Four Fires by Bryce Courtenay

Author:Bryce Courtenay [Courtenay, Bryce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780141011448
Google: T35Sd2eHSSkC
Amazon: 1743109296
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2003-11-26T14:00:00+00:00

terrible and that factory workers in any other industry wouldn't work there in a fit. The seats the women sit on behind their sewing machines are old and broken so they make cushions to pad their backs and bring a blanket from home to drape over their knees to keep themselves warm in winter. In summer it is so hot they take off their frocks and work in their slips and brassieres.

The toilet is old and broken, without a seat, and is always clogging with you-know-what as well as the women's monthly rags. That was the first time I'd ever heard about such things and I think it was for Bozo too. There's one toilet for the fifty women machinists and it's so dark in there you can hardly see, with just an old smelly cloth to wipe your hands. There's a bin for where they should put the stuff that shouldn't go down the toilet but they don't always do the right thing and emptying the bin is also Mike's job. Poor old Mike says he can't go in without first tying a hanky around his nose and mouth.

Of course, Mike only tells Bozo and me about this, because he doesn't want Sarah and Nancy to know what he has to do. He just tells them that he has to clean the lavatory once in a while, which doesn't sound too bad when you think of city lavatories like the ones they have in the Russell Street gym. You know, white porcelain and shiny white tiles on the walls and red tiles on the floor and a chain you pull so everything disappears in a rush 'n' gurgle of water and is the very meaning of cleanliness itself.

Because we don't have that sort of posh toilet in Yankalillee we can't even imagine what it is that Mike's describing. Things like proper flush toilets being cracked, broken and old, clogged with stuff, just isn't in our experience yet. But anyway it's not the sort of thing you can tell Nancy or she'd go spare and march on Melbourne and down Flinders Lane and up the stairs where she'd wallop Mr Stan with an uppercut and grab her son back from the brink of disaster.

'All the Jewish-women machinists suffer from nerves and they're not the only ones/ Mike says.

'In the toilet there's a jar about this big/ he indicates ajar about six inches high. 'I fill it with Bex every morning and by the night it's empty. Sometimes you see them taking five or six at a time when the tea lady comes around. You can't blame them, there's fifty machines going all at once on an old wooden floor and the din is something terrible.' He says that you can cut the air with a knife, it's that stale and stinking with sweat and bodily odours, which Mike calls B.O.

The Greeks and the Italians are the worst, because they don't shave under their arms and eat stuff called garlic and

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