The Fighter Read online

  PRAISE FOR ARNOLD ZABLE

  ‘Arnold Zable is a writer who turns the unnoticed and the overlooked into something fine and lustrous.’ Courier-Mail

  ‘A master storyteller.’ Australian Book Review

  ‘His ability to see the beauty in the ordinary in a world obsessed with the extraordinary informs every aspect of Zable’s writing.’ Australian

  ‘The essential combined genius of Zable is that he can find a story of universal interest and tell it in such a way that it commands universal attention.’ Australian Jewish News

  ‘No one writes about the immigrant experience in Australia quite like Arnold Zable…His books have an ethereal, myth-like quality, complete with beautifully lilting prose and near-tangible warmth.’ Big Issue

  ‘Years of reflection and his own life experiences have contributed to the mastery with which Zable explores the themes of displacement, loss, nostalgia and homecoming in all of his books.’ Canberra Times

  ‘Zable’s vision is ultimately optimistic and affirming.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ALSO BY ARNOLD ZABLE

  Jewels and Ashes

  Wanderers and Dreamers

  Café Scheherazade

  The Fig Tree

  Scraps of Heaven

  Sea of Many Returns

  Violin Lessons

  Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller, educator and human rights advocate. He lives in Melbourne.

  arnoldzable.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Arnold Zable 2016

  The moral right of Arnold Zable to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2016.

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Text design by Jessica Horrocks

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication

  Creator:Zable, Arnold, author.

  Title:The fighter : a true story / by Arnold Zable.

  ISBN:9781925355062 (paperback)

  ISBN:9781922253637 (ebook)

  Subjects: Nissen, Henry.

  Nissen, Henry—Family.

  Boxers (Sports)—Australia—Biography.

  Youth workers—Australia—Biography.

  Social workers—Australia—Biography.

  Dewey Number: 796.83092

  Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

  A long ways from home

  AFRICAN-AMERICAN SPIRITUAL

  And that road was long—long—long amidst the

  Solemn and crystal

  Stillness

  Of Siberia’s earth.

  ANNA AKHMATOVA,

  ‘POEM WITHOUT A HERO’

  To the mothers of the neighbourhood

  1

  So it’s come to this. Sixty-seven years old and he labours on the docks. Cropped grey-white beard, ex-boxer’s pug nose, he is stocky, rotund and short. His strength is sensed rather than seen, belied by age and excess weight. Henry Nissen exudes vigour. His life force is strong. It animates his gestures, powers his determined walk.

  Thirty-five years he’s spent on the streets supporting wayward youths: he’s vouched for them in court, lugged furniture to their homes, and accompanied them on hunts for jobs. He is on alert at all times, a doctor of sorts, his mobile within reach, ever ready for a call—from a pregnant teenager on crack, a family ripping itself apart, a kid on a bender stumbling in the dark—but the meagre wage he was paid for street work has long run out, so it’s dock work he’s turned to now to make ends meet.

  He drives to the port in a yellow Hyundai. Victoria Dock, South Wharf and Yarraville Dock are all on his beat. Tonight it’s Appleton Dock—the night shift, eleven till dawn. He’s hired as a general, a labourer in layman’s terms, and a casual at that.

  He loves it. What choice does he have? He delights in the camaraderie, the company of his workmates. And they love him, this gnome of an ex-pro who fought some of his most famous bouts not far from where he now works: two kilometres give or take—at the West Melbourne Stadium, also known as Festival Hall, locked away in industrial streets within walking distance of the port, evoking the ghosts of fights long past: the scent of liniment and sweat in the change rooms beneath the cavernous hall, and the long descent to the ring, running the gauntlet of a baying crowd.

  Henry Nissen was once ranked number three in the world and offered a title bout, and was also once, along with Leon, his identical twin, the smallest and skinniest kid on the block. And because they were the smallest and skinniest, they were the ones who copped it most: two scrawny Jew-boys, easy beats, relegated to the lowest status of the schoolyard and the hierarchy of the street.

  For a time Henry took shelter in numbers, running with members of the pack. He made his way to the city to meet them, a quarter-hour tram ride from home, via Lygon Street. They took him in, this little goer, who would prove handy in a stoush.

  They huddled in each other’s company, and spent nights hanging out, buoyed by the reflections of streetlights, and the companionship of city life. They loitered on street corners, on the footpath fronting the town hall, and on the steps beneath the station clocks—on the lookout for strangers they were certain they could beat.

  They chased them for the thrill of the hunt, and laid into them for the sheer pleasure, the thwack of knuckle on flesh. It was never one-on-one, never an even fight, just some poor bugger on his own, easy pickings for the pack. It was, Henry soon realised, the same old cowardly set up, the mob dominating the weak.

  Henry took to warning potential victims. He once jumped from a bus when he saw his mates cornering two younger boys. The sight made him feel sick. He didn’t wait for the bus to stop. He doubled back. Stood in front of the distraught boys. Offered to fight in their place.

  The leader was impressed at Henry’s cheek. Besides, he knew him, and you did not turn on your own. He shrugged his shoulders and ordered his mates off. Henry had prevented a bashing, but his time with the pack had run its course.

  There must be a better option, he reckoned.

  He was an Amess Street boy and, as luck would have it, Peter Read—ex-Australian middleweight champ, newly retired—lived in the same street, on the very same block. He lived there, in a double-storey terrace, with his father, Mick, and with his wife, Merle, and their growing brood of kids. 1962. He’d set himself up as a trainer and was taking on a few select boys.

  Henry knocks on the side-lane door.

  ‘I want to learn how to fight.’

  Mick lowers his eyes to Henry’s height. ‘You’re too small and too skinny. Grow taller, put on weight.’

  Henry returns the next night: ‘I want to learn how to fight…’

  Henry persists.

  Read relents. Invites him in. Puts him through his paces. Thinks, he’s got a bit of talent, this kid. And his tenacity’s a great plus.

  So the story goes.

  Perhaps the Reads sense something else: a restless energy, a wound not yet declared. They do not know what goes on in Henry’s house, the rage that courses through the single-fronted cottage half a block away, a minute-and-a-half’s walk. They have no idea of the woman bereft, in terror of shadows and ghosts.

&n
bsp; To this day Henry is reluctant to recall that. Far better, he reckons, to reflect on what he loves most—his salvation in a backyard gym.

  Peter and Mick see a ferocious will that can be honed, a boy desperate to please and a quick learner at that. And they will get two for the price of one.

  Leon knew something was up. Henry was avoiding him, keeping his mouth shut. He was on a secret mission, vanishing at odd hours.

  Leon follows him one afternoon after school. He does not let him out of sight. Henry tries to lose him. He leads him on a circuitous route to Princes Park, round Cemetery Road, doubling back to Elgin Street, via the university grounds. They are kilometres from home.

  The little bugger ducks down back lanes, and through the rubbish dump off Curtain Square; he finds a path through wild grasses littered with abandoned couches and cars. He cuts through neighbourhood parks and vacant lots, and darts along the median strip gracing Canning Street; weaves between the poplars and palms, and the veranda poles of corner shops. He rounds entire blocks—to no avail. Leon sticks to him the entire distance.

  Henry is late for training. He has no choice but to front up. Leon stays resolutely with him, as he makes his way along Amess Street to the Reads’ house. He is with him as Henry raps on the side-lane door.

  ‘Dad, come quickly, there’s two of them,’ Peter exclaims.

  It doesn’t take Peter long to discover that Leon too possesses sharp wits, and a strong desire to climb out of the muck.

  Years later Henry retains those traits. They have stood him in good stead—allowed him to wield influence, and make lifelong friends. Enabled him to prise open new doors when old jobs came to an end.

  It was a contact of Father Bob, the renegade priest, who recommended him for the docks, and it was ‘The Shark’ who taught him the ropes. Taught him how to lash bundles of timber and steel piping—how to tie them together with nylon straps—and how to chain them to a spreader and attach the load to the crane. Taught him how to secure machinery to the berths and how to unhook them from the deck. He had advised him to obtain a forklift and semi driver’s licence; and told him to look out for his mates, and keep his wits about him at all times.

  Henry can be assigned to the hold to steady the load and guide it into place as it is jibbed down from the deck or to steady it as it is lowered, unhooking it as it settles on the wharf. Either way, it’s dangerous work. Ask the Shark. Ask anyone who has worked on the docks. Ask Henry and he’ll tell you about the night he was lucky not to lose his life.

  The Shark was the foreman on duty that night, supervising from the deck: instructing the crane driver with hand signals to lower the arm of the crane to the wharf where Henry was waiting, hunched over, preparing to hook up the next load.

  The arm was poised over Henry’s head. His feet were planted either side of the load and his back was turned to the boat when he made the wrong move. He stepped backwards, and disappeared into the crevice between hull and wharf. He fell three metres, landing in the strip of water by the boat. Just one slight surge of tide and one lurch of the hull and, curtains, he would have been crushed.

  He’d fractured a shoulder, and he fought to stay afloat. Weighed down by work boots and winter woollens, he grabbed a pylon, but slid off and floundered between wharf and boat.

  ‘Where the fuck are you?’ yelled the Shark.

  ‘Going for a swim,’ Henry croaked.

  The Shark was sizing it up. The gang rushed to his side. They hurled down a lifebuoy. Henry dog-crawled after it, but it eluded his grasp. A ladder was lowered and the foreman climbed down. Jeff Gray was his name. Henry clung to him, and Jeff hauled him back onto the wharf.

  A year later Jeff would be gone. He was guiding a container from the wharf onto the deck above the hold. Just one metre out was all it took: and he was crushed between containers and fell thirty metres into the hatch, headfirst onto the steel floor.

  Henry was working in an adjoining hold. He heard the commotion and raced to Jeff’s side. He helped lift him onto a stretcher, hooked it to the crane and lowered it to the wharf.

  The crew laid out the body with a stoic tenderness—as if administering last rites—contemplating death, a bloodless face in an eerie light.

  2

  We sit in the Port Diner, a low-slung aluminium prefab that sells basic fare—schnitzels, sausages, hamburgers and chips, potato cakes, lasagna, souvlaki and grilled steaks—heavy meals for hungry men of muscle and bulk. With donuts, rice pudding, and vanilla slices for dessert, washed down with coffee and coke.

  Ten minutes from the dock, the diner is a truckies’ haven, a wharfies’ retreat accommodating the twenty-four-hour-a-day movement of rigs to and from the port. Dwarfed by freeway overpasses, towering billboards, electricity pylons and vast parking bays, it is easily missed, except by those in the know. It stands with a minimum of fuss in a desolate space—a gravelly no-man’s-land where the work that keeps the city oiled goes on day and night.

  Henry is holding court. His thinning hair is combed forward over his balding pate. His complexion is ruddy, his nose spread flat: ‘Hit many times over,’ he quips, ‘by the best fighters in the world.’

  He hunches over a notebook and draws diagrams of the mechanics of dock work. He makes sure I get it right. Blow by blow he recalls his most famous fights, and the perils of life on the wharves.

  One memory begets another: the night Roscoe was down in the hold signalling to the crane driver just as the Shark had been signalling the night Henry fell. Roscoe was guiding a load of thirty-foot pipes strapped to the hook. An end of a pipe got caught as it was hauled from the boat, and Roscoe was crushed between pipe and hull. Dead by the time Henry and his workmates arrived.

  Within weeks of his own fall Henry was back, his shoulder barely healed. Work insurance had done its job, but the coffers were emptying. He needed the work. This is how it remains twenty years after he first stepped onto the docks. He rings each afternoon to see if there’s any work up for grabs—sunrise till mid-afternoon, afternoon till eleven, all-night from eleven till dawn—any shift will do.

  Here’s the routine: Henry arrives at the wharves in his yellow Hyundai. He is dressed in his work clothes—blue overalls, a yellow hard-hat, steel-capped boots and a fluoro jacket with horizontal stripes. He pulls up in the workers’ car park and takes his kit from the boot. He heads to security in the gatehouse by the barbed cyclone fence; chats to the officer on duty as he signs in and receives his pass.

  He knows them all—the customs officers, the security staff, the stevedores who have finished their shifts, and those who are signing on for the next—and they know him. They know he can be relied on, and that he bears no one any ill will; know he is up for a joke, a bit of a ribbing, a yarn in the mess hall.

  He makes his way from the gatehouse to D shed, a spacious storage hold. The shed is spread with imported cars and tractors, bobcats, mini-excavators and four-wheel drives, lined up side by side like soldiers on an assembly ground. All is clean and orderly—the floors swept, the chains and hooks stored in steel bins. By the wall stands a row of forklifts awaiting the next shift. Tarpaulins and cables are on hand, neatly stacked. The goods are easily accessed, amply spaced.

  There’s been a takeover and the company is in new hands. What does it matter? As long as there’s work.

  Henry climbs the steel steps to the upper landing and makes his way into the mess hall. They call it the toolbox, this pre-work drill. The gang is ready and waiting, mugs of coffee in hand. The supervisor issues instructions, and the foreman delegates individual tasks. Then it’s out to the boat—could be a Bass Strait trader, a tanker, a cargo ship. Could be an ocean-going freighter from some far-flung corner of the globe.

  Tonight it’s a roll-on roll-off freighter, a ro-ro for short. Henry climbs into the hatch, like a Jonah entering the belly of the whale. The jaws open, and from them emerges a flotilla of farm machinery, train carriages, trucks and semi-trailers, unlashed from their moorings on the multiple tiers of decks.
The polished ducos glint beneath floodlights mounted on steel poles. Henry stands on the ramp, directing the drivers to the shed and beyond to a vast parking lot. The crew returns to the boat for the next run. Viewed from a distance, the procession resembles a file of ants.

  It is the best time—the dead of night. All is reduced to the sound of work: the rumble of trucks, the murmur of water lapping against the wharves, and the shrieks of seagulls circling, swooping from dock to boat, or perched on the riggings and sheds.

  An arc of blue and red lamps on the Bolte Bridge reflects in the water below. Trains depart from the terminus trailing heavy freight, like ghost riders in the dark. Over at Patrick Wharf, mobile straddles, their steel jaws clamped on containers, move between freighter and dock.

  Henry stops for a breather. He stretches his arms. Then unscrews his thermos, pours a coffee and watches his frosted breath. His eyes focus on the city lights. The breeze flares up from the river and he inhales the scent of the sea mixed with diesel and damp.

  Midnight party boats pass by. Laughter evaporates into the night. The stars are all but extinguished by the city lights. Henry rests for a while, here where city meets river, upstream from the bay. He senses the vastness of the metropolis, registers its pulse. He is distracted. Disarmed.

  Mum, poor girl, he whispers. Mum, poor girl.

  Her image flits through his mind. It can appear at any time. It catches him now, off guard, out in the open in the depths of the night.

  3

  She lies on the living room sofa. Her eyes are closed, and her hands rest in her lap, there’s a pillow under her head. Her chest rises with her breath. She is blessedly at rest.

  Henry and Leon are eight years old. They stand in the doorway, unsure whether to approach or let her be. Both boys long to touch her, and be touched.

  Leon makes the first move. He tiptoes over the linoleum. It crackles. He pauses. Her breathing remains steady, but he knows how abruptly it can change. He resumes his steps. At some indefinable point he crosses the threshold. He is within reach.