From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (27 page)

You couldn’t tell where they were being filmed. With just stone wall behind them, it could be anywhere. Barney had done well.

‘It’ll look better on the big screen,’ said Barney. ‘But the black and white’s good.’

They both wore shirts, buttoned at the collars – almost like a costume. Girl sat straight, looking down the lens. Obi shuffled and scratched, his eyes flicked back and forth. Eventually he settled, looking slightly to the side of the camera. His hair was brushed back. It made his face very Orange Boy again.

Ren felt a small ache.

‘So,’ came Barney’s disembodied voice, ‘I’ll start you off with a simple question.’ He sounded confident. He was always confident behind the camera. It was quite different to the way he had sounded for most of the long first night with Obi and Girl.

Ren stole a look at actual Barney. He was giving nothing away.

‘You’ve been here for a while,’ said cameraman Barney. ‘Why did you want to be interviewed?’

Huh, thought Ren. Barney’s questions never started at the beginning. She herself preferred to start with, where were you born?

Linear story was so yesterday, Barney said.

Obi and Girl looked at one another, each wanting the other to speak.

Obi resumed his focus just to the right of the lens, and well to the right of Barney. He scratched his skinny thigh long and slow, then rubbed quickly at the side of his head. Pause. Then.

‘We knew this guy, he had a bench in the Gardens, and he
told us about this place. People used to use it, he said, but then the locals got onto it. It got boarded up. But he was a lock picker from way back, in his old life. And he felt sorry for us.’

‘He was being a dad,’ said Girl. She peered at the lens almost suspiciously.

‘Huh,’ said Obi, sceptically. ‘He brought us here one night. He got us inside and left us to it. That was back in November. We slept upstairs first, on some carpet.’

It was amazing to hear Obi talk at length. In this film he was yet another person – not tyrannical Obi, clipped and almost mean, nor Orange Boy, wordless and haunted. Not that he’d answered Barney’s question. Or not yet. They had noticed this. People often didn’t answer the question – or not immediately. Unless they were pros, like Sally or Albert. Or Suit! He’d been a wonderful surprise. But most people wound their way to an answer. Most people went the long way. The non-linear way.

‘It was good here, no one bothering us. No other street types.’

‘We’re not street types,’ said Girl.

It was almost as if Obi and Girl were being interviewed separately, as if they were addressing quite different audiences. Ren glanced at Barney, but his eyes were fixed on the little screen.

‘We were only staying a while,’ said Obi. ‘We knew it would get tricky. Too many people around. Someone’d notice in the end. But we liked making it cosy.’ His eyes flicked to the camera, away again.

They both fell into silence at that point.

Ren waited. She could feel cameraman Barney waiting, too. And flesh-and-blood Barney.

‘Did you have any money?’ asked cameraman Barney, finally.

Obi’s eyes, flicking.

‘Sometimes. We sold stuff. Did portraits at the markets. Chalk art. But it costs. And you’re supposed to have a licence.’

‘How did you get your materials?’ said Barney.

‘That stuff’s boring,’ said Obi, sharply. ‘We don’t want to talk about all that. It’s not the point. And we don’t want to talk about our old lives.’

‘Done and dusted,’ said Girl.

What on
earth
? Ren turned to Barney again, but he just pointed at the screen.

There was a long pause on screen. Ren looked wonderingly at the grainy surface, the diverging heads.

What did Obi mean? They
wanted
to hear everything about
all that
. It
was
the point. They certainly wanted to hear about their lives. It would be as Barney had said, as Ren had agreed. The interviews would show Obi and Girl’s stories, now and then, just as they were showing everyone else’s. The interviews would finally stitch together the full story of Orange Boy and Crimson Girl and connect it to latter-day Obi and Girl. They would find out why they had become homeless. How they survived. How they got all their
things
. They would learn about their clever thieving. Their nocturnal exploits. Their mysterious envelopes and zines. Their past and their present and their future, as Barney had said, during one of his several sermons on this subject.

Obi was looking at Girl. She chewed her nails thoughtfully.

Into the silence came Barney’s inevitable question.

‘You don’t want to talk about your lives?’

His voice sounded rather less confident. Ren snatched another look. Staring straight ahead.

‘Nope,’ said Obi.

‘Pointless,’ said Girl. She looked away from the lens finally. At Barney. A near smile. ‘Sorry, Maestro.’

‘Why do you want an interview then?’

Good question. And back to the beginning.

‘We’re
telling
you,’ said Obi, a whiff of his after-midnight self.

‘We were only going to stay a bit, a few weeks,’ said Girl. ‘Leave before Christmas. Everyone’s crazy then, shops are really
crowded. No one notices. Be riskier after.’

She folded her arms at that, like a full stop at the end of a sentence. It almost made Ren laugh. Folding her arms made Girl look suddenly ordinary, not at all intimidating. She was like Henrietta being impatient, or Mum arguing a point.

Obi waited for her to resume.

Cameraman Barney seemed to be waiting too. The silence stretched and as it lengthened it seemed to Ren to become awkward. And now she felt sad for cameraman Barney, and Barney-beside-her. His big idea had been thoroughly dashed. No X-factor making the documentary notmerelygoodbutgreat. All skewered by a few brief words. She wanted to turn off the camera. It was painful listening to the silence, watching Obi and Girl staring at Barney, feeling Barney’s disappointment.

But.

‘The thing about your brother,’ Dad had said once, ‘is he’s pretty much unpuncturable. Undeflatable. He is constitutionally incapable of true collapse. He just always bounces back. It’s a great skill.’

‘
Fine
,’ said cameraman Barney, right on cue, his voice assured. ‘No past lives. So why are we here? Why
did
you stay?’

Ren grinned at Barney-beside-her.

‘Wait,’ he breathed, not looking. ‘Watch.’

On the screen, Obi made a decision. You could see it. He gave a huffing sigh, he turned and looked directly at the camera for the first time. It was almost a shock to see his pale eyes, straight on, holding your gaze.

‘We started watching you guys,’ he said. ‘We saw you filming. That weirdo Christmas thing. You were so
weird
, filming all over the Street. Everyone seeing you and you never cared. You were the weirdest little
weirdos
. You yelling orders and old Specs with her clipboard. Your friends all marching off. We thought you were twats.’

Ren turned to Barney, goggling. Her mouth was agape, too.

‘
Wait
,’ said Barney.

On screen: several beats. Obi smirking. Girl shrugging.

‘Thanks,’ said cameraman Barney, drily. ‘And once again,
why
did you stay?’

Ren had never admired Barney so much. How smooth he sounded, how sophisticated. He wasn’t offended. Or he wasn’t showing it. He sounded poised and kind of light-hearted, like Albert Anderson. He sounded grown up. It was a fact.

On screen, Girl unfolded her arms. Obi made a funny face. He scratched his head for several seconds.

‘You were weird,’ he said. ‘But you were funny. And you knew everyone on the Street. And everyone on the Street seemed all right. Mostly. Not Big Dick. Or Claude the screaming queen –’

Ren oggled Barney once more, really quite offended on behalf of Dick and Claude. Of course, they constantly poked fun at various Street characters themselves, but it did not seem right at all when strangers did it.

But, still, Barney stared at the screen. And cameraman Barney said nothing.

‘– but most of them. And you were always there somewhere, the two of you, with your little friends, or your big ones. Or by yourselves. And you had
plans
.’

The tone in Obi’s voice did not match his words, thought Ren. It was not at all fond. It had a lip-curling aspect, like Claude when he assessed customers’ clothes.

Obi sat forward on his chair. His face was working.

‘You were
making
stuff,’ said Obi. ‘And everyone helped you! You were everyone’s
pets
.’

‘We liked your life,’ said Girl, flatly. ‘We liked watching it. It was like our own film, or TV series.’

‘Yeah,’ said Obi. ‘We’d think, What will Big-Hair Guy be doing today? And the midget sidekick with the Coke-bottle glasses?’

Ren gasped. Heat rose up her neck and into her face.

How
rude
. And actually mean. How horrible.

She could be that rude and mean right back, if she wanted. She could say Obi was scrawny and plain. With pale eyebrows like an old man. She could say Girl –

‘It
was
like a TV show,’ said Obi. ‘We should have left, but we couldn’t stop watching. New episode every day. New stuff: your names, what you did after school, where you hung out, what you ate, what everyone thought of your weird film, what you might film next –’

‘It was easy,’ said Girl. ‘You were in your own little world, you never noticed us. You’re always talking, loudly, all the time, all over the place; you don’t care who hears you. We heard you everywhere.’

‘Maestro and Specs,’ said Obi. ‘King and Queen of High Street.’

Girl laughed, and then Obi suddenly smiled at the camera and he did not look one bit scrawny or plain, or old-mannish.

But Ren was still recovering. She had her hands on her hot face.

‘We should have gone,’ he said, ‘but we wanted to stay and watch.’

‘And then we wanted to do more than watch,’ said Girl. ‘We wanted to make it a bit interesting.’

‘We wanted to mix it up.’

They looked at each other then and laughed, shrugged their shoulders.

Girl rolled her lips together, like she’d just applied lipstick. Obi was thinking. He went to speak and stopped. And tried again.

‘We thought you should know about
us
. We thought you should see what
we
made. We should have gone,’ said Obi, for the third time. He smiled again, almost sadly.

‘But I suppose we wanted to –’ He paused. ‘Make friends, I s’pose.’

Girl shrugged.

‘So we sent you a letter.’

Cut.

Ren watched the screen static. She listened to its buzz. She could not quite move or look at Barney. Nor did Barney move. He watched the static too. They sat, side-by-side, watching, listening, digesting.

Now it was Friday and Ren sat on her bed again. She waited for Barney to return from the second interview in the Post Office.

Today at 1.30 he had interviewed Hwan, Fern and Baby Soo, upstairs in their apartment above Comic Strip. After that he had filmed pick-ups of Brown Betty doing her rounds on the Street. The Ambulatorix had come upon him on the footpath beside the Mediterranean. Ren was surprised. Barney was supposed to be inside the Post Office before school came out, before the enquiring eyes of Henrietta, Edward and the others were at large on the Street.

Barney showed them all a little sequence of the tabby in the Mediterranean garden. She had pounced on a skink sunning itself on the hot concrete, under a shrub. The resulting chase was gruesomely entertaining – though not for Lovie, who had put her hands over her eyes. It
was
rather terrible, thought Ren. You watched the merciless stalking and beheading of an innocent skink and somehow you admired Brown Betty: her wily disinterest and infinite patience; her lazily thumping tail; her deft, deathly swat.

Barney was planning to use this footage at intervals throughout the final doco.

‘Nature red in tooth and claw!’ he said. (A quote of Dad’s.)

‘Worth getting,’ he said to Ren when they sat briefly on the leather sofa. ‘Even though I’m late.’

Jack had gone home to pack for an away cricket game. Edward,
Benjamin and JohnLeo were having a film night. Henrietta, Lovie and Bingo were going to the beach with Sally for a swim and fish and chips.

Ren had watched them all depart for their various entertainments. It made her wistful.

Barney was rewinding the interview at Hwan and Fern’s. He wanted to show Ren Baby Soo barfing up avocado, the
greenness
of it.

‘We don’t really have a normal life any more,’ said Ren.

She was picturing the great stretch of sand at North Beach, playing Footprint with Henrietta and Lovie, squealing in the waves. Or sitting in Kazimierz’s old peeling sofa eating carrot sticks and salted cucumber and watching
Back to the Future
for the thousandth time, laughing at Benjamin when he did air guitar with Michael J. Fox.

‘Artists don’t have normal lives,’ said Barney, cheerfully.

‘I’m not an artist,’ said Ren.

‘Yes you are,’ said Barney. ‘Sort of. You’re a
top
Slasher. You combine a number of skills essential to the art of film.’

‘Wow!’ He stood. ‘I love it when stuff like that just comes out of my mouth!’

He had departed then himself, planning a circuitous approach to the Post Office, but secure in the knowledge that the rest of the Street children were now busy.

Ren had wandered home and climbed aboard her bed with
Hark! A Vagrant
and four crackers and cheese.

She thought about the Post Office interview now, imagining its progress. Barney had agreed with Obi and Girl that he would film their projects: the zines and board games, their scrapbook of portraits. He would film them planning, drawing, cutting and glueing. He would interview them about their creations. They would relate the story of the YOU envelopes, the making of the
Orange Boy
zines.

‘But why won’t you come?’ Barney had said, on the way to school that morning. ‘You can slip in after school. They want you to come.
I
want you to. And you’ve done the questions.’