From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (16 page)

‘If Albert’s thief is the Street Thief,’ said Ren. ‘Which I think he – she – must be.’

‘Let’s just say They,’ said Barney.

‘But it could have been there already,’ said Ren. ‘You just mightn’t have seen it the first time – only when you were looking for
Seven Haircuts
.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said Barney, with certainty. ‘I’d already inspected all the shelves for envelopes. I was fully in zine-spotting mode. I have
been all week. I
definitely
would have seen it if it had been there.’

They both stared abstractedly at the zines.

‘So,’ said Ren, but found there were no words to follow.

Her eyes scrolled the zine titles and her mind scrolled through the great mess of speculations and propositions, trying to bring them to order.
Dishwashing Songs. Experiments in Love. My Mother’s Room
. Street Thief is Albert’s thief.
Goodbye Balloon Art. Haiku Holiday
. Albert’s thief is (possibly) a girl.
Saints You Will Never Meet. Saucerland. Second Thoughts on Home Renovation
. Albert’s thief planted the zine.
Small Sad Song. Sock Patterns for Sundry. Stoned Thoughts
. (Why is the fourth shelf alphabetised?)
Suddenly, Last Winter. Swans and other Long-necked Birds
. Albert’s thief is Orange Boy artist.
Swedes: In Praise of Neglected Vegetables
. Orange Boy artist is (possibly) a girl.

But.

‘But!’ said Ren, ‘even if it was
then
that the Thief-slash-Orange-Boy-slash-Girl hid the envelope, it still doesn’t mean it was for us. They didn’t know you were here.’

Barney opened his mouth to argue. And shut it again.

‘I mean, think about it. They don’t even know who we
are
.’

‘But, we’re the only ones who’ve found the envelopes,’ said Barney, obstinately. ‘How can it be a coincidence
three
times?’

Another long silence had followed, during which Barney had continued standing in front of the zines for some time. Ren returned to her chair behind Albert’s counter and stared without seeing at the syllogisms she had written in her notebook. The sounds of late afternoon in the Street drifted through the open window above the counter: the unhurried steps of passers-by; the strange music of different conversations coming and going; a distant siren, the muted racket of the starlings in the horse-chestnut tree at the end of the Street.

Ren dug in her pencil case for her best sharpener and sharpened each of her pencils in turn, with great deliberateness.
She watched the curls of wood fall to the counter top in pleasing patterns. She heard Barney walk towards the back of the shop, towards the La-Z-Boy; she heard him thump onto the big chair, sigh heavily, and wrench the chair lever.

She thought about the Kate Beaton thief and the burglarising Street thief, both sly, both elusive – in person and in definition: were They female or male? One person or two? Zine makers and deliverers? Zine characters? Real or imaginary?

She lined up her pencils on the counter, one two three four five six seven, their blunt ends even; the sharpened leads pointing threateningly at the graphic fiction bookcase across from the counter.

She thought about her afternoon spent looking through the viewfinder of a camera, how it had altered the Street and the people. How very unsettled it had made her feel.

It hadn’t been much use, thought Ren. She inched her pencils further and further forward, one at a time, until they were all teetering on the very edge of the counter. She hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary anywhere on the Street. Or not that she knew. Meanwhile, the important stuff had happened where the camera was
not
. It was perfectly possible you could sleuth for days with a camera and never detect a thing. It was almost as if Orange-Boy-slash-Girl-slash-Thief-slash-Thieves knew to keep out of the way. To stay unnoticed.

But to be noti
cing
.

Ren looked up from her finely balanced pencils and over at the zine stand. She experienced the hovering sensation in her head that came when she was just about to understand something like a cryptic crossword clue or an algebra equation.

What if Barney was right? What if the envelopes were not coincidences? What if they really had been for her and Barney right from the beginning? But how could that happen?

Ren had sat very, very still. Small goosebumps prickled her
arm. Her head began to fill slowly with a most agreeable airiness.

From the back room of Comic Strip came an exultant cry and the sound of someone propelling himself from a La-Z-Boy.

Of
course
, thought Ren.

‘Of
course
!’ shouted Barney, as he came crashing through into the front of the shop.

He stopped in front of the counter, beaming.

‘They’ve been watching us,’ said Ren, on behalf of them both. Her voice sounded very clear and matter-of-fact. ‘He, She, They, have been watching
us
. And for a long time. Since before the first envelope. Maybe since November.’

Barney punched the air and executed another small leap. ‘Oh,
yes
!’

‘Tonight you sleep on the floor,’
read Ms Temple.

The fans whirred. The class stirred sleepily at their desks.

Ren smiled again, thinking of that moment yesterday.

How
interesting
, Barney said, later. The
same
conclusion at more or less the
same
time. He had been brimming with confidence and resolve once more.

‘Go Kettle Productions!’ he roared. They had been in his bedroom. He dived from the window seat onto his bed.

Ren had been relieved. This was why she had
felt
the thief and Orange Boy were the same person, she explained to Barney. She had known somehow – at the back of her mind – that though the Street hadn’t noticed the thief, the thief had been all-noticing. And it was the same with the envelope deliverer – Orange Boy or Girl. They had never been seen by Ren or Barney. But They – like the Thief – had been
watching
. Ergo, they were one and the same. (Don’t ergo me, said Barney.) Her subconscious had worked it out, she told him. It just hadn’t communicated the logical steps to her conscious mind.

Whatever, said Barney.

The watchers had got to know Barney and Ren. Secretly. Without being seen or heard. They had observed their habits and their favourite places. Possibly their conversations. They had taken their time. And then, when They were good and ready, They had delivered the first envelope. They had known that Barney and Ren were in Coralie’s Café. They had known brother and sister would come out the swing door, pause perhaps and look around. They had counted on either Barney or Ren spying the first envelope, wedged and waiting beneath the outside chair.

The You on the front of the envelope did not mean
any
one at all. It was not random. It did not mean any
one
, either. It was second person plural. It was perfectly precise. It meant You Two. Either and Both.

I said, ‘What am I in for?’

Ren lifted her head from her desk. She yawned and stretched and missed the final sentence of the day’s reading. She had missed most of the reading. Her multi-tasking batteries were flat. She really had no idea what it was about. But she would ask someone. Or check the book.

Ms Temple looked over the top of the book at her class.

‘Three o’clock on the dot,’ she said, evidently pleased with her timing.

She shut the book and placed it in her top drawer. ‘Go home and cool off. No homework this week.’

Ren and Barney never walked home from school together. Not exactly. The Street kids all walked together – and apart. Ren walked with Henrietta and Lovie and Bingo. Barney walked a few metres in front or behind in a close and sweaty clump with Jack, Benjamin, JohnLeo and Edward. No one had ever decreed this
gender division but it had always been so. They all went at the same dawdling pace, thereby maintaining more or less the same distance between the two groups.

Albert Anderson called their after-school crocodile the Ambulatorix: he said they were like the front and back ends of a small-brained, lumbering pre-historic organism whose mid-section had been rendered invisible.

Some days the component parts of the Ambulatorix peeled off – in steady ones and twos, at their respective homes – until it was just JohnLeo heading for the café. Other days they rearranged themselves in a variety of combinations for after-school entertainments.

Barney and Ren might walk to Coralie’s with JohnLeo to have an (Organic) Iced Rodent and watch Albert Anderson’s current chess game, or enjoy the ever-fascinating Upside Down Catfish and her companions in the big aquarium. They might stop off with Benjamin at the Mediterranean, score some gelato, chat with Battista. Or they would go to the Museum with Lovie and Bingo and check out the displays and the Story Archive. At least once a month Lovie, Bingo, Jack and Benjamin came to Busby’s and Barney made the after-school specialty for which he was justly famous – Toast-Cake: extremely thick slices of toast on which was built a cake-like mound of butter, Nutella, peanut butter, sliced banana, a scatter of raisins, salt, grated cheese, just a little ground black pepper, and chocolate sprinkles, lightly grilled to melt the cheese and the sprinkles.

Edward and Henrietta always went straight home after school. They had a demanding after-school timetable of sports practices, dance and music lessons, extra maths tutoring and French language classes.

Of course, in the middle of a film production schedule it was understood that Barney and Ren had little time to idle after school. Thus, on the first day of the new term, they peeled off without
queries and without companions. They headed straight for home to pick up their gear for the scheduled interview with Mariko.

Barney had been all for cancelling the week’s interviews. He was too obsessed with the mystery of their unseen watchers.

‘I can’t think of anything else. Let’s just solve it first. Let’s
prioritise
.’

Ren had said no, and for two reasons.

‘If you say
A, B, C
, I’m going to gouge out my eyes,’ said Barney. ‘I’m hating that even more than your notebooks.’

‘
One
,’ said Ren, sternly. ‘The schedule’s way too tight. We have to keep strictly to the timetable or we won’t make the Easter deadline. It is my responsibility as Co-Producer and Assistant Director to
ruthlessly pursue the deadline
.’ She was quoting Barney back at himself.

‘Perhaps you don’t understand,’ sighed Barney, in his Sensitive Artist voice, which combined condescension and an air of injury. He raked his hair, theatrically. ‘A big project requires
total
focus, which is not easy. A Director should be fully protected from other distractions. And stresses. I won’t be able to concentrate.’

He sighed once more for good measure. Like Mum, when she was being patient.

But Ren was not in the mood for artistic temperament.

‘
Two
. We have to keep doing things normally. Think about it. We have an advantage now – we’ve worked out They watch us, They know what we do –’

‘Are you saying They with a capital T?’ asked Barney, in his normal voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Me too.’

‘We have little bits of description now,’ said Ren. ‘And, obviously, we
do
want to work out who it is –’

‘Unmask them –’

‘– but we can’t just drop everything and go on full-scale Look
Out. They’ll get suspicious. We have to watch for Them carefully – and filming the doco is our perfect cover.’

After more sighing and some half-hearted argument Barney had reluctantly agreed.

‘But you know what’s so weird?’ he said.

‘Only every single thing about this whole business.’

‘Well
that
, but don’t you think it’s truly strange that we have never, ever, not
once
, noticed anyone on the Street who could be watching us? Even in the last three weeks since we found the first zine. I mean they have to be
around
a lot to, well, work us out – and to hide the zines. How come we haven’t picked up on it? Especially if they’re not Street regulars?’

They had both considered this lengthily.

‘Magic,’ said Ren, finally.

‘Ha ha.’

Ren was not a fan of magic. Or stories with magic. They were so illogical.

‘I’ve actually been trying very hard to be a periscope with ears,’ said Barney. ‘Look.’ He modelled a periscope, elongated and stiff, slowly rotating, pausing, listening, rotating once more. He looked like a hairy meerkat. Ren giggled.

‘I can’t believe that hasn’t come up with something.’

‘Maybe they’re spies,’ said Ren. ‘Maybe they’ve been trained to shadow people.’

‘Or maybe it’s cyber surveillance. Drone cameras.’

They had been lounging in the leather sofa outside Busby’s Emporium during this conversation and Barney had actually looked skywards, hopeful of an unmanned aerial eye. But there were only the rooflines of the Street and the clear blue sky.

All the same, thought Ren, as she and Barney trudged up the back stairs to the apartment on that first school afternoon, it was eerie to think that someone might be observing you as you went about your day, as you did all the ordinary old things that made
up your life. Window browsing on the Street. Pausing to pet Art in the entranceway to Comic Strip. Going to Toto’s for a DVD. Arguing with Barney. Reading an old Baby-Sitters Club book in Montgomery’s. Running to the Yoga Room to fetch the scarf Mum had left there. Sitting in front of the Emporium and enjoying ten minutes in the life of the newly christened Brown Betty: how she uncurled herself from a patch of sun outside Montgomery’s, padded purposefully down the Street to Hair Today, paused in a new patch of sun, spent five minutes fastidiously tending to her fur, recommenced walking, and finally made a fluid turn and disappeared down the little alley beside the old Post Office building …

It seemed that someone – or some two, perhaps – had, over time, monitored Ren and Barney, together and separately, had seen them engaged in all these activities, had divined certain things about them, and had calculated where they might reliably be at different times. The thief-slash-thieves had made deductions and predictions. It was kind of risky. But also logical.