Peter Corris - The Black Prince

‘Yes, maybe.’ A noisy truck went by outside and I dropped my voice. ‘Would one of these blokes be Daniel Roberts?’

She looked at me closely, taking in the broken nose and other signs. ‘I should’ve known. Bloody boxing. Danny! Bloke here wants to talk to you.’

My face might bear the marks of a few fists and beatings with other objects, but the face that turned towards us was one sculptured by pugilism. His nose was a flattened ruin, the heavy eyebrow ridges were a mass of scar tissue and his mouth and ears had been pulped into shapelessness. He stood. I was expecting a drunken lurch but he advanced steadily and stuck out his hand. He was sober or very nearly so.

‘Gidday,’ he said. ‘I’m Danny Roberts. Journalist are you, mate?’

The name clicked then. Danny Roberts had been a journeyman welterweight in those years Joe Cousins had described as the doldrums. The fighters made lousy money, endured bad managers, mismatches and crooked promoters and were lucky to come out of it with their health. Whether Roberts had or not I couldn’t be sure. His speech was clear and he didn’t have any of the tics that afflict brain-damaged fighters.

I stuck out my hand and we shook. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a journalist. I’m a private detective.’

‘Yeah? Never met one of them before. I’ve met a few of the public ones.’

I grinned with him and felt at ease. I began to tell him what I was about but he stopped me and suggested that we go over to a table where we could talk in private.

‘Buy you a drink?’ I said.

‘Sure. Middy of light.’

I’d made a fair impact on the schooner. I tossed it down, got two middies of light and joined Roberts at a table. ‘Have to be careful talking Koori business in public,’ he said. ‘That bloke at the bar’d be all ears and probably get it wrong when he blabbed to the nutters.’

‘Nutters?’

‘There’s people around here, blackfellers, who reckon we should kick all the whitefellers out and take the country back.’

‘Big ask.’

‘Fuckin’ right. Madness. And most of ‘em’d be stuffed when the beer ran out. Me, I’m a moderate. Get everything we can, every bloody thing, and don’t worry about what we can’t get.’

‘Sounds right to me. Mind you, I can understand the other point of view.’

‘Me, too. But this isn’t fuckin’ South Africa. Now, what Kooris have you talked to about this?’

‘Only Joe Cousins and the woman on the phone at the Aboriginal Progressive Association.’

‘Beatrix,’ he said. ‘Good lady, but a dead-set wowser. Because I come in here for a couple of beers in the middle of the day she reckons I’m a lost cause. Okay, she steered you to me and she’s right. I talked to your bloke. Young feller, like you say, West Indian, but he said his name was George.’

I fished out the photo of Clinton and showed it to him.

‘Yeah, that’s him. Hair was longer but that’s him all right. Good looking kid, good build on him. Tall middleweight. Cruiser, maybe.’

‘What did he want to talk about?’

‘Ah… hold on, d’you want something to eat?’

I did. We went across to the counter and ordered steaks with chips and salad. I told Danny Roberts I could put the cost of the meal on my expenses and he shrugged his acceptance. When we sat down with our ticket I noticed that the other Aborigine had left the bar. A few drinkers and lunchers, white and black, had wandered in but we still had our privacy at the table.

‘All he wanted to talk about was Angie and the Cousinses. Now Angie, she’s my… fuck it, second cousin or something. We just call it family, you know? Julie, her mum, used to bring her down here for holidays when she was little. Beautiful little girl. She could run like a greyhound. And jump? You never seen anything like it. She jumped over this creek out in the bush once. I wasn’t there but the others told me about it and I went out and measured it. It was seventeen fuckin’ feet. Now that’s a hell of a jump for a thirteen-year-old in bare feet off grass onto grass.’

I drank some beer and nodded. ‘Did you know about what had happened to Angie when Clinton… George, was talking to you?’

Roberts shook his head. ‘Knew she was in hospital and pretty crook, but I didn’t know she was in a coma and that. The women would’ve known. Sometimes they keep things like that secret from the men.’

‘What else?’

The kitchen hand shouted our number and we went across and collected our plates. The steaks were big and well done. The chips were crisp and the salad contained slices of tinned beetroot and that was fine by me. We both ate a few mouthfuls and drank some beer.

‘All right?’

‘Bloody good.’

‘Mine’s all the fuckin’ better for being paid for by you. Okay, now George wanted me to tell him things about the Koori way.’

‘What things?’

He masticated a mouthful of steak, plucked out a sliver of bone and grinned at me. ‘I couldn’t tell him and I can’t tell you. He might’ve had a brown skin but he was just as much a whitefeller as you as far as I was concerned. I showed him some blackfeller fishing tricks. No harm in that. Oh, and we had a day out in the bush and I learned him a bit about hunting and that, bush-tucker stuff. But he wanted to know how I felt about the country and what things mean to me. Couldn’t tell him much. Hard, because he was real sincere about it.’

‘How’d he take it?’

‘Bad. Very upset, like it was the end of the world. Got pissed. I have to tell you he was a terrible drinker. I mean, he fuckin’ tried to drink and he did. But it didn’t take much to get him rotten.’

‘How many times did you see him?’

‘A few times.’ He jabbed his fork at the table. ‘Mostly in here.’

‘And when was this, exactly?’

‘Mate, exactly is a bit hard for me. I’m on a pension, see. Do a bit of fishing and odd jobs, but one day’s much the same as the next and the weeks sort of run on. It was a fair while ago. That’s about all I can tell you.’

We kept eating, exchanged a few remarks about the food, finished our drinks and he got up to get another round. We were Cliff and Danny by now and I asked him if he’d liked Clinton.

‘Yeah, well enough. Nice young bloke when he wasn’t pissed. He got me to teach him a few things about boxing. Wish I hadn’t.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘He got into a fight one night when he was drunk. Right here it was. Picked on a big blackfeller and got the shit beat out of him. He was knocked about real bad and on top of that he was the one got thrown in the lockup. I reckon the copper thought he was just another Abo.’

‘What happened to him after that?’

‘I dunno, mate. Like I told that young feller from the university, I never saw him again. Reckon you’d have to ask the copper.’

I was tossing up whether to pay Danny Roberts for the information he’d given me when he finished his last mouthful of food, downed his beer, wiped his mouth, put his knife and fork together and stood up.

‘Gotta catch the tide, Cliff. Should be a few sand whiting about.’

‘Good luck, Danny. And thanks. By the way, what’s the policeman’s name?’

We shook hands.

‘Pipe,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Pipe. Goes by the nickname of Copper, but not to his face, mind.’

‘Right.’

‘I hope you find the kid and that he’s not in too much trouble. But from the fuckin’ look of him I’d say that’s where he was headed. I know the signs. Thanks for the tucker. See you.’

He gave a wave to the fat barmaid as he walked out. I cleaned up my plate and put down the rest of the beer, thinking that to live on a pension in a place like this and do some fishing and odd jobs couldn’t be too bad. Then I remembered that he’d said he lived on his own and I knew the downside of that. He’d befriended a young man who’d got into trouble and left without saying goodbye. He had a lot of dignity and resilience: all things considered, Danny Roberts was one of life’s lucky people.