Four Fires Read Online Free PDF Page A

make too much fuss.
    'We don't take charity,' she'd say. 'It's not the Maloney way. But we're not up ourselves neither. Someone is kind to us, you remember it, you wait long enough, the opportunity will surely come when you can return the favour.'
    Getting up at three in the morning in the summer wasn't too bad.
    With a hot day ahead, at that time in the morning there was usually a bit of a breeze coming up the valley. Winter was a different matter Page 17

    entirely. Every minute out there on the run was bloody awful and us kids had chilblains and runny noses all winter long. For chilblains we had to soak our feet in a bucket of boiling salt water for hours until they turned red as a lobster.
    Mike, ever the questioning one, once pointed out to Mum that it would be far more logical to start work in Bell Street on a Monday. It took a good fifteen minutes of wasted time in an empty truck to make the slow climb to Oliver Twist's house on Hill Road. 'Fifteen minutes saved on the entire morning's run meant we could hose out the back of the truck and be back home by seven instead of a quarter past,' he explained to Nancy. Bozo and me immediately agreed, nodding our heads. In terms of getting ready, if we were late to school on a Monday morning we got detention as well as a caning. A quarter of an hour saved on a Monday was valuable.
    'Well, darlin', you're probably right,' Nancy replied, leaning down from the cabin and putting her big hand on Mike's shoulder. 'But there's a principle involved, what I call "Maloney payback".'
    'Huh? What's that when it's at home?' Bozo asked.
    'Well, it's like this see, every time that pompous, self-righteous old bugger Oliver Twist places his scrawny elbows on the bench and removes his glasses and sets about wiping them with his clean linen handkerchief and at the same time proceeds to give Tommy another one of his half-arsed twopenny lectures before sentencing him and then adds a second helping, another six months, I say to myself, "Right, Your Honour, that's every Monday you're going to start the week having had a bad night's sleep!"' She hesitates and looks at each of us in turn,
    'Just because Tommy's done a bit of time on the hill in the past doesn't mean he can treat us like dirt.'
    'But we are dirt!' Bozo says, grinning. 'We collect the garbage.'
    Nancy doesn't laugh. I guess she doesn't like what we're doing for a crust any more than we do. 'It's honest work, Bozo, which is more than can be said for a lot of the locals. Right then, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted by my own child?'
    'Maloney payback,' Mike reminds her with a bit of a sigh.
    'Yes, righto. Well, us getting Oliver Twist's two German Shepherds barking their heads off and you three banging the bins and me yelling out at you at the top of my voice to keep the noise down so as to make absolutely certain the miserable bugger is good and awake, that, my dears, is Maloney payback.'
    I have to admit, we had the routine down pat. Bozo would line Page 18

    Bitzers One to Five up in a row directly in front of the magistrate's gate, right up close. 'Okay, sit!' he'd command, then 'Silence!' he'd order next, bringing his forefinger up to his lips as if they were humans. You see, Oliver Twist kept these great big ferocious German Shepherds running loose in his high-fenced, quarter-acre property because he was paranoid that someone he'd sentenced might some day come after him. He probably thought that someone would be Tommy, who was one of his more frequent victims.
    The two dogs would come hurtling down the side of the house, skidding, their nails scrabbling on the cement path as they tried to gain traction around the corner to the front, both barking fit to kill.
    Bozo's Bitzers would be waiting, their snouts just out of reach beyond the wrought-iron gate. The German Shepherds would push their noses through one of the fancy iron grilles, slavering at the mouth, fangs flashing at the sight of Bozo's mutts, who would sit there