Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  One thing I’ll say for Nancy, she was quite open about us all, including Tommy. When people who didn’t know, which wasn’t very many, asked about her husband, she’d simply say, ‘My husband’s in prison for burglary.’ If they expressed their sympathy, she’d reply, ‘He’s better off up on the hill than in the bloody pub,’ and leave whoever asked with egg on their face.

  ‘There’s nothing to hide,’ she’d say. ‘Better the truth than always having to live with a lie. God Himself knows that the first four of you were born out of wedlock, it’s His and my business and nobody else’s.’ She’d grin suddenly. ‘Anyway, I reckon when I knock on the pearly gates He’ll look the other way when He sees how good you lot all turned out. I only took Tommy in holy matrimony after he’d got fattened up a bit in the repat hospital in Heidelberg. I was broody at the time and we definitely did the deed right after he came back looking like a drover’s dog, all prick and ribs.’ She chuckled, suddenly remembering, ‘It was like banging a bag of Bozo’s dog bones, bloody good thing I’d developed a bit of upholstery in the meantime. Mole was still small when we were finally married by Father Dunstan seven years after Sarah was born. We christened Mole the selfsame day, killing two birds with one stone.’ She gave Sarah one of her tender looks, ‘I must say, darling, you made a lovely flower girl and I made you the prettiest pink dress.’

  I remember we were all gathered around the old cane couch with its sagging cushions, Sarah was sitting on the one arm and Mike on the other, with Nancy filling up the remainder of the couch except for little Colleen who was squeezed in at the very end, her legs sticking out in front of her. The rest of us were sitting on the cement floor at Nancy’s feet.

  Sarah was working on a broderie anglaise coverlet and Mike was doing a garland of forget-me-nots on a christening robe, using bullion stitch, detached chain stitch and French knot. Mike was a champion embroiderer, much better than Nancy or Sarah, he could do rosebuds perfectly and rose leaves so you could see the little veins in the leaves. Under Nancy and Sarah’s names he’d win the blue ribbon every year at the Wangaratta, Albury and Wodonga Shows. At the Royal Melbourne Show the previous year he’d entered a design for a Quaker-style baby’s bonnet, bib, booties and a summer blanket which Nancy had made in natural-coloured linen and Mike had embroidered. Nancy called it ‘Bush Blossoms for Bonnet, Bib, Booties and Blanket’, with all the ‘b’s lined up like that. Clever, eh?

  We’d gone out and collected all these little wildflowers and Mike created this garland which was scattered over the whole ensemble. It took a long time and he used just about all the stitches available. We Maloney kids knew the twelve embroidery stitches off by heart, even little Colleen. It was a rhyme Nancy taught us, you had to say it very fast without becoming tongue-tied. Nancy said her mother taught it to her and her mother before her until way back time out of mind.

  Wicked witches wear pretty britches

  Made from silk with fancy stitches

  Bullion, back stitch, crafty fishbone

  Scattered from the knee to hipbone

  With knots colonial all tight tied

  Enough to send you glassy-eyed

  Back stitch, hem stitch, lazy daisy

  Stitches meant to send you crazy

  Stem stitch, straight, fluffy feather

  All those stitches worked together

  Cretan, pistil, chain for hitches

  Stitches for wicked witches’ britches.

  It was sort of our own ‘If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’, you know the one? If you work it out, there’s all twelve common embroidery stitches in the rhyme. Anyway, Mike used them all and then some.

  Nancy said his design probably wouldn’t get anything because it wasn’t traditional. You know, rosebuds and forget-me-nots in fairy gardens or Beatrix Potter bunnies in Farmer Brown’s vegie patch and all that dumb shit. She said it was the Royal Melbourne Show after all, and the Queen, who was English, might get all snotty if we did something Australian for a change. But she did add that this was the first woman in charge of the throne since Queen Victoria and she probably knew a bit more about embroidery.

  So, for insurance, Mike and Sarah did an ‘England’s Cottage Garden’ summer bonnet in Egyptian cotton. Mike did the bullion-stitch roses, forget-me-nots and detached chain-stitch daisies and other cottage-garden flowers, all of which covered the top of the crown and stretched across the edge of the brim, and Sarah filled any remaining spaces with colonial knots and then she did the broderie anglaise that made up the remainder of the bonnet.

  The Queen must have been in a good mood that year because Nancy was dead wrong. Mike got the blue ribbon in his section and also Best of Show for his ‘Bush Blossoms for Bonnet, Bib, Booties and Blanket’. ‘England’s Cottage Garden’ also won the baby-bonnet section.

  Nancy said it was probably because the Queen was a young woman of twenty-seven when she’d come to Australia last year and she’d probably seen some of our beautiful bush flowers. Nancy didn’t care much for the English, but she said they’d got it right this time, Queen Elizabeth was very popular in Australia and seemed like a nice person despite her religion. From the way she said it, I was convinced the Queen had given us the prize herself. Anyway, Nancy said it was the biggest thing that would happen in our lives and we were jolly well going to the presentation!

  I can tell you, getting ready for the big day was quite a to do, we washed the Diamond T with disinfectant and polished it to within an inch of its life. Except it was never meant to be shiny because it was military paint, sort of green-brown with spots where the paint had worn off. It also had a fair few scratches, but it had never looked better since way back when Tommy first brought it home. We took blankets and cushions and put a mattress in the back for Nancy to sleep on at the showground. Bozo took his toolkit because the Diamond T hadn’t travelled that far before, nor, for that matter, had us kids, except for Sarah, when she’d played hockey for Country Victoria Schools.

  Anyway, we set out early, all high and hopeful, for Melbourne, Nancy driving with Sarah and Colleen in the front all squashed up and us on the mattress, comfortable as you can get, with Bozo’s mutts, all of which had been dusted up with flea powder. I tell you what, we were that excited and proud. Nancy said it was a pity Tommy was on the hill and couldn’t come with us. But I know we didn’t agree with her, though of course we wouldn’t have said so.

  The Diamond T wasn’t all that used to getting out of second gear and the hundred and thirty miles to Melbourne was going to take all day. About halfway, near Seymour, it started to rain and soon it was pissing down and the mattress got soaked through. We pushed the blankets and cushions under it and they only got a bit wet then dried out in the wind later. ‘There goes Nancy’s sleep,’ Mike says. ‘We didn’t take the spoon out the sink.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I protest. ‘We couldn’t help that it rained!’

  ‘Canvas, we should have wrapped it in the back-verandah canvas, Nancy’s going to be cranky as hell.’

  ‘At least the rain will wipe the squashed grasshoppers from the windshield,’ Bozo says. ‘The radiator’s probably half blocked with the blighters.’After it stopped raining, he banged on the roof and Nancy drew to a halt and Bozo was dead right, the radiator was almost clogged with dead grasshoppers. That’s what I mean about Bozo, maybe we didn’t get it right with the mattress but the Diamond T was his personal responsibility and he’d taken the spoon out of the sink. The Diamond T could easily have overheated and then God knows when we’d have gotten to Melbourne, if ever.

  The Diamond T held up after that and we came into Melbourne just as the lights were coming on. We couldn’t believe it, stretching as far as the eye could see were lights dancing like a million fireflies in the dark. We’d dried out a bit in the meantime and fortunately the big old army duffle bag we’d packed our posh clothes into for the presentation had kept them dry. Bozo wasn’t all
that happy about the duffle bag being used for our clothes. He’d filled it with river sand and it hung from the back verandah as his punching bag. We had to empty all the sand out so we could use it for the trip.

  ‘What if the Queen gives us the prize, wants to hand it to Nancy personally?’ I say, as we’re coming in to the showground.

  ‘Better not, if Nancy has to curtsy she’ll fall on her arse,’ Mike laughs.

  Bozo shakes his head, ‘Don’t think she’d do it.’ ‘Do what?’ I ask.

  ‘Bow and scrape to the Queen,’ Bozo replies.

  ‘More than that, she’s also head of the Church of England,’ Mike says. ‘We’ve got the Pope and they’ve got the Queen.’

  ‘Nancy has to, it’s the law,’I protest. ‘She’s the Queen of England and Australia, they told us in school, she’s higher up even than Bob Menzies.’

  ‘Still and all, I don’t like her chances, Nancy’s pretty stubborn,’ Bozo counters.

  Mike cuts the argument short, ‘Queen’s not even in the country, so I wouldn’t worry too much, maybe she’ll come year after next for the Olympic Games and stay over for the show.’

  ‘What do you mean, not here? Nancy said the Queen likes bush blossoms because of what she’d seen before?’

  ‘That’s just Nancy, because it’s called The Royal Melbourne Show,’ Mike replies. He seemed to be thinking. ‘Still an’ all, it would’ve been nice to get the prize from the Queen. Her handing it to Nancy.’

  We couldn’t believe our ears. Bozo was the first to recover. ‘Jesus, what do you mean? The Queen’s a Protestant and she’s English and head of their church, you said!’

  ‘Yeah, I know, it’s not that, it’s all the hoity-toity people in Yankalillee, they’d eat their livers.’ He spread his hands, like he was reading a newspaper, ‘I can see the Gazette, in these big black letters on the front page, there it would be for all to see: MRS NANCY MALONEY MEETS THE QUEEN! They’d puke with envy. Imagine Mrs Yerberry in her fox stole hearing the news, she’d have a conniption, maybe drop dead on the spot!’

  ‘Conniption’ was a Nancy word and it meant something like ‘they’d almost shat their pants they’d be so angry’, only it’s in polite language. We laughed at the image Mike had portrayed. It sure would be nice to bring all the town’s snooty-nosed bastards to heel for once, make them see they weren’t the only ones who could do things around the place.

  Mike wasn’t like the other blokes his age and he could make you laugh about things you never thought about before. Nancy said it was because ‘he was of a sensitive nature’. Stuck on the wall beside his bunk he had these pictures he’d torn out of magazines like The Women’s Weekly. They were of dresses. Not like, you know, horny pictures, just dresses. Sometimes, if he didn’t like a hat, he’d cut the heads off. Often he would have drawn over some of them with a pencil, like he’d make the skirt narrower or change the neck or collar, or put a belt on the waist or take up the hem. ‘It’s a fashion statement,’ he’d say if you asked.

  When I asked Bozo what he thought of them, he said he’d already had a close look. ‘Isn’t one worth wanking over,’ he declared, dismissing the lot.

  ‘One day Mike will be famous,’ Sarah said. After we came back from the trip, Mike designed the dress Sarah wore at the end-of-year school social which was held a few weeks later, at the end of the month. Although Sarah was in the fifth form, she had already been told she would be head prefect for her matriculation year and had turned it down.

  Nancy had got the material sent from Myers in Melbourne and it was silk shantung and ‘cost a fortune’. It was a sort of shiny, smoky peacock-blue but when she moved in it, there was this green colour like a budgie’s breast, not shiny like a mirror, a sort of a soft, rich shine Nancy called ‘subtle’. Sarah looked very beautiful even though she didn’t have a date.

  Mike said it was because she was a Catholic and all the blokes were Protestant and their parents would drop dead at the thought of their precious son going to the school social with a Mick.

  But Sarah said it was because they were all creeps and she wouldn’t be seen dead with any of them, not even Murray Templeton, who was going to be head prefect, and was already the captain of the footy team and a bit of a hero all round, even to me.

  This was also the year Sarah should have gone to the debutante ball but she told Nancy she didn’t want to go, even though Nancy said we’d find the money somehow. So the posh dress was sort of Nancy’s way and Mike’s way to make up for her not being a debutante, which secretly we knew she’d have liked to have been.

  Nancy burst into tears when Sarah came out of the bedroom on the night of the school social. The skirt of Mike’s dress was splayed out like an inverted tulip and ended just above her knees. A broad belt, made of the same shantung material, like a solid band, clipped at the back with press-studs, clasped her tiny waist and then the top of the dress was off her shoulders so that her long neck and smooth shoulders sort of grew out of the dress. ‘Très èlègant!’ Mike said, clapping his hands together. He sometimes said weird things like that.

  Sarah had on these white shoes she’d been saving up for, with high heels. She was wearing lipstick and her hair fell down past her shoulders and shone so you almost had to squint to see it properly. I have to say, even though I probably wasn’t much of an authority on girls’ looks at ten, nearly eleven, Sarah looked beautiful to me. Bozo, who had recently turned twelve, said the same.

  Nancy saw us to the front gate, still wiping her eyes and smiling her big smile at the same time. We boys then walked with Sarah to the Town Hall. It was funny seeing Sarah walk in her new shoes. She was wobbling a bit, teetering, like she was about to fall over any second.

  After about a hundred yards, she sighed and took her shoes off and only put them on again when we’d practically reached the Town Hall. All the way Mike kept pulling at the dress and doing stuff to it, until Sarah told him to stop fussing, that someone might be looking. He stopped then, but you could see he was pleased with what he’d done, and no wonder. We left our sister outside the Town Hall and you could hear her dress rustle when she climbed the steps and turned to wave goodbye to us. Then she said to Mike, ‘Thank you for my lovely dress,’ but not so loud that anyone could hear and Mike was so proud he nearly burst wide open. ‘Enchanté!’ he said.

  But then a nice thing happened at the dance. Murray Templeton, who could have had any girl in the school because they were all falling over him, didn’t come with a partner either. So everything was all right in the end, head prefect and vice-prefect for the next year sort of being together but not being together so tongues could wag, if you know what I mean?

  As it was a Saturday with a sleep-in Sunday, we all stayed up to see Sarah come home. She wouldn’t allow us to go and fetch her and said she was quite capable of walking home on her own. Sarah didn’t want us hanging around the Town Hall steps at midnight so that people would think she needed to be protected or anything.

  Anyway, then came the big surprise. Sarah arrived home in a brand-new yellow Holden, it was a colour Murray’s dad had specially sprayed for his dealership so it would be different from the other Holdens around. Nancy started to bawl again. ‘The Princess has arrived home in a pumpkin carriage,’ she sobbed.

  The Yerberrys’shit-coloured Packard was the best car in town but the Templetons’ Holden was the one most of us noticed because of its bright pumpkin colour. Murray, the football captain and all-time hero, had brought Sarah home. He was eighteen so already had his driver’s licence. They didn’t kiss or anything, he came around to her door and opened it and then said goodbye and she said goodbye to him, shaking his hand and holding her new shoes in her left hand. After he drove off, we came rushing out of the house to welcome her home. Sarah looked happy and the lipstick was off her mouth.

  That was a big month for us Maloneys with the Melbourne Show also in September. I guess these days everyon
e’s been to the show so knows what it’s like. But we’d never seen anything like it. We were country kids so we knew about animals and stuff and that part wasn’t all that different to the agricultural show at Wang, only more of the same. They had about a thousand types of chicken in the poultry section, some even had feathers sticking out their legs and these plumes from their heads. Weird-looking buggers. Did you know chickens came from China?

  Nancy must have saved real hard, because she bought us each a show bag and we spent money like water, going on the Big Dipper and Bozo won a pink kewpie doll with a ballerina skirt for Colleen by knocking down three sets of skittles with three balls. Later we went into the boxing tent, that is, Mike, Sarah, Bozo and me.

  There is this skinny-looking Aboriginal guy who challenges all comers within twenty pounds of his own weight. Bozo says he’ll have a go and Mike says not to and Sarah gets mad and says she’ll tell Nancy and then she leaves the tent. But Bozo is pretty stubborn and he steps up to the scales and is three pounds heavier than the Abo. The promoter asks him how old he is and Bozo fibs and says sixteen.

  Some of the old blokes in the tent, who are full of hops, are shouting encouragement, saying, ‘Give the kid a go, yer mug!’and things like that, waving one-pound notes. ‘A quid on the kid, what odds?’ and everyone laughs except Bozo and me and the bloke in charge. So with all the pressure, the bloke in charge, who had this thin pencil moustache and greasy curly hair like some wog, finally says to Bozo, ‘Are you sure you’re sixteen?’