The Fighter (7 page)

He has had to accept there are souls so tormented and defeated that nothing can be done. Nothing. He has seen kids become addicts, become thugs, become dealers, become thieves and armed robbers, prisoners, recidivists—an infernal wheel of release and imprisonment.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

He has seen drink unleash the furies. Juveniles in men's bodies, beer in hand, arms flailing, the police drawing up and tackling them to the footpath. Five hefty cops on top of one rage-stricken body, cheek pinned to the asphalt. Foam gathering at the mouth, as he is subdued, handcuffed, and carted off to the divvy van.

He has seen them fall, never to get up.

Has received the phone call: ‘Henry, I can't stand it. I can't handle it. I can't do it any more.'

And he has responded, ‘Where are you? I'll come, mate. You don't have to hurt yourself. Hang in there. Hang in there.'

‘Henry, leave me be. I can't take it any more.'

‘Just tell me where you are, mate. I won't stop you. I'll just come over. Hang in there.'

‘Henry, I can't fuck'n stand it.'

He has found them dead in the morning. Or read about them in the paper—boys he had implored not to top themselves.

Cemeteries are on his beat. Fawkner and Melbourne, Spring-vale, quiet country graveyards. Rarely more than a couple of months go by without Henry attending a funeral. It's a familiar scene—a huddle of friends assembled graveside, dwarfed by the space, a scattering of cypress and open skies, brief eulogies
evaporating into silences.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

Each death is a personal loss, but there is little time to pause. Henry cannot look back. He cannot fall prey to doubt. He cannot lose momentum.

And there is something else, always something else. It lies buried, barely kept in check. The whisper returns.

Mum, poor girl. Mum, poor girl.

The enduring memory of a mother's terror.

He is unnerved. Weary. In need of respite.

11

Henry parks the Hyundai near the Vic Market. Weeks can go by, months, but sooner or later he finds himself drawn back to the two-storey bluestone. The Spiritualists' Union is a modest presence on a narrow street, rising hard against the footpath.

He climbs the stairs to the first-floor landing. The walls on either side of the staircase are crowded with portraits: bearded presidents and church founders, sketches of psychics and healers, and of spirit guides and sages bent over parchments, penning messages received from ‘the other side'.

A woman by the auditorium door hands him a blue folder songbook. The songs are an eclectic mix of hymns and popular classics: Satchmo and Cat Stevens: ‘What a Wonderful World',
‘Morning Has Broken'. An organist plays ‘Abide With Me'; then switches to a medley of waltzes. Up the back an elderly couple dance to ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling'. They step lightly, swaying cheek to cheek in mock intimacy.

The hall is carpeted in blue, as are the three steps that lead to a small stage. The navy-blue curtain drapes the back wall. Centrestage stands the speaker's mic and to the left, a wooden lectern. The piano and the stage are decked out in bouquets of fake flowers.

Henry sits in the front row and glances about him. The chairs are white plastic, with seats upholstered in red fabric. For the first time in weeks, he switches his mobile to silent.

He looks up at the exposed beams of the ceiling. He surveys the congregants seated against a wall on blue upholstered benches. Most of them are casually dressed in jeans, open-necked shirts and jumpers, the women in denims and plain dresses.

They are at home in the modest surroundings. Many are lost in contemplation. Several old men are slumped back, chins fallen upon their chests. Dozing. Above them hang brass plaques with honour rolls of past members, long-dead notables of the union. The wall is lined with framed pencil drawings, swirls of colour said to represent states of feeling.

Henry closes his eyes, and straightens his back. He rests a hand on each knee, palms up, thumb and forefinger lightly touching. His breath is slowing, his mind settling. His eyes remain closed while the leader of the service steps up to the lectern and recites the dedication and invocations, instructions to tend the poor and downtrodden.

Henry listens with rapt attention. He leans forward to take in her homilies:
On this earthly plane we need just three things—food, warmth and comfort. That's all we need to be content and protected… As you give, so you will get back…Yesterday I was clever and I wanted to save the world
.
Today I am wise and I'm saving myself…

Henry nods his assent, sings: ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee'. Drifts in and out of meditation. He is both present and lost in reflection.

He has sought the truth for many years, answers to that nagging question: What is life's purpose? He has consulted psychics downstairs, behind the drawn curtains of the ground-floor cubicles. He has sat in the polished pews of churches and synagogues, on cushions in Buddhist temples, and on the hard marble floors of ashrams. He has attended séances and study groups in the reading rooms of the Theosophical Society.

He has consulted mediums and conversed with priests and rabbis, and has accumulated books on many traditions, treatises written by philosophers and self-styled healers. He has been to India and sat at the feet of gurus. He has attended international multi-faith gatherings and travelled the islands of the Philippines to study with faith healers, catching them out in their deceptions.

He is drawn to the quest rather than the argument, to fellowship more than definitive answers. As long as he is among people of good will he is placated. He is an agnostic rather than a disciple, neutral rather than impassioned, seeker rather than believer. But if a door is open, he will enter. If there is discussion he will join it. And if there is meditation he will close his eyes and, at long last, he will cease running.

There is space in this modest hall, blessed space within which to release himself from his body, and to drift a while. And time in which to relive and reflect on his day-to-day encounters. On this Sunday afternoon, Henry is thinking of a dying man. The image is lucid. The man is lying on a hospital bed. He is in intensive care, on life support, a captive to machines, and to the tubes of mechanical ventilation.

Henry has known him for thirty years and long tended him in his heroin addiction. He received the call from his family yesterday evening. The man was found in a coma, slumped on the sand against a seawall, spent syringes discarded beside him. He has days to live, perhaps hours.

‘Please visit him, Henry,' his elderly mother pleaded.

Henry sat by the man's hospital bed into the early hours of the morning. He talked to him, told him to hang in there. Told him he loved him. Urged him to fight on, told him he could make it. When the service ends he will return to his bedside, but for now he has time. His mind is loose to wander.

Mum, poor girl. If only the healers and mediums could have helped you. If only I had a clairvoyant's eyes, I might have seen the ghosts and phantoms. If only I had psychic powers—perhaps I could have discovered your secrets. Maybe understood you better. Maybe saved you.

Mum, poor girl.

The mantra is engraved in his consciousness.

It surfaces now in the auditorium of the Spiritualists' Union, and with it the image of a single-fronted brick house, and a glimpse of a father's despair. A mother's fury.

12

Henry is back on home turf driving north on Rathdowne Street. He turns right at the Great Northern, and right again into Amess Street. He parks the Hyundai on the diagonal to the footpath one house from the Pigdon Street corner.

Two hundred and twelve is a workers' cottage, six paces wide. The roof is made of red tiles, and the walls are red brick. A box-bay window juts from the front bedroom. It has three vertical panels of etched glass, the centrepiece graced with a floral pattern. The plain door that once stood here is long replaced by a restored period piece. The low brick fence encloses a slab of concrete, barely a metre wide, devoid of plants and flowers. The door is set within a tiny portico.

Henry stands and looks at the house, and walks around the corner to the back lane that runs off Pigdon Street. The lane is barely a metre wide. Asphalt. Strewn with weeds and garbage bags. All is miniature: low-slung backyards and houses with fences of galvanised iron and timber. Henry recalls the pocket-size garden and the weatherboard laundry. From the outside, all appears as it once was, but it seems far smaller.

It is sixty years since the Nissen family moved in, and more than four decades since Henry lived here. And it's more than fifty years since he first set out on the 150-metre walk to the Reads' boxing gym.

Retracing the steps now, Henry stops to greet passers-by. He cannot resist an opportunity. He falls into conversation with a neighbour two doors up. She had moved in long after the Nissens left. On the timber veranda stands a tricycle, and beside the front door, a basketball and a ragged row of runners.

The front garden is luxuriant. Creepers scale the side fences. A young citrus is weighed down with oranges. An olive tree leans over the footpath. Henry stands beneath the canopy as he tells the woman that he once lived at 212 with his twin brother, Leon, his older brother, Solly, his younger brother, Paul, and his sister, Sandra, the baby of the family.

‘Such a small house and so many of us,' Henry says. ‘Solly died a few years back, and the rest of us live in distant suburbs now. He was sixty-one when he died. He smoked and drank too much, the poor bugger. Died of lung cancer.'

The woman is in a hurry. She has to pick up her children. Henry would have told her his life story if she'd had time to listen.

He keeps walking and within a minute he is standing outside the Reads' terrace. The front garden is well tended. The iron-lace balcony and elevated veranda provide a touch of grandeur. The bay windows reveal a high-ceilinged living room. French windows open onto the upstairs balcony.

Henry turns into the lane. The side entrance has gone. He glances up at the windows of the first-floor room he slept in during the week leading up to each fight. Rising over the backyard, in full view, is a raised sundeck; a wooden table and easy chairs are laid out in permanent readiness. In place of the garage-cum-gym, a two-storey timber studio stands at the intersection of the side and back laneways.

The mobile rings. Henry looks down. The terrace is, for the moment, irrelevant. His focus is on the voice of a mother. Her son is in prison. Henry has known him since he was a teenager. He was a decent enough kid but he got into drugs, and then burglaries.

‘A decent enough kid.'

It's an expression Henry uses often. The decent kid is now an incarcerated adult with a long stretch in front of him for armed robbery. He is depressed. His mother wants Henry to visit him. She is distraught. Her son doesn't know what he's doing. He's going bonkers.

‘Henry, you're the only person he listens to. He asks after you often. I am afraid of what he might do. He has tried to kill himself before and will try again. I'm sure of it.' She persists until Henry agrees to see him.

He continues his walk. Once arrangements have been made,
and the call is over, he is back with his childhood memories. The transition is instant. He singles out individual homes, the names of the families who lived in them, and the few contemporaries who still reside here. He has stayed in touch with them and dropped in, now and then, over the years.

The street is redolent of sensations all but forgotten: the aroma of dinners wafting through open doors at nightfall, rain-cleansed streets, and fresh tar poured by workmen over cracked bitumen. The memory of cricket games played in the middle of the thoroughfare, lampposts used as wickets, and fruit boxes placed to force drivers to skirt the players. Of drinkers bursting out of the pub around the corner, the Great Northern, at six o'clock, the mandatory closing time. In autumn they wade through gutters choked with leaves and twigs, detritus and rubbish. After winter downpours they step over blocked drains and gutters gushing with rainwater.

The smell of jasmine trailing over back fences heralds spring. Sweat dampens the bodies of children at play on warm summer evenings. Men in singlets and shorts hose front gardens; others sit on chairs out on the footpath. The red glows of their cigarettes rise and fall in the darkness.

Henry is moving on a path that will lead him back to the red-brick cottage at 212. He is in no hurry. He crosses the street and knocks on the door of a former neighbour. The front garden is dense with marigolds and geraniums, interspersed with pot plants and rosebushes.

Mrs G is overjoyed to see him. A tiny woman, she looks up at him. She scans his face with maternal affection. She invites
him in and leads him through the house to the kitchen. The passage and lounge-room walls are lined with photos of children, tracing their lives from infancy to adulthood.

There are photos of her grown-up son and daughter as parents, posing beside their own children. They are dressed in suit-jackets and white shirts, creased pants and pristine-white communion dresses. Scenes of weddings and christenings hang alongside images of saints and angels. Christ presides over the last supper, and crucifixes dangle beside the photos of great-grandchildren. Family and faith are the twin pillars that sustain her.

Henry pulls up a chair in the kitchen. Mrs G remains on her feet, chatting as she fusses about. She arranges crockery, wipes crumbs off the tablecloth and fills the kettle. Her eyes glow when she speaks of her great-grandchildren. Henry gives her his full attention. At this moment no one exists except Mrs G. Nothing matters except what she is saying.

Her English is heavily accented. She struggles to find words that do justice to what she wants to express. She resorts to gestures to describe her great-grandchildren's energy, the way they rush about when they visit. She mimics their childish quirks and laughs at their talent for creating mayhem. She appears to grow younger, almost girlish, as she conveys their antics.