Mike shakes his head, the penny drops at last, the interview was doomed from the start. ‘Oh, Jesus, Mr Stan!’ he exclaims.
Sally Harris turns furiously on Mike, ‘You told Mr Stan?’
‘No, of course not. He’s made an assumption, taken a punt in the dark, then come to see Mrs Pongarse.’ He turns to Erica Pongarse, ‘Did Mr Stan come to see you, madam?’
Mrs Pongarse looks pleased with herself. ‘I can’t deny that.’
Here was the master at work, because Mike now guesses that Mr Stan has sold his last stock to Country Stores. ‘And he sold you eight hundred dresses because he said I’d . . .’
‘Eight hundred dresses on the strength of his accusation!’ Sally says, furious. ‘You’ve gone against my recommendation?’
Mike realises that the dresses can’t have been delivered yet or Sally would have known about them.
Mrs Pongarse sighs and looks over at her niece. ‘I had no choice. Mr Stan pointed out, quite correctly, that you had taken a piddling order of only one hundred and fifty garments in three specific designs, all of which were the work of his junior cutter, Mr Maloney.’ She now looks at Mike and then back at Sally Harris. ‘Mr Stan was kind enough to say that Mr Maloney’s designs were in the range for a singular purpose, to be rejected. He confided in me that it is common practice in his trade to give the buyers something to reject. It gives them a sense of being in charge.’ She points a finger at Sally Harris, ‘And you, Miss Harris, were sufficiently naive to buy the rejects!’
‘Naive! How dare you! Can’t you see the Jew has conned you?’
Her aunt ignores this remark like all the others. ‘What am I supposed to think? It was obviously a conspiracy between Mr Maloney and you. Either that or blatant incompetence! Though now I’m inclined to think, both. I had no choice but to put things right for the good of this company and our reputation in the trade.’
‘Reputation? We’ve just become the laughing stock of the trade!’ Sally shouts.
‘You have shamed me, Miss Harris! My own flesh and blood has shamed me and put the company at risk with this whippersnapper, this . . . er, junior cutter!’ She pulls back, reaches out to put on her hornrims, and sneeringly says, ‘Go into business with this little twerp. You really must think I’m a fool!’
Sally Harris leans forward in her chair, now she’s spitting chips. ‘Let me put a few things straight as well, Mrs Pongarse! The dresses won’t sell, not even in the bloody bush! I made a professional decision not to order them and a private one to sleep with Michael Maloney! Who, I think, may just one day save the moribund Australian fashion industry from Parisian sycophants like Mr Stan and his cohorts! I agree, the decision not to buy his summer range very much concerns you and this company and, speaking frankly, you’ve been gulled! As to the second decision I made, to make love to a beautiful young man, I count myself fortunate to have done so. So why don’t you mind your own business! I’m sick and tired of having to kowtow to you, you’re a stupid, dried-out, old harridan!’ ‘I beg your pardon!’ Mrs Pongarse points to the door, look ing directly at Sally Harris. ‘Miss Harris, you may leave. At once! I shall discuss this with you later. Now leave at once!’
Sally Harris jumps to her feet, ‘You can have my notice as of now, Mrs Pongarse!’ She turns to Mike, who can see she is very close to tears, her bottom lip quivering. ‘I’m sorry, Mike, very, very sorry! I apologise for my aunt who has used you shamelessly to get at me!’ Then she storms, sobbing, towards the door.
‘Did you know you slept with a Roman Catholic, Miss Harris?’ Mrs Pongarse shouts after her niece. ‘That’s disgusting and degrading!’
Sally Harris opens the door and whams it after her, practically slamming it off its hinges.
‘It’s just Catholic, Mrs Pongarse, not Roman Catholic, we’re Australian, not Italian, have been for five generations,’ Sarah says. Then she rises from her chair. ‘And you, madam, you are a bigot.’ She turns to Mike, ‘C’mon, Mike, this disgusting old woman doesn’t like us and the feeling is entirely mutual.’ To Sarah’s credit she doesn’t raise her voice even once, she’s calm as early-morning Mass.
Outside on the footpath Sarah grabs Mike’s arm, ‘Oh, Mike, I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t help myself, the old bitch was horrible. You couldn’t really have worked with her, could you?’
Mike laughs. ‘I think we grabbed the spoon out of the sink in the nick of time.’ He wipes the front of his jacket as if wiping himself down. ‘Though I reckon we got splashed a fair bit in the process. It really should be pronounced Pongarse, she’s a nasty smell all right.’
Sarah then says, ‘Anyway, one thing is for sure, she never intended to make us an offer, she was using us, the entire interview, to punish Sally Harris for sleeping with a Roman Catholic!’
Mike grins to himself, ‘Mr Stan, the rotten old bastard, got the better of us all in the end. There’s a lesson in that alone. When you play the game, don’t justify, don’t complain, always explain,’ Mike quotes, then says, ‘What he didn’t say is that the art is in the way you explain things to your own advantage. He sure took that old lady for a ride. Jesus, eight hundred navy dresses with, I quote Fashion Week, “just a soupçon of white, anything more would be deemed vulgar”.’
‘And in the process he’s wrecked things for you,’ Sarah adds, looking soulfully at Mike.
‘Let’s be fair, he couldn’t have known about the proposition Sally Harris and Country Stores made to me.’ Mike thinks for a moment, ‘Nah, he didn’t wreck nothing,’ he says, reverting to Maloney English. ‘We couldn’t have worked with the old bag anyway. Good thing she had it in for us right from the start. In a sense Mr Stan did us a big favour. Bozo’s right, she’d have eaten me alive.’
Sarah turns to Mike and says earnestly, ‘But what will you do now? This is my final year at uni, I can’t exactly model clothes as a resident in the Royal Women’s Hospital.’
Mike doesn’t reply right off, but says instead, ‘Look, we’re not far from Bourke Street, let’s go to Pelligrini’s and I’ll buy you a cappuccino, then I’ll tell you exactly what I’m going to do.’
Sarah grabs Mike’s arm, ‘Good, I’ve never had one of those.’
‘There’s another reason for going.’
‘What?’
‘Well, about this time of the morning most of the factory owners in Flinders Lane either catch a tram or walk up to Bourke Street to Pelligrini’s to have a cappuccino and a dolci. I want them to see what a beautiful woman looks like in a Mike Maloney original.’
Sarah laughs, pleased with the compliment. ‘What’s a dolci?’
‘It’s like a small cake, only in Italian. The bosses are mostly overweight, see. On a constant diet and under the beady eyes of their wives and so they always say, “Such a little cake, so tell me already, how can such a small thing hurt a person?”
‘Then someone says, “It hurts, believe me, it hurts.”
‘And someone else says, “Only the conscience. It hurts only the conscience. On za other hand, in za rag trade, tell me please, where can you find a conscience?”’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Well, there’s not a lot happening in Yankalillee that you should know about us Maloneys. I’m in my last year at school, which isn’t exactly shattering news, though I think I’m doing okay, not like Sarah or anything, but okay. School hasn’t started yet, it’s the hottest January since the bushfires of 1952 and everyone’s talking bushfires.
Since coming back from the Rome Olympics, Bozo’s going gang-busters in the cartage business, which he calls the trucking business. It’s an American expression but he says cartage sounds like it’s done with horses and drays. The business had to be called John Crowe Transport because when they went into it Bozo was too young to be a company director and have his name on a business. They’ve even got a logo. It’s this crow that sits on a box which is wrapped like a parcel with string and
above the crow it says ‘John Crowe Transport’ and below the box it says:
As direct as the crowe flies
Which is Mike’s work again, that bloke’s a genius. Already the transport business is showing a small profit and earning a bit of a reputation around the place even as far as Albury across the New South Wales border.
Now here’s the juicy bit of gossip that’s got the whole town looking shocked and indignant and up in arms. You’re not going to believe this, but I promise you it’s true. Do you remember Crocodile Brown, my teacher in primary school and also Anna Dumb-cow-ski, the reffo girl who was in a concentration camp in Pooland? You will recall how Crocodile Brown always used to be nice to her because of what she’d suffered and all that? Well, she’s turned out to be the ace student in the school, even better than Sarah was. But that’s not the scandal, the scandal is that Crocodile Brown has left his wife and fallen in love with Anna and they’ve eloped and taken the boat to England where he comes from.
Crocodile Brown never had any kids so at least that’s something. Anna’s mum died a year ago and her stepdad, who she married after they come to Australia, says ever since Anna’s mum died there’s nothing he could do with her, she wouldn’t listen to him and he’s not surprised what’s happened. It turns out he’s a bit of a drongo anyway and gets pissed most nights and everyone says they don’t know how a nice woman like Mrs Dombrowski got involved with a no-hoper like him in the first place. Loneliness, I suppose.
So there’s Anna, who they say might be the brightest student in the state, with old yellow-teeth Crocodile Brown on their way to England. Big Jack Donovan went to see her stepdad, whose name is Barnes, Chicka Barnes, and he’s not a Catholic, thank gawd, and works at the abattoir. Big Jack explained to him that Anna was under-age, just seventeen and was, according to the law, under his protection, that they could have her sent back, extradited from Great Britain if he gave his consent. But Chicka Barnes said, ‘No way! If she was old enough to screw a school teacher, she was old enough to stay away permanently.’ Only, in the Gazette, he said ‘old enough to have an affair with a school teacher’ but everyone knew what he meant because Tommy says ‘screw’ is what he said to all of them in the pub.
Then, of course, the rumours started. People said that it was Barnes who’d been playing sticky-finger and other things more drastic with Anna and that she’d really run away from him and it’s him who doesn’t want her back because there’s a thing called carnal knowledge in the law. It says that if he was the first to have a go at Anna, he’d be guilty of an indictable offence that could get him up to twenty years in prison. No wonder he doesn’t want her back.
Crocodile Brown was the only one who’d always been kind to her, which is true, if you remember. All this came from the Gazette where Big Mouth Saggy Tits, Vera Forbes, the ace reporter, had her finest hour reporting the entire episode.
Nancy read every word for two weeks and after every article said the same thing, ‘Isn’t it nice, for once in our lives, it isn’t a Catholic that’s done the bad deed and, what’s more, there isn’t a Maloney anywhere in sight.’
She spoke too soon. Old Saggy Tits found Anna’s diary when she was in primary school. She made it sound like it was a discovery as important as The Diary of Anne Frank because it was written when Anna and her mum had not long come from Poland to Yankalillee. She printed a page from the diary which said:
Today in our class Mister Brown stopped Jografee to have a lesson on birds. We all don’t know so much about birds, excep Mole Mulonee who nose everythin and watchs birds but don’t took the eggs because it’s krool. He is a nice boy and I love him. But some time he fall asleep in class and Mr Brown beats him with a stik. Mister Brown is krool. I love Mole Mulonee who piks up rubbish in the mornin so is always tide.
So there we go again, a Maloney’s in the middle of ‘The Diary of Anna Dombrowski’, which is what Vera Forbes has as the headline when she writes the article for the Gazette. Nancy’s ropeable and can’t believe her eyes, ‘Y’know, I think a Maloney must have stepped on the head of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Doesn’t nothing happen in this gawd-forsaken town that our name isn’t in it somewhere!’
Of course Father Crosby comes around and wants to know what’s going on? How come I’m mixed up in the affair of the Jewish girl and the Protestant school teacher and choir master at the Church of England. For once in his life he thinks he’s in the clear; there’s a scandal in town and there’s no Catholic involved. Then this happens and, say fifteen-Hail-Marys-before-you-go-to-bed, the bloody Maloneys are back in the bad news.
‘Fer Christ’s sake, Father! Mole was nine years old at the time!’ Nancy protests.
‘That’s blasphemy, Nancy Maloney, you’ll not be taking the Lord’s name in vain! And as for the other, the Church teaches us that carnal knowledge, which is a part of original sin, exists in the very young, all of us being born with it.’
I think the next real big scandal in Yankalillee will most likely be about this three-hundred-pound lady garbage collector who strangles the local Catholic priest with her bare hands in broad daylight and then pleads temporary sanity. Nancy can’t believe the old priest. She’s often wondered why the Bishop in Bendigo sent him to Yankalillee. ‘Could be that he thinks we must all be as stupid as Father Crosby!’ she sighs. Now she looks at him and shakes her head, ‘Father, Mole had nothing to do with it, it’s only stuff in a little girl’s diary. At nine, Mole wouldn’t have known that little girls don’t have peckers the same as little boys.’
That’s not true, I’d seen little Colleen in the nuddy often and I wasn’t stupid enough to think that you grew a willy later on in life. She has a point, though, the only thing I can remember thinking about Anna at that time was that she’d been sent to concentration camp to learn how to concentrate in Pooland.
I have to confess, things have changed. Anna isn’t only the cleverest person in school, but in this year and for the last two years in high school she’s been the most beautiful as well. There’s not a bloke in class who wouldn’t do it to her if he got half a chance. I know I would, no questions asked, and I wouldn’t even have time to think about using a rubber because I’d be that carried away.
But Anna isn’t a cockteaser, not like some of the girls in class. Everyone likes Anna, she’s a real beaut person but all of us thought she was a bit too serious, only interested in getting a scholarship to the university and reading books, that all that beauty was going to waste. In the meantime, while all our tongues are hanging out from lust, old Crocodile is doing the dreaded deed. I’ve got to be honest and say that I’ve taken myself to the dunny on more than one occasion on Anna’s behalf. I just can’t believe that an old bloke like Crocodile Brown with his big yellow teeth could pull a bird like Anna. It makes you think there’s no justice in this world.
So, in a strange way, Father Crosby is right, only he’s eight years too early for the accusation. I’ve had all the carnal thoughts it’s possible to have over Anna Dombrowski.
Now I need to talk about Bozo’s boxing career up to the time he won his Olympic medal. There’s not much to tell after that because he’s given up boxing even though lots of people thought he should turn professional. When Bozo got back from Rome, he had this long talk with Jimmy Carruthers, an ex-Olympian who was the professional bantamweight champion of the world in 1953 and after the Rome Olympics came down to visit the Russell Street gym. Jimmy’s fallen on hard times and it seems he’s made a few bad investments and is just about broke and runs a fruitjuice bar in Sydney. After the discussion Bozo had with the ex-world champ, to everyone’s surprise, except Sarah, Mike and me, Bozo announced that he was giving up boxing for business. Nancy would have danced on the table if she’d been able to climb up on it in the first place because now she knew Bozo was going to use his brains instead of having them scrambled. It was always her greatest fear that Bozo would end up like Bobby Devlin, even though we’d told
her it wouldn’t happen, not with Bozo, no way.
Bozo’s amateur career up until he won a bronze at the Rome Olympics can’t be separated from Mrs Rika Ray. She’s his number-one fan but much more than that as well because there’s also her and Bozo’s Bitzers, they took to her like she’s their mum and Bozo’s their dad. It’s uncanny. I mean, Bozo’s dogs have always liked us, the family that is, they’ll wag their tails and jump up and let you scratch behind their ears, no problems. They’re nice mutts every one of them, but they won’t take food from us or go for a walk or do any of their tricks unless Bozo first gives them permission. No way otherwise. But with Mrs Rika Ray they’re different. She even teaches them new tricks and they say you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. Well, she did. She also gets three new dogs from the pound at Wangaratta, so now there’s eight, Bitzers One to Eight, though some of them are getting a bit long in the tooth so they only do the easy stuff because they’re semi-retired.
So every fight Bozo has, except the National Championships and the Olympic trials, Mrs Rika Ray is there with Bitzers One to Eight. At every other fight the Bitzers put on a show before Bozo’s bout. It’s Mrs Rika Ray who takes them through their paces: jumping through fire hoops, climbing ladders, keeping this big ball in the air with their noses so it goes from dog to dog and never touches the deck, marching in line on their back legs, doing a tug of war with people making bets, dancing as couples to square-dance music, playing cops and robbers where Bitzer Three stands on his hind legs and points a paw at Bitzer Seven and there’s the sound of a gun going off and then Bitzer Seven leaps in the air, does a backward somersault and plays dead, sprawled on his back.
Mrs Rika Ray is dressed in this sari dress made of gold silk and she wears earrings that are miniature red boxing gloves as well as a rhinestone tiara that spells ‘Bozo’. The only pity is that Bitzer Five can’t do his handstand piss against the corner post, which is reasonable enough, but normally the highlight of the show. Now he’s the dog that can’t do anything – the dumb dog, he falls over when they sit up or salute, baulks at the fire ring, falls off the ladder, gets knocked arse over tit by the ball, and he’s out of step in the square dance. People love him the most. The whole Bitzer routine runs about ten minutes in the ring before Bozo fights his opponent and is an absolute crowd-stopper.
Four Fires Page 52
