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  Author and journalist Paul Daley’s books—Canberra, Collingwood: A Love Story, Beersheba and Armageddon—have been finalists in major literary awards, including the Nib, the Manning Clark House Cultural Awards and the Prime Minister’s History Prize. He is the winner of the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism and the Paul Lyneham Award for Press Gallery journalism. In 2013 he co-wrote, with Katie Pollock, the acclaimed political play, The Hansard Monologues. He also writes essays and short stories, and about history and national identity for The Guardian. He lives in Canberra with his wife, Lenore Taylor, and their children.

  Challenge

  PAUL DALEY

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2014

  Text © Paul Daley, 2014

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2014

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Daley, Paul, author.

  Challenge/Paul Daley

  978 0 5228 5863 1 (paperback)

  978 0 5228 6053 5 (ebook)

  Political fiction, Australian.

  A823.4

  For Peter Fray and Katie Pollock—supporters, collaborators, friends

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Chisel deserved to die. Nothing less, for all he’d done.

  When I reach back thirty-five years to conjure a winter’s night in 1974, my mouth dries up and my heart instantly palpitates, so vivid is my recall of what it’s like to hope, to wish, that someone—me, if I could summon the strength—would actually kill him.

  I got my chance. And at the end of that night I lived on, satisfied that one way or another Chisel finally got what he’d long had coming. That’s quite an admission from someone in my position, I know. But the thing is I am trying to tell the truth these days, and not just some of it some of the time.

  About when we reach our mid-forties we all start bragging about how we live in the now. Really, though, it’s just faux-Zen horseshit, a way of coping with the reality that the best—or at least the most—is probably history, and that our sore joints, our insomnia, our anxieties and our growing fear of the grave will only become more acute as we run up against the end.

  So, yeah—I’m as in the now as anyone else my age. But that doesn’t stop me from dwelling on the past quite a bit—a lot more so in recent years since I hit the big five zero and won the chance to become who I deserve to be. But for fuck’s sake, the past is not another country, foreign topography to be pored over, held up to the light and drawn from. You can’t relive it. The only lesson of the past is that it’s always with you—a black weight on your soul and your memory and your conscience, the sum total of which is regret. That’s all. Regret.

  Regrets … yes, I have a few.

  If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have been on the 5.56 from Hurstbridge as it lurched and hissed into Platform 14 that shitty Saturday evening of the Skyhooks concert at the Myer Music Bowl in 1974.

  I can still hear the carriage doors of the red rattler as they slam open symphonically. Weary, inky daylight at each end of the platform and a few flickering phosphorescent tubes light the landing deep under the Edwardian Baroque façade of arcs, Diocletian windows, turrets and towers. And that signature row of clocks over the shabby station’s yawning mouth that have recorded a dozen old men’s lives in delayed trains since the Gold Rush.

  A few waiting commuters including a family—mum and dad, thirties, two kids in Hawthorn jumpers—watch tentatively as Chisel fills one of the carriage doorways.

  I’m in the next carriage, right, so I can’t see him directly, although I know him well from the trains and the bowling alleys and the shopping-centre car parks and the outers of the footy grounds across the city to anticipate what he’s about to do. It’s his old party trick. Predictable. Terrifying.

  I’ve got my face up to the carriage glass. And I’m watching the family register Chisel’s six-three of black-and-purple skin-tight woollen ‘connie’ cardigan, hock fists, calloused knuckles with blue stars, black patent-leather high-heeled square-toed lace-ups, flared scrotum-splitting tight Staggers, top button undone with the Winfield Reds jammed into the waist. They register, too, the tent-boxer nose, peroxide rats’ tails, the tattooed Indian-ink tears at eye corners and the silver cross, left lobe.

  I know from their faces that Chisel is running through his usual routine: clutching the doorjambs to flex pec majors, triceps and biceps, and leaning forward to greet the father with that decayed gummy grimace.

  Dad returns a quivering smile and shudders involuntarily like he’s just been jabbed with a cattle prod. He instinctively sweeps the family behind, trying to stay calm, passively disengage. It’s a textbook response to a dangerous situation. But it won’t work. Chisel is determined.

  Chisel demands, Seen the Hawks?

  The man swallows hard, twice, like stale bread’s caught in his throat, eventually coughs out, Yes, mate, his voice rudderless and quivering.

  I bet the Dees did ’em, Chisel spits, the Hawks are fuckin’ poofters—right?

  Ahh no. Hawthorn won.

  Fuck that, mate—you’re just having me on. So, youse goin’ home now? On the train?

  Yes.

  Where to?

  Ivanhoe.

  Ivanhoe. Nice.

  Chisel steps down onto the platform and into my line of sight. He cocks his head back, sniffs deeply, blinks slowly. The smell of fear re-draws that ugly smile onto his battered potato-that-fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck face. The little boy is whimpering and shaking now. Chisel turns his head slightly to the left and quizzically studies the father grasping for his son’s hand, squeezing—It’s okay—to reassure him.

  In a well-rehearsed flourish Chisel suddenly jumps like a cat shot up the arse and crashes his forehead into the man’s face,
busting his nose in a miasma of blood, snot and tears. The man crumples. Wife and kids—huddled—scream and shiver, watch sideways. Other commuters intently ignore and scuttle for exits.

  Ivanhoe? Chisel says contemptuously. Well haven’t ya heard—this train is going straight to fuckin’ hospital.

  The kids are now clinging to the wife’s arms as she stoops over her husband who lies in a foetal position on the platform. She kneels then cradles his upper body.

  Chisel looks over his shoulder, says softly, C’mon, triggers an orderly push across the platform of maybe thirty men and boys—mutated Chisels. There’re a few girls at the tail: Bowie cuts and bangs with white connies over pushed-up tits; minis and treads; handbags holding bricks. They stop behind Chisel and his batman, Vulture, a black-hearted, stumpy, prison-tattooed Scot in a skintight red t-shirt that’s white flock-embossed with THOMASTOWN SHARPS. Vulture surveys the victim, grins, stabs a bone-snapping kick into the man’s ribs and searches Chisel’s face for approval. The wife screams again, sobs.

  About here I make a mental note to maybe fuck up Vulture tonight, if I’m given a bee’s dick of a chance.

  Chisel glances dismissively at Vulture and then holds his gaze one carriage along. He registers our faces in the windows. He’s seen us before, occasionally punching on with his boys and the other sharpie gangs. But he’s high on the thrill of the pain he’s causing and so can’t quite finger us right now. The reflexive, barely discernible flick of an eyebrow, though, simultaneously signals a fleeting spark of recognition and a Darwinian registration of potential threat from us pseudo-surfs.

  I catch and hold Chisel’s eye, mouth right at him—I’ll get you for this, cunt. But I only actually mouth the words inside my head. Then I look at the boy. He is staring straight at me, too, his bottom lip sucking in and blowing out with each rapid breath. I want to go out there and help. But my knees feel weak, my hands are shaking and my heartbeat is pounding in my ears. The Fear.

  I’m wishing for the boy’s sake that it would end. But really, it’s just beginning. In thirty-five years he’ll still be regretting everything about this evening. He’ll long ago have given up trying to divine a lesson from it. But he’ll still be wrestling with the shame of a lifetime’s anger at his father for doing nothing—not an air punch, not a bitch slap, not even a dry spit or a defiant fuck you—in retaliation.

  Everybody knew the trains were sharp lifeblood, linking gangs from everywhere to Flinders Street—sharpie Mecca, where it was sharp against sharp but always, first, sharp against the world.

  Sharp feasted on boredom. Kids from every dingy suburban sinkhole were in it for the raging brutal, nihilistic herd-like madness. Some liked the fashion and the music. But Chisel was in it for one thing: violence. I fucking hated his type. The sharps had been bullying me since I was a kid in the clapped-out suburb where I’d grown up. And now, as a seventeen-year-old, with a firm eye on a way out and with a little encouragement from a stealthy mate, I was ready for some judiciously timed revenge violence. Actually, it was a good deal more than that, having been convinced that belting the occasional one or two of these dickheads was a form of natural justice—payback for all the evil things they did to strangers in the name of fun, like this family, across the city. In some ways I think it might’ve actually been my real political awakening. Not that I’ve ever said that in my speeches to the true believers at National Conference or anything. That wouldn’t be too smart. Half the union delegates are probably former sharps.

  Anyway, Chisel was the biggest, toughest and nastiest. The challenge I didn’t really want but couldn’t ignore.

  Jolting me back to the present, Eddie interrupts, says to me, I already know your log-cabin story, darl, how you survived the mean streets of the seventies. So you’re a tough guy—a survivor. Bravo. I mean—who doesn’t know that about you? And anyway, I’ve seen the YouTube doco on the sharps—I don’t really need a dissertation on them from you. But okay then—tell me what happened next if you’re insisting, I mean, if it’s really that important right now.

  Forget it, I say, forget it. I’ll tell you if ever you really need to know.

  You mean another time—when the sky’s not falling in?

  When the sky’s not falling in? Well, that could mean never. My office seemed to lurch from crisis to mishap, managing the political trash by sweeping it from one end of the party and the parliament, and hiding it under the carpet at the other, placating the colleagues with vacant promises and going full frontal against every new daily line of attack from the government.

  I’d at least tried to tell Eddie that I could be accused, one day, of killing a man. But back to the story and the bit she doesn’t know yet.

  All right, I’m watching through the train window as Chisel leads his bunch of Neanderthals orderly double-file, up the concrete ramp from the platform. They always follow him like this. The ticket collector stands aside, holds the gate open like a blind cinema usher, eyes glued vacantly to his feet so as not to catch Chisel’s or any other nasty prick’s.

  Station staff and a few other commuters are clustered around the bleeding man and his family now. The police and ambulance will come. But no one will identify Chisel. He’ll get away with it. Again. As I walk past them, I bend over, gently tousle the boy’s hair, say, It’s okay, he’ll get what’s his. The boy ignores me.

  We follow the tail of the gang up the ramp. They spill into the cavernous piss-smelling atrium with its decades of masticated gum blots, carbon-stained walls, greasy spoons, smoke sellers and soft-porn vendors. Outside a gentle, icy patina of rain is setting in. Under the clocks the steps are a humming, steaming, hyper-mass of hundreds of sharps—spitting, smoking fags in cupped hands, screaming and laughing, six-pack bracelets dangling from wrists.

  We stick out like dogs’ balls, so we cross the road, stand on the steps of St Paul’s and watch as Chisel parts the crowd, revelling in the potency of respect he thinks he commands but oblivious that it’s really just fear, which is quite different. Four of his boys go for beer from Y&Js across the road: four cartons of VB Mick Nolans. Chisel cracks a tinny, sucks deeply and leads the rest—a ravenous crocodile line—over Swanston Street, across the bridge spanning the serpentine river and down towards the Myer Music Bowl for the concert.

  The sharps were suss as on Skyhooks because they weren’t straight hard rock like Lobby Loyde or Chain, what with that faggot in drag and the pretty-boy Shirl. But the ’hooks nailed it with their songs about dope deals and Toorak cowboys and the wogs down Lygon Street. Sharps liked chicks and chicks liked Skyhooks. Not just sharpie moles. But little rich babes from convent schools who’d told their parents they were going to the pictures at the Rivoli Twin when they were actually chasing a bit of tough-boy edge down by the Bowl.

  The violence comes in recurring waves. Police drag someone out by the legs or arms or head. It stops for a minute then a punch or a bottle flies and it crescendos again, as sharps tear into sharps and bystanders and voyeurs scurry to avoid getting roped in. Girls wail as the cops charge in and out of the gouging, writhing horde, dragging smaller stragglers up to the flotilla of paddy vans on the lawns.

  We watch Chisel lurk, vigilant in the shadows, and run in occasionally to belt someone, then retreat before he can be collared. He’s got one arm snaked around the neck of a scruffy-looking sheila in a red connie and tartan skirt that just covers her white knickers, one of his hands wedged into her cleavage, the other clutching a beer.

  Duffo out front of Kush orders the band to stop.

  Fuckin’ cool it, guys, he says. Stop the fighting. It lulls. Then, as he picks up ‘Banana Song’, someone tosses another punch. It reignites, and only calms when the ’hooks start.

  After the concert a progressive brawl rolls through the gardens around the Bowl and past the Shrine. Gangs hunt each other through the trees—Punch chasey!—and back towards the station. There’re coppers and TV cameras everywhere.

  Dozens hammer away at one another at the Flinders
–Swanston intersection. Chisel and his goons take turns to race in from the packs to punch the backs of heads. Cops bring in the horses. Girls scream and run. The cavalry enlivens others who dart about the horses’ legs, belt the whinnying beasts on the flanks—Thwack!—with open palms.

  Vulture is kicking the life out of some poor prick on the ground right in front of me. My chance. I step forward, shape up and say, Game on, fucker.

  But before I can get one in I’m hit hard in the back of the head. King hit. Coward’s punch. I see stars, drop to my knees. I lift my eyes to catch Chisel looming above me, spinning his punching arm like a windmill. I don’t feel anything when his fist connects. But there’s a loud pop—you know, like when one of the valves on the old black-and-white telly used to blow. Everything goes white for a few seconds. I crawl away before any of them can kick me.

  I must’ve looked like complete crap. Blood all down my front. But I’d had worse concussions on the footy field and still played out those games. A funny thing would happen whenever I got sconed really bad on the oval: I’d leave my body like I was in a dream, levitating, and look down on myself playing. Every time I was seriously concussed I played a blinder.

  I sink back into the crowd but I’m on my feet. The Fear’s gone and I’m thinking, Why not? Then I take off, out of my body, and I’m hovering above it all, watching down as Chisel keeps circling, arms overhead like a demented prize fighter, while the cavalry struggles at the perimeter of the crowd, looking for a way through without stomping screaming kids.

  Chisel doesn’t see him emerge from the shadows, this big bastard dressed like me in cords and a white t-shirt, with some sharp’s connie cardigan wound around his head like a scarf, sleeves knotted at the nape of his neck, leaving only his eyes visible at the front. He’s not quite as tall as Chisel, but he’s fit and with gym-cut iron-pumped pecs and biceps. He walks like he’s lining up a goal from forty-five out. With his head and face covered there’s something other worldly about him—like the Palestinian gunmen on the TV news all the time.

  Chisel collapses before he knows he’s been punched, his head bouncing on the wet bitumen.