Four Fires by Bryce Courtenay

Crocodile Brown had it in for us Maloneys. He was the choirmaster at the Anglican church and when Mike was ten he heard him singing at the school assembly and came to see Mum.
    Nancy offered him a glass of milk stout, but he said no thanks.
    Sarah made him a cup of tea and Mike brought a wicker chair out to the back verandah.
    'Mrs Maloney,' Crocodile Brown leaned forward in the rickety old chair and looked serious, 'I'm here to tell you, your son Michael is a boy soprano with perfect pitch.' He leaned back again, pleased with himself, glancing at Mike and then smiling his yellow smile at Nancy,
    'I say, you really ought to be proud with such a lark in your midst.'
    'Thank you,' Nancy said, not giving too much away, but then she added, 'I'm surprised he has any voice at all with all the carbon monoxide he swallows of a morning.' Crocodile Brown misses her reference entirely and takes a sip from his cup to cover his confusion.
    Though we never tell her anything about what happens in school, something about him must have leaked out somewhere, because Mike says he could see Nancy wasn't that keen on him and wasn't going to give Crocodile Brown too much rope.
    Crocodile Brown brings his cup down to the saucer balanced on his lap, 'Well, we'd like to have him in the Anglican church choir, train his voice properly, eh?'
    Nancy took her time, which was always a bit of a warning. She put her head to one side and looked at Crocodile Brown and slowly put down the layette she was working on, her eyes never once leaving the schoolmaster. 'And what do you think Father Crosby would say to that notion, Mr Brown?'
    'Well, er... I must say... I hadn't really given that much thought,'
    Crocodile Brown stammered. It wasn't at all the reaction he'd expected.
    'Your boy isn't at St Stephen's so... er, naturally, I assumed...' His voice trailed off then came on again. 'But... but the Roman Catholics haven't got a boys' choir, Mrs Maloney.'
    'Ah, yes, but they have got my boy's immortal soul in their safekeeping and we'll not be giving that to the Church of England,' she Page 33

    paused then added, 'And, by the way, Mr Brown, we're Catholics not Roman Catholics.' Nancy hated to be called a Roman Catholic. In fact, Mike's soul was out of Catholic circulation as Nancy had declared us all collapsed Catholics, or that's what we thought she said and we only found out years later that she'd meant 'lapsed Catholics'.
    Nancy's refusal to hand over his immortal soul to the Anglicans, Mike reckoned, started it all with Crocodile Brown and us. He said to take the hidings like a man, no use telling the sadist bastard that we'd been up since three in the morning, shovelling the shit out of his garbage can. He knew anyway and he'd done the exact same to him and Bozo. Instead, Mike said we'd have Bozo's Bitzers catch a couple of live rats on the tip and leave them in his garbage bin. Maloney payback.
    'He'll know it's us and he'll report me to Mr Flint,' I say fearfully.
    'No way!' Mike says. 'We'll leave the lid off so he can't positively prove the rats didn't get in on their own.'
    'Rats'll jump out a bin,' Bozo points out.
    'Not if we grease the bottom and inside,' Mike replies.
    We did just that, left Crocodile Brown a couple of live-rat letters of warning not to mess with a Maloney. The next time we emptied his bin it had eight holes in the bottom where he'd blasted the rodents with a
    .22 rifle.
    One of the kids who lived in his street said Mrs Crocodile Brown had gone out on the footpath to fetch the garbage bin and nearly dropped dead on the spot from a heart attack. She was last seen running screaming back into the house, pulling at her hair. Crocodile Brown must've buried the dead rats to stop them smelling because only the eight holes were there when we tipped his bin up next time around. But he must have got the message. While the thrashings didn't stop completely, they didn't happen as often and not for about a month afterwards, which gave my bum a