5

It is still early when Henry is off in response to a call. Our conversation is over. The story can keep; there is work to be done. He hurries from the Port Diner, eases the Hyundai over the gravel and out into Footscray Road. It’s a familiar route, the fifteen-minute drive from the roadhouse to the legal district in town.

Sara is waiting outside the Magistrates’ Court. She is dressed in low-heeled shoes, a blue shirt and black pants. A pack of cigarettes is tucked inside her cuff. She wears lipstick and mascara. Her hair falls halfway down her back. She lights a cigarette and paces. There is an awkwardness in her movements. She is a sixteen-year-old trying to match it with grown-ups.

Henry greets her with a hug. He ushers her up the steps and through the revolving glass doors. She has committed a series of thefts to support her drug habit and is scheduled to attend a bail extension hearing. If she doesn’t get it she will be jailed.

‘Let’s hope luck is on your side today,’ Henry says.

‘Been off crack for months,’ she replies.

He keeps an eye on her as they proceed through security. ‘Haven’t seen you in ages,’ says the officer stationed by the conveyor belt.

‘Always a pleasure to see you,’ says Henry.

A woman greets him in the foyer. She is ecstatic to see him and he overjoyed to see her. They first met on the steps beneath the station clocks, when she was twelve, twenty years ago. Henry was serving in a soup van, and she was hanging out with friends, one of whom was to become the father of her three kids. She is in court to support him. He is on trial, and back in jail.

‘Haven’t been in trouble for years,’ she says.

‘Glad to hear it,’ says Henry.

‘I want to become a youth worker.’

‘I’ll write you a reference,’ he replies.

He holds both her hands. ‘You’d make a great youth worker,’ he says.

‘I know,’ she replies. ‘I’ve been there.’

Henry is dressed in a dark-blue windcheater, worn jeans and runners, in contrast to the formal attire of the barristers, solicitors and clerks. He greets friends and strangers. He leans in towards them, and engages in banter.

He knows them all, the lawyers and magistrates, youth workers, and the conveners of prisoner support groups. This is familiar terrain. He’s been coming here for thirty years and knows every courtroom, cubicle and interview room, each branch of the court. He knows the holding cells down a flight of stairs, round the corner on Lonsdale Street, and he knows the jail interview rooms where prisoners attend hearings by video link. He’s been coming here so long he’s now supporting the children of those he first met when they themselves were kids.

He has spent hours waiting for cases to be heard, sitting in the foyers and corridors with an arm around a distraught friend. He’s had urgent conversations with confused relatives, eased their anguish and their weary resignation to fate. He has helped as many as ten defendants in a single day, rushing from courtroom to courtroom, from one sitting to the next—while justice proceeds at its sluggish pace, prone to sudden adjournments, rescheduled hearings, hours of deliberation and talk.

He stops to speak to a barrister, and kisses him on the cheek.

‘Still at it I see,’ says N.

‘Except now they’ve stopped paying me,’ says Henry.

He takes Sara into an interview room and, after a briefing with her lawyer, accompanies her into court.

‘What can we do for you Mr Nissen?’ the magistrate asks.

She has known Henry since she first worked here as an articled clerk. They chat before proceedings begin. Sara sits anxiously by Henry’s side as her case is heard; he rests an arm on her shoulder and puts her at ease.

Henry is called on to provide a reference. He extols Sara’s efforts to go straight. He argues she’s on the right track and that prison will set her back. He outlines the extent of her support network. She deserves a break.

‘That’s what you always say,’ the magistrate replies with a bemused smile, and she extends Sara’s bail.

Sara’s relief is obvious. She unclenches her fists and takes deep breaths. She is unburdened. Light. And disoriented; Henry reminds her to bow as they leave the court.

‘I’m happy,’ she says. ‘I’m rapt.’

‘You’ve got a couple of months to sort things out,’ says Henry. ‘Another chance.’

‘Grab it and make good use of it,’ he adds.

He accompanies her back to the street, hugs her, and then returns to the car.

He is back on the move, the white rabbit, always out and about. His mind is on overload, thinking ahead, calculating who needs what, where to get it, where to find donations of food, furniture and clothes, where to store them, and how to dole them out.

His wallet bulges with business cards—his name attached to a network of agencies: Kids off the Kerb, Emerald Hill Mission, Open Family, the Father Bob Maguire Foundation, the First Step Program, Beacon of Light. The entire city is his beat.

He knows the short cuts, along Wurundjeri Way to the southern suburbs where he lives, back to the city at dawn on a Saturday morning to run round the Botanical Gardens, and to the Domain Cafe for a coffee with his jogging mates. Mid-afternoon, he leaves for South Melbourne, his main youth-work territory for the past thirty-five years. He steps out of the Hyundai, hurries up the stairs of a public housing high-rise to deliver a carton of vegetables and fruit. He stops for a quick chat, and dashes back down to the Hyundai; the port company has called, and hired him for the night.

He heads for Docklands, and drives past the sculpted white eaglehawk standing on a black pedestal that rises from the grass verge. He turns left into Footscray Road and pulls up at Appleton Dock. Opens the boot and changes into his work gear, then trots by the cyclone fence. He works through the night, and returns to the Port Diner the following morning, parking the Hyundai beside a road train.

He orders breakfast and sits down. He spreads out photographs, newspaper clippings and magazines: Fighter Book, Fighter, Boxing Illustrated, The Ring. He has kept every scrap written about him: excerpts from anthologies of boxer biographies recounting the exploits of the Nissen boys; news snippets and fight previews, post mortems on every bout; features and magazine specials on his street work. He has photocopied the yellowing originals many times over and laminated them, just in case.

No matter how many times he recounts his tale, he will tell it again, to anyone willing to listen, stranger or long-time friend. It can never be enough. He is desperate to show you who he is, who he once was. Driven by a fierce desire to be known.

To be loved.

‘Mum, poor girl. Mum, poor girl.’

Even now, ten years since her death, she is always nearby.