‘Ask my brother,’ Bozo says, turning to me.
The bloke doesn’t ask me, but I nod, so it is only half a lie. ‘Righto, put the gloves on,’ the promoter says. ‘Three rounds or a k.o.! I have the right to stop the fight at any time, referee’s decision is final!’
‘Yeah,’someone yells, ‘if the Abo’s gettin’beat and you’re the ref, the other bloke goes t.k.o.?’
But the wog, who isn’t a wog because he speaks proper Australian, ignores him and holds up a five-pound note and winks at the Aboriginal boxer. ‘Winner takes all!’ he shouts.
Well, I suppose it was a good example of not taking the spoon out of the sink and Bozo lasts one round and is no match for the black guy. After the first round Bozo’s nose is bleeding, though only a trickle, and you could see the Aboriginal boxer is toying with him and could have hit Bozo any time he wanted to.
When the bell for the second round comes, the Abo guy stands up, waving his gloves to show the fight is over. Then he walks over and raises Bozo’s hand and declares him the winner. The greasy bloke with the moustache doesn’t look too happy about it, but the crowd is on our side and so he has to give Bozo the five quid and we are suddenly rich. All the onlookers cheer and throw coins into the ring, so I reckon they must have nearly got their money back.
Later, when we were feeding our faces on these hot dogs on sticks, Bozo says to me, ‘After the first round I knew I was gunna get a thumping, Mole.’ Then he looks at me, and there is tomato sauce all over his mouth. ‘I’m never going to say nothing bad about the Abos again.’
Bozo’s fight worked out for Nancy as well, though at first I thought we were in the shit. We were in the back of the Diamond T later that night, trying to sleep with the mattress taken out and leaned against the side of the truck to dry. Colleen and Sarah were in the back with us boys, and little Colleen was sleeping on the pillows. We’d spread the blankets on the deck of the truck because it wasn’t really cold. Nancy was up front trying to kip sitting upright in the cabin when this bloke comes up and talks to her and we hear him say, ‘Saw the young bloke having a go in the boxing tent.’
‘Shit, we’re in for it,’ I whisper to Bozo. I know Mike or Sarah wouldn’t have dobbed us in to Nancy. ‘Boxing tent? What’s this?’ Nancy says.
‘Oh, sorry,’ says the bloke, realising he’d made a mistake. ‘It’s nothing, madam.’
‘Bozo, come here!’ Nancy commands, sticking her head out the cabin window.
‘What?’ says Bozo, sounding all innocent, but knowing he is in trouble.
‘What’s this about the boxing tent?’
‘We was in it,’ Bozo mumbles.
‘And?’
‘Look, madam, I’m sorry,’ the bloke says, all apologetic. Then, ‘The kid’s got guts.’
Nancy ignores him, ‘I’m waiting, Bozo?’ ‘I had a go, Mum,’ Bozo says, real soft.
‘It’s my fault, madam. I’ve gone and dobbed the lad in.’ He turns to look at Bozo. ‘I’m sorry, son.’ Then he has this good idea. ‘You sleeping rough, I see. None of my business but . . .’
‘No, it ain’t!’ Nancy says, cutting him off.
But the bloke keeps on, ‘Look, there’s the hay room back of the stables,’ he says quickly. Then he looks up at the sky. ‘Rain’s forecast, I’ve got the key, how about you all bed down there? Let you have a bit of canvas to put over the hay so it don’t prickle.’
He says it so nicely that Nancy knows he’s a good bloke and means no harm. You can see he’s from the bush like us.
Nancy turns back to Bozo. ‘You’ll keep,’ she says, then thanks the bloke and sticks her hand out the window.
‘Adams, Johnny Adams, Merrindale Stud, Gilgandra.’
‘Nancy Maloney, Yankalillee, pleased t’meetcha, Mr. Adams.’
‘Johnny,’ he corrects, smiling, ‘no point being formal then, is there? We’d invite you to share our trailer, but we’ve got a new baby, see, gets the colic bad, could keep you awake all night.’
Bingo! Somebody’s going to get a christening robe. So we spend the night in the hay shed, comfy as you like, with the hay for a mattress. Johnny Adams was right, it did rain that night, came down in buckets, we’d have been pretty miserable, but for him.
Next morning Sarah and Mike persuade Nancy that Bozo shouldn’t be punished as his boxing had got us out of the rain and all he’d suffered was a bit of a nose bleed.
‘I don’t know what’s to become of that boy,’ Nancy says, tut-tutting, before agreeing reluctantly to let Bozo off the hook. But we know she doesn’t mean it. Bozo is loved by her just the same as all of us and she was dead proud whenever Big Jack Donovan stopped by to tell her Bozo was going great at boxing.
Then Bozo hands Nancy three pounds and ten shillings, which is what’s left of his winnings, and says he’s sorry and all is forgiven.
We take the morning looking around and spending Bozo’s money. Then that arvo we’ve got the presentation, it’s not the Queen, only the Lady Mayoress of Melbourne. Still and all, we have on our best clothes and Sarah wore this dress Mike tie-dyed and remade from an old one. Nancy had the usual daisies-on-a-yellow-background but she wore a big hat and these white gloves Sarah had crocheted and Mike had embroidered with a sprig of bush blossom to keep the theme going. So they both looked great standing up there on the stage with the flash bulbs going off pop, pop, pop and people clapping.
Nancy and Sarah got their names in the women’s section of The Weekly Times with a black and white picture of the two blue ribbons arranged over ‘Bush Blossoms’. The Melbourne Sun also gave them a mention and the Border Mail had a black and white picture, but they got it wrong and showed Sarah and Mike’s ‘England’s Cottage Garden’ by mistake. Toby Forbes gave the win a big spread in The Owens & Murray Gazette.
BUSH BLOSSOMS
BELTS ALL BONNETS,
BIBS, BOOTIES & BLANKETS
BEST OF THE BEST!
ROYAL MELBOURNE SHOW
Nancy said Toby Forbes was being a smart-arse and, anyway, why wasn’t our name in the headline. But it seemed pretty damned good to me, our big win in black letters that took up half of the front page of the Gazette. I tore it out and sticky-taped it to the wall next to my bunk. Some of the teachers at school came up to me in the playground the week after and said we should be really proud. For about five minutes the Maloneys were famous in Yankalillee and I reckon we stuck it up a few people even without the Queen. Showed them they weren’t the only ones who could do good things.
Mike was a boy wonder at embroidery but couldn’t ever share in the glory. We had all his blue ribbons pinned onto the picture rail in the front room. Of course, he’d probably have killed us if we’d told anyone at school. But we knew it was just something he did to help Nancy and because he was the artistic one in the family. Sarah said we must never speak about it, that it was a Maloney thing to help each other and that people wouldn’t understand.
Nancy could do all of this stuff real well herself, of course. It was her who taught Mike and Sarah in the first place. Because they were so good, they’d do the special pieces and Nancy would concentrate on the smocking. Altogether it was a pretty good team and I doubt if there was anyone in our part of Victoria who could take us on at embroidering.
It was one of those days when Nancy was in a mood to talk and so she continued with the saga of our family.
‘After we were married I stayed faithful, no more hanky-panky. I took the vows before God and there’s been no one else since, except for Tommy.’ She looked at us and gave a small shrug as if to apologise for her error in judgement, ‘I couldn’t leave the poor miserable bugger after all he’d been through in the war. Besides, his heart’s in the right place, there’s not too many blokes who would have gone away on a promise to make his pregnant sweetheart respectable when he returned and then found that, in his absence, his obligations had increased to
four. You’ve got to hand it to Tommy, he done the right thing.’ She laughed, a big open sort of guffaw, ‘Mind you, I must say he hasn’t taken his subsequent obligations too seriously. But it must have come as a bit of a shock to the system coming home near dead from three years of starvation as a prisoner of war to find out I’d popped out three babies he hadn’t had a hand in and didn’t even know about.’
She smiled again, this time real sweet. ‘Come here, all of you. Give your old mum a hug then. You’re all mine from the selfsame womb and I wouldn’t want it any different. A wog, a Septic Tank and three fifth-generation Aussies whose ancestors came here from Ireland as convicts and whose father seems determined to keep up the family tradition.’
We took turns giving her a hug and then Nancy patted her great belly. ‘All of them blokes were needed to make you lot, the mighty Maloneys, and I thank God he gave you to me because if it had been left to Father Crosby, Lord knows where you would have been.’ ‘Why’s that?’ Bozo asks.
‘It’s why we are collapsed Catholics,’ Nancy said. ‘With each of you, soon as it was known I was pregnant, Father Crosby came around. “Now Nancy,” he’d say, “you’ll be wanting those taken care of, we’ve a nice place you can go to have your baby where the nuns will take good care of you and, then, when the wee mite is born, we’ll have it adopted by a good Catholic family. There’s plenty of good deserving couples the Lord has not seen fit to bless who’ll take a healthy child. It’s the best thing to do all round, my girl.”’ Nancy’s got his voice down pat, only her voice is a bit deeper than Father Crosby’s.
‘My God!’ Mike says, slapping his palm against his forehead. ‘I could have been adopted into a rich family and slept in every morning of my life!’ We all laugh, Mike’s a real card when he wants to be. ‘I was having none of that,’ Nancy said. ‘I wanted each one of you, but the Church wouldn’t leave me alone. They put pressure on my parents and said I could even have been excommunicated if I didn’t do it their way. But I knew that was crap. I decided then and there the Church, not my faith, that’s different, but the Church had no room for me and my children. “Where does it say in the Bible that Adam and Eve were married?” I asked Father Crosby.’
‘“To be sure, Nancy O’Shane, Eve was made from Adam’s rib, there was no hanky-panky going on there now.”
Then he said, “A rib isn’t fornication outside of wedlock.”
‘“A rib, is that what they called a man’s percy in those days, Father?” I said to him.
‘“That’s blasphemy, and you’ll be punished for that, Nancy O’Shane, God is not mocked!” and he sweeps up the edge of his soutane and storms off. “You’d better come to confession,” he shouts out.’
‘Weren’t you frightened, Mum?’ Sarah asks.
‘Scared out of my wits, but I wasn’t going to give you up, darling. Then, after you were born and I wasn’t struck by lightning nor got leprosy, it was easier to resist the pressure when your brothers came into the world under similar circumstances.’
‘Is that why you didn’t send us to the convent?’ Sarah asks.
‘It was well known that you were all born out of wedlock and I didn’t want the nuns to get at you. They would have, to be sure, and they can be cruel as witches.’ Nancy smiles, ‘What a lovely bunch of Maloneys you all turned out to be.’
‘But technically we’re not all Maloneys,’ Mike points out. ‘Bozo and me, we’re not.’
‘Might as well all be called Maloney, eh?’ Nancy says.
‘It’s a damn sight better than Vincentio Tomasetti or Audry Bozonik, even if the present and rightful owner of the Maloney name isn’t this town’s most upstanding citizen. Though we mustn’t forget he fought and suffered for his country.’
So there we were back to Tommy’s mysterious war. We’d heard Nancy say he’d come back like a drover’s dog all prick and ribs and words like ‘after all he’d been through’ and ‘near dead after three years of starvation’ but we still knew nothing except that he’d been a prisoner of war under the Japanese in Borneo.
When on occasions we tried to push her further on the subject, she’d say, ‘It’s not all his fault. Your father’s the way he is because of what happened to him in the war,’ and then she’d say no more. Sometimes you’d see her eyes close as if she was about to weep or was trying to understand herself what had happened to the nice young bloke who’d gone laughing off to Singapore, promising to return and take care of her and whatever the bun in the oven turned out to be. Then she’d sniff and say quietly, ‘It’s not something he can talk about.’ It was as if there was some other man, a sweet ghost lurking in the background somewhere, who had been replaced by Tommy Maloney, small-time crook, alcoholic, chronically unlucky punter, loner, loser, bushman and a grand fighter of bushfires.
It was in this last couple of respects that Tommy seemed the greatest contradiction, he loved the bush and when he was out of gaol he’d spend days away from home simply wandering about in the eucalyptus trees that covered the deep valleys and the surface of the hills leading up to the Snowy Mountains. It must have been sheer hell for him to be locked up at night in a prison cell up the hill.
We’d come home from school and know almost immediately that things were different, the air was lighter somehow, or something weird like that. ‘Tommy’s gone bush,’ Nancy would announce, then she’d give this sad little smile. ‘Good thing, too, get him out of the pub for a spell, eh?’
Having Tommy around the place when he came down from the hill, which was the expression used when he came out of gaol, wasn’t easy. It meant Sarah and Colleen had to move out of Nancy’s bedroom into ours and we boys had to move onto the back verandah.
In the summer this was okay, even quite good, there’d be a bit of a breeze blowing on hot nights. But it was shit in the winter when we’d rig a piece of canvas from the roofline that dropped to the cement floor and which we held down with bricks to make a sort of outside wall to keep out the wind.
It was colder than charity out there on the back verandah with the wind buffeting the canvas wall and wailing along the roofline. Once there were drifts of snow piled up against the outside of the canvas. It may seem a bit farfetched in these affluent times, but there were never enough blankets, so Mike and Bozo slept with two of the dogs each and I had the woolliest one, Bitzer Four, a mainly Scottish Terrier–Cocker Spaniel combination. I reckon a dog in the bed is worth three blankets any time.
But then we’d wake up one morning or, as I said, come home from school, and Tommy would be gone. Hallebloody-lu-yah! We’d move back and things would be normal again!
‘Your father has to have the bush. It’s for his nerves,’ Nancy would say, forgiving him for the utter bastard he’d been the couple of weeks before he’d gone AWL, coming home drunk most days and behaving badly.
Not that coming home drunk was a sin. In Bell Street it was an everyday occurrence and every family accepted it as normal. Half an hour after the six o’clock swill when the men would stumble home from the pub, the trouble would start in our street. Not just Bell Street, you’d see kids in school with stinkers or split lips and bruises over their bodies. Like the kids in our street, they were too ashamed to talk about it. If a teacher asked them about it, they would say what their mothers told them to say, that they’d walked into a doorknob. There were doorknobs in Yankalillee to fit every-sized child in the school.
Though I’ve got to say this for Tommy, he wasn’t violent like some of the fathers in our street. There was one case when I was six when a bloke in our street came home drunk and twisted his wife’s neck right around so that their kids found her in the morning seated at the kitchen table, staring out the window, a bowl of peas she’d been shelling still on the table in front of her, only she was dead with her head turned the wrong way around. The police went into the bedroom to arrest her old man and found him lying across the bed, fully dressed, one shoe missing and his big toe
sticking out of a hole in his sock, snoring his head off. When Big Jack Donovan questioned him he had no recollection of what he’d done. He got ten years for manslaughter. Nancy said they should’ve locked him up and thrown away the key. But most people thought it was a fair whack, seeing he was drunk and all and not responsible for his actions.
A man has the right to drink, nobody’s disputing that, but he doesn’t have the right to beat the living daylights out of his wife and kids when he gets home, that’s not on. But unfortunately it was what happened in Bell Street far too often and the next day their wives, wearing a black eye or a split lip or broken nose, would make the standard excuse, ‘He’s a good bloke really, it’s only that he can’t handle his grog.’
When we were little and Tommy came home with a skinful, he’d hit out at us. I don’t mean he beat us up deliberately, Tommy wasn’t like that. But when he was drunk, he’d lash out if he got annoyed with one of us and you’d fair cop a backhand that would sometimes land you on your arse.
When this happened and Nancy heard us bawling, she’d come steaming in. ‘Bugger off, you bastard, get out!’ she’d scream. ‘You touch one of my kids again and I’ll kill you, you hear?’ Tommy would try and say something back, but the words would come out wet and slurred, his lips all sloppy and not able to grab a hold of the words, which seemed to slide over his bottom lip to the floor.
There was never any question of Tommy beating up his wife. Nancy would’ve slaughtered him with one arm tied behind her back. But when he’d had a go at one of us kids, later she’d be the one to apologise to us on his behalf, ‘Your father isn’t really like that, it’s what happened in the war that’s done this to him.’
‘Yeah, fucking war’s been over ten years,’ Mike would say when we were away from Nancy’s presence.
But at the time I’m talking about we were big enough to fend for ourselves. That is, with the exception of Colleen and, even drunk, Tommy wouldn’t have been game to put a hand on her. Mike wasn’t much of a fighter but Bozo, the Boy Boxer, would see that Tommy stayed in line. As well, Sarah would have flattened him, no risk. If she had her dander up, watch out, mate!
Four Fires Page 7