Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘When I say “break”, you break clean. Defend yourself at all times. Obey my commands. All right?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Bozo says, but Johnny Thomas doesn’t even bother to nod, he knows the instructions are for his opponent.

  Mr Flanagan takes a stopwatch from his pocket. ‘Box!’ he calls out.

  Both boxers come out of their corners fast and get stuck in right off. Bozo’s a body man and he likes to fight close when he can, going for the hook and the left and right uppercut under the heart. Thomas may be the same, but he wants to make quick work of this round when there’s no interference from the coach and he’s going straight for his opponent’s head. Seems silly, Bozo’s got a protective headguard on, Thomas must reckon Bozo’s jaw is a sufficiently big target.

  Both boxers are fast and good defenders. Bozo gets in a good body blow and then tries to move backwards out of range. Thomas lets him have it with a long straight right, a beautiful punch, and Bozo finds himself sitting on the deck. He’s up in a flash, almost bouncing off the deck back on to his feet, but he’s fooled nobody, it was a terrific punch.

  ‘Stop!’ Flanagan shouts. He asks Bozo how he feels, if he’s had enough. ‘No way,’ Bozo grins.

  Flanagan wipes his gloves on the front of his shirt and says, ‘Box on.’

  Thomas has got this sort of half-grin on his face and now he’s showboating, his hands hanging loose, his shoulders moving up and down. He’s doing a little dance and then he baulks at Bozo, taunting him. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s got the wrong fighter, Bozo’s not going to worry about anything like that. Bozo continues all business in the ring and he steps forward and catches Thomas with a loop ing left to the side of the head. Thomas knows he’s been hit and he brings his gloves up high. Bozo tries to come in again and Thomas catches him with a good solid right that knocks his head back. The boxers watching wince. Bozo covers up and then steps to the left and Thomas catches him with another right that sends Bozo into the ropes.

  The Melbourne boxer is getting on top. He comes in with an uppercut that misses and Bozo goes down below with two lefts followed by two rights, each side of the ribs, hard telling shots that come in lightning fast and Thomas doesn’t like it one bit. Bozo pushes Thomas away and gets off the ropes. They move to the centre of the ring and Bozo keeps Thomas away with three left jabs. Thomas is still going for the head. He comes in with a big right hand over the top and whacks Bozo square on the forehead, sending him flying backwards. Thomas is onto him fast and comes in with a looping left which Bozo takes on the point of his shoulder. Then Bozo lets rip with a right uppercut that seats just under the rib cage of the other boxer. It doesn’t look much but it’s a tremendous punch and Thomas goes into a clinch. Flanagan separates them.

  I think the Melbourne boy still thinks Bozo got lucky, because he comes straight back and they slug it out in the centre of the ring until Bozo steps away. Thomas is getting the better of his opponent, throwing more punches, though Bozo is the harder puncher and is doing a lot of damage down below yet there’s no telling what effect the frequent body blows are having on Johnny Thomas.

  I’m suddenly caught up in the fight, I’m no longer scared for Bozo, who’s giving almost as much as he’s getting. Thomas is starting to use his feet and he’s clearly a very skilful boxer, making Bozo miss badly on a couple of occasions. But Bozo’s fast enough to get himself out of trouble and takes a couple of glancing blows that probably would have scored but didn’t do any real damage.

  Thomas is slowly beginning to realise he’s got a fight on his hands and the other boxers watching around the ring are grinning. I don’t think Johnny Thomas is the most popular bloke in the gym. Bozo’s not backing off and throwing some good hard punches that hit their mark, most of them rips and uppercuts to the body. There’s an old saying in boxing, which Big Jack Donovan never tires of quoting, ‘Land ’em to the body and sooner or later the head will follow.’

  Thomas seems to sense that it isn’t a boxing exhibition any longer, that he’s got to step up a notch and he throws a left–right combination that’s copybook perfect and Bozo stumbles backwards into the ropes, hanging on. The older boxer is onto him in a flash, going for the head. But he doesn’t realise how strong the young boxer is. Thomas smashes a left and then a looping right into Bozo’s headguard. Bozo brings his gloves up and Thomas gets a good punch into Bozo’s ribs. Bozo, if he’s hurt, doesn’t show it and manages to push Thomas away and move off the ropes, moving laterally so that Thomas has to half-turn. Bozo’s got his feet set square and Thomas swings with a big right hand that goes over Bozo’s head and throws him slightly off balance, his left glove too high, exposing his gut and ribs. Using the full weight of his shoulders, body and legs, Bozo plants a tremendous left hook into Thomas’s solar plexus. All of us feel it. Thomas doubles up, drops to the deck and rolls over onto his back, clutching his stomach with both gloves, his legs in the air.

  There’s clapping and cheering from the side of the ring. Thomas makes no attempt to get up and Mr Flanagan goes over to him. He’s down easily for a ten count before he gets up slowly, first onto his knees then still half-stooping, his hands now cupped over his knackers. He spits out his mouthpiece. ‘Foul blow!’ he gasps, ‘Bastard hit me in the balls!’

  There’s a howl of laughter from the boxers watching. They’ve all seen Bozo’s punch, an absolute classic left hook well and truly above the waistline, high and hooking upwards under the rib cage, leaving Johnny Thomas with not enough puff to blow a harmonica.

  ‘That’ll do, boys,’ Mr Flanagan says. ‘First round’s over, anyway.’ His face shows nothing of what he might be feeling. He’s seen Bozo twice and twice he’s knocked out his opponent. An amateur featherweight can go his whole career without a knock-out. ‘Go take a shower, Johnny,’ he instructs.

  ‘I’d like to go on with it, the bastard hit me low!’

  ‘Forget it, son, you fought him real dumb! You can do a whole lot better, but that was the best left hook to the solar plexus I’ve ever seen. If it had been a real bout, you’d have been counted out twice over. That’s enough for today, take a shower, we’ll talk later.’

  Flanagan undoes the lace on Thomas’s right glove and pulls it off, leaving him to do the left himself. Thomas is angry and starts to climb through the ropes.

  ‘Where’s your manners, lad? Bozo’s our guest, now do the right thing, touch gloves!’ It’s the only sign Flanagan’s given that he’s ropeable.

  Thomas glares at him, but climbs back into the ring. Bozo goes straight over to Thomas. ‘Thanks, Johnny, it was real good of you to let me spar.’ He smiles at the other boxer. ‘You’re right, Bozo is a bit of a dumb name.’ He holds out his gloves to touch Thomas’s. ‘But then we’re Irish, what can you expect?’

  ‘Get fucked!’ Thomas spits, climbing out of the ring without touching Bozo’s glove. The other boxers shake their heads. Amateur boxers are supposed to be good sports. What happens in the ring stays in the ring. They don’t like what’s just occurred, it’s their gym and Thomas is shaming them. One of the bigger fighters, a cruiserweight I’d say from looking at him, shouts out, ‘That’s piss-poor, Thomas, do the decent thing. Shake the man’s hand, he whupped you good!’ Johnny Thomas doesn’t look around but keeps on walking towards the change rooms. If Bozo ever gets to fight him in a real contest, there’s gunna be no love lost, I can tell ya.

  ‘Righto, Bozo, there’s a couple of things you’re doing wrong,’ Kevin Flanagan now says. ‘If your opponent hadn’t been so aggro going in, he’d probably have put you down more than the once. You’re stepping directly backwards when you’re coming out of a clinch or fighting close and decide to break off, that’s as good as helping the other boxer to line up a big punch. He’ll cop you, mostly with a right, even a left and a right if he’s got the hand speed and the bloke you’ve just been sparring with could have done so easily enough if he’d been concentrating. It’s the easie
st way to get yourself knocked out. Move to the sides of your opponent, don’t let him get set. Move left or right, keep him off balance. Lateral movement keeps him looking for you, trying to guess where you’re going next.

  ‘Also, you’re standing too square, you’re giving the other boxer the maximum target, your whole body is exposed. Come in with your left shoulder, fight him with the minimum body exposure, make yourself small, a hard-to-hit target, the less he can see, the less he can hit. You’re a good boxer, Bozo, but you tend to want to fight, to slug it out. Box smart and the hard hits will come later when your opponent is tired and starts to get sloppy.’

  Funny how he never once uses Johnny Thomas’s name when he’s explaining things to Bozo. Flanagan goes on like this with a whole heap of things. I can’t believe Bozo’s done so many things wrong and still put Thomas on the deck. But when Mr Flanagan puts him in the ring against Eddie Blake, who’s a pretty fair boxer it turns out, it becomes apparent Bozo’s caught on fast. Kevin Flanagan stops them several times and demonstrates what he wants. He works with Bozo for half an hour, during which time Thomas has come out of the dressing room in his street clobber and walked straight out of the gym without saying anything to Mr Flanagan or any of the others. He’s still pretty aggro and I think maybe he feels humiliated. It’s him who’s the Olympic prospect and you can’t blame him for feeling the way he does, Bozo’s just a kid from the bush.

  When it’s all over, Eddie Blake thanks Bozo and pats him on the back, ‘Sorry I said what I done, I should’ve known better. Bloke don’t ask to fight Thomas unless he knows a thing or two.’ He smiles his gap-toothed smile, ‘Shit, that was a good punch took him out!’

  Kevin Flanagan doesn’t say well done to Bozo or anything like that but in the dressing room, some of the other boxers who are showering tell him he’s done good. ‘You in the Olympic trials?’ one of them asks.

  ‘Nah, I’m only fourteen,’ Bozo tells him.

  ‘Fourteen? Shit, hey? You don’t look fourteen. You doing weights?’

  ‘Garbage bins,’ Bozo says, not explaining further. We go over to Mr Flanagan when Bozo’s showered and changed and thank him. Bozo’s got a black eye starting but is none the worse otherwise. Nancy’s going to go crook on him though.

  ‘Nice shiner comin’, Bozo, souvenir to take home to Big Jack, eh. I’ll give him a call, maybe we need to make a few arrangements to see a bit more of you, son. Four years don’t take that long to come around.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr Flanagan,’ Bozo says, ‘I’ve learned heaps.’ Flanagan smiles, ‘There’s a lot more to learn before you can call yourself a champion, Bozo. Maybe we can learn together. Australia’s only ever won one Olympic boxing medal, Snowy Baker 1908.’

  I’m dead-chuffed and real proud of my brother. Coming home in the tram I tell him so. ‘Mate, you done good. See, you did have the speed to hit him.’

  Bozo nods. ‘Yeah, I was happy about that. Though when he put me on my arse, I didn’t see the punch coming.’

  ‘Wait until Kevin Flanagan phones Big Jack Donovan, maybe he’ll tell the Gazette.’

  ‘Christ, no! I’m not supposed to fight out of my age group, even spar with a seventeen-year-old. Boxing Union could suspend me.’ He turns to me, ‘Don’t tell no one, Mole, you hear? Not even Mike.’

  ‘What about Nancy? She’s going to see your shiner.’

  ‘I’ll tell her it was an accident, you and I walking along looking at everything and I ran into a lamppost not looking.’

  ‘Ha! She’s not that stupid.’

  ‘It’ll have to do. You know how she feels about me fighting Thomas, she’ll go spare.’

  When we get home, Nancy’s got a crisis. Her sewing machine doesn’t work and there’s a whole heap of stuff has to be done for Sophie who is doing piecework for a frock factory and has to have it done by Monday morning. She doesn’t even notice Bozo’s closed eye and asks him to take a look at the Singer. Bozo says he’ll do it right after he’s fed the dogs. Nancy has a lot of confidence in Bozo’s ability to fix things so she hasn’t panicked or anything. She’s holding her granddaughter and cooing and bib-bib-bibbling and she doesn’t even look up when we come in. Bozo makes himself scarce by going out to the Diamond T and getting the bag of bones and offcuts he’s brought for the dogs.

  The Bitzers have been in the backyard all afternoon and when Bozo goes over to feed them they go ape. ‘It’s the smells,’ Bozo says, ‘They don’t know the local smells and they thought they’d been deserted. Dogs depend on smells almost as much as their eyes to know where they are.’ Now they jump up and climb all over him, licking his face, yelping their heads off, telling him they love him, more interested in him than they are in the tucker he’s putting out.

  Mike, of course, sees the eye right off and so does Sarah and we know immediately there’s no point in fibbing, the game’s over, Sarah’s as good as Nancy at not being conned by us kids. ‘You tell them, Mole,’ Bozo says, sighing.

  So I tell them the story and Sarah says we ought to be ashamed, but you can see she doesn’t mean it and Mike says we know he thinks boxing’s bloody stupid, but he’s glad Bozo stuck it to Thomas, who sounds a right bastard. Both of them laugh when I tell them how, after Johnny Thomas had a go at us about our names, Bozo asked how come he’d been named after a prick.

  We agree that when Nancy asks, we ought to stick to the lamppost story, feeble as it is. ‘It’s an AC/GC,’ Sarah decides.

  Whenever there’s general agreement over a matter between us kids, it cancels out the sin of telling a lie and it becomes an AC/GC. Sarah once told us that sometimes parents shouldn’t know everything us kids know and, if it doesn’t harm Nancy, then it’s not a real lie. It’s what she calls ‘A Conspiracy for the Good of all Concerned’, or AC/GC.

  Mrs Rika Ray also sees the eye and soon she’s back with a poultice made of leaves that look like cooked spinach. Who knows what it is, her remedies are endless. She’s been for a walk and on the way she’s picked weeds and stuff growing out of the pavements. She’s walked all the way to the Fitzroy Gardens in East Melbourne and struck up a conversation with one of the gardeners, who has taken her to the nursery, and she’s come back with an armful of herbs and cuttings. She makes Bozo lie flat on his back on the porch as she puts the poultice on his eye. Bozo’s not too happy, it’s drawing attention to him and he doesn’t like that. It’s okay in the ring, but outside he doesn’t like a fuss being made. After about five minutes, Mrs Rika Ray takes off the poultice.

  ‘We are doing same every hour, three times only, tomorrow you waking up, eye a bit red, but open and not black. Always after the fisty-cuffs you are promising to come, black eyes we are not having, cuts we are not having, bruises we are not having, one hundred per cent Indian guarantee and no arguments, full stop.’ She can be pretty formidable when she carries on like that.

  Little did we know at the time that Mrs Rika Ray was going to become Bozo’s Number One fight fan, never missing a fight, sitting in the front row with a plastic bag of wet herbs on her lap and, whenever possible, with Bitzers One to Five at her feet watching the fight with her. In time, she and they would become almost as famous as Bozo himself.

  Everything’s been going perfect but we should have known it couldn’t last. Now things start going wrong. The first thing is that Bozo can’t fix Nancy’s sewing machine. When we had to stop because of the cows crossing the road on our way down and the Singer broke loose and banged into the opposite side of the Diamond T, the wheel that holds the belt which drives the treadle must have hit the metal side of the truck and is bent. Bozo tries to straighten it, but he hasn’t got the right gear and only makes it worse. There’s no getting it fixed until Monday.

  But that’s not all. Given all the excitement of the birth and Sophie cooking all the delicious tucker for dinner and then again for tea that night, she’s way behind with her piecework for the factory in Flinders Lane and, what’s
more, the shuttle in her sewing machine is playing up as well. It’s a hand machine and very old but Bozo gets it going again, but then an hour later it breaks down proper. It’s now four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon and there’s four people can use a sewing machine and both machines are history.

  Even though Sophie and Mrs Rika Ray had been up all Friday night with the birth of the baby and cooking and caring for everyone the next day, it would have been easy to complete the piecework. The idea was that Nancy and Mike would work all afternoon and late into the night to allow the two other machinists to have eight hours’ sleep and then take over. By Sunday morning they would have finished the lot.

  Sophie has got this job with Mr Stanislaw Zelinski, who came originally from Klobuck which is in the west of Poland. She reckons she is dead lucky to get the job. Mr Stan, which is what her boss is called by everyone in the frock factory, wants his workers on the premises and except for very skilled hand-finishing, won’t have a bar of pieceworkers. What you can’t see, you can’t guarantee is his motto. Sophie, on the other hand, needs piecework if she is to stay at home and look after Sarah’s baby.

  Being Polish, the same as him, doesn’t help Sophie neither. Flinders Lane is full of Polish immigrants who are willing to put up with the primitive conditions and come into the factories to work. What gets her the job in the end, is when she mentions her cousin, Halina Jankowski, who also came from Klobuck and it turns out Mr Stan and her were childhood sweethearts.

  Halina, of course, has long since travelled the way of the six million – ghetto–cattle-train–Belsen oblivion. Mr Stan is a concentration-camp survivor the same as Sophie, but so are a lot of the people who work for him, so that was no help whatsoever. For the sake of old-time sentiment and of pastsweetheart tragedy, Mr Stan makes an exception in Sophie’s case and allows her to work from home. But first he tells her the rules of the establishment, which she must observe to the letter. Any cabbage must be returned to him with the completed garment. Cabbage is any material over six inches in width that may be left over when a garment is finally sewn up. In time you learn that all of Mr Stan’s rules are made into slogans. If you know the slogans, you know exactly what to expect. The Australians who work for Mr Stan have this rhyme they say behind his back: