Boxing Match

The boy got taken by accident.

He was playing on the beach not far from where his mother sat. The women had their backs to the sea and by the time they lifted their heads the whaleboat was upon them. The sealers came stumbling through the surf, motley club-wielding men dressed in strips of kangaroo and emu skin, sharp-nosed toggle irons and blubber shanks hanging from their belts. Their arms were corded with muscle from the long rhythmic pull across Bass Strait and their eyes and lips flecked with anticipation. The women didn’t stand or run; they simply spat and turned their heads. The sealers clubbed them where they sat as they would any living thing they found on an half-exposed lump of basalt in the waters of the strait.

Not all were taken. They couldn’t fit more than five in the boat. But the boy’s mother was one of the ones they dragged by the hair down through the scrub and into the shallows and two by two pitched her into the muck that sloshed about in the keel. There they lay–the five of them–a strange pile of twisted, lacerated bodies, half-conscious of the agony they were in. One of the sealers lay with them, limp on one side, bleeding from where he’d been slashed with a sharpened rock. They pushed the boat back out into the surf and piled in. It rocked madly and for a few hairy moments it looked as though the whole thing was about to go keel up in the swell. But they righted it and started hacking at the waves with their oar blades. A minute or two could very easily cost a life, or all their lives, for word travelled like lightning in this bush and the mob when they had to be weren’t much slower. Two blokes not half a year before had been speared as they stood in the stern of their boat giving a final go fuck yerself to the gathered crowd though they were forty yards or more offshore. That’s how deadly the mob could be with a length of sharpened wood.

The boy had run after the women and thrown himself into the boat. He clung to his mother as a sea mollusc to a crop of salty rock. None of them had the heart to kill him. And there wasn’t the time to pry his fingers one by one. So there he was, and there he stayed, a full fifteen hours of heaving and sweating and swearing across the mountains and the furrows that divided Van Diemen’s Land from Australia Felix.

Welcome to yer new home boy.

He looked up at the man. He hadn’t noticed before that he only had one eye. The other eye, the one he had, was small and dark like an oyster and yet seemed to contain a trace of something kind. The man reached out to scuffle his hair. The boy shrank back and his mother swatted the man’s hand away. The man laughed. Have it your way, he said, it aint going to change nothing. He turned and disappeared back into the smoky mouth of an humpy. The place was dotted with them; tiny, squalid constructions barely big enough to sleep a single sealer, let alone the stinking groups of ten and twenty that congregated in them. They were thatched with paperbark and sound against neither the continual winter drizzle nor the torrential downpours that swept up off the Antarctic in spring and smashed straight into the face of Kangaroo Island. Despite being so poorly proofed they had very little ventilation and every time a body emerged or withdrew into one of them a great plume of smoke would billow forth from behind the bark flap that served as entrance.

The boy was unsure where to look. Lying around the camp were so many men and mostly they had their eyes trained on him and his mother. A few of them spat and jeered and finally one of them threw a bottle which sailed straight past them and smashed on the rocks leading down to the foreshore.

Sit down before we fucken knock youse down!

The boy felt his mother push him gently in the back. She took his arm and guided him over to a drooping sheoak against the base of which two women had put their backs. They weren’t the women that had come over with them. They must have been here for some time because they hissed and motioned at her to stay away from their tree. Their faces were scarred and one of them had an ear missing and in its place was a nasty lump of purpled flesh which had grown up and around the hole as if trying to recreate the shape of the ear.

The boy’s mother picked him up and carried him over to the smouldering ashes of an early afternoon cooking fire which had been abandoned for the larger, more collegial fires of the evening. The place reeked of shit and piss and the sharp pungency of regurgitated rum. The boy asked his mother where the other women had been taken but she did not answer.

It was not long before one of the men approached and, swaying, grinned at the boy’s mother. His hair was long and lank and they could hardly see his rotten teeth behind the swathe of bristling hair that shrouded his face. The man reached into his pants and fumbling with his other hand undid the frayed belt-cord. He produced like a magician’s rabbit his sooty penis. He let his balls hang over the front of his oil-stained pants for good effect. The whole package dangled there like some sort of offering of which he was particularly proud and for which he expected some sort of reciprocal exchange.

Come on, he said.

He motioned at her to come to him, to come with him. Neither the boy nor his mother moved. Come on then, he said more forcefully. There was a pause as their eyes locked–the man’s and the boy’s mother’s–and each knew that this could end poorly or well. The man took his penis in his hand and pumped it a couple of times and yelled right into her face. A few of the other men looked over and one of them called out, What’s the matter Reid? Reid turned back to them and said, This lubra doesn’t like the look of me cock. They stood up moved over to hover behind him. Now there were four men looking at her and she didn’t have the courage to incite them any further. She told the boy to stay where he was and, if he had to, to go and sit with the other women even if they pushed him away.

She stood up and immediately one of the men clubbed her to the side of the head breaking her jaw and laying her out flat in the still warm ash. The boy threw himself on his mother but the men just brushed him off. The boy’s mother tried to stand but she could not so they hauled her up onto her feet and carried her off. The boy trotted alongside and they kept pushing him down until at last they grew tired of him and one of them threw him hard against a stand of scarlet bottlebrush. He picked himself up and tried to follow after but reached up and found he was bleeding from the skull. He took a couple more steps and fell face forward into the leaf litter. He was not unconscious but he could not move and he did not understand why. He cried out but no one came.

What’s yer name?

The boy didn’t answer. I said what’s yer name? There was no way to tell if his silence was deliberate. Stupid fucken darkie why don’t you open your mouth and see what sort of a noise you can produce? You can’t communicate if you don’t open your gob now can you? It is an airway you know, air is needed to make a sound come out of that hole. The other kid opened his mouth wide and made an ahhh sort of a sound like when a doctor tells you to.

Now you do it.

The boy sat there stubbornly looking at the ground. Youse just determined to be a sour-sack, aren’t you? The other kid looked up at the cloudless sky and sighed. He picked up a rock and skimmed it across the water. Go on, darkie! The boy stood and picked up a rock and all casual as though he were going to bend over and scratch his ankle he let go a perfect skimmer that made a mockery of both gravity and hydrology.

How’d you do that?

The boy picked up another rock, looked at it and cast it aside. He stooped to the shale-strewn floor and fossicked around for a few moments before straightening up with a small gleaming object in his hand. He gave it to the other kid and made a motion as like to throw. The kid threw it and, lo and behold, it skimmed across the shallows as good as Jesus himself.

Hey can you find me a few more of them rocks?

The two of them made a habit of swimming.

They’d get up before anybody else was stirring and they’d swim out to the seal rocks. Sometimes they’d filch somebody’s club and together–the black boy and the white kid–they’d club a seal like the older men did and take it back to the camp to be skinned by the waking sealers. No matter how many times they did this the men would still express surprise and grumble distrustfully that this was not how it should be done as they rubbed at their beards and their bloodshot eyes. None of them were swimmers and even if they knew how they chose not to. Man was not made to inhabit the water, said Reid, else why should we have a need to build boats? He was convinced the seal rocks were surrounded on all sides by ravening sharks and he said the boys were fools to dip their toes in the water let alone clamber around on the rocks and drag a bleeding carcass back through the swell.

The boy had stopped thinking so much about his mother. He hadn’t seen her since that night with the four men. At first the sealers in the camp had ignored him and wouldn’t look him in the eye even when he grabbed them by the leg they’d just brush him off or when he hung back at the edge of the campfire they’d just throw him scraps of food without looking. But for some reason Reid had taken a shine to him. He gave the boy big swigs from his grog bottle and when that one was finished he cracked open a new one and they made inroads into that. He let the boy follow him around and one time he even stepped in and showed another sealer what the back of his hand looked like after the other man had touched the boy while he was asleep. It wasn’t as though the boy had forgotten her or how she disappeared–Reid’s face snarling and drooling–but survival brought its own set of concerns, pressing and immediate, which somehow changed the world’s hue, sharpened the edges of things and blurred others, left him weak and dizzy and above all hungry.

It was the mornings they spent on the seal rocks that became the focus of his being. He and the other kid would lie there for hours pretending to be dead until the seals forgot about them or thought they were rocks or clumps of kelp. They’d come nuzzling over, whiskers whirling, and the two of them would jump up their hearts pounding in their throats and madly bludgeon the unsuspecting cub or sire. That was the moment he lived for, the flash that lit up his dark nightly dreams, and yet the question was always left hanging in the air. Who was the leader, who the follower? Who was responsible for the congealing pool at their feet? Who had landed the terminal blow? Who amongst them was a man?

The sealers were suddenly all around him.

The boy couldn’t understand why they were pressing in on all sides in such a large throng. He knew from their wide eyes and bared teeth and the ragged handfuls of clenched sterling that this was not some ordinary grievance lying between two angered groups but something that concerned everyone and that he was somehow at the centre of. They swept him up and carried him along like a pagan emperor in a human chair and deposited him on the edge of a rough circle of dirt whose circumference was staked out by a hawser wound around on itself twice over. Plenty of sealers were already gathered there, the older ones seated on an old acacia stump, and they were eying him up and spitting on the ground as if sizing up a horse or dog for a race or a rack of lamb for dinner. It was some time before he even noticed that the other kid was standing on the opposite side of the ring rubbing his fists and scratching at the ground awkwardly with his feet. Seeing his friend, the boy went over to speak to him and the crowd suddenly roared and someone pushed the other kid towards him and the kid lashed out with his small closed fist and knocked the boy flat on his back.

The boy found himself looking up at the late afternoon sky with the stars clearly visible through the blue and the moon framed against the overhanging swamp gum. It was a queer sight and perhaps the last thing he expected to see in that moment. Then there was the screwed up face of the other kid peering down at him and suddenly his mouth opened and he spat, or sprayed, a clot of gunk into the boy’s eye. It felt wet and warm and it clung to his eye socket and his eyebrow as he tried to wipe it away. He stood up and looked at the other kid who had his thin arms raised and his clenched hands held in front of his face.
Get in there Dutton! Destroy the black bastard!

The other kid was much bigger and clearly he’d been taught how to fight. He didn’t swing his fists around like daisy chains but drove them straight out from his chest like lumps of hell hot lead. The boy could hardly keep his feet he was being so badly beaten about the head. In a corner, as though inspired by the events at hand, two dogs started to scrap. Hardly anyone noticed except an older man who put a boot into them which sent them yelping off into the undergrowth.

Go on Dutton! Finish him off!

The other kid was a southpaw and he jabbed the boy twice to the head and followed up with a right hook that was a wide as a barn door. The boy went down for the second time. He thought that he was crying as his face was wet again but when he reached up with his sore right hand he discovered that it was blood. His mouth was very sore. He wanted to cry but more fiercely he felt something swell within him, a meteor of resentment that yanked him up on his feet and almost without conscious control drove him straight into the arms of his friend. He shrugged off another punch to the face and wrapped himself around the other kid’s neck, brought him down like a boomer caught in a rope-trap and, grabbing his head with both hands, tore at his right ear with his teeth.

A number of sealers cheered and clapped their hands but three men came forth and pulled the boy off his adversary and held him in their iron hands. Another man, whom the Kangaroo Islanders called the Doctor–though he was no doctor–knelt over the other kid and held a rag to the side of his head. The other kid yelled and screamed and kicked up his legs and accidently struck the Doctor a blow to the side of the head. The Doctor motioned to a couple of others to come over and help him hold the kid’s legs pinned to the earth. It was a long time before the ruckus died down and the crowd dispersed.

While the boys slept everybody discussed the boxing match.

It was agreed by all and sundry that that was not how a fight should proceed. But then again, no one was surprised by what had transpired. No one had set any rules or regulations and they had no gloves in the camp to make it sporting. An old sealer spoke of a similar fight he’d heard about between James Kelly and some disgruntled blackfella when Kelly was circumnavigating Van Diemen’s Land in a whaleboat. He said Kelly had only been saved because one of his mates had stepped in for him. Another sealer said no such thing had taken place and he ought to know because he was related to Kelly’s second cousin. The old sealer slapped his hand on his thigh and rose up saying anybody who called him a liar was liable to get their face stoved in. Somebody said, Maybe we’ll get to see a real fight now. There was a chorus of laughter and then the old sealer smiled sheepishly and sat down.

They’ll soon be mates again, he said, mark my word.

‘Boxing Match’ has been awarded second prize in the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writer’s Competition and is published in the September issue of The Victorian Writer magazine. ‘Boxing Match’ is part of a wider collection David Mence is working on called Portland Cycle about the early sealing and whaling days in Western Victoria. The story ‘Denmaar’ from this collection was published in Meanjin, no. 2, 2011 and ‘Dutton’s River’ will be published in Meanjin, no. 4, 2011.

Copyright David Mence 2011