The Fighter (16 page)

I struggle to keep him in my sights. He darts in and out of traffic, and whips around corners. He takes a shortcut through Docklands. The city high-rises are quickly on him. The clarity of a winter's day has washed them clean. Upper-storey windows blaze in the sunlight. Cranes rise from construction sites. Henry all but vanishes in the windy canyons.

Just as I am about to lose him he pulls up at a kerb, indicator flashing. He waits till I catch up, then takes off and is soon well
ahead again. He is impatient. He weaves through the morning traffic and parks at the edge of the legal district. I join him outside the Magistrates' Court entrance, and we walk round the corner into Williams Street.

M is relieved to see him. He has been waiting for him. M is twenty-eight years old, but he appears far younger. Henry first met him when he was a boy of ten roaming the grounds of the housing estate in South Melbourne, Dorcas Street. His father had died of an overdose. M moved from dope to barbiturates—Valium and Xanax, then ice and heroin, and to burglaries and assaults to feed his habit.

He served time. Reoffended. Returned to prison. And was recently released after an eighteen-month stint for credit-card fraud—he'd used the card to steal jewellery. ‘Gold mate, a stash of gold: rings and necklaces, bracelets, watches, there for the taking. Enough gold to keep me high for ages.'

He is outside the roller door, waiting for his girlfriend. She is scheduled for release, and is down in the holding cells, about to sign off on her bail conditions. There's no knowing how long it will take. M knows the cells well. ‘No windows,' he says, ‘just a hole for the screws to keep an eye on you.'

Henry waits with him. The morning sun hits the pale green dome of the Supreme Court on the corner diagonally opposite. The sandstone facades are gilded by sunlight. Gold, mate, there for the taking.

Solicitors, barristers, magistrates and caseworkers hurry by, clutching briefcases and folders thick with notes and case histories, transcripts of proceedings, police interviews, witness
statements—records of criminal pasts and uncertain futures. They are heading to the courts or their offices, or down below to the cells to see clients.

They stop when they see Henry. They are beaming, grateful for this unexpected interlude in their frantic schedules. A crowd is building. Conversations are breaking out on the footpath; work is momentarily suspended.

Henry is the centre, the still point. He is at ease, in his element. He has inexhaustible patience—he will remain at his post for as long as it takes, fully attentive to M's needs, and welcoming of whoever approaches.

The wind is rising and the skies are darkening. Rain is imminent. The change is sudden. M zips up his jacket. He stamps his feet against the cold. Off drugs he is mild mannered. Polite. Boyish. He is going to go clean, he says. He's been clean for two months now. There's a chance, he says, a real chance. It's different this time. His girlfriend is six months' pregnant. He's going to be a father, he says, in awe at the thought, determined.

‘Henry's a top bloke, grouse bloke,' he says, digging his hands into his pockets. ‘He hangs out with you. You don't see him for months, but when you do, you take up where you left off.'

He stops. Then minutes later, another burst: ‘He's always been good to me, respectful.' He mulls it over. ‘Like. He's a friend. Henry's a friend. He looks out for you.'

The roller door is rising. M's girlfriend ducks beneath it and steps out. She wears an ankle-length blue skirt, a white hoodie and white runners. She is elated. Through the open doors, down
an incline, can be glimpsed the holding cells, a netherworld. For now, she is free of it.

She glances about her, like a hare released from a trap, not quite believing in its unexpected freedom. Not knowing what to do next, momentarily frozen. Suspended. She embraces M and holds on tight, takes in his presence. She is twenty-four, but like her partner she appears far younger than her years: part child, part street-wise adult.

The storm has broken. The rain is bucketing down; the gutters are rising with water. Henry hurries alongside M and his girlfriend to the Hyundai. He drives them back to the suburb where they had first met years earlier. He drops them off at the doctor's and, an hour later, he meets me at the Seafarers' Mission.

The mission building is a stone's throw from the Yarra. The abandoned shipping sheds in the yard behind it are scrawled with graffiti. The wharves that were once here have shifted downstream. The apartment blocks of Docklands tower over it. Cranes rise from scrapers-in-progress. Wurundjeri Way cuts within metres of the entrance. The green-hulled schooner weathervane has been dwarfed into insignificance. Yet the mission complex holds its ground, as it has for close on a century.

Henry occasionally brings seamen here from the port. He meets them by their ships and drives them in the Hyundai or in one of the mission buses. He takes them through the entrance beneath the flying angel—protector of seamen on land and the oceans—her hands outstretched, and her eyes looking downwards.

Inside it's quiet, the traffic noise muffled. The inner courtyard and chapel are a haven. The garden, with its beds of carnations and lilies, geraniums, orchids, provides tranquility. On the clubroom walls there are photos of crews and gatherings of sailors with sea-hardened faces, their expressions lightened by camaraderie. There are paintings of ships anchored in mist-laden ports, and steamers on wild seas, defying the elements—reflecting the seafarer's craft, its beauties and perils.

Men come and go. They sit at computers, play pool, table tennis, while away the hours. The wall above the bar is covered with coins and notes, an impromptu gallery of global currency. The built-in cupboards and wardrobes and the wood panelling evoke a ship's cabin.

‘The men on the ships are isolated,' says Henry. ‘I've met them working on the wharves, and I've been bringing them here for ages. They are at home here.'

His arms rest on the red formica tabletop. His black-framed glasses perch high on his nose and his brow is furrowed. He is leaning forward, confiding. His good cheer has given way to reflection.

‘They are like refugees,' he says, ‘in each port they spend time in. Like M and his girlfriend—they're refugees from life, and refugees from themselves. It's not a matter of hope, but of urging them on, and reminding them not to cut corners. It's about the long haul.

‘M has a chance,' he says, ‘because he's trying to help his missus. He's showing concern for someone else. Maybe, just maybe, they'll make it.'

Henry knows the odds, figures they're about thirty per cent for, seventy against. All it takes is one falling out, one rejection, or money worries, and they'll be back on the streets, enslaved to dealers and creditors.

‘It is all about being there,' Henry says. ‘That's what the people of the streets—those who have nothing—respond to. To be of any use, you must be there.

‘You can't push it. You can't apply too much pressure, because if you do, they will explode, and they're coming at you, striking out, drawing you into the ring, where it's hit or be hit, punch or be punished, re-enactments of the scenes they have known since childhood, and the loss of trust that drove them onto the streets in the first place.'

Henry's speech is slowed by weariness. His thoughts are fractured by an encroaching forgetfulness, a legacy, his brothers say, of the poundings he received in the ring decades ago.

‘No, you can't hurry them,' he says. ‘All you'll do is make them react. Make them angry. Before you know it, you're in a fight with them, being told to fuck off. Or they're arguing with you: “Slow down mate. I can't do it.”'

The afternoon sun streams in through the arched windows. It falls on Henry's face and accentuates his exhaustion. Except for a few naps, he's been on the go for almost two days now. But he doesn't let go. This is the pattern, the way time works for him: an ongoing interplay between restlessness and patience, weariness and renewed energy.

‘You have to ignore time,' he says, ‘and enter their space. Earn their confidence. Make them know you care for them.
Make them feel you're on their side, ready to stick up for them. And then, when you're done, you have to let go of it.'

Henry pauses. He rests his elbows on the table, and clutches his hands to his shoulders, as if protecting himself. It's a reflexive stance, and for a moment the burden is visible—the years of being out there, responding to calls, keeping at it, the relentless activity.

‘And you have to be in good spirits,' he says, his arms still wrapped around him. ‘It gives the kids confidence, and it helps me defuse their anger and confusion. It makes them feel comfortable.'

Henry is a thinker, but on the streets he thinks lightly. If he thought too hard he would lose what he has to offer: his good cheer. He is wrapped in it, layer on layer of cheerfulness. It protects him so that, in turn, he can protect others. It is a shield fashioned over decades of application. Training.

His good cheer is an antidote to an intensity that would have long ago overwhelmed him. And good cheer is what sustains him in his own addiction to the streets, and his need to be out and about and heading to the next appointment, yet another encounter.

It's a trait Henry has nurtured over a lifetime—good cheer in the face of chaos and confusion. Despair. Violence. It's the art of the peacemaker. Good cheer put to the service of defusing.

It's a trait forged in dormitories of bunk beds, adjusting to yet another group of strangers, the interminable months waiting for a mother's return, and the drawn-out weeks waiting for a father's Sunday visits. Shaped in a single-fronted cottage, standing by,
watching a mother and father locked in battle. Begging them to stop.

It's a trait that extends beyond his homilies about life and love and caring, and beyond Henry's craving to be known, and to be praised and feted, beyond his love of the limelight and the simple storyline by which he defines himself—the script he repeats again and again with the barest prompting, of the child who fought his way up, overcame the odds and triumphed.

And there is something deeper than his good cheer. The steel at the core, the unbroken spirit. The pugnacious wisdom of the stayer, the long distance athlete—the creed of the fighter.

24

The mantra resurfaces. Mum, poor girl. It catches Henry unawares, even now, in the Seafarers' Mission. His gaze is turned inwards. His elbows remain propped on the red formica. He tightens his grip on his shoulders.

Mum, poor girl. It will always be there. It cannot be otherwise. Yet something is incomplete. She must be seen again, restored. Revisited.

She cannot venture outside. She is in fear of open spaces, afraid of people, but afraid also of the suffocating rooms, the passage, and in fear of the day as it makes its slow way through the hours.

The house is given over to stillness, leached of noise, of the
hum of daily living. Her husband and children are out in a world she is not part of.

She clings to the routines, and performs her chores. She goes from the kitchen to the tiny backyard to attend to the washing. She lights the wood-fired copper in the outhouse, and turns on the taps. She slaps and beats the sheets and pillowslips, towels and tablecloths, the clothes of a family of six. And she is pregnant with the fifth child.

She throws the washing into buckets and carries it to the lines strung across the backyard. She returns inside, and she cleans and tidies and irons and folds away clothing into drawers. She cleaves to her duty, and to the routine as if to a lifeboat. And she clings to the love of her children. Though there are times when they appear to her as strangers.

There comes a point when she can no longer bear it. She wanders from room to room, disoriented. She is weary. She lies down on the sofa, with its view to the kitchen and the passage. She is safe here, blessedly safe. The front door is locked and the passage secured. The house is a fortress. No one can see her. No one knows her. Perhaps she has never existed.

And this is how she wants it. She sinks back and looks up at the oval ceiling rose and the bare chain from which hangs a single light-globe. She sees the stains of damp beside it, the living-room windows, the raised blinds and trembling curtains, and beyond, to the narrow walkway, the half-metre gap between the window and the timber fence, and to the brick wall of the neighbour's house directly behind it.

She is hemmed in. The entire house is hemmed in. She is
protected, but choking; secure yet imprisoned. Locked in a paradox.

She can hear, from a distance, the shifting sounds of the day: a delivery truck pulling up outside Kurops, the warble of a magpie, clothes flapping in rising breezes, snatches of backyard voices, neighbours talking.

Their chatter is indistinct, muffled by walls and fences. They have no shape and no meaning, but they are warm. Intimate. They belong to people who are normal. She craves to reach out and join them. She aches to be one of them.

She knows each square metre of linoleum, the fissures, and the random patches of exposed underfelt. She knows each room, each ceiling rose, and the globes hanging from them. She knows each fracture in the plaster, each item of furniture, and her prized crystal, in the cabinet in the living room.

In better times she has ventured out and purchased crystal. Bowls, goblets, ashtrays and platters, jars and serving trays. Crystal traps the light. And crystal refracts memories of Odessa, the port city, and a village on its outskirts, and of the child who once received a maternal tenderness that now, she dare not think about. Crystal is an antidote. It is not plagued with doubts.

She is a fierce guardian of secrets. She can never utter what became of her mother and of her father and her brother as she fled. Nor speak of her violation. She has buried it. Yet the price she has paid is terrifying—a journey from vast exteriors to dark interiors, from the commerce of daily life to silences.