It’s the first game day of the season. The C Grade, our under-eighteen side, are playing as I arrive at the grounds. Inside the dank dressing room, men’s voices go up a few decibels and down a few octaves, echoing through the communal shower recesses. These are tough rugby-playing men, you can tell just by their voices.
“You fucking blokes know what to do with these cunts. Hammer them up the middle. I don’t want any fancy stuff, just hammer them. For the first twenty minutes just fucking hammer them. If they’ve got the fucking ball... hammer them. If we’ve got the fucking ball... hammer them. Don’t run around them. Run straight at the cunts!” The tall, thin, red-haired coach pauses for breath. “What are we gonna do to them?” he asks.
“Hammer the cunts!” the men shout in response.
“The big men up the middle for the first twenty... Okay?”
“Okay!”
“Pass back inside, okay?”
“Okay!”
“Hammer the cunts, right!”
“Right!”
“Say it! Hammer the cunts!”
“Hammer the cunts!”
The shouted strategy continues in the Redfern dressing room, back and forth, until a few seconds before the game.
Two hours later we are back in the same stinking, steam-filled dressing room. We won 22 to 7. We, me included, had well and truly hammered the cunts. The defeated C Grade boys joined in the celebrations and led the singing of our club’s victory song.
“Hey, uncle, you got the bastards who bashed Uncle Lally yet?” It was one of the younger players from the C Grade.
I’m on my back on the floor. “No, mate, still looking, lots of cops on it though. Me and Lynchie liaise, have catch-up calls most days. You know Brian Lynch?”
“No, I don’t know him, never met him,” he smiles, “but everyone knows Lynchie.”
“Yeah, best halfback Australia ever had.”
“Yeah... look, I heard something, uncle.” The kid looks serious. “Cowboy Cassidy drank with Lally every morning at the Anchor, the early opener. Cowboy’s a dealer. He’s a bad cunt, uncle.”
The Anchor Hotel is one of five Sydney early-openers that cater to the inner-city blue-collar shift workers. Of course there are the twenty-four-hour clubs, but Lally would never be allowed in those because often he’d arrive loaded. The Anchor was his favorite, according to his mum, and the closest to their place.
A barman is flushing the exterior walls and footpath of the Anchor with a garden hose as I approach. These types of places are tiled inside and out, like bathrooms, easy care, as often patrons could not keep their drink and fatty pub food down.
“Yep, I know Lally,” the slim barman replies to my question as he keeps flushing. “Haven’t seen him for a while. Is he okay?”
I tell him.
“Fucking hell!” He shakes his head.
“Do you know a bloke called Cowboy Cassidy?” I ask him straight-out.
“Cowboy?”
“Cowboy Cassidy.”
“Oh, I know Cowboy pretty well, from the bush, a rodeo rider.”
“Is he a dealer?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t get that from me.”
“Was Lally dealing?”
Slim turns the hose off and looks at me like I’m a kid. “D’you know Lally at all, mate?”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Ya cousin?” He stares into my face in disbelief, and speaks softly: “He’s been dealing for fucking years, mate.”
“I knew he smoked a bit...”
“Smoked? He was into fucking everything.”
I watch his lips move as he rattles off the range of merchandise that Lally handled, which included handguns. I didn’t know my cousin at all.
Slim tells me Cowboy comes in every day around eight. It’s seven. I have an hour to kill. I slip him a twenty and we part.
I walk the few blocks to the busy wharves at the quay. The ferries are unloading their people cargo in the center of the city. The sun is shining. It is a crisp winter day. I sit near the jetties, mesmerized, watching the sparkling sunlight on the surface of the water, eating hot chips from a cardboard carton. I wonder what life would have been like for the blacks living here before the British landed. Aboriginal people claim they’ve always occupied this land and never migrated here, as most academics say. The blackfellas simply reverse the logic — if people could walk south over the so-called land bridge which joined Australia to Asia, then surely they could also have walked north. After all, the most ancient evidence of human habitation has been found right here.
Just then, an unassuming aboriginal man carrying a long, elaborately painted didgeridoo takes up a position next to me. He peels off his shirt, reaches inside a carry bag, and pulls out several small jars of body paint. A few people stop to watch. He applies the paint in long stripes, first to his torso then to his arms, crimson oxide, yellow ochre, and white. The crowd swells to more than twenty. Now he paints his face using colored dots and concentric circles.
The crowd has increased to around fifty. He slowly secures the paint jars, takes up his instrument, and begins to play. The droning music from the hollow log reverberates through the quay. He closes his eyes, totally absorbed in the melancholic drone, oblivious to the coins and notes being placed in his large upturned cap.
I finish my chips and walk behind the busker and across the historic cobblestone road back to the Anchor Hotel. It is five after eight.
I perch at the end of the bar away from a pack of noisy desperates arguing with each other, barely able to sit. The thin barman recognizes me, acknowledged by a head nod, then he comes down.
“He’s not here yet. Want a beer?”
“Yeah, sure, Tooheys New, a schooner,” I say without meeting his eyes. I am busy looking about.
I pull out my phone.
“Hi, Lynchie here, mate.”
“I’m following a lead, a name, meeting with a bloke that might know something.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cowboy Cassidy... Do you know him?”
“Never heard of him. Who’s the informant?”
“A young kid from the football club.”
“What’s the connection?”
“Drugs, he says.”
“Okay... get back to me after you talk to him.”
As I hang up, Slim arrives with my beer and spins away without breaking stride. I glance about the bar. It is dim, hard to tell what time it is, not much daylight in this place. It is 8:20. The television is tuned into a sports betting channel; somewhere in the world there is always a horse or dog race to bet on, to lose your money on. Most pubs in Australia are licensed to take bets on any televised event. I couldn’t help watching, there’s something about a live race. I choose horse number two as they jump out of the starting gates; he settles behind the leading pack of five bolters, makes a race of it, down the final straight, he charges at the leaders, shit, can’t quite make it, comes in third.
Slim slides off his stool by the cash register, looks my way, and rolls his eyes at the double doors. The short guy who enters is not what I expected. He is gray-haired, wears a long winter coat two sizes too big with his sleeves rolled up; he is tough-looking, a pug, an ex-boxer for sure, but you know, really, he is an old man, seventy easily, maybe seventy-five. He takes a stool at the bar near the rabble. I sort out my options, how to play this, writing scripts in my head like I’m in a movie. He takes a beer from Slim and makes his way down the bar to me.
“You looking for me?”
“Maybe, yeah. Are you Cowboy?”
“That’s right.”
“I have a small location that I want to enlarge.”