Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Equal partners never work, Mr Crowe,’ Bozo now says,

  ‘sooner or later a decision comes up that one partner wants and the other don’t. You just said so yourself. There’s got to be a way to break the stalemate.’

  I don’t know where Bozo gets this stuff, I mean what kid would know that? I can only think that he’s got it from the radio, there’s a program on the wireless, the ABC, Friday nights, called ‘This Week in Business’, which Bozo has been listening to since he was thirteen.

  ‘Well, sorry, mate, but I reckon it’s fifty–fifty. If yiz don’t trust me then I ain’t good enough to be in business with yiz. Matter of fact, I’d rather not.’ John Crowe looks at Bozo and shrugs his shoulders. ‘Once bitten twice shy, Trish and me ain’t gunna start from scratch again.’ He grins. ‘Besides, this time it’ll be my partner that does the grievous bodily harm to me!’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, Mr Crowe. We may never have to make a decision we don’t both agree on. Like I said it’s not the extra money, we can split that fifty–fifty. Business decisions are liable to be more frequent than engineering decisions and I’m not going to tell you how to repair a truck or what brand of tyres to buy. Any big decision we have to make we’ll make together, but, well, things happen sometimes between partners, go wrong, like.’

  You can feel it’s getting a bit tense and Trish Crowe is looking down at her plate, her hands folded in her lap.

  Sarah jumps in. ‘What about forty-nine per cent each and have two per cent held by someone we both trust, a third party?’

  Yeah, good on ya, Sarah! She’s got it in one. It seems like such an easy solution and I wonder why Bozo hasn’t thought about it and saved us all the aggro.

  ‘Sounds okay by me,’ John Crowe says, ‘What say, Bozo?’ Bozo is smart enough to look around at all of us, pretending we all have to make the decision, but we all know it’s him has to. We nod, each in turn. ‘Okay by us Maloneys,’ Bozo says. He’s agreed too quickly and I know Bozo well enough to realise that he has thought about this solution. It’s just that he wanted to try the other because it would be the better way to go, the easier way to operate, Bozo always faces up to the hard decisions.

  Well, now we have the next problem. Who do we both trust?

  Nancy suggests Mrs Barrington-Stone right off. John Crowe pretends to think about it, but I know him well enough by now to know he wouldn’t want a sheila and especially one that’s from a posh Protestant family. We know she’s not like that and would be fair, but he doesn’t. Besides, everyone in Yankalillee knows Lucy Barrington-Stone is Sarah’s friend and protector, so, fair enough, John Crowe can’t be sure she’d be neutral in any disagreement between us and him.

  ‘Wouldn’t know her from a bar of soap,’ John Crowe says, putting the kybosh on the suggestion. ‘Big Jack Donovan?’ I suggest.

  ‘Bloody good idea!’ Tommy says right off. ‘Reckon Big Jack knows the worst and best about us all, hey Crowy?’ Tommy hasn’t said a word until now, though that’s not unusual these days since he’s back to binge drinking. The other night he stumbled home, been gone two days, and he’d shat his own pants, Bozo and me had to take him outside and clean him up.

  John Crowe rubs his chin. ‘He’s a cop, mate. How would you be going into business with a cop?’

  Quickly Tommy says, ‘I dunno, most crims been in business with a cop at one time or another.’

  This gets a laugh. Then Mike says, ‘Well, we’re both Catholics sort of, what about Father Crosby?’

  ‘Christ no!’both John Crowe and Nancy yell simultaneously and Nancy is so shocked at the suggestion that she has to fan her face with one of the paper napkins Mike brought from the restaurant where he works.

  There’s a lot more laughter, then John Crowe says, ‘If we have to choose between a cop and a priest, better take the more honest one.’

  So it’s decided. Big Jack Donovan is to have two per cent of our business. Or as John Crowe puts it, ‘Two per cent of bugger-all of nothing! Might just keep him in Minties for a week every year, that is if he chews real slow.’

  John Crowe puts in a tender for the shire garbage collection under the business name ‘John Crowe & Partners’, which Bozo registers and gets Tommy to sign because he’s under age. The shire council accepts our tender which is for about fifty per cent more than we’ve ever asked and we’re back in business. Philip Templeton even says how happy he is that a council worker, Mr John Crowe, a mechanic in the motor-depot workshop, has shown the initiative to go into business on his own. That men who show this kind of gumption should be encouraged by council. He also notes that Mr Crowe wishes to purchase one of the council trucks due to be retired from the fleet and he is sure that council members would approve generous terms of sale. Of course, he assumes John Crowe is going to give up his job, so the laugh’s on him. Nancy says that while it isn’t exactly fire and brimstone, at least it’s a kick in the bollocks to Philip bloody Templeton.

  Now, here’s the funny thing. Remember the Fargo we took the tyres off so that we could go down to Melbourne for the birth of Sarah’s baby? Well, it’s up for sale because the shire council sells their trucks when they’ve got 75,000 miles on the clock. So that’s the truck John Crowe buys for a song, because its logbook shows that it’s clapped out from hauling gravel from the quarry.

  However, it turns out that John Crowe has, thanks to the workshop’s spare-parts division, replaced just about every moving part, put in new suspension, stripped the gearbox and rebuilt it, the engine’s had a rebore, fanbelt, spark plugs, distributor leads, electrics, batteries. You name it, they’re all brand spanking new. The tyres are also virtually new, having been selected carefully from among the entire council truck fleet, one tyre off this truck and another off that one, until six practically new tyres are on the Fargo, whereas six trucks in the fleet will mysteriously require at least one new tyre long before the other five wear out.

  ‘That can happen with a truck, seen it plenty of times, no explaining it,’ John Crowe says, grinning and scratching his head. ‘One o’ the truckin’ mysteries of life, mate.’

  For the past three weekends, John Crowe and me have been out shooting rabbits fast as we can for Macca McKenzie’s greyhounds. The motor-depot foreman has six dogs and is considered a big owner as most blokes who have them can only afford one, two at the most. Macca swears greyhounds do better on rabbit meat and his lot sure get through a lot of rabbits even though they’re so thin you’d think looking at them that they hardly ate at all.

  John Crowe drives the Fargo up to the house and we all come out to see it. It’s astonishing, he has even given it a spray job. It’s dark green with a yellow stripe down the side.

  ‘Australian colours, green and gold, for when you go to the Olympics,’ he says to Bozo.

  Bozo laughs, ‘I haven’t been selected, it’s way off yet.’ ‘A shoo-in, mate. When you’re selected we’re gunna paint them Olympic rings on the door each side.’

  Bozo shakes his head. ‘There’s lots of good boxers around in the middleweight division, Mr Crowe.’

  ‘You been boxing a fair while, though?’

  ‘Yeah, since I was ten.’

  ‘And you’ve never been beat from before feather to bantam and now middleweight.’ John Crowe laughs, ‘I’ll take those odds any day, my son.’

  The Fargo with its green and gold paint job looks like it’s new. ‘It’s a beauty, Mr Crowe,’ Bozo exclaims, changing the subject.

  I wonder if there’s any other business like ours where the managing director, who is Bozo, is still at school and calls his partner ‘Mr Crowe’ and his partner calls him ‘Bozo’?

  Bozo takes us for a drive and when we get home again he steps down from the cabin. ‘Drives like a new truck, Mr Crowe, nice ’n’ tight, engine pulls great and the gearshift is smooth as velvet.’

  ‘Bloody ought to be, my son! Just about the only th
ing that’s original equipment is the mileage counter, didn’t want to wind that back in case some dickhead from the shire council came and took a squiz!’ He turns to me. ‘You can thank Mole here, all them “minor” repairs cost us about a hundred rabbits and he shot most of ’em.’ He looks at Tommy, ‘Don’t you go putting a quid on one of Macca’s dogs in the Waterloo Cup, mate, they’re fat as prime porkers, couldn’t win a race if all the other mutts in it were on tranquilliser pills.’

  Bozo hasn’t given up on the Diamond T. He reckons soon as he’s got a spare quid or two, he’s going to do her up. John Crowe says he’s crazy, the old girl was ready for the scrapheap years ago.

  And that’s how we stayed in the rubbish business and got into the road-hauling business. Bozo quit school in Leaving to concentrate on business. Nancy let him do it though she was pretty worried with Mike leaving early and then Bozo and she made me promise I’d do my Matriculation.

  It’s two years now since we went into business with John Crowe and there’s never been an argument. What’s more, he helped Bozo get the Diamond T back on the road.

  Starting with the two trucks, doing the garbage early mornings then working all day after that, we’re now in the short-haul trucking business. We’re hauling stuff between Yankalillee and Wangaratta and the surrounding districts and to Wodonga and Albury and back. There’s already talk of putting on a third truck as there’s one coming up at the council that’s going real cheap. We haven’t had a taste of offal on our plates in near eighteen months and things are looking pretty good. This coming Christmas we’re going on our first family holiday ever to Sydney, to a place called Manly which is on the beach.

  Well, that just about brings us up to date. Now you’ll want to know about Bozo at the Rome Olympics and Sarah becoming a doctor and Mike in the rag trade and Mrs Rika Ray becoming Bozo’s Number One fan and spare-time dog handler. Also about Tommy and me in the bush, all of which brings me more or less up to the present time, which is November 1961.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mike was doing it tough the first year he started work. You see, they don’t do apprenticeships for men in the rag trade because a young Australian boy who wants to go past a steam-presser in the business is unheard of. Flinders Lane is a place where you have to make your own breaks but where there are no rules to tell you how to go about doing the things you need to get on.

  Mike says that the workers in The Lane are almost entirely women and they come in three kinds. There are the Jews, then the Italians and Greeks with an occasional English migrant, and lastly the Australians. Though the bosses are almost all Jewish and mostly men, there are some women who run their own workshops and businesses.

  The Jewish workers and the bosses have usually come from a Europe destroyed by war where most have suffered personal tragedy and some have lost their entire families. These are people who’ve already had two other lifetimes and now face a third in Australia. Most see their lives as contained in three parts: a home with a loving family, death and the destruction of everything they’ve known, where their previous lives were rubbed out by the horror of the concentration camps, and many of those still alive then found their countries being taken over by the communists who imposed a new type of bleakness and despair. Now they face a third life, in a new place where they are known as ‘reffos’, misunderstood, often ridiculed, at best reluctantly tolerated. For them Flinders Lane is seen as a safe haven, almost another place to hide from a world they have long since given up trying to understand.

  The machinists, steam-pressers, pattern-makers, handfinishers and the rest of the ragtag army that make up the Jewish element who work in The Lane have fought tooth and nail just to survive. There are men pressing garments who, at another time in another world, were teachers, intellectuals, scientists or businessmen who owned and ran their own factories. To have endured against all odds is the miracle, a fluke that has no logical explanation. Now they will do just about anything to keep their heads up in the sea of chance and circumstance in which they are now treading water.

  They don’t speak much English and the most common languages among themselves are Polish and German, or if it’s a Pole speaking to a German then it’s Yiddish. English is the language they must reluctantly learn and use for the trams and shopkeepers and to speak to the confident and loud-voiced strangers all around them.

  Like the Jewish workers, many of the bosses have also arrived from a war-ravaged Europe without a penny to their name and have borrowed from a landsman to buy two sewing machines and a bit of material to get started. Though on the surface some appear to be doing well, it is a fragile, almost always undercapitalised existence and they, too, are trying not to drown. The only difference is that they’ve managed to swim a little closer to the safety of the shore.

  The second group of women workers in The Lane are Greek and Italian migrants who have also left their wartorn countries for the promise of a better life. They bring with them no social or language skills but offer instead an ability to sew and a high work rate. They are cherished by their Jewish bosses because they work hard and never complain. They too see The Lane as a place where they feel protected from the strangeness they encounter when they leave to go to their rented inner-city homes at night.

  The last of the workers are the Australians, young girls who start work at fourteen and who will leave when they get married. There is also a second Australian group, the older women who have missed the altar and have made the garment trade and Flinders Lane almost their entire lives. They are most often the senior workers, the hand-finishers, the foremen or the manageresses, and The Lane cannot do without them. Mr Stan spends a lot of time massaging the egos of these older ladies. If they got upset, they would up and go to the competition, because their special skills are always in demand.

  One of them is a Mrs Wilma Pinkington, called Mrs P, but never Wilma, by everyone. Mike says she can do the most amazing and original beadwork, but only when she’s drunk. She comes to work with a jumbo-size 4711 Cologne bottle filled with gin and it isn’t until she’s well under the weather that her best work comes out. But she gets pretty cranky in the process and Mr Stan is always having to softsoap her and tell her how vunderful she is. ‘Mrs P, we must have always the Pinkington look, without your genius with the beads we are not so special. You are the vun!’ Mrs P then reminds him in no uncertain terms that Mr Haskin at Henry Haskin has offered her double to work for him. ‘Ah, Mrs P, you are so precious, maybe a little bonus is comink your way,’ Mr Stan says soothingly, patting her scrawny shoulder. When they’re putting the Style & Trend summer or winter collection together for showing, he puts on an assistant specially to nurse Mrs P through the tension. Somebody she can shout at. Mr Stan then gives the assistant a bonus at the end for putting up with Mrs P’s harassment and general crankiness.

  Now imagine a kid from the bush with dreams of being a clothes designer coming into this strange world, this tower of Babel populated almost exclusively by female workers. If Mike’s arrival wasn’t so unlikely and impossible, it would be a joke, nobody’s ever heard of something like this happening before. Ridiculous! Quite impossible! Women are workers and men are the bosses or salesmen, and poor old Mike, with his burning ambition to design dresses, is a contradiction in terms.

  Ambition isn’t something most workers in The Lane think much about. The best possible outcome most can imagine is to try to stay alive and out of trouble, to be permitted to grab onto the passing flotsam and then hope it will carry them to the safety of the beach.

  Then swimming in from nowhere, from a country town nobody’s heard of, comes a boy who has a complete family, every one of them alive and breathing God’s fresh air. A young man who wants to design beautiful clothes, whose heart hasn’t been broken, who is possessed of a mind not tormented by memory and whose stomach has never cramped in fear or his bladder or bowels lost control.

  The men who work in The Lane, those who are not bo
sses or sales representatives, are mostly messenger boys, dispatch clerks, steam-pressers, sewing-machine mechanics or truck drivers. They think Mike wanting to be a dress designer can only mean one possible thing, he’s a fairy and when they see what he’s prepared to do to get on, they conclude he must be a bloody drongo and halfwit as well.

  Mike is pretty tough. Collecting other people’s rubbish all your life isn’t exactly dainty work, but he’s not come across anything quite like The Lane before. For a start, there’s rats, hundreds of them. Apart from the work he has to do, which is made up of all the tasks nobody else is prepared to tackle, he is made the official rat catcher for Style & Trend Pty Ltd, Mr Stan’s business.

  Mike laughed when he first told us, ‘One day when I’m a famous designer and people ask me how I started in the schmatte business and I tell them I was a rat catcher, they’re not going to believe me.’ He said it like it was funny but we could see he’s paying heaps for his ambition and inside him it was hurting like hell. All I can say is that us Maloneys don’t quit easily and Mike is a Maloney even if he is also half-Italian.

  When the rats get real bad they call in the proper rat catcher, but for the regular nightly rat visits Mike is the designated rat man. He has to put out a rat cage last thing, usually baited with a few bits of bread, crusts and scraps of food the workers bring for the lunch they must eat at their sewing machines.

  Then in the morning Mike has to reach into the cage and grab the rats and drown them in the hand basin in the toilet. Rats are good swimmers so he has to hold them down until they die. There’d be at least six every day, big buggers that come up from Queen’s Wharf. He wears rubber gloves and, as an extra precaution, bandages his gloves with strips of cloth so he’s wearing a sort of bandage a rat’s teeth can’t bite through; you never know what diseases they’re carrying. When they’re drowned he puts the rats in a canvas bag, goes down The Lane and empties it over the Queen’s Wharf into the Yarra River.