From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (28 page)

Ren had half wanted to go.

But she had also not wanted to. And not wanting had won.

She might have liked to see the latest Obi – fluent, almost chatty Obi – in the flesh. Just for a minute. And it might have been good to try and talk to folded-arms Girl from the grainy black and white film. Briefly.

But most of her wanted to
keep
them on the screen, inside the camera, as she sheepishly thought of it. The Post Office residents were easier on screen – and in their zines: that was the truth. It was altogether more comfortable meeting them in those ways, Ren had decided. She would wait for Barney to bring them back to her bedroom. You could stare and stare at them then, without them noticing; without the possibility of irking them in some way; without the possibility of them scowling or biting back at you.

You just couldn’t tell how it would go when you were with them in the flesh. That’s what the long Post Office night had told Ren. And the first interview. Being with them was unpredictable. Disorderly even. And certainly illogical. She had not explained this to Barney. She had just said it was too tricky if they both went during the day. It would take that much longer getting in and out, she said; it would increase the possibility of being seen.

Barney would be disgusted to hear her real reason. It was a fact.

They had watched the first interview through several times. It was much like receiving a new zine. You gulped it down but then you had to go back again and again, to taste it over and over, to get to the bottom of it.

‘They wanted to be friends,’ marvelled Barney. He had lain in the beanbag, with his hands over his stomach, as if replete after a
feast. Ren had lain on the floor, too, watching the images again in her mind’s eye, listening again to the words.

‘Mmmm,’ she said.

‘They wanted to make
friends
,’ said Barney. ‘And they knew enough about us to know that we would love the zines. That we liked stories. And mysteries.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Ren again. It was true. In a way.

‘They wanted us to see their work, too,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s what friends
do
,’ said Barney. ‘They share their stuff. Benjamin watches my videos and I listen to him play his guitar.’

Not really. Barney didn’t really listen to Benjamin playing his guitar. He
filmed
Benjamin playing his guitar and then Benjamin watched the film.

‘They wanted to make friends,’ said Barney, yet again. He was besotted with the idea, thought Ren. Everything else about the interview – Obi and Girl’s refusal to talk about their lives or the detail of their time on the Street – had fled his head. It didn’t matter, said Barney, waving a hand, waving away his shining idea of three nights ago, thethrillingalchemy’s recent brilliant offspring.

Barney’s sudden swerves, they sometimes made Ren feel seasick.

‘They’re artists!’ he said. ‘They just want to talk about their work. And
that’s
why they wanted to be friends. They knew we’d understand.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Ren.

She was remembering the Post Office night again: Obi and Girl’s ardent, almost greedy, questions about their family, their home, their friends, their birthday presents … Those questions had been unusual and they had come readily, as if they had been waiting for a long time to ask them, as if they had compiled a list.

And something else, too.

We
liked your life
, Girl had said in the interview.
It was like a TV show
, said Obi. That was funny, and almost nice. But the way they had said it was not so nice.

And
Big-Hair Guy and his midget sidekick
. That wasn’t even funny, not really. It was unkind. It was a little bit malicious – a word Ms Temple had once applied to Wilton Maxwell’s deliberate tripping up of Rosie Hamlyn in the cafeteria as she came past with a tray of lunch food.

Ren could agree with Barney in some ways. Obi and Girl did want to make friends.

And, they
were
artists. They made marvellous things. That would be a fine part of
The Untold Story
.

And Obi’s true smile, Girl’s folded arms and constant shrug, they did make something catch in Ren’s chest.

We liked your life.

Yes. But Ren did not believe that Obi and Girl liked
them
– actual Barney and Ren. Or, not very much. In a way she didn’t blame them for that. She could see why. But it was not a comfortable thing to know. Not one bit.

And it made her not like them back. She couldn’t help it. It was a fact.

Ren did not say any of this to Barney on that Wednesday night. She didn’t want to puncture his little hot-air balloon. There was the second interview to come, and perhaps there would be a third.

She would wait and see, she decided, lying on her bedroom floor, her arms behind her head.

She had thought then with such longing about the first
Orange Boy
zine, about the first days of their envelope chase. It had been so much better then, Ren thought. Not knowing about Orange Boy and his artist. That had been altogether better. Those days had been full of wondering – and wonder.

Those days had been
promising
.

It was very different now, though Ren could not think of the right word for it.

It was –

It
was
.

Ren picked up the last cracker crumbs with damp fingertips. She licked her fingers. Then she applied her tongue to the plate, daintily lifting the remaining flecks of cracker.

Six thirty. Barney had been there for nearly three hours. It must be going well.

Ren distracted herself by mentally rehearsing the timetable, something she did several times a day. As Arch-Slasher she knew everything that was coming next.

Eleven more days of filming and rushes.

Tomorrow morning at Coralie’s Café.

Afternoon, in the Street. Mia and silent Marcel on Sunday morning.

Suit and Mireille in the afternoon.

Li Mai and Ping on Monday after school.

She was like a walking appointment diary. She could recite the entirety of the next six weeks. It was all laid out in her head on a perfectly symmetrical grid. Edward and Henrietta’s parents on Tuesday before the restaurant opened. Mum and Dad on Wednesday – an evening interview, in the Emporium. And finally all the Street children …

It was always good to know what was coming next. That was what made her a true Slasher, Ren thought.

And that was what made her not want to go back to the Post Office.

Barney, on the other hand, actually enjoyed not knowing what was coming next. He raced headlong into notknowing. He loved it. He
invited
it. He had
enjoyed
the change in his plans in the first interview with Obi and Girl, he told Ren. It had made him tingle
with adrenalin, he said. It was an offshoot of thethrillingalchemy, he said. You could call it thethrillingappearanceoftheunexpected. He was very pleased with that phrase. He had given a little bow.

The thought of a second and third trip to the Post Office excited Barney. Who knew what would happen? Was this what made him an artist, too?

And Obi and Girl? They didn’t know what was happening next in their lives. They didn’t seem to care. And they were artists. Perhaps the two things went together.

It was certainly puzzling, thought Ren. It made her feel separate from Barney. And sad.

But here was Barney, now. And, yes, the second interview must have gone okay. She could tell by the way he announced his arrival: front door,
bang
. Internal stairs door,
bang
. Living room door,
bang
. She could practically predict his arrival in her room up to the second –

‘C’mon Slash!’ he said, crashing through the door. He threw something at her and Ren caught it clumsily. A small package.

‘Leave that!’ he ordered. He was rewinding at her desk. ‘Second Post Office Interview coming up. Ta da!’

Ren put the package aside and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Too slow for Barney. He was Fizz Ball Barney, the satisfaction practically foaming off him.

‘C’
mon
!’

At Coralie’s Café the next morning, Ren saw Obi and Girl together for the second time. And also, the last.

In the middle of the Saturday crush and clatter at the café, as nine hundred coffees were served and eighty-nine (Organic) Iced Rodents consumed, as a chess game played out and a Jenga tower crashed to the table amid shrieks and sighs, as the Upside Down Catfish and company performed their water ballet, and Barney framed a nifty shot through an aquarium wall – in the middle of
all that, Ren used Gran’s camcorder to film a sweeping shot from barista Laurel’s perspective. Ren was marvelling at how Laurel could chat and make four different coffees at the same time, when through the viewfinder, she saw the slightly hunched backs of Obi and Girl at the far end of the café. They sat on high stools at the window bench, in the corner, at the end of a row of stool-sitters, their backs to the counter, so that the casual eye might have missed them. To Ren’s accustomed eye they were immediately notable.

Unmistakeable.

Ren had not seen Obi and Girl arrive, but of course she had not been looking at the swing doors all the time and, besides, on Saturday mornings people streamed constantly in and out, so it was easy to miss individuals.

Nor did she see Obi and Girl leave. She held the camera on them in the window recess as long as possible (not long: she knew that to point the camera at them lengthily would draw attention to that corner of the café), then she moved quickly to the next Three-Question-Interview on her list (‘Timing’s
tight
, timing’s
everything
!’ were Barney’s last words before they began). She went to Josh, the breakfast cook, who was plating up a row of orders for table seven. When Ren turned round from the serving bench five minutes later, the corner window stools were empty.

Had they really been there? But for the evidence of the footage which Ren and Barney would watch some hours later, Ren might have believed she’d imagined their appearance, so crowded and confusing was all the activity going on around.

Though she felt as if she was in a particularly noisy and hectic dream, in the minutes after the two had swiftly come and gone, Ren registered one thing about the window bench where Obi and Girl had sat. On top of it, in the corner against the wall, was a small pile of magazines. And though time was
tight
, though time was
everything
and she had four more Three-Question-Interviews before she was to help Barney film the Port Hills cyclists’ table –
Ren put down the camcorder and walked as fast as possible towards the window bench, squeezing past packed tables, stepping over babies in their carseats, skilfully sliding by oncoming staff with their precarious piles of plates. Once at the window bench she hoisted herself onto the farthest stool, which was still warm from the departed guest. Quietly and systematically, she flicked through each magazine until in the middle of the fifth one,
Better Homes and Gardens
, she found what she had thought must surely be there: a rectangle envelope, addressed to YOU.

(Are you there, Moo? In the café, in the middle of the lovely riot, as you liked to call it? I have imagined you there, with your friends, in that last scene.

Near the Jenga game, I thought. Watching the children happily building the tower. Holding your breath at the gingerly removed and replaced pieces; sighing in relief each time the moves are successful. (It is always so hard to pull the gaze from a Jenga game, don’t you find?) And then, the inevitable, fatal move, and the carefully balanced edifice collapses. Exclamations. Commiserations. You, Bambi, Mariko and Judy. Flat whites, peppermint tea and brown rice porridge. And the children, ever optimistic, beginning, piece by piece, to start over …

I am being fanciful. And I am also delaying a little. You will want to read on, I know you will.

The sixth envelope has been delivered. And discovered. How very astute of Ren. Amid all her dark thoughts, the tremendous activity and the filming demands.

You will have been keeping track of dates and time, Moo. You will know which Saturday this was. You will know what comes next.)

Eight pages. Seven pictures. Each identical.

But no. Look closer, look carefully. Each succeeding picture is a little different to the one before. Each picture loses one or two or several items, so that by the time you come to the last page the final picture is substantially different to the first.

Spot the difference.

Orange Boy Lives VI
began with the familiar tableau of the Post Office den. Bed, table, books, games, clothes. But, picture by picture, the tableau slowly emptied; in twos and threes, items were removed: shoes, silk dressing gown, game boxes, brass bell, backpacks … On the last page there remained the table, neatly laid for a tea party. The pile of bedside books with NOP on top. The beer can
shelves, empty, except for the Kissing Couple salt-and-pepper set. The bed was stripped of rugs, the jumble of cushions beneath left exposed, scattered and skewed like dismantled vertebrae.

In the middle, composed and apparently unconcerned, her tail curled about her, was Brown Betty, staring straight out of the page at the viewer.

‘They’re leaving,’ said Ren.

‘They can’t be,’ said Barney. ‘They didn’t say. They would have said. Yesterday. They would have
said
.’

He was astonished.

They sat in the leather sofa, exhausted after the morning at Coralie’s and the afternoon in the Street. People, familiar and unknown, smiled at them as they passed by, they called out to them from over the road.

‘Tuckered out?’

‘Good effort!’

‘They pay you for all that work?’

‘When’s the première?’

They had not opened the envelope until nearly 5 p.m., after the other Street children had dispersed to their homes. They, too, had all been at work on the Street throughout the afternoon, busy on behalf of Kettle Productions – holding mikes, scouting vox pops, taking names and emails of people interviewed, running from one end of the Street to the other, on orders from Barney.

‘Blimey, I love having minions!’ said Barney. ‘Imagine a cast and crew of
thousands
.’

A potential High Street set and scene had streamed fully formed through his head: hostile skies, a dystopic future, pitched battle, a vast militia of armed kids pouring in from surrounding streets, fierce and focused, ready for the final clash with the adult tyrants. Ready to take back the Street. Snipers in the apartment windows. Gas attacks. Cratered buildings. General Dick Scully, grizzled and enraged and stumbling like a wounded bear. The
leader of the Kids’ Army, a guy with an impressive mane of hair, fourteen or fifteen years, his – but no. He’d have to be behind the camera. Someone could play him, though …

Under the cover of Ren’s notebook they opened the envelope and read the zine. The pictures told a plain story, but Barney could not, would not, believe what his eyes told him.

‘It was always going to happen,’ said Ren.

This was the kind of thing Mum said when something completely surprising occurred. Like, the Monkey King in Duncan Street suddenly closing. Or, Rob, the great guy at Toto’s, the one you could exchange
Star Wars
trivia with, resigning one day out of the blue. Or Rosie, Dad’s assistant, breaking up with her girlfriend after seven years. ‘That was always going to happen,’ Mum would say. Or, ‘I knew that would happen.’ Or, ‘No surprises there.’ It was beyond annoying.

Barney felt like putting Ren in her eleven-year-old place. He felt like hitting out. He felt nasty.

‘Like you would know, Professor. Like you have a hot-line to the future. You and your four radar eyes and your eleven-year-old
logical
brain.’

‘Well, it
was
always going to happen.’

It was actually impossible to put Ren in her place.

‘Why are you so surprised?’

Well, for a
start
, he snarled, though only in his head. He had been counting on a third interview: that was one thing. There was still the full story of the
Orange Boy
zines. There had not been enough time yesterday.

‘Were you and your
illogical
brain thinking they’d stay there forever?’

No, he hadn’t thought that.

Not exactly.

Of course Obi and Ren could not stay in the Post Office forever. Barney knew that. What with Willy knowing and Dick on
more or less constant bloodhound watch and people being vigilant after all the thefts – even his own visits to the Post Office – of course all that made things pretty dicey. He knew that. If you thought about it of course they’d have to go, it would all have to end.

But naturally he had tried not to think about it.

And Barney did not
want
it to end. Not one bit.

He tried to remember life before the beginning of
The Untold Story
, before the arrival of the first envelope. School. Home. Laughing with Benjamin. Earlier film efforts. Tea with Albert Anderson. All fine in their own way. But also all, somehow, so ordinary now.

The last six weeks had been
exceptional
. Like nothing else ever.

Barney had almost persuaded himself that the glorious oddness of the last six weeks – this backstory mystery humming away in their lives, their undercover envelope-chasing selves – would somehow be able to continue. It would go on into some infinite future of teasing parcels, brain-stretching speculations and midnight assignations, a perpetual secret life that he and Ren could blissfully worry away at.

And some part of him had secretly hoped – perhaps believed – that the edgy cat-and-mouse, the willtheywontthey courtship with Obi and Girl would have time to develop, that eventually they would be, could be, friends: Barney and Ren in their happyfamily goingtoschool filmglory lives, Obi and Girl in their coldtea, stalebagel, gamemaking Post Office hideout.

It was absurd, of course. He knew that. He
did
.

But yesterday, inside the Post Office filming them both for the second time it had been – what?

It had been ecstasy. It was a fact.

There had been very little conversation, but the absence of it had not been awkward at all. Obi and Girl had gone to work more or
less immediately, on either side of the tea party table, their paper and pens and pencils at hand. So Barney had gone to work too. He had held the camera on them, as close as possible, zooming out just occasionally to catch Girl’s face as she worked, her teeth mashing her bottom lip, or Obi giving his head one of its feverish rubs. For nearly three hours he had recorded them, drawing.

He had recorded the true lives of Orange Boy and Crimson Girl.

Through the viewfinder he watched Girl’s pencil, working on the first page of a freshly folded A3 zine, creating, with amazing swiftness, a picture of Ping and Li Mai – or several Pings and Li Mais, across a number of panels. Their successive poses were like an array of unusual sculptures, performing tai chi on Little Wilt, as they did, very early, each weekday morning.

He had watched Obi pencil quick lines on the second page; had watched, too, long moments as his hand rested and you could almost see it thinking. Then came more lines, shadings and rubbings, until Barney could discern a collection of items: an elderly golf bag and clubs leaning on an antique writing desk; stacked, empty picture frames, as skeletal and sad in the picture as Barney always found them in the Emporium: because, yes, it was a corner of Busby’s Emporium that Obi was drawing. There was even a glimpse of Dad – in the right of the picture: a crooked elbow with a rolled-up sleeve and a tell-tale quarter-moon tattoo.

And then Girl turned the page and began a new picture: Sabrina, in her storybook candy-striped dress and white pinafore, smiling behind her counter. When Sabrina was completed Girl passed the picture to Obi who drew the cabinet and a display of White Menace bonbons – toffees, caramel, fudge balls, acid drops and lollipops. Then Obi began a new picture: beanbags, tables, chairs, bookshelves – the Library! – and Girl peopled the scene, this time with pen. She drew teenagers with earphones; a kid in a beanbag, reading; the rear view of a straight-backed man in a suit,
papers spread before him, a satchel at rest beside his chair.

The zine passed back and forth between them until seven pictures were complete. In every one Girl had drawn the people and Obi the objects.

So. That was the way it worked.

They drew with great intensity and cooperativeness. They were like one person with four arms and multiple pencil-and-pen-wielding fingers, just a few words exchanged, a grunt here and there.

The final pictures were like their creators: sudden, spiky and unsettling. They were quite different to the
Orange Boy
zines. They were differently flavoured. This was not the melancholy recall of a rickety childhood, of disappearing pets and grandparents and playmates. This was a different kind of story world – it made Barney think of books he had liked to look at when he was younger: animals in their habitats. The giraffe with her acacia tree. The rhino lolling on the savannah. The kiwi in the night-time bush.

Obi and Girl had placed the Street people in their habitats. The junk-man in his antique-slash-junk shop. The confectionery cook in her White Menace store. The bibliophile Montgomerys, almost lost in a thicket of books.

It was another version of
The Untold Story
. The same story, from a different perspective. And in soundless stills. As was their habit, Obi and Girl preferred to record what they saw without words. They were really not much at home with words.

But they were kindred spirits. Thinking this made Barney blush. Kindred spirit was Ren’s quaint phrase, but in the hushed, out-of-the-world Post Office front room, its romance seemed just right. Though, blimey, he would never say it aloud.

Beneath their bristly surfaces, despite the fact he knew very little about them, Barney
recognised
Obi and Girl. He recognised their concentration, their non-committal grunts, their one-eyed, simmering sense of purpose. He recognised himself.

The second Post Office filming (it wasn’t exactly an interview),
Barney told Ren later, was one of the best experiences of his life in Kettle Productions – in his life full stop! He tried to explain why. He wanted her to understand exactly why he had felt so happy, so
content
, as he filmed.

‘It was like we were all
molto
connected. Kind of separately, but also together. Doing our thing.’

‘That is a contradiction,’ said Ren, tartly. ‘Separately but together.’ She was looking through the zine. Obi and Girl had presented it to Barney before he left.

‘And they know everything. They
get
everyone – like Sabrina in her whacko costume. It’s like they know the Street as well as we do.’

‘They don’t love it like we do,’ said Ren. ‘They make it seem different.’ She held out the picture of Doris, Henrietta and Edward’s mother.

Barney laughed. ‘Well, she has got a big middle.’

‘But it’s not
that
big,’ said Ren. ‘And Pete and Phil look like vampires.’

It was true. Pete and Phil
did
look like vampires. Girl had exaggerated their long faces and skinny, nut-diet frames. She had made their hands bigger and somehow sinister.

‘They make everyone seem silly. They look like Happy Families cards. Mr Comb the Barber. Mrs Bun the Baker’s wife.’

‘It’s just their style,’ said Barney.

But Ren would not share Barney’s exalted feelings about The Second Post Office Interview. She was interested enough to watch the portraits coming to life on screen – ‘It’s
real time
, Slash, see,
real
time!’ – but she was not at all fond of the finished product. Barney had been puzzled by her lack of enthusiasm. Then he had been wounded. Then he had been
molto
annoyed.

Ren was behaving
badly
. It was a fact.

‘It’s their
style
! It’s their signature. Everyone has their
signature
on the page.’ (He was quoting Albert.) ‘It’s the way they see the world.’

‘It’s mean,’ said Ren.

‘Kate Beaton is
mean
.’

‘But she’s funny. And anyway, I don’t know the people she’s mean about. Except for Anne of Green Gables.’

‘That’s what artists do!’ Barney yelled. ‘That’s what we’re doing with the doco. Warts and All!
Blimey
!’

Ren had remained obdurate. She had not wanted the portrait zine in her room. How ridiculous. Barney had stomped off with it and the camera. After dinner he had gone straight to his room and watched the interview all the way through.

His dreams had been all hands and pencils and snatches of murmured conversation. His first thought on waking had been of Obi and Girl, and when he might do the third interview: when he might hear, finally, the story of the
Orange Boy
zines.

But now, he sat, not twelve hours later, the sixth zine in his hand and the biggest ever worm of disappointment, a
sea monster
of disappointment, writhing in his chest.

‘I don’t get why it’s so sudden?’ he said. The appearance of Orange
Boy VI
, the disappointment of it, did not match with yesterday’s pure and satisfying time in the Post Office.

‘And why are they
telling
us? What do they want us to do?’

Barney spoke just for the sake of it. He’d often found that if you just said any old thing, if you just filled the air with words, you could stifle a bad feeling for a while. You could feel better for a minute or two.

‘Huh, why do they do anything?’ said Ren. ‘Probably just to get us all wondering again.’

Ren’s changed attitude to Obi and Girl upset Barney. It was since that first interview, he knew. She was holding a big grudge about the midget thing, about the Coke-bottle glasses. He wished it wasn’t so.

He stared, unseeing, at Mariko’s window across the road. He
sniffed his armpit absently. Filming made him sweat like crazy. And the heat wasn’t helping.

‘Eeew! Don’t lift your arm. It’s putrid.’