The ex-coppers have gone to seed in the way pro-athletes do – flat-footed, bung-kneed – a disdain for exercise now it’s no longer a requirement. There isn’t a crook in the city they could catch on foot these days. They leave their shirts untucked now, not realising this attracts the kind of attention it’s trying to deflect. “Jeez, Dave, is that a caftan? Or did Christo wrap you?”

But they still have a bearing, they still carry themselves like men with purpose and dangerous adversaries, only seconds away from conflict, a deportment that says, “I was in the job, in the game, in the know, I was a person to be reckoned with – meet me on those terms or you make a mistake.”

I had lunch with the ex-coppers at their annual catch-up at a football club where a waitress served me a steak the size of Uluru, a suburban refutation of degustation. “Salad?” one bloke said. “Yeah, I remember salad.” The first thing they ask is, “Were you in the job?” When you tell them “No”, a filter drops over their cordiality, they register you as a noncombatant – only those who were there know what it was like to be there. You were not there. Therefore, I will speak to you on that basis – as an outsider.

It’s not snobbery. It’s just recognition that they lived through something that they know, from experience, they can’t explain. People who’ve seen a ghost give up mentioning it after a while.

These coppers worked in a time before cameras when, unbelievably, the day’s high moments weren’t filmed, and a constable’s account of what happened was taken as true – a suspension of disbelief that oiled the wheels of justice.

Our parents told us that fibs were wrong. But our parents weren’t being wholly truthful themselves, because it turned out the fib was, in a certain workspace among certain people, a useful tool for cutting through the unhelpful facts, the stuff that actually happened, to the place you needed to be if you wanted to make things right. These coppers miss the old days when nothing was filmed and interactions of a disputable nature were disputed using tailored recollections. Real, proactive policing is impossible since everyone got a camera, they say, shaking their heads.

For all the comedy and bastardry involved in “the job” they’re happy knowing that in every town a line must be held, and on their watch they held the line – they kept a lid on the state’s cesspool virtuosi. Some of them have PTSD from their time in the job. Some of them have no dough – and that feels unjust, having fought a kind of war to keep the city from being overrun by the underworld, to be now making cat-scratching posts part-time for petrol money. People holding SLOW signs get paid more than cops in Victoria. They can’t make sense of that. Who can?

The stories they tell at lunch aren’t of their triumphs, though there were triumphs. Instead, they recall and extol their own folly. This wrongful arrest, that fight where the nude man took my torch from me and belted me with it, that time some innumerate detective misread 68 for 86 and we kicked the doors in on the wrong house and threw a startled book club face down onto the shag pile as they were dissecting a Salman Rushdie.

There aren’t many old cops. It’s a bureaucracy that insists you’re obedient and maverick at once – an impossible dance to sustain for long. Most get out early. Athletes, soldiers, and coppers endure a long afterlife in which the urgency and pride of the working years sparkle in the rearview. That poor young woman in Braybrook with three kids and a sociopath partner that required me to go beyond police procedure to fix … these are the memories you take into your twilight to remind yourself you mattered.

Think of Ali, or Keating, think of Napoleon – each trudging the treadmill of post-relevance, in dementia, Potts Point, or Elba, rerunning scenes from the splendid years. I was once a warrior for the people. They needed me. I burst through doors into the lairs of the infamous. I kicked in one crook’s door and tripped on his hall rug and the shots he fired went over my head.

After lunch the old coppers drift away to pubs to retell more tales of the working life, each story a Chinese whisper of last year’s telling, the past slowly becoming what they require.