by Peter Twohig
I knew the right answer. I said nothing.
‘Now your grandfather’s going to kill the bastard who did this to you, and he’ll probably go to prison for murder.’
This news made me feel two things at once. On the one hand I was pleased that Brother Ignatius was going to die. He would be unwelcome in Heaven and also in Hell, as the Devil would have his standards, and so would be doomed to spend eternity in Limbo with all the unbaptised babies and pagans. On the other hand I was unhappy about Granddad, who was a good person.
‘Maybe he’ll just send Barney down there to give him a little spanking.’
‘See, this is just the sort of thing I’ve been talking about, you coming out with all these violent ideas. No, he won’t send Barney, because he was hopping mad when he left — you don’t know what he can be like.’
Actually I had an idea, but I acted dumb.
‘Mum, did I have another … you know …?’
‘No, it’s all been a horrible dream, and now you’re awake and everything’s lovely. Of course you had a bloody fit!’
Short and to the point. I looked at my left hand and wrist: it was heavily bandaged and it looked like a scene from The Creeping Unknown, only white.
‘Am I in hospital — again?’
It was one of those questions that doesn’t need answering. I only asked it so that I could talk to Mum again.
‘Where else would you be?’
I made a mental note to ask for ice-cream for dinner.
That night, Granddad came to visit. He had brought some of my comics over for me, including a 100 Pages I hadn’t seen before and had that smell that only new 100 Pages can have — a cross between a vanilla slice and a pencil set. I gave it an eight. He also passed over a shoebox, after having a look around. It was full of an assortment of my favourite lollies: Fantales, Polly Waffles, and so on. I grabbed a packet of Fags, and Granddad shoved the box into my cupboard. He gave me a wink.
‘Gee, thanks, Granddad. I thought you’d be in jail by now. Did you, um, kill Brother Ignatius? Mum said you would.’
‘Nah, he was a gutless bastard. You won’t have to worry about him again.’
‘What’d ya do to him?’
‘I went to Daniel Mannix — I told you I knew him.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He promised me that by this time tomorrow that bloke’d be halfway to a De La Salle College in Port Moresby.’
‘Where the Japs killed the Yanks.’
He looked at me for a while. ‘Yeah.’
I felt I should explain.
‘Mum told me … about her American friend … and Mrs Kavanagh … in the war …’
I ran out of things to say that made sense. Mum had been slightly under the weather when she had told me about that. It still didn’t make sense.
‘Strewth, that takes me back,’ was all he said.
The next afternoon I woke from my nap to find my good hand being held. I thought it was Mum, so I pretended I was asleep so she wouldn’t stop. Finally, the hand holder leant over and kissed me on the lips. I tasted Juicy Fruit.
I opened my eyes to find that I was being kissed by Mona De Coney. She had tears in her eyes and was wearing a white blouse that looked a bit too small for her.
‘Hi, Mona.’
‘Don’t try to speak, sweetheart.’
‘It’s my wrist that’s hurt, not my mouth.’
‘That’s all right, then. That means you can kiss me.’
We kissed some more — it’s expected of you.
‘I bought you a comic at the shop downstairs. I told the man it was for a boy. When you’ve read it you can swap it with one of the other boys in the hospital.’
I half expected it to be called Holidays or something, but it was a Superman comic.
‘Gee, thanks. How’d you know I was here?’
‘Johnny’s friend told me. You’re famous.’ Her eyes were smouldering like Our Lady of Perpetual Succour gazing at the Baby Jesus.
‘I sprained my wrist. Wanna see?’
I waved a white flipper at her.
‘Ooh, it looks terribly painful. Can I sign it? Of course I can. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Will you be able to stand the pain? I expect so. I’ll be very careful. Have any other girls signed it? I hope not.’
She inspected the bandage, opened her school bag and pulled out an indelible pink pencil, a type that was popular with girls and very neat boys. She licked the end and signed simply her first name, and drew a heart with an arrow through it.
‘There.’
‘Thanks. But I don’t think it’s bandages you’re supposed to sign, just plaster. How did you get here?’
‘Tram. The hospital’s not far from school. But Aunty Lucky’s coming to get me. I rang her up.’
‘Gee, she’s a pretty good aunty.’
‘Mm. She said she wanted to ask you something. Want to pash again? I ’spect you do.’
When Aunty Lucky arrived she looked very pleased to see me, and immediately drew the curtains around me and sat down on the other side of my bed. Mona withdrew her hand from mine as soon as she saw her aunty coming, and adopted a serious, concerned face, the kind of face that the Beaver’s mum often puts on in Leave It to Beaver.
‘Mona,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go down to the shop and get our wounded soldier some lollies and a comic?’ She gave her a ten-bob note and a wink. Mona gave me a little smile, and went on her mission of mercy. I both liked and didn’t like this lolly and comic thing. I knew what a sweetener was, and I knew that it was the soft approach to something hard.
‘Mona told me about that stand-over merchant at the school. I didn’t realise who you were until today. So you’re Archie Taggerty’s grandson. Well, well.’
She smiled at me in a new way and squeezed my good hand.
‘I’d heard that Jean had boys — twins! — but I’m out of the country most of the time. I hope you and I will become good friends.’
‘Me too.’ I was thinking of the comics, though it was nice to have a family of Italians like me, as I knew they had terrific parties where the food was cool. The last Italian party I had been to was at Luigi Esposito’s place, just a few weeks back, for his birthday. It looked like half the Italians in Richmond were there, and by the time I left I’d learnt about twenty-seven new Italian words, including a new way to say ‘If you don’t like it you can lump it’ with just hand movements and no words, though Luigi’s Uncle Tony told me not to say it to any Italians unless I wanted to end up in a gutter with my throat cut, so I said: ‘Va bene.’ When I showed it to Granddad he told me not to do it in front of any Turks, Greeks, Maltese or Yugoslavs either (which only left the pommies). Lucky I checked, really.
‘I thought twins were supposed to be inseparable. Shouldn’t your brother be in the next bed?’
‘Nah, he died the year before last. His name was Tom.’
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, love. I had no idea.’ She started crying. I recognised that kind of crying: it was the kind you do when you’ve lost something too. She wasn’t just crying for me. Just as suddenly, she stopped, and dried her eyes. And smiled. She was dynamite!
I pulled myself together. I had a mission.
‘Do you know my mum?’ I said. I could play the fishing game too.
‘I’m sorry about that. What? Oh, no. My mum knows your granddad, that’s all. He’s an old friend. So, I was wondering if you’d been thinking about our little conversation about the Larsons — you remember? Of course you do.’
So that was where Mona got it from.
‘I don’t really know anything about them, except what you told me yourself. You said that they lived in Richmond a few years ago.’
‘I was wondering if you knew anything else about them.’
‘No, I just liked the name, so I decided to call my secret society the Larsons, but then I thought of a better name.’
‘Oh, what?’
The pressure was off. I could tell that she did
n’t give a bugger what I’d decided to call it.
‘The Olympians.’
I was right. But she kept looking at me, with the beginning of a beautiful smile on her face. Despite the smile, the whole thing was pretty uncomfortable, especially as Lucky was still holding my hand, and sitting very close to me, with her shirt open because of the weather, which was hotter than usual just then. Though she was being as nice as she could be, I’d never been asked so many serious questions by someone who wasn’t a nun or a museum attendant. My plan was to say nothing until I figured out what was going on or until she told me something herself. A superhero needs something at the end of the day, otherwise he looks like a bit of a dill. I was just wondering if she had a sweetheart, when she piped up again.
‘Well, there’s something else I’ve been wondering about. You’d probably know the Kavanagh boy, wouldn’t you? Didn’t he live near you?’
I was tempted to say: ‘What’s a Kavanagh boy when it’s home?’ but I wanted to see where this was going. I couldn’t believe that she would have the slightest interest in Flame Boy, as she was a lady with a sports car, and he was a kid who didn’t know his arsehole from his elbow — one of Dad’s.
‘Yeah, until his house burnt down, then he and his mum stayed with us for a little while.’ I was only repeating what was in the paper. And something told me she was up there with Madame Curie in the brains department.
‘And when the Kavanagh boy came to live at your place, did he have anything with him?’
So that was it — she was after the flamin’ thing too!
‘No, everything went up in smoke.’
‘You know’ — she looked around the ward as if she could hardly be bothered asking, really — one of Granddad’s tricks — ‘some boys were seen at the Kavanagh house after it burnt down, watching my friends … um, helping out.’
She looked at me with her pleasant smile. I began to wonder if she was a rozzer. Not even Mr S was so desperate for information about the briefcase as to ask me these questions, and I hadn’t even seen Mrs S’s chest — I didn’t want to think about that. Anyway, I reckoned the Sandersons knew a lot more about it than she did. I wanted to help her. I felt that in a way she and Mr S might have been after the briefcase for the same reason, without knowing it. But I didn’t want to discuss Mr S, because I was always on his side.
‘I went to the house to see how things were going. And there were blokes everywhere digging the place up. And a tip truck taking all the rubbish away.’
She thought about that for a moment, then gave my hand a friendly squeeze. Larry Kent would have passed out.
‘And who was the other boy?’
She didn’t realise that Gazza Turner wasn’t a boy.
‘Just a kid.’
There was no way I was going to dob Gazza in. So he’d nicked a toolbox from one of the cars; as far as I was concerned, it could stay nicked. Besides, she didn’t seem to know that little detail.
‘I hate to ask you these questions. It’s just that my family has reason to believe that the Kavanagh boy might have something that was taken from them years ago. If you could help me to find it, I’d reward you very generously. Do you understand?’
I understood all right.
‘Yes. But I don’t think I’ve seen the thing you’re talking about. I haven’t even seen … um … Keith since he ran away, and that was weeks ago. But I’ll keep an eye out.’
‘Now remember, I don’t want you to get your friend into trouble. It’s just the thing he’s got that I’m interested in.’
‘What is it?’ I asked in my talking-to-zookeepers voice.
‘I’ll tell you, but only if you keep it to yourself. That means you can’t tell anyone about this conversation. Not even your friends, the Sandersons. I’m not asking you to do anything dishonest, mind.’
‘Course not.’
‘Good. All right then, it’s some papers. When they were stolen they were being kept in a briefcase. Perhaps they still are. Ah, here comes my lovely niece with some goodies for you.’
26 The Great Fires of Richmond
When I returned to school I discovered that I was a hero, something like Jungle Jim, or even some kind of war hero who had been tortured by the Nazis for secrets about the French Resistance, but refused to tell where the attack on the railway was going to take place. That was the other kids in my class. The brothers hated me.
I soon discovered that I would be punished twice as much as anyone else for the same slip-ups, as a result of which I became an excellent performer in every area. They now avoided giving me the cuts on my good hand, in case I had chalky bones, like Leslie Bus, who always had something in plaster and was covered in leather straps, like a monster, and switched to whipping my legs with a cane, which was guaranteed to bring tears to my eyes. There’s no incentive like pain. I now had a new reason to find Flame Boy: I wanted to invite him over to my school one night for a bonfire. I didn’t care anymore.
I didn’t have to wait long for a message from the Kavanagh family, but it could just as well have been a message to the whole City of Melbourne. The lumberyard at South Richmond went up in flames. It was close to both Flame Boy’s and my old homes, and next door to the old tannery, from which Flame Boy had watched the Orange Tree Hotel burn down. The lumberyard had been brim-full with building materials fresh off the goods trains and awaiting redistribution to the outer suburbs. It was like a little wooden town. But the most exciting thing was that it was right next door to the Richmond tram depot, which my Uncle Clive told me was one of the biggest tram depots in Melbourne, and which was, at that time of night, full.
So the tram people went off their rockers and tried to move all the trams out of the yard and into Church Street, which ended up looking like a scene from a war picture. I remembered that Flame Boy had once set fire to one of these trams, and I thought of him at this very moment occupying some nearby high point, the better to observe his handiwork.
As for me, I had my own vantage point. The Sandersons, with whom I was staying that night, had one of the tallest houses on the east side of Church Street, and I was able to sit in a second-floor window and watch all the confusion and lights. The whole fire took hours, and in the end I had to go to bed, I was so knackered, but I stayed up long enough to see a few things I’d never seen before, and even experienced a slight tinge of admiration for my nemesis, Flame Boy, the Superhero Who Went Nuts.
That was the first night after school commenced that I was allowed to stay with the Sandersons, as Mum soon remembered what a pest I was and gave me the push. She preferred to be alone, like Greta Garbo. I guess that’s why girls never have Commando Clubs and secret societies. The next morning, over a latish breakfast, it being a Saturday, I saw that The Sun had the big fire on the front page. In fact, they had two big fires on the front page, one on top of the other.
Mr Sanderson straightened the paper and showed it to me. The headline said: Torch Strikes Twice. I tried to put on my Efrem Zimbalist Jr face, but nothing happened.
‘What do they mean “twice”?’
‘While the lumberyard was going up in flames, so was a shoe factory in Abbotsford.’
‘There must be a thousand shoe factories in Melbourne. Prob’ly one catches fire every second day.’ It was an argument on the side of fairness.
‘Kavanagh once worked there, before it was a shoe factory.’
You could have heard a pin drop. I think I did.
‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘Please, dear,’ said Mrs S. ‘You must tell us, if you know anything.’
‘But I don’t. Anyway, it says “Torch”, not “Torch and Son”. So Keith didn’t have anything to do with it.’ It was flimsy, and I knew that if they bunged me on the rack I’d take it back.
‘It goes on to mention the boy. It says they could have done this together.’
‘But Flame … Keith specialises in small things — trams and houses and things — not something this big.’
&nbs
p; ‘It could have been our house, dear. Do you understand? People could have died.’
‘I’ll find him.’
‘No, dear,’ said Mrs S. ‘You will not go looking for that boy. He needs to be found and cared for by people who know what they’re doing. You just get on with mending that arm. And staying out of trouble. I know you can.’
Which just goes to show how little they knew about the Spirit of Progress, probably the greatest spy since the Scarlet Pimpernel. Or maybe not, as Mrs S did have that funny sound in her voice, like punters have when they’re worried about something. I had learnt to spot it, because whenever we heard it Granddad would get that look like he had just discovered he had a mouth ulcer.
I knew Mrs S had the funny voice because Mr S was sitting right there, and she was married to him, and he was a kind of copper, so she could hardly say: ‘That’s the spirit, Spirit! Now get out there and get that bloody briefcase, and when you do find it give that Kavanagh kid a smack in the ear for us. Go on, off you go!’ But I knew that’s what she meant.
‘Okay.’
I knew a bit about firebugs already, of course, because of my Uncle Pat. But long before I knew he was a firebug, I remember that he was very keen to light the fire in the fireplace at Nanna Blayney’s place. He not only lit the fire, but gave a sort of talk about it, as if he was teaching us. He knew words like inflammable and combustion, words which I immediately committed to memory, not because I had a good idea what they meant, but because they sounded exciting. Years later I would hear the same words used by Flame Boy or someone who was talking about him. Uncle Pat was as silly as a two-bob watch, and was always lighting matches.
One night we were visiting Nanna and ran into him, and she gave Dad the nod, and Dad took the matches away from him and gave them to Nanna. Everyone kept on talking but I noticed that what they were saying was suddenly gibberish, as the matchbox thing was stealing the show, like Topsy the Elephant at Bullens Circus. In the end, Nanna told Uncle Pat to sleep in the old sleep-out, which upset Tom and me, as we were hoping to spend the night there. And now Uncle Pat has been put away somewhere.
The same thing had happened to Fergus Kavanagh, who, according to the local gossip, was just your ordinary bloke trying to get by, when Kapow!, he gets done for being a pyromaniac, or for murder — or treason, in one version of his life I’d heard. In fact, I’d never met a person about whom so many people had a ready-made opinion, unless it was the much-rubbished Blarney Barney, or perhaps Constable Murphy, who lived in our old neighbourhood down the hill, and was a bloody nuisance, especially where yours faithfully was concerned. Or perhaps Ned Kelly, though I had never met the man, and only knew that he’d had a few opinions about coppers he wasn’t afraid to say to their faces (never a good idea).