Peter Corris - The Big Score

‘She’s Aboriginal?’

‘Just a bit, like Jimmy.’

‘That bit can mean a lot these days. You’d better give me the names and the address and anything else that might be useful. Got a photo?’

He gestured at the cabinet. ‘In my wallet. A couple of snaps from back when we were sort of together. Siobhan was just a baby.’

Snaps was right: they were polaroids and pretty faded. In one of the photos, Kevin, with more hair on his head and flesh on his bones, stood beside a tall woman who was carrying a baby. In the other, Kevin was holding the baby securely in his big, meaty hands, but the look on his face suggested he was afraid of dropping it. The woman was handsome rather than pretty, with strong features. Impossible to tell her colouring from the old pictures, but dark rather than fair, I thought. I put the photos back in the wallet. Kevin took it from me and extracted a wad of hundred-dollar notes.

‘Eight hundred do you?’

‘For starters, sure. You might have to hang on a bit longer, Kev. These things can take time.’

‘I’ll try, mate, but don’t count on it.’

I got Marie’s last known address, in Leichhardt, and left him there with the television on and the remote in his hand that was like a claw.

I remembered Jimmy O’Day. He was a fast-moving middleweight back when boxing was very much in the doldrums. He fought in the clubs, had a few bouts in New Zealand, and won the Commonwealth title, which meant practically nothing at all. I saw him once at Parramatta and thought he was pretty good without being sensational. He was a boxer rather than a puncher, and that didn’t please the pig-ignorant club crowd all that much. He dropped out of sight after losing the title to a Maori. I still had contacts in the boxing world and it might be possible to get a line on Marie O’Day through him if all else failed.

It took me a couple of days to clean up a few other matters before I got around to visiting Leichhardt. The young woman at the address Kevin had given me, a neat single-storey terrace not far back from Norton Street, remembered Kevin’s call and could only say she knew nothing about former residents.

‘I think it had been a rental property in the past,’ she said. ‘Tess and I had a lot of repairs to do when we bought it.’

I got the name of the agent she’d bought through, thinking they might have had the letting of the house beforehand, and thanked her.

‘Does the house have a history?’ she asked. ‘Like a criminal past?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Oh, you look like a policeman or… something.’

I rewarded her with an enigmatic smile.

Ten-plus years ago, when Marie O’Day was there, Leichhardt was already gentrifying, with properties turning over quickly as people took their capital gains elsewhere and new residents moved in, renovating and restoring. None of the houses in the vicinity looked as if they were owned by old-timers who knew everything that went on in the street. I knocked on a few doors and got confirmation of that impression. As a last gasp I tried the corner store at the end of the street, one of the few survivors. The proprietor was an elderly Italian with limited stock, just hanging on. I bought some things I didn’t need and asked him how long he’d had the shop.

‘Twenty years, mate.’ His accent was pure Italo-Australian.

I showed him my PEA licence. ‘I’m looking for a woman who used to live at number 76. Her name’s Marie.’

He shook his head. ‘They come and they go.’

‘Good-looking woman, darkish maybe, with a child.’

He sparked up. ‘Oh, si, Marie, with the kid. I couldn’t never get the name right.’

‘Siobhan.’

‘Yes. I called her honey because of the colour of her hair. Beautiful hair.’

‘She was in here a lot, Marie?’

‘Most days. Nice woman. No trouble. She do something wrong?’

‘No. I don’t suppose you know where she went when she left here?’

He rubbed his hands together and looked around at his meagre stock. ‘I’m trying to remember. Some people say, “Carlo, I’m off to Queensland”, and I say, “Take me with you”-for a joke, you understand. But no, Marie, she just…’

‘What?’

‘Si, I remember. Her cousin paid her bill. I let her have a little bit of credit because she always paid when she got her pension. But I didn’t see her to say goodbye, ciao -she used to try to speak Italian. But this man came in and paid. He said he was her cousin.’

‘What did he look like?’

Carlo squared his shoulders and set his fists in front of him. ‘Qui cosa!’

‘A soldier?’

‘No.’ He drew his index fingers across above and through his eyebrows. ‘With the scars. Like you. A boxer.’

Trueman’s Gym in Erskineville retains the name although Sammy Trueman died years ago. It has undergone periods of prosperity and adversity, renovation and neglect. Now, with boxing in Sydney on the upswing, partly due to the charisma of Anthony Mundine, the gym had attracted a respectable number of wannabe fighters paying respectable fees for the facilities. Footballers use it and some actors, waiting for the follow-up to Cinderella Man.

For generations the gym has served as a poste restante address for fighters and trainers often too down on their luck to afford proper accommodation. A couple of sports journalists drop in regularly in search of colour for their columns. I go there once in a while just to stay in touch with the business I had thought of taking on professionally until a hard left hook from Clem Carter in an amateur six-rounder convinced me otherwise. I’d done some work for a couple of the trainers and managers over the years, scaring off touts and persuading promoters to pay what they owed.

Wally Tanner was one of those trainers and I knew he hung out at Trueman’s, always on the hunt for a promising fighter. I didn’t think he’d trained Jimmy O’Day, but O’Day had certainly put in time at Trueman’s and there was a good chance Wally would know something about him.

In the old days a boxing gym smelled of tobacco smoke, sweat and liniment, now it’s just the sweat and liniment. It was early in the afternoon, not the best time when most of the fighters have jobs and only get to the gym after they knock off, but Wally was there watching a couple of heavyweights plodding around the ring.

He nodded to me. ‘Gidday, Cliff. Look at these no-hopers. It’s a disgrace to let ‘em in a ring.’

‘As they say-they’re slow but they can’t hit.’

‘That’s right. Haven’t seen you for a while. What brings you around?’

‘D’you remember Jimmy O’Day?’

Wally turned disgustedly away from the ring to watch a skipper and a kid working on the speed ball. They didn’t please him either. ‘Sure I do. He was a good boy-good, not great. Why?’

‘I’m trying to locate a cousin of his named Marie. I’m told they were pretty close at one time.’

Wally was an old school racist. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well they’re like that, aren’t they? Especially when one of ‘em’s got any cash. Jeez, they bled Dave Sands dry. Lionel too, I reckon.’

‘Any idea where Jimmy is now?’

‘Be in Redfern, wouldn’t he?’

‘Come on, Wally, keep up. There’s Aborigines in parliament, in the law, in business.’

‘Not ex-boxers. The money goes and they get on the grog.’

‘Have it your way. I’ll ask someone else.’

‘Hang on, don’t get shitty. I don’t know anything about a cousin, but I did hear that Jimmy was doin’ something. What was it? Oh, yeah-he’s got a band. They play country music’

‘What’s the name of the band?’

‘Dunno. I just heard someone mention that Jimmy was the leader. I suppose he plays the guitar and sings. Don’t they all play the guitar and sing, the leaders?’