Matthew Flinders' Cat (41 page)

‘Yes,’ Billy admitted.

‘Would you like to tell me about it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ Billy was surprised at himself, he’d said it with a certainty that belied his own confusion.

Vince decided to try the second tactic. ‘Look, Billy, you’ve broken your nose, you’re upset, you’ve got two days here before you go to St Peters. Just give us the two days, then you can decide, eh?’ Billy shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’ The program director decided to throw caution to the wind. He straightened up and leaned forward, pointing the biro at Billy. ‘You won’t achieve anything. If you go after the boy and can’t find him right off, which is on the cards, you’ll be on a downer and you’ll go straight to the pub. In forty-eight hours you’ll be back where you were five weeks ago! Billy, listen to me. You can’t make it on your own out there, not at this stage of your rehabilitation, you’re simply not ready, mate, you’re too fragile. You’ll be back on the sauce and then what good will that do the boy? The boy doesn’t need another drunk in his life, does he?’

‘He’s in trouble, I have to find him, that’s all. I have to take the chance.’

‘Billy, you’re not taking a chance, you’re committing suicide! It’s your duty to yourself to stay!’

Billy shook his head. ‘No, you’re wrong. If I stayed I’d be committing suicide. I’m not going to repeat what I did to Charlie.’

‘Charlie? That the boy’s name?’ Billy didn’t answer, instead he took a deep breath. ‘Vince, I have to leave. I’d like to think you’d allow me to come back if I needed to?’

Vince shrugged. ‘This is the Salvation Army, they don’t turn anyone away, mate.’ Billy could sense that Vince Payne thought the request purely academic, that he’d just witnessed the opening of the last chapter in the final demise of Billy O’Shannessy. ‘You’ll have to stay here today and tonight, there’s a fair bit to do, paperwork, your disability pension transfer, you’ll have to have another medical.’ He threw the biro down on the desk. ‘You’ll be allowed to go first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Oh, I was hoping simply to slip away unnoticed.’

‘No, you can’t, you see . . .’

Billy held up his hand. ‘Please, Vince, I know you’re hoping the group will bring pressure to bear collectively. It won’t work. I’m not leaving the rehabilitation program because I’m tired of it and think I can manage my life back on the street. I’m leaving because I have something I have to do and if I don’t try to do it, then remaining sober for the rest of my life would be pointless.’

Vince sighed. ‘Righto, Billy, I’ll make arrangements with the major for you to leave quietly after breakfast tomorrow. Just remember, it’s never too late to change your mind.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Billy said, rising from the chair.

‘Thank you, Vince, for all your help, I’m sorry I’ve let you down.’

Vince Payne wasn’t a happy loser. ‘No, Billy, be sorry that you’ve let
yourself
down.’

At morning tea, when the mail was handed out, a very excited Davo came rushing up to Billy. ‘Lookee here!’ he said, flashing an envelope. ‘Jeff Fenech, he’s wrote to me!’

‘Hey, that’s great, Davo, what does he say?’ Billy cried, pleased as punch for Davo.

‘Read it for yerself,’ Davo said, handing Billy the envelope.

Billy removed the letter and unfolded the single typed page. ‘Look,’ he pointed to the letterhead, ‘“Team Fenech”, pretty posh, eh?’

‘Fair dinkum, that what it says? “Team Fenech”?’ Billy had caught himself just in time. Davo, of course, was illiterate, and he’d guessed the letter was from Jeff Fenech because of a pair of boxing gloves drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of the envelope. The letter was typed.

Dear Davo,

Thank you for your letter, I was really glad to get it. You sound like you’re in a spot of bother, mate. Don’t worry, we all have these bad things happen to us, you’ve just got to fight your way out. Remember you’re only out for the count after the man has counted to ten. Don’t take that poison no more, mate, that way the bastards are winning. If you going to do time, then do it clean, come out with a clean record, give the shit the knockout punch! Kapow! No more drugs! Pow-pow-pow! No more grog!

You say you like to box, eh? Well, here’s my proposition. Stay clean, stay healthy, work out in the gym where they send you, build up your body and keep your nose clean, mate. Earn respect. If you can do this, then here’s my idea. When you get out, come and see me at Team Fenech. I reckon we’ll be able to sort something out for you, mate. If you’d like to learn to fight then I’m in your corner. That’s my promise, I’ll give you a fair dinkum go, but only if you keep your side of the bargain. Have we got a deal?

See you in the ring, buddy,

All the best,

Jeff Fenech

‘Jesus! Jesus Christ!’ Davo said, shaking his head, hardly able to believe what he’d just heard.

‘Shhh! Language, Davo!’ Billy cautioned, looking around.

‘You reckon he’s for real? I told you, didn’t I? He’s a top act, the champ of champs, best there ever was, best there ever will be!’ Davo couldn’t stop shaking his head.

Billy folded the letter, placed it back in the envelope, and held it out for Davo to take. ‘Well then, Davo, what say you?’

‘Bloody oath! Team Fenech, eh? Jeez, Billy, a man feels like cryin’.’ Davo’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. He grabbed the letter and took off down the passageway and into the shower block. Billy wondered how long it had been since the young bloke had had a good cry simply because he was happy. Despite his own anxieties, Billy smiled. Davo had found his motivation to go straight and Sydney’s BMW owners could breathe a little easier.

After the evening meeting, when they were all together again in the room, Billy waited until Freddo, Morgan and Davo were settled before he made the announcement that he was leaving in the morning. What followed was complete silence from the three men.

It was Morgan who was the first to speak. ‘Billy, don’t go, mate, please.’

‘Yeah, don’t go, Billy,’ Freddo echoed.

Davo said nothing, a look of incredulity on his face. Morgan, like the others, had been lying on his bed and now he sat up, swinging his legs onto the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at his feet. After a few moments he raised his eyes to look over at Billy. ‘We need you, mate,’ he said simply. ‘I don’t know about Freddo and Davo here, but I been tellin’ myself all along, if the old bloke can hack it, then so can I.’ The hint of a smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. ‘You’re a wise old bastard, it’s like havin’ a proper dad, someone you trust.’

Freddo nodded and Davo burst out, ‘Billy, yiz me mate, look what yer done for me!’

‘We loves yer, Billy,’ Freddo said simply.

‘Don’t give it away, Billy, you’ve come this far, we’ve held each other together . . .’ It was Morgan again.

‘Billy, I want yiz to be there when I have me first fight, Team Fenech, mate. Like Morgan said, youse our dad.’

Billy was finding it difficult to contain his conflicting emotions. These were young men who had long learned not to trust, not to love, and now they were saying they trusted and loved him. It was almost too much for him to bear. He’d always been Mr Nice Guy, well-mannered, polite and even, in his younger days, gregarious. With sufficient liquid refreshment, he’d been the life of the party. Essentially he was a loner, unable to love, unable to trust anyone, and as a defence mechanism he’d developed an ability to fake his emotions. When it had come to the crunch in any relationship, he’d been careful always to keep it at arm’s length. The way his father had treated him as a boy was how he had responded to his wife and daughter. There were times when he was so drunk he couldn’t even remember his daughter’s name. Then there was Charlie, it had been even worse between the two of them.

Now these young blokes, misfits like himself, the dregs, had crept in under his guard to reach out to him. Almost without being conscious that he was doing so, Billy had begun to open up, to say some of the things that lay buried deep, hidden in his subconscious.

‘I guess we all know a bit about each other, a bit about our past lives, and when I hear the stories of your background, your childhood, I feel ashamed because my childhood was nothing like yours. My old man was a Supreme Court judge. I had the best education money could buy, a career in law that some people have said was spectacular, and, well, here I am, in a rehabilitation unit, an alcoholic trying to make amends.

‘I’m not at all sure how I got here,’ Billy said sadly.

‘People would say I was headed for the bench, I’d be a judge like my father. They were right in a way. I did end up on the bench, the one beside the Mitchell Library.’

‘Billy, yiz too good to be a judge, they’s all bastards,’ Davo interrupted.

Billy smiled at the young bloke. ‘Anyway, when my boy Charlie died that finally tipped the scales for me. Now I could allow myself to have what everyone would say was a nervous breakdown and give myself permission to run away from the past. I could walk away from the mess I’d created and leave it to the people I was supposed to love, my wife and daughter, leave them to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives.’

It was Morgan, not able to resist a one-liner, who said, ‘Yeah, mate, tough, someone’s got to pick up the pieces. Big house, money, yacht, BMW, overseas travel, them’s the breaks.’

‘BMW!’ Davo cried out. ‘Shit, yiz didn’t, did ya?’ He was plainly shocked.

Billy was forced to laugh. ‘There was a Mercedes and a Volvo. I think my daughter had a Honda, one of those Japanese models anyway.’ Billy discovered to his surprise that he was telling them the story of his life in a completely dispassionate voice. As he dredged up the past, visiting his greatest fears, he was able to remain calm. He was facing up to the person who lived deep inside him and whom he’d been trying to avoid meeting all his adult life.

Freddo, who, in his own way, or as Morgan might have put it ‘in his own fucked-up way’, was the most serious-minded of the three of them, now spoke. ‘It wasn’t your fault your boy died, Billy, you don’t have to take the blame for everything.’

Billy was silent for a few moments. He was grateful for the interruption, he was indulging himself, this wasn’t the time to talk about himself. His own troubled background would seem inconsequential compared to what they’d been through. ‘I guess you could say that, but it wouldn’t be true, Freddo,’ Billy answered, leaving it there.

Billy appeared to be thinking, but was trying to find a way to deflect the conversation away from his personal life. ‘Do you know what came through for me in most of the lectures and the group discussions?’ he began. Not waiting for a reply, he quickly continued, ‘Almost every one of us at some time talked about our mothers or the women in our lives. We mostly associated them with whatever warmth and comfort and love we’d experienced as kids, even if, for some blokes, like Davo for instance, there wasn’t a lot of that either.’

‘Nah, that’s wrong, Billy, I loved me mum ’til she gorn away and left me,’ Davo protested.

‘Well, there we are, even Davo has some good memories of his mother, but what I found of particular interest was that whenever the subject of a father came up, he turned out to be a bastard. He was always someone who beat us or abused us sexually, neglected us, or in my case ignored me on the one hand and demanded perfection on the other. The father figure in our lives was the bloke we were always trying to please and never could. So, as we grew a little older, we started to resent him, then hate him for what he did to our mums and to us. When we grew up, we became just like him, the grog or drugs took over. It was the same pattern all over again, we found we couldn’t maintain a relationship with our wives or girlfriends or even our children. We started to abuse them physically or, with me, the mental torture my father put me through was what I was doing to my own children, in particular to my son Charlie.’ Billy sighed. ‘Freddo and Davo, you’re not married and you haven’t got kids yet so you don’t know how you would have responded if you hadn’t decided to go straight.’ Billy turned to Morgan. ‘How about you, Morgan? You once mentioned that you’d been married?’

‘You’ve just written the script, buddy. I fucked up big time.’

‘Okay, now let me ask you something. My father went to war and so did his father. Mine ended up a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma railway and in Changi, his father went through Gallipoli and France.

How about your fathers?’

‘Right on,’ Morgan said. ‘Second World War, captured in Singapore. I was born ten years after the war.’

‘Vietnam,’ Freddo said, ‘he died there when I was nine months old. But wait on! All them “uncles” me mum brought home, they were all Vietnam vets, every one o’ the bastards. It was like she felt guilty or something, she could only screw a Vietnam vet. I gotta tell you, mate, some of those blokes, the ones she brought home, they were sick puppies, they was damaged huge, man. Don’t nobody tell me that the Agent Orange they sprayed everywhere was harmless. Them blokes, their lives was blown away with that defoliant.’

‘Dunno,’ Davo replied. ‘All I know is me old man was a drunk and a deadshit.’

‘And your grandfather, his father?’

‘Dunno, wouldn’t ’ave a clue, mate. Me old man said he were an orphan, Dr Barnardo’s.’

‘It’s curious, isn’t it, we don’t know about Davo, but all the rest of us had fathers who went into combat. We now know that many of the guys who went to Vietnam suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and, although it wasn’t diagnosed before Vietnam, there’s no reason to suppose this hasn’t occurred after every war. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it did. There’s been a war every generation this century, which means every war produced a great many men who were deeply traumatised by the experience. I now realise that my father was, and I’m quite sure his father was before him, and the one thing we know about this condition is that the wives and children often suffer the consequences. We grow up hating our old man but deny it to ourselves as long as we can. They grew up hating theirs and doing the same. Those of us with an addictive personality, well, we treat our children much the same as we were treated, and when it comes to talking about our fathers in the groups we can’t, the hurt and the denial are too deep.’