You Never Met My Father (26 page)

“Jesus,” she muttered. “Not so hard.”

I had finished in a few seconds. But Jimmy, being a slow writer, apparently, took twice as long to sign Dawn's thigh.

Later when we were alone Jimmy put his arm around my shoulder. “Sparkesy,” he said, “for a while there I thought you were crapping about all them pretty birds you knew. I reckon I owe you an apology.”

“I was just waiting to get back to school,” I murmured, blushing.

He gave me a grateful squeeze. “Things are definitely looking up.”

Ashamed of my shyness, I realised I was trying to create a myth about my virility to hide the truth that girls like Kathy and Dawn intimidated me. In fact I found most girls intimidating. Suddenly it occurred to me I ought to start climbing out of the deep hole I was digging before I made a complete fool of myself.

“You don't want to get too carried away with those two,” I said. “They're just mucking around, testing you out. Dawn's got a boyfriend who's already got a car. She's not going to be interested in you that way. She only wants you to be interested in her. If she's got a string of blokes walking around after her with their tongues hanging out, it gives her some bargaining power with the guy she really wants. But you and me, Jimmy, we come from the wrong side of the tracks. They wouldn't go out with anyone from the Housing Commission, no matter how good looking he was. It'd be beneath them.”

Jimmy chewed on his cheeks and pursed his lips, impressed with my insight. “Jesus, Sparkesy, you're right. You're not half as dumb as you look.” He burst into laughter and punched my shoulder affectionately. “Only joking.”

I wondered which part he was joking about.

My logic was as effective as a cold shower on Jimmy. He studiously ignored Dawn and Kathy, much to their confusion, and turned his attention to girls that I knew were working-class. But they were a lot harder to impress. To my relief, if not Jimmy's, the attractive ones had their eyes fixed firmly on bigger fish than us. We had to content ourselves with observation.

At a discreet distance we followed them home after school. We mooned about, channelling most of our frustrations into sport. With money I earned as a lolly boy at the Star Theatre, money I had started to hide from Denny, I bought myself a cheap, portable record player. Then Jimmy and I fell into the habit of listening to records in my bedroom.

The first single I bought wasn't anything by the Beatles or Rolling Stones, who had started taking drugs and putting out weird albums, like
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Instead it was
Th
e
Green Green Grass of Home
by Tom Jones. Another I bought was
Release Me
by Engelbert Humpeldink. Jimmy's favourite was Johnny Preston's
Running Bear
. The poignancy of the lyrics honed our virginal angst.

When March came around pre-season football training started. Jimmy hadn't played much, not competitively at least, but I was gaining a reputation as a possible future champion. Oddly enough, despite my slight stature, football was the one aspect of my life to which I was committed recklessly. On the field I was fearless. It was as if some intrepid being inhabited my body for the duration of the match but vanished as soon as I walked off. Knowing my sporting prowess would impress him, I took Jimmy along.

I was confident that someone with his build, regardless of ability, would make a half-decent ruck-rover, which just required a bit of muscle and tenacity, attributes he had plenty of.

On the first training night I noticed a few of the more senior boys huddled together, occasionally looking at him. Off the playing field, I was wary of every one of them. None of them still went to school. A few were already fishermen and well on the way to earning their first million. A couple had well-deserved reputations for toughness, even delinquency. I had played against them in previous years and copped a few blows to the kidneys and knackers, an aggression they were quite happy to display beyond the football field, in the streets whenever our paths crossed, although so far I had been spared a belting. So I knew it was unwise to aggravate them.

Once the training was underway, each one made a point of passing by Jimmy, at my side, to ask him if he knew a ‘Mr Lee'. Their behaviour baffled me. Jimmy became tense. Then one of the fishermen came around again and asked him if he knew of ‘any fences'.

In an instant Jimmy decked him.

Notwithstanding my mettle on the football field, my legs turned to jelly. The other toughs, taken aback momentarily by the unlikely turn of events, were sure to advance on us. I could see myself unwittingly and unwillingly targeted, outnumbered and outgunned. I felt sick in the stomach. I watched the fisherman struggle to his feet. Jimmy braced himself, waiting for the logic of his actions to unfold.

Then an amazing thing happened. The fisherman, cradling his jaw, emitted a nervous chuckle. “Fair enough,” he said and started to back away. His mates retreated with him.

“What was that all about?” I asked as soon as we were left alone. I glanced sideways at him in admiration and incredulity. To have as a friend someone unafraid to take on one of the town's delinquents and have him retreat without so much as a scowl was a development I needed time to absorb. I wasn't totally convinced the capitulation I'd witnessed was due just to Jimmy's audacity. There seemed to be something else behind it.

Jimmy shrugged, reluctant to enlighten me.

During the rest of the training session, they steered clear of him.

“Come on, who's this ‘Mr Lee', for chrissakes?” I badgered later as we walked home, lugging a footy bags and boots, but with a touch of levity in my voice to make him think I didn't care one way or the other for an explanation. “And what was he going on about bloody fences for?”

Jimmy, his shoulders hunched in thought, refused to answer for a while. He dropped behind me. I realised something worried him and let him be.

He eventually spoke. “Does your old man get
Th
e Truth
?” His face was grim.

I nodded. Denny bought
Th
e Truth
for the form guide but it contained a lot of salacious material, which is why I browsed through it, and scandalous stories of crime and corruption in high places.

“You know what a fence is, don't yer?”

I patted the one we were walking past. “Here, mate.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, disgusted.

I was completely baffled. It didn't seem the topic you'd find in
Th
e
Truth
. Nor did it seem a good enough reason to deck someone.

Jimmy walked in silence for a while, sucking in his gums and chewing them in thought. I dared not interrupt his reverie. He kicked a stone along the path. He sniffed profoundly, drawing snot down into his throat, which he ejected on an accurate trajectory towards a lamppost.

“I might as well fill you in, Sparkesy, since you'll find out sooner or later. Better you hear it from me than them pricks.” He twisted his mouth like he had a toothache and looked at me sideways. “My old man was a fence.”

“What kind? Barbed wire? Electric? Cyclone? Picket?”

Jimmy snorted. “A receiver until he ran out of favours with the pigs.”

His father, I learnt over the next few days, was a crim, a fully paid-up, card-holding member of the Melbourne underworld. He had been a fence, a receiver of stolen goods, and to be a success in his line of business required doing favours for the police, mainly in the form of bribes. Police would come around to his house in Yarraville with a search warrant and find the garage full of stolen TVs, fridges, washing machines. Barry would slip them a pre-arranged amount and they would leave with an apology for the intrusion. “I understand. You're just doing your job, boys,” he would say. Occasionally the police walked off with a TV or stereo, anything that would fit in the back of their paddy wagon. Jimmy had witnessed it often enough. But eventually the police started asking for more—information on crimes and other criminals—under the threat of arrest. Eventually he was an informer to some of the top detectives in Melbourne. For Barry, and most likely the rest of his family, it was a dangerous development. If the underworld found out, he was as good as dead. Or his wife, or kids, could be targeted. For a couple of years he managed to avoid suspicion. He became quite good friends with two or three members of the major crime squad, who were corrupt. But after some of his closest associates were convicted and imprisoned, he was ostracised at his local pub.

Terror gripped him as he contemplated possible reasons. Shortly afterwards he was arrested himself and held in remand. He phoned one of his contacts in the force who told him he was on his own. Somehow he had lost favour. He realised his cover had been blown. All the proof he needed soon arrived. An attempt was made on his life. Someone tried to put him in one of the large ovens when he was on duty in the prison kitchen. He fought ferociously and survived but knew it was only a matter of time before the underworld would have its revenge.

In a desperate bid to save his life, he managed to contact the Attorney-General's Department to reveal all he knew about police corruption. He named several ‘bent coppers'. He was shrewd enough to insinuate that someone in the press already had the details and would release them if anything happened to him, a lie he used to pre-empt any official manoeuvres to silence him. The Attorney-General swiftly secured bail. Barry then did go to
Th
e Truth
, whose editor-in-chief, fond of a good scandal decided to cover the story. An inquiry was held, not a Royal Commission as Barry had hoped, which would have had the power to summons suspects, but a Police Discipline Board Inquiry with limited scope. His name was suppressed. He was known in the court as Mr X. He was the star witness, in fact the only witness as it turned out because the inquiry ran into a wall of silence. And the few police that were charged had brilliant lawyers, who successfully discredited much of his evidence with withering marathon cross-examinations. Most charges were dismissed.

In desperation Barry requested and received protection. His family took an assumed name and disappeared, around the country at first, at each stop their cover being blown, until they reached Portland where it appeared their identity had also preceded them.

“We're staying this time,” said Jimmy. “We're getting sick of moving.”

“Know what you mean.”

“Our real name's ‘Lee' not ‘Woods'. That's my grandma's maiden name.”

“Fair enough,” I responded, having lived under a few aliases myself.

“Is this going to make a difference?” he asked me. “To us, I mean, mate.”

“No, no,” I answered, with a whistle, contemplating a boost to my own status: the mate of the son of a notorious underworld figure. “Makes no difference to me.”

He faced me and gripped my shoulders. “Thanks, Sparkesy.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Jimmy told me all this and more besides about growing up amongst criminals, about his father who could be more vicious than my own, like the time he had broken a beer glass against the bar and thrust it into the throat of someone he was arguing with; or lewd, telling filthy jokes that mocked women, small penises, virginity, homosexuals (‘faggots', ‘fairies', ‘poofters', ‘queers'), the anatomy of black men, all of which Jimmy was keen to repeat. Barry was educating him to be open-minded. That was his intention, Jimmy said. That's why there was an edition of Havelock Ellis' seminal work on sexual mores and practices available to all his children and a supply of condoms if they ever needed them.

I listened to all this, utterly enthralled. The world seemed to have suddenly doubled in size. Not only was his father a criminal and a libertine, it turned out he was a communist as well, an ex-Melbourne wharfie and erstwhile member of the Ship Painter and Dockers Union, an unapologetic supporter of the Soviet Union. Perhaps this was why he and Denny became friends and got along so well. Both had been wharfies. Both were familiar with the inside of a prison. Both hated the police. Both were mavericks. But Denny was also, if not a communist, a believer in the state owning everything and the equitable distribution of wealth. Both were staunch members of the working class, even if neither of them worked. (Marx would have slotted them in with the ‘lumpenproletariat'.) They belonged to the last generation to hold an unshakeable faith in socialism.

And there was another thing they shared. Like Denny, Barry enjoyed a punt on the gee-gees. In fact he considered himself more astute at it than Denny, based on his success rate. He was more inclined to back favourites than any old nag at long-odds, which was Denny's technique. My father was always hoping for the big win that would lift him out of the hopeless vortex he considered himself caught in through no fault of his own. The one big win… that made Barry smirk. They often spent the morning in the Woods' kitchen, form guides spread across the laminex table, the tipsters on the radio, a cup of tea or coffee mug in one hand, Denny with one of his humble
Albany Trims
and Barry with a superior
Rothmans
in the other, discussing track conditions, weights, distances, jockeys, odds, the recent form of each horse, the likelihood of the race being fixed and any other issue that might influence their choices. Usually by mid-afternoon Denny would be back home, unable to stand the prospect of entertaining Barry with his accumulating losses.

Barry's wife, Barbara, often attended these morning sessions. She liked to have what she called a ‘flutter', a frivolous interest and a small bet on one or two races. She had an uncanny ability to pick winners but neither men took much notice of her, which usually prompted a quiet smile.

She was a taciturn woman, with long, straight, black hair, more suitable, I thought, for a teenager than a woman close to thirty, and moist green eyes that seemed to reflect some private sorrow. Quite a bit younger than Barry, she was his second wife. He had met her in a rough city pub six months or so after Jimmy's mother had died in childbirth. I liked the way she used to say a lot with her silence. She obviously loved him but was under no illusions about what sort of man she had married. She knew of his criminal past; had lived through part of it. She knew he was mad enough to attempt to disinter his dead wife in a fit of guilt and grief. She had heard that story. She had heard all the stories he told. Barry rarely stopped talking about himself. She smoked constantly and, like Barry, enjoyed a beer, which meant she was unlikely to socialise with my mother. Two of the Woods' children were hers.