‘You were a man back there,’ he said, glancing quickly at Dan, ‘going up to apologise to that prick, that was a brave thing to do. Those fucking people just live in their own world, they don’t have time for people like us, wogs like us,’ he added with a laugh. ‘I tell you, Kelly, it’s been years since we were at school but they still fall into using surnames, because that’s what you did, the surnames mattered. I was so glad when I heard you’d punched out that prick, and I wasn’t the only one. There were a few of us who high-fived when we heard what you did to Taylor.’
For the first time since he’d got in the car Dan opened his mouth, found the words. ‘What I did to Martin was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, no, the biggest. I regret it every day.’ Dan wanted to escape from the clammy claustrophobic heat; he just wanted to be out in the clean night air. ‘You were a prick too, Morello, let’s not forget.’
‘We were all pricks,’ said Morello, merging the car into the long queue of traffic waiting to turn right onto Barkers Road. ‘You too, Kelly, bloody Barracuda, you wouldn’t even look at me at school. You’d just look right past me like I didn’t exist.’
The throbbing at his temple, the incessant sound of the heater, the sweat under his collar; Dan needed to be out of the car, to be in open space.
He was about to say that to Morello, but before he could speak, Morello said, ‘You and I were kids, Danny, we can’t blame ourselves for all that. We were just trying to survive it, weren’t we? You wanted to be the best swimmer in the world and I walked up that fucking drive for six years promising myself that today, today, I wasn’t going to look like a poor wog, I wasn’t going to smell like the poor wog whose mother worked in a fish-and-chip shop, whose father never had an education. I did that for six years, Danny: I lied about my father and I lied about my mum, I never let anyone come over to my place so they wouldn’t have to meet my parents, so they wouldn’t know who I really was. I’ll never forgive myself for that.’
The boyish charm had gone. The man was glaring out into the night, his teeth gritted, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
‘We were kids, mate, we were just kids.’ It was only when John breathed out that Dan let himself exhale as well.
And there it was, Frank Torma’s house, untouched, unchanged. There was the dark narrow passage, the small bedroom at the front, his bedroom, the one Danny had always slept in. The crammed tiny living room, the small kitchen out the back; the fridge was new but the benchtops were the same. One cupboard door was hanging off its hinges; the stovetop was black from the congealed ancient grease.
Dan went back to the first bedroom, his room. It was exactly as he remembered it, except the dusty photographs which had once hung next to the door had been placed on the bedside table, as though Coach needed to be closer to them, had wanted them to be the first images he awoke to and the last things he saw at night.
Dan was there, a young boy, fourteen, in brand-new Speedos with a towel around his shoulders and a smile a mile wide. The boy seemed about to leap out of the frame, having tasted victory. There he was, framed in the Coach’s bedroom, forever unchanged. There was another photograph, of another young swimmer, fair-haired and smaller than Danny; and another, more recent photograph showed a boy wearing their school uniform, his dark, wet hair slicked back, holding up a small blue ribbon, a look almost of gratitude on his face as he stared proudly at the camera. Next to the three photographs was the one of the unsmiling old couple.
‘That’s his mum and dad, in Hungary somewhere.’ John had sat down on the bed.
‘I know.’ Dan didn’t need Morello to tell him anything about that house.
But John seemed oblivious to Dan’s gruffness. ‘I’ve got a photograph of my grandparents that looks exactly like that one.’ He gave a quick self-deprecating laugh. ‘Paisans are paisans are paisans, eh, wherever they’re from?’
Dan couldn’t bear Morello’s assumption of camaraderie. He looked around the room again. He’d used to think that room meant freedom, he once thought it offered him a possible future. There were the four photographs, the dresser, the bedside table, an old weathered cupboard, the bed, and the thick dusty curtains drawn across the window. There were no books, no papers; it could have been the room of a monk, thought Dan. It could have been a prison cell.
John picked up the photograph of Danny and examined it. ‘He always talked about you. He said you were the best swimmer he ever coached.’
Dan silently begged John to put down the photo. He couldn’t bear looking at that photograph. He knew it was of him but he couldn’t find himself in it. ‘Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he? I failed him.’
John put the photograph back and said, ‘Funny, that’s what he always said about himself when it came to you. He’d always say to me, after a few drinks, that he’d failed Danny Kelly.’
As John said this, a sudden gust of savage wind whipped at the window. For a moment the curtains separated and Dan saw a panel of battered and gnarled plywood fastened with masking tape to a broken pane. The wind died away and the curtains fell back into place.
John Morello was a stranger; the distance from the shadowy boy to the man before him was equal to the distance between who Dan was now and the boy in the photograph. But in front of that stranger, Dan allowed his body to break and to finally breathe. Dan allowed himself to cry.
He sat huddled on the bed, his hands shaking, the force of the grief bursting through in waves. His body seemed relieved of all solidity, as if he had become a swimmer again at the end of a marathon, the outpouring coming from deep within himself, as if all that was inside him had been expunged, as if the inside were the outside. All he was conscious of was that he couldn’t stop the tears, the bestial howling. He must have frightened John, or more likely disgusted him, as he’d fled the room. It was just Dan, alone, in a room that had reminded him of his boyhood glory but was now the prison cell of adult disgrace; and he knew that when he’d glimpsed the future all those years before, it was indeed such a room that fate was putting in store for him.
The breathing, in and out, one of the first things he’d learned as a swimmer; it helped.
Afterwards, spent, sitting on the Coach’s bed, it was as if there was nothing left inside him: no flesh and no muscle and no bone.
John had not disappeared, he came back into the room carrying a tea towel, which he handed to Dan. ‘Sorry, mate, this is all I could find.’ His voice was gentle.
Dan scrubbed at his face, at his shirtfront. He screwed the tea towel into a knot. John sat down beside him. The two men were breathing in unison.
‘Do you own your own home, Danny?’
The question was so unexpected that it made Dan laugh. He shook his head.
It was as if Dan had never broken down, as if that had happened in another time, in another space, away from the world.
‘You married, Danny, you got kids?’
Dan opened his mouth, then quickly shut it. He just shook his head.
John proudly flashed the thin gold ring on his left hand. ‘I am. My wife’s name is Dora. We’ve got a beautiful little boy, Troy, and we’re trying for another. Best thing that can happen to you, mate, having kids. That gives you perspective, shows you what really matters in this world.’
‘I’m not going to have kids.’ Dan straightened up, surprised how weight had returned to him, how he felt anchored to the ground once again. He turned to John. ‘Why me?’