Four Fires (25 page)

'Bloody hell!'Tommy whispers. 'They didn't say nothing about this! Bugger must a wanted to keep yer mum away!'

'Peter Maloney, will you step up to the platform, please,' Philip Templeton shouts out.

I don't know what to do, because he's our mortal enemy and maybe I shouldn't go up.

'Better go, mate,'Tommy whispers, Til explain to yer mum couldn't be helped.'

J T

I get up and walk towards the platform, I'm pretty nervous and 1 don't trust Tommy to get it right when he's explaining it to Nancy, who's

going to go right off her scone when she hears I've took this certificate from our family's mortal enemy.

There's all this clapping from everyone as I go up the steps to the platform. Philip Templeton
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shakes my hand and gives me the certificate and Toby Forbes from the Gazette has got this fancy flash camera which must be new because he didn't have it when he took pictures of Nancy and Sarah after Mike won at the Melbourne Show. He makes me and Mr Templeton shake hands again and with my other hand hold up the certificate. The flashbulb goes off and everyone claps and a few people shout, 'Good on ya, Mole!'

I'm about to leave the platform when Mrs Karpurika Raychaudhuri comes storming in like a steam train and charges her way up the steps to the stage. She stands facing Philip Templeton with her back to the audien'ce. 'It is medals they must be giving this boy! Medals, not bits of paper for wiping your bottoms on!'Then she turns to face the stage and puts her hand on my shoulder and Toby Forbes's flash goes off again. As the din dies down, Mrs Karpurika Raychaudhuri has another go. 'This is a very, very brave boy and I am writing to the Queen and I am telling her the story of Master Mole who is fighting fires in Yankalillee and Silver Creek and rescuing old ladies from death and destruction and is only getting a piece of bottoms-wiping paper!'

Everyone's laughing and some are clapping and Mr Templeton doesn't look too pleased and has put up his hand and is trying to make everyone be quiet again.

I'm pretty embarrassed standing there next to the old lady with her hand on my shoulder. She has that same smell her house had when we first went in and that little stick was burning. When I went back the next day to fetch Sarah's medicine, I asked her if Sarah was right and it was called incense?

'Incense, yes, you are calling it correct. A very beautiful smell, this one is sandalwood, Master Mole,'she'd said at the time. But I can't say I agreed with her. It smelled like very old things burning. Now she smells a bit like that standing next to me.

The din eventually dies down and Mr Templeton calls out, 'Let's have three cheers for the brave little chap, eh!'

He says the hip-hips and the hoorays follow. But I hardly notice. I'm in deep shit. What do I do now? I'm sandwiched between a family enemy and an Indian lady who gave my sister Sarah stuff that didn't luckily get rid of her baby, which Morrie and Sophie want badly. Nancy's going to kill me!

But now everyone's clapping again after the cheering. Toby Forbes's new camera is going pop-pop-flash right in our faces and Philip Templeton puts his hand on my other shoulder.

When everyone's quietened down, he looks down at me, his huge gut sticking out, then he sort of smiles and asks, 'Would you like to say something to us, Peter?'

Kids don't say things in front of grown-ups. He knows that. Everyone knows that. I'm embarrassed enough and wish there was a hole in the floor I could disappear down into. All I can think is that Philip Templeton is having his revenge on us Maloneys in front of everyone by asking me to say something.

The old lady has made a fool of him and a bit of me too, but I know she doesn't mean to. But he thinks it's those Maloneys having a go at him again. Most of the people, if not all, know about Murray Templeton and Sarah. It's popular gossip and the town's tongue-waggers haven't stopped working overtime and he knows that some of the firefighters would be on our side even though Murray Templeton was captain of the school footy team.

I shake my head and look down at the new shoes that Tommy's bought me and I can feel my face and the back of my neck is burning hot. There's no way I can say anything and my mouth is dry like my tongue is stuck to the roof.

When I get home I'll have to answer to Nancy who's going to question me about every detail of what's happened tonight. If I tell her I didn't say nothing, she's going to be disappointed. Like, she won't say anything herself, because she knows kids don't talk in public, but she 11 think I've let us Maloneys down in front of Mr Templeton by not saying at least thank you for the certificate. Our manners are important and she's strict on them and she probably hasn't had her
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tongue stick to the roof of her mouth like mine is now. Now Mr Templeton's gone and pointed out to the rest of the town how Maloneys are real stupid and not able to say anything when they're asked and don't have nice manners like civilised people.

I somehow manage to get my tongue unstuck and I work up some spit so my mouth isn't all dried out. 'It wasn't me done nothing, sir. My dad, Tommy Maloney and Mr Crowe and Mr McTavish, they done everything except what Mrs Karpurika Raychaudhuri done herself with the tent pole and cutting a hole in the carpet to let the air come in so she didn't smother. All I done was sit in the creek.'

There's a lot of laughter, like I've said something funny, which I ain't. I've only told the exact truth. I'm so nervous my hands are sweating and I've gone and scrunched the certificate Mr Templeton gave me into a little damp ball in my fist.

But all I can think is that I've called Tommy my dad in front of everyone and it feels real good and Mr Templeton can get stuffed for all I care.

chapter eight

What I want to know is this: if your name is Maloney, why trouble seems to follow you wherever you go. I didn't do anything brave to get that certificate and I wasn't a hero like they said I was, but that didn't stop Toby Forbes putting a big picture of me and Mrs Karpurika Raychaudhuri on the front page of the Gazette and writing under it in huge letters: silver creek fire

local boy

peter maloney

saves mysterious

indian woman's life

What he's gone and done is cut Mr Templeton's picture out of the group, but if you look carefully you can see the toecap of his left shoe in the corner of the photo. The old lady has her hand on my shoulder and it looks to all the world like she's thanking me for saving her life. Then it goes on to say a whole heap of bull about, the flames leaping and roaring around her house which was totally destroyed and, but for my quick thinking, Mrs Rika Ray, an elderly woman of Indian descent who has appeared mysteriously in our town, would have gone up in the

'conflagration'. There's almost nothing about Tommy and Mr Crowe and Mr McTavish and what they done, which is the true story as everybody who was there well knows.

Nancy says it's typical of Toby Forbes and his gutter journalism and then she goes spare because now the whole town will want to find out why we know this Indian lady and how come I knew that she lived in her humpy tucked away in the bush.

It's the word 'mysterious' in the headline that's the big problem. Why is she mysterious?

Everyone wants to know. Admittedly, probably no one in town has seen too many Indian ladies walking around the place, but Mrs Karpurika Raychaudhuri has been in town shopping plenty of times before the fire and has been around quite a while. It's just that nobody's talked to her, because she's from 'over there. So now she's all of a sudden mysterious? Being a herbalist doesn't help either. People don't know what to think. Maybe, like I admit I did that first time, they think she's a witch or something.

Tommy's also in the shit with Nancy for letting me go up on the stage at the Mechanics Institute but she says she'll deal with him later. 'Mole, you never took the spoon out of the sink!' she yells at me. 'Look what's going to happen now, everyone will want to know who this Mrs Rika Ray is and what we're doing-associating with someone from away, who is a herbalist and some sort of witch doctor! Won't take them long to put two and two together neither. Then there'll be more damn silly rumours about Sarah to keep their tongues wagging.'

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The Indian lady said if anyone asked her a girl's name who'd come to see her, like Sarah did, she'd not remember any such name or person. It's true, Mum, I'll swear it on a stack of Bibles, you can ask Sarah, that's what she said to us. She hasn't talked about Sarah in the Gazette. She didn't the other night at the Mechanics Institute neither.'

Then, of course, I remember she mentioned Sarah to Tommy, John Crowe and Ian McTavish when she told Tommy we were both clever. I don't know if they're gossips or would even remember because it was when we were sitting in the pool. I decide it's best not to come clean on that one to Nancy, it would only cause more trouble for me and I'm in enough shit as it is.

'Lets hope so, Mole,' Nancy says, becoming a bit more

understanding. 'In the meantime, if anyone asks, you were just mucking around in the bush when you met her.'

'Mum, that's dumb! People know I don't muck about in the bush there's joe blakes can get yer. I only go with Tommy of a weekend because he knows about snakes.

'Mole, I'm giving you permission to tell a lie. Sometimes you have to for the greater good. You were out bird-nesting or something. Right, there you go, that will do as good as anything, boys sometimes do that, bird-nesting, don't they? You were out bird-nesting and you come across the humpy and met this old woman.'

'Bird-nesting? They only do that in English comics like Beano and Dandyl I don't know nothing about birds, except crows and ducks and Mr Dorf's racing pigeons down the street and, yes, kookaburras, because they eat snakes and make a racket in the early morning and the evening.

Ferreting maybe, to get rabbits only we ain't got a ferret.'

'No, not ferreting, Mole! I don't want people to think you go ferreting! Ferrets smell to high heaven, garbage collecting and ferreting ain't a good combination. Get Tommy to teach you a few bird names, he knows them all,' Nancy says, like it's that easy. But I think she quite likes the old lady, though they haven't yet met. When I told her about the bottoms-wiping certificate she couldn't stop laughing for five minutes. 'She sounds like a woman after my own heart!' she cried.

So she hasn't banned me from seeing Mrs Rika Ray.

To my surprise when I told her about Philip Templeton, Nancy didn't go ape-shit. She just said Sarah was lucky he wasn't going to be her father-in-law and that Dora Templeton was in love with 'Doctor Bottle' and the both of them weren't worth a pinch of 'you know what'. She also said that Tommy shouldn't have told me to go up and get the piece of paper which you couldn't call a proper certificate because it was written out on a typewriter with a worn ribbon and was typical of Philip bloody Templeton. Sarah tried to iroathe certificate straight again but it was too far gone. Mike said, 'What can you expect from that shire mob? They're that cheapskate they wouldn't even put it in a frame with a bit of glass around it.'

But I didn't really mind because I didn't deserve the bottoms-viping certificate anyway and it would only have reminded us that we'd got into even more trouble because of it.

Nancy is right. Everyone wants to know who Mrs Rika Ray is. She's not Mrs Karpurika Raychaudhuri any more, she's Mrs Rika Ray, because that's what Toby Forbes has called her in the Gazette. 'The mysterious Mrs Rika Ray from India' is how people refer to her now.

Even Crocodile Brown fronts me in the classroom, 'Mole Maloney, we saw your picture in the Gazette and we all congratulate you.' He turns to the class, 'A big clap for Mole Maloney, who makes us all very proud to be Yankalillians.'

Everyone in the class claps but I don't think they're that proud of me or of being Yankalillians neither. It's because of our garbage collecting. Even if what I done was true, a bit of spare bravery isn't going to help change the Maloney reputation overnight. So then Crocodile Brown says, 'Perhaps you'd like to tell us how you met the mysterious Mrs Rika Ray from India and led her to safety from the raging inferno?'

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'No, sir, it was a lot of bull what they said in the Gazette about me saving her life. I didn't do nothing, sir. It was Tommy, I mean my dad, and the others, Mr Crowe and Mj McTavish, I just showed them where she lived, but she'd already saved her own life when we got there.'

I can tell you, I was getting bloody tired of explaining about the tent pole and the carpet with the hole cut into it for air.

'Ah, such modesty in one so young!' he exclaims and I think he's being sarcastic. 'How did you know her whereabouts in the bush in the first place?' he goes on.

Uh-oh! Here comes Nancy's lie for the greater good, 'I was bird-nesting, sir. Then I come across her house.' I don't want to say too much because I haven't thought about how bird-nesting should go and nobody I've ever known has done it. But I've got a few bird names from Tommy, just in case I get questioned, like I am now.

'I didn't know you were a bird-nester, Mole!' Crocodile Brown says. He seems very pleased with this notion. 'I say, I used to go bird-nesting when I was a lad. We'd go rambling in the Fens in Norfolk during school holidays. Perhaps we should compare notes, eh!' He turns to the 192 bryce courtenay

class, 'We'll make a nature-study lesson from this. Who can name a bird to be commonly found in north-eastern Victoria?'

Half the hands in our class go up and, I must say, I'm dead surprised.

'Right, you, Noel Johnson,'Crocodile Brown points to Pissy Johnson.

'Crow and canary, sir!'All the other hands go down except for Anna Dumb-cow-ski who shouldn't know a bird because she's from away and a reffo and comes from Poland.

'Canary? The canary is a caged bird, used as a pet in this part of the world and is not found flying free in the district, Johnson.'

'Well, crow then, sir?'

'Yes, all right, crow. What about all the parakeets? The crimson rosella, the galah, the green grass parrot, the sulphur-crested and the glossy black cockatoos?' Crocodile Brown reels them off just to show he's smarter than all of us and that Pissy Johnson is an idjit.

'Yes, sir, sorry, sir,' Pissy Johnson says.

Pissy would know about crows because he lives on a farm near Yackandandah. When an animal, a calf or lamb, goes down, the crows come in to land thick and fast and they'll peck the eyes out of any beast. A bunch of crows can easily kill a lamb or a newborn calf. I'm also surprised he hasn't said eagle. Tommy says farmers see them as flesh-eating predators and so they shoot them whenever they can. I've seen it myself, these wedge-tailed eagles with their wings stretched out nailed to fence posts by the farmers as a warning to other eagles I suppose. Tommy says if they go on killing them like they are, they'll soon enough be killed out.

Anna Dumb-cow-ski still has her hand up and Crocodile turns to her, 'Yes, Anna?'

'Magpie, sir.'

'Yes, that's a good one!' Crocodile Brown smiles. He likes Anna because of the concentration camp, so he doesn't dump on her like he s just done with Pissy Johnson. If anyone else had said magpie, he'd have gone crook on them, because it's also a bird everyone knows but forgets about and isn't any better than saying a crow.

'Anyone else?'Crocodile looks around.

Somebody says a duck and someone else a dove and Crocodile Brown says what kind of duck and what kind of dove and nobody

knows and nobody remembers a kookaburra, which, like the magpie and a crow, is one you always know but can easily forget when you're asked. It turns out the whole class is the same as me, they know bugger-all about birds.

'Right, this is not a rich vein of avian knowledge we're mining here,' Crocodile says, 'So now let's
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ask the true bird-nester among us.' He turns to me, 'Mole Maloney, which nests belonging to our feathered friends have you plundered recently?

That's the problem with parents, they don't know the kind of shit they can get their kids into.

Now I've got to lie beyond myself and it's like Sarah's always told us, you tell a little lie and then it has to get bigger and bigger until it becomes a whopper. But I also guess what's behind all Crocodile Brown's questions is that he wants to know more about Mrs Rika Ray. Probably his wife has set him onto me because of those rats in their garbage can, which he could never prove was us but knows it was.

I try to remember exactly what Tommy's told me. So I clear my throat to get a bit more time to think. 'Sir, there's the red-browed finch, that's the most common species of finch around here.

It's got red eyebrows, that's why it's called a red brown and then it's got grey underpants . . .'The class roars with laughter at the mention of the grey underpants. I did too when Tommy told me that's what it's called in bird language. Crocodile Brown holds up his hand for silence. 'And a golden splash on the side of the neck and then the rest is sort of brownish-gold with a red patch top o' a longish black tail, sir.'

A very good description, I know the red-browed Finch very well, loves the grass seed at the edge of my road.' Crocodile Brown seems pleased with himself for knowing my first bird. The eggs, Mr Maloney, what do the eggs look like?'

Shit, how would I know that? Tommy hasn't told me about the eggs. Here we go again! Far as I'm concerned eggs are either white or brown, hen eggs that is, don't see why birds should be any different.

'A X 71

White, sir,' I say, which is the most common colour with hens.

Well, well, then, it becomes obvious you know something of bird-nesting, Mole Maloney.' He stops and looks at the rest of the class. Which is more than I can say for the rest of you lot who are downright ignorant when it comes to things ornithological.'

I write down the word he's just said though I'm not sure how to spell it. Sarah will tell me what it means or she'll make me look it up in the dictionary.

'That will do nicely, thank you, Mr Maloney, we shan't belabour the point. I can see you know what you're talking about.' Crocodile Brown says all this a tad sarcastic like because I've given him the info on the red-browed finch a bit parrot fashion, following Tommy's own words almost exact. 'I must say I'm surprised, there are depths to you I've never plumbed,' he says. 'So, as you said, you met this mysterious Indian lady out bird-nesting. Would you consider bringing your bird-egg collection in for the class to see?'

See what I mean? There's always a trap. Just when you think you've escaped you're back in the shit and have to tell another lie. 'Sorry, sir, 'fraid I can't, sir.'

'It would make an excellent nature-study lesson for us all, maybe this lot of ignoramuses will learn something,' Crocodile Brown says, pressing the point.

'My dad, he won't allow it, sir. He says we're losing too many birds because of the insecticides farmers and orchardists are spraying like Dieldrin and DDT, and then there's the feral cats who are destroying the bird life and the small rodents and reptiles. He says I can look but I mustn't take. The eggs must stay in the nest.'

It's true enough, it's what Tommy said when I asked him. I mean what he said about the DDT

and how, if I really was a bird-nester, he'd tell me not to take the eggs. Tommy's also dead against feral cats, who, he says, do the most damage to bird and wildlife. They'll wipe out a whole species and nobody seems to care. Had my way I'd put a bounty on feral cats, wipe the lot off the face of the earth.'

The lie for the greater good is getting bigger. But not by so much it's become a real whopper yet.

'That's very commendable, Mole Maloney,'Crocodile says. But I can see he's disappointed. He
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