‘You don’t need to know why: just do it,’ Brick says.
Here I was feeling left out, and there was never any big secret. None of the guys know, they just do it.
I yank my footy shorts to my ankles and do the Eagle Rock in my jocks.
There are few things worse than having a klaxon raised to your ear drum to wake you from a hangover coma, but that’s exactly what Brick does to us all at seven thirty the next morning.
Everything’s blurry. I’m sick. Sore. Tired.
‘I’m hungover,’ I groan.
‘Everyone’s hungover,’ Brick retorts, yanking the curtains open to gently pan-sear my corneas with sunlight. ‘Too bad. We drink as a team. We train as a team.’
Fergus, Mason and Tommo are groaning in the other beds, too. We slowly piece together fragments of the previous night. We did funnels. We did shoeys. At some point I passed my bottle of poppers around the table and guys were just taking casual hits while we played poker and a game of Uno that seedily devolved into Strip Uno.
And apparently, I fucked Fergus.
Which I have no recollection of.
‘You and Fergus were so ratshit pawing at each other you didn’t even know me and Tommo were in the room,’ Mason advises me, smirking.
‘Sameroom?’ Tommo blurts out, amping up his voice like he’s traumatised. ‘I was in the samebunkwhile they rooted on top. The bed frame was shaking. I was waiting for Zeke’s jizz to rain down on me. You fucked me by proxy, man.’
I feel so stupid to have gone so out of control in front of the team.
I make apologetic eye contact with Fergus, who gives me a gentle nod and says, ‘No complaints from me, mate. I had a good time.’
I’m saved the necessity of working out if I had a good time or not by Brick returning and rounding us up for training.
We pull our uniforms and boots on and head down to the footy oval.
Hungover training is both hilarious and terrible.
Tommo sprints behind some trees at one point after our usual handball drill and yaks in the bushes. My guts are still iffy and I’m almost tempted to join him.
A wild kangaroo appears from nowhere during our kicking drill and accidentally kicks one of our footies onto the road.Fergus shrieks at the roo like a banshee and tries to square up to it and we all crack up.
During our match sim at the end, Brick throws me in defence and Jack rains goals on me like I’m not even there. I start to feel like a failure.
The next time Tommo clears the footy forward, something hijacks my legs. I race up to Jack and launch myself into the air, my shoulder colliding with his and my hand just managing to tap the footy away from him.
‘Ouch – sorry,’ I mutter to Jack, rubbing my shoulder. It really hurt – like a punch.
Unexpectedly, Jack smiles at me. ‘First time I’ve seen you go at a contest with some fire in ya belly,’ he says. ‘Well done, mate.’
We head down to the Lancelin Tavern for a pub feed among the skull-and-crossbones LLFC Pirates banners of the local footy club, then walk back to the Beach Shack for what Brick promises are ‘team-building activities’.
At first, I wonder if it’s like a hazing or initiation. It starts with Brick and Jack making all six of us – ‘recruits’, they call us – do a timed drill. It involves sculling a whole stubby of beer, then going for a sprint lap around the block, then returning to scull a shoey, and finally do push-ups until we fail.
If this was designed to make us chunder, it succeeds. Tommo yaks again, and after my arms give out on me on my thirtieth push-up, I do, too.
Embarrassingly, I smashed two chocolate mousses at the pub after my parmy, so the vomit comes up brown and creamy and lumpy, leading Fergus to say, ‘Ewww, fudgy!’
And that’s how I get named Fudgy for the rest of the trip.
The rest of the team-building gets a bit more serious. We split into groups of four – I’m with Brick, Mason and Fergus – andcompete at various challenges. Building the tallest tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows. Holding up buckets of water with our feet and having to communicate like a team to take all our socks off without spilling the water.
As dusk hits, we do an activity Brick introduces as ‘The Timeline Activity’. It’s so we can get to know our brothers in the team. We choose three significant years in our lives and write down on a Post-it note a major event (positive or negative) for each year. Then we stand up one by one, pin our sticky notes to the timeline Brick’s drawn on butcher’s paper on the wall, explain our choices to our teammates, and finish with a shot of Fireball.
