by Kim Kelly
‘Hi, Addy, isn’t it?’ Another massive wall of a man was beside her: it was Dave, her brother’s housemate, not a boxer, a weightlifter, and friendly enough, but she could barely say, ‘Hello,’ in return.
‘Addy?’ It was Dan now, suggesting they take an empty table just behind the front row; she nodded, though by this time, so close to the bell, she was barely there at all. She tried to tell him with her eyes: I’m so sorry.
They sat down either side of the small, square table, in plastic bucket chairs, just as the referee ducked through the ropes, followed by the boxers, and the announcement over the PA: ‘In the blue corner, we have Nicky Loest of Wollongong.’ The man had pronounced it ‘Loast’, and declared him from Wollongong rather than Port Kembla, but whatever, at least their dad wasn’t here to be offended by it. ‘And in the red corner, we have John Deloso of Penrith.’ Whoever he was.
The first part of Nick she saw was his back, monstrous, the overhead lights enhancing the contours and ridges of all the muscles across his shoulders. He looked like he’d got bigger since she’d last seen him, and that was less than a month ago, when they’d both gone home for Easter. He was only twenty-two. How much bigger was he going to get?
‘That’s your brother?’ Dan said, and she nodded, used to the incredulity. Addy was, by physical comparison, an actual wisp of nothing; and while all her features were fine, birdlike, Nick’s had been brutally chiselled, his nose broken twice already. He was as fearless as she was frightened all the time.
Dan asked her: ‘You worry for him?’
Addy made some kind of face that could have meant anything but in fact meant: Worry is not the word – nowhere near it. I am paralysed with fear. She clutched the edges of the plastic seat until they dug into her flesh.
‘Round one,’ the announcer called and the bell went: DING!
‘Aaaand box!’ The ref set them off, two young men, dancing at each other, bare-chested, bizarre, and at the first punch Nick threw, Addy left the room – mentally.
The thwacking of gloves; the squeaking of boots on canvas mat; she was watching and not watching; she could tell more or less how things were going from the sound of Nick’s ugs, anyway. He was winning from the first round, chasing his opponent down and towering over him.
DING!
She heard Dan say: ‘Wow. He’s pretty full-on, your brother.’
‘Yep.’ Addy nodded. ‘Full-on.’
Nick was as full-on in the next round and the next, and the more he belted into the other guy, the more Addy reeled, clinging to the edge of her chair, though she could no longer feel it there. The sixty-second countdowns between rounds were too short and too long; she would never remember what scraps of conversation were exchanged with Dan amid the rising din of the crowd: ‘Smash him, Johnno!’ ‘Gloves down, Nicky!’ ‘Come on!’ ‘Get into it!’ ‘Go harder!’ It wasn’t unlike being drunk, she thought, this stuck-still dizziness she felt; it was also not uncommon for her to blank out much of it, either.
This time, however, she saw Nick’s dogged ferocity in a new light. She saw the Gestapo officer beating their grandfather to death; she saw her family fighting back; she saw her father’s desperate need to win it this time, too. She saw the noblest height and most murderous depths of every man. But these men … what did they do to her grandmother? What did they do to Frieda Stevenson? Of course, Addy knew. Oh, she knew. She knew in her own bones: women couldn’t fight; not like this. Nick weighed more than ninety kilos; Addy weighed somewhere less than fifty, give or take a hamburger. If Nick had wanted to, he could have thrown her across the room. Not all men were violent thugs, not all men were caveman rapists, but the fact that any were stained them all, so Addy’s revelation told her now.
She looked across at Dan, who was himself engrossed in the contest, just like every other man here: flexing and flinching with the blows, imagining himself there in the ring, no doubt.
She had begun to tremble even before she returned her gaze to the match, where she saw the smaller man, Johnno Deloso, find the gap in Nick’s gloves at last and land one – CRACK – to the side of his face. She watched her brother’s head snap back, sweat flinging upwards from his hair, an arc of silver droplets under the harsh downlights. He stumbled backwards, to the ropes, but he only used them to his advantage, hurling himself straight at his opponent once more. Somewhere behind her, his mate, Dave, had leapt up out of his seat and was bellowing: ‘Nail him, Nicky – nail him!’
Addy wanted to be sick, yet her stomach, so full from that very nice meal she’d enjoyed with a boy she might have begun to love, already seemed hollow again. And just as well, for when Nick turned at the next bell, to shake a fist at Dave from his corner, he looked right at Addy, the side of his face streaked with blood, his left eye already swelling, and he grinned around his mouthguard like the rampaging ape he was.
You are fucken demonic.
Max Kovacs had to yell at him and push him to sit down to have his face cleaned up, swabbed with adrenaline hydrochloride to stop the bleeding and greased with vaseline to try to keep the wound from worsening. The bout only lasted another two rounds, though, Johnno Deloso getting pounded and pounded to his knees, counted out at number eight.
Hooray, you win.
As Addy watched her brother’s hand being raised by the ref, listened to the crowd cheering, stamping their feet in appreciation of the match, she knew her father would be above and beyond proud. Nick was one fight closer to Commonwealth Games team selection; barring some not inconceivable corruption of the process within the Amateur Boxing Association, Nick would be off to Edinburgh next year. In the meantime, Nick would be insufferably pumped up. She didn’t want to go near him, but she would have to, to try to get him to call their dad before he got drunk, before appreciative punters started pouring beer all over his head. She had to find a phone and get him to it – the main point of her being here. Of course, she could call home herself; Max would almost certainly call within the next half-hour, too; it wouldn’t be the same, though. Her dad would be at home now, sitting by the phone, lighting another cigarette: waiting for Nick to call.
Nicky. Nicky. Nicky.
Prick.
‘Oh man.’ Dan was shaking his head in admiration, hands gripping his knees, laughing: ‘That was sensational.’
Addy frowned at him, unsure of what she was looking at, some rage of her own roiling in her glare. Maybe you’re not who I thought you were. How could I tell in any case? I’m a serial fantasist. She didn’t realise that the trembling she felt inside her bones was adrenaline of her own; she didn’t yet understand how reasonable it was that she should want to smash her fist into the tabletop between them. All she knew was that she had to get to Nick, and that this would not be an easy thing to do.
She stood up.
Dan stood up, too; he said: ‘That was great. Thanks for asking me to come.’ Still shaking his head: ‘Man, that was so full-on.’
She said: ‘I’m probably going to be ages, waiting for Nick. Really, you don’t have to hang around.’ She could hear the flatness in her voice: rude, aloof: Go away.
‘What?’ He squinted at her now, and not in an endearing way; he was becoming annoyed.
I don’t blame you. But even then, she could only say: ‘It’ll be boring. For you. Hanging around.’ I don’t want you to see me here anymore, in this place – this place in my head. This place in my too-weird family. You won’t understand. Please, go away.
He touched her on the arm, on the back of her elbow, the lightest touch, probably only about to say something reassuring like, ‘I won’t be bored,’ or, ‘I don’t mind that you’re nuts, I really don’t,’ or, ‘I’m going to find the bathroom, be back soon,’ but she’d already recoiled, moving her arm away as though he’d just attempted to grab her; she couldn’t help it.
‘All right, Addy.’ He straightened to his full height: ‘I won’t hang around.’
‘Dan, I —’ Her arm hurt where he’d barely touched her; it hurt with the
longing to tell him everything she really meant, all her truths; so many truths they jammed in her throat.
‘No worries, Addy.’ He gave her a careful smile, a face-saving smile; he said: ‘You’re out of my league, anyway.’ Then he left her; she watched him move through the crowd.
Out of your league? Mine is not any league you want to belong to, she told his back as he pushed his way through the door and disappeared. Addy’s league was far too exclusive: it was a league of one. For a moment, she stood there as if all her joints had seized. She scanned the room for Nick, unthinking.
‘The serious business of this evening is yet to come,’ the announcer was saying over the PA. ‘The ladies’ jelly-wrestling tournament will commence in fifteen minutes …’
Someone wolf-whistled above the general hubbub; a blow-up pool was being wheeled into the arena, wobbling with red jelly, bouncers in black shirts rushing to reconfigure tables around it. The shutters rolled up on the bar at the back of the room; and the eerie opening notes of ‘99 Luftballons’ began to play.
It wasn’t an uncommon song, having been a number-one hit last year for several weeks; with the bell-like, ardent voice of its singer, Nena, and its boppy beats, it was the kind of song that might be heard anywhere, and especially at a people-pleasing venue like this. It was a pop-rock taste of something otherworldly; something political from a place where politics actually mattered; it was romantic: it was German. But here, now, for Addy, it seemed to draw a fat black texta line beneath her own absurdity. She knew all the words, of course, and had spent countless hours grappling with their meaning, and yet as they loomed out at her across this cavernous space – Zeit, Lied, Krieg; Time, Song, War – she couldn’t understand any of them anymore. She couldn’t understand anything that was happening around her.
Many of the older men were filing out, like a riptide; a younger mob was rushing at the bar; a group of girls in oversized bathrobes leaned against the platform of the boxing ring, smoking, fluffing out their fluffy feather-cut hair – the wrestlers, Addy supposed.
Nick, where are you? Panic rose and rose; she couldn’t see Max Kovacs anywhere now, either. She had no idea where the dressing room might have been, but she guessed that’s where he’d be – having his cheek looked at, she hoped, and probably getting a dressing-down from Max for whatever he might have done better.
I can’t believe I let Dan Ackerman walk away.
Can’t you? I can. And you’ve done him a favour.
Nick, where the fuck are you?
The hurdy-gurdy of the loose luftballons wound down into the twanging rubber-band bass of INXS – ‘I Send a Message’. If only she could. She was sure the volume of the music had increased, amplifying her distress. She spun around and the room spun with her, but she found a familiar face, sort of – Dave – emerging from a door at the dark and as yet unpeopled edge of the jelly pool. She just about ran for him. Before she got there, though, she saw Nick hulking out after him, Max with them. They looked like a different species of human, Nick and Dave, with their overinflated torsos, incapable of walking side by side without bumping against each other; and the elder, Max, appearing as though some of his air had escaped, having been left out too long in the sun. Or the solarium, as the case was – Nick wouldn’t attend his own funeral without a decent all-over tan.
As she neared, she saw Nick’s face, his left eye almost completely closed by the swelling. She’d seen him in various states of beaten-up, but immediately she sensed this one was a bit worse than usual.
‘Hey, Sprout,’ he said to her. ‘Get me a beer.’
He was joking, but only half, and the way he shouted it above the music pushed every nerve in her. The way he sounded so much like their dad, loading Addy up with expectations she couldn’t fulfil. Her every cell screamed: Get fucked and fuck off. She would do as she was asked, though; much as she loathed her brother’s oafishness, she loved him, too. She loved his stupid beaten-up face, now that she was forced to look at it with some care; and today she’d been gifted a window, a precious snippet of history, on why he was driven to this violence. It was a violence he’d never used for evil, she thought, remembering a moment of their more recent history, back in primary school, when he’d efficiently dispatched a playground bully for her: Craig Benson was the boy’s name, and after tormenting her one too many times, Nick had snatched up Craig’s peanut butter sandwich, filled it with a handful of dirt and made him eat it. Those were the days when they were close, before puberty and mutual disgust had set in; such was the glue of siblings. Besides, she also more than wanted a beer herself at this particular moment: And I am fricken well going to have one. I am going to have half a dozen.
But just as she was about to ask him what kind of beer he wanted, so she would make the right choice from whatever they had on tap here, he seemed to bump against Dave unnecessarily. His face slumped forward, his corn-coloured hair, still damp from the shower, fell across Dave’s pale-blue shirtsleeve as his whole body slumped sideways.
Oh my God! Oh my God! Her arms reached out to him instinctively, though futilely; only someone with equal strength could have prevented him from crashing to the floor. Thank God for Dave; thank God for Max and his quick reflexes, too, catching Nick on the other side, and accidentally knocking Addy with his own shoulder in the process, sending her staggering into a table nearby.
‘Oh, mate.’ Dave was bearing the majority of the weight, almost crouching with the effort of holding Nick up, but just as quickly Nick came to again, dazed, raising a hand to his head.
Oh my God. Addy could do nothing as they sat him on a chair, the music blaring around them; her mind blaring: If you die, you will kill Dad. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. That wasn’t entirely irrational, either: the Korean boxer whose death had changed the rules met his end exactly like this, and Addy knew it, just as she’d known there’d been a huge all-in brawl inside the boxing fraternity about reducing the number of rounds from fifteen to twelve at the time. Fucken idiots – all of you. What am I going to tell Dad?
‘Don’t tell your father anything – not yet.’ Max was beside her, of the same mind, growling into her ear: ‘I’ve already called him to tell him Nick won. Don’t tell him anything more until we know if there’s a problem. Go and get some water. It’s probably only dehydration.’
It was almost a shame that Addy would not remember how good she was in such a crisis; pushing her way determinedly through the crowd at the bar to demand a jug of iced water, calmly informing the barman of the emergency, anyone might have thought she’d been trained for the purpose. But as it was, all she’d ever remember was standing with her brother as he sat with his head in his hands, her small hand on his large back, waiting for the ambulance to come, rockabilly drums thumping out a ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’.
‘Mrs Loset?’ A nurse appeared in the waiting room with a clipboard and a new variation on the surname theme; and yet another, before Addy had had the chance to interpret the first: ‘Losest? Mrs Nicholas Losest?’
Addy might have found a laugh in that, if she hadn’t been shredded of all good humour; she’d have been revolted at being mistaken for her brother’s wife, too, if she hadn’t been so sure she was going to be told he was bleeding on the brain.
‘I will come with you,’ Max said, beside her, getting up from the row of vomit-coloured vinyl seats they shared with an assortment of Friday-night walking wounded and diseased; and she shook her head – she’d rather have stabbed Max Kovacs to death with a biro. She exchanged a look of unmasked terror with Dave instead: poor Dave seemed as wrecked as she was; sweat beading on his brow, he’d hardly said a word since Nick had fainted again getting into the ambulance. Dehydration? I think not. And all Max seemed to have been worried about was making sure the paramedics took him out through the back of the club. ‘So it will be quiet,’ Max had said. So no one will see what you’ve done, Addy suspected.
She braced herself now as she stepped towards the nurse, as much as she could when it felt a
s though she was dragging her feet through molten tar.
‘Mrs Losest.’ The nurse, blank-faced with her own exhaustion, gestured with the clipboard for Addy to follow her down a corridor of curtained beds.
‘It’s Miss,’ Addy said, her voice dull, the correction irrelevant. ‘I’m Nick’s sister,’ she told the hopscotch squares of light on the ceiling.
‘Really?’ The nurse threw the question over her shoulder. ‘You don’t look alike.’
‘Probably because I’m not a boxer,’ Addy replied, her nerves so chewed up she couldn’t hold back the rudeness.
‘Whatever.’ The nurse didn’t turn or break her steady stride. ‘Your brother has a concussion, a serious concussion. The X-rays appeared to be all right – there seems to be no cause for immediate concern – but the registrar wants a second opinion, wants another senior doctor to take a look before deciding whether or not to keep him in overnight, for observation.’
Addy could have fainted herself, with relief; she blurted: ‘Where’s the nearest telephone? Please. I need to call our dad – in Port Kembla.’ He’d be a special Pete Loest blend of worried and furious now – two hours on from the event.
The nurse stopped then and turned to her; Addy was sure she’d earned directions along the lines of, ‘Take yourself across the carpark, down a dark alley and boot yourself straight to hell,’ but she said with stunning kindness: ‘Once you’ve seen your brother, come to the nurses’ station, just around the corner.’ She pointed up towards the end of the corridor. ‘You can ask to use the phone there, so long as you’re brief – don’t mention it’s a long-distance call and I won’t mention it, either.’ She swept open the curtain at her side, ‘Here he is,’ and then she walked away.
Oh, Nick. There he was, holding an icepack to his face; and he grunted at her on sight. Yes, ug to you, too. He must be okay.