The Torch

by Peter Twohig

  She could have looked away — most girls did — but she didn’t. On her beautiful face the faintest of smiles appeared. She was ‘so like the lady with the mystic smile’ in that Nat King Cole song. Was she remembering that time in the playground when I threw her tennis ball back to her? Or possibly that time at the school Christmas break-up party when I cleverly took her picture while pretending to take Mother Sylvester’s? Or was she remembering the day we met at her gate, and talked of this and that? Perhaps she was smiling at the silly clothes I was wearing, which made me look like a frankfurter wrapped in a doily — I didn’t care. The only thing that spoilt the scene was that out of the corner of my eye, I could tell that the girl sitting beside her was frowning like half a balloon. And that’s because that girl was Mona De Coney.

  I once asked Barney, who knew a lot about girls, why they take everything so personally.

  ‘It’s because so few of ’em drive cars, nipper.’

  I couldn’t see it then, but I can now. You never saw girls, or the bigger variety, ladies, driving cars. There were exceptions: Miss Schaeffer, who had been one of my teachers at St Felix’s in my final year, had a black Morris Minor, which she drove from Heidelberg to Cremorne every day; Mother Sylvester had an enormous black Chev, which she often drove the nuns around in, probably to the beach, and so on; and Mum once let slip that she had driven an ambulance during the war, which was as hard to believe as that there was a war. Pity the poor buggers she had to drive to hospital: I reckoned she would have driven over every pothole if the person in the back was a bloke. Also, few girls — none, in fact — drove trains, buses, trams, or steamrollers, though it didn’t look as though it was that hard. The point is, Barney was on to something.

  ‘Barn, why don’t they drive cars?’

  ‘Dunno, young feller. Maybe it’s because they’re short-tempered. Yer have to have a fair bit of patience to drive.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Say you run into some other bloke’s car. You don’t want to get all heated about it. He’s probably just had his ear bashed by the missus. He doesn’t want an ear-bashing from you as well, does he?’

  ‘But you haven’t got a missus.’

  ‘Done well there, touch wood,’ said Barney, tapping me on the head.

  ‘My point is that I’ve probably had a hard day as well, picking up deliveries, and whatnot.’ He gave me a wink. ‘So I’m not in the mood for a blue either, especially as, with my record, I’d probably end up getting done for attempted murder — you’d be surprised how much prejudice a holiday or two in prison can cause in the judicial fraternity, young Blayney. Stay well clear of those bloodsuckers.’

  He began to roll a smoke.

  ‘So what d’ya do, then?’

  ‘We drop in to the nearest pub — there’s probably one right there on the corner — and shout each other a pot or two, and, Bob’s your uncle, you’re getting on like a house on fire.’

  It all made sense. However, the trouble with Barney was that he tended to give advice about girls that was impossible to follow. I didn’t know if Mona even liked beer.

  I mention this conversation because of another, more recent, one which pushed Barney’s advice wide going into the home turn and consequently had the better run home. It was just after that horrible Mass — the one attended by the Girl Guides of Richmond, an organisation which ought to be banned as a menace to society — that I was on my way home, when who should I see but Uncle Seamus, standing outside St Dominic’s and looking like he had just been to Mass, which was, I suppose, not impossible, just hard to imagine. He was bending the ear of Father Jackman, and had a group of adoring women around him, as if he was Graham Kennedy or Cary Grant, although they could have been there for Father Jackman, who was very popular since the Big Knife Fight In The Church (which they ought to make into a picture). I jumped off the tram, and went over to the crowd. Milling around the church after Mass and having a natter is one of the things really keen Catholics love to do, and I was no exception. Also, everyone can see that you actually turned up for Mass, and therefore that the rumours about you are not true.

  ‘Hello, Father; hello, Uncle Seamus.’

  ‘Ah, my favourite nephew of sorts, and the boy tipped to be Australia’s next Charlie Parker.’

  ‘Are you one of our altar boys?’ asked Father Jackman, who was still new.

  ‘No, Father. I’m already an altar boy down at St Felix’s. You know me from my nanna’s place … Mrs Blayney.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Your grandfather plays piano.’

  ‘One of them does, Father,’ I said with the Blayney twinkle in my eye, which was returned by Uncle Seamus, but not by Father.

  ‘Yes, well. There’s a committee member I must talk to. Have a lovely day.’ The twinkle needed work.

  We watched him go, and I noticed that the women drifted off with him, probably hoping for his autograph. I wondered if I could be a priest and a sax player.

  ‘Uncle Seamus, I wanted to ask you about Mona, that’s my um, sort of … girlfriend.’ (I wanted to say sweetheart, but I’d never said the actual word before, and it sounded bad enough when it was just in my head.)

  ‘How can I help, young Blayney? My vast knowledge of the female sex’ — I blushed: this wasn’t what I had in mind — ‘is at your disposal.’

  ‘You see, I was staring at Josephine Thompson in Mass —’

  ‘Not Mona —’

  ‘Not Mona. And Mona was sitting right next to her at the time.’

  He sucked air between his teeth, as if he’d been burnt.

  ‘And now Mona is —’

  ‘Disenchanted.’

  ‘Yeah. And I was wondering if you could give me any tips … you know, for putting things right.’

  ‘Young man, that’s like asking for tips on how to fly a Canberra bomber.’

  ‘Anything will do.’

  ‘Well now, young Tommy — it is young Tommy, isn’t it? — I’m glad you asked me that, for you’ve come to the right man. Many’s the time I’ve asked myself why God gave the world the tenderer sex, and many’s the time I’ve told myself’ — he paused to bow to a lady with a pram and doff his hat, a very smart bloke’s hat with no sweat marks or finger marks at all — ‘Mrs O’Halloran, it’s a rare pleasure to see you well again. Good day to you — Where was I?’

  I was still staring at the back of the lady when she turned around and gave him half a smile, even though he had turned back to me.

  ‘Oh yes, the tender sex. They’ve been put here to brighten up the world, which would otherwise be a cesspool of priests, politicians and police.’ He overpronounced the ‘p’ in each word, so that he spat on the ground as he said it. ‘And poets,’ he added, with the same emphasis. ‘For we the bards must above all not be allowed to have our way.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and leant on me, and I realised he was in pain. ‘Our way is the Way of the Fool.’

  I was astonished at all this, which was his normal way of speaking, but tended to cloud the issue, whatever it was.

  ‘Do you know what the Way of the Fool is, young man? No? It is the creative path.’ He shook his head at the footpath, as if to silence it. ‘Archie has resisted it all his life, I know. And look where it has got him. No, the Muses will brook no resistance. We are a family of poets! Still, p’raps it’s for the best. One lunatic in the family is enough, eh?’ He winked at me.

  ‘Now, this Mona of whom you speak with a tell-tale catch in your throat has taken hold of your heart, if I’m not mistaken. In which case, there’s no hope for you: you are The Doomed. All you can hope for is a pleasant life together and enough children to keep you in baccy and writing necessities in your dotage.’

  ‘But Uncle Seamus, she will never speak to me again.’

  ‘Illusion, all illusion. She will speak, and she will trill like a nightingale. Just remember: brook no backchat, for that is the key to success with the female of the species.’

  ‘Mona never backchats, Uncle Seamus.’

  At hea
ring that he raised his voice like a wounded gorilla, attracting a hundred pairs of eyes to us.

  ‘Not her: you, you young barbarian!’

  He spotted another lady and, raising his hat, toddled off, smoothly slipping two bob into my hand.

  Nanna Blayney once told me that the Blayney men had a certain way with women. And Nanna Taggerty told me the same thing about the Taggerty men, separately. They did not say what that certain way was.

  30 The Tiger gets cool

  The Cobras was a highly advanced club that made the Olympians look like a bunch of girls. For a start, they were all older than Raffi and me. In fact, I discovered that I was the youngest. Also, they had secret code-names, and all their code-names were snakes. For example, the captain was called Sidewinder; that was Mario Camponi. Tony Capra, the kid who lived next door to Raffi, was in it, and his code-name was Blacky. When a meeting was on, they always called each other by their code-names. Raffi’s code-name was Copperhead. When I turned up at the first meeting, I was pretty worried, because Raffi told me that I had to learn their code-names, and never use their real names during meetings or when they were out and about together.

  ‘What if I slip up?’ I asked Raffi, as we arrived at a house in Yorkshire Street that had been painted pink and lime green. I’d changed clothes in preparation for my tannery investigation, so at least I was dressed for an initiation.

  ‘Then you get a punishment worse than death: the Snakebite. Believe me, you don’t want the Snakebite.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Can’t tell you, or else I’ll get it meself. But it’s worse than torture. Now I have to blindfold you. Are you ready?’

  I nodded; my mouth was too dry to speak. I wasn’t so sure about this Cobra thing anymore.

  Raffi took out a black scarf that smelt like Mrs Radion and blindfolded me.

  ‘You will now be taken into the Snake-pit of the Cobras,’ he said with a ringing voice that worried me a bit. ‘We must remain absolutely silent, or we will die.’

  He opened the front gate against its will and led me up the steps to the front door, which was open because of the heat. The house was leaking three different kinds of music at once and the sounds of people of all ages arguing tumbled out. Raffi knocked on the screen door very hard three times, so that I could tell it was the secret knock, and it made the screen door give that fuzzy sound as it shook. Let’s face it: you can’t do a proper knock on a screen door.

  ‘Someone getta the door,’ yelled a tired lady’s voice.

  ‘You get it.’

  ‘No, you get it.’

  And so on, until some bantamweight ran down and opened the door.

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked a smart-arse kid.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ said Raffi, pulling me through the door.

  The kid ran back into the bowels of the house, and I was led after him into the coolness.

  ‘Hi, Raffi,’ shouted a girl as we went past a doorway.

  ‘Can’t talk now,’ said Raffi. We pushed on.

  ‘You can talk to me.’

  ‘Sorry, Tina, Cobra stuff.’

  ‘Sorry, Tina, stupid Cobra stuff,’ said the girl. ‘Hey, he looks a bit like you.’

  Raffi pushed on down the passage. The noise and aromas engulfed us.

  ‘Hey, Raffi, will you close the door, please? And where’s that comic you said you’d bring over?’ It was an older boy, a familiar voice, but that was all.

  ‘Forgot, Sal, sorry. Can’t talk about it. There’s a Cobra meeting.’

  Raffi reached out past me and closed a door.

  ‘Thanks,’ came a reply.

  On and on we went, deep into a living room in which someone was playing an Italian record and there was the smell of food, sharp, deep and warm, like a holiday in the Rosella factory. I gave it a nine. You can try to beat Italian food, but really, it’s useless.

  ‘Izza your name Raffi?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Camponi.’

  ‘Then the boys are outside, playing. Justa go on through. Whosa this?’

  ‘I can’t say his name, Mr Camponi. I’m not allowed.’

  ‘There are no secrets in thisa house, Raffi. Except I no tell Mrs Camponi how much I spend on tobacco, and she no tell me how much she spend on these bloody records. And my daughter no tell me how long she’sa gunna be in the shower!’ he yelled.

  Raffi hadn’t waited but dragged me on through a cloud of mouthwatering smells and out the back door.

  ‘What? You don’t say hello anymore? My husband you can talk to all day, but me, I’ma not even here?’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Camponi … Hi, Mrs Camponi.’

  ‘Have a bite of gnocchi. I make it special for Sam, but you can have some, and your friend. You both look skinny.’

  ‘No, thanks, Mrs Camponi, we can’t eat before the meeting — rules.’

  By this time we were out the back and in rough hands.

  ‘Welcome, Copperhead. Did you bring the new member here in complete silence?’ asked a threatening voice.

  ‘Yes, Sidewinder. Complete silence.’

  ‘Time for The Ordeal. If you fail, you will be taken back, without ever seeing our faces. If you pass, we will remove the blindfold, and you will take your Cobra code-name. Now, up you go!’

  I was led to a ladder and ordered to climb. I didn’t like this already. Heights were not my strong point, and I had told Raffi this days before, so I was hoping he would explain to them, but apparently he forgot. I went up the ladder, probably as high as the house, and at the top, a hand took my arm and helped me off. I was walked across a corrugated-iron roof that threatened to collapse under our weight, and was stopped. Below I could hear the Cobras, chanting: ‘Jump! Jump!’

  I put my foot out a few inches, and felt the gutter along the edge of the roof. My feet were immediately shot with pain and I began to wobble. I had made a dreadful mistake, and was now going to chicken out and become an outcast, because there was no way I was going to kill myself.

  Suddenly, I smelt fresh Lux Soap Flakes and heard Mrs Camponi below me in the back yard singing along to ‘That’s Amore’, the record being played inside, as she was hanging out the washing. There was something comforting about it, knowing that she was down there, and that she would have known that I was up here, and was not concerned. The fact that she didn’t stop them killing me told me something.

  I jumped.

  I fell about six inches and tumbled over on a bouncy rough surface. It was a terrific joke, though I was the only one who was not laughing. The boy who was with me untied my blindfold and I saw that I was on the roof of a wide shed of some kind, which I later discovered was a sleep-out. I climbed down and they all slapped me on the back.

  ‘Welcome to the Cobras,’ said Sidewinder. ‘And, for being the first idiot who ever jumped, you can choose your own code-name. Have you picked one?’

  ‘Rattler.’

  ‘Sorry, s’taken.’

  ‘Browny.’

  ‘S’taken.’

  ‘Death Adder.’

  ‘You can’t have two words.’

  ‘All right, Adder.’

  ‘S’taken.

  ‘Python, then.’

  ‘Welcome, Python.’

  ‘You are all very cruel,’ said Mrs Camponi.

  I was introduced to the members. One of them, who did not seem to be an active participant and who had a head like a duck, was standing at the back wearing sunglasses.

  ‘That’s Tiger,’ said Sidewinder, nodding. ‘He’s our secret Mystery Member. He never says anything, and we never ask him anything,’ he said with a threat in his voice.

  Flame Boy — it was he — gave me a lopsided smile. He was the only boy my age I had ever seen wearing sunglasses in real life and looked very cool, so that I wished I’d thought of it.

  ‘Do you know who he really is?’ I whispered to Sidewinder.

  ‘He’s in charge of the Snakebite,’ said Sidewinder, as if that said enough. In a funny way, it did, and I shut up. ‘If you
tell anyone he’s a member, we’ll hold you down and sic him onto you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

  ‘We made him promise not to tell anyone about us, and also, not to burn down any of our houses,’ said Sidewinder.

  I swallowed.

  ‘But what about my house?’

  ‘That was before you were a member.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘So we don’t want you to give him a hard time.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Sidewinder whispered to me: ‘He’s not right in the head.’

  Which made me wonder if it was Sidewinder who was not right in the head.

  But, mainly, it was Raffi I was wondering about. He had known since we met that Flame Boy was my archnemesis, and hadn’t said a word. I looked at him now, and he shrugged. Sometimes, you just do what you have to do. Funnily, I respected him for it.

  If the worst thing about the Cobras was the initiation, the best thing was the tucker. And it was difficult getting out of that place, because I hadn’t tasted such good tucker since the last time I’d been to Luigi Esposito’s house, on his birthday. Also, Mrs Camponi was one of those mums who thinks all the kids are going to drop dead from malnutrition any tick of the clock, and as a result can’t stop feeding them. It turned out we had to eat outside, because of Tiger: he smelt awful, and I wondered if he’d had a falling out with Mrs Foster. By the time I left that place I was a stone heavier, which is not much chop when your super-identity is called the Spirit.

  It was only a short walk to Balmain Street.

  As I walked I had a quick shifty back over the day’s most recent surprise. I was concerned that in joining the Cobras I had accidentally organised for myself another one of those sneaky connections that lately seemed to be coming at me from all directions. I was losing control of my life, and a superhero must not do that.

  I had been wrong in thinking that I had stamped out the coincidences, and that wrongness had taken the shape of Tiger. I had that very morning found myself face to face with his old man, in an old underground railway station of all places. Also, I had got into enough hot water to boil a bucket of yabbies just doing what any normal boy would do, and staring at girls in Mass. I wondered if it was a coincidence that she had been sitting next to my girlfriend at the time. No, they had connections, lots of them. So where did that leave me? I didn’t know. But then I reminded myself that I was the Spirit of Progress, and was on a caper: the Old Tannery Caper, and that I was about to put one over Flame Boy.