The Winning Side Page 6

  ‘You ever play craps, Charlie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Great game, you wanna try it. Tell you what, come and have a few with me tonight, and I’ll swear off it after. Might even go in for a bit of the old boxing training again; see if I’m any good. What d’you say?’

  Thomas looked at Parker’s yellowish complexion and the puffiness around his half-focussed eyes, and agreed. After the evening meal they went to the canteen, and Parker drank furiously; Thomas drank more than he usually did, so as not to upset him.

  ‘What’s the matter, Blue?’ Thomas asked. ‘You’re as jumpy as hell. Malaria coming on again?’

  Parker looked past Thomas to the door. ‘No, son’, he slurred. ‘Last night on it, start training tomorrow. Lick ’em all. Bloody Yanks. Lick ’em all.’ He started singing the words to the tune of ‘Bless ’em all’

  Thomas quietened him and bought another round, instructing the barman to water the whisky. When he got back to the table, Parker was struggling to light a cigarette; his eyes rolled in their sockets and seemed to be trying to look at both doors at once.

  ‘Christ, you’ve drowned it’, Parker complained. ‘Bloody drowned it.’ He tossed off the drink in two swallows. ‘What about a swim, Charlie boy?’

  ‘It’s ten o’clock.’

  ‘There’s a bloody good moon, big moon. Last drink, then a swim. Train tomorrow. Do us good.’

  Thomas considered; the swimming pool was at the far end of the airstrip, perhaps a mile away. He needed the air.

  ‘Right, swim it is. Let’s go.’

  Parker got up and weaved to the bar. ‘One for the frog ’n toad.’ He poured the drink down, and lurched off for the door with Thomas following.

  ‘Didn’t show’, Parker said when they got outside. ‘Fuckin’ cowards.’

  ‘Who didn’t show?’

  ‘Bloody Yanks. Lick ’em all.’

  ‘Didn’t show where?’

  But Parker was singing again.

  Planes stood on the airfield, their paint gleaming under the almost full moon. A few hundred yards away the sea lapped noisily. There was a light, salty breeze and Thomas felt his head begin to clear. The pool was a rough concrete construction, fed and drained by the sea. The Japanese had neglected the sluices and pumps, and the pool was stagnant and foul when Lae was liberated. It had been cleaned and restored immediately, and the water Thomas and Parker dived into was clear and almost cool. Parker floundered and then started to swim the width of the pool, about thirty feet. Thomas pushed off from the end and started to swim a length, fifty yards, in a slow, relaxed crawl. He reached the end, turned and stroked back. At the deep end there was no sign of Parker.

  Christ, Thomas thought. He’s gone under. Swimming pissed, what a pair of mugs. ‘Blue!’ he shouted. ‘Blue, where are you?’ He got ready to dive when he heard a groan from the other side of the pool. He thrashed across.

  ‘Blue?’ The groan came again; Thomas grabbed the edge and hoisted himself out of the water. He felt hands grab his arms, and then his legs were swept out from under him. He lifted his head, said ‘What?’ and a fist hit him in the face. A boot took him in the ribs. He said, ‘Blue?’ and a grating American voice said, ‘We don’t like welshers, Aussie.’ Then a boot crashed into his face, and he flopped down and lost consciousness.

  It was still dark when Thomas woke, and a cool dew had settled on him. His ribs sent stabs of pain through him when he moved. His face was numb. His mouth filled with blood suddenly as he probed a gap in his teeth with his tongue. His jaw hung loose and bone grated on bone when he tried to move it. No sound came when he tried to speak.

  Parker was lying on the grass on his back. He was breathing shallowly, and one side of his face was black with blood. One eye socket was filled with blood and one ear was pulpy and dripping onto the grass. There was a beer bottle lying beside Parker and Thomas picked it up and raised it to his mouth; it was nearly full and the beer rushed into his battered mouth, stinging, bringing back the feeling and blinding him with pain. He staggered off down the airfield, towards the lights glowing nearly a mile away.

  Halfway there, two shapes loomed up in front of him, and the hard, round end of a baton poked him in the chest.

  ‘What’s this?’ An Australian voice—thin vowels and a nasal drawl.

  ‘It’s a native.’ Another Australian voice.

  Thomas was suddenly aware of his dark nakedness; his wet hair would be crisply curled, his mouth mashed and shapeless. He tried to talk, but only grunts came.

  ‘He shouldn’t be here, this is out-of-bounds for the boongs. Hey, you-fella, what for you stop long here?’

  Thomas waved his arms and gibbered. The bottle glinted.

  ‘Hey, he’s pissed. Come on, fuzzy—piss off!’

  Thomas turned and tried to point behind him; his arm swung up and the bottle hit one of the MPs on the ear.

  ‘You black bastard!’ There was a swishing sound, and Thomas felt his head explode.

  Later, he felt the cold, hard concrete against his skin. He rolled on it and felt it rough and dusty. He squirmed on to his back and saw light coming in through a small, barred window.

  The cells, he thought. Shit, they’ve put me in the cells.

  He struggled to his feet and lurched over to sit on the hard wooden bench under the window. His stomach heaved and he vomited bile; every movement sent shrieking pain through his head. His tongue was burning and lacerated where he’d bitten it, and his jaw seemed to be hanging to his knees. I can see though, he thought. I can hear. I’ll be all right. Oh, Christ, Blue. He reeled across to the door making small barking sounds and intending to pound on it with his fist. The door swung open.

  ‘Come on, fuzzy’, a big corporal said. ‘It’s your lucky day. A big mob of Japs have packed it in. War’s just about won. What do you think of that?’

  Thomas drove his raised fist straight at the corporal’s face but the punch ended in a week, nerveless tap. The soldier shoved him roughly back into the cell.

  He said, ‘You silly bugger.’ He slammed the door.

  RINGSIDE CHARLIE

  Australian Journalists’ Guild

  100 Kippax St

  Surry Hills

  1 April 1947

  Mr Charles Thomas

  c/o Editor, The Worker’s Journal

  23 Hay St

  Sydney

  Dear Sir,

  The AJG is happy to admit you as a member (classified ‘Casual’). The annual membership fee is one guinea, on receipt of which you will be sent your membership card.

  Yours faithfully,

  E.E. Tracey

  Hon. Sec.

  1

  GETTING the Workers’ Journal to press that week was a bastard. Some of the unions were getting restless about what they’d had to put up with during wartime—security checks, military manpower control on essential jobs, that kind of thing. We had a lot of gripe letters to print and articles critical of the government. Money was short; the printer hadn’t been paid for weeks and we were all on starvation wages.

  It was the closest thing I’d been able to get to a journalist’s job after I was demobbed. No education, no experience. And it took a bit of pull from an officer to get it. I was learning about reporting and sub-editing, slowly. I was putting the lights out, the ones with bulbs, when Sam Tollman, the editor, beckoned me up to his cubicle with a tired hand. The strain was telling on Sam.

  ‘Come for a drink, Charlie’, he said. ‘I can’t do another tap tonight.’

  I was dubious, I had the thirst but no money for beer. My deferred pay had gone on travelling around Australia, some useless correspondence courses and books. I had the thirst, but no money to go drinking.

  ‘My shout’, Sam said. ‘I won two quid on the horses.’

  I doubted it: he’d probably wrung it out of someone, somehow; but the thought of a few beers going down removed the doubt.

  It was cold out on George Street, windy and wet. We hunched down into our coats an
d pulled our brims low. Sam said we were heading for a club he knew. It’d be seedy, with foreign waiters, but no Yanks. Sam had a thing about Yanks—he accused them of every rape in the papers, every child molestation, and he lectured us on the way the world would go now that the war was over.

  ‘Stars and stripes dunny paper’, he’d said, ‘and you’ll be a traitor if you wipe your arse on anything else.’

  There were still plenty of Americans around town. They had lightweight coats that the rain seemed to slide off, and it was good shoe leather hitting the pavement when they walked.

  Sam hissed an obscenity when we passed a couple hugged up tight in a doorway.

  ‘See that tart’, he snarled. ‘Probably married. Those bloody Yanks are fathering Australians.’

  ‘Take it easy, Sam, it was them or the Japs.’

  ‘Jesus, how did we get to that? The Yanks or the Japs?’ The wind flicked his words away and the ragged red woollen scarf he always wore muffled the words. But I didn’t have to catch them, I’d heard it all before.

  ‘American is the new Rome’, he’d say. ‘Best legions, best ships, most gold, the lot. She’s come out of this war with a bloody empire, and it’ll be the ruin of her in the end.’

  He was grunting away something like this now into the wind and rain, and I made non-committal responses. Truth was, I was unhappy at the paper and with the city, and torn. I was at it again, passing for white, but Sydney wasn’t far enough south for me to get really pale. I was tempted to go to Melbourne, where they had fewer Aborigines and more Italians. In Sydney, too many people could pick me. Against that, I wanted to go north, to work the land, do something in the sun. My Gandju ancestry was a close secret from Sam. Aborigines were well up on his list of dislikes. He’d seen them used as strike-breakers in the west, and there was a story around that he’d got a dose of clap off a black girl in Broken Hill.

  The rain got heavier and we took shelter in a doorway; water streamed off our hats, down our coats and dripped on to our shoes. I wanted to go north.

  ‘What’s the matter, Charlie?’ Sam cocked an eye at me and spoke out of the corner of his mouth as he tried to get a cigarette lit. ‘You crook? You look yellow.’

  ‘It’s the light’, I muttered.

  ‘Bugger-all light.’ He puffed smoke. ‘It’s blacker than an Abo’s bum.’

  It was like standing under a waterfall; the rain roared on the roof and sprayed up off the pavement. Suddenly, I felt I could do without the beer and Sam’s company.

  ‘When does this joint close, Sam?’ I ventured.

  ‘Doesn’t. Goes round the clock.’

  ‘Illegal?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s been going since my old man’s time. He took me there. It’s a bit of old Australia, this place; you want to enjoy it while you can. We’ve got bloody little in the way of tradition and there’s going to be less still. You mark my words.’

  I was up north in my mind, smelling the fruit and the other scents on the wind. I could hear the slow voices.

  ‘Abos have got traditions’, I said.

  He glanced at me sharply. ‘Dying race’, he said. ‘Come on, it’s eased up.’

  We tramped on up George Street and turned right before the Town Hall. My thin shoes were sodden and I slipped on a squashed orange near the shut-up fruit barrow on the corner. I went down hard on one knee, tearing my pants and the skin. I swore.

  ‘Up you get, boy’, Sam’s arm was strong. I wondered what sort of a drinker he was.

  A fit of coughing stopped him at Castlereagh Street. He was near sixty, wounded at Lone Pine and batoned in Port Adelaide in 1931, and he sucked down Turf corktips non-stop. I grabbed him and felt how thin his arm was through his old tweed coat, his ribs were unpadded too. When the spasm passed, he spat into the streaming gutter and lit another Turf.

  ‘You fit, Charlie?’ he gasped.

  ‘Not bad, I walk a lot.’

  ‘Yeah’, he wheezed and pounded his chest. ‘So do I. You look fit, brown. Got an Eye-tie back there have you?’

  ‘Could be’, I grunted. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘Up here.’ He pointed, and following the line of his arm I saw some movement in a lane beside a pub on the other side of the street. It was hours after closing but a dim, yellow light was oozing out of the door of the pub. I saw an arm moving up and down quickly, I heard a thud and a cry and I was yelling and running before I could think. It was the army training, I suppose.

  There were three of them doing the bashing; I saw white faces and white hands. One of them staggered and fell, and then a tall, thin man in a light-coloured coat came flying from nowhere and sailed straight into the bashers. He pulled one of the attackers back and got in a good punch. I was nearly there when the one who’d been knocked down got up and smashed his fist into the dark, shapeless lump by the wall. Then he swung around, and the bloke in the light coat flattened him. I shoved one of them back towards the wall, but they didn’t like the odds any more, and two of them pelted off into the dark. The third one lay still with his face in the shallow gutter that ran down the middle of the lane.

  I squelched across to the wall and eased the victim up into a sitting position. As soon as the light fell on him I knew him, thousands would. The top of his head seemed to hang thickly over the rest and the skin around his eyes glistened with scar tissue. But he was still the man who’d won three Australian boxing titles, and knocked out the number four light-heavyweight in the world in the first round.

  Then I became aware of the thin man; he wore a US service poplin coat and his accent was slow and soft.

  ‘Say, that’s terrible thing. Why would they beat up on him like that?’

  ‘For fun’, I said. ‘To say they knocked him out.’

  ‘That’s terrible’, he said, then recognition hit him. ‘Oh, I get it. Say, did you see him fight Lesnevitch? What a hitter!’

  ‘Yes, I saw it.’

  Then Sam came up, blowing hard. He looked at us—the dark, blood-smeared ruin by the wall, me, yellow-faced beside him; and the crew-cut Yank in the poplin coat all ready to shake his hand and call him sir.

  I said something, but Sam ignored me. The basher stirred in the gutter. He felt his chin. ‘Gawd, me bloody jaw’s broken.’

  Sam’s coat was open, his red scarf hung to his knees. The Yank brushed off his hands and straightened his tie. He stood a foot taller than Sam.

  ‘I don’t know’, Sam shook his head slowly as he spoke. ‘This country, I don’t know.’

  2

  YOU look like you done a bit of fighting.’ He jostled me as he got his beer and the remark was his way of apologising.

  I grunted that I had and drank. I didn’t want to talk, just to drink. That was how I did my fighting now—against the craving for it and the nausea in the morning before the first one. But he wouldn’t let me alone: his big, beery face hung over the schooner he’d parked near mine. The closeness of the glasses seemed to force some kind of relationship between us. He wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t condescending, he wasn’t just trying his hand at talking to an Abo; he was being friendly.

  ‘Where did you fight?’

  ‘Here and there, Leichhardt a couple of times. Tents mostly.’

  ‘Whose tent?’

  ‘Sharkey’s, know it?’ It had happened now, I was talking to him and I swung around to face him just in case his sight was bad. Now he could see my dark skin and heavy eyebrows. It didn’t worry him.

  ‘Sharkey’s, yeah, I seen it. I’m a bushie myself. Must’ve seen Sharkey’s show up north half a dozen places—Bourketown and that.’

  ‘That’d be right; we went through Queensland mostly.’

  Just saying that brought a lot of it back—the smells of the travelling troupe, the heat and the blood and the strange, elated feeling of winning the occasional real fight.

  ‘Who’d you fight in town?’

  ‘Alby Roberts. Remember him?’

  ‘I’ll say, he was good. Real tough. How’d you go?’
<
br />   ‘He beat me. Were you a fighter?’

  ‘No, just keen on it. You going on Friday?’

  He meant to the Butten-Campbell fight. I knew it was on but I hadn’t thought of going. I didn’t go out much. I’d been in Sydney four, nearly five, years since the war and I’d had a few jobs and a few problems. Being white hadn’t worked, but then I had trouble being black. I felt the ties, but the pull always felt like a downward pull. I didn’t know what to do about it. I drank a lot.

  ‘Hey’, he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You’d be going to see Butten wouldn’t you?’

  That was another thing, I could say ‘Why?’ in a hostile way and force him to say something about me being an Aborigine and we could get into a fight. I’d done it too often, I didn’t want to do it anymore.

  ‘Let me get you another beer’, he said.

  ‘No, it’s all right’, I said. ‘I’m going slow, got to work tonight.’ That was half-true, I could work if I wanted to—night subbing on the News. A phone call, a bath and a shave and I could do it.

  ‘Get you a seven’, he said. It came, along with his fresh schooner, and he emptied it into my half-full glass. I thought perhaps I’d make the effort, just put this beer down slowly and buy him one and make the phone call. The pub was filling up and he was pushed closer to me at the bar.

  ‘Tommy Cossey’, he said and stuck out his hand. I gave my name and we shook.

  ‘You should’ve seen the welterweight I saw at the Stadium a coupla years ago, during the war it was. He was a negro, near six foot and shoulders like this. Beautiful.’

  It didn’t sound like anyone I knew, O’Neill Bell maybe, but he was after the war. I asked him if it was Bell.

  ‘Nah, not him. Nothing like him. This bloke was so black and he was bigger, and his waist’, he made a circle of his thumbs and forefingers, ‘was like that. Beautiful.’

  ‘Who’d he fight?’

  ‘Can’t remember, it was a four rounder.’

  That was a surprise and I took another look at him. He was well-worn, with cropped sandy hair, faded eyes and pale freckles on his big hands. He didn’t look simple. Except I’d never heard a fight fan enthuse about a four round fighter before. They hardly notice them as a rule; they’re out having a piss, or talking to their mates or working out which corner to back. I was interested: a black Yank, six foot, welterweight, I might get a par or two out of it for the sports page. I hadn’t written anything for a while.