On the way home that day, as I’ve said, the rain came down. I ducked through the hole in the fence, jumped the barrier, and stepped out onto the racetrack where the fresh grass was glistening. This was Moonee Valley, I realised, a place I’d heard racing commentators referring to from pub televisions ever since I was a kid. The name had always evoked an image of jagged white mountains, like an aged black-and-white photo I must have seen somewhere. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about what would happen if somebody stopped me. I walked and walked, expecting at any moment to hear the voice of a security guard. But nothing happened; just faint grey rain like a thickening of the air and crows arking among the pines in the no-man’s-land that lay in the middle of the track. Eventually, I stopped thinking. The smell of earth and grass. In front of the stadium, on the far side, I could see figures in fluorescent jackets, but I had become invisible to them — I had slipped out of the world altogether. And even when I entered the straight, close enough to see their faces, and jumped the fence again, and headed out towards the members’ carpark, they continued to ignore me. They were big guys, with red faces and grey goatees, but I guess it wasn’t their job to give a shit.

7.

7.

Most nights after that, I stayed up watching boxing videos on YouTube until I fell asleep and dropped the phone into my lap. Then Sylvie would cry out, and I would wake and run to settle her with the pressure of my hand on her chest and a few renditions of ‘Silent Night’ or the ABC. When it worked, it was like a superpower, and then I would go back to the couch, and pick up where I had left off, watching men punch each other in the head.

The Fenech/Nelson rematch took place the year after their first fight, on 2 March 1992, at Princes Park, in Melbourne. Denis and my dad were there for that as well. I remembered seeing them that night on the Channel 7 news, walking through the crowd together, the image of my father made fantastic by television.

You can watch Fenech v Nelson II easily enough now on YouTube, but the footage I remember watching is grainier and even harder to make out. Most of the boxing I saw as a kid was like that: lurid, alarming, mesmerising footage, obscured by time and fading technology, which my dad had taped and retaped onto VHS cassettes and then marked carefully (Fenech v Payakaroon, Tyson v Botha, Fenech v Shingaki II), and which he kept at the top of the bookshelf beside the whiskey. Two conjoined names signifying a supernatural occasion.