Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Most mornings I’d snooze at the back of the class during the first period of the day and often enough take the strap coming to me from our teacher, Mr Brown. He was English and known to one and all as ‘Crocodile Brown’ because he had these big yellow teeth from smoking little black cigars and his eyes had these heavy lids so they’d never open properly and, when he smiled, you knew you were in deep shit.

  ‘Peter Maloney, are you asleep again?’ he’d shout from the front of the class.

  I’d wake up with a start. ‘No, sir, only thinking.’ ‘Thinking? Hmmm . . . that would make a nice change in a Maloney,’ Crocodile Brown says all sarcastic like. ‘And what were you thinking about, laddie?’

  ‘The lesson, sir?’

  ‘The lesson? Well, well, then perhaps you’ll be so kind as to enlighten us a little, eh? What was the last thing I said?’

  ‘Missed that, sir, too deep in thought.’ Laughter from the class.

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, lad. We don’t like clowns in our classroom, do we now?’ ‘No, sir, sorry, sir.’

  ‘Sorry isn’t good enough, Maloney. You’re not paid to think, laddie, you’re paid to listen!’ ‘I didn’t know we were being paid, sir.’ More laughter.

  ‘Right, that’s just about enough from you, Maloney! Up you come.’

  Whack, whack, whack, three of the best, the deadly strap whistling through the air, the new welts on my bum freshening up the ones the bastard gave last time round.

  A lot of the teachers in country schools were bloody sadists, and Mike and Bozo copped the same as me until they got to high school. Anyway, Crocodile Brown had it in for us Maloneys. He was the choirmaster at the Anglican church and when Mike was ten he heard him singing at the school assembly and came to see Mum.

  Nancy offered him a glass of milk stout, but he said no thanks. Sarah made him a cup of tea and Mike brought a wicker chair out to the back verandah.

  ‘Mrs Maloney,’ Crocodile Brown leaned forward in the rickety old chair and looked serious, ‘I’m here to tell you, your son Michael is a boy soprano with perfect pitch.’ He leaned back again, pleased with himself, glancing at Mike and then smiling his yellow smile at Nancy, I say, you really ought to be proud with such a lark in your midst.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Nancy said, not giving too much away, but then she added, ‘I’m surprised he has any voice at all with all the carbon monoxide he swallows of a morning.’ Crocodile Brown misses her reference entirely and takes a sip from his cup to cover his confusion. Though we never tell her anything about what happens in school, something about him must have leaked out somewhere, because Mike says he could see Nancy wasn’t that keen on him and wasn’t going to give Crocodile Brown too much rope.

  Crocodile Brown brings his cup down to the saucer balanced on his lap, ‘Well, we’d like to have him in the Anglican church choir, train his voice properly, eh?’

  Nancy took her time, which was always a bit of a warning. She put her head to one side and looked at Crocodile Brown and slowly put down the layette she was working on, her eyes never once leaving the schoolmaster. ‘And what do you think Father Crosby would say to that notion, Mr Brown?’

  ‘Well, er ...I must say ...I hadn’t really given that much thought,’Crocodile Brown stammered. It wasn’t at all the reaction he’d expected. ‘Your boy isn’t at St Stephen’s so ...er, naturally, I assumed . . .’ His voice trailed off then came on again. ‘But . . . but the Roman Catholics haven’t got a boys’ choir, Mrs Maloney.’

  ‘Ah, yes, but they have got my boy’s immortal soul in their safekeeping and we’ll not be giving that to the Church of England,’ she paused then added, ‘And, by the way, Mr Brown, we’re Catholics not Roman Catholics.’ Nancy hated to be called a Roman Catholic. In fact, Mike’s soul was out of Catholic circulation as Nancy had declared us all collapsed Catholics, or that’s what we thought she said and we only found out years later that she’d meant ‘lapsed Catholics’.

  Nancy’s refusal to hand over his immortal soul to the Anglicans, Mike reckoned, started it all with Crocodile Brown and us. He said to take the hidings like a man, no use telling the sadist bastard that we’d been up since three in the morning, shovelling the shit out of his garbage can. He knew anyway and he’d done the exact same to him and Bozo. Instead, Mike said we’d have Bozo’s Bitzers catch a couple of live rats on the tip and leave them in his garbage bin. Maloney payback.

  ‘He’ll know it’s us and he’ll report me to Mr Flint,’ I say fearfully.

  ‘No way!’ Mike says. ‘We’ll leave the lid off so he can’t positively prove the rats didn’t get in on their own.’

  ‘Rats’ll jump out a bin,’ Bozo points out.

  ‘Not if we grease the bottom and inside,’ Mike replies.

  We did just that, left Crocodile Brown a couple of liverat letters of warning not to mess with a Maloney. The next time we emptied his bin it had eight holes in the bottom where he’d blasted the rodents with a .22 rifle.

  One of the kids who lived in his street said Mrs Crocodile Brown had gone out on the footpath to fetch the garbage bin and nearly dropped dead on the spot from a heart attack. She was last seen running screaming back into the house, pulling at her hair. Crocodile Brown must’ve buried the dead rats to stop them smelling because only the eight holes were there when we tipped his bin up next time around. But he must have got the message. While the thrashings didn’t stop completely, they didn’t happen as often and not for about a month afterwards, which gave my bum a bit of a rest.

  I can safely say we were bloody weary most of the time, but it wasn’t true about us being stupid. Sarah was dux of the school and had to refuse being made head prefect.

  That’s because of what she had to do at home. She washed and ironed and cooked and cleaned and looked after Colleen, which left her no time to do the school job properly, because the head prefect had to have meetings and do other extra-curricular duties after school. It was her own decision to turn it down.

  They made her vice-prefect anyway because she was better and more popular than Murray Templeton, whose father was the Holden dealer in town and so was only made head prefect by Sarah-default.

  I admit Bozo’s reports weren’t always up to scratch but that didn’t mean he was stupid. Nobody could call Bozo stupid, he just wasn’t that interested in school work. Even as a thirteen-year-old he wasn’t big, but he was wiry and bloody strong and could lift two garbage bins at once into the back of the truck if we were running late of a morning. He was also a self-taught mechanic and kept the Diamond T going after it should have long since conked out. He could fix anything mechanical and when the family was on the bones of our arses, Bozo could always be relied on to sell something he’d repaired.

  We’d collect stuff people had thrown away, bits of bicycles, old hand-pushed lawnmowers, hot-water jugs, electric kettles, hedge clippers with the blades rusted, kids’ scooters, prams with wheels missing, old deck chairs, primus stoves, hurricane lamps, Vacola Bottling Systems, anything that could be re-wired or scraped back, cleaned, repaired or painted. Bozo would do the fixing and I’d do the scraping and painting and we’d go halves when we sold it. Sometimes I’d have money jingling in my pocket, enough to toss my jam sandwiches in the bin and buy a Herbert Adams pie one day and a Four ’n’ Twenty the next for school lunch for a whole week. I never could decide which tasted the best. Or I’d pay for the family to go to the pictures, though we generally ended up giving our profits to Nancy when a cash crisis hit, which was just about all the time.

  Bozo even built two complete bicycles from scratch from parts collected over three years. All we needed was tyres, tubes and valves and half a dozen new spokes. Miraculously Tommy came good with one of his very rare wins with the local SP bookmaker and gave us the money. It was magic. Me and Bozo had our own bikes. But then shortly after, Tommy went up the hill again and the SP bookie came around to see Nancy. It turned out that the
money Tommy had given us wasn’t won on the horses after all, that he owed the SP ten quid, and where was it?

  I suppose we could have argued that we weren’t responsible for Tommy’s gambling debts and the bookmaker would just have to wait until he came out of gaol. But that wasn’t Nancy’s way. ‘When you do that, all you do is accumulate shame. Soon enough you’re drowning in it and people don’t trust your word any more. Better to do without, pay our way and keep our noses clean.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mike would say afterwards, mimicking Nancy, ‘it’s not your father’s fault, it’s something that happened to him in the war.’

  So after only three weeks of the luxury of riding to school and parking our bikes with the other kids in the shelter behind the boys’ toilet, they were sold for eight pounds and Nancy found the other two quid somewhere and we paid the SP bookie in full.

  The thing I couldn’t understand was, except for the bike tyres that cost three quid, we never seemed to benefit from Tommy’s life as a burglar. The Shamrock did, the SP bookie certainly did, but our family fortunes remained per manently at low tide. I mean, he couldn’t have got nabbed every time he did a heist, could he? There must have been times when he’d fenced stuff and was suddenly flush with dough and we should’ve benefited, but I don’t remember it ever happening in my time.

  Mike and me never once failed a class and Mike always came top in art and music while I generally came in the top half, sometimes even close to the top of the class, and in biology and science I was never beat.

  Considering we were half asleep all the time, it wasn’t too bad really. Mike didn’t play much sport, only when it was compulsory, but Bozo and me were good at footy and cricket and Sarah was captain of the girls’ hockey and basketball teams and played for the state in the Australian Inter-Schools Hockey Tournament.

  As we grew a bit older, our sporting endeavours saved us a lot of abuse. Nobody would pick on Bozo who was already the state amateur champion in his weight division and was going to represent Country Victoria in the National Police Boys Club Championships in Sydney later in the year. Big Jack said that his coach, Bobby ‘Rock Fist’ Devlin, the ex-Victorian welterweight contender, thought Bozo was a certainty for a gold medal. That he might even make it to the Olympic Games next year. But Nancy said not to count your chickens. It was kind of strange with Bozo being, like, Big Jack Donovan’s favourite boy boxer and him being the son of a crim who, more often than not, was arrested by Sergeant Donovan and charged and placed under remand. But then life is strange, I suppose.

  I’d better line us Maloneys up, because if you work it out, given his years as a prisoner of war in Borneo, Tommy Maloney couldn’t be the daddy of all of us. Sarah was the eldest and was seventeen in 1955, born a year before the war was declared. Tommy, wanting to get away from the farm, decided to join the permanent army and was doing his training at Broadmeadows in Melbourne. She was shotgun number one, the result of a weekend leave pass. Nancy, who was doing her nurse’s training at the time, said Sarah was definitely Tommy’s daughter, because he was her first and it happened after the Women’s Auxiliary Dance when Tommy offered to walk her back to Mrs Frost’s boarding house. She laughs when she tells how they never got any further than the concealment of the bulrushes beside Lake Sambell.

  Nancy’s dad reckoned that with a bun in the oven growing bigger by the day her nursing career was over anyway, so he took Nancy back to their dairy farm at Allan’s Flat to hide the family shame and to keep a sharper eye on his daughter in future. As it turned out, he proved to be a pretty lousy watchdog.

  When Tommy was confronted with the prospect of fatherhood, he pointed out that he needed the permission of his company commander to marry and several weeks later reported that the big brass had put the kybosh on a young soldier marrying because he’d got some girl up the duff. Tommy even showed Nancy’s old man his application for permission to marry with a rubber stamp over it that read ‘Permission Refused’. The old bloke was too ignorant to know that these application forms with rubber stamp intact could be purchased for two bob on the sly in any military training establishment. But when war was declared in 1939 Tommy must have had a sudden softening of the heart, thinking that perhaps he might be killed without offspring, the Maloney name in Yankalillee extinguished forever (not necessarily a bad thing). He’d come to see Nancy on her parents’ farm, begging her to give Sarah his name and promising that should he return from the war he would marry her. ‘Wait for me, Nancy, our little daughter will be well looked after when I return.’ It was about as close as he ever got to saying anything that might vaguely be taken as romantic.

  However, Nancy wasn’t very good at waiting. She thinks Mike, who is fourteen, was begat by an Italian who worked on her old man’s dairy farm and who later, when Italy declared war on us, became a prisoner of war. The government said he could continue to work on the farm, only now he was an enemy alien. So Nancy couldn’t be said to have been consorting with the enemy because Mike happened before his father was the enemy. Although, she’s not absolutely dead certain about the Italian. ‘There were dances and things,’ she explains offhand, but then she’ll add, ‘It must have been the Eyetalian, Mike’s the musical and artistic one with the dark hair, isn’t he?’

  Bozo’s next, who at thirteen doesn’t quite make the correct Tommy chronology either. Mum’s certain he is the result of a red-hot fling with a Yank marine that lasted only four days but one she never forgot. She was in Sydney because of the death of her Auntie Molly. Her father had come down bad with rheumatic fever and her mum had to take care of him on the dairy farm as well as run the place and take care of Sarah and Mike, who was just eighteen months old, so Nancy was sent to Sydney by train to attend the funeral and pack up her auntie’s stuff and put her cottage on the market.

  This was in 1941 before the Americans were in the war, but it just so happened that the American cruiser Portland from the US Asiatic Fleet was in Circular Quay on a diplomatic visit and Nancy, along with just about every young girl in town, went down to the dockside to visit the ship.

  She must have been a pretty good-looking sort because the sailors and the marines on board could have picked anyone they wanted, but this marine sergeant in his full dress uniform took one look at Nancy and said, ‘Hi ya, good lookin’, what’s cookin’?’ and that was that.

  Nancy took him by the arm and straight home to her dead auntie’s cottage though they didn’t do a lot of cooking but made love instead. He returned every day for the four days the cruiser was in town to do the same. His name was Sergeant Bozonik, although she is never quite sure of the exact spelling, possibly because the cruiser sailed away early on the fifth morning without leaving a forwarding address and without him saying goodbye. The only thing she knew about Sergeant Bozonik was that he’d been the welterweight champion of the US Asiatic Fleet and came from Idaho. But Nancy must have liked him a fair bit because she named Bozo after him even though he’d done the dirty on her.

  But Nancy’s not quite through yet. Although I’m a true Maloney, I’m not Tommy’s son. It seems in 1943 Tommy’s cousin visits from Darwin where he’s been in the military hospital. Earlier, he’s fought in New Guinea and was wounded and repatriated to Darwin where he spends four months in hospital and then is given home leave before rejoining his regiment. He visits his folk in Gippsland and maybe he gets bored or something because he decides to visit Mr Baloney. Well, he hears all about Tommy’s daughter from them and decides to have a look for himself, see how Tommy’s little girl is getting on, and finds Mike has mysteriously joined the Maloney clan and that Nancy’s a pretty good sort and not married to Tommy.

  Nancy explains it like this, ‘Well, he was quite a decent sort of a bloke and he took me dancing and I suppose, hav ing seen little Mike about, he reckoned he might be in with a bit of a chance.’ Nancy laughs, ‘It was all over with the Eyetalian, I couldn’t fraternise with the enemy now, could I? With Tommy’s cousin,
Sean, I reckoned it was sort of, you know, keepin’ things in the family and doing me bit for the war effort at the same time. Poor sod, wounded for King and country and in need of a bit of a cuddle and me alone again. So next thing it’s Maloney number two on the way, same rotten blood, different bloke.’

  I’m born in December 1943. So I’m the only boy in the family who’s a true-blue Maloney, which is a bit of a disappointment really as Nancy says, Mike and Bozo have probably got the better blood. My real dad, Tommy’s cousin, went back to his regiment and was killed in New Guinea in 1944 so there’s no knowing how he would have turned out. But Nancy says he was a Maloney and you wouldn’t want to take any bets, there’d never been a good one yet, so why now.

  Then, of course, little Colleen is born, she’s six years younger than me and the reason there’s this big gap is because the first three years Tommy came back from the war he was that crook nothing happened. Then he gets three years for robbery with possession of a firearm.

  Him and Lenny Smith, a crim he’d met, were caught doing a warehouse which was storing those new electric jugs. They were all the rage at the time and everyone wanted one. Tommy, as I said before, never did houses, only industrial sites. ‘You don’t shit in yer own backyard,’ he’d say. But I think that the real reason was Nancy, who would have beaten the crap out of him if he’d robbed someone whose garbage we collected.

  But on this occasion with Lenny Smith, the police had been tipped off. With the cops closing in, Tommy’s so-called real-good mate planted an old army service revolver he’d been carrying under his leather jacket in Tommy’s burglar bag. Tommy said later that he didn’t even know Lenny Smith was armed and the bloody thing turned out not even to be loaded. Himself, he never carried anything but a pinch bar and a few tools, glass-cutters, drills, hammer, hacksaw, all that sort of respectable and harmless burglar gear.

  There was a night watchman present on the property, even though he was pissed and snoring his head off at the time and was later dismissed for incompetence, Tommy was charged with armed robbery. Oliver Twist gave him a year for breaking and entering and then added a second helping, two years extra for possession of a firearm. He served two years and three months and got nine months off for good behaviour because of a bushfire he’d played a big part in diverting. He came home and did the job on Nancy that got us little Colleen exactly nine months later, so she is the only legitimate Maloney in the entire collection of kids.