The Winning Side Read online

  Kearney grunted.

  The ring was in the centre of the showgrounds, under heavy lighting which washed out over the tightly packed banks of seats. There were no large gaps, and the crowd was building towards an emotional height for Rose and Rocky. O’Reilly reached the ring first and moved around confidently. Rusty was nervous in the middle of the big crowd. I studied O’Reilly carefully, but there was no sign of fat. He looked hard-muscled and dangerous. He also looked a lot older than Rusty, although they were the same age. This alarmed me; in my experience, that’s the look of a winner.

  That’s the way it was. The fight was almost a repeat of the previous one, with O’Reilly perhaps showing some improvement. Fenton had improved too, but his opponent’s awkward, disconcerting style kept him off-balance and neutralised his skills.

  ‘Look at him’, Kearney said in the first break. ‘He must be ten stone.’

  ‘Yes’, I said, ‘and he’s smart and fast with it’.

  O’Reilly boxed Rusty’s ears off in the third, and near the end of the round I picked up the towel.

  ‘Let him go another round’, Kearney said. ‘He’ll never forgive you.’

  ‘Fuck you’, I said. O’Reilly caught Rusty on the ropes and belted him with a heavy right; I saw Rusty’s eyes go out of focus and one knee sag. I threw the towel at the referee’s feet and slipped through the ropes. O’Reilly’s glove was in the air in the victory wave and the tears were starting in Rusty’s eyes when I reached him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie’, he said. ‘He’s too good.’

  Thank Christ you know it, I thought.

  Fenton walked over and touched O’Reilly’s glove. ‘Good luck, mate’, he said.

  O’Reilly looked suspiciously at him as he slipped his big, white arms into the dressing gown. ‘Yeah, you too’, he muttered.

  I watched Rusty closely on the way back to the dressing room and after looking for the vagueness or numbness that meant trouble, but he seemed to be all right. He showered, dressed quickly and examined his swollen jaw in a mirror.

  His grin was grotesque. ‘My last punch’, he said.

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘He out-classed me, and I was scared.’

  I hugged him. ‘It takes brains to know it’, I said. ‘And guts to say it. C’mon. Let’s see how Lionel goes.’

  We went out and sat with Kelly. She said comforting things and Rusty grinned lop-sidedly at her. The noise has risen and it drowned out speech as Gatellari got into the ring. He was very pale, and I wondered why he hadn’t been out in the sun. He looked fit and frail at the same time. Rose got a big hand from the WASPS and respect from the Latins. Not very many blacks had been able to afford the prices. He bounced around in the ring, looking young and keen, despite the dark bristle on his cheeks and jaw and his pouched, shadowed old man’s eyes.

  Vic Patrick whipped quickly through the instructions and Kelly gripped my arm as they moved into centre ring. Rose connected with a crisp left lead, and Gatellari moved back. Rose crowded him and the Italian seemed unsure of which way to move. Rose scored with a left-right combination, rangefinding punches that he hadn’t really expected to land. He boxed briskly for the rest of the round and skipped back to his corner. Gatellari settled down a little in the next few rounds, but he didn’t inconvenience Rose, who dictated the pace of the fight. In the fourth Gatellari, bobbing, moved his head directly into a short right and smothered up.

  ‘What’s wrong with Rocky?’ Fenton said.

  ‘Burruni’, I said.

  The Italians became quieter as the fight went on; they shouted encouragement to Rocky and cheered him when he did something, but the tide was with Rose, and they knew it. It looked to me as if Rose could have stopped him in any round after the seventh, and after the tenth I stood up.

  ‘Let’s go, Kelly’, I said. ‘This is going to be nasty. I don’t want to see it.’ Fenton watched intently as the trainers clustered around Gatellari. He hardly saw us go.

  We filed out and the bell rang. Outside the air was warm and still as we walked through the tangle of cars to the road.

  ‘Isn’t Gatellari good enough?’ Kelly asked.

  I was stridingly angrily and she had to trot to keep up. ‘It’s not that’, I said harshly. ‘He’s all right, or he was. He was over-matched with the world champ and he got thrashed. Now he’s in with the best bantam in Australia and he’s still thinking about Burruni. I hope they stop it before Rose hurts him.’

  ‘What do you really think about boxing, Charlie?’ She tugged at my arm, slowing me.

  ‘Don’t know. Love-hate. Doesn’t matter much, it’s finished. I give it five years, ten at the most. Rusty says he’s giving it away.’ I knew that meant I was giving it away too.

  We walked towards the city. Kelly talked about the flower scents on the wind. They were rich, almost tropical and they came from single pots on front porches and wild, tangled fence vines.

  ‘Would you like to come back to Sydney?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where do you think we should live?’

  I stopped and put my arms around her. ‘Anywhere.’

  Back in Melbourne life had an insubstantiality. I was waiting out my year of service, waiting to move to Sydney with Kelly. Waiting for that. Rusty went into summer training with the Richmond football club. The bad beating Gatellari had taken from Rose had confirmed his feelings about the lack of prospects in boxing. His mother was pleased, and she transferred some of her approval of me to Mrs Christian. Things got a little warmer there. Rose signed to fight Harada for the world title.

  As the summer holidays set in, Kelly and I went to the bayside beaches, which I found insipid, and then to the surf beaches further out. There were some good surf beaches, but they had a desperate, tuned-up air which made me uncomfortable. I liked Sydney’s relaxed acceptance of the surf. We made love in motels and our skins went dark.

  ‘It’s not really black though, is it?’ Kelly said once, contemplating her long, brown leg.

  ‘What about this?’ I said.

  ‘Very nearly.’

  A couple of my charges went away on holidays, but I tried to keep an eye on them, and checked them in back at their jobs in the new year. I worked hard at it, making up for earlier slackness, and the department took my resignation hard.

  ‘You’re doing a great job, Charlie’, my boss said. ‘Eight kids, whole year almost and no trouble. I think it’s a record. You sure about this?’

  ‘I’m sure. We want to go to Sydney. There’s others here who can do the job if you back them up.’

  ‘Maybe. Don’t like to say this, but have you thought you might be letting the kids down?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll probably do something the same in Sydney though, and with the blacks. Sorry if it sounds selfish, that’s the way it is.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  The day before I finished, I was sitting in the office working late on a final report. I’d concealed McDonald’s enlistment and was now trying to put the best construction on it. The phone rang and I answered it in the dull, routine way you do in offices.

  ‘Sergeant Smith, police, Mr Thomas. I wonder if you could get down to Russell Street?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re holding a Solomon Rockman on a serious charge.’

  ‘Jesus. He asked you to call me?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He said to get hold of the Abo.’

  I took a taxi to the police station, trying to recall any difference in Rockman the last time I’d seen him. None; as prosperous-looking and full of resentment as ever. I should have checked on all that bloody money, I thought. Cafarella had opened a shop in St Kilda—I’d looked at it once, flashy clothes and shoes. I’d assumed it was making money, but I should have checked.

  At Russell Street, they told me that Rockman was being held on a number of charges of thefts from homes and of cars.

  ‘Break and enter?’

  �
�Not exactly. Seems he got copies of the keys to cars and houses and then lifted the stuff. Got a Jag and a couple of Mercs away. It took the bulls quite a while to put the case together, but it’s tight.’

  ‘Where was he arrested?’

  ‘At home, St Kilda.’

  ‘Him and who else?’

  ‘Just him.’

  Rockman was too well-dressed for the cells. He was in a cream suit and polished shoes, but the tie was askew and the neck of his shirt was grubby where his sweaty fingers had pawed at it. His face was pale and there was a raw smoking-sore on his bottom lip.

  ‘Bad trouble’, I said.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll go up for a while for this. You’re the only one I can think of who can help me.’

  ‘What d’you want me to do?’

  ‘See my old woman. I wouldn’t give the cops the address. Go and see her and break it gently somehow. If a couple of cops land on her doorstep, she could drop dead. She’s got a crook heart.’

  ‘All right. Is that all?’

  Rockman lit another cigarette with fingers stained the colour of his boots. ‘Yeah, what else is there to say?’

  ‘Where’s Cafarella?’

  He blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘He went to New York, yesterday.’

  I nodded goodbye and started back past a block of three cells. There was a roar, a blast of static and then a wild, up-country yell. A dark face appeared at the bars, he spotted me and whooped again.

  ‘What? What is it?’ I said.

  He stuck his hand out for me to shake. ‘It’s Lionel, mate! He won! Our Lionel’s the champion of the world!’

  3

  ‘RIGHT up your alley, Charlie. Shit, sorry. Christ, I don’t know what to say.’ Max wiped sweat off the bare skin that had had a respectable covering of dark hair when I’d first known him, here on the News, years ago.

  ‘Just tell me what it is, Max’, I said. ‘But if it’s another bloody Abo winger, fast as lightning, I’ll start chucking things through windows.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  I’d been back in Sydney almost a year, and was back working on the paper. Still mostly sport with an occasional straight story, even a political one. I was regarded as something of a specialist though, and I could type ‘Aboriginal’ in the dark with my hands tied behind my back. Not ideal, but Kelly was pregnant and there were the payments on the house. It was all right, most of the time.

  ‘It’s this Damien Franklin bloke’, Max said. ‘The painter, you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  Max skimmed the scribble on a bit of copy paper. ‘This kid up there’s been talking to him. Reckons Franklin knows about a big massacre.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Kid doesn’t say. Long time ago, I guess.’

  ‘Well?’

  Max leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s too big for the kid, he wants help. Big story, Charlie; flight up, expenses, big feature. What d’you say?’

  I was on four days casual at the News, plus some subbing and book reviews for the other papers. Kelly taught part-time at the nurses’ college, but that’d stop when the baby came. There was no sense in standing still.

  ‘Okay, Max, thanks.’ That was diplomacy in return for his—he could have just said ‘Go’. ‘Where does Franklin live? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Little dump up there. Absalom.’

  ‘Fuck.’ It was in Gandju country.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a hell of a long way up.’

  Max smiled. Diplomatic again.

  ‘When do you want me to go?’

  ‘Now.’

  I went home, packed, wrote a note for Kelly when I couldn’t find her by phone and got a taxi to Mascot. Sydney-Brisbane-Townsville-Cairns was a slow grind that left me wrung-out and smelly. I checked into the motel that the Brisbane office had booked and collapsed.

  I didn’t hear the breakfast arrive and the food was cold and congealed when I got to it. I sat in the anonymous room, thinking: I hadn’t been in Queensland since the war, not on the streets, in the shops, asking for things. If there’d been looks and remarks the night before I’d been too tired to notice. Drinking the cold coffee I decided to play it that way—not to notice unless I had to.

  The policy collapsed within seconds, when I asked the motel manager about hiring a vehicle to get out to Absalom. He was an over-padded, under-exercised type, relishing the too-cold air-conditioning.

  ‘You don’t want to go out there.’ His pale eyes looked sceptical and then, I thought, suspicious. I pulled myself together and focused on what I was doing—massacre, bones, old skeletons in graziers’ cupboards.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s to see old Damien, eh? He’s a lunatic, you want to leave him alone. Anyway, no one’ll take you out there.’

  ‘I don’t want to be taken, I’ll take myself.’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t know about that.’

  I had a lot of money on me and I used it to hire a Land Rover and pay through the nose for a sleeping bag, food, water bags. I drove the vehicle gingerly around the streets to get the feel of it before parking outside the Ocean View Hotel. Two Aborigines were sitting under a tree beside the pub. They jumped up and hurried across when they saw me locking the Land Rover. I waited for them. They came up, bringing flies. They wore singlets and shorts; their hides were encrusted with dirt. I had on clean jeans, a new shirt and R.M. Williams boots.

  The taller of them, a middle-aged man with white stubble and a convulsively twitching face, held out a two dollar note.

  ‘Get us a flagon, mate.’ His voice was thin and toneless.

  ‘Why can’t you get your own?’

  ‘White man banned us.’

  ‘Why?’ But I could see why in the wild, hating eyes and the scarred, horny knuckles. He’d be a glass-smasher, a chair thrower. His mate was stockier, had once been powerful in the chest and shoulders before it had all slid away into a soft, swelling belly. Fat and skinny, they were like a comedy pair, but not one bit funny.

  ‘I dunno why.’ The fat one said.

  But I had a job to do, and buying piss for these two was no way to start. ‘I’m sorry’, I said. ‘I can’t help you.’

  The thin one spat at my feet. ‘Fuck you then, you yellow bastard.’

  According to the cuts in the News library, Damien Franklin was fond of whisky, so I bought two bottles of good scotch. The next step was to contact the stringer who’d put us on to the story. I found him in a house a long way from the flash part of town. The lady of the house, a frowsy old bottle-blonde, sent me around the back of the house to his door. Some of the stilts had given way and Brian Rivers’s room had a warped wall and a twisted floor. He yelled ‘Come in’ and I twisted the knob, lifted and wrestled the door open. Rivers jumped up off the bed and came over with his hand out. He was tall and thin, wearing pyjama bottoms. His hair was straight and black, his features were broad with slanted eyes and he had a mid-brown skin. The racial mix made it hard to guess his age—twenty-five?

  I looked around the room which was sparsely furnished, scrupulously clean and over-loaded with books. It reminded me of rooms I’d lived in in Brisbane thirty years before. We shook hands and Rivers went off to make tea. When we were drinking it I asked him how he’d got on to the story.

  ‘Went out to see him to talk about his painting.’

  ‘The Queensland stuff?’

  ‘Right. All my people come from up there—white, Aborigine and Jap. That’s me, the lot. He’s got all of them in the pictures. Great pictures.’

  ‘Yeah, they are.’

  ‘Well, I thought he might name some names, tell a few yarns and I could get a piece out of it.’

  ‘And …?’

  He drank some tea and looked cautious. He was a bright young man whose colour must have been a handicap until then. Now it was suddenly an asset and here was some southern yeller-feller on the scene. He was right to be cautious.

  ‘I’m not going to pinch your story’, I said. �
�If we do it, your name goes first.’

  He nodded, put down his mug and started collecting folded clothes from a chair. ‘I’ll have a shower and think about it. Excuse me.’

  I’d come a long way to be thought about under the shower, and in other circumstances I might have got angry. But I liked Rivers. He came back, shaved and spruce, and asked me where I was from. I told him.

  ‘But I haven’t been back here in thirty years.’

  ‘How’d you get away in the first place?’

  I fingered my scarred right eyebrow. ‘Luck, then boxing, then the war. What about you?’

  ‘Japanese family in Brisbane took me in. Good school, all that.’

  ‘But you came back?’

  ‘Yeah, I wanted to be a writer, still do. I went to Japan.’ He gave a short, barking laugh. ‘No joy there. My white folks came from Scotland but I don’t feel much pull to Scotland. Ended up here.’

  ‘How’s it been going?’

  ‘No good. Till now.’

  That made it tougher, he had a big investment in the story, but I convinced him that I would collaborate and not take over. He was apprehensive about his ability to handle Franklin and the story. I was apprehensive too, but I didn’t tell him that. He had an open invitation to talk with Franklin, and when I told him I had a Land Rover ready he stuffed a spare shirt and pants in a duffel bag, grabbed a pen and pad, a camera and a broad-brimmed hat and we got going.

  Absalom, Rivers told me, was a crossroads and a creek. The creek feeds into the Normanby, like the one I lived beside fifty years before. At Absalom the reasonable road and the telephone line ended. Franklin had sought it out as the remotest place he could find and still stay in touch with civilisation. After a few miles, Rivers offered to drive and I let him. He did it a lot better than me and we had nearly two hundred miles to travel.

  We took the coast road to Port Douglas, travelling through the sugar country with its heavy, gritty-sweet air, then pushed west towards the head waters of the Normanby. Lush grass and fringes of forest on the horizon.

  Several hours of jolting loosened us up emotionally. Rivers felt he had a novel in him but was having trouble with every aspect of producing it—characters, setting, period. He’d looked into the history of the Chinese on the Palmer river goldfield and the pearl divers of Thursday Island, had soaked up large doses of racial injustice and inhumanity, but hadn’t fixed on a story. In Franklin and his massacre he felt he might have the theme.