Forever Underneath - Michael Blake It’s not the humidity, it’s the heat. Keep your furnaces and hell-hinges and Adelaide in December. You wish to know true, suffocating, dehydrating lip-chapping cookery? Go to the establishment formerly known as the Tattersall’s™ Hobart Aquatic Centre1 in winter. Wear trousers and a cardigan, because the external temperature is hovering between twelve and nothing degrees celcius. Stroll in like an executive, dressed like this – a manner you thought sensible – and you will know warmth, writ large and profound and equatorially cloying, if the equator was dependent on trench-warfare quantities of chlorine to stay clean. You will struggle through the conversation with the girls at the front desk without fainting, then run into a guy you went to highschool with2 as you pass the lifeguard station. He is jovial, and apparently unaffected by the appalling heat. He will ask you what you are doing here, and it is here that our stories diverge. You might say: Oh, there was a deal on membership so I’ve joined the gym, or Just going to drop in for some laps, or I’m going to try and break my record on the waterslide, or I have to fight a twelve-year-old with a pool noodle, or any number of things, sensible or otherwise. I say: ‘I am here to write.’ He gives me the Look this deserves.3 I explain further – the Hobart City Council and the Tasmanian Writers Centre thought it would be a good idea to offer residencies to the young writers of the city, to get us out and writing in the common and not-so spaces of the city, and I applied to come to The Pool. His Look, which had softened throughout the explanation, reverts stonily when I reveal that I chose to come here specifically. ‘But why?’ I point across the lap pool. ‘Initially, to write about them.’ 1 Now just The Hobart Aquatic Centre because apparently they wanted to keep the T at the start of the acronym, hereafter referred to as ‘The Pool’ 2The coincidence is unremarkable, this being Tasmania – you also knew one of the girls at the front desk in a roundabout friends-of-friends kind of way, and will later, at the dive pool, see a girl you propositioned one time (and were politely rebuffed by) in a taxi on Sandy Bay Road. 3 It’s like the look you’d give someone when they inform you they’ve taken up folk-dancing, or MMA for Seniors. Grave, questioning, with an underlying note of concern for their long-term mental health. He turns to look at the group I have indicated. About eight self-consciously muscular young men stand at the bottom of the bleachers in various states of undress or budgie-smugglery, conversing in front-row-concert yells and hoots of masculine laughter. Most of them have long green bags that say AUSTRALIA in large yellow lettering down the side. They hold masks and snorkels and flippers and small bats which look like an obese boomerang that has suffered an unspeakable industrial accident. There is an indefinable something about them – a slight edge to their ease, a studied carelessness – that gently shoves the words Private School to your forebrain, which then feels guilty and judgemental. They are, and presumably always will be, The Underwater Hockey Boys. ‘Those guys? The hockey guys?’ ‘My housemate is one of them. It’s an interesting sport – people haven’t heard of it. Good thing to write about.’ He is silent for a moment. ‘I say, those guys – gosh. Those guys are a lively set of chaps, and Underwater Hockey is certainly a sport worth attending to.’4 I limply defend the chaps in question (or the ones I know, at least), and we discuss other things one could write about at the pool, as well as the fact that he is hoping to purchase a third house before the end of the year, and the recent holiday which is responsible for my current state of sullen jetlag. I mention the punishing temperature, although not above a thousand times. Eventually he is called away to the yellow booth that sits – like the world’s most humid office cubicle – in the middle of The Pool5, and I amble over to the Boys. The ones I know greet me briefly and then enquire as to why I am here, on a Tuesday night, when I could be watching football, or playing Dota, or drinking at the pub, or perpetrating arson, or, you know, doing anything else. I trot out my reasoning and receive variations on the Look from almost all of them. I’m sure there’s something in that. These boys – or young men, or whatever – are mostly very good at what they do, and they take it as seriously as a heart attack when required, but there’s also a vibe of 4 This is not, word-for-word, exactly what he said. In fact, this is nothing like what he said, but I don’t believe he really meant what he did say (which could be construed, in the wrong light, as unkind), so I have invented something else to serve my own ends because I do what I want. #yolo, etc. 5 The Pool as in the building, obviously. Not the actual pool. Let’s not get silly. tongue-in-cheekness about it all, a feeling that they’re still able to reconcile the fundamental ridiculousness of their sport – of all sport – with their love and dedication to it. Which is not something that can be said for, say, a lot of other sports, professional or otherwise. Like, Lionel Messi defies rational explanation, but he defies rational explanation in a realm where well-conditioned grown men regularly spend full minutes thrashing on the turf in the clutches of injuries that turn out to be – more often than not – extant only in the mind of said thrasher.6 It’s odd to see, and kind of disarming (the Hockey Boys’ attitude to hockey, that is. Not Arjen Robben rolling around looking pained). I like it. ‘What size shoe are you?’ ‘Nine?’ My housemate nods and disappears. I continue taking notes about the heat and the septuagenarian in lane one who I’ve taken an intense interest in.7 Said housemate returns with a pair of flippers (‘fins’, for those in the know8), a snorkel-mask combo, and one of those tiny floppy hats-with-ear-covers you see water-polo players wear. He throws the bundle at my feet. ‘You got speedos?’ ‘Do I look like I own speedos?’ I should mention that this is the first time I’ve set foot in a public pool in at least six years, which probably explains the whole heat issue, as well as the shock at the septuagenarian’s endurance9, and the overall feelings of dislocation and confused regression – the bulk of my pool-time went down when I was at school. Earlier when my housemate bent down to pick up a bag from the floor I flinched, fully expecting him to backhand me in the nuggets. He didn’t. 6 This is not a dig against soccer in particular – it’s just a glaring example of the ludicrousness allowed in some sports that have been eclipsed by the spectre of themselves – see also: boxing weigh-ins; cycling’s parent-in- denial stance on doping; golf salaries; LeBron James. And for the record, I love all of these things, soccer in particular. 7 When I say ‘interest’ I mean I’ve been watching him closely for about twenty minutes so I can record the exact moment when he a) sinks slowly to the bottom of the pool and dies or b) reveals himself to be a cyborg built so people can measure their strokes against it, like a metronome. These are the only foreseeable outcomes. 8 This may be lies. I felt disinclined to double-check for fear of being practised upon. 9 I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a thing in 2009. He tosses a pair of lurid green speedos with TASMANIA across the butt onto the pile. ‘You need to spit in your mask. Do you know how to clean your mask?’ I know how to clean my mask. Though I am still dressed and it will probably be redundant by the time I am changed, I spit desultorily in the mask. ‘I hope that’s not your idea of cleaning your mask.’ He strolls off, massaging his pectoral muscles and muttering about exhaustion sets. I spit again – weakly, petulant – in the mask (rookie error – one has to wait to build up a decent salival mass or you end up producing this white pasty stuff, useless to man or beast), then go get changed. Speedos are not super comfortable. I imagine they’re less-so for the guy I’ve borrowed them from, who is bigger than me. There is a lot to be said for sporting apparel when it comes to feeling prepared. There’s a calming sort of quality to strapping on your pads and helmet, or tucking your fireproof underwear into your other fireproof underwear and then putting on your fireproof suit and boots and balaclava and helmet and six-point harness (man, how has motorsport not killed me yet), or even just folding your socks over the top of your shinpads. The apparel required for underwater hockey (which is very similar to that of underwater rugby, which is what I am apparently about to watch), lacks sadly in this department.