Enforcer by Campbell Caesar & Campbell Donna

Author:Campbell, Caesar & Campbell, Donna [Campbell, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business, Finance
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers Australia
Published: 2010-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

It was 1983, and I was riding along behind Knuckles. Dukes was in the pack too, plus a couple of others. I don’t know whether Knuckles just got into a daydream or something hit him in the face – because he didn’t have sunnies on – but all of a sudden he swerved and ran straight into the pointy end of a cement lane divider. He went up in the air, the bike went up in the air, and then he came down again, crashing onto the road with the bike landing on top of him.

We pulled the bike off him and got him to Westmead Hospital, where he was operated on straightaway. They put a shunt in his forehead to relieve the pressure inside his fractured skull, his brain had swelled that much. It looked to me like a little garden tap was coming out of his forehead. His body was all banged up, too. It was a pretty bad crash. There were times there when the quacks thought we were going to lose him.

One of our members, Porky, hired a room in intensive care, which they had for friends and relatives, so he could be close to Knuckles in case anything happened. Porky spent the first week more or less living there. As Knuckles clung on, other members started using the room to give Porky a break. Every night there’d be at least fifteen or twenty Comos up in the waiting room outside. We knew that most of us couldn’t get in to see him, but everyone felt that they had to be there anyway. The nurses got used to this big bunch of bikers hanging round. One nurse came up to me and said, ‘You blokes have changed my opinion of bikies. I’ve spent most of my career in intensive care and I’ve never seen a bunch of blokes care so much about another man in my whole life.’

Gradually Knuckles came out of the woods, but he wasn’t the same man. The accident left him with severe headaches, no sense of smell or taste. His memory was shot and he was often disoriented.

The whole club pitched in to get Knuckles back on his feet. He moved in with his brother Dukes while he was still recovering, and Dukes and I took turns to look after him; the accident had caused him to become violent with anyone other than me and Dukes. When he was right to move out on his own again, the club rented a house for him and his old lady, Wendy, filled it with furniture and put on the phone and electricity. Wendy had just had a baby boy, Harley, so her time was taken up with him and they had no money coming in. She would sneak the bills out the window to us – because Knuckles would never have asked for help – and the club would pay them. We looked after our own. Especially his brother Dukes, who couldn’t have loved a brother any more than what he did.

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