Scraps of Heaven (21 page)

Bracken stalks out at the opening bell. He has Carlos on the back foot with savage left rips and short rights. Carlos holds his ground with left jabs. Bracken scores with a series of hooks. Carlos works with his gloves, his elbows, elusive movements of his head. ‘Copybook defence,' Logan remarks. ‘Rip and hook, bob and duck. Italian-style. Don't let yourself get hit.'

The fight assumes its first rhythm, with Bracken stalking, hitting out, and Carlos, the evasive quarry, fending him off with left jabs. Five rounds the pattern persists, until in the sixth Bracken jolts Carlos with three long rights. He attacks Carlos with a two-fisted assault to the body and head. Josh can see the trembling of flesh, the spray of sweat. Carlos is on the ropes, but edges his way out. He keeps Bracken at bay with darting lefts to the face.

‘Best fight I've seen in a long time,' says Logan, at the end of the tenth. ‘In Bracken we have copybook attack, in Carlos, vintage defence. Yeah. Look at how he tucks his chin under his left shoulder. Watch how he covers up with his right to prevent damage to his suspect left eye. Still, Bracken is well ahead on points.'

Then in the eleventh it comes, a shattering right cross to the jaw. Bracken's mouthguard flies across the ring. He is buckling at the knees. It has taken him by surprise, and it has jolted his trainer, his seconds, his waterboys, the entire crowd. Carlos is in for the kill. He comes after Bracken with jarring blows to the head. Bracken's strength is ebbing, his confidence shaken. He clinches, smothers the punches, and wills himself back into the fight.

The two boxers stand toe-to-toe, trading blow for blow. The stadium is a madhouse. The crowd is on its feet. This is why they are here, damn it. This is why they paid good money. This is why they had braved the cold. This is why they crave blood and a closely fought bout. They are baying for action. They are giving vent to their anger and elation and, as if on cue, the rain breaks out.

It splashes against the walls, reverberates upon the tin roofs. Josh is riveted by the fighters' contorted faces. He has seen the same expression in Zofia's eyes; Zofia, the warrior, just hours earlier striding on Canning Street. Zofia declaring
ikh bin a kempfer.
I am a fighter. Zofia stalking shadows, Zofia side-stepping ghosts.

These are fleeting thoughts. The shrieks of the crowd break back. Even Logan is on his feet screaming at Bracken, ‘Hold on! Hold on!' The fighters are locked together. There is sweat on their foreheads, sweat streaming down their chests, settling on their backs and waists. All is reduced to a working of flesh against flesh, of heart and knuckles, lungs and muscles, tendons and bone. Punches land. Punches fly astray. They are fighting by instinct, blindly clinging to all they know. There are just seconds to go. They do not hear the final bell. Referee Reilly tears them apart.

‘I think Bracken's got it,' says Logan. But Reilly lowers his hand on Carlos' head. Bracken punches the corner ropes in disgust. Carlos breaks out into an uncertain victory dance. And the hooting begins, along with the cheers, and the arguments, ringside, in the stalls, the balcony and bleachers, and in the aisles.

The crowd floods out, and still they are arguing. They stand in the deluge, hands wrapped across their chests, fingers pointing, clasping their arms, shaking their heads, their voices pitted against the rain. Bracken was ‘robbed', is the common verdict. He was miles ahead on points going into the eleventh. And he did enough to hold on in the final four rounds.

Logan and Josh push through the maelstrom. Then it is over, aborted by the curious stillness that ensues when passengers clamber out of the rain. The tram lulls Josh's senses. He observes the men around him. They are slumped back in their seats, or hanging onto overhead straps, a satiated herd moving homewards through a city veiled in rain.

Josh steps off at stop sixteen to walk home on Fenwick Street. ‘See ya later,' he says, and Logan replies with a wink. The street-lamps glow, the rain has slowed, and somewhere in the city boxers are tending to their wounds, and somewhere nearby exhausted fans are stumbling home to their wives, and in a room three blocks north, Bloomfield is awakening from a dream. He is crying out his daughters' names. ‘Khannele. Sorrele.' He calls them as he had last called them at the gates to Gehenna, where SS men had prised them from his grasp and sent them to the left, and he to the right. They to their deaths, and he, condemned to awake from the same dream, night after night.

Bloomfield's walls are papered with photos culled from newspapers and
National Geographic
s of
bociany
, storks standing guard over their giant nests, and of
drogu
, country roads and rutted paths. He can hear a conversation in the passage, just audible beneath the rain. A phonograph is playing an aria in an adjoining room, and Bloomfield surveys his gallery of
bociany
and
drogu
petering out into snow and swamps. It is his mission to rejoin these paths to the rustle of a forest, the squawk of a frog in the marshlands, the sight of storks in full flight.

But the names still ring out. Khannele. Sorrele. He presses his hands to his ears but can find no respite. The room is a prison. He opens the window, but it does not help. He runs into the passage and descends the front steps into the tempest, and surges towards the square on the run, in a staccato-like movement upon short legs.

All around him fences are shaking, trees bending. He flees to the path beneath the Moreton Bay figs. Their canopies form a shelter within which all sounds are amplified into a resounding boom that obliterates all thoughts. The dense foliage is a filter that reduces a torrent to random drops. Bloomfield knows that an arched canopy contains a great secret, the power to transform all sounds into one sound which in turn contains all sounds. And he knows also, that within that one sound all other sounds can be drowned.

Two blocks north, Josh nestles under the
paraneh
, a goose-feather quilt. He can sink in its billowing folds, be cocooned by its warmth. There is no end to its softness. Josh is returning to sleep, falling through space, and he is touching down, sliding along the passage, over the linoleum. He glides into the front room, lifts himself over the wooden rails of a cot, and falls through the bottom back into space.

Again he is floating, descending, and a cry is breaking his fall. He awakes abruptly. The half-moon is visible through the bedroom window. A dog barks in a lane nearby. Josh has been dragged out of his dream by a dream far more powerful. ‘Mama. Mama.' Zofia's voice can be heard beyond the passage, the lounge and kitchen, past the bathroom, from where she sleeps in the back room.

And night deepens into night, and rain begets rain, and all cries are wiped out. Zofia stares at the ceiling, the corners of the room, and sees clouds hovering about. They are sinister energies, suspended like spiders, ready to descend, to pounce. She clutches her chest, and holds up her arms. She sees men advancing, shearing her hair, clutching her flesh. She places her hands over her nakedness, her pubic hair, her once shrivelled breasts. The clouds are descending. They are disembodied spirits seeking to possess her. She lies between dream and terror, trapped in the dark.

And the dark extends into darkness, and Romek awakes in the pre-dawn dark to a silent house. In winter he discovers that time is not linear, but a circular movement. It begins in winter darkness, and ends in darkness. It begins with the streetlamps aglow, and ends with the lamps newly lit. For those who man the factories and market stalls, the abattoirs and corner stores, winter is one extended night.

Romek emerges from the back lane. Again streetlamps light the way. The air is sharp, the streets have been washed clean by last night's rain. He looks up at the lone palm, as if taking his bearings against the Pole star. Romek voyages to work in the winter cold. He had woken to the cold, and to recurring news of cold wars, and photos of mushroom-shaped clouds. It is the dominant image of the times. A cloud hangs over them all.

Each day, the news is of atomic tests, hydrogen explosions, experiments conducted on Pacific islands, Australian deserts, Siberian wastes. Hot bombs to fight a cold war, fire pitted against ice. He has read that in another desert, in Arizona, there are people who have built underground shelters with enough supplies to tide them over, in readiness for the day when the world will be wiped out.

Perhaps all wars can be divided into hot and cold, thinks Romek. Hiroshima was searingly hot. He has browsed through books at the Rathdowne Street library and gazed at images of charred corpses stretched out upon scorched earth. Cold wars are harder to depict. Perhaps the defining image is of soldiers goose-stepping through Red Square. Their arms are frozen in a salute as they move past balconies lined with winter men in bulky furs and overcoats. Perhaps these are cold war leaders presiding over armies marching to frozen tunes. He imagines tanks moving over snow-clad lands. Their metallic wheels gouge white crevices in the ice. Perhaps in centuries to come, the soldiers of this cold war will be unearthed frozen mid-charge, bayonets in hand.

Hot wars and cold wars. Romek and Zofia. They live at opposite ends of the house. A cold war is raging at a distance; but cold wars can become hot wars, sudden eruptions after days of fragile truce. Romek prefers to sidestep the thought. He holds fast to his morning walk. He acknowledges the streetlamps that light the way. He is outside history. It is passing him by. He has lost control over his fate. He makes a virtue out of his helplessness. Like Bloomfield, he retreats to the present. ‘For me history is not so important,' he reflects. ‘The moment is more important than the past. The palm tree is far more potent than the phantoms I left behind.'

An hour later Josh walks the same route. He thinks of the ghostly glare of the boxers under the ring light the previous night. He recalls the spatters of blood, the fighters' struggling breath. He has read the reviews of the fight on the back page of the newspaper left on the kitchen table, headlined: ‘Carlos New Champion after Action Packed Bout'. He has devoured the sports news, and today Australians have much to boast about. Ashley Cooper won the Wimbledon title in an all-Australian final overnight. Stuart McKenzie triumphed in the diamond sculls at Henley. World record swimmers Murray Rose and Jon Henricks starred at an international swim meeting in Los Angeles.

And he has read the football previews. The Collingwood Magpies have been tipped to beat the Footscray Bulldogs in the afternoon match. He has skimmed the soccer news and noted how Valerio's team, Juventus, is faring. His favourite jockey Bill Williamson still heads the jockeys ladder and Australian golfer Peter Thomson is leading the charge at the British Open. Josh's mind is full of statistics, sporting possibilities. He thinks of Logan and his solidity, and the simple logic of the ring, the football field. He is looking forward to the afternoon match.

A feeble sun has prised through the clouds by the time he steps off the tram. Josh turns left from Victoria into Peel Street and strolls towards K shed. Trucks and vans are completing their deliveries. The smell of exhaust gluts the air. Romek is laying out his goods when Josh makes his way past. As he nears Ferguson's stall, one-legged Pete hobbles towards him. His tightened fists grip his crutches. ‘Rob a war veteran of his job, would you?' he says, as he propels himself alongside.

‘I had to do it, son,' Ferguson says, when Josh steps in through the three-ply door. ‘He was pinching too much cash from the till. I caught him red-handed last night for the umpteenth time. I had to sack him, didn't I?' He shakes his head. There is a tremor in his lips. ‘I had to do it,' he says. ‘I'd given him fair warning. I had to do it, didn't I?'

Josh hauls his baskets onto the pavement and takes up his position by the mixed nuts. Pete stations himself in front of him. His cheeks are hollowed, his face gaunt. He leans by the gutter on his crutches. His shoulders are taut, his eyes fixed upon Josh. ‘You ratted on me,' he says. He shakes his head in disgust. His posture is an accusation. He rocks on his crutches, back and forth.

By late morning Ferguson is reeling. ‘I had to do it, didn't I?' he repeats and takes another swig from his hipflask. He stares at the rafters. He has sacked a good mate and a war veteran at that. He cannot cope with the thought. ‘Look after the business,' he slurs, and he eases himself down under the counter. He sinks onto a pile of hessian sacks and surrenders to the aroma of peanuts and dust.

Josh hears his snores as he dismantles the stall. When the job is finished he wakes him up with a gentle nudge. Ferguson struggles to his feet. His eyes blink in the noon light. He pays Josh his wages with a timid grin. One-legged Pete is still on the pavement. ‘Rob a war veteran of his job, would you?' he shouts, as Josh sets out for the trams.

And four kilometres north Bloomfield has re-emerged into the daylight. Fallen leaves are being blown into waterlogged mounds scattered over gutters and kerbs. They stick to the shoes, and block the drains. The winter light is sharp. On the shopfronts opposite the square, the iron roofs cast reflections on stucco facades.

Bloomfield stops by the house engraved with the title Limerick. He turns the word over, enunciates it. Limerick. Limerick. Adopts it as a refrain. He makes his way from Canning to Fenwick Street, and turns into a lane. Mrs Boucher is leaving for her daily walk. Her dogs are yelping at her heels. Through gaps in the fences, Bloomfield catches glimpses of backyards. He sees a bearded man asleep, a newspaper falling from his hand. A cat suns itself on a back porch, a dog strains at the leash. He inadvertently kicks over a rock, and exposes a scurry of slaters and ants. Worms shrivel in the unexpected light. A centipede inches its way towards the shade.

Bloomfield looks down at the scattering insects and he sees the bare feet of children running over a country path. Khannele. Sorrele. The names are rising. Bloomfield leans on a fence for support. He is fighting to stave off the winter cold. He sees feet vying for attention, the feet of his children superimposed upon his muddied shoes.