Shadowboxing

by Tony Birch

  Scribe Publications

  SHADOWBOXING

  Tony Birch has published short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, and has also worked as a writer and curator in collaboration with photographers, film-makers, and artists. He has a Master of Arts in creative writing and a PhD in urban cultures, and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Shadowboxing, his first book, was shortlisted for the 2006 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Birch’s stories have been published in Best Australian Stories and his new collection, Father’s Day.

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  PO Box 523

  Carlton North, Victoria, Australia 3054

  Email: info@scribepub.com.au

  First published by Scribe 2006

  This edition published 2009

  Copyright © Tony Birch 2006

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may 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 written permission of the publisher of this book.

  Edited by Aviva Tuffield

  Text and cover design by Miriam Rosenbloom.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Birch, Tony

  Shadowboxing

  New ed.

  9781921753909 (e-book)

  A823.4

  Fitzroy (Vic.)–Fiction.

  www.scribepublications.com.au

  For my children

  ‘It’s a great life—if you don’t weaken.’

  —Alma Maree May Corcoran

  Contents

  The Red House

  The Lesson

  The Butcher’s Wife

  A Disposable Good

  The Bulldozer

  The Return

  The Sea of Tranquillity

  Ashes

  Redemption

  The Haircut

  The Red House

  We moved to the red house in the winter after my younger sister, May, died of meningitis. That year was also one of the wettest on record, my mother reminds me whenever we sit and think back to that time. In the weeks following our move from Clunes back to Fitzroy, our new house was almost submerged by a rising flood. Although there must have been days when it was not wet, my memory of that winter is of looking out into the backyard from the kitchen window at an unrelenting curtain of rain.

  As a result of the weather the house soon resembled an old rickety wooden boat, set adrift in a murky grey swamp that had only weeks earlier resembled a dustbowl. Although the house creaked and swayed in the fierce winds of the storms that attacked it, we were luckily left relatively high and dry and secure inside the house itself. It was in better condition than anything my mother had expected to find in the city, with only a few rotting floorboards, no broken windows and, remarkably, a tin roof that stood the test of the weather and did not leak at all.

  The owner of the red house was an Italian, Mr Carboni. Over the years that we lived in Fitzroy he was never seen out of a pair of overalls, except when he went to the bank on a Friday afternoon to deposit the rent money he had collected that week, and to mass on Sunday at All Saints, the church of the local Italian community.

  Mr Carboni was a better landlord than most. He had done the place up a bit before we moved in, and remained willing to come over and do any work that was needed, although my mother did most of the small jobs around the house herself.

  The house was the last in a line of similarly built single-fronted terraces. We lived on a corner on the hill that fell away to Smith Street, the main shopping strip. Consequently, a steady stream of foot traffic marched past our side gate, as people made their way to and from the shops each day.

  Our new home was structurally no different from those around us, and would not have attracted any attention from passers-by, except that it did not wear the same coat of uniformly dull, colourless paint as did its neighbours. The facade of our house, including the verandah and a wooden fence that leaned precariously into the street, were painted a rich congealed red, as were the sidewall and fence, and even the letterbox, crudely nailed to the side gate. The paintbrush had missed nothing.

  The first time that I saw the red house I was standing out the front on the footpath with mum and dad, while Mr Carboni searched through his pockets for the front-door key, which he found only after emptying every pocket of nails, screws, a pouch of tobacco and bits of paper with reminder notes and figures written all over them.

  As we stood staring at the front of the house, each of us was thinking the same thing, I’m sure: that the colour was more than a little overwhelming. No one painted houses that colour where we had just come from. And nobody around here either by the look of things.

  After opening the front door for us, Mr Carboni walked back onto the footpath, pointed to the house and commented, almost to himself, ‘Red.’

  My father looked at the house with real embarrassment. He turned to Mr Carboni, seeking an explanation.

  ‘Red? What’s going on?’ he quizzed with a screwed-up face.

  ‘Yes, red, red,’ Mr Carboni replied, as if to confirm the obvious. He looked back at my father while waving the family into the house with a welcoming hand, feeling no need to provide further explanation.

  We inspected each room of the house and ended our tour in the backyard. A rusting, corrugated fence skirted the property. A sudden wind picked up a covering of dust and whipped it around the barren yard. My mother looked around and smiled. She did not seem disappointed that there was not so much as a single flower bud to be seen among the few blades of grass and weeds. Unlike my father, she was not bothered by the garish colour of the house either. As long as the inside was clean and tidy and not knocked about too much, she knew she could turn a shell into a home.

  Mum entered into negotiations with Mr Carboni. She had argued against coming back to the city. She sensed the looming danger in my father moving back both to his old streets and his old habits. But on realising that she had no real say in the matter, she was determined to ensure that she at least have some say in the house she was moving into.

  All that she asked of Mr Carboni was a ‘new’ second-hand stove to replace the burnt-out double gas-ring cook-top in the kitchen, and a ‘cut out’ from the first week’s rent so that she could buy material to make some curtains. Mr Carboni agreed immediately.

  Turning to my father, she informed him as much as asked him, ‘What do you think? We’ll take it?’

  My father brought out his battered wallet and handed over two weeks’ rent and the same in key money, all of which he’d borrowed from his boss at the timber mill back at Clunes. And that same afternoon he caught a train back to Ballarat and then a bus out of town, so that he could arrange to have our furniture and belongings sent down the highway on the back of the wood truck used to deliver fuel around the town.

  Although my father was suspicious of the colour of the house, he was happy to be back in the city, and back to his old stomping ground and the suburb that he had grown up in. His childhood home was just one street away from the house we moved into. It was only after he had met my mother and moved with her to my grandmother’s house over in Carlton that he had left Fitzroy for the first time in his life.

  The eventual move to the bush had come on the advice of a doctor at the public hospital. He said that the fresh air would help my dad recover from the asthma that he had suffered since taking his first job in a shoe facto
ry, when he left school at thirteen. If it was a good idea at the time it did not last, as my father soon ended up in a timber mill filling his lungs with sawdust.

  My grandmother told me years later that the move did not really have all that much to do with his asthma. It was the drink. My father had been a boxer and a top street-fighter around the time that he met my mum. He gave up the ring (but not the street) after I was born, a decision he soon regretted. When he wasn’t at work, he was at the pub. And when he finally got home to my grandmother’s house of a night, he was always drunk and was looking for an argument, or worse.

  Mum should have known what was coming. When they had met she was just a girl, and he a boy, really, who charmed her off her feet and into bed, and then into the maternity ward at the Royal Women’s, all in one movement. But he was the boy who was also already the violent young man, who on the day after their wedding had asked his six months’ pregnant wife to ‘fetch us a cup of tea, will you?’ When she hesitated with ‘in a minute, love, I’ve got to sit a minute, my back’s killing me’, he hit her with a straight right on the end of her nose that sat her on the floor. ‘I said now, not in a fucken minute.’

  He fought with her so much that my mother eventually decided that she would have to move away from her mother’s house, for both their sakes. Clunes was a drastic move. But it worked, for a time. He drank less, got back in shape due to the heavy work around the mill, and seemed content for the first time in many years. They appeared happy. And when May came along it seemed that their move was complete.

  When May was born she was called a ‘special baby’. She was magical even, some claimed, in a town where old superstitions held sway over logic. After her birth the women of the town, who had become friends with mum, came to the house each day just to stare at May.

  My father’s habit of explosive anger melted before May. He was truly besotted with her. They both were. Mum would sing songs that she had heard on the radio to May, while my father carried her in his arms from the moment he walked in the door after work until she went off to sleep. Those large hands of his that could so quickly be fashioned into fists of stone now lifted May gently into the air.

  And then it all ended with the suddenness of her short illness and death. May was two days away from her second birthday.

  My father wanted to bring May back to Melbourne for burial, but my mother stood up to him and demanded that she be buried in the town where she was born. On the day of her funeral the women of the town lined up and took it in turns to offer their sympathies. Mum mumbled polite replies when anyone commented ‘it’s very sad, very sad’, although little of what was said that day appeared to register with her. My father did not come out into the lounge room at all. He stayed in May’s room, sitting on her bed, and did not speak with anyone.

  I can’t remember much more about that day, with the exception of walking by May’s room and stopping in the doorway as I watched my father crying into his big hands. He looked like he was no more than a kid himself.

  In the weeks following the funeral he refused to speak to anybody. It was difficult for my mother to find anything safe to say to him, let alone confide in him about May, something that she was desperate to do.

  She tried to talk about May with him several times, but he either responded with silence, or swore and yelled at her uncontrollably. He also found his way back to the pubs, and began to spend each night in the saloon bar of The Pioneer — just around the corner from our house — before staggering home drunk.

  And then one night after he had walked in from the pub he sat down at the table and just said to her, ‘Fuck all this fresh-air bullshit, we’re going back to Melbourne.’ She tried persuading him to stay, talked about his job and my school, but he would not listen. He got sick of her talking and slammed a fist into his heavy palm.

  ‘We’re fucken going. That’s it. We’re going.’

  And that was it.

  She looked across the table that night and saw once again the man she had married six years earlier, the man who she had deceived herself had faded and eventually disappeared with the move away from the city.

  Without our furniture we could not move into the red house immediately. While my father was back at Clunes organising the truck, my mother and I stayed at the old temperance hotel opposite Spencer Street railway station. We couldn’t afford even the cheapest accommodation for more than a couple of nights. The funeral had cost my parents every penny they had, and some more that was borrowed. And they had not even begun to pay it back.

  The cheapest rooms at the hotel were about the size of a wardrobe and had only a narrow single bed in them, so my mother and I slept head to toe, ‘sardine style’, as my grandmother used to call it.

  On the first night at the hotel I lay under a pair of heavy grey blankets watching the passing carlights skim across the ceiling while listening to the grunting engines of the trains straining away from the city and heading for the bush. I could also hear someone in the room next door coughing out their lungs into a pillow. Getting a good night’s sleep would have been difficult enough with all the distraction, but I had not been sleeping well anyway, not since May had gone. I missed her and thought about her most nights before I finally drifted off.

  On the night that she died a nurse at the base hospital had held my hand while attempting to console my sobbing by telling me that May had left us so that she could ‘walk across to the angels’. It sounded nice to hear that from the nurse, but I never really believed it. Even then, when I was so young, I did not believe in God. I knew that May was in the ground in the Clunes cemetery. That was as far as she had gone.

  Mostly I did not fall asleep until the middle of the night, only to be woken exhausted, in the early-morning light, by May herself. She would press her face against mine, waking me as her warm breath touched my cheek. I would sit up in bed with a jolt and search the room for her, but she would be gone.

  I did not mention a word about May’s visits to either mum or dad. My father would not have listened to me anyway. He would not have her name spoken in the house. And I knew that if I told my mother about the visits she would only get upset and start crying. So I kept them to myself.

  With my father away in Clunes for those two days that we were at the hotel, I was tempted to ask mum about so many of the things that had been on my mind since May’s death. I looked up to the other end of the bed. She was sound asleep. So I rolled over and faced the wall while listening to the hiss of another diesel engine snaking its way through the goods yard opposite the hotel.

  I soon got used to the colour of the house. After I began to make friends at my new school I found that it was easy to direct them to our house.

  ‘It’s the red-painted place on …’

  ‘Oh, the red house. I know the red house.’

  Everyone knew the red house, and no one made much of a fuss about it except for my father, who never stopped complaining, either to himself or anybody else that would listen to him.

  ‘Red?’ he continued to ask after we had moved in. ‘Red? Why the fuck would anyone paint a house red?’

  He eventually spoke to Emu Bailey, a local junk man who rented a front room in a row of double-storey stone terraces up the road from us. Emu claimed to know the entire history and business of the street, so my father asked him when it was that Mr Carboni had painted the house the colour it was.

  ‘Oh no, it weren’t him. Was done well before he took the place over, the Iye-tie fella. There was this woman lived there, a long time back, Ettie Rogers was her name. She did it. One Saturday morning, I still remember. I was just coming back from the street when I saw her out there painting the house, with a six-inch brush. Did the lot in half a day. Some sort of communist, was Ettie. So they say, anyway. Most everyone around here back then was DLP. Still is, some of them. Ettie wasn’t in agreement with the others in the street, so she let them
know all about it. Redone it every summer too, the same colour, red. You must remember that time, from when you were a kid? She did it back then. You must remember that, Mick?’

  My father shrugged his shoulders. He did not appear to remember anything at all from when he was a child. And if he did he kept it to himself.

  As he spoke to my father, Emu cast a disapproving eye over the house. ‘Looks like it could do with a spruce up, I reckon.’

  Although my father appeared to be settling back easily into the suburb itself, linking up with his old mates and his drinking haunts, he became increasingly unhappy with the house colour, and would not let up with his complaints. He occasionally threatened to repaint the house, but he had no real pretensions to home repairs.

  He had landed on his feet back in Fitzroy, getting a good job laying tar on a local council road crew. He worked long, hard hours, and spent his remaining time (and money) at the pub, so taking up a paintbrush was never a threat carried into action.

  My mother was different. She began to put all her energy into the house. She went around to local op-shops looking for materials. She sewed curtains for each of the windows and spread her two tea-chests full of photographs and ornaments throughout the house.

  On the day that we had left the house at Clunes for the last time, she had carried a framed portrait of May with her on the train. In order to protect it from damage she wrapped it in a tea-towel and then a pillowslip. Then she clutched it to her chest all the way down to Melbourne. I know that she kept the frame under the bed in the two nights that we stayed in the hotel but it was nowhere to be seen in the house now, and I could not bring myself to ask her where it was.

  My mother also became an insatiable scavenger. If someone left an unwanted chair in the street, she’d give it a quick examination, decide whether it could be covered or painted, before carrying it home if it passed her inspection. It wasn’t long before the inside of the house came to life and began to resemble the old place at Clunes.