The Winning Side

by Peter Corris

  ‘Gidday, Charlie’, Tony rasped. ‘Got a smoke?’

  I rolled a cigarette and pushed it through the mesh. An inch of it came back through the wire, the other end was held in his puffy, blueish lips. I lit it.

  ‘Thanks. How’s everyone at home?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You haven’t said how well I’m lookin’.’

  ‘You look bloody awful. What’s happened to you?’

  ‘I’ve been crook’, he said. ‘Tried a hunger strike, didn’t work.’

  ‘That’ll be enough of that, Moondi’, the guard said.

  Tony put his cigarette in his mouth and spoke around it.

  ‘Remember any of the language, Charlie?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Neither do I. This bastard probably wouldn’t let us talk it anyhow.’

  We said a few childish words, and the guard leaned closer to listen. My temper went and I pushed my chair back.

  ‘Listen you’, I snarled. I’ve got a paper here that says private visit. Fuck off!’

  ‘I don’t leave this room.’

  ‘Then get over in the bloody corner and stop flapping your ears.’

  He flushed, and was ready to reply when Tony spoke up.

  ‘I hear you’re matey with Bill Oliver, Charlie?’

  ‘Right’, I said.

  The guard scowled and moved back a few feet; I sat down and swivelled my chair so that all he could see of me was the back of my head.

  Tony grinned. ‘Good on you. ‘Course, I’ll probably get a bashin’ for it.’

  ‘Shit! I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Way it is in here.’ He kept the cigarette squarely in the middle of his mouth like a circus performer waiting for it to be shot away. His mouth scarcely moved when he spoke.

  ‘Well, Charlie?’

  ‘You know why I’m here, Tony.’

  ‘I can guess.’ The cigarette jiggled, and ash dropped off it. His voice was a whisper.

  ‘Don’t be in it.’

  He laughed, the guard looked up sharply, then away. ‘I’m the leader’, he said.

  ‘You’re a mug then. How d’you reckon I heard about it?’

  His mouth twisted ironically around the butt. ‘Someone must’ve thought you might help. But you was always out for number one, Charlie.’

  We sat quietly for a while. He could say what he liked, I felt very close to him. ‘They’ll kill you’, I said.

  ‘Look at me. I’ve got ten years to do. They’re killing me now.’

  ‘One minute’, the guard said.

  ‘We’re goin’ tomorrow, Charlie. See you around. Give us another smoke.’

  I rolled it, poked it through, our fingers touched. His skin was hard and shiny, like enamel.

  I said good luck, and he pushed his chair back and shuffled away. The guard and I went back through all the doors and devices of the big cage.

  ‘He reckons he’s got ten years to do’, I said. ‘How come? He’s done eight of twenty. Nobody serves twenty.’

  ‘He will’, the guard said. ‘He’s picked up more along the way. He’s an animal, I don’t think he’ll ever get out.’

  They called me a taxi from the office; I had to pay for the call and for the taxi — both ways. I thought about what the guard had said on the drive back to town. It was Bert Sargent who’d whispered in my ear about Tony coming out of Marsden the short way. He’d done it as we were going out after the Dupas-Mazzinghi fight, which was a good fight.

  Bert has served time almost everywhere for almost everything, and the one matter he’s an expert on is prisons. This was a few months back; it takes time to arrange to see an intractable prisoner, and when I’d seen Bert again he’d told me that the break was soon. But I’d been bluffing when I tried to make Tony anxious about his security—Bert was safe.

  So there I was, in Marsden, knowing the break was on and wondering what to do. Tony didn’t have any money so far as I knew, and I never heard of a successful prison break without it. Sometimes they break them out to do a job or a series of jobs, but I couldn’t see that in Tony’s case. Before that one bad night the only shooting he’d ever done had been at rabbits.

  Back in town I had a few beers and wandered about; the town moved along at a slow, steady pace but there seemed to be a slight grimness about it. Maybe it was the presence of the gaol, maybe it was my imagination. I ended up at the local newspaper office yarning to a sub-editor, a fellow worker. We went to the pub, and I asked him what he knew about the gaol.

  ‘Not a thing’, he said.

  ‘Paper ever do a story on it?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Just interested. I visited someone out there today. It looked like a real shit-hole to me.’

  His name was Clive Allen; he had the desk man’s beer belly and the journós tired, suspicious mind. ‘It’s not meant to be Luna Park’, he said.

  ‘Do they bash them?’

  ‘Lets talk about something else.’

  ‘All right. What’s there to see around here? I don’t want to go back to Sydney with the sight and smell of that place in my head.’

  ‘Good scenery up river. You could go down the coast too—beaches are worth a look.’

  The following day I hired a Holden and drove around; I looked at the scenery up river and at the beaches. I looked at the mines and the roads, and the whole time I was wondering how the hell Tony planned to get clear of the area. The roads were out; they could block them quick and easy—it had to be the river. The main road was back from the river a mile or so, but there were dirt tracks leading down to it every couple of miles. I bought a map of the district and plotted the shortest course from the gaol to the river. I drove down the lumpy, over-grown track to where the remains of a wooden jetty stuck out into the water. A humpy stood a little way back in the scrub; it looked as if it had been built with scraps from the ruined jetty. I got out of the car and made a cigarette. A thin, dark man, darker than me, sauntered across from the humpy.

  ‘Gidday’, I said.

  He nodded.

  I pointed with my cigarette at the worm-eaten piles and cross timbers. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Ferry wharf, long time back.’ He got out a packet of Craven A and a lighter, and lit up. His clothes were old and worn like himself and carried oily stains. I could smell fresh beer on his breath.

  ‘You lookin’ for someone?’

  ‘No, just having a look around. Came up from Sydney to get away from the smoke for a bit.’

  ‘Yeah? Where you from?’

  I said Queensland, and mentioned that I had some people on the north coast. I gave him a few names and he nodded at some of them. I didn’t mention the Moondis, and he didn’t give his name. He didn’t give me a cup of tea either, and I could feel his discomfort. I wandered down to the water, squatted, squinted about a bit, and straightened up. He had another cigarette going.

  ‘Nice country’, I said. ‘Well, better get back.’

  He stood in the middle of the track and watched me out of sight. When I’d rounded a few bends I stopped, and sat in the car thinking. The dark, tarpaulin-covered shape under the old ferry wharf had rocked gently up and down in the water, and the stains on the custodian’s clothes were from diesel fuel.

  That left me with a full hand for the role of police informer and I could rationalise that by saying that I’d be doing Tony a favour by stopping the break-out. I couldn’t do it of course: everything, the blood, the code, more than thirty years’ suspicion of the people, was against it. I couldn’t help in any way either: if it was planned right any interference could screw it up, and if it wasn’t well planned it’d be a dangerous shambles. All I could do was watch.

  In town I bought a torch and some batteries, a couple of packets of cigarettes, matches and a bottle of whisky. I stood outside a sporting goods store, looking at the armoury and thinking, Christ. I hope there won’t be any guns. I didn’t h
ave a drink all day and I felt edgy and strained when I drove out of town at around eight p.m. I took the road that went close to the river, turned down the track, but pulled off it into the bush after a couple of hundred yards. It was a nice night, with a light wind and a moon. With the help of the moon and a few flashes of the torch I picked my way carefully through the bush to a point a little up the river from the ruined jetty. The bank stuck out in a slight promontory into the stream: I had a good view of the wharf, the boat and the humpy.

  There was no one around, no fire, no smoke, no coughing. I settled down to wait and risked a couple of cigarettes, carefully cupped. It got cooler and darker when the clouds came over; I had a couple of nips of the whisky. The bush hummed and scraped and scratched itself around me and I remembered the river bank in Queensland that had been home. I suppose I was hoping I’d see Tony come loping out of the bush, hop into the boat and go up the river to freedom.

  It wasn’t like that. He came out of the bush, but he was bent over, coughing and dragging one leg. He collapsed twice, the second time the top half of him went into the water and I had to run down and get him out. I dragged him up the bank and my hands came away sticky with his blood. He looked up at me and coughed as if his insides were coming up. Blood trickled out of his mouth.

  ‘Charlie’, he said. ‘They shot me.’

  ‘Is it bad, Tony?’

  ‘It’s everywhere, leg, guts everywhere. Jesus.’

  ‘Where’re your mates?’

  ‘Split up outside, I think they shot one. Monty, I think … Oh, Christ.’

  ‘Easy, I’ve got a car a mile away. I’ll get it, get you to a doctor.’ He touched my arm and stopped me.

  ‘No, Charlie, please, I can’t go back. Please.’

  ‘You’ll die.’

  ‘I know. It’s all right. It’s not too bad. It won’t be long.’ I shone the torch on him long enough to show that he was right: his shirt was open and there were black punctures in his abdomen from bullets that had gone in there and a great chunk of his thigh was blown away where one had come out. His back had to be a mess, and the blood welling out and soaking the earth said so.

  ‘I feel weak’, he said. ‘Hurts, but it’s not so bad … just gettin’ weak.’

  ‘I’ve got some whisky. I’ll get it.’

  I ran for the whisky and the cigarettes; the cloud cleared and I could see Tony’s face plainly when I got back. It seemed to be folded and crumpled, and one of his ears was half shot away. I filled the bottle cap with whisky and tipped half of it into his mouth; he held it and then let it trickle down.

  ‘Shit. That’s good. More.’

  I gave him more and lit him a cigarette, he tried to draw on it but couldn’t.

  ‘Leave it in me mouth, I like the smell. Did you grow up by a river, Charlie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me too. Sorry I said you were a selfish bastard, sorry …’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Sorry. Put me in the river, Charlie.’

  I gave him more whisky and kept on giving it to him until he died.

  I smoked and drank whisky and looked at him until I didn’t need to look anymore. I stripped naked and carried him across to the boat; he used to be a good weight Tony, an amateur middleweight, but he felt more like a lightweight now. There were metal jerry cans on the boat, heavy with fuel. I passed a length of clothes line I found behind the humpy through the handles of the cans and wound it around Tony. I poled the boat out into the middle of the river and put him in the water. I washed the blood off the boat and myself, put the boat back and set off back to my car. I drank whisky as I went, and felt pretty light-headed when I got back. I put my hand on the door and a voice shouted ‘Don’t move!’ from the darkness. I flashed the torch; and there was a bang and something hit me in the chest, and I went down. I heard the bottle break.

  When the police found that I was going to mend up all right, they started in on me in long, exhaustive sessions. What was I doing there? Where was Tony? How far up the river had I taken him? Where was the money? Who else was in it? Where was the gun? I told them nothing but it was hard going, repeating that I’d gone out into the bush for a quiet drink and saying ‘No’, ‘No’ and ‘I don’t know’ over and over again. They had bloodstained tracks to the river and nothing else; they knew I was lying but they had nothing on me. When I made threats about a legal action for being shot while unarmed and minding my own business an uneasy, unspoken pact developed. Eventually, they left me alone. I was told my hospital bill would be paid. Another escapee was dead and a third was back in custody. Anthony John Moondi was presumed dead. Case closed.

  I was in the Marsden hospital for almost a month while the ribs and flesh healed. Bill Oliver visited me, no one else. Rolly Meares wrote from the News to say that my job was still waiting. My flat in Bondi was waiting.

  I got off the train at Kempsey and caught a bus and walked until I got to the mission on the Macleay river where Tony’s mother lived. My relationship to the Moondis was through my mother to her and we got that straightened out over tea and stale cake. She was dark and fat, and had been jolly once. She cried as I told her what had happened, but she said she was glad I’d been there.

  ‘Did you bury him?’ Something urgent in the way she said it made me lie.

  ‘Yes, I buried him.’

  ‘That’s good’, she sobbed. ‘That’s good. I had two kids drowned in the river. I wouldn’t like to think of him in the river.’

  Office of the Chief Secretary of

  New South Wales

  11 November 1954

  Mr Charles Thomas

  11 Rose St.

  Chippendale NSW

  Dear Mr Thomas,

  This is to notify you that your application to be licenced as a trainer/manager of professional prize fighters has been approved. Your guarantors have been notified and further correspondence respecting your obligations under the Worker’s Compensation Act and other statutes will be forwarded from this office.

  Yours faithfully,

  V.E. Thornton

  (for the Chief Secretary)

  4

  ‘THE trouble with come-backs, Speedy’, I said, ‘is that they don’t work.’

  ‘That’s bull’, he cut in. ‘Look at Bert Spargo and that Stumpy Butwell.’

  ‘Statistically, I was going to say. Statistically, they don’t work. That’s two, look at all the rest.’

  Speedy scratched the scarred skin above his left eye. ‘I still reckon I can do it, Charlie. Spargo and Butwell—they won titles.’

  ‘All right.’ I could feel myself starting to get impatient, and that was no way to handle Speedy. ‘All right, let’s look at Spargo and Butwell. Little men, mate, feather and fly, that makes a difference. And they came back in the same division, you’d be a lightweight coming back as what? A welter? It’s an old story, Speedy, it’s got disaster written all over it.’

  He smiled then and I knew that I’d lost the argument. We were sitting on a bench in Henry Gallagher’s gym in Chippendale; it was late afternoon and the boys were drifting in from work for training. Most of them were labourers and they didn’t need to warm up; they put their togs on and got straight into it. I could remember the feeling, starting tired, getting a second wind and finishing flattened. It was a good feeling, and probably only boxers had it. Speedy had asked me to meet him there, and as I was working at night and had nothing much to do at that time of day but drink, I agreed. I wasn’t too happy about being around boxers again, though. It reminded me too much of the old travelling life before the war and some of the ups and downs since then. I was settling for a quiet life—a night job in the paper, a few beers, books.

  Speedy pulled his shirt open and stood up; what he had to show was a flat stomach quilted with muscle. He turned around, there were no pads of flesh above his hip bones where the fat builds up when an athletic body declines.

  ‘Nine ten, Charlie’, he gave his wheezy fighter’s laugh. ‘I can make light
weight easy. What do you think of that?’

  I was impressed. ‘How’d you do it?’

  He stripped the shirt off and bent down smoothly to pick up his togs bag. ‘Not by starvin’ meself. I’m eating good.’

  ‘How then?’

  ‘No grog, not a drop, and ten miles a day roadwork. I looked up this old clipping see? I was fighting Teddy Rosenbloom and the paper had our measurements. Me waist was thirty inches then. I cut a piece of string thirty inches long and tried it around me middle. It came about six inches short. I knocked off the grog, started running and doing exercises. The ends of that bit of string touch easy now. I’m fair dinkum, Charlie.’

  Speedy had been a top lightweight three years before. He’d had two shots at the title and lost narrowly on points both times. After the second time he went on the grog, and lost three of his next four fights. Then he retired: he was twenty-six. I used to see him in the pub from time to time, lifting schooners, blocking punches and laughing. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and then I got a message at the paper to meet him at Henry’s. I thought he might want to have a beer and talk about the old days or try to persuade me to write a piece about him for a quid or two, although I knew he had a job on the wharves and had hung on to a bit of his money. He’d had more than fifty fights but he’d been clever and he wasn’t too battered; he’d been cut a bit. When I looked closer at him I could see that his eyes were clear and that the bone structure was showing through his skin. He was fit all right.

  ‘Why, Speedy?’ I asked. ‘Do you need the money?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He swung his bag. ‘I want to get out of the city, go up north near Taree and do some farming. That’s my country.’

  I knew what he meant. Speedy was part Geawegal on his mother’s side, not that much and he didn’t talk about it, but I knew. I liked the idea of Speedy Kinnane with a freehold on a couple of hundred acres of Geawegal land.