Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

Demet is saying something else, going on about my altruism or my fortitude, or, for fuck’s sake no, my courage .

‘Really, it’s nothing,’ I interrupt. ‘It’s just a job.’

She laughs again and my resentment is gone. ‘OK, Danny Kelly, OK. It’s a job.’ She has lit another cigarette, has finished her wine. ‘I bet it’s better than my job.’

‘You don’t like tutoring?’

‘I don’t like the hours, I don’t like that I’ve been doing it two years and I’m still a fucking casual, I don’t like the whingeing students at Melbourne Uni, and I especially don’t like their sense of entitlement.’ She groans. ‘Listen to me — and I call the students whingers!’

She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m exhausted, Danny, I think that’s what it is. I’m working on my PhD and I think I’m never going to finish it and I know that every bloody fool out there doing a PhD is saying and thinking the same thing. I’m boring myself, Danny. I’m not good when I’m bored, you know that, I’m terrible. I’m a bitch to my girlfriend, I’m a bitch to my students, I’m a bitch to myself.’ She looks again at her empty glass. ‘I’m going to have another. You want one?’

I have chugged down the wine the way a baby sucks on a teat. Desperately. But then so has Demet. We can’t settle, can’t find our way back to the easy freedom of our past friendship. Since we sat down she has not referred to prison again. It is as if the apology on the street was all that was needed, and she thinks she is now forgiven. But sitting here opposite her, being reminded of what we had, my shame has been banished by resentment. It did hurt that she didn’t visit, it had crushed me that she had made no effort to find out how I was, hadn’t even written a letter. I’ll never tell her but every visitors’ day it was her I expected to see. She had promised it to me: that we were soul mates. And she had betrayed that. I look down at my empty glass. Do I want another drink with her?

‘Yes,’ I answer, and when she is at the bar I am thinking of how loyalty is more often compromised by carelessness than spite; and I am thinking of how good it is to hear the laughter of a good friend: and I am thinking that I also took our friendship for granted — I assumed she would follow me wherever Cunts College and swimming took me. I had been careless as well. We had both been negligent.

There is music in the courtyard, the untamed noodlings of jazz; light and sprightly, the notes whistle down from the speakers, the melody is purling, it is plashing and rustling through the spindled arms of the naked elm trees. It is hush and it is rhapsody.

Demet returns and I raise my glass. ‘It’s good to see you, mate,’ and Demet says, ‘You too.’ Then she says, ‘Cheers,’ and I answer with, ‘ªerefe.’ That makes both of us laugh. And so it is through our shared outburst of glee in my customary mangling of that Turkish word that I know we have returned to one another. In the relief of the laughter our bodies uncoil and we are released. We are finally returned to our friendship. And like that leaping, skipping, joyous music above us, we do not need words. I can’t see it but I am sure there is a light dancing between us, touching her, touching me. That light, it sings our shared history, and that we are forgiven.

If you want it, it’s yours, Coach said. You can do it . Coach demanded of him: Do you want it?

Yes, sir! I want it, sir .

He barked it out silently, coughed it up from deep within him, spat it out, phlegm and blood, as though he was a recruit in an American war movie, like he was Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise. But he did it silently, so as not to wake Wilco in the next bed.

He barked it silently from deep in his gut and from the back of his throat: Yes, sir! I want it, sir. But there was that nagging doubt that he tried to ignore, that rising chortle that was itching to get out: You sound like a wanker, who are you kidding, who speaks like that, only frigging Yanks speak like that. He could hear his father: Why are you speaking like a frigging Nike ad? You can’t mean it, seriously, you can’t mean it?

Yes, sir! I want it, sir.

This time he said it out loud. As though Coach were there, in front of him, right in his face, demanding, challenging him: Do you really fucking want it?

Yes, sir! I want it, sir.

This time he shouted it and there was a groan from the next bed. Wilco turned, twisted, doubled over his pillow. ‘Kelly, you OK?’

‘Yeah, yeah, mate, sorry. It was just a dream.’

Danny lay still in his bed. Wilco’s breathing was constant, alert. Danny lay still and waited for him to fall asleep again. He closed his eyes, blotting out the room, the bed, the boy in the next bed. He imagined the pool, the sound of the water slapping the tiles, the heat and the steam, the chill of the change rooms, tried to bring back the image of Coach. He was back in Melbourne, about to hit the water. He was telling Coach how much he wanted it, how it was going to be his.

There was a snigger from the next bed. ‘You want a wank, do you, Kelly?’ It was followed by a disgusted snort. ‘Not here, mate, that’s filthy. Go do it in the dunny if you have to.’

Danny forced himself not to think about the room, the moonlight, Japan, bloody Wilco. He wished it were Taylor sharing the room with him, not bloody Wilco.

Forget him, he told himself, don’t let him get to you. Concentrate. Stay focused. That was the golden rule, they all knew it — swimmers, athletes, sportspeople; anyone who knew the thrill of competition. Concentrate, reject anything that would be a distraction.

He breathed in slowly, a rattling shiver going down his spine, and a spasm rolled down his back in a wave from the nape of his neck. It took all his will not to move. He breathed out, palms flat against the cool sheets. But Melbourne was gone, Coach was gone, the pool was gone, and he couldn’t bring any of it back; bloody Wilco had fucked that up. Danny breathed in. He lay in the bed, palms flat on the cold sheets, legs apart, wishing Taylor was there with him. There was a rustle from across the room and then the light wheeze of Wilco’s snore. Danny tried to bring back the pool, retrieve the Coach, the race, the solid slew through water and time. But his cock was full, the blood rushing there, it was now his centre of gravity.

You want a wank, do you, Kelly?

He flung back the sheet, got up and searched for his t-shirt and trackpants. There was a fumbling from the other bed and the room was filled with blinding light.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Wilco had half-risen from his bed and the sheet fell down to his hips. Danny looked away but not before he saw the boy’s moon-pale body, a colour whiter than light, white as the cotton of the sheets. So white that Wilco’s stubby pink nipples and perfectly round aureoles were almost obscene, so white that the spray of freckles on the boy’s shoulders and neck flashed like specks of gold. You look like a skinned rabbit, Danny thought, recalling going hunting with his granddad Bill in Mernda, the sound of the shotgun, the animal leaping, twisting, fitting in the air, his grandfather taking the knife and stripping the fur and skin from the meat, the flesh raw and pink and dead beneath. Danny turned, so quickly that he knew the other boy hadn’t seen the outline of his erection under his white briefs, hadn’t glimpsed the ugly shock of black pubes showing through the material. Wilco got waxed from top to bottom, every single bit of him, every month. His bloody daddy paid for him to look like an ugly skinned rabbit.