Shadowboxing

by Tony Birch

  I slammed another fist into George’s face. He fell onto his back. The momentum of the punch carried me over the top of his body. I landed on his chest and continued to punch into his body.

  ‘I hate you! I fucken hate your guts! I hate you!’

  Finally, my father moved in to separate us, dragging me away from George, laughing wildly as he did so.

  ‘Hey there, Michael. Hey there, mate. Steady up. Take it easy on him. You’re a fucken animal.’

  As I got to my feet I pushed my father away from me. He fell back onto his arse and began laughing hysterically to himself. I was covered in blood and dust. I ran from the yard and into the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the table. She looked up at me. There were tears smeared across her face.

  I ran through the hallway, onto the verandah and out into the street. Katie was still on the footpath, skipping. She stopped for a moment and watched me as I ran past her. I kept on running, across the road and around the corner and across the wasteland where the streets and houses of the suburb were gradually being demolished. I ran until a sheet of iron half-buried in the rubble tripped me up.

  I fell, and stayed where I was, in the dirt.

  The Butcher’s Wife

  I was on my way home on the last day of the school year when I saw her. I was coming out of the corner shop just as she was going in, carrying her baby under her arm. I caught only a glimpse of her face as we passed each other, but I noticed it immediately. I didn’t really want to look, yet I found it just as hard to look away from her.

  Her bruises were probably less than a week old and any swelling that she may have suffered had gone. And there were no obvious cuts. She had done a reasonably good job disguising the mottled blue-yellow patches around her eyes with a heavy foundation of powder. It was probably the same one my mum used.

  But the layers of make-up never quite did the job. The shadows under the surface always managed to give themselves away. I had seen the same shadows around my mother’s eyes as she waited for me after school, on the opposite side of the road from the gate.

  I took a final look at the butcher’s wife. She looked back at me. I am still not sure why, but I smiled at her. She lowered her eyes, at her crying baby, while rocking her awkwardly up and down. It was then that I noticed that there was some swelling and a small cut above one eye — a small curved cut. That would have happened when she was hit by the edge of his wedding ring. I had also seen that before.

  Her battered face would have surprised no one in the street. It was common to hear her screams coming from their house, accompanied by the swearing and abuse of her husband. In the following days the results of his handiwork would be displayed all over her face for the entire street to see.

  He wasn’t the only one who did that, of course. My father was the same. Most men around here, they were the same, most commonly after they had been drinking. But not my dad. He did not need the drink in him. And he gave no reasons either.

  More and more, he enjoyed using mum as an occasional punching bag. He had done that the last time when she was pregnant, and all because she was a half-hour late home from the shops to prepare his tea.

  I cannot remember seeing him hit her, that night, but I have not forgotten running into the kitchen, with Katie skipping behind me, and seeing her pinned to the floor beneath him. He had a knee wedged between her legs. Mum screamed at me to get Katie out of the room. I took her by the hand and we ran out and went to sit on the front doorstep together. All I could think about was that there was a baby just there, on the other side of my mother’s stomach, where he had forced his knee. I knew that because when my mother was pregnant with Katie I would lie on the bed with her and she would lift her dress and let me feel Katie kicking on the other side. And Katie had done the same with this baby.

  But this baby did not come. After that night my mother got sick. There were no more kicks to feel. The baby was gone.

  My father was not like the butcher. He did not need the drink in order to strike out. But it helped. Saturday night was his night of the week. It was when he was at his most unpredictable and destructive. On Sunday mornings we would assess the damage that he had left for us. He would sleep in, while Katie and I were sent off to mass, and mum cleaned the mess away.

  Behind closed doors along the street many women went through the same ritual as my mother: mending a broken vase and making up a blackened eye. And no one said a word about it. Years later my mother told me that after that he started hitting her she asked an older woman at work what she could do to stop him. She was told to stay out of his way as best she could. And other than that: ‘Get used to it, love. It passes as they get older. They get slower and soften with the years. Or if you’re real lucky, they drop dead.’

  The butcher was not close to softening. He was a hard man, with muscled arms to rival my father’s. He left early of a morning for work at the abattoir and did not get home of a night until after the pub had closed, just after six o’clock, ready to have a go at anyone.

  In summer I slept in the sleep-out on our verandah. I would often wake during the night to the cries of the butcher’s wife. I was never sure at first if the noise was coming from across the street or from my own house. It was not until I shook myself awake and trained my ear that I could go back to sleep, reassured that on this night it was not my mother who was being beaten.

  It was a warm night, between Christmas and New Year. The coming school year still seemed like a century away, and the factories had turned off their machines and closed their doors for the break. It was a time to relax. Except for my father, whose work on the road crew was at its busiest during the holiday season. He stayed inside the house alone, drinking in the kitchen.

  Almost everyone else had moved their lives into the street for the night in an effort to escape the heat of the narrow terraces. A radiogram up on the next corner was spinning rock’n’roll records. Lots of kids were out in the street playing under water hoses, while empty beer bottles were quickly mounting in a stack in the gutter.

  I was standing behind Katie, wearing only my bathers, running a gentle stream of water over her head with the hose as she sat splashing around in our tin laundry tub. I had one eye on Katie and the other on my mother. She had dragged a kitchen chair into the street and was straddled across it while brushing her hair. She was wearing her favourite floral-print dress. She looked beautiful.

  A breeze drifted down the middle of the street. It was lazy and sweet and warm. The sun was about to go down, but it did not look as if anybody was ready to give up on the street for the night. Katie jumped out of the trough and watched mum as she tossed her long, dark hair from side to side, catching the afterglow of the setting sun.

  It was then that we heard the screams. Instinctively I turned around and looked across the road towards the open door of the butcher’s house. Most everybody on the street did the same. I then heard a second scream followed by an inaudible bark from the butcher, and then the familiar thud of her body bouncing off a wall.

  She ran from the house and into the street. Her face was covered in blood. She lost her footing and fell over, into the gutter. She managed to get to her hands and knees just as the butcher emerged from the house. He was carrying a trouser belt in one hand. We could hear the baby crying from somewhere inside the house.

  The butcher’s wife looked up at him, but did not try to get to her feet. She did not move at all. She remained perfectly still, as if she were attempting to make herself invisible. The butcher walked out onto the footpath towards his wife and stood over her with hands on his hips. He then looked across the street to those of us watching.

  Even before he started hitting her with the belt, most people along the street were already collecting their kids under one arm and their chair in the other before disappearing inside and slamming their front doors behind them. Somebody had turned the radiogram off. I co
uld hear it being dragged back into the house.

  Each time that she tried to get to her feet the butcher whipped her with the trouser belt. I looked away and stared deeply into the floral pattern of my mother’s dress. Katie began to cry. My mother looked at her and then up and down the street before getting to her feet.

  She had taken only one step forward, in the direction of the butcher, when we heard his voice.

  ‘Come on inside.’ It was my father standing behind us.

  My mother did not move, so he repeated himself. ‘Come on in. It’s late. Get the kids in.’

  She looked at him pleadingly. She wanted him to do something, to intervene.

  ‘Mick, please.’

  He knew what she wanted. He looked across the road to the butcher. My father looked down at Katie, and then at my mother again.

  ‘It’s over, anyway. Come on in.’

  The butcher looked proud of himself as he stood in the street with the belt hanging from his hand. He puffed his chest out. His wife got to her hands and knees, and peered up and down the street through a veil of hair hanging over her eyes. She slowly got to her feet. Blood was running from both her nose and mouth. Her dress, also covered in blood, was ripped from one shoulder to below her waist. She was wearing a white bra. It was also smudged with blood.

  She wiped blood from her face with her forearm. She looked down at the blood smeared across her skin. She then spat more blood from her mouth into the gutter. It ran away with the water from some kid’s play-hose. The butcher’s wife then scanned the street, looking into the eyes of those who had just witnessed what had occurred.

  The butcher grabbed her by the arm and pushed her towards the house. She swung her arm at him and refused to move. It was only then that he looked uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed. He pushed her slightly in the back.

  ‘Get going.’

  She began to walk towards the house but then stopped again and looked over her shoulder at the street. We collectively looked the other way. She wiped her hand across her face one more time, and walked back into the house.

  I lay on my bunk in the sleep-out later that night, unable to sleep. Family arguments could be heard up and down the street. I finally got to sleep, but woke during the night to the sound of a stray cat’s purring. It had settled on the end of my bed. I was about to give it a good kick with the ball of my foot when I heard somebody walking by the house. I sat up in bed. The footsteps were followed by a second sound that I could not identify. I looked out through the louvre window. Someone was walking along the other side of the road towards Gertrude Street. It was the butcher’s wife. And she was pushing her pram. It looked as if she had finally decided to escape from her husband.

  I looked down to the end of the bed at the cat. It looked back at me through its one open eye. I let it stay there and fell back to sleep.

  I spent the next day at the Fitzroy pool, lying on the warmed concrete between swims. I walked home with Sab Tulio. We went to the same school and lived in the same street, but didn’t hang around together all that much. He played soccer, I played football, and his family kept to themselves, along with all of the other Italian families. I don’t know if I liked Sab all that much; I didn’t really know him well. But he was good company to walk home with. He could fight as well as any kid on the street so it was helpful to have him with you, just in case you ran into trouble.

  We stopped at Corrigan’s Ice Works along the way. A crowd had lined up with prams, handcarts, and even the occasional car, waiting to buy a block of ice, wrapped in hessian, for the family ice chest.

  While Sab waited out the front I went into the factory to get each of us a chip of ice, something cool to bite into on the way home. I came out with two large chunks of ice wrapped in my towel. I gave one to Sab and sucked furiously at mine as it quickly melted down my arms.

  We stopped at the corner of Young and Webb Streets. Sab’s father ran an espresso and gambling club on Brunswick Street, and he helped in the shop of a night, cleaning up mostly. He asked me if I wanted to come over to the club that night.

  ‘We can hang out in the back. You can help with the sweep. They drop a lot of small change on the floor. I make more out of that than the old man pays me, which is fucken nothing.’

  I knew that my father would not let me hang out at the club with Sab. He was always on about ‘fucken dagoes’ this and ‘dagoes’ that. But maybe I could give him a story.

  ‘Yeah, maybe Sab. I’ll see what I can do.’ We left each other at the street corner, going our separate ways.

  When I got home my father was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. He looked at me over the headlines.

  ‘Your mum’s at the fish and chip shop with Katie. They’ll be back soon.’ He went back to the paper.

  The kitchen was like an oven, so I sat in the yard with Katie as we ate our tea together. We could hear mum and dad sitting at the table, talking and laughing. I could not understand how she could sit there with him, seemingly enjoying his company. I looked over at Katie. She was watching a bird skip along the tightrope edge of the tin fence separating our place from the side street. It was quiet in the yard. There were few people on the street. After what had happened the previous night, most of them would have decided it was best to stay inside for a few days.

  Katie looked up as we heard the police siren whistling its way along Smith Street. Within a minute we heard a second siren, and then a third. It was not unusual to hear several police cars on the street at night, although it was a little uncommon for a Sunday night, when the hotels had been closed for the day.

  The next morning’s newspaper headlines provided the answer to the commotion of the night before. I walked into the kitchen and picked up the paper that my father had left on the table after leaving for work.

  headless body found in house at fitzroy — discovery by teenage boy.

  I was looking down at the photograph of a beaming Sab Tulio, being ‘interviewed by Detective John Webb outside a derelict block of land at the rear of a migrant café in Fitzroy’. I sat down at the table and pored over the details of the story. It read that the ‘thirteen-year-old youth, Sabino Tulio, discovered the headless and limbless body of a male person on a vacant allotment at the rear of a family restaurant in Brunswick Street’.

  The article went on to describe the body, ‘consisting of a torso, cut into several sections. The head, along with parts of the chest and abdomen are missing in addition to the arms and legs. A pair of size 34 trousers was located near the body.’

  The policeman leading the investigation, Senior Detective Jack MacInerney, informed reporters that ‘the body appeared to have been dismembered by a person with an acute knowledge of anatomy. The killer would also have had to have been quite strong as the body appeared to be quite large and would be difficult to transport to the allotment.’ In relation to the missing body parts Detective MacInerney speculated that ‘the killer may be keeping the head to delay its identification’.

  I re-read every word of the article as well as others on the inside pages of the paper. Leaving the paper on the table for mum, I quickly got dressed walked up the street to the double-storey terrace where Sab’s family rented two rooms. There were several news crews out the front of the house, waiting for somebody to come out and speak with them. But except for the Russian woman who rented the front room on the ground floor, not one resident left the house to greet the wall of photographers.

  Over the next few days the surrounding streets remained on a knife-edge. There were several body parts yet to be located, and a series of rumours, substituting for a lack of genuine information, quickly circulated around the streets. Some suspected that the dissected body was that of a gang member. The claim was that local gunnies had rid themselves of one of their opposition. A ‘forensic expert’ from the University of Melbourne informed the nightly televisi
on news that he believed a ‘thrill killer’ had been responsible for the killing. ‘The Black Hand’ were also prominent suspects, particularly as the partial corpse had been dumped behind an Italian gambling joint. The tension only increased with the discovery of the remaining body parts, with the exception of the head, three days after the initial finding.

  There were no sirens this time, and the police managed to keep the discovery quiet long enough so that an additional frenzy of rumours hit the street at around the same time as the headlines of the afternoon papers. The front page of the Herald led with the story of the grim discovery in fitzroy body puzzle.

  The paper now stated that a worker at a mattress factory in Little Charles Street reported a ‘noxious smell emanating from a disused stables in the rear of the factory ... On entering the stables a senior constable discovered the fly-blown sections of a corpse, being the arms and legs.’

  It was also reported that the glass face of a watch found on the left wrist of the body was full of water and had stopped at twenty past eleven. Additionally, ‘the putrid smell and state of the body indicate that it had been dumped at the stables during the previous two to three days, with decomposition being in an advanced state due to the recent extremes in temperature’.

  The last of the street gossip was put to rest later that same night. It was another warm evening and a few people were out on the street, although no one appeared to be in a similar party mood to the previous Saturday night. Sab was enjoying his celebrity status, standing out front of his place holding court despite the disapproving gaze of his mother, who was watching him from the first floor balcony.

  We all heard the sirens again, our eyes following the police cars as they entered our street from opposite directions. They came to a screaming halt facing each other in the middle of the street, between our place and the butcher’s house.