Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Are you referring to the boys who attacked my son, or the dogs?’ Nancy says, quick as a flash.

  ‘That’s enough from all of you!’ Sergeant Donovan says, trying to conceal his smile at Nancy’s crack back at Big Mouth Saggy Tits. ‘Why don’t we start at the beginning and try to get to the bottom of this mess, hey? Maybe the headmaster here can get someone to make you all a cup of tea and I’ll go next door and see if the doctor’s completed the tetanus injections and then I’ll question the boys involved in the fracas.’

  Big Jack Donovan is a country cop from his boots to the point of his cap, well over six feet with a barrel chest and stomach to match, an untidy-looking sort of chap who will dominate any room he steps into. In his heyday he was a famous ruckman for South Melbourne and played at the MCG in the Grand Final against Richmond. He’s known to be even-handed and doesn’t take any crap from anyone. Because he wasn’t allowed to join up, being classified as Essential Services, he’s been in Yankalillee more than twenty years. Him, not Oliver Twist, is the real voice of the law in this town. Not everyone loves him, though, he’s got his fair share of enemies in high places. Nancy says he’s in the know on just about everyone in town and the word, even among the bigwigs, has long been out that it doesn’t pay to mess around with Big Jack Donovan. But all the lags know he’ll give a battler a break if there’s family and hardship involved and if some misdemeanour they’ve perpetrated can be patched up without too much fuss. Now he nods his head and smiles again, backing away towards the door. ‘Righto then, excuse me, ladies ...gentlemen, be back soon enough.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we be with you, Sergeant?’ Hamish Middleton calls out. He’s plainly miffed at the way things are turning out, with him not playing an important role in the proceedings and what with Nancy getting the better of him and Vera Saggy Tits Forbes. ‘After all, they’re our children!’ he protests. Two of the parents nod their heads, agreeing.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Mr Middleton.’ Big Jack is firm.

  ‘You know how it is with young fellas? I’d best see them on my own.’ Then he turns and goes out and comes into the classroom next door where the doctor is just finishing up sticking a needle in the bums of those who got bit, and the young nurse’s aide he’s brought with him from the local bush-nursing hospital is busy patching us up with Mercurochrome and long strips of sticking plaster she’s tearing off a big roll with her teeth because she forgot to bring the scissors.

  Sergeant Donovan stoops as he enters the classroom and takes off his cap and puts it on the teacher’s desk. ‘Afternoon, Doctor, Nurse. Afternoon, boys!’ he says cheerfully.

  We all chorus ‘afternoon’ back at him, though ours doesn’t sound that cheerful. There’s twelve of us in the classroom, ten from Brent Middleton’s mob and Bozo and me.

  ‘Right then, I’ll just make myself comfortable while the doctor and the nurse finish up dressing your wounds. How’s it goin’, Doc?’ Big Jack Donovan asks as he pulls the teacher’s chair way back and sits down and puts his big policeman’s boots up on the desk and starts to look at each of us in turn. When he reaches me, I try to look back but it’s impossible and, like everyone else, I look down at the desk. Suddenly I’m guilty as sin and I don’t even know why.

  ‘Won’t be much longer, Sergeant,’ Dr Wallis says, then he points to Bozo, whose nose and lip have stopped bleeding but who is holding a wad of cotton wool to his left ear. ‘Lad here needs a couple of stitches to his ear, that’s about it. You can send them all home after you’re through with them.’ You can see the blood that’s soaked the cotton-wool pad peeping through Bozo’s three fingers. ‘I’ll send my report on to you later,’ Dr Wallis adds.

  ‘Good on ya, Doc,’ Sergeant Donovan replies. Doctors in those days were really somebody and even though I’m shitting myself at Sergeant Donovan’s presence in the classroom, I’m still pretty impressed at the easy way he handles Dr Wallis. Nancy’s always said Sergeant Donovan was a good bloke and a good Catholic, if we ever got into trouble, to tell him ‘The truth and nothing but the truth so help me God’. It was years before we found out where she’d got that expression from.

  The doctor finishes off with Bozo, who only does a couple of tiny winces when the stitches go in, and then the doctor and the nurse take their leave.

  We’ve all been standing and now the sergeant says, ‘Sit, boys, take the weight off your legs.’ He indicates the inkstained school desks stretched out in front of him. There’s the usual scuffle as we go to sit down, Bozo and me to the one side and Brent Middleton and his mates to the other. Some of the blokes have bites on the bum and you can hear them wincing, probably exaggerating, as they slide themselves into a desk.

  Then there’s silence. Nothing. Sergeant Donovan looks up at the ceiling, then out the window and slowly he fixes his eyes on all of us. I’m gone, shit-scared and ready to confess to anything he wants. I look at Bozo, but his broken face gives nothing away, although his eyes flicker briefly as he looks at me before he looks to the front.

  ‘Hmm . . .’ the policeman says. Then nothing again. We all look down at the desk in front of us, not willing to meet his eye. The nothing continues.

  Then suddenly, so we all get a start, ‘Tell me, Mister Middleton, is Mister Maloney here a mate of yours?’

  ‘No, no, sir,’ Brent Middleton stammers, looking up, surprised at being so formally addressed.

  Now Sergeant Donovan turns to the other blokes on Brent Middleton’s side of the classroom. ‘And, you lot, are you friends of Mister Maloney?’

  ‘No, sir,’ they all mumble, not looking at the policeman.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Dunno, sir,’ they mumble.

  ‘Is it because he’s a Catholic?’

  ‘No, sir,’ they chorus anxiously.

  ‘Just don’t like each other, hey? Well, that happens sometimes. Just don’t like the cut of a man’s jib?’ The classroom remains quiet as a mouse.

  ‘Mister Middleton, would you stand up please and come up here, you too, Mister Maloney.’ Bozo gets up out of the desk and so does Brent Middleton. ‘Up here on the platform, please.’ They both step up onto the teacher’s platform. ‘Now stand back to back, if you’ll oblige me please, gentlemen.’ Bozo turns and he and Brent Middleton touch backs. The pocket of Bozo’s khaki shirt has been torn and hangs in a flap, he’s got blood down the front of it and two buttons missing as well, Sarah’s not going to be too happy when we get home. Sergeant Donovan turns back at us. ‘Right, now who would you say was the tallest and the heaviest, Mister Middleton or Mister Maloney?’

  ‘Middleton, sir,’ several of us mumble.

  ‘By a good head, I’d say and by what . . . say, one and a half stone in weight?’ Silence from us all.

  ‘Eight inches and twenty pounds, that’d be about right, don’t you think, gentlemen?’ We don’t say anything. Brent Middleton is the biggest bloke in the school and he knows it, that’s what makes him the school bully and head of a gang, everyone’s been shit-scared of him until Bozo today.

  ‘Righto, you two can separate, but stay up here if you will, please.’ Bozo goes to stand with his back to the blackboard. Brent Middleton stays where he is but turns front on, looking down at us. ‘Now, tell me, who threw the first punch?’

  ‘He did, sir,’ Brent Middleton says quickly, wanting to gain the advantage.

  ‘Oh, I see, the little bloke attacked the big bloke, is that it?’

  ‘Yes, sir, he king-hit me and knocked me down.’ He points to Brent Middleton’s left eye, ‘Looks like you’ve got a bit of a stinker coming on, Mister Middleton. Good punch, was it?’ ‘Dunno, sir. Suppose so, sir.’

  ‘Dunno? You said a king-hit, didn’t you? Hit you when you weren’t looking, took you by surprise?’

  ‘No, sir, yes, sir.’

  ‘Just walked up and whacked you?’

  ‘We was talking, sir.’

&n
bsp; ‘Just talking, then he up and hit you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And, Mister Middleton, what precisely were you talking about? Was it something you may have said to Mister Maloney? You see, in my experience, little blokes don’t go around hitting big blokes unless they’re very stupid or drunk.’ He turns to Bozo. ‘Were you drunk, Mister Maloney?’

  The blokes all giggle, our laughter breaking a bit of the tension. ‘No, sir,’ Bozo says, trying not to grin through his split lip.

  ‘Stupid then? You don’t look stupid to me.’ Bozo blushes, but doesn’t reply.

  ‘Some of us got hit by him as well,’ Brent Middleton now offers, side-stepping Sergeant Donovan’s original question. There follows a mumble of approval from his side of the classroom.

  Big Jack Donovan stops and thinks, then says, ‘Us? Oh, I see! It wasn’t just you and Mister Maloney fighting, Mister Middleton, the big bloke and the little bloke, there were others involved?’

  ‘My friends, sir, they came to help me.’

  ‘And what did they do to help you, Mister Middleton?’ Brent Middleton looks at Bozo, ‘Tried to pull him away, sir. He’d gone off his scone, sir.’

  ‘Little bloke hits big bloke, big bloke’s friends, all bigger than little bloke, come to his rescue and get hit in turn by little bloke who has turned into an unstoppable, raging bull. Doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, does it now?’

  ‘Then the dogs come, sir,’ Middleton bursts out, again not responding to the sergeant’s question.

  ‘Dogs? What dogs? Is that what happened to Mister Maloney? I see he has a split lip and stitches in his ear and it looks like he’s had a nose bleed, and, judging from his eyes, he’s going to have a couple of stinkers.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘That nasty bruise above his knee, I could have sworn was a kick from a boot. Do you mean to say the dogs did all that to him?’

  ‘No, sir, they were his dogs, he set them onto us,’ Brent Middleton explains.

  ‘Hmm . . . how did the dogs come? I mean, did Mister Maloney stop beating you all up and turn and, you know, whistle for them?’ ‘Dunno, sir, maybe, sir.’

  ‘But no one heard him whistle or call out?’

  ‘There was a lot of noise, sir. Whistle, I suppose.’

  ‘With his lip split open and his nose bleeding and nine blokes trying to pull him away from you and all that noise and ...amidst all this confusion he had time to whistle for the dogs? By the way, where were these dogs? Were they standing around waiting for instructions, a whistle from their master, permission to attack?’

  ‘I dunno, sir, they just come at us from nowhere.’

  ‘Come now, Mister Middleton, nowhere? They must have come from somewhere?’

  ‘The school gates I suppose, they’s always there.’

  ‘How far would you say the school gates were from where the fight took place?’

  ‘Dunno, sir.’

  ‘Would you say ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred yards?’

  ‘About fifty yards, sir.’

  Sergeant Donovan looks out of the window for a long time. He takes his feet off the table and pulls the chair up, so he’s sitting with his elbows leaning on the teacher’s desk, his hands cupped under his chin. ‘Well, well, well, if they were Mister Maloney’s dogs, I’ve seen them myself on numerous occasions and there isn’t one of them that stands much taller than ten inches off the ground. As I recall, they’re well trained to obedience and I’ve never had any complaints about them being vicious. So there must have been a good reason for them to come at you lot, wouldn’t you say, Mister Middleton?’

  There is a mumble of ‘No, sir, no reason, sir’ from their side of the classroom.

  ‘Your point is well taken, Mister Middleton, some sort of signal must have passed. May I put it to you that any dog worth its salt will come to his master’s rescue if they see him attacked? I put it to you, the signal wasn’t a whistle from Mister Maloney, but simply the unprovoked and cowardly attack on him and his brother by you and your friends. That, I suggest, is what got the dogs going.’

  ‘No, sir, he hit me first!’Brent Middleton protests again.

  ‘Then I suggest there must have been some sort of provocation on your part, Mister Middleton? I asked you previously what you’d said to Mister Maloney and, on that occasion, you refrained from answering. Perhaps this time you’ll tell me what it is you said to Mister Maloney?’ ‘It was a joke, sir. We was only teasing him.’

  ‘A joke? What sort of a joke? It must have been a very strange joke to make a little bloke like Mister Maloney go berserk and run amok? What was this joke?’ His voice grows suddenly stern, ‘Come on, boy, let me hear it and no more bullshit!’

  ‘It was about his auntie, sir,’ Brent Middleton’s voice shakes, he is suddenly dead-scared.

  Sergeant Donovan jerks up straight and bangs the desk with his fist. ‘What about his auntie? What did you say about his auntie?’

  Brent Middleton begins to sniff and now he’s looking down at his shoes. ‘About her escaping from the asylum without clothes and walking down King Street, sir. We was only mucking about, sir, teasing him, sir.’

  ‘Why you little shit!’ Sergeant Donovan yells out, kicking back his chair and drawing to his full height so that his huge body seems to fill the whole room and spill out the door.

  Brent Middleton begins to shake and then to blubber and back away, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry, sir.’Some of the others also start to cry and there’s a good deal of blubbering going on all around.

  ‘Right, all of you except for the two Maloney boys are under arrest. I’m arresting you for causing grievous bodily harm and for defamation!’He reaches down for his cap and jams it on his head. ‘Follow me!’He turns to Bozo, then me, ‘You two may as well come along as witnesses, see that justice is done.’

  Of course, we had no idea he was bluffing about arresting Middleton’s mob and one of them, a boy named Bluey Taylor, wets his pants on the spot, piss running down his leg onto the floorboards. Sergeant Donovan takes three giant strides to the door and we shuffle after him as he makes a right turn into the headmaster’s office where all the parents are waiting.

  It is a pretty crowded gathering but we all somehow fit in, the twelve of us, six parents, Mr Flint the headmaster, and the police sergeant. Most of the Middleton gang are now sniffing and getting themselves generally het up, thinking they’re going to be thrown into the clink with the key thrown away.

  Sergeant Donovan looks around until he spots Hamish Middleton. ‘Sir, your boy will now tell us all what happened to provoke this fight, which I must say was just a tad onesided, with your bully-boy son and nine of his gutless mates against the two Maloney boys.’ He turns to Brent Middleton, ‘Step up, son, tell your father and the other parents here exactly what you said to Bozo Maloney.’

  Brent Middleton bawls and chokes and gulps and by the time he’s finished telling the truth of what happened there’s two snot runs under his nose, his eyes are all puffed up and red, and his shoulders are shaking like he’s having some sort of a fit.

  The decision is finally taken that each parent should punish his own child. Bozo and me, though, are let off scotfree, with Sergeant Donovan saying to one and all that we showed a lot of character and true guts. The headmaster didn’t say anything, you know apologise for threatening to expel Bozo. Nancy called him right the first time, he’d rather stay thick as thieves with the right people in town than be seen apologising to a garbage collector.

  Nancy now tucks us, one on either side, under her arms and we walk out the school gates where she’s got the Diamond T parked right in front of the school. We have to push her into the driver’s seat, which must have looked pretty damn funny, though those parents following us didn’t laugh. It was a rare victory for the Maloney family against the forces of evil.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Nothing more was said
about the dogs and it was suggested that Vera Forbes keep the incident out of the Gazette. It probably wouldn’t have stopped her talking her head off around town anyway and the verbal version would have turned Bozo and me into villains.

  But the long and the short of it is that Sergeant Donovan comes to see Nancy and says that there’s a prisoner doing a brick (ten years) on the hill who was a handy boxer in his day. He once fought for the Victorian professional welterweight crown but lost on a knockout in the first round. Still and all, that’s pretty big time for Yankalillee. He explains that he’s talked to the prison governor, Mr Sullivan, about starting something up for the town’s kids, who’ve got nothing to do and always seem to end up getting into trouble with the police. He’s thinking of a boxing club under the auspices of the police and with the help of the prisoner, namely Bobby Devlin, who he hopes will be the coach. He’ll call it the Police Boys Boxing Club and he wants Bozo and me to join, Mike also if he’d like to.

  Nancy says it’s up to us to decide but that she doesn’t object in principle. She points out to Big Jack Donovan that we don’t have much time and we could only attend training afternoons after school and no weekday evenings except Fridays because of the garbage collecting next morning. Saturday nights would also be okay because we could sleep in Sunday mornings. She’s throwing what’s left of our lives away willy-nilly but she puts the kybosh on Mike joining up, although she doesn’t tell Sergeant Donovan it’s because she needs him to help her with the layettes in the afternoons. Mike tells us he wouldn’t have joined anyway and Sarah says that at least one of us has some brains.

  Bozo loved it from the first go and couldn’t get enough of boxing. Though it turns out to be a big ask for me and, although I stick at it for a while, to tell you the truth I’m not that good and I’m that bloody exhausted after getting up at three in the morning, I can hardly stay awake waiting for my turn to spar. Sometimes I’d fall asleep leaning against the big red punching bag. The mornings at school are bad enough, let alone spending the afternoons learning to get my head knocked off.