The Slap (60 page)

‘I don’t start till one.’

Adele was wanting to say something. He held in his breath; he’d count to ten. He had his back turned to her.

‘Hey,’ he heard her call out. ‘Tell your dad I’ll go in on the iPod. Might as well get you a good one.’

He swung around, a big grin on his face. Adele was exactly like an aunt.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

Of course, she had known his father. They were in school together.

‘Thanks!’

He kissed the two women goodnight.

 

As soon as he was in his bed he reached underneath it and pulled out three notebooks and flicked through them. The oldest, its once vibrant indigo vinyl cover now faded to a pale cyan, held his maps and notes for Priam. This was a small island continent, half the size of Australia, that lay far east of Madagascar, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The second notebook, A3, a present from his mother when he had turned fifteen, a Green Day sticker fading on the black binding, contained all the maps for Al’Anin, an archipelago of four hundred and seventeen islands off the coast of California and Mexico. The third notebook was full, and contained his sketches and designs for the city of New Troy, the capital of Priam and one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring cities in the whole world. Its deep, natural harbour ate into the lush tropical coast. The harbour city with its ancient temples once dedicated to the old Greek gods stopped at the imposing cliff faces of the Poseidons, a mountain range that had collapsed into the ocean, leaving a sheer escarpment that ran for hundreds of kilometres along the coast. Towering hundreds of metres above the city, on the enormous plateau that stretched to the horizon beyond the cliff face were the dazzling skyscrapers, mosques, churches and temples of New Troy, a shimmering jumble of silicon and marble and concrete and brick—all gold spires and silver minarets and bronze domes shining in the cobalt tropical sky.

Richie opened the first notebook again and began to write. Priam was the place to which a group of the defeated warriors of Troy had escaped. They had discovered this continent, bred with the proud indigenous population that lived there, and named their new world after their last king and ruler. They too established a kind of Rome but unlike the founders of that city, these Trojans of Priam had disappeared from Asian and European history for over a thousand years. He had filled the book with stories of the intermarriage of Trojans and Aborigines, had detailed notes on the unique fauna and food crops of this rich, fertile kingdom.

He had now come to the point where he had to deal with what happened to Priam with the arrival of Christian explorers and settlers. He knew that he did not want the Spaniards to discover it. He guessed he had to make the explorers English, as it was the only language he knew. He had played with the idea of making the first Europeans to land Russian, but that did not accord with any of the history he had read on European colonisation. The Renaissance and the World, his favourite unit in Year Eleven, taught by the profane, impatient Mrs Hadjmichael, who always wore a Collingwood jumper in winter and a Brasillia soccer shirt in spring, had made him hungry to bring the ideals and values of modernity to the closed hierarchical world of the New Trojans—though he knew that the old religion would survive; even in the twenty-first century there would be New Trojans who worshipped Zeus and Athena, Poseidon and Artemis.

He stopped writing. He turned back a few pages and looked at his sketch of Grigorovich D’Estaing. He traced the outline of the man’s face. The music thundered through his headphones. He turned the volume up even louder and the pen dropped to the floor. His wrist was sore. He had not done too badly with the sketch, especially the shading of D’Estaing’s copper breastplate, with its insignia of a dragon fighting a phoenix, which he had copied from a fantasy site he found on the internet. He shut the notebook and lay on his bed, turning the volume to its loudest setting, letting the music bash against his eardrums. When the CD was finished he removed his headphones and opened the third notebook. In the back there was a little plastic pocket he had created and in that pocket were all his precious mementos: a photograph of a drunk Nick at Jenna’s party, his arm tight around a smiling Richie’s neck; a slim ticket of shots of himself and Connie, piled into the photo booth at Northland Mall, their cheeks touching, her grin, his smile, exaggerated, hysterical; the cards his dad and nan had sent him; his ticket stub to the Pearl Jam concert his mother had taken him to for his thirteenth birthday. And finally, tucked at the end, the photocopy he had made of the photograph he’d stolen from Rosie and Gary’s place, the young Hector cast against a clear turquoise sky, his naked torso wet from the sea, his heroic profile calm and unflinching in the sun. This was the model for Grigorovich D’Estaing. The photocopy was creased, torn on one edge. He would have to be more careful with it. Richie gently pulled it out of the folder. He held the photocopy high above him, imagining that it was real, made flesh, that the man in the photograph was about to turn his face away from the sea and the sun and look down at Richie, part his lips. Richie closed his eyes and reached for his cock.

He had asked his mother to wake him at seven and her voice cut into his sleep like nails screeching down a blackboard. He groaned and tried to toss himself back into sleep. He must have succeeded because he was woken again by his mother coming into his room and clapping her hands close to his ear. He shot out of bed. His mother laughed at him cruelly.

‘What time is it?’

‘A quarter past seven,’ his mother called on her way out of the room, ‘and if you’re not out of the shower and dressed by seven-thirty I’m not driving you to the pool.’

Seven-fifteen. That felt like a school day. Like the old days. He had not woken before ten since school had finished, and most days not before noon. His two shifts at the supermarket were in the afternoon and evening, though Zoran the shift supervisor had intimated that there would be some morning shifts available after the school holidays had finished. Richie loved the liberation of uninterrupted sleep, especially as he realised that it was possibly his last opportunity to indulge in it, that the future would soon grab him and study and work and life would again order his body to a clock. Seven-fifteen. He ran to the shower in his underdaks. As always, he stayed under long enough to quickly wash and brush his teeth. The drought had forced him to change his ways: he used to love spending ages under the shower, ignoring his mother’s tirades over his waste of water. He’d clean his teeth, shave if he needed to—still only once a week—and most often wank. Not anymore.

His mother was already waiting for him in the car. In minutes she had turned into the driveway of the YMCA. Thanks, Mum, he called out, slamming the door shut. She hooted and he waved, not bothering to turn back to look at her.

 

He didn’t need to be at Hugo’s till nine-thirty, and he was determined to swim for at least forty minutes. Richie had decided at the end of school that he wanted a new body, a fit, strong body. Eventually, like Nick, like Ali, he would join the gym, but he wasn’t ready for it yet. He’d never been particularly good at sports or Phys. Ed. He was too scrawny, felt too weak.

Undressing in the change rooms he eagerly anticipated his birthday present. An iPod. Awesome. That would make the gym bearable. He slipped into his trunks and jumped into the pool.

He was determined to get to one hundred laps, that was his goal. Nick had told him that by swimming he would be exercising all the muscles in his body but that he needed to concentrate on speed and endurance if he wanted to build up his strength. So far, in just under two months, Richie had built up to fifty laps. The first twenty were always the killer—he always found them excruciating to complete; they seemed to take ages. Time passed slowly, and he experienced every boring second of it. He detested the monotony of repetition. He had nearly given up swimming in that first week; it was only the embarrassment of seeing his thin, reedy body in the change-room mirrors that forced him back to the water. But he discovered that if he did persevere, if he reached the twentieth lap, and kept on going, he entered what he-tried-not-to-but-ended-up-calling-it-what-the-fucked-up-jocks-at-school-called-it, ‘the zone’. The zone was a space of timelessness and disassociation. It was like being stoned, but healthier. In the zone, time was not made up of dull seconds and even more tedious minutes; in the zone, time had no markers, no beginning and no end.

Sometimes, not very often, he and Nick would swim together. But it was uncomfortable, and he found it impossible to enter the zone with Nick swimming next to him. He was too conscious of his friend’s body, of the ferocity of his own desire. Not that he ever dared look at Nick when they were changing; they always dressed facing away from each other in the showers. He did take peeks, he couldn’t help it. He could describe every part of Nick’s anatomy, a composite body he had snatched in illicit glances. The light wave of golden hair underneath Nick’s balls, the almost scarlet blotch of the birthmark above his friend’s right nipple, the boy’s stubby, hooded cock, so much smaller than his own.

Richie swam to eighteen laps, breathing heavily, struggling to reach the magical twenty. He tried not to think of his friend’s beautiful cock, of the almost perfect profile of the pool attendant standing bored over the empty kiddie’s pool. Nineteen. He wanted to give up, go home, go back to bed. He touched the cold tiles and tumbled into the next lap. Twenty, he had reached it. He was in the zone. When he touched the wall to finish his fiftieth lap, it felt as if no time had passed at all. He sucked deeply from the tepid warm air, then taking a breath, he folded his legs to sink beneath the water. He’d count to thirty. He reached twenty-one and his chest began to hurt. He refused to panic. He got to thirty and broke the top of the water. Grabbing his towel he dashed for the spa.

An old Asian gentleman, his skin a bronze colour, was the only person in the spa. Richie quickly showered, ridding his body of the stench of chlorine, and then slid into the frothing water. The jets pummelled into his back. He quickly turned around, felt the warm punches of water against his stomach. He lifted himself up and let the water throb against his crotch and, turning again, the jets slammed into his arse. It was always a nice feeling, it always felt sleazy and a little pervy. Would a cock up his arse feel like this? Nah, he’d stuck his fingers up himself once and, though kind of hot in a dirty, pornographic way, it had also hurt. A cock would definitely hurt. He turned again and slid into the water, his back against the spa wall, his arms outstretched on the tiled rim. His armpits seemed lewd, gross and hairy, especially compared to the near hairlessness of the Asian man. Richie looked up through the glass. A man, sweaty from a workout, his singlet drenched, was opening a locker.