David Malouf - The Great World

He had always been a follower of fairs. The sound of a merry-go-round and the wheezy music it pumped out, the sight of a dozen men in shorts and blue singlets with sledgehammers and guy-ropes raising a tent, turning a bit of waste ground into a carnival site, was enough to draw him away from any message he was on. More than once he had got a good box on the ears for slipping under the canvas and getting in late for tea, or for hanging around outside to hear the spruikers and coming home with a mouthful of nonsense (he could learn off the most intricate patter in just minutes) that filled Jenny with a wailing desire to experience these wonders for herself.

He loved the lights strung from pole to pole, red and blue and orange, casting weird shadows where the warm breeze struck them, the smell of animal shit, the satin and spangles the showies wore, which could be grimy when you got up close, but under the lights, and in the glow that was created by the spruikers’ empowering descriptions, took you right out of yourself.

Toddlers swung up high on their fathers’ shoulders would be dazed or crowing. Noisy youths with slicked-down hair and a fag in their mouth would be lining up to fire at a row of ducks or to swing a hammer and ring a bell, their girls, all permed and lipsticked, looking on and pretending they weren’t bored. Only later, with a kewpie doll or alarm clock or plaster dog under their arm, would these girls find something at last that really touched them. Looking out from the vantage point of a rough normality they would feel a pricking fear run up their arms at the sight of the pin-headed Chinaman drinking tea from a dolly’s cup, or a poddy-calf sad-eyed and huggable on its six legs.

Digger, who had been haunting such places since he was ten years old, would move about in an excited trance, taking in the noise, the sweat, the colour, the cruelties. And always at the centre of it all, not quite a freak-show but drawing to itself some of the loose emotion the freak-shows generated, was the tent with the boxers; half a dozen fellows, not all of them young, but all dark — half-castes or Islanders — lined up on a board in front of a painted flap.

The flap showed two boxers, taller than the real ones, shaping up. On a separate platform to one side was a spruiker to stir the mob. Already gloved and booted, in silk shorts and dressing-gowns that proclaimed their fighting names in letters of gold, the coons would be dancing about just at head level, jabbing the air, hissing through their nostrils, looking terrible.

They were there as a challenge. To question the toughness and assumed manhood of the farmhands and counter-jumpers who stood about with a girl on their arm and a stick of sugarcane or a cornet of fairy-floss in their fist, asking themselves, but secretly, if they measured up. Mugs, they were.

Telling it over later to Mac and Doug, Digger would laugh, a little shamefaced before these new friends of the role he had played, but carried away by the sheer fun of it. He would do a take-off of one of those muscle-bound farm-boys standing with his arms bared and his mouth open, breathing through his nose; or the others who cat-called and chiacked, too fly themselves to step into a pounding, but quite willing to urge on their mates.

There was, after all, something very stark and simple in it that appealed to fellows whose fathers and grandfathers had cleared the country, fought off blacks, made themselves a reputation in a war. It was over, all that. Life now was a tame affair of scrounging for a living and worrying always how to pay the rent and feed the kids, or, worse still, of lining up for a hand-out; and with the vague suspicion always that you had been let down and betrayed — only who by? — and a gnawing resentment in you that needed something out there you could nail and take a poke at.

What was on offer here was a real fight: amateur against professional, white against black, an ordinary man’s muscle and skill, a dairyman’s or meat worker’s, against forces that had to be pushed back every now and then, flattened and shown their place, or you wouldn’t know what you were worth. Those were the terms.

Partly it was what the spruiker put into their heads with his quickfire clever patter. But mostly, and especially after a few beers, it was the sight of the coons themselves looking so flash up there in their leather gloves and their maroon or green silk gowns with the stitched-on lettering. You could smell them. For all the showy material of their get-up they were just abos, coons.

It was a put-up job. That’s what the mugs didn’t realise. But once it got going there was enough bitterness on both sides to make it real. Blood, that’s what the mob wanted. To see one of the coons get laid out with a cut lip, or, if the mood took them, to see some swaggering lair, a local bully, get done over by a black. The crowd was unpredictable. It could switch sides just like that.

Most of the challengers in fact were no match for the fast-footed members of the troupe, even those of them who had seen better days and were soft-headed with grog or from the beatings they had taken in real fights. They were professionals and knew all the dodges. They had been in this game, most of them, since they first learned to shape up, and were wily and tough. All the challenger had was brute strength, his hatred of flash niggers, and the wish to impress the girl he was with or his mates.

Digger’s job, standing in his shirt-sleeves in the warm night air, while the music of the merry-go-round rose and fell and beetles hurled themselves at raw bulbs, was to make himself one of the crowd, a country kid like the rest (which he was of course), and to appeal to the spirit of emulation or savagery in them.

‘That big bloke don’t look so tough,’ he would remark to one of his neighbours, ‘waddaya reckon?’ and he would begin to urge this or that man on. Only if no one else would be in it would he step forward himself.

‘You sure about this?’ the spruiker would ask as he climbed the stairs to the platform. ‘Yer mother knows about it, does she? You are sixteen? — Nice lookin’ bloke, isn’t ’e girls? Shame about that nose. Well then, son, yer on! The rest is your lookout.’

The first time, carried away by the noise and excitement and the certainty of his own skill, he had just gone up like any other mug and got floored. But he went two rounds and was good. The crowd liked his clean looks, his keenness, and the manager, seeing the possibilities in him — he was slight and boyish but surprisingly tough — had come out while he was washing up and offered him a job. He was to do, for three pounds a week, what he had just done for the heck of it; only from now on it would be play-acting. He would live with the troupe, travel with them from town to town, and be part of the show. What did he think of it? He jumped at the offer.

It wasn’t just the three pounds, though that too was a consideration when so many thousands were out of work, or the chance to be one of the show folk, or the prospect at last of seeing the world. It was the chance it offered (he touched on this very lightly, hardly confessing it even to himself) of stepping aside from what fate, or his mother, who claimed to be its agent, had set up for him. Of getting away .

He kept the news to himself for a day or two and made his plans. Then he told his father.

‘Good on yer, mate,’ his father said, delighted to see Digger show a bit of fight and to be part of a conspiracy. ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll cover for ya. You get away while the going’s good. Wish it was me!’

He was young and took things lightly, including the bruises. It was an education. He had eighteen months of it and saw every town from Albury right through the west and up the coast as far as Bundaberg. Bought himself boots, a kangaroo-hide belt, a couple of flash shirts, and soon got to know the other showies on a neighbourly basis.