Fenech v Nelson II was somehow different, and my father seemed to return to it on nights when he couldn’t sleep, as if it held some mystery he was trying to unravel. I remember watching him once, as I stood unseen on the brass carpet plate that marked a border between the kitchen and the back room. After my bedtime that back room became a forbidden zone; dark, green-ish, often smoky. I remember my father’s face in the glow of the fight, and the way he moved gently with the punches as the luck drained away from Jeff Fenech’s life.

They had both felt that something wasn’t right that day, Denis told me. Fenech had looked slow from the beginning; he’d forgotten to make the sign of the cross before the bell and then, in the first round, he’d stepped into an unspectacular overhand right, like a man who had woken up with a hangover and walked straight into a door. Fenech kept fighting, of course — he didn’t know how to give up — and he took the seventh convincingly, but in the eighth, a round spent locked in what looked like a titanic thumb-wrestle — both fighters pounding away with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders — Nelson finally produced an opening and rocked Fenech with a left hook, then another, and then a right that felled him sideways. Fenech got up, but he had acquired an expression of bewildered innocence. The best part of him, the part that made sense of all the rest, was dying up there. With his back to the ropes, he stood for his execution.

One night I found an online documentary about Jeff Fenech. He was a man who fluctuated between moods of tremendous goodwill and foolish anger. The lessons that he kept claiming to have learnt never seemed to stay learnt for long. Many years after his retirement, he would be attacked on the street by four men. They smashed a bottle into his face. Some time later, gangsters shot up his family house. Later still, he was caught shoplifting watches on the Gold Coast. At the age of forty-three, he tried to redeem his loss to Nelson in a final rematch, but they were both old men by this stage. Nelson was forty-nine at least (no one knew exactly), and though Fenech won on points, it was too late: the stakes were too low, and nothing was really redeemed.

‘Come look at this,’ I said to Sarah.

Jeff Fenech was on the screen. He was in Princes Park, fighting for his life. My father was there, too, somewhere in the crowd, twenty-five rows from the front. Sooner or later, I’d spot him.

‘You know, you actually live with two real people,’ Sarah said.

I looked up at her tired face, which was shining with moisturiser.

‘What?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m going to sleep.’