Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  Not that Nancy was doing all that well with her own attempts at damage control. She’d gone ape-shit the first night when Tommy dobbed Sarah in. It wasn’t the mum we knew, an entirely new Nancy came out and there’s still a fair bit of this new person hanging around the place.

  I mean, fair enough, you could understand her being pissed off at what had happened. But it was a bit hypocritical when you think about it. What had Sarah done that Nancy hadn’t done herself? Who was she to blame Sarah?

  All of us, except Colleen, had been born out of wedlock.

  She and Sarah were almost the same age when she was up the duff the first time. It was a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. But that didn’t stop Nancy going spare.

  That night around the table with all of us munching away on birthday cake and Sarah admitting the deed by bursting into tears, Nancy came wading in, a great dreadnought with all guns blazing. ‘You’ve ruined your life, girl!’ she screamed at Sarah. ‘You’ve destroyed your chances and you’ve destroyed us! For once in our lives we looked like we might crawl out from under the miserable rock the Maloneys have been hiding under for-bloody-ever! All our dreams! All our hard work, and you open your legs to the first Protestant boy who touches you on the tits! How could you do this to us?’

  ‘Hey, wait on, Mum,’ Mike says. ‘That’s not fair!’ Nancy turns furiously to Mike. ‘You! Shut the fuck up!’ she screams. ‘You should talk, God only knows where you’ll end up!’

  Mike is shocked and humiliated and looks down at the uneaten piece of cake on his plate. Nancy’s never spoken like that before, not even ever used that word before in our presence, turning on both her kids like they’re dirt. It’s as if she’s someone else who’s gone right off her scone.

  But Nancy doesn’t care. ‘Just once!’ she yells and then looks up at the ceiling appealing to God, ‘just for once things seemed to be going right and now this! What is it?’ she says to God. ‘What is it that I’ve done! Didn’t go to bloody Mass! The Eucharist, is that it? Eat yer body and drink yer blood! Can’t you leave us alone? Pick on someone else for a change!’ Boy, did she give God a big serve, I expected lightning to come down and fry us all on the spot.

  She looks around and her eyes are strange, wild, popping out her head, like she doesn’t even see us and is in some sort of blind panic. All of a sudden she brings her hands up to cover her face and she starts to wail. She’s wailing and Sarah’s sobbing. Little Colleen’s watching all this going on around her, not understanding, her green eyes big as saucers and on the verge of tears, her bottom lip trembling. Then she too starts to cry. Colleen’s crying, Nancy’s wailing and Sarah’s sobbing. You’ve never seen so much misery in the one room at the same time.

  Mike looks at Bozo and me and goes over and puts his arm around Sarah and nods, indicating we must do the same to Nancy and Colleen. Tommy’s looking down at the oilcloth that’s stretched tight over the table and drawingpinned to the underside. He’s taken out a drawing-pin and is using it to pick the dirt out of his nails, not looking up even once.

  Bozo goes to Colleen and picks her up and sits down in her chair. Putting her on his lap, he pulls her head into his chest, stroking her soft blonde hair. I go behind Nancy’s chair and put both my arms around her neck. Her whole body is shaking, like she’s got the trembles, then her shoulders start to heave like an earthquake’s about to happen. She goes silent and you can’t hear any sound coming out, just the trembling and heaving, then it comes out again, rushing up like a volcano, angry and unstoppable. Nancy starts to roar this time, making an angry sound we’ve never heard come out of her before, like a wild animal that’s been wounded and is dying and is going to have one last shot at getting to its tormentor.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ I shout out as I hug her tight. But her great arm flings back and catches me to the side of the neck and I’m sent flying, splat into the wall behind. Now she turns on Sarah again. ‘You little bitch! You randy little bitch! You filthy harlot!’ she screams and her hand comes up and with a fresh roar of anger she starts to rise, she’s going to hit Sarah, she’ll kill her, but before she’s properly out of her chair she seems to freeze in midair, then drops like a stone, crashing to the floor.

  ‘Christ, she’s had a heart attack,’ Tommy shouts out. He hasn’t done nothing until now, just sat there like a stunned mullet cleaning his nails. Him who started everything in the first place.

  Nancy is lying like a great hippo spread-eagled on the floor, not moving. Her yellow-daisy dress has pulled right up around her navel and the elastic of her pink crepe de chine bloomers is cutting into her tree-trunk thighs just above her knees and again across her enormous stomach. Tommy rushes over and jumps astride her and starts right off giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Suddenly Nancy opens one eye. ‘Get off a me, you great pillock!’ she yells out and her arm sweeps across and it’s Tommy’s turn to go flying under the table. Then she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand like she’s just ate something really nasty.

  It must have been her blood pressure. When she got up too suddenly from the chair, she must have momentarily blacked out. We all rush over, even Sarah, who pulls Nancy’s dress back down over her knees. Then we start to pull her to her feet, which ain’t easy, her lying flat like that on her back. Getting her into the Diamond T is a piece of cake compared to this effort.

  Tommy’s bleeding above the eyebrow where he’s caught it against the edge of the table leg and he doesn’t look too happy. Eventually we get Nancy back into her chair, she’s huffing and puffing, her huge breasts rising and falling like a blacksmith’s bellows. She’s red in the face and sweating like a pig. I think that now maybe she really is going to have a heart attack, because she’s gulping for air and wheezing something terrible. Mike has grabbed Friday’s Gazette and he’s fanning it furiously in front of her face and Bozo’s rushed into the kitchen to get her a drink of water and a Bex.

  Nobody notices as Sarah leaves the room. Later, when things have calmed down around Nancy a bit, we realise she’s gone. Sarah’s not to be found in the house and we go outside looking for her, then down Bell Street, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

  There’s a place I know near the lake she likes to go sometimes, so that’s where I head off on my own.

  I find her sitting looking out into the lake. ‘Sarah,’ I say, ‘that you?’ Of course I know it’s her, but I’m not sure I’m welcome.

  ‘Hello, Mole,’ she calls softly.

  ‘You all right?’ It’s another silly question.

  ‘Yeah.’ She gives a bitter little laugh, ‘Good as can be expected.’

  ‘You want to be alone?’

  ‘No, come sit with me.’

  I sit next to her and we don’t say anything, her and me looking out into the lake, which isn’t a real lake but opencut diggings made during the gold rushes with the local creek diverted into it later to make the lake. It’s a near full moon with just a bit of the side missing so it’s easy to see things. A couple of ducks glide past and go quack, quack. You can also see some of the lights from the houses up on the hill reflected in the water and there’s the sound of the wind through the bulrushes. The frogs are croaking away, going at it hell for leather in a frog chorus before suddenly stopping for no reason, then it’s on again for one and all. Frogs do that and nobody knows why. Maybe they’re singing a song, only we don’t know it because our ears think it’s all the same tune. But it isn’t and they’re taking a smoko before they start the next number.

  We’re sitting on almost the exact spot where Bozo caught the redfin that tasted of mud, when we swore we’d never eat fresh fish again and we haven’t. Maybe if Bozo had caught another fish that tasted like that last one, Sarah might have got away with her excuse because we all wanted to vomit after eating that first one.

  Sarah’s arm comes around my shoulders and she pulls me close in and ruffles my hair, ‘I’ve really
fucked up, haven’t I, Mole?’

  I can’t tell her, that’s the truth and then some. ‘They say he’s been signed up to play for Richmond, is it true?’ It’s all I can think to say.

  ‘They’ve made an approach, but he’s going to Duntroon.’

  ‘Duntroon, what’s that when it’s wearing baby booties?’ (Maloney expression.)

  ‘The Royal Military College in Canberra. Murray wants to be a cadet officer and then go into the permanent army.’

  ‘What?’ I can’t believe my ears. A chance to play for Richmond and he gives it up to be a soldier. I’m beginning to think Murray Templeton must be a bit of a dead-head.

  ‘His grandfather was a lieutenant general in the first world war, he wants to follow in his footsteps, it’s a family tradition.’ Sarah pauses a moment, then gives a bitter little laugh, ‘Like me following in Nancy’s footsteps, that seems to be our family tradition.’

  It doesn’t seem appropriate to mention that bushfires are our tradition as well. ‘Are you going to have a baby, Sarah?’ I’m full of dumb questions. Of course she is, but I can’t think of another way to put it.

  ‘Looks like it, unless I have a miscarriage.’

  ‘Miscarriage?’ It’s not a word I’ve heard before.

  ‘Lose it, something goes wrong and you lose your baby,’ Sarah explains. ‘But with the Maloney luck that’s not going to happen to me.’ She turns and looks at me, her mouth pulled down at one corner and sort of wobbling, like she’s trying not to cry again. ‘Forgot to take the spoon out of the sink, Mole.’

  I’m twelve years old that very day and I know she must mean she didn’t use a franger. Or Murray Templeton didn’t. Perhaps she meant that she shouldn’t have done it in the first place. Which we all know is true, but too late thinking about that now.

  I’d never seen a franger, but Bozo has. He said that this guy brought one to boxing, pinched it from the barber shop where they sell them. He was having his hair cut and Billy Tucker the barber went to answer the phone out the back and there was this drawer half open and he could see these red packets in it. He thought it was chewing gum and so he pinched one. Then he found out later it was a franger.

  Bozo said they all got fats on in the shower out back of the police station and took turns to try it on. ‘It’s that strong, but it fits real smooth and tight,’ he told me. Then later they filled it with water and he said it took more than a gallon of water and didn’t break. You could also blow it up like a balloon. Bozo said how he’d heard of these bank robbers in America using them. Only they call them frenchies over there, we do sometimes too. I tried to imagine Tommy with one pulled over his head, but I couldn’t. If it fits so tight, like Bozo said, how come they could breathe? So that bit about the bank robbers was probably bullshit. Bozo said, ‘Its real name is Ansell Contraceptive, because on the outside of the pack it said “Ansell Contraceptives – for your unconcerned pleasure”!’

  So, you see, I knew what a franger was all right. It was just that I couldn’t imagine Sarah doing ‘it’ with one. You know, like a parent would. Matter of fact, before tonight I couldn’t have imagined her doing it anyway. Now my commonsense told me that if she was going to use a franger, like she meant when she said she didn’t take the spoon out the sink, that would mean she was doing it all the time with Murray Templeton. I’m positive now that’s not true. What’s happened to give her a baby was a definite one-off mistake. Them two not using a franger when they did it is positive proof it only happened the once. Stands to reason, don’t it? Think about it. Bozo said this bloke at boxing said you had to be asked. The barber would say while he was cutting a grown-up’s hair, ‘Do you need any home supplies, sir?’ which is the secret code for a packet of frangers. Murray Templeton couldn’t just walk into Billy Tucker’s barber shop and say, ‘Hello, Mr Tucker, packet of frangers,’ right out in the open, him being a schoolboy and all. So it was a spur of the moment thing for sure. They probably didn’t even know that every time you don’t use a franger you get a baby.

  I also wondered a bit how you could lose a baby when it’s inside you. I’d heard of people losing one before. Nancy would say of some women she knew ‘She’s lost her baby, poor thing.’Until now I hadn’t really thought about it, other than that it was something women occasionally did, lost babies. What’s more, I also never thought it was something that was lucky when it happened, that is, until now with Sarah saying, with our Maloney luck, meaning bad luck, she wouldn’t lose hers.

  There was a long silence then between Sarah and me. Silence can build up and after a while the air around gets tighter so you think any moment it’s going to tear, rip apart, right above your head. Then goodness knows what would happen. That’s when you have to say something to stop it happening. ‘What are you going to do?’ I say to Sarah.

  Like all my questions to her tonight, it’s the wrong one again, because she drops her head and starts to sniff. But then she looks up over the lake and takes her hanky that’s already sopping wet from all her tears and nose-snuffling and blows her nose. ‘I don’t know, Mole,’ she says in a real small voice.

  We’re silent for a long time again and I’m throwing these pebbles in the lake, plop, plop, plop, when she says, ‘I could go to the nuns’ hospital in Melbourne and have it. You’re allowed to hold it the once and then they take it away for adoption.’ I can see she can’t yet call it a baby. What’s in her stomach is still an ‘it’.

  We’re both thinking the same thing, her with a big tummy and what people will say if Sarah stays in Yankalillee. ‘Them Maloneys, been here since Ned Kelly was a lad, but they’re still Bog Irish!’ Or they’ll say, ‘Not young Templeton’s fault, boys will be boys, she’s a real little cock-teaser that one. Makes out she’s so ladylike but you can bet she was planning to get her hooks into him all along.’

  We can’t send Sarah away neither, there’s nowhere to go, no relatives or anyone that we’ve kept up with. Who’d want one of Tommy’s kids anyway?

  ‘Will you marry him?’ I now say, because that’s the next question needs to be asked.

  Sarah turns and puts her arm around me again and pulls me into her and gives this little whimper, ‘Oh, Mole, I love him so much. They’re High Church of England and we’re Catholics and Murray’s going to Duntroon, his parents will never allow it!’

  I can see right off we Maloneys are up shit creek without a paddle. But I already knew that. And it was me who thought she only had a sore tummy this morning and I was the one who was having his whole life ruined! Me feeling sorry for myself when it’s really her who’s in the shit! Sarah’s now sobbing quietly, but it’s nice with my head against her chest.

  I must have fallen asleep because next thing I know she’s saying to me, ‘Wake up, Mole, it’s time to go home and face the music again. It’s been a long day for you, you’re on your last legs, mate.’ She gives me a kiss on the forehead, which normally I wouldn’t allow. ‘You poor old sausage, it hasn’t been much of a birthday, has it?’

  Well, matters go from bad to worse in our family. Monday morning, after we’ve done the garbage rounds,

  Tommy’s off to wait for the pub to open. Monday, come sixthirty, he staggers home and collapses at the front door and has to be dragged in and put to bed. He’s back on the grog in a big way. Tuesday morning at three I go to wake him, he gets up and comes out, but he’s still so pissed from the night before he’s about as useless as a one-legged man in an arsekicking contest. He’s falling over bins and tripping and calling out and swearing and we’re getting behind on the job cleaning up the mess he’s making. He’s got this half-jack of brandy and he’s taking swigs from it and falling on his arse. Funny how they never seem to break the bottle. Tommy is normally a McWilliams sweet-sherry man, which is bad enough, but now it’s Tolleys brandy and that’s a real bad sign. We try to put him in the Diamond T cabin with Nancy but he won’t have a bar of it and in her present mood she’s
not that keen to accommodate him neither.

  So we have to leave him by the side of the road to sober up, which is real bad for our image. We know what will happen, he’ll go wandering off, shouting and swearing and staggering all over the place until half the bloody town will have looked out their windows and seen him before breakfast.

  But then, as we’re trying to figure out what to do, he takes out his donger and starts to piss in someone’s empty garbage bin. His trousers fall down below his knees and he’s waving the half-jack above his head, trying to keep his balance. Then he commits a mortal sin and takes a kick at Bitzer Four and sends the little mutt flying and himself on his arse, with the piss-stream spraying every which way. ‘Right, that’s bloody it!’ Bozo shouts.

  ‘Mary, Mother of God!’ Mike says, spitting to one side in disgust.

  So we gag Tommy and tie his hands and ankles with a bit of rope and toss him on top of the garbage. In about two minutes he’s fast asleep.

  ‘Never seen him looking more at home,’ Mike grunts. Nancy doesn’t even look through the back window of the Diamond T while all this is going on.

  We know Tommy’s pattern of old. Once he starts on the grog he’s on a bender that could last a week or all the way to Christmas. One good thing though, no bush-whacking of a Saturday for old Mole. Fuck the Yellow Box and the bees making honey, fuck all the other eucalyptus trees as well, I’m a free man.

  Nancy’s not herself neither, instead of shouting out and calling directions she hardly speaks at all. Though, all is not lost, she still makes sure we get Oliver Twist shouting down at us from his bedroom window, but she doesn’t laugh or shout ‘Half-past three and all’s well,’as usual as we drive away.

  It’s three nights later when Nancy asks Sarah if she’s told Murray Templeton she’s pregnant. You’d think it would have been one of the first questions asked, which goes to show how bad things were, how we’ve lost all our commonsense.

  Sarah says she has.