Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  By the time Friday came we’d do the workers’ cottages, which included our own street, Bell Street. Nancy said this was our way of sticking it up the rest of the town. By Friday the nobs on the hill would have full garbage bins and still have the weekend to go, but the Bell Street mob would have nice empty garbage tins for the weekend. I could never quite see what the point was, but it was Nancy logic and you couldn’t argue with that.

  Our street was called Bell Street because, to add insult to injury, the Anglican Church was at one end, its bell tower casting what Nancy called ‘its long, dark, treacherous shadow’ over the first half-dozen houses in the street. All the cottages in Bell Street belonged to Catholics and Nancy saw this as a deliberate act of provocation by the Church of England, another example of what she constantly referred to as ‘the bitter divide’.

  It would be seven-fifteen when we finally got back to Bell Street. Most of the workers who lived in the street would already be up, or if they weren’t they’d use our arrival as their alarm clock. In the cottages, all of which were identical and had the kitchen facing the street, you’d see their men sitting in their singlets and braces, already having a first ciggie and cuppa tea in the kitchen, the wives fussing with breakfast at the stove. We’d usually cop a thank-you wave as we emptied their bins with barely a clank.

  Sometimes one of the men would stroll out and hand Nancy a leg of mutton or half a sack of spuds, or a couple of cabbages or a bag of carrots from their vegie garden. ‘Good on ya, Nance,’ they’d say, hoisting the stuff up into the cab for her to grab a hold of. Nancy would smile and quietly thank them, no big display. But you knew that if one of them had a baby, they’d be getting a christening robe with the full rosebuds and forget-me-nots, wrapped in brown paper. It would be left in their emptied garbage bin with the person’s name in Nancy’s neat-as-a-pin handwriting so that they’d know it wasn’t garbage left behind. Nancy didn’t like to make too much fuss.

  ‘We don’t take charity,’ she’d say. ‘It’s not the Maloney way. But we’re not up ourselves neither. Someone is kind to us, you remember it, you wait long enough, the opportunity will surely come when you can return the favour.’

  Getting up at three in the morning in the summer wasn’t too bad. With a hot day ahead, at that time in the morning there was usually a bit of a breeze coming up the valley. Winter was a different matter entirely. Every minute out there on the run was bloody awful and us kids had chilblains and runny noses all winter long. For chilblains we had to soak our feet in a bucket of boiling salt water for hours until they turned red as a lobster.

  Mike, ever the questioning one, once pointed out to Mum that it would be far more logical to start work in Bell Street on a Monday. It took a good fifteen minutes of wasted time in an empty truck to make the slow climb to Oliver Twist’s house on Hill Road. ‘Fifteen minutes saved on the entire morning’s run meant we could hose out the back of the truck and be back home by seven instead of a quarter past,’ he explained to Nancy. Bozo and me immediately agreed, nodding our heads. In terms of getting ready, if we were late to school on a Monday morning we got detention as well as a caning. A quarter of an hour saved on a Monday was valuable.

  ‘Well, darlin’, you’re probably right,’ Nancy replied, leaning down from the cabin and putting her big hand on Mike’s shoulder. ‘But there’s a principle involved, what I call “Maloney payback”.’

  ‘Huh? What’s that when it’s at home?’ Bozo asked.

  ‘Well, it’s like this see, every time that pompous, selfrighteous old bugger Oliver Twist places his scrawny elbows on the bench and removes his glasses and sets about wiping them with his clean linen handkerchief and at the same time proceeds to give Tommy another one of his half-arsed twopenny lectures before sentencing him and then adds a second helping, another six months, I say to myself, “Right, Your Honour, that’s every Monday you’re going to start the week having had a bad night’s sleep!”’She hesitates and looks at each of us in turn, ‘Just because Tommy’s done a bit of time on the hill in the past doesn’t mean he can treat us like dirt.’

  ‘But we are dirt!’ Bozo says, grinning. ‘We collect the garbage.’

  Nancy doesn’t laugh. I guess she doesn’t like what we’re doing for a crust any more than we do. ‘It’s honest work, Bozo, which is more than can be said for a lot of the locals. Right then, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by my own child?’

  ‘Maloney payback,’Mike reminds her with a bit of a sigh.

  ‘Yes, righto. Well, us getting Oliver Twist’s two German Shepherds barking their heads off and you three banging the bins and me yelling out at you at the top of my voice to keep the noise down so as to make absolutely certain the miserable bugger is good and awake, that, my dears, is Maloney payback.’

  I have to admit, we had the routine down pat. Bozo would line Bitzers One to Five up in a row directly in front of the magistrate’s gate, right up close. ‘Okay, sit!’he’d command, then ‘Silence!’ he’d order next, bringing his forefinger up to his lips as if they were humans. You see, Oliver Twist kept these great big ferocious German Shepherds running loose in his high-fenced, quarter-acre property because he was paranoid that someone he’d sentenced might some day come after him. He probably thought that someone would be Tommy, who was one of his more frequent victims.

  The two dogs would come hurtling down the side of the house, skidding, their nails scrabbling on the cement path as they tried to gain traction around the corner to the front, both barking fit to kill.

  Bozo’s Bitzers would be waiting, their snouts just out of reach beyond the wrought-iron gate. The German Shepherds would push their noses through one of the fancy iron grilles, slavering at the mouth, fangs flashing at the sight of Bozo’s mutts, who would sit there staring at the two killer dogs, like they were dirt or something. Which goes to show how well they were trained, you try stopping a small dog barking at a big one. I swear Bozo had taught them how to do a bored sort of a yawn in sequence.

  It never failed to work, we’d hear Oliver Twist cursing and trying to get his upstairs bedroom window up to abuse us, whereupon Bozo would give this little whistle and his dogs would leave the gate and hurry to the blind side of the truck so that their intimidation act couldn’t be seen by the furious beak.

  The window would eventually go up, but before the furious magistrate could ever get the first word in, Nancy, her head already stuck out the truck window, would shout up at him, ‘Better call those brutes off, one day they’re going to get out and bite one of my boys!’ Her tone of voice always suggested that such an event would be more trouble than even Oliver Twist could handle on his own.

  The magistrate in his red-striped pyjamas would open his mouth to say something and Nancy would quickly add, ‘They’re a menace to society!’ Which was what Oliver Twist had once said about Tommy. Lost for a reply, he’d try to call his dogs off and we’d be away with a clank and a roar, sending a perfumed cloud of carbon monoxide up through his bedroom window. Nancy would yell out over the noise of the engine, ‘Half-past three and all’s well!’ like the night watchman in that movie Great Expectations, or was it The Hunchback of Notre Dame?

  Oliver Twist really pissed Nancy off. Tommy never took personal property, like jewellery and stuff, or broke into someone’s house. He only did warehouses or commercial premises where the insurance would cover the loss. He mostly worked in Albury–Wodonga or the industrial areas in the western suburbs of Melbourne and only occasionally in Wangaratta. Nancy reckoned that Tommy didn’t deserve more than one stretch at a time for being such an honourable crook.

  Shortly after six-thirty we’d be at the tip a mile out of town for the last time that day, having been out twice already. Unfortunately the Diamond T wasn’t a tip-truck and so each trip out the three of us would pull on our broken old gumboots, grab a blunt shovel and shovel the shit that came out of people’s bins onto the tip.

  Then o
n the way home we’d stop at the abattoir and hose the back of the truck clean while Mum went in and fetched us a bit of meat for that night and Bozo got half a sack of bones and scrag ends for the dogs. Fridays we’d eat fish, mostly smoked cod in white sauce which us kids hated. Once Bozo caught a fish in the Sawell Dam and it tasted of mud. We all had about a teaspoon each of that fish to comply with God’s wish and then filled up on bread and jam. It was the first fresh fish we’d ever eaten and we vowed it would be the last if we had any say in the matter.

  Bozo and Nancy had the selfsame thing going for them, they had mates everywhere and the abattoir workers never saw us short, although Nancy would always pay, even if sometimes she’d have to put stuff on tick. Maloneys didn’t take charity. ‘Nothin’worse than someone feeling very sorry for you,’ Nancy would say.

  We’d be back at Bell Street by seven-fifteen, just in time for a cold shower out the back shed, winter or summer. The smell of garbage clings on, gets up your nostrils and into the pores of your skin, in your hair, everywhere. So we’d need to scrub real hard, using Velvet soap on our arms, legs, stomach, up the bum crack, between our toes, back of the ears, places you wouldn’t normally care much about. Each spot had to be rubbed practically raw with the scrubbing brush. Last of all, you’d get Mike or Bozo to do your back.

  Sometimes, in the winter, it would be below freezing. We’d come home from riding in the back of the truck, breathing frost smoke, and freezing our balls off. Sarah would’ve put our school clothes in the shed with the towels and straight off we’d have to go into the shower or we’d be late for school and cop the strap.

  Often times in the winter we’d have to first knock the ice from the shower rose. We’d dance about on the cement floor, sucking in our breath, the shower sending deadly ice needles raining down on us, piercing us to the very bone. But we still scrubbed till it hurt. We took as much time as we could stand without freezing to death to get rid of the smell of garbage and the shame Sarah said it would bring if people smelt it on us kids.

  You’d be standing under the shower, gasping, trying to rinse off your all-over-body soaping with frantic hands, Mike and Bozo waiting, eyes closed from the soap dripping down from their hair, both still furiously scrubbing, slapping themselves, yelling out to me to bloody hurry up. Bozo’s balls would disappear somewhere up between his legs and they’d only drop down when he was warm again. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘they only came good during the second period at school.’

  Sarah said we had our pride and even if we were the town garbos and Tommy was in gaol, so what? Nobody was going to say a Maloney wasn’t a clean person. She’d have ironed our school clothes with the creases in our shorts sharp as a knife. Then when we came in from out the back, all dressed for school, there’d be these big enamel plates filled with steaming oatmeal porridge with a ring of melted brown sugar on the top, hot milk, thick wedges of white toast and plum jam as well as tin mugs of hot, sweet tea waiting for us on the kitchen table. After that we’d wash our mouths and clean our teeth at the sink, grab our jam sandwiches for school lunch, kiss and hug little Colleen and call ‘Cheerio!’ to Nancy out the back verandah.

  ‘You four stick together, you hear? You tell me if any teacher gives you trouble!’ She’d shout the same thing every morning from where she’d settled down in the old cane couch, and she’d already be halfway through a large bottle of milk stout. Her latest layette order, together with her embroidery stuff and the old Singer sewing machine, would be on the work table beside her.

  We’d be out the front gate and off to school in a great tearing hurry, Sarah walking along with us, the three of us boys scrubbed properly to her satisfaction. She’d be neat as a pin in her box-pleated tunic and blazer with her prefect’s stripe sewn on just below the school badge. If you looked at Sarah, who had this shining red hair, Nancy called it ‘titian’, and just a sprinkle of speckle freckles around her nose, it would make us proud that at least one Maloney had turned out okay.

  Sarah, Mike and Bozo, together with Bozo’s dogs, would peel off to the high school and I’d make my way alone to the primary school down the road a bit. I know I’m carrying on a bit about Bozo’s dogs but you’ve got to understand they were truly amazing. They’d wait at the school gates minding their own business, never giving any trouble, until school came out. They did the same when Bozo and me were in primary school, going crazy with joy when they saw us at the end of the day, you’d think we’d been away on holidays. Which never happened of course. In fact, it was Bozo’s dogs waiting at the school gates that was the real reason for him becoming a boxer.

  It happened like this. We were in the playground and this kid, Brent Middleton, bigger than Bozo by a good head and surrounded by nine of his mates, comes up to us and says, ‘Hey, Bozo, is it true your auntie escaped from the loony bin and went starkers down King Street?’ He’s got this half-smile on his face and the others with him are all grinning their gobs off.

  Bozo’s got no option, has he? So he smacks the bastard, only it’s with his fist and the perpetrator drops like a stone. Well, he knocks him down anyway. Brent Middleton is one grade above Bozo and the school bully and the leader of a gang and, before you know it, there’s four or five of them having a go at my brother.

  I get stuck in, but at the time I’m too little to do much damage, but they’ve got Bozo down and they’re kicking the daylights out of him. He manages somehow to get up and he clocks a couple of them in the mouth and eye. Old Bozo’s going at them like a threshing machine but now there’s nine of them and only the two of us. He’s taking a hiding and I’m getting an unwelcome slap or two as well.

  And that’s when the cavalry arrive. Bitzers One to Five get stuck in and suddenly there’s mayhem, kids scattering every which way, dogs yapping and snapping at ankles, jumping up and grabbing a hold of the hems of khaki shorts, biting at bums, everyone’s yelling, teachers come running and there’s blood and torn uniforms everywhere you look.

  Bozo gets up off the deck, calls the dogs to heel and makes them sit at his feet. You can see they’re not too happy neither, wanting to finish off what they’ve started, but they do as they’re told. My brother’s nose is bleeding and he’s missing a tooth and has a split lip and a torn left ear. I’m okay, having just been pushed aside with a couple of stiff belts to the ear, and only copped a thick lip. Bozo’s the worst wounded of all by far, but he still has the presence of mind to send the dogs home, knowing they’re going to be in deep shit caninewise.

  Because of the dog attack, the teachers all blame Bozo for what’s happened and he’s hauled off to the headmaster’s office while the rest of us, Brent Middleton and his cohorts and me, are herded into the spare classroom next door.

  Brent Middleton has been bit good and proper and has a black eye and a bloody nose where my brother’s punched him first and second time around. Several of the others have something to show for their trouble, Bitzer bites, and a bloody nose or thick lip as well, compliments of Bozo’s whirring fists.

  Mr Flint, the headmaster, doesn’t even listen to Bozo’s side of the story before he phones Hamish Middleton, who has the jewellery shop in Fitzroy Street, ‘Jonah Middleton & Sons, Est. 1872’, and tells Mr Middleton what’s happened and asks him to come over to the school.

  Nancy later says that Flint’s a real crawler and it’s obvious he was more interested in damage control than whether or not Bozo was hurt. Anyway, the headmaster calls several of the other parents to come over. Then he phones Dr Wallis at his surgery and arranges for him to come to the school to give all those who’ve been Bitzer-bit a tetanus shot. Last of all, he phones Sergeant Donovan and Nancy. He turns to Bozo. ‘Maloney, you’ll probably be expelled for this, what you’ve done cannot be overlooked, I’ll deal with you later. Now get next door with the others!’

  The long and the short of it is that Nancy goes in to bat for me, Bozo and the dogs. But the various parents who’ve made it to the school want
the dogs put down and Bozo severely punished. I guess I’m too little for them to bother about. Hamish Middleton assumes the leadership and mumbles out loud that he’ll gladly do the job on the dogs himself and, looking directly at Nancy, he barks, ‘That boy of yours is way out of line and should be sent to the boys’ home!’

  ‘What did you say, Mr Middleton?’ Nancy says, real slow and soft, her blue eyes narrowed down to chips of ice. What Bozo’s done to his son, Brent, ain’t nothing to what’s coming to him if he decides to repeat what he’s just said.

  Nancy’s dressed in one of her floral dresses that’s big as a circus tent which she’s made herself, all of them the exact same pattern and design – white daisies on a yellow background. With her great ham arms sticking out the sides larger than Hamish Middleton’s thighs, the poor bastard is no match in the intimidation stakes and the look from Nancy sends the town jeweller and council member two paces backwards.

  ‘Your lad has to be punished, Mrs Maloney,’ Middleton senior repeats, though this time his voice is way downwind.

  ‘He’ll be punished if it’s his fault, but that hasn’t been clearly established yet,’Nancy says coldly. She’s a dab hand at court procedure and adds, ‘Would you mind if we waited until all the evidence has come in, Mr Middleton? Or is this going to be some sort of kangaroo court? Parents of Yankalillee Primary School versus Maloney?’

  Vera Forbes from the Gazette, who’s already sniffed out the story and has come running, has a second go at Nancy. ‘Well,’she says all hoity-toity, ‘those vicious brutes will have to be put down before they attack and kill someone!’