The Fighter (2 page)

‘Where the fuck are you?' yelled the Shark.

‘Going for a swim,' Henry croaked.

The Shark was sizing it up. The gang rushed to his side. They hurled down a lifebuoy. Henry dog-crawled after it, but it eluded his grasp. A ladder was lowered and the foreman climbed down. Jeff Gray was his name. Henry clung to him, and Jeff hauled him back onto the wharf.

A year later Jeff would be gone. He was guiding a container
from the wharf onto the deck above the hold. Just one metre out was all it took: and he was crushed between containers and fell thirty metres into the hatch, headfirst onto the steel floor.

Henry was working in an adjoining hold. He heard the commotion and raced to Jeff's side. He helped lift him onto a stretcher, hooked it to the crane and lowered it to the wharf.

The crew laid out the body with a stoic tenderness—as if administering last rites—contemplating death, a bloodless face in an eerie light.

2

We sit in the Port Diner, a low-slung aluminium prefab that sells basic fare—schnitzels, sausages, hamburgers and chips, potato cakes, lasagna, souvlaki and grilled steaks—heavy meals for hungry men of muscle and bulk. With donuts, rice pudding, and vanilla slices for dessert, washed down with coffee and coke.

Ten minutes from the dock, the diner is a truckies' haven, a wharfies' retreat accommodating the twenty-four-hour-a-day movement of rigs to and from the port. Dwarfed by freeway overpasses, towering billboards, electricity pylons and vast parking bays, it is easily missed, except by those in the know. It stands with a minimum of fuss in a desolate space—a gravelly no-man's-land where the work that keeps the city
oiled goes on day and night.

Henry is holding court. His thinning hair is combed forward over his balding pate. His complexion is ruddy, his nose spread flat: ‘Hit many times over,' he quips, ‘by the best fighters in the world.'

He hunches over a notebook and draws diagrams of the mechanics of dock work. He makes sure I get it right. Blow by blow he recalls his most famous fights, and the perils of life on the wharves.

One memory begets another: the night Roscoe was down in the hold signalling to the crane driver just as the Shark had been signalling the night Henry fell. Roscoe was guiding a load of thirty-foot pipes strapped to the hook. An end of a pipe got caught as it was hauled from the boat, and Roscoe was crushed between pipe and hull. Dead by the time Henry and his workmates arrived.

Within weeks of his own fall Henry was back, his shoulder barely healed. Work insurance had done its job, but the coffers were emptying. He needed the work. This is how it remains twenty years after he first stepped onto the docks. He rings each afternoon to see if there's any work up for grabs—sunrise till mid-afternoon, afternoon till eleven, all-night from eleven till dawn—any shift will do.

Here's the routine: Henry arrives at the wharves in his yellow Hyundai. He is dressed in his work clothes—blue overalls, a yellow hard-hat, steel-capped boots and a fluoro jacket with horizontal stripes. He pulls up in the workers' car park and takes his kit from the boot. He heads to security in the gatehouse by the
barbed cyclone fence; chats to the officer on duty as he signs in and receives his pass.

He knows them all—the customs officers, the security staff, the stevedores who have finished their shifts, and those who are signing on for the next—and they know him. They know he can be relied on, and that he bears no one any ill will; know he is up for a joke, a bit of a ribbing, a yarn in the mess hall.

He makes his way from the gatehouse to D shed, a spacious storage hold. The shed is spread with imported cars and tractors, bobcats, mini-excavators and four-wheel drives, lined up side by side like soldiers on an assembly ground. All is clean and orderly—the floors swept, the chains and hooks stored in steel bins. By the wall stands a row of forklifts awaiting the next shift. Tarpaulins and cables are on hand, neatly stacked. The goods are easily accessed, amply spaced.

There's been a takeover and the company is in new hands. What does it matter? As long as there's work.

Henry climbs the steel steps to the upper landing and makes his way into the mess hall. They call it the toolbox, this pre-work drill. The gang is ready and waiting, mugs of coffee in hand. The supervisor issues instructions, and the foreman delegates individual tasks. Then it's out to the boat—could be a Bass Strait trader, a tanker, a cargo ship. Could be an ocean-going freighter from some far-flung corner of the globe.

Tonight it's a roll-on roll-off freighter, a ro-ro for short. Henry climbs into the hatch, like a Jonah entering the belly of the whale. The jaws open, and from them emerges a flotilla of farm machinery, train carriages, trucks and semi-trailers, unlashed
from their moorings on the multiple tiers of decks. The polished ducos glint beneath floodlights mounted on steel poles. Henry stands on the ramp, directing the drivers to the shed and beyond to a vast parking lot. The crew returns to the boat for the next run. Viewed from a distance, the procession resembles a file of ants.

It is the best time—the dead of night. All is reduced to the sound of work: the rumble of trucks, the murmur of water lapping against the wharves, and the shrieks of seagulls circling, swooping from dock to boat, or perched on the riggings and sheds.

An arc of blue and red lamps on the Bolte Bridge reflects in the water below. Trains depart from the terminus trailing heavy freight, like ghost riders in the dark. Over at Patrick Wharf, mobile straddles, their steel jaws clamped on containers, move between freighter and dock.

Henry stops for a breather. He stretches his arms. Then unscrews his thermos, pours a coffee and watches his frosted breath. His eyes focus on the city lights. The breeze flares up from the river and he inhales the scent of the sea mixed with diesel and damp.

Midnight party boats pass by. Laughter evaporates into the night. The stars are all but extinguished by the city lights. Henry rests for a while, here where city meets river, upstream from the bay. He senses the vastness of the metropolis, registers its pulse. He is distracted. Disarmed.

Mum, poor girl, he whispers. Mum, poor girl.

Her image flits through his mind. It can appear at any time. It catches him now, off guard, out in the open in the depths of the night.

3

She lies on the living room sofa. Her eyes are closed, and her hands rest in her lap, there's a pillow under her head. Her chest rises with her breath. She is blessedly at rest.

Henry and Leon are eight years old. They stand in the doorway, unsure whether to approach or let her be. Both boys long to touch her, and be touched.

Leon makes the first move. He tiptoes over the linoleum. It crackles. He pauses. Her breathing remains steady, but he knows how abruptly it can change. He resumes his steps. At some indefinable point he crosses the threshold. He is within reach.

He leans over the sofa and extends a hand. He begins to lower it; then draws back. He is weighing it up. Now that he's
come so far he cannot retreat. He extends his hand again and lowers it to her cheek.

He has not quite touched her, yet she knows. She knows. She has always known.

She sits up, enraged, her eyes uncomprehending, wild. She slaps his hand away and screams.

‘Get away from me, get out.'

Her hair is dishevelled, her mouth tight. She draws in short, sharp breaths.

Leon steps back. He is not about to give up. He scans the room, eyes a pair of scuffs. They lie on the linoleum beside the sofa, discarded when she lay down. He picks one up. The leather sole is thin and hard, but the upper is pliable and soft. He rubs it on his cheek. He presses the sole to his lips and kisses it.

‘What are you doing?' she shouts.

Leon doesn't let go of the scuff.

He returns it to his lips. He takes his time, aware of the lie of the room. He is emboldened by Henry's presence.

She snatches at the scuff.

Leon steps out of reach. He is methodical, calm.

Henry moves forward. The boys stand side by side. The two are as one and they are not about to give up. They want to comfort her, to relieve her pain, but they have long known they can't help.

Her face is crumbling. She cannot endure the yearning in her sons' eyes. Their longing is an accusation. She stands now, in front of her boys, bewildered. She too wants to reach out, but the voices are returning, crowding all reason out, compelling
her to stand her ground.

Then, as abruptly as it had flared, her rage subsides. She returns to the sofa, and rolls onto her side. She hunches her shoulders, draws up her knees and holds them close to her chest. She buries her head in the pillow, and presses her hands to her ears. Touches elbow to elbow, and squeezes tight.

Leon and Henry know the voices are back. They know when she is captive to other worlds. They have known for the better part of their lives.

They are distraught. They want to comfort her but they don't know how. There are mysteries that cannot be explained, and energies that cannot be controlled.

They turn and leave the room. The house is cramped, and the passage narrow and dark. The bedrooms are small, hard up against each other. They walk in unison. Step in step. They glance back. She is receding. Her back is turned to the world.

The boys are at the front door. Henry opens and closes it gently. They step onto the tiny porch. It is barely a metre from the door to the front fence. They unlatch the gate and step out. They have returned to the familiar, the comfort of the streets.

4

Henry's shift has ended. The sun is rising; the river is a ribbon of gold. He makes his way to the Hyundai and opens the boot. He strips off his fluoro jacket and throws it in beside the kit. The sun reflects off city high-rises in sharp jabs as he drives from the dock. It lights the rims of the broken-down ferris wheel, a phantom presence over the port.

He turns right into Footscray Road and left into the parking lot. He pulls up by the grass verge well clear of the trucks. The air is thick with dust and windswept exhaust. He heads to the Port Diner, ducking under the railing by the door. He orders a milkshake and joins me as we had arranged.

Workers are hunched over hot breakfasts, and Henry is
talking of the Reads' backyard gym, and his well-worn route from the side-lane entrance, up the stone steps, past the scissor-sharpening workshop, out into the backyard. The walls of the garage are brick, lined with fibreboard and corrugated iron. Two timber gates back onto a lane.

The ring occupies the entire space except for a toilet cubicle and shower, and a one-metre-wide strip around the edge, between the rope and wall—room enough for trainers issuing instructions, and for punching bags; and an improvised target made from a tyre supported by an iron pipe and a second tyre to steady its base.

The twins train seven days a week, all year round. Each day the same routine: a warm-up in the pocket-size backyard predawn, before starting out on a ten-kilometre run. The streets are empty bar early morning workers trudging to the Rathdowne Street bus and the Lygon Street tram.

The boys jog across Lygon Street and along the grass verge beside the cemetery fence. They veer right into Princes Park and set out on the three-kilometre gravel track. They run under eucalypts and oaks, round Bowen Crescent and then straighten up on Royal Parade, an elegant boulevard lined with elms. They turn from Royal Parade into Cemetery Road along the wrought-iron fence. They pick up pace past the sandstone colleges flanking the university grounds back to Lygon Street, the home straight.

After school it's back to the gym. There is no need to stop off at home; their gear is packed in their bags. They are bursting to get to work, shadow boxing with Peter and Mick, then pounding medicine balls and a vest strapped to Peter's midriff,
an innovation of old Mick's—and his most fearsome improvisation, a punching bag so heavy it requires body and soul to move it an inch.

Boxing is the art of the immediate, of shifting tempos and manic energies tempered by discipline and craft. Boxing bookends the boys' days, at daybreak and dusk, for months on end. They are finding their feet in the rhythms of the ring. Growing in fitness and strength.

There are times on their morning runs when they are exhilarated. Tram commuters are met by the sight of identical twins rounding the cemetery bend under a rising sun, accelerating on the downward slope. Taking flight.

There were differences, apparent early on. Leon was the boxer, Henry the fighter; Leon the thinker, his twin reliant on steely resolve. Leon boxed his opponents round the ring, and waited patiently until he wore them out. He was more cautious than Henry, light on his feet, more adept at slipping a punch, and he had greater ring sense. He listened intently to his trainer's instructions and learnt to hold back that second longer to create an extra sliver of space. He weighed up his options, calculated on his feet. When on song, he was sharp, evenly poised between evasion and attack.

Henry was a hustler and brawler out to beat his opponent into submission, brawn over thought. He charged out at the bell, imposing his physical presence, carving out his space. He was not a crisp puncher, but he nullified his opponent's skill with relentless attacks. He rarely took a backward step. He had the mongrel
in him. But no hard feelings, he claims. There were no grudges in it, he says. No need to psych himself up.

His motivation was uncomplicated. Simple, he says. He did not want to be defeated, to lose face. He'd been a loser long enough. In boxing he'd found his métier, a whiff of a chance. He would train to exhaustion and fight till he dropped, if that's what it took to make his mark.

His philosophy was basic: hit and don't allow yourself to be hit, but don't inflict unnecessary pain. In the ring it's one or the other—you or your opponent—and no way out. He was in it to win, but once on top, he tended to pull his punches, allowing his opponent to hold on. His passion was spent.

He once drove his trainer to distraction at his reluctance to come in for the kill.