From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (11 page)

Right now, for instance, Dick Scully was boycotting the Nut House because Phil and Pete had objected to Kiwi Keith and his dribble entering their shop.

Sylvie, during her interview, had confessed to a political disagreement with Sarah Montgomery, a long time ago, at the Scullys’ election night party. They still did not quite take tea, said Sylvie.

In the month since Christmas, Solomon had several times spoken sharply to Kazimierz about his late-night mandolin playing. Kazimierz’s living room was just metres away from Solomon and Hana’s bedroom. The pluck and wobble of a mandolin, said Solomon, did not invite sleep.

And, Clifford and Sabrina had not spoken since the week before Halloween, when Sabrina had unveiled her seasonal confections in the window of Mrs Corry’s: Eyeball Truffles, Severed Gum Fingers and Chocolate Spiders. This had driven Clifford to tell Sabrina she was no better than a drug dealer, only the poison she peddled was White Menace – by which he meant sugar. Clifford detested sugar, all sweets and Halloween. He had banished sugar from his diet and believed everybody else should do likewise.

The Street kids had skirmishes, too. Of course they did. Particularly Barney and Edward. It was because of their most recent spat that Edward sat now, on set, asking the questions in
The Untold Story
.

Five mornings ago Barney had been abruptly woken to find a small crisis on his hands.

It turned out that dispensing with one’s traditional cast and crew, though good for trouble-free filming, was very bad for friendship. On that sunny Wednesday, Barney had opened the door of his bedroom to a deputation of Street friends, in the form of Edward and JohnLeo.

‘Why are you keeping the new film to yourself?’ said Edward, who never mucked around. His face had a most belligerent cast.

Barney rubbed his eyes. He was confused.

‘You’re back,’ he said, finally. Edward and Henrietta had been to Australia for three weeks to stay with their cousins. JohnLeo had been with his cousins at Coralie’s bach.

‘What
time
is it?’

Edward’s furious knocking had woken Barney from a mad dream involving mud, camera gear, white rats, Suit, Suit’s alarm clock, and Izzy. (Izzy and her long golden plait had appeared more than once in Barney’s dreams, a fact he had felt compelled to share with Ren.)

‘Time to tell us why we’re
not in your film
,’ said Edward. JohnLeo nodded in unfriendly agreement.

‘How did you get in?’ said Barney. He was finding it hard to get oriented to the day and the moment.

‘Judy,’ said Edward. ‘She’s gone to Teachers’ Day. She said to tell you. And your dad’s downstairs. But what about this film? And what about
us
?’

‘Wait!’ said Barney. He shut the door on them, shook his hair mightily – which sometimes, oddly, seemed to clear his head – and searched the floor for his clothes. His room, he saw, was returning with pleasing speed to its normal chaos.

Blimey. Why hadn’t he thought of this? He hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the other kids. Perhaps he actually was a megalomaniac. But why hadn’t
Ren
thought of it? Barney wrestled himself into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, opened his door, glared at Edward and JohnLeo, and yelled Ren’s name.

‘You were both
away
,’ he said to the two boys.

‘Benjamin was here. You didn’t include him,’ said Edward.

This was inconveniently true. But there’d been nothing for anyone else to do. And Benjamin –

‘He went to a theatre sports thing!’ said Barney, remembering. ‘For three days! We had to get on with it!’

‘He wasn’t busy yesterday,’ said Edward. ‘Or the day before. You were filming those days.’

It was so annoying how everyone on the Street
talked
. You could never keep anything on the down-low. Not that they’d been trying to. Oh, it was all so tricky.

Barney readied himself to explain how few crew were actually required for a documentary and how quickly
The Untold Story
had gathered momentum.

The trouble with Edward was he simply didn’t understand thethrillingalchemyofthecreativeprocess. He was hard-headed. He planned to be a courtroom lawyer when he left school. Meanwhile he was perfecting the art of cross-examination. His questions came like a spray of enemy arrows. He pinned you to the ground.

‘Why aren’t you using us kids?’ said Edward. ‘What’s going on? What about Street Loyalty? Have you
forgotten
about Street Loyalty?’

When they were eight, Edward and Barney had formed The Street Club. You had to live on the Street. You had to be a kid. You had to be eight or older. (Henrietta and Ren had been seven at the time.) There was a meeting place – the children’s section at Montgomery’s Books – and a blood oath –
Street Loyalty Forever
; they had heated needles and sprung real blood. Edward maintained a childish devotion to the blood oath, which Barney thought absurd, even embarrassing. They were practically thirteen after all. But anyway –

‘Of
course
I didn’t forget,’ said Barney indignantly. ‘The film’s
about
the Street. It’s like the
definition
of loyalty!’

It was
unfair not to include us
, shouted Edward. No one was there, Barney shouted back. After some more shouting Edward had raced down the stairs and out of the house, JohnLeo close behind.

This was the way Barney and Edward’s spats usually ended – Edward’s furious departure, a wingman at his heels. The very second the front door slammed, Ren emerged from her bedroom, dressed and ready for the day, her hair in a spritely ponytail, her eyes wide and alert behind her glasses. She looked crisp and full of purpose.

‘Well, thanks, Slash,’ said Barney. ‘You were a big help.’

‘There’s never any point getting between you and Edward,’ said Ren, most Mum-like.

‘But relax,’ she added, her ponytail bouncing. ‘I know what to do.’

Ren
was
a genius, Barney reflected a little later, his mouth full of French toast, his heart full of gratitude. The salty bacon and sweet syrup thrilled his taste buds. Edward was back to good humour. JohnLeo no longer looked unfriendly. Ren had mollified them both: Edward should do the questions for his parents’ interview! JohnLeo would be consultant for Coralie’s! All the kids would be the researchers for their own parents’ interviews. It was so obvious.

‘Dumb of us not to think of that,’ she had said to Edward, infinitely crafty.

‘The truth is,’ said Ren now, pouring syrup, ‘apart from Edward, everyone just wants to be
in
the films. The others don’t care about research and all that. But deep inside Edward there’s a Producer/Director crying to come out.’

‘A budding dictator,’ said Barney, darkly. ‘I
knew
it.’

Ren snorted. ‘But what if we bring Edward onto the
production
team? Make him Assistant Producer and Researcher? A Slasher. That’ll make him happy.’

Ren had the Production Book at hand. She was already entering the new personnel details with a sharpened pencil.

‘But also, guess what?’ Ren underlined
Assistant Producer/ Researcher
and drilled a dark full stop.

‘What?’

Barney was remembering Edward in
Silent Movie
and
Feliz Navidad
. He’d had far too much to say, it was a fact. He’d argued with Barney more than once about his direction. Arguing with the Director was a complete no-no. Yet, according to Felix La Marche and Hal Nicholas, filmmaking was a collaborative art. It was all very confusing.

‘We completely forgot about
interviewing
the others,’ said Ren. ‘And we forgot ourselves! It can’t be a proper Street doco without us kids.’

So they had. How funny. What an oversight. That was the trouble when you were caught up in thethrillingalchemy – the finer details got lost. They got lost in the headlongrushofinspiration – another phrase Barney had written in his Filmmaker’s Diary.

Ren turned to the centre spread of the Production Book. Their interviewing timetable was laid out in intricate splendour: a ten-week calendar.

‘Question is,’ said Barney, ‘should we film us kids separately or in a group?’ His heart sank a little. ‘It
will
be like a cast if it’s a group. Chaos. I vote separately.’

‘We don’t have enough time,’ said Ren, firmly. ‘There’s school.’

Barney’s heart sank still further. School. What a big fat
drag
.

‘A group interview will be fun!’ said Ren. ‘We can all write questions for each other. We’ll do it last. Everything else will be in the can and you’ll be all happy and full of goodwill.’

‘Everything except the editing,’ said Barney. ‘That’s weeks.’

‘I know that,’ said Ren. She pointed with her pencil at the calendar. ‘Six weeks for filming. Four weeks for editing.’ They
planned to première the doco at the Easter Egg Hunt Party.

Barney gave Ren what he imagined to be a
fond
look. She would definitely be running a large corporation one day.

Ren entered more data. She ruled off. She closed the Production Book and smiled, sphinx-like and complacent.

Barney zipped up the tripod bag and stowed it with his camera bag behind the zine stand. Albert was searching through a box of
Star Trek
back-issues with a customer. In a minute he would make peppermint tea for himself and Barney. Edward had gone home. He had before-school chores to do.

School. Barney picked out a zine to distract himself from this persistent and most disheartening of thoughts. The zine was called
Relative Christmases
. It showed the collection of siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, step-uncles, step-aunts and strange cousins with whom the author was obliged to spend Christmas. Moderately funny, thought Barney, leafing through. Average drawings. Not a patch on
Orange Boy
, of course.
Orange Boy
was in another league. And also, at the moment, in Ren’s possession. They were having half days each. They must photocopy both
Orange Boy
zines. It would be terrible to lose them.

They were on red alert for a third zine. Barney had already scouted the shelves and counters of Comic Strip. It was an automatic habit now. On the way to Albert Anderson’s he had studied the summer mannequins in the window of Ping’s. He had checked their shirt and jacket pockets, the bags and accessories, for telltale signs of white envelope. He had ducked into the Nut House, too, to survey Nut News, the little corkboard where Phil and Pete pinned nut information (harvest dates; pine nut and pecan recipes; nut blights around the world, etc.): it seemed a likely place for a zine drop. Barney planned to check the greeting-card stand at Forget-me-Knot on the way home, and the old postcard boxes at Montgomery’s. The Street was rich with possibilities for
zine camouflage. And every place needed to be checked daily.

Ren had started a new notebook that week. Reading
Orange Boy Lives II
had made her dejected, but beginning a new notebook was always cheering. She sharpened several new pencils and wrote down everything they knew about Orange Boy – or thought they knew. Then she wrote all the questions they had about him, everything they
wanted
to know. It was the only way to order their thoughts, said Ren.

‘What it boils down to,’ she announced after reviewing what she’d written, ‘is
A
, who is leaving these zines?
B
, why are they leaving them?
C
, is Orange Boy fiction or non-fiction? Is he the person in the story
and
the person making the story? Or is he made up by someone who is
not
him? If you get what I mean.
D
, how can we find the answers to these questions?’

‘We definitely can’t just sit around and wait till the next zine appears,’ said Barney. He took a swig from the bottle of iced water he had been holding against his cheek. It was yet another hot day. Apparently they were having an actual heat wave.

Barney had stared at Ren’s various lists: Orange Boy: Probable Facts. Orange Boy: Questions. Orange Boy: Fact, Fiction or Both. Orange Boy: Puzzling Things etc., etc., etc. The lists were like distant cousins to the bulging columns Ren had fashioned that day in Coralie’s Café – blimey, just two weeks ago, it felt like
years
– but instead of simple nouns suggesting solid and graspable objects, these lists were full of vague notions like
summer/grandparents? real animals or storybook?
where is home?
The phrases made Barney feel gummy-headed and slack-limbed and somehow unable to
think
. It was rather similar to the effect brought about by Ms Temple’s favourite kind of mathematical exercise, the kind beginning,
If Danny and Cara and Jackson have $9.50 each and each buys between 8 and 11 card games, some of which cost 75 cents each and some of which cost 60 cents each, and Cara blahblahblahblahblahblah
…

‘We need to –’ Barney held the water bottle over his fuzzy
head and squeezed gently. ‘We need –’ The thin stream of cold water jabbed his skin most bracingly.

‘We need to do some actual
detective
work!’ he said. Excellent. Cold water was the answer. He squeezed again.

‘What are you doing?’ squealed Ren. The water ran in small rivulets down Barney’s neck and onto the notebook.

‘We need to
find
this guy,’ said Barney. ‘It’s all very well writing things down, but,
actions speak louder than words
, you know that!’ This was an admonition much favoured by Dad. He had inherited it from North Island Granpa, RIP. Barney threw his head back, away from the table and Ren’s precious notebook, and held the bottle over his face, squeezing hard.

Ren squealed some more but Barney lapped up the icy water; it cooled his eyes and cheeks and throat, and somehow rinsed his brain.

That was it. They needed to be out on the Street, ready and watchful, alert to whatever clues Orange Boy’s courier left in his wake, alert for Orange Boy’s – or his maker’s – solid, non-fictional self. Barney recalled the immortal words of Felix and Hal: like great filmmakers they must become
periscopes with ears, rotating this way and that
. Made sense. Detecting would be like filmmaking. They could even detect
while
filming. They could multi-task. And divide up tasks.