‘Right!’ said Hudson.
Johnny began beating the drum and a rhythmic booming jerked the heads of people to attention. Many left the arena fence and began walking towards the tent. Hudson raised his cupped hand to the side of his mouth and began to harangue the people.
‘Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.’
‘Boom, boom, boom,’ went the drum.
‘We’re open. The big boxing show. The fighting boys. Hudson’s troupe of fighters. Hurry. Hurry.’
He gestured a signal to the boxers.
‘Hi, hi, hi,’ they all yelled in unison. ‘Hi, hi, hi.’ They changed the cry to a shout and stamped their feet and waved their arms aloft. The drumbeats quickened their rhythm.
The crowd grew till it stretched back and covered the pathway people were following round the arena, blocking the flow of women with perambulators, children with balloons and family parties carrying thermos flasks and luncheon baskets. They all stopped to listen.
‘Where are your local fighters?’ called Hudson, his voice amplified by his cupped hand. ‘Put up your hands, all the fighters. First in, first served.’
‘Hi, hi, hi!’ shouted the boxers.
A local youth with a swaggering air adopted to hide his self-consciousness put up his hand.
‘I’ll have a go.’
‘What’s your name, son?’
‘Tom Fields.’
‘Ever done any boxing, Tom?’
‘A bit.’
‘Who’d you like to fight?’
‘That bloke there.’ He pointed to the novice who, no longer bored, looked at him in swift appraisal.
‘He’s your boy, son. Come up here on the board.’
I had expected Red to make an appearance when fighters were invited from the crowd but he was evidently waiting to see how many local boys were anxious to put on the gloves with members of the troupe.
Hudson, having finished his build-up of the fight he had just arranged, sought an opponent for the champ, a fight which would be the draw-card for the first house.
‘Who’ll take a glove? Who’ll have a go? Where’s this spud digger who’s been skiting about the hiding he’s going to give the champ? I’ve heard about him. It was all talk, was it? Where’s this bar-room pug? Is he in the crowd? Come on! Where is he?’
From the rear of the crowd Red raised a thick, powerful arm capped by a knuckled hand and shook it challengingly.
‘You won’t find me hiding, mister. I’ll take a poke at you if you don’t lay off me. I’ll have a go at that big baboon beside you for a fiver.’
He pointed at Bob who was obviously no actor and could only register amusement at the insult. Johnny was more experienced. With a contemptuous forward wave of his open hand he called out in an angry voice, ‘Get back to your loafing, mug. The only spuds you’ve ever dug is out of gravy.’
Red apparently became seized by a furious anger. He brushed people aside and strode towards the line-up board shouting, ‘Get off that board, you lying cow, and I’ll flatten you. I’ll take you on down here now. Come on! What are you waiting for? Yellow, are you?’
Johnny stepped forward as if about to leap from the board but Hudson flung an arm across his chest and held him back.
‘Cut it out!’ he shouted, his face reflecting concern; his movements urgency.
The crowd had grown tense. Women bent swiftly down and lifted children in their arms then turned to push their way out of the crowd. Men shouted, ‘Give him a go.’
Hudson raised a placating hand. ‘Break it down, men. Go easy.’ He looked down at Red, his mouth twisted into a snarl. ‘You’ll get all the fight you want, son—inside the marquee. We don’t fight out here.’
‘Let me have a go at him,’ demanded Johnny trying to push past Hudson.
‘Pipe down, Johnny,’ he snapped. ‘We’ll set you in a minute’, then to Red, ‘So you want to have a go at the champ?’
‘I told you I want to fight that bloke there.’ He pointed to Bob. ‘If you don’t want him hurt, say so.’
‘You’ll hurt no one, son. You won’t have a go at the champ, is that it? He’s your weight. What do you weigh?’
‘Twelve stone, about.’
‘I’ll match you against the champ for a fiver.’
‘What are you coming at?’ demanded Red impatiently, his voice raised in anger.
They argued, shouted at each other, Johnny joining in with contemptuous insults. Some men in the crowd began shouting at Hudson.
‘Give him a go.’
‘Quit stalling.’
He straightened himself from the bent position he had assumed when arguing with Red and faced the crowd.
‘Now, people,’ he said. ‘This spud digger definitely has size and reach. He’d be a better match against …’
They howled him down. They moved forward shouting.
He gave way, a cynical smile curving his lips for a moment.
‘Righto, righto.’ Then with a show or reluctance he addressed Red. ‘Get up on the board. I’ll match you against Bob.’
Red placed his hands on the board and sprang up beside him. He was wearing shabby trousers held up by a leather belt. The sleeves of his faded working shirt were rolled up above his elbows. He folded his arms and faced the crowd, smiling.
They cheered and clapped him. He was one of them. He would be their revenge for the high price of admission, for the superiority in confidence and power of the boxers on the board, for all that was granted to these unfettered men and their boss but that was denied them.
‘You know the conditions,’ Hudson was saying. ‘If either of the challengers is on his feet at the end of three two-minute rounds they get the purse—two pound to the local lad, a fiver to the spud digger.’
His voice rose to the excited tones of the spruiker, ‘Get your tickets at the entrance to the marquee. Don’t push please. There’s room for everyone.’
In the ticket box below him sat a grey-haired man with a cigar in his mouth.
‘Five bob; children half price. Take your time. Don’t shove.’
Hudson leapt from the board and took his place just inside the entrance where he took the tickets purchased by those who entered. He nodded as I passed him. No ticket from me. He regarded me as belonging to the showman’s world. He jerked his finger towards the post where Red was standing with the local boy.
‘Over there,’ he said through the side of his mouth. ‘Build up that kid.’
I stood beside Red and his companion. Without looking at me, Red said, ‘How’d I go?’
‘Good.’
He took off his shirt. Beneath it he was wearing a white athletic singlet. The local boy watched him. He was nervous. His teeth were set to control the twitching of his face.
‘Give him a lift,’ I whispered to Red.
Red bent down and spoke to him. ‘Swing for all you’re worth, son. He won’t hurt you. Don’t take any notice of your mates yelling at you to go for a kill. If you do that you’ll stop something.’
A little while later the boy was sitting with his back against the post, panting, blood on his face, one eye swollen. It was the end of the second round. Inspired by the shouts of his mates and the lack of aggressiveness in his opponent he had dropped his caution and landed a vicious uppercut on the chin of the novice who, angered, had belted him mercilessly round the ring of people till he was saved by the bell.
Hudson, bending over him, was massaging him beneath the ribs with a circular motion. The boy’s mouth was open. There was blood on his teeth.
Hudson gave him rapid advice: ‘Don’t try and mix it with him. Go back. You’ll ride it out.’
‘Hell! A man can’t stop everything,’ said the boy.
But he was on his feet when they finished. The crowd cheered him. He was a hero now. He’d gone the distance. His mates would look up to him now.
When Hudson was lacing the gloves on Red, Red listened to his instructions with an impassive face. He must have heard them many times. They varied but they wer
e all calculated to rouse the crowd, to get them on his side, to fill the next house.
‘Go down in the second round just before the bell. Roll on the ground. Make a song about him hitting you low. Stagger to your corner. Belt him into the crowd in the last round. Don’t stop when the bell goes. Let me separate you.’
Red followed his instructions. He seemed to lift himself off his feet to the studied blow Bob delivered to his ribs. He fell gasping.
The crowd were his way. They hated Bob. Bob stood breathing deeply, scowling as he looked down at Red under their abuse. Hudson held him back.
When, in the last round, they traded blow for blow beyond the ring and back to the canvas, when the crowd swayed away from their violent passage and Hudson rang a desperate bell, the shouting and the yells moved far beyond the tent, bringing people hurrying towards the sound from the other side of the arena.
They fought again in the next house, an indecisive bout that prepared the way for Red’s fight with the champ in the last house of the day.
‘We’ve got to charge extra for this, people. It will be one of the greatest bouts ever fought on this showground.’
Maybe it was. Maybe it was more real, gave an impression of being more merciless and violent and desperate than any genuine fight could be.
Red was on his feet when it finished. He got his fiver, presented by Hudson in front of the cheering crowd, a fiver which he returned when the tent was empty and only the boxers remained sitting on cases with their heads in their hands.
Hudson hurried away to his caravan with his bulging bag. I sat down on a four gallon drum. Red and Johnny looked at each other.
‘I’m sorry that swing connected, Red,’ said Johnny. ‘I thought you were moving back.’
‘My reflexes are slowing up,’ said Red. ‘I saw it coming but just didn’t seem to be able to ride it back.’
‘By hell I’m sore!’ said Johnny. ‘How are you?’
‘My face is a bit sore,’ said Red feeling his cheeks and chin. ‘She’ll be right though.’
‘We open at Hamilton tomorrow, don’t we?’ asked Bob.
‘Yes,’ said Red.
‘Through it all again,’ said Johnny. ‘It makes you wonder.’
They sat in silence for a while then Bob rose to his feet.
‘Let’s get cracking on this tent,’ he said. “We’ve got to be on the road by eight.’
23
I camped for a few days near a shelter for bagmen outside the town, where I completed my notes, then made down the highway to Boswell, a prosperous town in a wheat-growing area further south. The Boswell Show was to take place in four days time and there I would meet up with the sideshow people who were doing other towns on their way down.
About four miles from Boswell there was a river bend sheltered by ancient red gums and clumps of wattle. I pulled up on the roadway skirting the area and looked at the tussocky spaces between the trees, wondering whether it was safe to drive over them.
Beneath one old tree was a tent. In front of it a tripod stood over a camp fire with a black billy suspended between its legs. Steam was rising from the billy, the lid of which lay on the ground beside the fire.
Near the tent stood an old Dodge car. It had once been a tourer but the rear portion had been cut away from the chassis and in its place a van body with sides of painted canvas had been built.
The paint on the canvas had dried into a brittle crust laced by a multitude of cracks. In one corner a hole edged with the ends of grey threads had been worn through the material and through this hole I could see the edge of a plank lying inside the van.
A sign had once been painted on the canvas but rain and sun had so weathered it that the yellow letters had almost faded from sight. In the form of a bow that curved from the front to the back of the van I could just make out the words ‘Fortune Teller’ and beneath them, within the curve, the words ‘Hypnotist’, ‘Palmist’.
Two men occupied the camp. One, a thin, long-limbed young fellow with unruly hair, was poking at the contents of the billy with a toasting fork; the other, an alert, ageing man with crinkles round his eyes stood watching me from the tent’s entrance.
I drove over and pulled up a few yards from the fire.
‘Do you mind me camping here, mate?’ I asked the older man.
‘No. It’s all yours. Go ahead. Where you making for?’
‘Boswell.’
‘Going to the show?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where you from?’
‘Melbourne.’
‘Melbourne, eh! I dunno … Sydney is a very nice place but as I say the streets are too narrow. Now Adelaide is beautiful. The streets are nice and wide. Some people might like Melbourne but I dunno …’
He paused and looked sourly at the ground. ‘Bugger Melbourne anyway. What did you say you did for a crust?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘Well, all right. What’s your lurk?’
‘I pick up a quid or two writing articles for the papers.’
‘Well you must be a liar,’ he said smiling.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘Course you wouldn’t. Want your fortune told?’
‘No.’
‘Aw well,’ he said resignedly. ‘You can’t pick up a mug every day. Education’s ruining this country.’ He nodded towards the man at the fire. ‘Ask Albert. He’s as cranky as they come.’
‘Mad as a snake,’ agreed Albert mildly. His interest was in the contents of the billy.
We camped together until the day before the show. I learnt that the older man went under the name of ‘Roman’.
‘He’s never stopped roamin’,’ Albert explained.
Albert was his son. He must have been in his twenties but he only looked eighteen to me. He had sandy hair and a freckled face with intensely blue eyes that looked steadily at one with uncritical interest. They seemed to be laughing even when his expression was serious. He laughed a lot but always silently with his head back and his eyes closed.
Laughter without sound seemed incomplete to me. It turned his laughter into an ironical comment rather than an expression of happiness.
Yet he was a happy man. His relationship with his father was one of affectionate tolerance, though they were always abusing each other. Their frequent arguments and disagreements supplied colour and life to an existence that could have been flat and dull, and supplied reason for expressing a sense of humour based on cynicism that kept their minds from becoming inert.
Roman’s oft-repeated claim that Albert was mad was based on the fact that Albert had no ambition. Not only that, he refused to spruik before Roman’s tent or learn to tell fortunes. He was content to rig and dismantle the tent, do the cooking and look after the car.
He liked observing people and speculating on the reasons for man’s existence. He loved looking at the moon and the stars and would study an ants’ nest for hours. He professed absurd beliefs, then would watch my face to see my reaction.
‘Do you reckon your brain governs you?’ he asked me one day.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Have you got a spirit in you, like?’
Roman who was stitching a bright, fortune-telling garment near by raised his head at this. ‘You’ve got as much spirit in you as that bloody stone,’ he said.
‘My old man,’ said Albert confidentially, ‘is frightened of spirits. He won’t face up to them.’
‘Be damned to that!’ said Roman loudly.
‘What I mean …’ went on Albert. ‘It comes out of you when you die. Like smoke. You know.’ He raised his hand upwards, fluttering it like a moth. ‘Like that.’
‘I don’t believe in it,’ I said.
‘How did man start then?’
‘He was once a primitive being,’ I explained. ‘He lived in caves and was covered in hair. Some of his paintings are on the walls of caves in northern Spain. He was a hunter and killed animals for food. We gradually evolved from creatures like th
at.’
‘I’ve heard about this springing from monkeys but I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Adam and Eve now. You can’t toss them out of it.’
‘Of course I can,’ I said. ‘That’s an allegory.’
‘A what?’
‘An allegory.’
‘I don’t give a damn what it is; you’ve still got to bring them into it.’
‘There were no such people,’ I persisted.
‘Well all right,’ he said. ‘Let them go. Now what are we here for?’
‘That’s up to us. I’ve got to make up my mind whether I’m here to try and get that watch you have on your wrist or give you mine.’
‘Go on!’ he exclaimed smiling. ‘What have you decided?’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘That’s not all I can do. I might think I’m here to give you five bob for your watch on condition I always tell you the time when you want to know it.’
‘Yair. But what about my old man? He wants to know the time too. I always tell him. But now I haven’t got a watch; you’ve got it.’
‘Right. For an extra bob from him I’ll always tell him the time too. I’ll get a monopoly on watches and tell the time to everyone who gives me their watch for five bob. I’ll build a tower and shout the time from the top of it. And then blokes with money will begin paying me to shout the wrong time so that the people working for them won’t know when to knock off. It’ll get that way that no one knows the right time.’
‘It gets dark you know,’ said Albert. ‘They’d go by that.’
‘That’s when they’d wake up to me,’ I said, ‘when I started shouting midday in the middle of the night. They’d declare war on me, then I’d fill my guns with watches and fire them at people I pinched them from. You’d probably get killed with your own watch.’
‘Is that what we’re here for?’
‘No, I never said that.’
‘What are we here for then?’
‘I’d like everyone to own his own watch so they would always know the right time,’ I said. ‘There’d be no wars then.’
He poked at the ground with a stick then looked at me half-smiling. ‘You don’t think I’ve followed you, do you?’
In Mine Own Heart Page 21
