In Bed with Jocasta (17 page)

P
eople said you were a rotten team,’ says Batboy’s soccer coach, Sam, addressing the boys in his usual Churchillian style. The boys are all exhausted, sucking at oranges, but they’re listening hard. Sam — who’s Italian, and knows the value of a rhetorical flourish — pauses for effect and then stabs at the air with his hand. ‘Well, anyone who says that you’re a rotten team now, well, they’d have to have rocks in their head.’

Eleven-year-old boys don’t give a lot away, but I can see them quietly glancing at each other, out from under their fringes, a clamped-down smile creeping onto their faces. They know something transforming has happened to them, somewhere in the last four months.

Sam doesn’t go into details, because we all know the story. The long season last year when Batboy’s team didn’t win a single game. OK, let’s be honest here, didn’t score a single
goal.
Not one. Not even close. All season. Not even against teams which could only field eight players. Not even against the team whose goalie was bored, fiddling with the net, and got himself tangled, unable to move. Not even then.

The boys coped fine with their losses, although they did develop a sudden taste for American sports films — and always with the same plot. A team that couldn’t score a single goal or point, a team which everyone laughed at, miraculously came good. They could watch that plot a thousand times. Especially on Saturday afternoons, following that week’s crushing defeat.

This season, Batboy found himself in a team made up of remnants of various old teams. Few knew each other, and they had sharply different temperaments. Quickly they fell into warring factions. There was even the odd punch being thrown. It was a spiky group of kids, one that didn’t look likely ever to play together as a team.

I was remembering how grim things seemed at the beginning of this season, as I stood watching Sam finish his speech. ‘You didn’t win today,’ he tells the boys, ‘but you played great football. You showed character.’

This is Sam’s favourite word, so he says it again: ‘Character.’ He points to David, his co-coach. ‘We didn’t do it,’ he says, ‘we just coached you. You guys did it. You did it for yourselves. You found out what happens when you play like a team.’

Sam makes the
best
speeches. By the end of it, the boys are dazed, drunk on praise, and various parents are dabbing at their eyes with tissues.

Sam pauses for effect again, and tells them they’ve made the semifinals. We’re going to have extra practice for the next few weeks. He reckons they might even be in with a chance.

I look out over the neighbouring ovals, and see other teams dotted around, all with their coaches and their managers. Lots of little speeches. Lots of emotion. Lots of lessons. And yet none of it seems to fit into the public discourse that we have about ourselves. We talk also about how society has fragmented, how there’s no community left, yet to believe all that, is to squeeze our eyes shut to this — these people, on every oval in every city and town.

Sam and David are young guys, without kids of their own yet. Both soccer mad. When Sam finishes his speech, someone tells the boys it’s his birthday, and so they crowd around and sing to him, laughing to see their coach blush and stumble. They slap their arms around each other, and babble about the semis. They’re a team.

One week later they win the semi, and then — with a penalty shoot-out — the final. Another week on and it’s the grand final.

Tino — one of Sam and David’s friends — leans towards me, and whispers conspiratorially. ‘We’ve heard Burwood has come up with a new formation. They’re going to try to surprise us on Saturday.’

I pass the information to Batboy, and a flicker of fear crosses his face. ‘But, Dad, what do you think they’ll try to do?’ Batboy’s not used to talk of soccer strategy. To him, the word ‘formation’ has only one implication, and that’s military.

I explain: ‘It’s just a new way of placing their players. They’ll be trying to come up with an answer to “Il
Pressing”.’
He nods. Of course. Burwood would be
desperate
to find an answer to ‘Il
Pressing’.

‘
Il Pressing’
is our coaches’ secret weapon. It’s what’s taken Batboy’s team from being awarded Most Pathetic in the Inner West, to today’s moment of drama.

Already the boys chatter among themselves, dropping the term
‘Il Pressing’
as if they’ve known it from birth. ‘Well that’s what you get with
“Il Pressing”,’
I hear Jimmy say to Will, real casual.

Actually, it was only last week our Italian-Australian coaches confessed they’ve had a particular strategy all year — one based, and I swear I’m not making this up, on that used by the Dutch National Team in the 1974 World Cup. ‘Total football’. Or, in the Italian, ‘Il
Pressing’.

I’ve watched Sam and David, arguing about it with Tino and Maria; all four bent over David’s chalkboard, arrows flying everywhere, diagrams more complex than for the Battle of Waterloo. And all directed at the second-lowest division of the Under-11 competition, in a single corner of an Australian city. Such arguments! Such knowledge! Such history!

Tino stares at the chalkboard and announces that
‘Il Pressing’
is too dangerous. David points out that after the Dutch let it go, it was taken up by the Italian national side. He squares his shoulders and emphasises his point: ‘The Italians — the most technically-correct soccer nation of all time.’

What can Tino do? He’s hardly going to disagree. So ‘
Il Pressing’
it is.

But when Sam drags the boys together, he doesn’t talk to them about winning. It’s another of his Churchillian speeches. ‘It’s not about winning. It’s not even about soccer. You got here not because of your soccer. Not because you kick well.’

I notice how he steps around using the words ‘win’ and ‘lose’. ‘You got here because you played like a team; because you had respect for each other; because you showed character.’

Sam’s been to the laminator, and he hands them bits of laminated cardboard, telling them to pin them next to their beds. It says: ‘A champion team is remembered longer than a team of champions.’

Already that week, before the tension of the grand final, Sam had handed out the photocopied yearbook. It had pages of little paragraphs: each coach’s assessment of each boy and girl. We’d all read what the coaches had written about our team. James, they’d written, is ‘the true definition of an Italian striker.’ Young Nicholas a ‘typical Italian-style attacker.’ Fast Edward is like Maradonna. Evan plays ‘in the true modern way, à la Paolo Maldini.’

And Batboy — since you ask — is the spitting image of Gaetano Scirea.

It’s 10.30 on a late winter morning, and they are about to run out for the Grand Final. This gaggle of ordinary boys, straggling over the field, but in their coach’s eyes, each holding hands with one of the greats.

So much has been written about the darkness of our culture. But there is also this. Coaches who see greatness in the most unlikely of materials; and children hungry for that transforming gift.

I see my boy holding his body a little differently, enjoying what it can do, the skills he’s learnt, the confidence he’s won from earning David and Sam’s regard. There may be an answer to ‘Il
Pressing’
— we’ll find out today — but not, I think, to all the other things they have learnt.

T
here’s an old dentist joke in which the dentist is leaning forward over the patient, about to start the drill, when the patient shifts forward and gets a pretty workable grip on the dentist’s testicles. Says the patient: ‘Let’s agree not to hurt each other, OK?’

I was repeating this joke to myself, as a sort of dulling mantra, while sitting on the metal chair waiting for the doctor. I knew what was about to happen. This complete stranger — sure, he
claimed
to be a doctor — would soon invite me into his rooms, request I remove my pants, then give my knackers a good hard squeeze. If only I were armed with a dentist’s drill, it might put things on a more equal footing.

Men are getting a lot of heat these days for our refusal to have regular check-ups at the doctor, but my experiences have not been good. For a start, amid the current blaze of litigation, doctors seem unwilling to do anything without a flurry of tests.

Walk into a Sydney surgery with a harpoon sticking out of your head, and the typical GP will start insisting on a blood test and an X-ray ‘just so we can rule out prostate cancer’.

He’ll then get quite shirty if you suggest the reason you feel unwell may be connected to this enormous harpoon, and the fact that buckets of blood are, as you speak, spurting forth from the wound. The implication is that he hasn’t done six years of medical school to have patients telling him what a harpoon looks like.

‘Well, usually we find the harpoon is masking deeper problems,’ he’ll say, gloomily gloving-up to commit a few passing indignities on one’s bottom.

This time, I didn’t even have something as complex as a harpoon injury. I’d presented to my GP with a good, straightforward injury, caused by dropping a double-hung sash window on my right foot — yet still ended up with a referral to a specialist to have my testicles squeezed.

Which is fine, except two weeks later I find myself sitting in the specialist’s waiting room, and already I’ve been here for a full hour and a half, floridly imagining my galloping testicular cancer, while enduring a truly ancient copy of
Woman’s Day.

Specialists appear to have some sort of agreement that a patient must sit in the waiting room for at least two hours, presumably so one’s heartbeat can return to normal after hearing the cost of the consultation.

Of course, as patients, we should stand up for our rights — making the same sort of fuss we’d make if kept waiting for an hour at a restaurant or a bar. The only difference being that, at the time he’s listening to your complaint, the bartender usually doesn’t have you on a table, stretched out naked, with his hands cupped around your balls.

Depending, of course, on your personal choice of bar.

Eventually, though, my doctor sauntered in, showed me to a side room and promptly left me for a further twenty minutes — no doubt so I could complete my galloping cancer fantasies — then returned and began the examination.

Which brings me to the other reason we blokes don’t enjoy seeing doctors. Their use of the phrase ‘Oh, my God.’ For myself, I find the phrase ‘Oh, my God’ quite useful, especially after a trip to the hairdresser. It’s less useful when uttered by a doctor who at that precise moment is examining my testicles.

Doc: ‘Oh, my God.’

Me (voice a-quiver): ‘What do you mean: “Oh, my God”?’

Doc (fascinated): ‘It’s the lump. It’s huge!’

Me (showing the sort of dignity you’d expect): ‘Awwwwwww! I’m dying!! Awwwwwwwww!!!’

Doc (as if stating the bleeding obvious): ‘Course, it’s harmless, just a haematoma. But by God it’s a big ‘un.’

It’s at this point he wanders out, no doubt to check his waiting room queue isn’t moving too fast, leaving me to stumble out into Macquarie Street, wondering if those two hours reading
Woman’s Day
might have done some permanent intellectual damage. Hope not. Otherwise I’ll need another check-up.

T
he worst moment was on Old Windsor Road, with me driving along, Jocasta in the passenger seat, and each of us screaming about whether we should choose the
calypso
blue or the
china
blue. Of course, the colours are identical, but that wasn’t going to stop an experienced married couple like us from enjoying a fairly extended argument.

Especially since I could picture just how superbly the calypso blue would set off the white kitchen appliances, while the china blue would drag us into a life of degradation, shame and frothing insanity. And if you’ll give me a moment, I’ll try to work out which colour is which.

That’s what happens when you decide to fix up your kitchen; suddenly you find yourself thinking the colour of your benchtops is an issue of some importance, right up there with the changing role of NATO.

You find yourself speaking a language called ‘Kitchen’ — raving about coordinated trims and multi-function ovens with the intensity you once reserved for sex. It’s Kitchen Lust, and it keeps you awake at nights — trailing your fingers over imagined whitegoods, wondering how long it will before you’ll be alone together, just you and them, and how you’ll get to turn them on.

But like all lust, Kitchen Lust brings its ghostly sibling, fear. You’ll make a terrible mistake. You’ll go all the way with the wrong colour. And you’ll end up not with a kitchen, but a
kitsch-en.

It’s the kitchen outfitters who are to blame. They’re the people trying to convince us that kitchens are important; that the world judges people according to the colour of their benchtops. ‘Are you marble people or laminate people?’ the saleswoman asked chirpily, right before she checked whether we were ‘fawn people or bright colours people’.

And so Jocasta and I cheerily admitted we were laminate people
and
bright colours people, which, translated into the language of ‘Kitchen’, means roughly: ‘Look, everyone, the Suburban Trash has arrived.’

Certainly, there’s nothing like staring at a wall-full of laminate samples to make you feel it’s all hopeless; that you’ll end up with a colour combination proved to cause grand mal seizures in laboratory mice.

First up, there’s the row of reds and coppers — sophisticated tones which can transform the most humble home into an up-market brothel. And there, just below, are the charming pastel blues and pinks — irresistible colours for anyone considering converting their kitchen into a Darrell Lea outlet.

But the more colour chips you accumulate — and I’ve so many I rattle when I walk — the more you realise you’re about to do something both ghastly and permanent. That’s the point about Jocasta and me. We know we’ve got bad taste. We’ve seen the clothes we buy. And the mistakes I’ve made in the shirt department should look quite startling when seen over a whole benchtop.