In the kitchen, her mother was making a din with pots and crockery, noisily preparing food and impatiently switching radio stations back and forth: from a haranguing evangelist on the Worldwide Church of God to a country-and-western couple yodeling competitively. The radio was hopeless on Sunday mornings.
“What’s up with her?” Judy murmured. She picked a pink frangipani blossom and put it behind her ear. “Back to bed, smooth fish,” she whispered.
As he trudged upstairs behind his frisky wife, she continued to scold him. “Fancy trying to shave your own back. You don’t grow any hair there, thank goodness.”
It wasn’t only the lazy mornings that Brian relished on Sundays. At around one thirty, the couple would rise languidly, put on their swimsuits, and head to Bondi Beach. Dulcie sometimes joined them, and this particular afternoon she was keen to do so.
After his hundreds of pool laps during the week, it was a luxury for Brian to swim purely for pleasure, to catch waves, enjoy the ocean. Today the salt water made his shaved limbs tingle and his back sting in an unfamiliar, sensual way.
Indeed, after a surf, a milkshake, a meat pie, and a hamburger, sunbaking on the sand with Judy and Dulcie stretched out on either side of him, Brian felt sated, pampered. Like a sultan. Judy’s hand rested openly on his newly sensitive left thigh. And as Dulcie turned on her back and wriggled and adjusted her swimsuit to expose a fraction more chest to the sun, her knee or foot kept brushing his right calf.
The sea, the warm rays, and the tasty takeaways were such great revivers of a top young athlete’s body and spirits that the sultan was soon speculating on the week ahead, suddenly a bewilderingly different and arousing week, beginning with this evening when he and this slender blond girl presently stroking his left leg would be in bed again.
When this did occur several hours later, however, a loud knock on the bedroom door interrupted them. Judy groaned. How long had Dulcie been standing there, within earshot?
“What’s the matter, Mother?” Judy called out. “We were fast asleep!” Clearly false, but difficult for an eavesdropper to contradict.
“I’ve brought you some cocoa.”
“We don’t need cocoa!”
“Brian always has a cup of cocoa at this time. It’s part of his training diet.”
“God! Leave the cups outside the door then.”
“I can’t. I’ll spill them.”
Brian’s back was smarting. He was suddenly exhausted.
Judy rose, strode naked across the room, and opened the door. The women faced each other. Neither was smiling.
Judy took the cups of cocoa. “Thank you,” she muttered.
“Put something on,” her mother said.
Judy shut the door on her and returned to bed. Brian’s eyelids were drooping as the couple lay waiting for Dulcie’s footsteps to go downstairs. In the long silence, Judy thought she could hear her mother breathing outside the door. Eventually the stairs creaked and shortly afterward plates and cutlery were clattering and cupboard doors were banging in the kitchen.
“Where were we?” Judy whispered to Brian. He was nearly asleep but he rallied valiantly to the cause.
On Monday afternoon, when Don Wilmott put his 1,500-meter specialist through a time trial, the newly shaved-down Brian Tasker swam the distance 3.5 seconds slower than in his natural hirsute state the month before.
“Heavy weekend, boyo?” Don asked, shaking his head. “What happened to your back?”
Brian shrugged. “Shaving-down,” he said.
For punishment, Don made him swim an extra three miles, made up of ten 400-meter swims within an hour, with an average time of four minutes and forty-five seconds, representing about 90 percent effort.
As if the shaving-down and its sexual aftermath had never happened, the week passed as it had before Dulcie’s Sundaymorning razor work.
There was no real reason for Brian to shave down the following Sunday; the point was to shave just before a big race, so your body felt the difference — the physical transformation — and reacted accordingly. But as soon as Judy left for church, Brian was in the back garden with the shaving cream and razor.
Under low humid clouds the day headed sullenly toward a thunderstorm. Cicadas buzzed a monotone refrain in the trees and a mirage already juddered across the water. Brian watched the tiny Lavender Bay ferry steaming through the harbor: the illusion was of two mysteriously joined boats, the regular ferry and, over it, another ferry that churned boldly through the air, above the water’s surface. For some reason Brian thought of his nemesis, the up-and-coming young harbor swimmer Murray Rose.
Soon Dulcie joined him. She’d changed into her blue satiny swimsuit and heat seemed to radiate off her flesh. With a frown, she examined him. Only a shadowy stubble showed on his limbs and chest but she lathered his body and shaved him anyway.
Although the westerly breeze from the harbor was warm and humid and carried smoke from a far-off bushfire in the Blue Mountains, Brian shivered. The air was pungent with the smell of burning eucalyptus and the drone of the cicadas was almost deafening. As the two conjoined Lavender Bay ferries approached Circular Quay, they slowed, then docked, and their images merged back into one small boat.
“I need to be thorough,” Dulcie said. When she finished, she ran her fingertips slowly over his body. Neither of them had spoken until that moment.
As she drew him into the house and upstairs, he asked, “Have you trimmed your fingernails?”
Her glistening eyes aroused and slightly unnerved him. She didn’t answer.
There was an abrupt change in Brian’s weekday routine. Now when he got home from his afternoon pool laps, still damp-headed and smelling of chlorine, Dulcie was waiting by the door to take him directly upstairs to her bed. Afterward, she served him his customary big dinner and bedtime cocoa.
Once only, starving after training, Brian suggested dinner before bed, but then fell deeply asleep the instant they’d finished having sex. It was difficult for Dulcie to wake him, drag his heavy body out of her bed, across the landing, and into his own.
“Come on, Ross!” she’d urged him. It was nearly midnight and she was beginning to panic. “Christ, Ross, wake up!”
“Ross?” Brian had mumbled sleepily. Ross Gooch had been Dulcie’s first husband. A front-rower for Randwick Rugby Club, and Judy’s father, big Ross had died of a heart attack at thirty-one.
As for Sundays, Judy was slightly mystified that Brian now waited in the shade of the frangipanis and oleanders for her return from church. And that he’d always shaved himself again — even attempted to shave his back. They’d head upstairs of course, but Brian seemed wearier these days.
“Poor boy, has Don increased your training load?” she asked one Sunday.
He shrugged. “We’ve had to step it up. The Games are getting closer.”
Her heart went out to him: her champion. Usually he thrived on tough training, and he’d worked so hard for this. Ever since she was sixteen and he was eighteen, high school sweethearts, he’d had this grand ambition of the Olympic Games. As the Games drew closer it was understandable that he was feeling stressed.
He’d even lost interest in their Sunday-morning pillow talk. After they’d celebrated her return from Mass — although not as playfully and energetically as they used to — Brian just wanted to go back to sleep, whereas in the past they’d lie there chatting about the past week’s newspaper gossip.
As a Telegraph copytaker, she was well up on the local news. When deadlines drew closer, reporters out on the road would phone in their stories to the copytakers. Sitting there with her headphones, or typing up the paragraphs they dictated from the nearest public phone, she’d get the latest news from the law courts, police beats, and crime scenes even before the editors did.