Four Fires (5 page)

The doctor finishes off with Bozo, who only does a couple of tiny.

winces when the stitches go in, and then the doctor and the nurse take their leave.

We've all been standing and now the sergeant says, 'Sit, boys, take the weight off your legs.' He indicates the ink-stained school desks stretched out in front of him. There's the usual scuffle as we go to sit down, Bozo and me to the one side and Brent Middleton and his mates to the other.

Some of the blokes have bites on the bum and you can hear them wincing, probably exaggerating, as they slide themselves into a desk.

Then there's silence. Nothing. Sergeant Donovan looks up at the ceiling, then out the window and slowly he fixes his eyes on all of us.

I'm gone, shit-scared and ready to confess to anything he wants. I look 29

his broken face gives nothing away, although his eyes

flicker briefly as he looks at me before he looks to the front.

'Hmm .' the policeman says. Then nothing again.

We all look down at the desk in front of us, not willing to meet his eye. The nothing continues.

Then suddenly, so we all get a start, 'Tell me, Mister Middleton, is
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Mister Maloney here a mate of yours?'

'No, no, sir,' Brent Middleton stammers, looking up, surprised at being so formally addressed.

Now Sergeant Donovan turns to the other blokes on Brent

Middleton's side of the classroom. 'And, you lot, are you friends of Mister Maloney?'

'No, sir,' they all mumble, not looking at the policeman.

'Why is that?'

'Dunno, sir,' they mumble.

'Is it because he's a Catholic?'

'No, sir,' they chorus anxiously.

'Just don't like each other, hey? Well, that happens sometimes. Just don't like the cut of a man sjlo.

The classroom remains quiet as a mouse.

'Mister Middleton, would you stand up please and come up here, you too, Mister Maloney.' Bozo gets up out of the desk and so does Brent Middleton. 'Up here on the platform, please.' They both step up onto the teacher's platform. 'Now stand back to back, if you'll oblige me please, gentlemen.' Bozo turns and he and Brent Middleton touch backs. The pocket of Bozo's khaki shirt has been torn and hangs in a flap, he's got blood down the front of it and two buttons missing as well, Sarah's not going to be too happy when we get home. Sergeant Donovan turns back at us. 'Right, now who would you say was the tallest and the heaviest, Mister Middleton or Mister Maloney?'

'Middleton, sir,' several of us mumble.

'By a good head, I'd say and by what.., say, one and a half stone in
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weight?'

Silence from us all.

'Eight inches and twenty pounds, that'd be about right, don't you gentlemen?' We don't say anything. Brent Middleton is the biggest bloke in the school and he knows it, that's what makes him the school bully and head of a gang, everyone's been shit-scared of him until Bozo today.

'Righto, you two can separate, but stay up here if you will, please.'

Bozo goes to stand with his back to the blackboard. Brent Middleton stays where he is but turns front on, looking down at us. 'Now, tell me, who threw the first punch?'

'He did, sir,' Brent Middteton says quickly, wanting to gain the advantage.

'Oh, I see, the little bloke attacked the big bloke, is that it?'

'Yes, sir, he king-hit me and knocked me down.'

He points to Brent Middleton's left eye, 'Looks like you've got a bit of a stinker coming on, Mister Middleton. Good punch, was it?'

'Dunno, sir. Suppose so, sir.'

'Dunno? You said a king-hit, didn't you? Hit you when you weren't looking, took you by surprise?'

'No, sir, yes, sir.'

'Just walked up and whacked you?'

'We was talking, sir.'

'Just talking, then he up and hit you?'

'Yes, sir.'

'And, Mister Middleton, what precisely were you talking about?

Was it something you may have said to Mister Maloney? You see, in my experience, little blokes don't go around hitting big blokes unless they're very stupid or drunk.' He turns to Bozo. 'Were you drunk, Mister Maloney?'

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The blokes all giggle, our laughter breaking a bit of the tension.

'No, sir,' Bozo says, trying not to grin through his split lip.

'Stupid then? You don't look stupid to me.'

Bozo blushes, but doesn't reply.

'Some of us got hit by him as well,' Brent Middleton now offers, side-stepping Sergeant Donovan's original question. There follows a mumble of approval from his side of the classroom.

Big Jack Donovan stops and thinks, then says, 'Us? Oh, I see! It wasn't just you and Mister Maloney fighting, Mister Middleton, the big bloke and the little bloke, there were others involved?'

'My friends, sir, they came to help me.'

'And what did they do to help you, Mister Middleton?'

Brent Middleton looks at Bozo, 'Tried to pull him away, sir. He'd gone off his scone, sir.'

'Little bloke hits big bloke, big bloke's friends, all bigger than little bloke, come to his rescue and get hit in turn by little bloke who has turned into an unstoppable, raging bull. Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, does it now?'

'Then the dogs come, sir,' Middleton bursts out, again not.

responding to the sergeant's question.

'Dogs? What dogs? Is that what happened to Mister Maloney? I see he has a split lip and stitches in his ear and it looks like he's had a

nose bleed, and, judging from his eyes, he's going to have a couple of stinkers.' He pauses, then adds, 'That nasty bruise above his knee, I could have sworn was a kick from a boot. Do you mean to say the dogs did all that to him?'

'No, sir, they were his dogs, he set them onto us,' Brent Middleton explains.

'Hmm... how did the dogs come? I mean, did Mister Maloney stop beating you all up and turn and, you know, whistle for them?'

'Dunno, sir, maybe, sir.'

'But no one heard him whistle or call out?'

'There was a lot of noise, sir. Whistle, I suppose.'

'With his lip split open and his nose bleeding and nine blokes trying to pull him away from you and all that noise and.., amidst all
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this confusion he had time to whistle for the dogs? By the way, where were these dogs? Were they standing around waiting for instructions, a whistle from their master, permission to attack?'

'I dunno, sir, they just come at us from nowhere.'

'Come now, Mister Middleton, nowhere? They must have come from somewhere?'

'The school gates I suppose, they's always there.'

'How far would you say the school gates were from where the fight took place?'

'Dunno, sir.'

'Would you say ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred yards?'

'About fifty yards, sir.'

Sergeant Donovan looks out of the window for a long time. He takes his feet off the table and pulls the chair up, so he's sitting with his elbows leaning on the teacher's desk, his hands cupped under his chin.

'Well, well, well, if they were Mister Maloney's dogs, I've seen them myself on numerous occasions and there isn't one of them that stands much taller than ten inches off the ground. As I recall, they're well trained to obedience and I've never had any complaints about them being vicious. So there must have been a good reason for them to come at you lot, wouldn't you say, Mister Middleton?'

There is a mumble of 'No, sir, no reason, sir' from their side of the classroom.

'Your point is well taken, Mister Middleton, some sort of signal must have passed. May I put it to you that any dog worth its salt will come to his master's rescue if they see him attacked? I put it to you, the signal wasn't a whistle from Mister Maloney, but simply the unprovoked and cowardly attack on him and his brother by you and your friends. That, I suggest, is what got the dogs going.'

'No, sir, he hit me first!' Brent Middleton protests again.

'Then I suggest there must have been some sort of provocation on your part, Mister Middleton? I asked you previously what you'd said to Mister Maloney and, on that occasion, you refrained from answering.

Perhaps this time you'll tell me what it is you said to Mister Maloney?'

'It was a joke, sir. We was only teasing him.'

'A joke? What sort of a joke? It must have been a very strange joke to make a little bloke like Mister Maloney go berserk and run amok?

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What was this joke?' His voice grows suddenly stern, 'Come on, boy, let me hear it and no more bullshit!'

'It was about his auntie, sir,' Brent Middleton's voice shakes, he is suddenly dead-scared.

Sergeant Donovan jerks up straight and bangs the desk with his fist. 'What about his auntie? What did you say about his auntie?'

Brent Middleton begins to sniff and now he's looking down at his shoes. 'About her escaping from the asylum without clothes and walking down King Street, sir. We was only muc -king about, sir, teasing him, sr.

'Why you little shit!' Sergeant Donovan yells out, kicking back his chair and drawing to his full height so that his huge body seems to fill the whole room and spill out the door.

Brent Middleton begins to shake and then to blubber and back away, 'I'm sorry, sir, I'm sorry, sir.' Some of the others also start to cry and there's a good deal of blubbering going on all around.

'Right, all of you except for the two Maloney boys are under arrest.

I'm arresting you for causing grievous bodily harm and for defamation!'

He reaches down for his cap and jams it on his head. 'Follow me!' He turns to Bozo, then me, 'You two may as well come along as witnesses, see that justice is done.'

Of course, we had no idea he was bluffing about arresting Middleton's mob and one of them, a boy named Bluey Taylor, wets his pants on the spot, piss running down his leg onto the floorboards.

Sergeant Donovan takes three giant strides to the door and we shuffle after him as he makes a right turn into the headmaster's office where all the parents are waiting.

It is a pretty crowded gathering but we all somehow fit in, the twelve of us, six parents, Mr Flint the headmaster, and the police sergeant. Most of the Middleton gang are now sniffing and getting themselves generally bet up, thinking they're going to be thrown into the clink with the key thrown away.

Sergeant Donovan looks around until he spots Hamish Middleton.

'Sir, your boy will now tell us all what happened to provoke this fight, which I must say was just a tad one-sided, with your bully-boy son and nine of his gutless mates against the two Maloney boys.' He turns to Brent Middleton, 'Step up, son, tell your father and the other parents here exactly what you said to Bozo Malone)'

Brent Middleton bawls and chokes and gulps and by the time he's
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finished telling the truth of what happened there's two snot runs under his nose, his eyes are all puffed up and red, and his shoulders are shaking like he's having some sort of a fit.

The decision is finally taken that each parent should punish his own child. Bozo and me, though, are let off scot-free, with Sergeant saying to one and all that we showed a lot of character and The headmaster didn't say anything, you know apologise for threatening to expel Bozo. Nancy called him right the first time, he'd rather stay thick as thieves with the right people in town than be seen apologising to a garbage collector.

Nancy now tucks us, one on either side, under her arms and we walk out the school gates where she's got the Diamond T parked right in front of the school. We have to push her into the driver's seat, which must have looked pretty damn funny, though those parents following us didn't laugh. It was a rare victory for the Maloney family against the forces of evil.

CHAPTER Two

Nothing more was said about the dogs and it was suggested that Vera Forbes keep the incident out of the Gazette. It probably wouldn't have stopped her talking her head off around town anyway and the verbal version would have turned Bozo and me into villains.

But the long and the short of it is that Sergeant Donovan comes to see Nancy and says that there's a prisoner doing a brick (ten years) on the hill who was a handy boxer in his day. He once fought for the Victorian professional welterweight crown but lost on a knockout in the first round. Still and all, that's pretty big time for Yankalillee. He explains that he's talked to the prison governor, Mr Sullivan, about starting something up for the town's kids, who've got nothing to do and always seem to end up getting into trouble with the po]ice. He's thinking of a boxing club under the auspices of the police and with the help of the prisoner, namely Bobby Devlin, who he hopes will be the coach. He'll call it the Police Boys Boxing Club and he wants Bozo and me to join, Mike also if he'd like to.

Nancy says it's up to us to decide but that she doesn't object in principle. She points out to Big Jack Donovan that we don't have much time and we could only attend training afternoons after school and no weekday evenings except Fridays because of the garbage collecting next morning. Saturday nights would also be okay because we could sleep in Sunday mornings. She's throwing what's left of our lives away
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willy-nilly but she puts the kybosh on Mike joining up, although she doesn't tell Sergeant Donovan it's because she needs him to help her with the layettes in the afternoons. Mike tells us he wouldn't have joined anyway and Sarah says that at least one of us has some brains.

Bozo loved it from the first go and couldn't get enough of boxing.

Though it turns out to be a big ask for me and, although I stick at it for a while, to tell you the truth I'm not that good and I'm that bloody exhausted after getting up at three in the morning, I can hardly stay awake waiting for my turn to spar. Sometimes I'd fall asleep leaning against the big red punching bag. The mornings at school are bad enough, let alone spending the afternoons learning to get my head knocked off.

Most mornings I'd snooze at the back of the class during the first period of the day and often enough take the strap coming to me from our teacher, Mr Brown. He was English and known to one and all as

'Crocodile Brown' because he had these big yellow teeth from smoking little black cigars and his eyes had these heavy lids so they'd never open properly and, when he smiled, you knew you were in deep shit.

'Peter Maloney, are you asleep again?' he'd shout from the front of the class.

I'd wake up with a start. 'No, sir, only thinking.'

'Thinking? Hmmm... that would make a nice change in a

Maloney,' Crocodile Brown says all sarcastic like. 'And what were you thinking about, laddie?'

'The lesson, sir?'

'The lesson? Well, well, then perhaps you'll be so kind as to enlighten us a little, eh? What was the last thing I said?'

'Missed that, sir, too deep in thought.'

Laughter from the class.

'Don't be cheeky, lad. We don't like crowns in our classroom, do we now?'

'No, sir, sorry, sir.'

'Sorry isn't good enough, Maloney. You're not paid to think, laddie, you're paid to listen!'

'I didn't know we were being paid, sir.'

More laughter.

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'Right, that's just about enough from you, Maloney! Up you come.' Whack, whack, whack, three of the best, the deadly strap whistling

through the air, the new welts on my bum freshening up the ones the bastard gave last time round.

A lot of the teachers in country schools were bloody sadists, and Mike and Bozo copped the same as me until they got to high school.

Anyway, Crocodile Brown had it in for us Maloneys. He was the choirmaster at the Anglican church and when Mike was ten he heard him singing at the school assembly and came to see Mum.

Nancy offered him a glass of milk stout, but he said no thanks.

Sarah made him a cup of tea and Mike brought a wicker chair out to the back verandah.

'Mrs Maloney,' Crocodile Brown leaned forward in the rickety old chair and looked serious, 'I'm here to tell you, your son Michael is a boy soprano with perfect pitch.' He leaned back again, pleased with himself, glancing at Mike and then smiling his yellow smile at Nancy,

'I say, you really ought to be proud with such a lark in your midst.'

'Thank you,' Nancy said, not giving too much away, but then she added, 'I'm surprised he has any voice at all with all the carbon monoxide he swallows of a morning.' Crocodile Brown misses her reference entirely and takes a sip from his cup to cover his confusion.

Though we never tell her anything about what happens in school, something about him must have leaked out somewhere, because Mike says he could see Nancy wasn't that keen on him and wasn't going to give Crocodile Brown too much rope.

Crocodile Brown brings his cup down to the saucer balanced on his lap, 'Well, we'd like to have him in the Anglican church choir, train his voice properly, eh?'

Nancy took her time, which was always a bit of a warning. She put her head to one side and looked at Crocodile Brown and slowly put down the layette she was working on, her eyes never once leaving the schoolmaster. 'And what do you think Father Crosby would say to that notion, Mr Brown?'

'Well, er... I must say... I hadn't really given that much thought,'

Crocodile Brown stammered. It wasn't at all the reaction he'd expected.

'Your boy isn't at St Stephen's so... er, naturally, I assumed...' His voice trailed off then came on again. 'But... but the Roman Catholics haven't got a boys' choir, Mrs Maloney.'

'Ah, yes, but they have got my boy's immortal soul in their safekeeping and we'll not be giving that to the Church of England,' she
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paused then added, 'And, by the way, Mr Brown, we're Catholics not Roman Catholics.' Nancy hated to be called a Roman Catholic. In fact, Mike's soul was out of Catholic circulation as Nancy had declared us all collapsed Catholics, or that's what we thought she said and we only found out years later that she'd meant 'lapsed Catholics'.

Nancy's refusal to hand over his immortal soul to the Anglicans, Mike reckoned, started it all with Crocodile Brown and us. He said to take the hidings like a man, no use telling the sadist bastard that we'd been up since three in the morning, shovelling the shit out of his garbage can. He knew anyway and he'd done the exact same to him and Bozo. Instead, Mike said we'd have Bozo's Bitzers catch a couple of live rats on the tip and leave them in his garbage bin. Maloney payback.

'He'll know it's us and he'll report me to Mr Flint,' I say fearfully.

'No way!' Mike says. 'We'll leave the lid off so he can't positively prove the rats didn't get in on their own.'

'Rats'll jump out a bin,' Bozo points out.

'Not if we grease the bottom and inside,' Mike replies.

We did just that, left Crocodile Brown a couple of live-rat letters of warning not to mess with a Maloney. The next time we emptied his bin it had eight holes in the bottom where he'd blasted the rodents with a

.22 rifle.

One of the kids who lived in his street said Mrs Crocodile Brown had gone out on the footpath to fetch the garbage bin and nearly dropped dead on the spot from a heart attack. She was last seen running screaming back into the house, pulling at her hair. Crocodile Brown must've buried the dead rats to stop them smelling because only the eight holes were there when we tipped his bin up next time around. But he must have got the message. While the thrashings didn't stop completely, they didn't happen as often and not for about a month afterwards, which gave my bum a bit of a rest.

I can safely say we were bloody weary most of the time, but it wasn't true about us being stupid. Sarah was dux of the school and had to refuse being made head prefect. That's because of what she had to do at home. She washed and ironed and cooked and cleaned and

looked after Colleen, which left her no time to do the school job properly, because the head prefect had to have meetings and do other extra-curricular duties after school. It was her own decision to turn it down.

They made her vice-prefect anyway because she was better and
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more popular than Murray Templeton, whose father was the Holden dealer in town and so was only made head prefect by Sarah-default.

I admit Bozo's reports weren't always up to scratch but that didn't mean he was stupid. Nobody could call Bozo stupid, he just wasn't that interested in school work. Even as a thirteen-year-old he wasn't big, but he was wiry and bloody strong and could lift two garbage bins at once into the back of the truck if we were running late of a morning.

He was also a self-taught mechanic and kept the Diamond T going after it should have long since conked out. He could fix anything mechanical and when the family was on the bones of our arses, Bozo could always be relied on to sell something he'd repaired.

We'd collect stuff people had thrown away, bits of bicycles, old hand-pushed lawnmowers, hot-water jugs, electric kettles, hedge clippers with the blades rusted, kids' scooters, prams with wheels missing, old deck chairs, primus stoves, hurricane lamps, Vacola Bottling Systems, anything that could be re-wired or scraped back, cleaned, repaired or painted. Bozo would do the fixing and I'd do the scraping and painting and we'd go halves when we sold it. Sometimes I'd have money jingling in my pocket, enough to toss my jam sandwiches in the bin and buy a Herbert Adams pie one day and a Four

'n' Twenty the next for school lunch for a whole week. I never could decide which tasted the best. Or I'd pay for the family to go to the pictures, though we generally ended up giving our profits to Nancy when a cash crisis hit, which was just about all the time.

Bozo even built two complete bicycles from scratch from parts collected over three years. All we needed was tyres, tubes and valves and half a dozen new spokes. Miraculously Tommy came good with one of his very rare wins with the local SP bookmaker and gave us the money. It was magic. Me and Bozo had our own bikes. But then shortly-after, Tommy went up the hill again and the SP bookie came around to see Nancy. It turned out that the money Tommy had given us wasn't won on the horses after all, that he owed the SP ten quid, and where was it?

I suppose we could have argued that we weren't responsible for Tommy's gambling debts and the bookmaker would just have to wait until he came out of gaol. But that wasn't Nancy's way.

'When you do that, all you do is accumulate shame. Soon enough you're drowning in it and people don't trust your word any more. Better to do without, pay our way and keep our noses clean.'

'Yeah, yeah,' Mike would say afterwards, mimicking Nancy, 'it's not your father's fault, it's something that happened to him in the war.'

So after only three weeks of the luxury of riding to school and parking our bikes with the other kids in the shelter behind the boys' toilet, they were sold for eight pounds and Nancy found the other two quid somewhere and we paid the SP bookie in full.

The thing I couldn't understand was, except for the bike tyres that cost three quid, we never seemed to benefit from Tommy's life as a burglar. The Shamrock did, the SP bookie certainly did, but our family fortunes remained permanently at low tide. I mean, he couldn't have got nabbed every time he did a heist, could he? There must have been times when he'd fenced stuff and was suddenly flush with dough and we should've benefited, but I don't remember it ever
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happening in my time.

Mike and me never once failed a class and Mike always came top in art and music while I generally came in the top half, sometimes even close to the top of the class, and in biology and science I was never beat.

Considering we were half asleep all the time, it wasn't too bad really. Mike didn't play much sport, only when it was compulsory, but Bozo and me were good at footy and cricket and Sarah was captain of the girls' hockey and basketball teams and played for the state in the Australian Inter-Schools Hockey Tournament.

As we grew a bit older, our sporting endeavours saved us a lot of abuse. Nobody would pick on Bozo who was already the state amateur

champion in his weight division and was going to represent Country Victoria in the National Police Boys Club Championships in Sydney later in the year. Big Jack said that his coach, Bobby

'Rock Fist' Devlin, the ex-Victorian welterweight contender, thought Bozo was a certainty for a gold medal. That he might even make it to the Olympic Games next year. But Nancy said not to count your chickens. It was kind of strange with Bozo being, like, Big Jack Donovan's favourite boy boxer and him being the son of a crim who, more often than not, was arrested by Sergeant Donovan and charged and placed under remand. But then life is strange, I suppose.

I'd better line us Maloneys up, because if you work it out, given his years as a prisoner of war in Borneo, Tommy Maloney couldn't be the daddy of all of us. Sarah was the eldest and was seventeen in 1955, born a year before the war was declared. Tommy, wanting to get away from the farm, decided to join the permanent army and was doing his training at Broadmeadows in Melbourne. She was shotgun number one, the result of a weekend leave pass. Nancy, who was doing her nurse's training at the time, said Sarah was definitely Tommy's daughter, because he was her first and it happened after the Women's Auxiliary Dance when Tommy offered to walk her back to Mrs Frost's boarding house. She laughs when she tells how they never got any further than the concealment of the bushes beside Lake Sambell.

Nancy's dad reckoned that with a bun in the oven growing bigger by the day her nursing career was over anyway, so he took Nancy back to their dairy farm at Allan's Flat to hide the family shame and to keep a sharper eye on his daughter in future. As it turned out, he proved to be a pretty lousy watchdog.