screen where I don't have to reveal myself, not my voice, not my body, not my truth, I would be engulfed and be lost, roaming that world. When I swam, how strange that phrase sounds to me, as absurd as if I were to say 'when I was a woman', so distant and so foreign is that experience to me, no one had to tell me not to masturbate, to insist that it would dissipate and corrupt my will. I just knew. As I think we all did, all of us boys, in the team, in the heats, in the competitions, in those pools and in those change rooms, we all knew what giving ourselves over to another thrill that could equal swimming would do. And now I know it about porn and about the internet. I know how it taints desire, how it poisons memory and corrupts time. I have a second-hand laptop given to me by Regan on which I do my course work. I log on at the TAFE library or the Vietnamese internet cafe on Main Street. I save my work on a USB stick and I print it off at the library.

I feel a stab of something like pain. It must come from thinking back to the swimming, recalling being back with those boys. A rush of shame sluices right through me, as real as a blade disembowelling me from my groin to my throat. Those boys. The shame: the weight and the cost and the dishonour of what I have done.

I sigh so deeply that Hassan turns around. I'm OK, I say apologetically, and he doesn't answer. He leaves the bucket upturned just outside the cafe door and goes inside to fetch his broom. But not before he squeezes my right shoulder gently. Again, wordlessly. He's been making me coffee for close to a year and, apart from the most generic of pleasantries, I still don't know if he can speak English at all.

It is the email from Luke that has unsettled me. I thought at first that it must have been Demet who gave him my email, dk03101980@hotmail.com: my initials, my birthday. His first message was cursory' Danny, is that you? ' but since my equally brief response ' yes, mate, it is ' he has been emailing me every fortnight or so, with news of China, of work, of family, sending me photos of Katie and their child. He had found Regan through Facebook and she had passed on my email address. Are you on Facebook, Danny? he asked. No , I typed back, I haven't heard of it . I enjoy his letters, am proud of my friend, the shy fragile Eurasian boy who is now an executive in China, who emails me photographs in which he wears expensive suits and has a stylish haircut, and who has mastered both tennis and squash and lives in that exotic-sounding place Shanghai, a city more populous than the whole of my vast country. You have to come over , he wrote, and I replied, Do they accept ex-cons in China? A week later I logged on at a computer at Sunshine Library and I read his six-word response: Lie on your visa application, dickhead . And then three capital letters: LOL . I was puzzled and had to ask Sophie in my class what it meant. 'Laugh out loud,' she snapped, her eyebrows arching, appalled at my ignorance. 'Oh my God, Dan, get with the program!'

Katie has a friend, a classmate from the university she attended in Glasgow. All I have been told about him is that he works in film and television, 'in production'. He has been living in Sydney for over a year and is only now making his first trip to Melbourne. And Luke couldn't help it; when he asked if I could meet up with this man Clyde, he joked that it was no surprise that Clyde had been in Australia for nearly two years but had not yet bothered to visit Melbourne. Arse end of the world , Luke typed.