Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

I give them all a thumbs-up and then I turn to face my lane. Don’t think about them, forget about them, I tell myself. I look out at the still water. I can’t wait to dive in.

The chant abruptly stops. Some parent or official, some adult, must have said something to them. The pool goes quiet.

I am looking at the water. I have to stop myself leaping in, I have to control myself. I can’t wait. Not yet. Not yet.

The starter raises her whistle to her lips. But she doesn’t blow it yet.

Wait, Danny, I tell myself. You just have to wait.

The boys either side of me, I can tell they’re impatient too. One of them has the skinniest body I have ever seen, there doesn’t seem to be anything between skin and skeleton. The other one is shuffling from side to side, as if the race has already started, as if his feet have already started to kick.

Look to the water, that’s all that matters. Don’t think about the other boys.

Will you blow that whistle, will you please blow that whistle . The sound is screechy but thin. I am like a coiled spring. I don’t know how it is I am on the starting block. It’s like I moved through time. I am on the starting block, I am nearly there. I rein myself in. This is the moment I always have to watch it. In my second race, I slipped up and dived too early, and was disqualified. I didn’t want to get back in the pool for weeks, I was such a sook. I just couldn’t forget it, couldn’t get it out of my head or my sleep or my daydreams — how could I have been so stupid, how could I have been so hopeless? I’m never going to be that stupid again.

On your marks .

She’s called it. I put my right foot forward, I arch my arms. And then I stop thinking.

Don’t think, just listen.

She’s putting the whistle to her mouth, I can almost hear the slip of her spit over the metal. But it’s some other sense, it’s not hearing or seeing, I just know she’s about to blow the whistle. I have my arms out in front of me. The sound this time is strong, she’s blown with all the force of her lungs. And I’m ready. I leap and — just for a second, just a flash in time — I know that I am faster than the sound and I am entering the water before the sound has reached the other boys’ ears. I am in the water. I’m away.

It’s easy. Not that I’m not working for it, not that I can’t feel my muscles twisting and turning, turning and twisting, all up my arms, all down my legs. I can feel them working hard. But still it’s easy. What I don’t understand, what I can’t work out, is how it can all be still. Not that I’m not racing down the lane, not that my strokes aren’t splitting the water, not that my kicks aren’t thrashing the water. But it’s like I know the water doesn’t mind, that the water is guiding me and so I am swimming in stillness. I see it as a tunnel that the water makes for me, but a tunnel filled with bright blue and white light, a light so bright I can’t tell where the blue is white and where the white is blue. I sense, as though the water is explaining it to me, it is somehow whispering it to me without words, that other boys are not capable of calming the water, they don’t know how to do that. In the lane to my right the boy is punching hard, water churns and erupts around him but it is defeating him. I’m at the turn and he’s still struggling to reach it. I am away. All around me the water is in an agitated panic but where I am, there is the stillness.

It’s over too soon. I don’t want to stop but I slap the tile and I start to shiver. The cold has gone through me. I am trembling. I look up at the benches where they’re jumping up and down, making noises like wolves and dogs, sounding like the big birds in the aviary at the zoo. But I look for Demet’s face, I search for my father. Demet isn’t going spaz, she’s just got the biggest smile on her face and she’s swinging her Carlton scarf around and around. And next to her, Dad’s only half-smiling, only a little smile, but that’s all I need. He winks at me.

I’ve won.

I wish I could stop time, I wish I could make life a movie where you can stop time and be frozen forever. It feels so good, all the warmth in the world is coming from the centre of me, even though my teeth are chattering, even though I’m shivering. I nod, shake my head at all the other boys, at the boy who came second and the boy who came third, but I don’t even see them. I can’t stop time. I have to move. I have to get out of the water.

There’s a lady with a camera who grabs me after I’ve changed, says she’s from the local paper, says can she take my picture. I look to Dad, who nods. I hold up the trophy they’ve given me, I hold it up and beam at her. Demet and Dad, Boz and Sava, Mia, Shelley and Yianni, they’re all waiting for me, Sava is pulling dumb faces trying to make me laugh. But I just beam at the camera. I hold the trophy up high.

In the station wagon, heading home, Dad asks Yianni and Sava to keep low until he can drop them off. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with the police. Mia and Shelley are buckled up in the back seat; Boz, who is a shorty, is in the middle. Yianni and Sava are lying flat in the back, I can imagine them, trying to lie as flat as they can. Arms tight by their side, loving it, loving that my dad is letting them ride like this. That’s why everyone adores my mum and my dad, because of what Mum and Dad let them get away with. I am in the front seat, with Dad, and Demet is in the middle. Dad has his weird music on, old music from long ago, the music Dem calls skinny music, but she is swinging her legs in time to it, making up words and singing along. I am holding on to my trophy.

Dem turns to me. ‘Can I hold it?’

‘’Course.’ I give her the trophy. She doesn’t even look at it, she just holds it clutched to her chest, smiling, banging her feet, making up words to a song she’s never heard.

We drop off the others, pick up burgers and fish and chips, and we’re heading home. But I’m so hungry that the smell of the food is making me dizzy. I rip open the bag containing the hamburger, and I stuff it in my mouth in four or five bites, the sauce dripping down onto my trackie daks, onto my shirt, I don’t care, it feels so good to eat. Dem is laughing at my appetite but when we get home, she scowls. There is a new sign up in front of her house, her house next door to ours. It reads: Auction . There’s going to be an auction in a month. She does something then she’s been doing since she and I were kids: she wraps her Carlton scarf tight around her hands, like she’s a prisoner. Except now my trophy is caught up in the middle of it; it kind of looks like she has three hands.

Everyone’s in our backyard. Regan is playing in the small blue sandpit and little Theo is pushing his Thomas the Tank Engine around on the grass. Mrs Celikoglu is sitting on a kitchen chair and Mum is behind her, scissors in one hand and a comb in the other, doing her hair. Mr Celikoglu is sitting on the steps to the kitchen, drinking a beer and listening glumly to the radio. Carlton must be losing.

I grab the trophy from Demet but it’s caught in her scarf and won’t come loose. I start tugging harder and she yells at me, ‘Stop it, Danny, that hurts.’

‘I want to show Mum!’ I don’t mean to but it sounds like I’m whining.

Demet jerks her hands apart and the trophy falls, clang, on the concrete. I rush to pick it up but there’s a scratch, a dull streak across the polished aluminium surface. Demet puts her hand up to her mouth, she’s going to start crying, I know it, and I have to stop her doing it. I can’t bear it when Demet cries. No one else’s crying hurts. Only hers. When she cries it’s like I want to cry too.