The Winning Side

by Peter Corris

  We had no way of marking three minute rounds, so we agreed on rests to the count of a hundred when the shadows touched certain places on the beach. The crowd was getting restless, and Hesse was so angry I knew I couldn’t hold things up any longer. I handed the rifle to Nol and moved out.

  ‘Go ’im Jackie! Flatten the flash bugger!’

  Jackie landed a clumsy swing which I took on the shoulder but he hardly got a look in after that. He was built all wrong for fist fighting — short arms and legs, stiff, slow trunk. I peppered his face with straight lefts, the way Harry Sellars had taught me. Everything I’d picked up from Harry came back in the next twenty minutes — feints and hard, stinging hooks; head combinations and deep gut-punches. Jackie soaked it all up, getting slower but still swinging. The watchers were quiet, and I got angry when I couldn’t knock him out. I belted him in the belly to bring his hands down and swung into his dark bloody face; the flesh was squelchy and pulped, but he stood there swaying and taking it.

  I started to tire from punching so often but his eyes were closing and there was no chance left for him. I sucked air in deep, moved in, and straightened him with a left to his nose that was soggy with blood, then I put my shoulder and all my weight behind a right to the side of his jaw; his mouth flew open and I gave him a little push and he crumpled down.

  My knuckles were sore, my legs were tired, and my breath was coming in short gasps as I stood over him. He didn’t look big at all lying on his back with his legs drawn up; the blood glistened on his skin and spittle drooled from his mouth. Suddenly I hated myself. I wanted to comfort Jackie and tell him how game he was.

  ‘He’s had enough, Charlie’, someone in the crowd said. It got a few laughs.

  ‘Shut your face.’ I croaked. I wanted to fight them all and get beaten and crawl away into the bush.

  Then the Reverend Schmidt came, pushing bodies aside to get to me. He had a walking stick and was jabbing and thrusting with it. His pale face was scrubbed pink and his eyes were pink. His clothes were snowy white, almost blue. He lifted the stick.

  ‘Fighting’, he cried. ‘You animal, sinner …’

  I hit him as hard as I could, just above the belt; my bloody fist made a dirty red smear on his white shirt. I whipped his head with a backhand swing that shattered his glasses and split the clean pink skin. Then I ducked back, grabbed the rifle from Nol, and ran along the beach with my dirty, scarred feet flying.

  3

  DON’T believe anyone who tells you that it never gets cold in Brisbane. After running away from the mission I slogged my way south, catching rides on goods trains, fruit picking and doing a lot of walking. After three years in Brisbane I’d decided that the winters were getting colder. Part of the problem was the thin clothes I wore and the cheap room in the valley I lived in. It seemed to stand directly in the way of the cold winds that blew in the winter and spring. I was saving money.

  No one knew that I was part-Aborigine. My features owed as much to my Welsh blood and I was light-skinned, especially in the winter. I had a job cleaning railway carriages, and stayed out of the sun as much as I could. Some people suspected, but no one knew. It was hard, boring work cleaning the carriages; but it had perks, like the money, cigarettes and half-empty bottles you found. And the books and papers; I jumped on the interstate papers, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. I read them from end to end, and promised myself that I’d get to those cities one day.

  Meantime I was stuck in Queensland, but I had a purpose. I was moving towards getting a seaman’s ticket which meant first, papers, and second, a union ticket. Both meant money. I needed a driver’s licence, a reference from the railway job and a birth certificate, all available for cash. I was going to wipe the fact that I was a reserve Aborigine off the slate, that was essential, especially for the union ticket, which was the costliest thing of all.

  I stayed well away from the blacks, out of the pubs where they drank and I deliberately spent my time where they were never to be found — the art gallery and public library, in bookshops and sedate city cafes. I missed the smells and warm, moist air of my childhood and came to hate the grey, sluggish river that reminded me painfully of the clean streams up north. I read Conrad and Louis Becke and lived in the future.

  The nearest thing I had to a friend was old Sam McBride, a retired sea captain who claimed to have been a blackbirder.

  ‘They were wild heathens, Charlie’, he said. ‘The blacks used to cut them out and eat them.’ He glanced at me shrewdly more than once as we talked, he was an observant old coot. We’d sit out in the shade and I’d smoke cigarettes while he puffed his pipe. I prompted him for stories about the islands and he responded endlessly.

  ‘The Solomons, now; black clouds, black hearts.’

  I looked down at my hands. ‘Had a fight with one once’.

  ‘Fist fight?’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘I never saw a kanaka fight with his fists. Unbeatable with a cane knife, take your arm off.’

  A car clipped me and I spent some time in hospital. I met Gloria there, a trainee nurse and she became my part-time girlfriend, fitting me in between shifts and young doctors. We wrestled on my bed with layers of clothing between us. We went, frustrated, to the pictures—‘The Great Ziegfeld’, ‘Boys-town’, ‘The Good Earth’.

  Gloria was curious about me; she read nothing and gaped at the piles of books in my room. Books were my only indulgence; I didn’t spend much money on her. After one wrestling match my shirt hung open, and she looked at my brown skin.

  ‘You Spanish or something, Charlie?’

  ‘Could be, I’m an orphan. Could be Italian or Portuguese.’

  ‘Well, we’re all different. My Dad’s Dutch.’

  Her name was Sluyssen. ‘I know’, I said.

  One night, a warm one, I took Gloria to a film and we went back to my room where I had a half-bottle of brandy I’d found on a train. We mixed it with ginger beer. Pretty soon we were on the bed and her thin summer dress was riding up. We went on and she giggled, and I thrust myself up inside her without grace or coordination.

  After, we sat on the bed and drank the rest of the brandy while the city went quiet around us. Six weeks later she told me she was pregnant. We were sitting in a park near the river, and I looked out over the grey water and felt the fear rising from my feet.

  ‘We’ll have to get married’, she sobbed.

  ‘I can’t get married’, I blurted. ‘I’m seventeen.’

  She went stiff beside me and the tears stopped suddenly. I’d told her I was twenty, the same as herself. I looked twenty, and she was desperate.

  ‘You’re an orphan. You don’t need no one’s permission. I’ve got parents to worry about.’

  Parents, I thought, one in gaol somewhere, the other in a tobacco haze up north.

  ‘You’ll have to do it, Charlie. My parents’ll help, I think.’

  She’d thought it out in the six weeks, and I could feel the trap closing.

  ‘They won’t help, Gloria’, I said harshly. ‘I’m an Aborigine.’

  It was like hitting her with a hammer. She slid away on the seat and moaned.

  ‘Take a good look.’

  She did, and the tears started again as her fantasies evaporated. I could imagine old man Sluyssen on his farm a couple of hundred miles to the west with his pale eyes and lips, his thin nose. He wouldn’t give her a slice of bread.

  ‘What can I do?’

  I felt nothing for her; I wanted to get up and walk away along the river, around the first bend and the next and the next. She was small and pale, with a puffy, tear-stained face. All the nurses’ confidence had drained away. I reached over and patted her shoulder.

  ‘It could be worse. You know some doctors. You’ll be able to get someone to help.’

  There was hate in her eyes now. ‘It’s horrible’, she said.

  I wondered what she meant; what was horrible? But I didn’t say anything.

  I went to work depres
sed and miserable. Confessing to Gloria had damaged me, and I wanted to go all the way; to go into the pubs and booze with the darkies, to go to the stadium and cheer for the black boys against the white. I didn’t, but I lay on my bed, and let my mind wander back to the camp and murmured half-forgotten words in the language and tried to remember things my old blind uncle had told me.

  I met Gloria in the park again. She wore a severe dress buttoned up high and her sensible shoes. She had no make-up and was paler than I’d ever seen her.

  ‘I know a doctor who’ll do it’, she said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He wants money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred pounds.’

  I almost smiled, it was all I had. ‘I’ve got it. I’ll give it to you.’

  I saw relief and colour flood into her face.

  ‘Didn’t think an Abo could have two hundred quid did you?’

  ‘No’, she whispered.

  I drew out the money, hand-delivered it that day to the nurses’ hostel, and never saw her again.

  I drifted, I drank. I spent my money on women—tough old pros, the darker the better. I had white ones when I was drunkest; I always told them I was an Aborigine and they never gave a damn.

  I moved to Paddington and started to drink with the blacks in the pubs and around the rooming houses. I took on their hoarse, slurry speech and gave up regular reading. My work suffered, word went around about me and my job was shaky.

  Easter came, a break from work and I went to the Show after spending all morning in the pub. Four of us, all black, all drunk, ended up in front of the boxing tent. Six or seven men were lined up on a trestle in front of a grey canvas tent. A man in a singlet with a cigarette stub in his mouth was ringing a bell and shouting: ‘Roll up! Roll up! Who’ll take a glove?’

  The fighters stood stony-faced, looking out at the crowd. They wore dressing gowns, although it was hot, and they were all shapes and sizes. And colours—two were white, there was a lean, very dark Aborigine with heavy brows and a sloping forehead and three other coloureds, one of whom looked like a Maori. The spruiker was offering a fiver to anyone who could stay three rounds, and a tenner for knocking one of his men out.

  ‘Good money’, I muttered.

  One of my mates laughed. ‘You must be pissed. They’d knock your fuckin’ head off.’

  ‘He doesn’t look so tough.’ I pointed to a middle-sized sandy man in the centre of the row. He was the only one around my weight. His face was a bit battered and he had a mild, abstracted look as if he might be simple.

  ‘You going to have a go, Charlie?’

  I considered. I’d had a lot of beer but I felt pretty steady. I was almost out of money, and payday was a long way off.

  ‘Why not?’ I pushed through the crowd and shouted my challenge.

  ‘What weight, son?’ The cigarette stub jiggled.

  ‘Ten stone, near enough.’ I pointed to the sandy man. ‘He’ll do.’

  ‘Righto’. He rang the bell vigorously. ‘Challenger ladies and gentlemen, lightweight contest. Who’ll fill the bill? Who’ll take a glove?’

  I’d broken the ice and a few other takers pushed forward. Nobody challenged the thin Aborigine with the heavy brows, he looked too tough. Inside the tent, the boss threw him a skipping rope.

  ‘Give ’em a show Jack.’

  The dressing gown came off to show sloping shoulders with great packs of muscle up near the neck. He twirled the rope and did stylish double jumps and cross-overs, not really trying. When there were a couple of hundred people in the tent the bell rang again.

  ‘You get a good fight in Sharkey’s tent. Good clean fights. Let’s go!’

  The Maori knocked a big man who looked like a wharfie over in about thirty seconds. Two other challengers failed to stay the three rounds.

  The gloves felt strange, but I slapped them together the way William Holden had in ‘Golden Boy’. Someone in the crowd called out ‘A quid on the Abo’. I’d been out in the sun, had put on weight around the face with the beer, and there was no hiding it. Sharkey was referee, time-keeper and master of ceremonies. He called us to the centre of the square of stained, grimy canvas stretched over the dirt.

  ‘Know the rules, boy?’ he growled.

  I was very nervous. ‘Yeah, does he?’

  ‘Smart coon’, my opponent said. He wore his shorts pulled well up and I could see the soft well of his belly. I promised him one there. Sharkey made a show of pushing us apart.

  ‘No grudges’, he roared. ‘No grudge matches in my tent.’

  He waved us together and I had a glove in my face the next instant. I staggered back and he moved up and chopped me in the ribs. He was fast, in and out, and he landed most of his punches cleanly. I retreated and put out my left, trying to get the range. He brushed it aside and belted me. I didn’t hurt as much as it should have; I bored in and swung one into his gut that made him gasp and swear. Sharkey hit the bell.

  I did better in the next round. For some reason he couldn’t hit hard. I remembered what Harry Sellars had told me—stand on his foot, spit at him, hit him more than he hits you. He didn’t like it in close; I claimed him with my left and whipped a right up into his face. I butted him and swung to his belly again: I was amazed to see him falling away from me. Sharkey gave him a slow count and whispered harshly to him in between the numbers. He got up at eight and circled away for the rest of the round.

  The crowd was yelling and I gave my mates a thumbs up. I felt wonderful. Sharkey came across and gave a towel to wipe my face.

  ‘My boy’s crook’, he said. ‘Go easy eh?’

  ‘I want the tenner. I’ll flatten him.’

  ‘Go easy. You’ll get the tenner. Just see out the round and I’ll fix you up. He’s sick; he shouldn’t be fighting.’

  I was confused when I came out. He didn’t look good, very pale, almost shaky and he seemed to be dragging his leg. I remembered reading that Jack Haines’s leg had gone funny on him just before he’d had a stroke that nearly killed him when he was fighting Palmer. I pulled my punches and went gently with him in close. I heard the crowd shouting at me to knock him out. I gave him a couple of light punches that seemed to shake him. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back with a cold, numb feeling in my legs. I tried to get up, everything went cloudy, and I couldn’t stand. Sharkey raced through the count and helped me up.

  ‘Good try, son.’ He shoved a note into my hand. One pound.

  ‘You tricked me, you bastard.’

  He was grinning, and so was my opponent who bounced and slapped his gloves. ‘All part of the game, son. One side now.’

  I collected my shirt and stuffed the money in my pocket.

  ‘Thought you had ’im, Charlie. Come on, lets get a drink.’

  ‘Hold on.’ I went over to the rope-skipper who was jigging and doing fancy steps.

  ‘How long are you here?’ I asked.

  ‘Week here, week at south Brisbane.’

  I didn’t spend the pound on beer. I bought some sandshoes, and did some running through the streets. I skipped and shadow-boxed. I let my beard grow, and said at work that I had a face rash. After ten days I had a respectable beard; I’d worn my hair long as part of the Spanish-Italian pose but now I had it cut brutally short. I stopped drinking and went out in the sun. Bearded, thinner, darker and with my hair cropped I turned up in front of Sharkey’s tent at a small carnival in south Brisbane.

  I challenged the same man, whose name I learned was Willy Jones. I was on my own and wore different clothes. Before we started I took out a pound note and waved it.

  ‘I’ll knock him out’, I yelled. ‘Who’ll get on him?’

  Hands and voices were raised. I got two bets down to win ten pounds if I stopped him.

  The fight followed the same pattern, but I was more aggressive from the start. At the end of the second round Sharkey propositioned me again. I nodded. I went up to Jones, slamming with both hands. He dropped his guard; my gl
oves felt as light as fairy floss. I ripped him under the heart and brought across a right with everything in it. He took it flush on the chin and went down hard. Sharkey slowed the count down to a crawl, but Jones was out. I took off the gloves, collected from the punters in the crowd and stuck my hand out at Sharkey.

  ‘Ten quid.’

  He paid me. ‘Stick around’, he said. ‘Wanna talk to you.’

  I shrugged and stayed to watch the rest of the fights which weren’t up to much until the rope-twirler got in with a nuggety tattooed white kid. He was a whirlwind, and had his man on the ground and giving up inside a minute. When the show was over Sharkey ambled over to me.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’

  ‘Charlie Thomas.’

  ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’

  I nodded. ‘Brisbane Show. You pulled that crook fighter trick on me.’

  I folded the money carefully and put it away while he looked at me. ‘Done much fighting?’

  ‘You’ve seen it all.’

  ‘How’d you like a job?’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Fighting, what else? You’ve got the makings, boy.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Four quid a week, and everything found. Fifty-fifty split on the showers’.

  I scratched my beard, I was sick of railway carriages, sick of Brisbane.

  ‘You get to travel’, he said quickly. ‘I go everywhere—the Alice, Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie.’

  I had to smile at that, so it was to be the Alice and Broken Hill instead of Honolulu and Pago Pago.

  ‘All right. When do I start?’

  ‘Tomorrow. We’re leaving for Gympie. Be here around six on the morning.’

  He looked pleased with himself, and lit his cigarette end. We shook hands and he walked away. A battered old blue heeler followed him closely.

  I paid my rent and packed some books and clothes into a bag. I didn’t tell them anything at the railways, I just didn’t turn up.

  At a quarter to six the air was crisp, and there was a light breeze which I felt sharply against my freshly shaved face. Sharkey, wearing a ragged cardigan over his singlet, gave me a wave and the heeler gave me a growl. The fighters were standing around an old Bedford truck and Sharkey introduced me—Flash Jack (the rope man), Arch Teal, Flinty Bell, Snowy Flynn, Eddie Bunker, Reg Pollitt. They all nodded in a neutral way and swarmed up into the back of the truck.