From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (26 page)

‘They’re very careful,’ said Willy. ‘Two kids. Teenagers. Saw them near the back entrance one night when I was working late. Clearly not from around here. I figured they might have found their way inside. Saw them in the alley another time, late-ish. I saw the same girl once at Coralie’s, too. She scooped someone’s leftovers into a bag. Lightning quick. It was impressive.’

‘Hum,’ Barney seemed to say.

Ren stared at Willy’s blowfly head. She couldn’t think of a thing to say.

‘Hum,’ said Barney again. ‘So, don’t you, like,
mind
?’

‘Course I don’t mind,’ said Willy. ‘Why should I? They’ll be runaways. Who knows what from. I shudder to think. Homeless. I don’t care if they’re in the Post Office building. Nowhere else for them to go, probably. They’ll move on eventually. They always do.’

Afterwards – when they had waved Willy off, when they had crossed the road and sat, weak-kneed, in the leather sofa outside Busby’s, waiting for their pulses to settle and their thoughts to gather – they had both turned their faces determinedly to the north end of the Street,
not
looking at the Post Office. It was impossible to be in the Street now and not feel the rearing presence of the building and its inhabitants. It was impossible to pass by it and not feel that the secret inside was betraying itself by some invisible, though potent, means, leaking like a poisonous gas perhaps, between the gaps in the boarded-up windows.

And, now, just like that, Willy’s casual, alarming words.

‘We should tell them,’ said Ren.

‘Not yet,’ said Barney, quickly. ‘Not till after the interviews.’

Ren waved to Hana, arriving home from the Polytech in high heels and with a fat satchel. She waved back.

‘He didn’t say anything about not telling anyone else,’ said Barney.

‘He’s not allowed,’ said Ren. ‘Adults aren’t supposed to ask you to keep secrets. Ever.’

‘He doesn’t want us to, though, does he?’

‘No,’ said Ren. She felt sure about this.

Willy had looked at them just before he swung his leg over his bike. His pleasant blowfly face had a serious cast. The look had lasted a few meaningful seconds. But he had very conspicuously said nothing.

‘This is all so
weird
,’ said Barney.

Photocopying the
Orange Boy
zines was easy enough. You just opened them out to their full A4 size and laid them flat on the copier. Ren made three copies of each, as they had agreed. Less than a dollar! Standing at Dale’s photocopier she studied the originals to see how to fold the copies correctly into little books.

It was more complicated than you thought at first glance. When laid out flat the eight sections of the story did not follow each other in the way your brain had been taught to read, left to right, going down a page. If you read in the usual way the pages went 4,5,6,7,3,2,1,8; if you turned the A4 paper upside down to try again, it merely did the same thing backwards: 8,1,2,3,7,6,5,4.

A zine did not follow the traditional logic of story until it was folded properly, which required an ingenious slit in the middle of the paper and several folding-unfolding-folding actions. The properly ordered story did not emerge until you turned the folded paper on its side and pushed one part of it towards the other, allowing the resulting flaps to fall into their proper place.

The story only made sense when you pushed it around! When
you manipulated its bits into place. Funny, thought Ren, a zine story only followed a logical path after you had done something to it that did not seem logical at all.

She pondered this little paradox as she walked home from Dale’s. It reminded her of algebra. Mum had explained algebraic principles to her last summer. Once you got the hang of the formulae they were very satisfying, they were patterned and logical. But on the face of it they did not seem so. There was a code you had to crack in order to understand, say, 2x + 4y = 240. Ren did not know the zine code. Though she could put a zine together manually, she couldn’t quite work out
why
it went that way. She did not yet understand – she could not
see
in her head – how the illogical order became logical.

She knew what Barney would say.

Who
CARES
why? It just
does
!

Barney wasn’t bothered by the how of things, the structures behind the surfaces. He just enjoyed the
things
. He wouldn’t care about the why of the zine folding. He was content with the existence of the finished zine.

It was 4.47. Barney would be home by 5 p.m. He would finish the interview with Obi and Girl and leave the Post Office before any of the office workers on England Street began leaving their buildings. He would open the back door slowly, camera in hand, scope the immediate surroundings with great care, look up to those windows with a view of the back of the Post Office and check for faces. Then he would slip through the door and wait in the alcove until he had scoped some more. If someone should pass through the area between the Post Office and England Street and notice him he would have his camera ready.

Should anyone cast a curious glance they would see Barney filming the empty lot behind the Post Office. He would be filming it through the alcove window. The cracked glass, grubby and clouded by years of weather and no maintenance, created a most
interesting effect through which to view movement a few metres away on England Street: pedestrians, cars, animals, whatever. The light falling on the murky window, on the spider-web cracks, was
molto
atmospheric, according to Barney.

Just building a stock of moody pick-ups, he would say, should a curious glancer go further and ask what he was doing. He had his answers all ready. He could even – cunning, this – offer a glimpse through the viewfinder.

Barney had dreamed up this complicated deflection after Willy’s troubling revelation. Ren had been all for going back to night-time interviewing, despite its risks. (How much
time
they spent debating these things, in lowered tones, alert for nosy parents.)

‘Don’t worry,’ said Barney, ‘we just need a reason for me to be lurking round there. But, think about it. If I’m holding the camera, it neutralises everyone. Dick, Willy, anyone. Most people round here will just think, oh it’s Barney, doing his thing. Oh, that’s the kid from Busby’s, the film nut, he’s always got his camera lens somewhere weird.’

Ren had been persuaded. She could easily imagine Barney carrying this off. He really was an impressive liar; he’d pulled off some shocking whoppers with Mum and Dad, in the interests of thethrillingalchemy.

But so far, so good. The first daytime visit had not required such duplicity. Entering and leaving the Post Office had been uncomplicated. The visit had been straightforward. On the outside, anyway.

Barney had made his first solo visit to the Post Office on Wednesday.

Neither of them had returned to the Post Office den since that first night, but they had several times left food in the alcove for the residents. Quite quickly they had become expert at strolling past the alcove while on some invented errand, artlessly swinging
a supermarket bag round the entranceway, dropping it softly and carrying on. The supplies inside were a decidedly odd combination of foodstuffs gathered from home or scrounged from various places beyond the Street, in the South City Precinct.

It was astonishingly easy to take food from home without Mum or Dad noticing, as long as you observed a few rules. Take tins of tuna or apricots from the back of the cupboard; fossick deep inside for the forgotten packets of nuts or crackers. Take only a few pieces of something: four carrots, say, two bananas, a couple of celery sticks, a row of chocolate. A bread roll here and there. A few Sultana Pasties, not the whole packet. Just a spoonful or two from the bowl of leftover vegetable salad in the fridge. The truth was, Barney and Ren discovered, no one in their house really knew how much food was there at any one time, or who had eaten what. There was no need to monitor it. When they ran out of something, they could just get more.

‘Damn,’ Dad would say. ‘We’re out of olives. Do us a favour and race over to the Mediterranean?’

They raced over to the Mediterranean, or Ted’s Fruit and Veg, or the Only Organics in Duncan Street, with uncomplaining promptness, lest the swift consumption of the last tin of olives or packet of sultanas or jar of peanut butter be reflected upon.

‘Our family could support another whole child, probably two, without any problem,’ observed Barney. He had just found a half loaf of rye bread, forgotten at the back of the fridge.

‘They might notice after a few weeks,’ said Ren, wondering, as she did quite often now, if their double lives would just continue on forever, into the vanishing future.

‘Nah, they have heaps more money than they think. They should definitely not be making us work for every cent.’

As to the provisions from the Street, Barney had come up with the bright idea of enquiring at cafés down England or Duncan or at the north end of the Street – where no one really knew them.
HelloWe’reCollectingwouldyouconsiderdonatingyourOldFoodtoaGoodCause?

‘What’s the good cause?’ asked the guy at Bagels Plus.

‘We’re helping fatten a pig for the school fair in October,’ said Barney. ‘Our class. Proceedstotheschoollibrary. We need heaps of scraps.’

How terrible Barney was, thought Ren, even as she admired his apparently bottomless supply of good causes: hens laying eggs for charity; goats keeping the grass down at a foster home; a science experiment with rats.

‘I’m on a roll,’ he said, after they had accumulated a small bag of bagels, a cling-wrap package of rather dry ginger loaf, half a dozen cheese scones and some damp salad and pesto pannini. ‘It’s kind of like thethrillingalchemy. The ideas just keep coming.’

‘Your impertinence is breathtaking, Barney,’ said Ren, which was a direct quote from Ms Temple.

After school on Wednesday, Ren had lain on her bed, reading
Hark! A Vagrant
, but very distractedly.

‘How did it
go
?’ she squeaked, when Barney arrived in her bedroom, camera in hand. She snapped the book shut and slid from her bed. She was anxious for the rushes.

Barney pushed the door closed with his backside.

‘You’ll see,’ he said.

‘Anyone see you?’

‘Nope.’ He moved the tidy piles on Ren’s desk to the floor, and rested the camera on the desk.

‘We can’t watch this on the computer.’

‘I know,’ said Ren. She was trying to discern Barney’s mood.

Pleased? Maybe. Thoughtful? Hmmm. Triumphant? No. Not as bullish as this morning on the walk to school. They had high-fived at the gate and gone their separate ways. Barney was to leave school at 1 p.m. He would film Izzy in her studio-slash-apartment above
Brummel’s until 2.30. After that it would be Obi and Girl.

‘Did it go okay at Izzy’s?’

Barney had been looking forward to Izzy almost as much as the Post Office, though in a different sort of way. The Unpublished Poet would be there, too. Pity, said Barney.

But they had both agreed The Unpublished Poet was a new man since his victorious chess rematch with Albert Anderson. Whether Albert’s concentration had been less than his best, due to the arrival of Ms Bloodworth in his life, had been a matter of some speculation among the residents and the chess-playing jazz students who had gathered to watch the much-heralded game. (The jazz students had begun as Albert supporters but – perhaps remembering their regular thrashings at Albert’s hand – had changed sides midway, cheering The Unpublished Poet as he moved inexorably to checkmate.)

Albert had been remarkably cheerful about his loss.

The Unpublished Poet had been transformed! He was fired up about a new project now, a reflection on chess in sixteen different poetic forms – to represent each player’s pieces.

‘Izzy’s was good. Did you know The Unpublished Poet’s real name is Gus? Short for Augustus?’

This was certainly a good thing to know. It would make her encounters with The Unpublished Poet a lot friendlier, Ren thought. She could say, Hi
Gus
. Not merely,
Hi
aloud, and
Unpublished Poet
silently.

‘I filmed Izzy’s sock sculptures.
Molto
excellent.’

Izzy had gone door to door the full length of the High Street collecting unmated socks for her Lonelyhearts Dating Agency Sock Installation. This artwork, which aimed to bring together mismatched but potentially sole-mate socks for a happy-ever-after-life, would be opening in the Today Room at the Living History Museum during the Mid-Winter Festival. Every building on the Street had been able to contribute a widowed or
abandoned sock; some had donated whole communities of solo socks. This was encouraging, Izzy said. It confirmed the need for lonelyhearts sock activism.

‘And I filmed Gus.’

It would take some getting used to, thinking of The Unpublished Poet as Gus.

‘In his office. Which is really their walk-in wardrobe. He gave me a copy of his latest poem. A haiku about pawns.’

Normally this hilarious piece of information would have caused Barney to demonstrate his mirth with extravagant physical gestures: a nose-dive onto Ren’s bed, say. Grotesque facials while pulling fistfuls of his product-stiffened hair upwards so his head resembled a gorgon sun with bushy radials. Corpsing suddenly into the beanbag.

But he was distracted – or intent. He rewound the videotape. Pulled out the LCD screen.

‘Ready?’

‘Are we doing rushes now?’

‘Just the Post Office.’

‘Did something go wrong?’ said Ren. He was round the other side of the bed now, getting the other chair.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’ He sat down at the desk.

‘C’mon!’ he said, gesturing to her chair.

Ren sat down.

‘You’ll see,’ said Barney.

She looked dutifully at the black screen.

Barney pressed Play.

The camera was trained first on the empty chairs.

Then Obi and Girl took their seats.

The tiny video-camera screen made them seem even more out of the normal world, as if they were being beamed in from a small cell on another planet. A black and white planet. B&W would be
better, Barney had said: more atmospheric. The picture was low res, grainy and dark. Obi and Girl seemed to come from a different time, too, some time long before the dash and colour and racket of the Street. It made them seem less imposing, a little shrunken, even, needing nourishment and sun. Their faces were a bit stiff and blank, like the faces of people in very old photographs, people who had sat and stared interminably, waiting for the flash.