Sunshine & Shadow

by Larry Writer

  [JAMES]

  tramps like us

  I was sixteen when I learned the worst about Mum’s illness: that she had cancer. The manner of my finding out was less brutal than the way our aunty broke the dreadful news to Stephen, but it was no less devastating for me.

  I was at St Luke’s Hospital in Kings Cross and my mother was there and so was a doctor. I was used to being the head of the family by then – I’d had an old head and a heavy sense of responsibility since our father deserted us, leaving me the eldest male in the family. Mum that day in an office at St Luke’s told me she had a cancerous tumour in her stomach. I stood there stoically taking in the information. I showed no emotion that I can recall. I was numb with fear and sadness. My beautiful mother. Now I knew why she had been below par these past months. Then the doctor took over and explained gently that there was hope for Mum. She was going to try to shrink the tumour and take it out of my mother’s stomach, and if she was successful, Mum’d be fine and there was no reason why she would not live a long and healthy life. ‘There’s hope, James,’ she said. ‘There’s a chance she will be okay.’

  I grasped that thread of hope that the doctor offered, and it sustained me even when I could see that the treatment was not as simple as she intimated. Mum kept going into Macquarie Street for chemotherapy and radiotherapy. It made her so very sick. She lost weight and suddenly looked ancient. Her hair fell out. She was always exhausted. She had the operation, and the tumour was removed, but in the following five years the cancer kept returning.

  At one of many low points, I asked the doctor, ‘How long has Mum got?’ and she tried to put a positive spin on the situation but her eyes told me the truth. I left the doctor convinced that the end for Mum was very near. Yet she battled on and on. For the next five and a half years, as my mother worked through the pain to feed and clothe us and send us to school, she endured cobalt and God knows what other treatment, and operations. Her cancer could not be quelled and in time it consumed her. Her love for us never lessened as she fought her terrible battle. I have never witnessed such bravery, and as I sit here now remembering her mighty struggle there are tears in my eyes.

  There was no history of cancer in Mum’s family that I know of. She smoked for a while, but stopped ages before she was diagnosed with her illness. No, I know what brought it on. It was the stress of being my father’s victim, a deserted mother with no money, left to work two and three cleaning jobs night and day so she could raise three kids she loved more than life itself. No matter what he did to her, she was always prepared to take my father back in, hoping against hope that he would be different this time and realise his love for us was stronger than his love for the bottle and maybe provide for us as a father should. She did without and she made sacrifices and continued to make them while her body was being eaten by a deadly disease. My mother literally loved us to death.

  About two years after her diagnosis, it was New Year’s Eve and I watched her slowly and painfully ascending the stairs in our house. She was so frail, she had barely the strength to put one foot in front of the other. Soon climbing stairs was beyond her, so we made her a makeshift bedroom in the lounge room, next to the dining table. There was her mattress and its bedclothes, and the bucket which she would vomit into, right in the middle of the house. There was no denying our mother’s condition now. We stepped over her as she lay in bed, as we moved from room to room in the tiny terrace. There was nowhere to get away and relax. Our house was one big sick bay. Just a bucket and a bed and it was so sad.

  At this tragic time, my old man barged back into our lives. I found out later he had been booted out by whichever girlfriend he was shacked up with, and, having nowhere else to go, he came back to his family. He stayed three months. It was the usual pattern. At first he was sheepish and contrite and full of promises that this time everything would be different. No more drinking for him. Then within a couple of days, he’d be back on the bottle, coming home roaring drunk and wild-eyed, slurring and shouting at us all until he passed out. At least, with Mum so deathly frail, he was an obnoxious arsehole to her without physically attacking her this time, although his behaviour and the tension he caused could only have worsened her condition.

  I was at breaking point, a nervous wreck. I was grieving for Mum, who was wasting away in front of us. I had no idea what would become of Stephen and Alison and me when she passed away, and while the old man went easier on her, physically anyway, I bore his drunken blows and ranting. I despised him.

  I decided that I would have to make a stand of some sort, and get him out of our house once and for all. If it came to a fight, then so be it. I was ready. He had always been a big bloke, and now, with his fleshy shoulders and chest and hard bulging gut he was bigger than ever. It is always unpredictable when you take on a drunk; you never quite know what they’re capable of in booze-sodden fury. Yet I was bigger now, too. At eighteen, I stood around 190 centimetres, and I was strong and fit from rugby league and surfing and hard workouts at the club.

  The inevitable blow-up came one evening when we argued over a car. His car. I wanted to borrow it to take out a girl. He told me I couldn’t. I persevered. He told me ‘No!’ again, and swore at me, and made a grab at me. That was all it took to unleash eighteen years of pent-up rage. As I charged across the lounge room at my father a scene flashed into my mind. I saw myself as a little boy, scared witless and pretending to be asleep as he slapped the living daylights out of my mother in their bedroom in our Camperdown flat. I punched him in the head. As I’ve said, violence does not come easy to me and as he was recovering from my blow I lost my senses and ran upstairs to my bedroom. He followed hard up the stairs, right on my heels. He crashed into my bedroom and stood there, panting and red-faced. He raised his fists. I moved in. I picked him up, threw him against the wall and I punched him again, this time hard in the face. He didn’t fight back, and it’s good for him that he didn’t because I was so enraged I might have killed him. I looked into his eyes as he cowered against the wall and he was clearly shocked and terrified by this painful and unexpected turn of events. I grabbed him and manhandled him down the stairs and then, as Stephen sat on the lounge wide-eyed, I frogmarched my father to the front door, and threw him out into the street.

  Whatever pride and self-respect he still had in shreds, he slunk away and disappeared into the Woolloomooloo gloom, mumbling about how I was an ungrateful sod after all he’d done for me and if I ever hit him again he’d fucking-well murder me. I’m not proud of what I did … well perhaps I am proud of what I did. That night I struck a blow for my mother, my brother and sister, and for me, against the man who had destroyed our lives. It should have happened a lot earlier.

  It would be nice to say that he never darkened our door again, but he did, about a week later. He stormed into our house drunk and threatened me. I whacked him and hurled him out onto the street again. That was it. He never returned to our home.

  I tried my best to be mother and father to Stephen and Alison. Stephen had been traumatised when our aunty so callously told him that Mum had terminal cancer. Yet my brother and sister were both troupers, looking after Mum and helping around the house as best they could, trying to cope with a situation no child should ever be forced to bear.

  It was part of my daily routine by now to do the shopping, prepare the food, make sure Stephen and Alison were clean and tidy to go to school, that they did a little homework and got some sleep. Mum by now was too sick to work, so we existed on her paltry pension. From time to time, my brother and sister went to stay with Mum’s relatives, to give me a break. Not having them around took a load off me, but somehow it was worse with just Mum and me in the house and no one else to share the horror of what was happening to her. The only real relief I got was when she went into hospital for more chemotherapy or an operation. Those times, I had friends around or sat and watched telly.

  Along with going to school, I did odd jobs to earn pocket money that I stashed away against the inevitable a
nd terrible day when Mum died, because I knew her pension would stop and that if I didn’t have enough money to pay the rent to the Housing Commission we’d be turned out of our house, and Stephen and Alison, who were both minors, would become wards of the state.

  I escaped the heartbreak at home by becoming the typical Woolloomooloo larrikin and lair.

  I was popular enough with the girls, and took them to pubs and clubs in the ’Loo, in Darlinghurst and in Kings Cross. For a while I was dating a girl in a terrace just around the corner from where we lived. I was in bed with her at her place one night when her mother came home early and totally unexpectedly. I fled out the back door of the little terrace and then, because there was no back gate, I climbed over the side fence into the yard of the terrace next door. There I hid in the garden trying to work out how I was going to get back out onto the street. Right then, the man who owned this terrace emerged from his back door and went into the dunny in his backyard just near where I was lurking. When he went into the toilet and latched the door, I took my chance. I ran from the garden through his back door into his house and up the hall to the front door, which was open onto the street. Unfortunately, the man’s wife was watching TV in a room off the hall and screamed blue murder when she saw me haring through her house. I wondered as I disappeared down the street if she recognised me.

  Turns out she did. The next day I was hanging out on a corner with some mates when the man and woman’s son, a strapping, tough bloke a few years older than me, marched straight up and eyeballed me. ‘I believe a little prick named James Dack who lives around here broke into my parents’ home last night. When I find him I’m going to smash him. Now, you wouldn’t know this Dack bloke, would you?’ When I assured him that I knew nobody by that name, he said, ‘Well, if you do happen to come across him, tell him that if I ever lay eyes on him I’ll break his bloody neck,’ and stalked off. He’d spared me, but his message was loud and clear.

  Being a tough guy came with the territory if you lived in the ’Loo. I wasn’t a hard-arsed kid at heart, but I had learned living in the ’Loo to pull off a pretty good impersonation of one. I had to in that world or I would have been squashed like a bug. I was an okay fighter, especially after I started going to the Police Boys Club, and my size, strength and fitness were definitely handy weapons.

  I got into some strife with a bloke who was taking out a girl I used to date. For some reason, maybe retrospective jealousy about his girl, this grub took a strong dislike to me, and tried to goad me into a fight whenever our paths crossed, which, because we moved in the same footy circles, was fairly often. He was a pest. I was with some friends in Double Bay one evening when my tormentor, very drunk, lurched up to me. He snarled, ‘You think you’re so bloody good surrounded by all your mates here.’

  I thought, I’ll crush this bloke, but that won’t prove a thing because he’s paralytic-drunk and there’s no value in that. It would be taking an unfair advantage. So all I did was look at him and say, ‘What’s wrong with you, mate? Why don’t you just go away?’

  And he said, ‘Oh, and who do you think you are?’

  ‘Just a bloke minding his own business. Anything else you want to say?’

  The best he could come up with was, ‘Well, why don’t you just fuck off!’ Then I saw him slightly cock his fist and I was prepared for him to throw a haymaker, but he thought better of it and left. As he scuttled away I thought how I’d like to get my hands on him when he was dead-set sober. I knew if I stood up to him he’d prove himself a coward and leave me alone.

  My chance came one Thursday night after football training. I was sitting with a group of teammates at the Beach Road Hotel in Bondi, feeling good after training and enjoying a schooner of lemon squash. As I’ve said, I’ve never been much of a drinker, unlike some of my mates from Woolloomooloo. In the reflection of the mirror behind the bar I saw my enemy and a huge Islander bloke stroll into the pub and sit down. His eyes met mine in the mirror and then he started shooting his mouth off about me to his mate in an animated and noisy way so other patrons could hear, calling me all sorts of names.

  He had just ordered a beer but hadn’t taken a sip, and sober was exactly the condition I wanted him in. I took the front foot. I swung around and said to him, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  He wasn’t expecting my aggression. He looked stunned and his mouth was opening and shutting but no words came out. The Islander stood up and put on his meanest face and started to say something to me. I wheeled on him and said, ‘Mate, do you really want to be involved in this? Because if you do I will knock you straight out right fucking now. Sit down and shut your mouth.’ Then, to the other bloke, ‘You … you are not going to finish that beer. If you don’t get out of this pub right now, I’m going to beat you like a fucking dog. Do you understand that? Leave your beer and go. Do you understand?’ The pub was hushed, every eye was on me and my enemy.

  My adversary responded by showing his true colours. He started shaking, he lowered his eyes, and he departed. While keeping up a defiant and heroic stance, I was thinking to myself, Thank Christ for that!

  Do I find it difficult to have a confrontation like that? Yes, because I’m not a violent person and I abhor violence; but also no, insofar as if you find yourself living in a dogeat-dog world, fortune favours the brave … or at least the aggressive. That was certainly the case in Woolloomooloo, where to display weakness was to invite persecution … and, as I’ve learned in the past twenty or so years, it is certainly the case in business.

  I believe that bullies can sense a lack of confidence in a quarry and zero in, fists flying, knowing they’re on safe ground. In my experience, a confident person rarely gets picked on. Bullies know to leave them alone. I was targeted in Camperdown as a little boy, and later by the Lebanese kids at St Mary’s and then by my old girlfriend’s mate. Each time, I drew a line in the sand, stood up for myself, and that put an end to it.

  There was another time when I had to play the heavy in Woolloomooloo, and it was in the best of causes. The Old Fitzroy Hotel has been a landmark in the ’Loo for decades. Today it’s a reasonably sophisticated establishment with a theatre where patrons can enjoy a play or show after a good pub meal. Back when I was a teenager, the Fitzroy was much rougher. It was known as the Revolving Battery, and the publican had no qualms about giving booze to us fourteen-year-olds, whom he’d welcome into his pub as warmly as if we were twenty or thirty. Knowing that the kids from the ’Loo who drank were generally more enthusiastic than discerning, he would mix up the dregs from various bottles of wine and spirits in flagons and sell the evil-tasting goop to us. This rancid rocket fuel became known as ‘concoction’. ‘Where you going?’ we’d enquire of mates.

  ‘Oh,’ they’d reply like men of the world, ‘we’re off to buy some concoction.’

  After we’d drunk the concoction, we’d walk around glassy-eyed and out of it, like zombies.

  Anyway, the paedophiles who hung out around the back alleys of Kings Cross tumbled to the fact that there were plenty of kids in Woolloomooloo poor enough, perhaps, to be persuaded to do their bidding for a few bucks. These rock spiders started turning up at the Fitzroy. One afternoon I was at the pub when I noticed a dodgy-looking stranger, a man in his thirties or forties, chatting to a group of kids and filling them up with Twisties and drinks. At first, it seemed an innocuous enough scene, but when I watched them closely, I realised that the stranger was a paedophile. I had to get him away from these kids. I sauntered up to them and said to one boy, ‘Is this bloke your father?’

  The boy replied, ‘No, I’ve just met him.’

  The man said, ‘I’m just a friend.’

  I said, ‘That’s bullshit. Now, fuck off!’ He began to protest, and then, hearing my raised voice, some of my pals came over, and the stranger fled. We watched him get into his car and drive away, towards the Cross.

  A few days later I was hanging out at Harry’s Café de Wheels, Woolloomooloo’s renowned pie wagon that’s be
en serving pies and mushy peas to Sydneysiders and celebrities since Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were regular performers at the old Chevron Hotel. The bloke who ran Harry’s knew the kids of the ’Loo and when we bought a pie he’d throw in a drink or a sausage roll which we’d gratefully wolf down. I was doing just that this evening when I noticed the paedophile’s car cruise around the corner and come to a stop not far from the Fitzroy. I went home, scaling fences to get there all the sooner, and took a knife from the kitchen draw and stuck it inside my sock. I then walked slowly down past the paedophile’s car. The lights were off, but I could see him sitting in the driver’s seat. I paused when I got near. He saw me, not recognising me in the dark, and said in a treacly voice, ‘Excuse me, can you come over here to the car window and tell me where such-and-such street is?’

  I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll tell you,’ and I advanced on the car, pulled out my knife and held it close to the man’s face. ‘And I’ll show you, too, with this!’ He fumbled his keys into the ignition and floored that car off up the street.

  If I never, ever have another physical confrontation in my life I will die a happy man. No one ever really wins a fight. What, after all, does winning a dust-up prove? That you’re stronger, meaner, can whack harder, or are more ruthless … big deal. Also, real street fights are not at all like the ones in the movies when one punch by the good guy knocks the baddie out. In reality, the bad guy gets straight back up again and this time he’s wielding a brick or a knife or a gun. People who get into fights run a very high risk of ending up in jail or in hospital; both are places I try to avoid.