by Mark O'Flynn
Clancy appeared out of nowhere with a slender branch, not unlike my mother’s makeshift broom.
‘Leave him,’ he said quietly.
‘Who’s gunna make me, Ringworm?’
‘Ringworm, Ringworm,’ chanted the small crowd.
The time for diplomacy was over. Clancy raised his branch and whipped Angus about the neck. He whipped the larger boy about the shoulders, the back, the arse, the thighs, the knees. Angus tried to use me as a shield, and while he was thus diverted I at last caught him in the stomach with a backward thrust of my elbow. He went ‘Oomph’ and let me go, falling breathless to the ground where he curled into a ball. Clancy continued to whip him until the leaves fell off the branch. I nursed the pain in my shoulder.
Then Clancy said, ‘Let’s tip the piss bucket on him.’ At this Angus jumped up, very red in the face, welts across his cheeks. None of the kids were laughing now. There was an awed silence.
‘Here comes Miss Husband,’ said someone who had been acting as nit keep.
Clancy flung the branch aside and pretended to study a passing bird. Miss Husband, coming around the corner, saw Angus’s red face and asked what had happened. No one spoke. She glared around at the downcast faces. ‘What has been going on here?’
The silence was profound. Finally, Joshua Morgan made the fatal error of meeting her eyes. His raw soul exposed beneath her gaze like a snail without its shell, he raised his arm and pointed at Clancy. But there was no need for him to speak because Angus, dusty and snivelling, cried, ‘He whipped me with a stick.’ Angus’s lip was trembling.
In Clancy’s defence I piped up, ‘Well, he twisted my arm.’
Miss Husband looked from me to Clancy. Clancy was much smaller than Angus or me. ‘Now, now, boys. Enough of this rough and tumble. I want you to shake hands and say sorry.’
I knew that what Clancy had done had not been rough and tumble. What Clancy and I did when we wrestled, that was rough and tumble. It usually involved giggling. What Clancy did to Angus was a savage assault. And yet I was glad of it. Angus and I made a pretext of shaking hands. Clancy refused to touch Angus’s hand.
‘There,’ said Miss Husband. ‘Now let’s have no more of this silly nonsense.’ She even managed a little laugh.
With this battle Clancy had staked his claim on the schoolyard, and I was enhanced by association. When Miss Husband herded us back towards the schoolhouse the other children made way for us. I sat stunned at my desk as the memory of the pain swept through and through me. The pace of the afternoon had no ordinary feel to it: an hour galloped by in a pulse beat, while the minutes dawdled. When Miss Husband asked me how to spell a simple word, I didn’t know. When she threw a piece of chalk at me Clancy caught it.
Clancy strengthened his claim a few days later when he was caught red-handed, as it were, giving Joshua Morgan a Chinese burn for fizgigging. It wasn’t the first time Clancy had persecuted Joshua. When Miss Husband intervened, Clancy again refused to shake Joshua’s hand and say sorry. There was a goaty clash of wills and Miss Husband had no choice but to dole out her arbitrary justice. Miss Husband was among the first of many who had it in for Clancy. She also had it in for Joshua, who was left-handed, something she was trying to rectify with cuts across the knuckles from her ruler. The corporal punishment she issued to Clancy was for more than insubordination, it was for insolence, and for all she suspected he had got away with in the past. It was an assertion of her authority over the class, and while she was about it she thought she might as well anticipate what he might do in the future.
She took Clancy to the front of the schoolroom. ‘Are you going to say sorry to Joshua?’
Clancy said nothing. She asked him again. Then she made him hold out his hand so that she could strap it six times with the leather strop she kept on top of the blackboard. She raised her arm high. He winced at each lash but didn’t pull his hand away as I think I might have done. Her bustle danced. She was puffing by the end of it.
When Clancy returned to his desk he showed me his palm, which was already purple and swelling. We were both impressed. Then he thrust it into his armpit where he kept it, refusing to write on his slate, until the afternoon bell.
‘Any child who does not finish their work shall stay back after school,’ Miss Husband announced. There was a whimper in her breath.
All heads were down. Looking back now I can see that Miss Husband knew the children were afraid of her. I suppose she would have preferred to be loved, but we raggedy, brute boys made it impossible for her. When Miss Husband wasn’t looking I leaned over and sketched out Clancy’s answers for him. I even made the mistakes that I knew Clancy would have made. It was with this arrangement of mutual necessity that we both managed to get through our schooling. If Angus Lovel came near me then Clancy would appear to keep him at bay, scowling on the far side of the playground.
Afterwards, all the children lined up to see Clancy’s swollen hand. The fingers were as thick as sausages and there was blood behind the nails. He was quite the hero.
‘Did it hurt?’
‘Did it sting?’
‘How did you write your answers?’
‘How will you wipe your quoit?’
Angus Lovel told us that across the back of the knees was worse, but no one listened to him. It was as if Clancy had tipped the piss bucket on him simply by saying the words. He continued to call Clancy Ringworm, but that name had lost its currency. Angus had been deposed.
Clancy’s hand was carmine. He showed it to everyone. ‘It’s numb,’ he said, tapping it. ‘It tingles, like a pin cushion. Like salt on a cooking fire. It’s like someone else’s hand.’
One of the other children, a tall girl with long braids called Violet Kefford, put out her cool finger and touched it.
FIVE
For four years we lived like this, up in the town, under the auspices of the Carrington Hotel. I missed my old life, but I didn’t miss the leeches. I saw my father once a week when he came to hand over his wages and do some repairs about the cottage. That seemed to alleviate the ache of missing him too fiercely. It was an ache nonetheless, but it was a thing I grew accustomed to. Clancy seemed not to feel the throb of this. Or if he did he didn’t speak of it. If anything he liked to goad Douglas, to make rude remarks about his bulbous nose or missing finger or some other imperfection.
‘Ho ho, Clancy Cleverdick,’ said Douglas, ‘just wait till the chicks come home to roost.’
Douglas constructed a chicken run and populated it with half a dozen pullets. Quolls regularly took them until Douglas perfected the art of chicken wire.
It was scandalous for two women to live and rear children together, but less so for sisters. It was as if they were coping with some tragedy, or this at least was how the neighbours seemed to regard us. In any case, it seemed to be the sort of living arrangement they would expect of Shadies. Clancy was good at making his lower lip tremble with a view to soliciting scones from them. For a while Emma and Ann both took in laundry for various businesses around the town. There was a particular smell of soap and clean light associated with the house in Ada Street, which was abuzz with activity on sunny days. They had curtains in the windows. They were making do.
At Miss Husband’s school they took to calling us the boys with two mothers. Joshua Morgan once called them the Sapphic vixens. This from a spridgy kid who couldn’t spell the word dim. Clancy was obliged to torture him until he recanted, and then explained his phrase and where he had overheard it. Rough justice, I suppose. Clancy knew how to give dead legs or Chinese burns or plain old whippings, so the taunts and slanders about our origins were short-lived. Together, Clancy and I were a formidable force against Angus and his gang. The frill-necked ferocity of his temper was our greatest defence.
There were eight children at the schoolhouse who came up from the colliery each day, and we were relegated to that faction. Shady children. I became their protector, but only because I was Clancy’s brother. Clancy would have let them look after
themselves. Bunty Garbutt brought us news of the ponies that worked the tramway. I missed the ponies and could still recite some of their names: Cloudy, Fluffball, Mule, Dusty. Sometimes she would bring messages from our father: Could our mothers wash him a clean shirt for Sunday? On Sundays when Douglas arrived, exhausted and dirty, his trousers flapping and bleaching on the line, he would throw himself into a chair, and Emma or Ann or Clancy or I would bring him a bottle of black ale and we would give the appearance of being more or less a normal family, apart from the impression that he seemed to have two wives. The neighbours couldn’t work out the arrangement.
For two wild boys, life in the town had its advantages. We gave full flight to our delinquency.
‘Nobody can catch me,’ Clancy would say. ‘I’m the fastest runner in all Katoomba. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’m the fastest runner in all New South Wales.’
‘I could catch you.’
‘You couldn’t catch a cold in the head, Byron, not even if I gave it to you underarm.’
What wild boy wouldn’t pick up such a gauntlet? We were often to be seen racing each other about the streets of Katoomba, beyond the railway tracks where we climbed over stockpiles of rail ballast, through Hudson’s Gully or the lush parkland gardens of the Carrington Hotel – anywhere our fancy pleased. Clancy was right: no one could catch him. There were plenty of people to give us our fun, shopkeepers up and down the street. John Chinaman the vegetable seller – whose real name was Wei Sing – always kept us on our toes. He would yap at us, throwing rotten tomatoes, which we would then gather up and throw back. We were, in fact, urchins. ‘Out!’ was a word we heard often from shopkeepers.
Sometimes we met Angus Lovel and his mates and had running battles with them. But Angus was wary. Those Shady kids, they fight dirty. Their mams teach ’em to fight dirty, ’cause they’s dirty mams. However, he said such things only from a distance. I danced with him in my pugilist’s stance as taught to me by Douglas, but this time not a punch was thrown. Clancy was watching. Clancy even pegged a yonnie at a police horse, hoping to make it shy. Unfortunately there was a police constable sitting astride the horse at the time. Constable Clout made us pick up horse droppings off the road and put them in a bucket, then tip the bucket on the roses growing around the Carrington Hotel tennis court. He said if we ever threw stones at his horse again he would make the horse tread on our feet. Urchins had to have their wits about them.
We used to sneak up the long driveway to the big hotel. It was like approaching a shimmering dream, or a house in a hymn. The wrought-iron arches of the portico, the stained glass above the doors and windows glinting with frozen flames. Filigree ironwork about the eaves like icing around a wedding cake.
We also liked to tease the maids as they hurried to and from the Carrington. In their uniforms, in the mist, they looked like mudlarks or magpies, sweet-singing and fine-feathered but the sort that might swoop on you in springtime. The Carrington gardeners also took it as their solemn duty to shoo us away, waving hoes and rakes and other garden implements. They were very protective of their roses and of the green tennis court, mowed to within a quarter-inch of its life in the foreground of the hotel. I remember the tennis court as something of an oasis, especially in summer. It was of a particular green that we didn’t see anywhere else. But if any of the gardeners tried to give chase, well, what chance did they have?
One day we dawdled home from school, distracted by usual mischief, to find in our house Mary Morgan, née Jansen, perched on a kitchen chair; a woman who had had a strange presence in our infancy. In fact the poor chair was lost beneath her. Her wrists were a parody of wrists; she had bracelets of flesh about her hands. At her side, enveloped in her skirts, was Joshua. Poor left-handed Joshua. There was the smell of specially baked scones and fat cakes. Normally it was Fisher who came to call, prying, Ann called it, not any of his wives. By the look of her, Mary had been enjoying a bit of a weep with Emma and Ann. They were looking sympathetic. There there, dear dear. Crying for some lost sisterhood, or else for her current lot, being the fifth of five wives with the rest of them barren – barren, yet between them they ate so much. Clancy and I didn’t care. Where were our fat cakes? Human interactions took a much more primitive turn with us.
‘Look at you poor boys,’ wailed Mary, ‘both as skinny as rabbits and not a skerrick of dodger in the place.’ The crumb-specked plate before her spoke of why there wasn’t a skerrick of dodger. The invisible stool creaked beneath her.
‘Have you been throwing tomatoes at the Chinaman?’ asked Ann.
We didn’t deny it. There were tomato seeds in our upright hair.
‘You are hereby forbidden to throw rotten tomatoes at the Chinaman.’
‘He threw them at us.’
‘Why don’t you take my Joshua outside and show him your games? I’ve a question to put to your – what shall I call them? – your various mothers.’
Our various mothers nodded in unison towards the door, so we went outside with Joshua trailing reluctantly behind us. The chickens showed us their indifference.
What relationship we had to Joshua we couldn’t clearly define. Could his mother possibly be our aunt? Was he to be more than our victim? It was as complicated as arithmetic, so we gave it up. What was clear was that if he tried to tease and poke mullock at us here beyond the battlefield of the schoolyard he would come off the worst, that was for sure. And he knew it. No Miss Husband to protect him now. Clancy wanted to thump him, to tie his thumbs together and lead him around like a slave, but I said that wouldn’t be fair. Clancy said he didn’t give a fig about fairness, and Joshua began to whimper.
By maternal law we had to be nice to him, so we showed him our big tree. ‘Why don’t you climb up?’
‘It’s too tall,’ he said.
We showed him our hidey-hole beneath the house. ‘Why don’t you crawl in?’
‘It’s too dusty.’
We dragged him in with us. There were funnel-web burrows. Clancy wanted to coax one out and throw it on him. Joshua bumped his head on the floorboards above and the women called out, ‘Quiet down there. Quit your spying.’
There was a manhole that opened into the larder box above, our secret trapdoor into the house. Light drifted down through the cracks in the floorboards. I couldn’t work out why Clancy had it in so for Joshua. Sure, he had given us up to Miss Husband, but that was months ago. Joshua’s timidity was the polar opposite of Clancy’s bravado; in a strange way they attracted each other. Sitting there, asking nicely if Joshua was all right, I could see that Clancy was enjoying Joshua’s discomfort.
‘I’m afraid, Joshua, that I’m going to have to give you ringworm, and do you know how I do that?’
The murmur of voices hummed down through the floorboards as if we were listening to bees in a bucket. It might have been possible to eavesdrop, but none of us particularly wanted to hear what they were saying. The obscure language of mothers: misjudged praise and unfair judgements. We only heard the shrill summons: ‘Joshua, it’s time to go.’ Joshua was out from under the house like a ferret.
‘Have you been having fun?’
And I am here to say there was not a mark upon him, apart from the dust of boydom and a small bump on his noggin.
The following week, still at the height of summer, William Garbutt, our neighbour from the valley, appeared on the doorstep. Mr Garbutt was a big, quiet man with a mighty moustache who spent long hours, like Douglas, working the coal in order to feed his family. It was a warm, milky feeling for me to see someone from our past, someone who remembered us from when we were little tackers. It was like having your eyes shut, knowing that people could still see you. But then he told us that Douglas Wilson had received an injury.
‘What sort of an injury?’ demanded Emma.
‘A wound,’ said Garbutt.
‘Spit it out, William.’ Ann couldn’t abide dillydallying. ‘Is he dead?’
I was suddenly horrified.
‘No, not dead.
Douglas? No fear.’
‘Then what happened?’
Garbutt reported that he and Douglas had been out on the tiger at the Centennial Hotel, along with many of the other miners, single men mostly (though it was no lie that those men with children and families drank just as fiercely as those without). The Centennial was a rough and ready place at the best of times, behind the façade of its picket fence. One of the single men, a Swede by the name of Anderson, had been mumbling under his beard, inserting shots of whisky through the bush of it. He was drinking with the flies and getting angrier by the minute. Here he was (I imagine him thinking to himself), on the far side of the world, and still he couldn’t escape his ghosts. Who could tell what Swedish ghosts, what Swedish thoughts, a Swede might have? At some little provocation, imagined or real, he pulled a knife from a sheath in his boot and began to wave it about. Perhaps a ghost had bumped his elbow. The other miners jumped back. ‘Steady on, Sven,’ they said. (Warming to his tale, Garbutt had started acting out the scene for us.) No one understood what Anderson was babbling about. He smashed bottles and kicked stools aside. Berserk, was the word Garbutt used. Harry Simple, who was himself full of Dutch courage, tried to take the knife off the Swede, but received a slash to the hand. Anderson stood, his back to the bar, waving his dagger, surrounded by a ring of cranky, half-rinsed miners. He was interrupting good drinking time. Behind him the proprietor brought down a flagon of plonk over Anderson’s skull and the Swede fell down into the slops and the sawdust. Douglas Wilson was first to step forward.
(‘Poon,’ said Ann at the retelling.
‘Tonk,’ agreed Emma.)
He intended to kick the blade out of harm’s way – Garbutt demonstrated this dance step with his dusty boot. Suddenly Anderson leaped up like a scrub-dangler, a stunned bullock, a mad Swede. He lunged at the nearest figure, stumbled and fell again, and with an arm thrust out, plunged the dagger into the top of Douglas’s boot. The point of it penetrated the hide and stuck fast. Douglas hopped about, performing like a grasshopper in a skillet. The knife stuck straight up out of his foot. His curses were ignored, however, as other miners jumped on Anderson and gave him a thorough pummelling. Garbutt laughed. It had now become a jovial scene in his mind. He hopped a little in imitation of Douglas, or else the grasshopper, but stopped when he saw the stern faces of his audience. Us.
