She braces, bowing her head, but since the first day—the big girl, Barbs, with the broken jaw—he has not hit any of them above the neck. Barbs’s entire face now is swollen, purple-black, and she cannot eat anything, even these soggy flakes. To look at her now it is hard to remember the sheer physical charge she used to have, ploughing freestyle through the water. Fast lane to the Olympics, they said, till she had to open her mouth about the ‘sports massages.’ On the coach’s hotel bed. And then the whole team called her some slurry from Cronulla and that was it, no Olympic Dream for Barbs.
