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equipment. And my mother’s a Nurse Educator at Bromley Hospital.’
    â€˜What are you going to do when you leave here — take over the family farm?’
    â€˜Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. My sister’s more interested in it than I am, I think. Whatever happens, I’d probably go to Uni first. My father says the only way you can go on the land if you don’t have an education, is as manure.’
    â€˜Do you get on with your parents? I mean, do you mind my asking?’
    â€˜Yeah, sure, it’s fine. Yeah, I get on with them really well. We’ve got a good family. Like, we can talk about anything. Sometimes I listen to the stories these guys tell about their life at home, and the way their parents fight and get divorced and stuff, and I think, “How lucky I am”. I mean, my parents never fight or anything. They’re more like friends to me than parents. I’m pretty well off, that way. How about you? You get on with yours?’
    â€˜Yeah, I guess. My parents run a newsagency in Gleeson so they work long hours and they work hard, but they’re good people. They put up with the dumb things I do and the way I have my hair and all that, although sometimes my father tries to have these serious talks about it, but I just laugh it off. They take it OK.’
    There was a pause while someone went past the door of the dorm, but, luckily, didn’t come in. Brian ‘Sog’ Bell rolled around in his sleep and cried out, something about ‘they’re not plums, they’re not plums’. Matt Roxborough was snoring, like he did every night. Down the other end a glow from under a doona showed that David O’Toole was reading in bed again. I stood up. ‘Better get some sleep I guess. These 6.30 appointments are killing me. It’s been good talking to you.’
    â€˜Yeah, you too. See you on the starting blocks.’
    I headed down the dorm but passing the bathroom door nearly ran into Clune, who was coming back from the toilet.
    â€˜Look out,’ he mumbled, in his poetic whining voice.
    â€˜Hey, watch it my man,’ I said. ‘One of these days I’m gonna squash you so small you’ll have to pull your socks down to take a shit.’ He stood gaping after me, his mouth stupidly open. I went to bed.

Chapter Six
    By now I was spending so much time in the pool that I was scared I’d grow gills. My hair was turning green from the chlorine and I kept expecting to find mould under my armpits. I was training harder than I had for the State titles two years ago, the last time I took swimming seriously. The way that water was parting for me, it must have thought I was Moses.
    I started shaving some times off some records, clocked my best ever hundred metre result in an invitation meet at Linley, and hadn’t been defeated yet by any of these rich little private school boys with their personal swimming pools and their hotshot coaches. I was training with the Opens and, believe me, those guys were swimming in broken water when I was in the pool. Crewcut had me doing some work with weights as well, four times a week in the Gym, and I got a buzz out of that — something really chemical happened when I got among those weights — although it meant I saw even less of Melanie.
    At the St Paul’s Carnival I won the fifty, hundred and two hundred; I broke two records at the Linley meet; and at the District All-Schools’, where they put me in the Opens, I took out two titles, a record, and swam the last leg of our relay, which came second to St Bede’s. You think I wasn’t loving it? That day at the All-Schools’, the pool felt like it was filled with champagne. My parents were in the stands; Melanie was winning her third diving title for the season; and I couldn’t understand why our ancestors had ever bothered to leave the water and grow limbs.
    I introduced Melanie to my parents. She stood there in her blue and