Four Fires (2 page)

In the town proper Philip Templeton (note one T in Philip), the Holden dealer, then either Tim McRobertson or James Hayley from McRobertson-Hayley Solicitors and Conveyancing, and Hamish Middleton, the town's jeweller, 'where everyone buys their wedding gifts', were also members of the council. The town chemist, Bluey Porter, was once a member and although he was a Protestant and even sometimes played organ in church, he was an inebriate, because only Catholics were drunks, so the rest of the council eventually put the kybosh on him being a member.

The owner of the local rag didn't make it either. The Owens & Murray Gazette was owned by Toby Forbes who, Nancy said, was rough as guts. 'After him, Tommy's almost a gentleman,' she'd say, while scoffing at something he'd written in the Gazette. There must have been something that went on between the two of them once, because

there were lots that were worse than Toby Forbes in town and he didn't seem such a bad bloke. Sometimes, when he had a special edition coming out, he'd pass by the house and see if we wanted to do a paper run with the garbage in the morning, and he always paid cash on the knocker.

Vera Forbes, Toby's wife, had social pretensions and wrote a
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weekly column in her husband's paper called 'Yacking On', which was a feeble enough play on the town's name. She also acted as a reporter and was able and willing to dish the dirt on everyone who wasn't on the Anglican Women's Guild. She was often referred to by those of us at the bottom end of town as 'Big Mouth Saggy Tits'. She'd wear these dresses in the summer without a brassiere and you could see her tits through the material, they hung nearly to her waist without sticking out much either. Mike called them razor strops.

Then there was Stipendiary Magistrate Oliver Withers, known to one and all as 'Oliver Twist'. This nickname came about because a magistrate can only impose sentences for petty theft, which is a maximum of two years. Oliver Withers, who hated this restriction on his power, would as often as not ask for a 'second helping', in other words, additional time for the prisoner, by referring a case to the district court judge.

Naturally, he was our family's mortal enemy and was also a lay preacher in the Congregational Church and, although high up in the law, was nevertheless a government worker. Nancy calls him a jumped up clerk. Because of his government job and his holy-roller religion, he'd never have made the shire council in a month of fire-and

brimstone Sundays.

But, to be totally fair, our side held a couple of much-needed aces as well. The sergeant of police, Big Jack Donovan, and the governor of the prison, Mr John Sullivan, both belonged to the Catholics. The shire council would rather have disbanded than have those two come on board. Nevertheless, they were men with power hard-earned and they knew their way around town and who was up whom.

In our particular family's case we had more to contend with than simple religious prejudice. Tommy spent as much time inside the prison on the hill as on the outside. More probably. We also had twin aunties, Dot and Gwen, both in the loony bin a little further up the incline, referred to as 'up top'. All of which didn't help the Maloney public image a whole heap.

Auntie Gwen, thin as a cinnamon stick, once escaped in the nuddy and went wandering off into the town proper, walking down the main drag, King Street, rosary beads in hand, shouting out her Hail Mary. 'Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of the) womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Someone got a hold of Mum, who went to fetch my auntie in the Diamond T and delivered her back to the asylum. Nobody ever forgot that - Mum bringing her mad sister back in a garbage truck. The town
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tongues were wagging overtime for weeks.

Then of course there was politics, Protestants voted Country Party and Catholics were being asked by Father Crosby to vote for the brand new DLP (the Democratic Labor Party). He said it was our duty and an order from the Bishop. There were a few fanatics who voted Labor.

They passed out leaflets at elections, smoked pipes and never answered a question first off, pretending to think while sucking on

their pipe stems. They held poorly attended meetings in local pubs, and said anyone in the Country Party was as stupid as Brown's cows.

Then there was the final Maloney putdown. To make things worse for our family, we were the town garbage collectors. 'Maloney & Sons Garbage' was what Tommy had painted on the side of the Diamond T

and that just about summed it up for the folk from Yankalillee. Mike wanted to paint out the sign but Nancy said that Tommy always fancied himself as a bit of a signwriter and had done it himself and was dead proud of the paint job. We'd just have to live with it, sticks and stones etc.

Tommy had won the contract from the shire council when he returned from the war and all went well for a while until his war wounds started him drinking. He had a crook shoulder and only one good eye and a caved-in cheekbone, his shoulder had been smashed with the butt of a Japanese rifle and he was left with only fifty per cent mobility and his eye was done in at the same time. There were those who said he shouldn't have got the garbage contract, him being what he was, but he could drive a truck and, despite his shoulder, he could work as hard as anyone lifting garbage cans. He had this amazing technique, he'd sling a can up over his right shoulder and jump up on the running board at the back of the Diamond T and sort of bend and empty the can into the back of the truck all in one movement. He was getting a part disability pension but didn't qualify for the full TPI when he came out of the repatriation hospital. Probably a good thing, as most of what he got from War Veterans went on grog. Then he started getting into trouble with the law. His first visit to His Majesty's boarding house up the hill was for petty larceny when he got six months and Nancy was forced to take over the business.

When the contract came up for renewal, Tommy was still in the clink so the shire council put it up for tender. Nancy put in for it, and since nobody else did, the council let her have it. I think it was mostly because the town clerk was a Catholic and the final decision was left to him. Nancy probably became the only woman garbage collector in business in the whole of Australia. That is, if you could call emptying people's garbage cans a business. She would laugh and say, 'Well, equal pay for women has to start somewhere, I guess.' But I don't think the job paid very well because there never seemed to be quite enough to get us through the month and Nancy had to do her layette work to
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make ends meet.

Naturally us kids were not that chuffed at being called 'dirty garbo!' Nancy said it could have been worse, we could have been the nightsoil collectors and that when the previous operator, Fred Bellows, had died tragically on the job and the contract was up for grabs Tommy had put in an unsuccessful bid for that job as well. His crook shoulder and one eye probably ruled against him this time around.

'Don't know how the silly bugger thought we'd manage both,' Nancy remarked. 'He was full of grand schemes when he first came

back from the war. "Waste disposal, it's the coming thing, the average person creates fifty pounds of waste a year and that's only human waste, shit and piss! Then there's all the stuff they throw out. "It's a business that's never gunna run out," he'd say, "like being an undertaker only you don't have to handle stiffs."

'"Yeah, only turds," I said.

'"That's just it, Nance, that's my very point! In Borneo, the villagers use human waste to grow their vegies, nothing to stop us doing the same, dry it into briquettes and sell it to farmers, make a fortune, eh?"'

Tommy, of course hadn't taken the advent of the flush toilet into consideration. A sewage works had been started before the war but it hadn't progressed very far and the shire council was yet to restart it.

But sooner or later it would be completed and that would be the end of Tommy's dream of briquettes of dried shit for the local farmers.

Some people though did have septic tanks. The Templetons and the Yerberrys and Oliver Twist were supposed to have flush toilets inside the house but nobody we knew had ever seen them. The dunny was still out the back and an indoor toilet was a real status symbol. In fact, we had never been into anyone's house that had one. Our dunny, like almost everyone else's, was out in the yard with a little lane leading to the back of it from the street. It had a small door that opened up in the rear so the nightsoil collector could place the can under the toilet seat.

A lot of people in Bell Street and elsewhere used torn-up squares of newspaper in their dunny but Nancy said we had to draw the line somewhere and the line was our bums. Somehow we always had shop bought toilet rolls. Mind you, they had one distinct disadvantage, the paper was shiny on one side and soft on the other and, if you forgot, the shiny side would slip over your bum without getting a good grip, which would often result in a bit of you-know-what ending up on your fingers.

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It was not until much later that I discovered there were toilet rolls with nice soft paper. Ours was the same as we got in the school dunny so I suppose it was the very cheapest possible but still not newspaper.

Fred Bellows, the dead nightsoil collector, had always been a bit of a loner, a huge bloke who could cart nightsoil all night but didn't have much to say for himself and liked to work on his own, using a huge Percheron, a large grey draughthorse, to pull the wagon that carried the night cans.

Nancy explained that Fred wore this oilskin headgear that fishermen use in storms and you see in pictures on sardine cans. It fits over your head and covers your neck and shoulders. Over this he wore a flat-top tin hat so he could carry the full nightsoil cans on his head.

The replacement cans came with a lid, which was removed and placed on the full can so there would be no spillage if Fred happened to stumble in the dark. The lid screwed round the rim and locked firmly into a groove to become watertight.

Well, one night, Fred Bellows removed a night can that must have been pretty damn full and, as usual, he locked the lid into place before he swung it up onto his head. The bottom of the can was rusted and his head, tin hat and all, went straight through it, with the container jamming down onto his shoulders. The oil-cloth headgear prevented much of the contents from leaking out but the rust hole refused to widen and, with the additional aid of the oilcloth, it gripped vicelike around Fred's neck. Strong as he was, Fred couldn't pull the can up off his shoulders without ripping his head off as well.

He must have tried to unlock the lid so he could bend over and empty the can in order to breathe, but he couldn't get the right purchase on the lid. He couldn't shout out neither, because his head was immersed in you-know-what. According to the coroner's report, Fred Bellows died of asphyxiation or, put less politely, he drowned in the town's shit and so, in a manner of speaking, became a pretty good metaphor for what was happening to our family.

After Nancy told us that story, we agreed being the town garbage collectors wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a Maloney under Tommy's parental guidance. Fortunately for us there wasn't a lot of him around, and our mum, Nancy, together with Sarah, was responsible for dragging us up on a day-to-day basis.

Nancy wasn't all that superstitious for someone whose ancestors had been Irish. Although we always seemed to be drowning in economic effluent, she didn't blame fate and believed that people made their own luck. 'A lot of Australian Irish in our situation think the hand of God is turned against them,' she'd say. 'It isn't the hand of the Almighty that's against them but the one that brings the bottle too
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frequently to their lips!'

Nancy didn't believe in feeling sorry for yourself. 'Shit happens,' she would say, 'can't help that, but there's one thing we can all do, eh?' She rose from where she was sitting and said, 'Follow me.' We traipsed into the kitchen after her, whereupon Nancy took a large spoon out of the drawer and placed it in the sink directly under the tap. 'Righto, everyone gather around.' Then she turned on the tap hard and the jet from the tap hit the curved spoon and we were all splashed in the face and over our clothes. 'It's a lesson for life, what's called a metaphor,' she then said.

'Maybe we can't always plan things perfectly, but what we can do is to make sure we take the spoon out of the sink before we turn on the tap.'

This saying became our Maloney motto: Always take the spoon out of the sink before you turn on the tap. If one of us was planning something that could have been a bit dicey, someone in the family would always ask

'Taken the spoon out?' You know, looked at every possible angle, anticipated every possible problem before going ahead with the project.

Of course this couldn't have registered with Tommy, because, if it had, I dare say he'd have spent a lot less time contemplating his navel up on

the lill.

Like Tommy, we called Mum 'Nancy' when she wasn't looking and

'Mum' when she was. It wasn't a sign of disrespect, she was our mum and we loved her, it was just something that happened between us kids. Mostly because when your father is in gaol a lot of the time, it's hard to think of him, well, you know, as your dad. You have to abstract him somehow so it doesn't look as bad as it is. Sarah started it when she said if we were going to call our father 'Tommy' whenever we talked among ourselves, then it was only fair to call Mum 'Nancy'. Mike wanted to know why that made sense. After all, Mum wasn't a crim.

Sarah said that was precisely the point. Because if Tommy was singled out, it was sort of an insult by us kids to our father, like a denial or something, but if we did the same to Mum then it was okay. Nancy also called him 'Tommy' in everyday conversation and seldom referred to him as 'your father' when talking to us except when she was sad or serious.