Circles of time.

The airless tram stopped, its door peeled open, and I stepped out into the shady archway of the gothic arboresque cathedral formed by the Royal Parade elms. 

Summer, late afternoon. The sun, scorching, had sailed across 135 vengeful degrees, burying its heat into every hard dark surface that its hot blind fingers could reach. 

I turned from the shade into a burning laneway, passed the brutalist angled academic buildings of the university and reached the Beaurepaire swimming centre. The building, a modernist cube of monumentally optimistic design, brazenly wears a multi-coloured frieze, an Aztec-like belt of mid-century zeitgeist, as if it were still 1956. As I passed its glass-walled blueness, I sensed, if not heard, the metronomic slap-slap of immersed students ploughing endless laps, subconsciously invoking a curious para-temporality designed to speed their five-year courses to an earlier conclusion. 

Outside the glass, the athletics track hosts the same time-bending ritual, carried out decade after decade by circling student runners defying exhaustion and vertigo. I should know; I ran innumerable Rawlinson Track laps over a quarter-century of frozen winter afternoons and oven-like summer nights; alternating long straights and tight curves through marriage, assassinations, falls of walls, tanks in squares, divorce, 27th floor corner-office ascendancy, more children, a million books and occasional torpor; literal circles of time. And why not? The track is a time-warp in itself; abutting a paling-fenced and impossibly green cricket field beyond which the spires of the colleges, arranged prettily in a semi-circle, soar in competition with an arc of tree canopies.

Knots of people were standing - some in that transparent body language of expectation, waiting for something to happen before formalities have begun - on the outer lanes of the track, or just outside the gate where a sign still advises ‘track closed for training 6 to 8pm’, or sitting on the old judges’ stand, a kind of timber and steel skeleton to nowhere, superseded for decades by electronic timing but still standing mute, like its fellow fossils in the earth sciences building.

Faces at such events are familiar, vaguely familiar, or unrecognisable. On occasion one will appear out of the hot evening air as if he or she had gone off to fetch a drink five minutes earlier, and returned to resume a conversation unbroken by the inconvenient trifle of time, and you find yourself exclaiming their name before it has occurred to you. 

Later, inside the club room, below the timing clock that silently, judgmentally, witnessed, single hand arcing, every one of my - our - thousands of laps, a once national field coach served platters of sushi like some hourly-paid hospitality casual; a champion sprinter told how his starting blocks had once (at a national championship meet) been thrown from the track by a primeval athletics official  who had snarled at him that a gay athlete would never run for Australia; and an ex-Olympian, in a speech harder than any two-hour tyre-dragging strength session, cried tears for a recently dead fellow ex-sprinter. The cracks were chasms. 

Her tears were genuine, bulbous, pendulous even, tinily reflecting the last orange light streaming in through the the west window. We embraced, time-doors metaphorically opening and shutting, and parted. I walked back to the tram stop in almost-darkness as the heat in the buildings and the walls and the pathways leached out, as if reliving the day via its own sequestered memory.