‘What about respecting your seniors?’ said Mac.
‘Don’t know about that one,’ said Lance, and they both laughed. ‘Anyway,’ Lance drained the rum and washed it down with beer, ‘I’m going to stick with it for a while at least.’
‘So we haven’t scared you off on your first gig?’
‘Actually, I learned something,’ said Lance.
‘What?’ said Mac.
‘Never, ever give up.’
Mac followed the cackling sounds coming from under Frank and Pat’s Rockhampton house. Carrying a bottle of white wine he limped across the lawn past the barbecue and saw Pat and Jen sneaking a fag in the rumpus room where Mac used to play table tennis and listen to Bruce Springsteen records.
‘Busted,’ he said, pouring wine for his wife and mother.
‘That’s what wedding anniversaries are for, my dear,’ said his mum, tipsy and dragging on her smoke. ‘You get to knock off the goody-two-shoes act.’
‘Yeah, leave her alone, Macca,’ said Jenny, making a face at the paucity of wine he’d just administered. ‘And anyway, Pat was just telling me about this missing ribbon.’
Following her finger, Mac saw the display of his old sports trophies and carnival ribbons. The player-of-the-day statues from rugby league were at the front and the swimming trophies were at the back, along with rep jumpers for rugby league and union. Sitting on a cork board on the wall were his blue swimming ribbons, ranging from when he was eight years old until his last year of high school. Pat had pulled them out of their boxes once he went to uni, and put them in order, tacking them up with small pins.
‘Nineteen eighty-five,’ said Jenny, squinting at the regimented lines of blue. ‘Nudgee College swim carnival. One’s missing — look, there’s a gap and a darker area where it was.’
‘Must have fallen off,’ said Mac, turning for the door. His brother-in-law had been demonstrating how a slightly tweaked grip could improve his golf and he wanted to get back before Virginia made him change the subject.
‘Oh, stop it,’ said Pat. ‘Tell her.’
‘Can’t remember,’ said Mac, blushing slightly.
‘He gave it away.’ Pat blinked slowly in the way women do when they’re saying, Can you believe it?
‘Gave it away?’ said Jenny, exhaling smoke. ‘Why?’
Mac shrugged. ‘Another bloke deserved it.’
‘He came second?’ said Jenny.
‘No,’ said Mac. ‘I really have to get back upstairs.’
‘What’s the secret?’ said Jenny.
‘He gave it to the boy who came last,’ said Pat.
Mac’s face flushed hot. ‘Mum!’
Pat grabbed Jenny by the forearm. ‘There was an old school friend in the hospital dying, this is about ten years ago. Alan went down to see him and a few days later I realised his ribbon for the fifty metres freestyle was missing.’
‘You gave it to someone who’d come last?’ said Jen, a little aggressive from the wine. ‘Why?’
Mac thought back to that afternoon in 1985, when Len Cromie swam the fifty metres freestyle at the swimming carnival — a mangle of limbs that didn’t work properly due to the ravages of cerebral palsy. Standing in his lane, having won the event, Mac waited for a boy who flirted with drowning rather than gave up. It was the end of an era — probably the last time any school allowed someone like Len Cromie to swim in a carnival, lest the school be set upon by lawyers and insurance companies or overprotective parents. Len had conned his way into the heat and was in the water before anyone could eject him. Mac remembered the teachers covering their eyes, unable to look as Len repeatedly slipped under the water only to bob up again for air. He remembered going down to see Len as a twenty-eight-year-old, when he was dying in hospital, and having nothing to give his old classmate but his best wishes and the blue ribbon. He’d left the hospital, embarrassed, when Len started crying.
‘I realised there were two kinds of winner,’ said Mac finally, staring at the floor. ‘The one who comes first…’
‘And?’ said Jen.
‘And the one who’s never beaten.’