12

Henry is back on home turf driving north on Rathdowne Street. He turns right at the Great Northern, and right again into Amess Street. He parks the Hyundai on the diagonal to the footpath one house from the Pigdon Street corner.

Two hundred and twelve is a workers’ cottage, six paces wide. The roof is made of red tiles, and the walls are red brick. A box-bay window juts from the front bedroom. It has three vertical panels of etched glass, the centrepiece graced with a floral pattern. The plain door that once stood here is long replaced by a restored period piece. The low brick fence encloses a slab of concrete, barely a metre wide, devoid of plants and flowers. The door is set within a tiny portico.

Henry stands and looks at the house, and walks around the corner to the back lane that runs off Pigdon Street. The lane is barely a metre wide. Asphalt. Strewn with weeds and garbage bags. All is miniature: low-slung backyards and houses with fences of galvanised iron and timber. Henry recalls the pocket-size garden and the weatherboard laundry. From the outside, all appears as it once was, but it seems far smaller.

It is sixty years since the Nissen family moved in, and more than four decades since Henry lived here. And it’s more than fifty years since he first set out on the 150-metre walk to the Reads’ boxing gym.

Retracing the steps now, Henry stops to greet passers-by. He cannot resist an opportunity. He falls into conversation with a neighbour two doors up. She had moved in long after the Nissens left. On the timber veranda stands a tricycle, and beside the front door, a basketball and a ragged row of runners.

The front garden is luxuriant. Creepers scale the side fences. A young citrus is weighed down with oranges. An olive tree leans over the footpath. Henry stands beneath the canopy as he tells the woman that he once lived at 212 with his twin brother, Leon, his older brother, Solly, his younger brother, Paul, and his sister, Sandra, the baby of the family.

‘Such a small house and so many of us,’ Henry says. ‘Solly died a few years back, and the rest of us live in distant suburbs now. He was sixty-one when he died. He smoked and drank too much, the poor bugger. Died of lung cancer.’

The woman is in a hurry. She has to pick up her children. Henry would have told her his life story if she’d had time to listen.

He keeps walking and within a minute he is standing outside the Reads’ terrace. The front garden is well tended. The iron-lace balcony and elevated veranda provide a touch of grandeur. The bay windows reveal a high-ceilinged living room. French windows open onto the upstairs balcony.

Henry turns into the lane. The side entrance has gone. He glances up at the windows of the first-floor room he slept in during the week leading up to each fight. Rising over the backyard, in full view, is a raised sundeck; a wooden table and easy chairs are laid out in permanent readiness. In place of the garage-cum-gym, a two-storey timber studio stands at the intersection of the side and back laneways.

The mobile rings. Henry looks down. The terrace is, for the moment, irrelevant. His focus is on the voice of a mother. Her son is in prison. Henry has known him since he was a teenager. He was a decent enough kid but he got into drugs, and then burglaries.

‘A decent enough kid.’

It’s an expression Henry uses often. The decent kid is now an incarcerated adult with a long stretch in front of him for armed robbery. He is depressed. His mother wants Henry to visit him. She is distraught. Her son doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s going bonkers.

‘Henry, you’re the only person he listens to. He asks after you often. I am afraid of what he might do. He has tried to kill himself before and will try again. I’m sure of it.’ She persists until Henry agrees to see him.

He continues his walk. Once arrangements have been made, and the call is over, he is back with his childhood memories. The transition is instant. He singles out individual homes, the names of the families who lived in them, and the few contemporaries who still reside here. He has stayed in touch with them and dropped in, now and then, over the years.

The street is redolent of sensations all but forgotten: the aroma of dinners wafting through open doors at nightfall, rain-cleansed streets, and fresh tar poured by workmen over cracked bitumen. The memory of cricket games played in the middle of the thoroughfare, lampposts used as wickets, and fruit boxes placed to force drivers to skirt the players. Of drinkers bursting out of the pub around the corner, the Great Northern, at six o’clock, the mandatory closing time. In autumn they wade through gutters choked with leaves and twigs, detritus and rubbish. After winter downpours they step over blocked drains and gutters gushing with rainwater.

The smell of jasmine trailing over back fences heralds spring. Sweat dampens the bodies of children at play on warm summer evenings. Men in singlets and shorts hose front gardens; others sit on chairs out on the footpath. The red glows of their cigarettes rise and fall in the darkness.

Henry is moving on a path that will lead him back to the red-brick cottage at 212. He is in no hurry. He crosses the street and knocks on the door of a former neighbour. The front garden is dense with marigolds and geraniums, interspersed with pot plants and rosebushes.

Mrs G is overjoyed to see him. A tiny woman, she looks up at him. She scans his face with maternal affection. She invites him in and leads him through the house to the kitchen. The passage and lounge-room walls are lined with photos of children, tracing their lives from infancy to adulthood.

There are photos of her grown-up son and daughter as parents, posing beside their own children. They are dressed in suit-jackets and white shirts, creased pants and pristine-white communion dresses. Scenes of weddings and christenings hang alongside images of saints and angels. Christ presides over the last supper, and crucifixes dangle beside the photos of great-grandchildren. Family and faith are the twin pillars that sustain her.

Henry pulls up a chair in the kitchen. Mrs G remains on her feet, chatting as she fusses about. She arranges crockery, wipes crumbs off the tablecloth and fills the kettle. Her eyes glow when she speaks of her great-grandchildren. Henry gives her his full attention. At this moment no one exists except Mrs G. Nothing matters except what she is saying.

Her English is heavily accented. She struggles to find words that do justice to what she wants to express. She resorts to gestures to describe her great-grandchildren’s energy, the way they rush about when they visit. She mimics their childish quirks and laughs at their talent for creating mayhem. She appears to grow younger, almost girlish, as she conveys their antics.

She has known the Nissens since the day she reunited with her husband who had preceded her from Italy, sixty years ago. Perhaps to the day, come to think of it. He was at the port on a winter’s day waiting for her. He whisked her from Station Pier to this house and the streets that would become far more familiar than those of her childhood.

The kitchen is as kitchens were before the gentrification: a small space lined with timber cupboards, the table in the centre. The window looks out on the back garden. Pot plants line the windowsill. There have been some changes: the floor is tiled now and an electric stove has replaced the old gas cooker.

The house is well kept, yet somewhat forlorn and solitary. Mrs G’s husband has passed away, and her two children have made lives of their own. A once-lively household has been reduced to a single woman moving about quiet rooms.

All that remains are traces. They issue from the photographs on the walls, the dressers and tables. They are implicit in the homely ambience and in a stillness that appears to deepen, mid-afternoon, once the time of her school children’s homecoming.

Mrs G recalls Ugo Ceresoli, the button accordion maestro, and his weekly visits to give lessons to her children; and Henry singles out the memory of her front door opening, and he and Leon being welcomed inside, a respite from the chaos raging in the house diagonally opposite.

Mrs G walks Henry to the front door. She is reluctant to see him leave. He promises to return soon. She remains at the door and waves until she can no longer see him.

There is little sign of street life. All is still. Henry’s circuit is almost completed. The house at 212 is cast in afternoon sunlight. The west-facing bay window glints, and the tiles glow orange. Patches of moss shade the bricks with jade and silver. The breeze has dropped. The clouds are motionless. Time is temporarily halted. The past slips in like a sidling huntsman.