Free Meatloaf in Manhattan by Robert Power Page B

the verandah of the bungalow where my dad had lived in the small town by the Indian Ocean.
    â€˜The murdering thief came in from the open widow. The dead of night. He struck your father from the right,’ says the policeman, his chopping motion indicating decapitation. ‘From the window, he came. The post mortem indicated your father looked to the left. Maybe he heard a creak. If he’d looked over the other shoulder, who knows, he may have saved his life.’
    Dark glasses, a moustache like a clothes brush: a rural policeman recounting the facts.
    â€˜I knew your father. A proud Irish man. We spoke often, on this verandah, smoking cigarettes. A heavyweight boxer, he once told me. If he’d had a chance he would have knocked the thief to the floor. An uppercut, a left cross. Just like when he KO’d the British army champion on the troop ship to Palestine.’
    A rural policeman shadow-boxing, silhouetted against a huge Indian moon.
    How my father had ended up in the morgue in Panjim, Goa, was a trickle of events. My mum had passed away a year or so earlier. For a few months he bumbled around their rented house in North Melbourne. Then, one day, he called me to say he was going walkabout. The Salvos were coming around with a truck and they could have it all: the furniture, the clothes, the garden rake, the lot. He was taking a change of shirt and trousers, a wash-kit and towel, his old rucksack and his ATM card. That’d do. He’d be going to Palestine (where he’d been in the police), Malaysia (where he’d been in the army), and then he’d follow his nose. I said I’d take him to the airport and he said that would be nice. And so I did, and saw him off on the Malaysian Airline flight to KL. Coming back over the Bolte Bridge I remembered all his old war stories of keeping the Jews and Arabs apart and holding back the surge of Chinese from the plantations in Malaya. I thought how fine it would be for him to retrace his footsteps, to relive some old memories.
    When I got home I felt the bereavement of the orphan, like he was gone for good, so close after mum. So I pulled on my running gear and walked down the end of the road to Central Park. It was getting dark, but the old fountain by the conservatory was still gurgling out the recycled water. Approaching the oval I could see that most of the dog walkers had left the dusk behind and returned home. I walked the first half-lap as a warm-up, heading for the John Landy plaque that served as my marker. I always read it. Sometimes, like this time, I’d run my fingers over the embossed lettering.
    Malvern East, Victoria, Australia, 6 May 1954
    John Landy leaves his house, walking in the darkness to Central Park. He looks up at a possum in a wattletree who has no idea what all the drama is about, that Roger Bannister, on the other side of the world, has become the first person to break the four-minute mile. John tosses a stone in the air, for luck, takes a deep breath and launches his body for its nightly run. Forty-six days later, on 21 June, in Turku, Finland, he will break Bannister’s record with a time of 3 minutes 57.9 seconds.
    My dad sent postcards from Malacca and the Gaza Strip, then he headed east across Asia, finally stumbling into Goa. There he fell in love with a 33-year-old melon seller, whose husband had hung himself the previous year, leaving her with three small children. They set up home and he became ‘Papa’ to the boys. He enjoyed his life in the village. The pigs and shoeless children reminded him of his youth in the lanes of Dublin. He decided to get fit and bought a rusty old bike that he peddled along the beach.
    He’d phone me on the weekends. I remember that last call. He was as cheerful in the Indian sunshine as I was gruff in the dark chilly mornings of Melbourne. I was a bit short with him. It was too early and too dark and he was just too enthusiastic about his cycling and the balmy