From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (17 page)

Such rational practice made Ren feel rather well disposed towards the spies, but still, it was unnerving to think there might be eyes on you at any moment. Perhaps they were looking right now, she thought, and at the top of the stairs she spun round, to catch them at it. Barney unlocked the door and went inside but Ren spent a moment scanning the backyard and the Square and the sidewalls of the neighbouring buildings – flat expanses of old, worn brick, relieved by just four small windows. But the only faces looking back at her were the yellow dahlias’, beaming from a vase in the window of Zipper.

On the short walk to Mulberry, Barney gave his annual First Day Report on the new teacher. This was also short. First Day Reports were very consistent, too: they were unfailingly negative. Ren could actually remember Barney’s first First Day Report. She had
been nearly four years old. It was the longest time Barney had ever been away. She had gone to Kate Sheppard with Mum to collect him and had been overcome by both pride and yearning when she saw the coat-hook and the sticky label above, with the name Barney Kettle.

Barney had pronounced the coat-hook dumb. His desk was dumb, too, apparently. Also the book he’d been given to read. Also, The Mat on which they had to sit for
ever
. The new entrant teacher – Ms Addington – had been especially dumb because she had not once in her life ever seen
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
.

Since then Barney had made it his business to ask every new teacher – usually on the first day – what their favourite film was and had they ever seen
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, and if so, what was their opinion? It made little difference really if a teacher had seen and enjoyed
Snow White
– Barney would never love them and nor would he ever love school. He merely endured school.

‘Name: Ms Bloodworth,’ said Barney. He ate an apple as he walked and talked, each bite a punctuation mark.

‘Gotta be a bad omen.’ Crack.

‘Character:
Seems
friendly.’ Crack. ‘But they always fake it in the first week.’ Crack.

‘Classroom rules: No shoes. Seating assigned.’ Crack.

‘Pet subject: Maths. Disaster.’ Crack.

‘Favourite Film.’ Barney stopped, mid-stride, apple poised. His expression was incredulous. ‘Wait for it.’

Ren obligingly did so. Could it be possible that, at last, someone’s favourite film was
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
?

‘
Love Actually
.’

‘Really?’ said Ren. ‘That’s the third teacher. How
interesting
?’

‘No it isn’t,’ said Barney. ‘It’s disgraceful. Conclusion: This year will be like every other school year since the dawn of time. Only with more maths.’ Crack.

Ren had seen Ms Bloodworth in the schoolyard at lunchtime
and thought she looked rather wonderful. She wore a green dress with a circular skirt and a wide, white belt. Her sandals were a startling yellow. Her thick, silver hair bounced against her white shoulders. But it was no use saying these things to Barney. It would only annoy him further.

She went around Barney to his other side, the side without the camera bag, and walked in close beside him. She dropped her voice. ‘Are you noticing anyone likely on the Street right now? Are you looking? Have you been looking the whole time you’ve been talking? I have.’

Barney flung his apple core at a bin as they passed by.

‘Yes,’ he said, at normal volume, possibly even a little louder. ‘I have. Nothing so far.’

They arrived at Mulberry and stood, by unspoken consent, in front of the shop’s window to admire the display. In Ren and Barney’s private and ongoing Street Awards system Mrs Corry’s window displays scored Most Mouth-Watering but Mulberry’s was Most Beautiful by Miles.

Mariko’s window was never crowded and only rarely filled with bright colour. Sometimes there was just one kind of item featured – washi paper place-mats, perhaps, fanned across a low wooden table. Or some narrow tenugui towels, earthern coloured on black wooden hangers, and strung at different heights so that they looked like a flock of mysterious long-tailed birds frozen in flight. Once, there had been an array of Binchotan charcoal toothbrushes, black bristled, stems all colours of the rainbow. They were paired as dance partners, caught in mid-movement on a long, lacquered-table dance floor.

Today, the window was a small tea ceremony room, with tatami mats and a wooden table and tea-making utensils. To the side of the table was a smaller one with a pale pink flower and a fern frond in a vase. Above hung a scroll painted with calligraphy.

‘Chabana,’ said Ren.

‘Tatejiku,’ said Barney.

Mariko had performed the tea ceremony for the Street children last year. It had been a joint birthday present for Ren and Lovie. They had all learned tea ceremony vocabulary. Sometimes they tested each other.

‘Harmony and purity,’ said Ren. There were four principles that guided the tea ceremony, Mariko had told them. ‘I can’t remember the other two?’

‘Respect,’ said Barney meaningfully, as if to imply this was something he was not receiving just now.

‘Oh yes,’ said Ren. ‘Harmony, purity, respect and tranquility. It’s kind of like logic, if you think about it.’

‘No it’s
not
!’ said Barney. ‘I am completely sick of you going on about logic all the time! I forbid you to say that word again for a month. I really mean it.’

Ren gave a small inner sigh. Barney seemed to be responding to the start of the school year with a restored appetite for tyranny.

She actually felt sorry for new, silver-haired, maths-loving Ms Bloodworth.

They began Mariko’s interview in front of the first of the folding screens that divided her shop into different rooms. This screen was in three panels and painted with pine tree branches. It had come from Japan with Mariko when she emigrated.

‘This has been in my family for one hundred and fifty years,’ she said, to the camera. ‘But it is the first time one of my family has lived outside of Japan. My parents wanted the screen to accompany me. Pines are a symbol of eternal happiness.’

Mariko had left Japan with her friend Yoko who was a doctor and a medical herbalist. Yoko was Mum’s doctor and made her laugh, which was, according to Mum, as good as pills. Also, said Mum, she felt very confident that Yoko was paying proper attention to her ailments and not thinking about croquet shots,
which certainly could not be said about Dr Beverley.

‘I should have known when I met Yoko that I would leave Japan,’ said Mariko. ‘Her name means
foreign ocean child
.’

‘What does your name mean?’ asked Ren, though, of course, she knew.

‘I am true
village child
,’ said Mariko. ‘It was destined I work on the High Street. We are like a small village, don’t you think?’

Mariko’s voice was gentle and the interior of Mulberry very still and quiet, even when there were numerous customers. Once inside the shop, people seemed always to talk in lowered tones. Entering Mulberry was a little like opening the big wooden doors of the Basilica, two streets away. The vast cathedral was dark and smelled of cold stone and musty corners and the memory of incense, while the shop was filled with soft light and the delicate scents of tea and fragrant woods, but still, in both places Ren moved more thoughtfully and spoke in a near whisper. Even Barney’s noise and determination faded away inside Mulberry.

Mariko described her childhood in Fukui, her mother, father, brother and two sisters. Holidays by the sea. School. Harp lessons. Visits to grandparents. Once she had brought a photo album to show the Street children and Ren had been secretly disappointed to discover ten-year-old Mariko dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She had imagined a Japanese life in traditional kimono and those ankle socks with the compartment for your big toe. But Mariko had only ever worn kimono, geta and tabi at her brother’s wedding and Great-Uncle Susumu’s funeral. Nor had she learnt the tea ceremony until she was at university in America. And she had not made a single origami crane until she began planning her shop.

It was then, said Mariko to the camera – and to the several customers who had left their browsing and were enjoying this live interview – it was as she began gathering the washi paper and silk fabrics, the wooden rice bowls, the porcelain mizusashi and straw sandals, that she had begun to understand the vessels and materials
of her other world. It was not until she was far away from Fukui and the Sea of Japan, the composed gardens and stone walls of the countryside, that she had truly appreciated the shadings and aromas and forms of her past. To be in Mulberry, Mariko told them, was to be in her old life just a little bit – just enough.

But what must it be like to go so far away from your family? And forever?

Ren had wondered this several times since they had begun filming
The Untold Story
. The Street had plenty of people who had come from elsewhere. Bambi, for instance, was from Manitoba, Canada, where there were blizzards and prairies and tornadoes. She had travelled over several continents – and with three different circus families. She had performed with a triple trapeze in countless Big Tops; she had lived closely with clowns.

And Solomon, who was from Ghana. At home he did not stand out in a crowd, he told the camera. But love – in the form of Hana, who taught at the Polytech – had brought Solomon to the Street. He was happy to stay, he said. He missed his country, sure, sure, and his family, but he had his music, he was in a good football team, the climate was bearable, the natives tame. The thought of tame natives caused Solomon to laugh uproariously. His laugh was like a strange song, his mouth opened wide and poured forth rumble, yelp and purr.

In Mulberry, Mariko bowed her head briefly at the camera and the little audience.

‘And now, please, I will show you my place.’

She turned and walked behind the screen and Barney followed, camera aloft. Ren beckoned at the little audience to follow. They made a tidy caravan of five. Ren didn’t know any of them. Two wore caps and sneakers and small backpacks. Tourists, for sure. Americans probably.

Barney and Ren had gathered audiences several times during
US
interviews.

‘Occupational hazard,’ said Barney, irritably. ‘Doco’s unpredictable.’

This was immediately after they had interviewed Phil and Pete at the Nut House and suffered regular interruptions by customers eager to converse about walnut varieties or the astonishingly addictive qualities of unshelled, salted pistachios and other such matters.

But later, viewing the rushes, Barney and Ren had seen the interruptions differently. They had enjoyed them. They were colourful. They were funny. They were warts and all.

‘We are so
dumb
!’

Barney had jumped from the sofa and stood before Ren in declaiming pose. ‘Customers are part of the Street, too! They have to be in the film. They’re not interruptions! They
are
the doco, just as much as Phil and Pete and everyone else.’

Of course. Of
course
the Street wasn’t just the people who lived and worked there. It was made up of all who came – everyone who drank coffee or wine or smoothies or green tea, everyone who strolled and window-shopped and browsed and chatted.

They were certainly slow about some of these things, thought Ren. They were learning a lot.

So when they interviewed Kazimierz – whose workshop was open to casual visitors – Barney and Ren had made the most of the customers. And the customers it turned out – of course! – had provided good stories of their own: the sad tale of the family dog and a broken violin; a pink-haired woman whose New Year resolution was to build her own lute – was cedar better for the soundboard, or Swiss pine? (Swiss pine.) Kazimierz himself told the story of the barbat he was working on, an instrument that had travelled all the way from Iran with its owner, an instrument whose history went back thousands of years.

As Kazimierz worked and talked the customers had drawn near.

They listened as Kazimierz talked about growing up in Bielsko-Biala in Poland, about castles and churches and aircraft factories and garlic soup and blood sausage for breakfast. They listened to the story of his family, all gone in the long-ago War, just his mother and father buried now in the old cemetery. Kazimierz’s eyes had become shiny then, and so had the eyes of some of the customers, and Ren had thought once again about being far from home, far from the people you loved. She tried – as she had done before – to imagine where she might live when she was older. Whenever she did this Barney seemed to be boisterously in the picture too.

In Mulberry now, the audience pattered through the rooms in Mariko’s wake. In each space they gathered around her and she told them about the objects, their making and their history. The language of Mulberry was yet another kind of music, Ren thought. It was different again to Kazimierz’s and Solomon’s, to Sylvie’s and Deirdre’s and Phil’s. Everyone’s life and work had their own language, sounds and rhythms with particular clicks and hums and sighs, round notes and lean tones.

In the different rooms Ren concentrated on Mariko’s languagemusic. She mouthed the sounds to herself.

Kozo
, said Mariko in the Paper room.
Mitsumata, gampi
. She gestured to the hanging lamps, the fans and small screens. She handled the washi paper bowls delicately.

Tengoju. Sekishu. Chiyogami, ikazaki
.

In the Fabric room they gazed upwards at the kimono swaying very slightly on their hanging rods.
Maemigoro
, said Mariko, as she worked through the parts of the gown.
Sodeguchi, tamoto, susomawashi, ushiromigoro
.

They finished in the Gift room where Mariko showed the customer-audience the Mitsu-Bishi drawing pencils in vermillion and Prussian blue, the Kizara wood memo pad, the beautiful furoshiki tote bags. And she introduced them to the Street girls’
favourite assembly – the menagerie of little animals carved from Paulownia wood. Ren and Lovie and Henrietta had spent much time doting over these animals. Last year they had bought them for each other’s birthdays: the dog with the winsome face for Henrietta; the little donkey with the bowed head and long lashes for Lovie; the sleek cheetah for Ren.