From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (34 page)

Ren smiled and put the maths book aside. She might send it to Nick Etherington.

She inspected the last item from the backpack. Ren recognised the blue bag. It was from the games cupboard. The travelling games – magnetic backgammon and chess; spare dice and the old pack
of cards with pictures of kowhai-and-rata – were kept inside it. But the bag was too light to contain any of those things. Barney had clearly comandeered it for his own ends. The magnetic backgammon, the kowhai-and-rata cards and co had gone the way of all the other games in the living room cupboard and everything else in the Kettle apartment – either broken or buried beneath fallen masonry or destroyed by the water that had sprayed from wrecked faucets.

Ren had not been allowed to visit the apartment after the earthquake, but she had been assured by both Mum and Dad that very little indeed had been retrievable from either her bedroom or Barney’s or anywhere else, except, improbably, the bathroom. Hello soap holder and half-full shampoo bottles. But goodbye blue alarm clock,
Hark! A Vagrant
, Kettle Productions’ notebooks and the bean-depleted beanbag. Goodbye Barney’s film gear, the carefully catalogued cassettes and all the
Orange Boy Lives
zines and also many things long lost to the civilised world, said Mum, in the dusty pockets of Barney’s room. Goodbye computer and its memory. Goodbye, Felix La Marche and Hal Nicholas, whose lotus-eating retirement had not lasted all that long after all. Goodbye to it all.

But, here was a blue bag with a drawstring and something inside that Ren’s seeing fingers found familiar.

Ren pulled the drawstring and took the contents from the blue bag. Two small packages tied with green ribbon. And a separate booklet.

Two sets of
Orange Boy Lives
; one with five zines, the other with six. Barney had inserted the sole sixth zine into its proper place, perhaps intending to photocopy it later, to ensure there were four full sets. He had followed Ren’s instructions about safekeeping. Two sets were back in High Street under the rubble. But two sets remained. One each.

‘Well done, Kettle,’ said Ren. She was really very pleased with him.

‘Told you I was practical,’ said Barney.

‘And the portrait zine,’ said Ren. She turned the pages slowly. She stared and stared at the old golf bag and the empty picture frames in the Busby’s portrait. At Dad’s elbow. It didn’t make her feel sick. Or unbearably sad. (She had been afraid of that.)

Pete and Phil grinned from behind the counter in the Nut House.

‘Funny,’ said Ren. ‘The pictures don’t seem so mean now.’

‘They were never that mean,’ said Barney. ‘They were just different.’

The Nut House was reopening in November, on the north side of town. Pete and Phil had been rebuilding their business online.

Ren smiled and sighed at Sabrina in her candy-striped outfit.

‘I miss the coconut mushrooms the most.’

Sabrina had gone to the North Island to stay with her sister for six months. She was still weighing her options. She was coming to the Christmas Party though. With confectionery!

‘So?’ said Barney.

Ren turned to the library page, to the kids with earphones and the boy in the beanbag.

The South Precinct Library had been damaged but not destroyed. Repair work would take at least a year. In the meantime Mum and Ren were going to the library near Mariko’s; it had escaped the earthquake unscathed. There was a large non-fiction collection, bays and bays; but Ren had lost her appetite for nonfiction. She mostly borrowed the Tintin books.

Ren looked at the straight back of the man at the library desk, the satchel leaning against his chair.

‘But that’s Suit!’

How had she missed this the first time? It was so obvious now that she looked at it properly. Suit’s rear view was so distinctive. Girl had caught his long neck, the slightly sticking-out ears exposed by his short hair. And, of course, the satchel was a good clue.

‘It’s Suit!’ she said again. It was such a nice surprise.

Girl had drawn Wednesday afternoon in the library.

‘What a lummox,’ said Barney.

‘Yes,’ Ren agreed. ‘I was too mad. You can’t see things when you’re upset.’

She looked at the picture for a while longer.

‘Ah,’ said Ren.

Barney was quiet.

Ren got up from the floor and retrieved Suit’s letter from under her pillow. His mobile number was typed beneath his address at the top of the page.

The next day Dad drove Ren into the city to visit Suit. The Kettle’s van had been flattened by a cascade of brick and stone in the earthquake, but they could use Willy’s car at any time. Willy preferred his bike. He didn’t like to be away from it for too long. He had actually been on the Lapierre Zesty during the quake, cycling out to the prison to visit a client – which may have saved his life. The huge, beautiful light fitting in Willy’s office ceiling had crashed to the floor during the tumult, laying waste to much of the office and its contents.

Dad would visit Albert Anderson and Gemma while Ren was at Suit’s. They were living in Gemma’s house on the west side. Albert had begun rebuilding a comic collection in the spare bedroom.

In the car Dad talked about the alpaca babies and the pleasures of living in the country. It was like being a kid again, Mum had said, like being back on the orchard with Gran and Granpa. Perhaps a country life would be the way to go now.

Perhaps a dog would be the way to go now, said Ren. Or even a cat?

They had remembered Brown Betty, then, last seen on the day of the earthquake by Albert Anderson. She was trotting northwards, said Albert. Off into her vagrant life.

But seriously, said Dad, they could open a new emporium in one of the villages. Rentals were cheap. What did Ren think?

Ren had noticed that the adults in her life asked her this a lot. What do you think? Or, How would that be? they asked, with great care – about the new school, about visiting friends, about a new pair of shoes, about the possiblity of dance lessons, about which kind of soup she preferred, or which film they should watch tonight?

She wasn’t always clear what she thought these days. It was quite different to back when she had been eleven, back when she felt as if she knew everything
precisely
. (Pea and ham soup, for instance.)

As for life in the country, Ren remembered what Barney had said, the time he’d been an imaginary lone wildlife cameraman. It was
disturbing
, he had told her. He’d had to talk out loud to feel he wasn’t alone!

So far, Ren hadn’t felt alone in the country. On the whole, the country seemed all right. She liked the alpaca babies and the walk to school beaneath the big poplar trees lining the road; she liked frost on winter mornings and the hedgehog who wobbled across long distances each day to drink the saucer of milk Willy left out; she liked the paddock filled with yellow rape flowers and the creek she and Henrietta had dangled their feet in when Henrietta came to visit.

She liked all that, she did. Every day.

But every night, her dreams all took place on the High Street, which was crowded with old stone buildings and colourful shop signs and the pleasant commotion of voices and cars and strident starlings and trombones and the singing of all the different doorbells and the steady heartbeat of the alarm clock buried in Suit’s satchel.

When she woke, Ren was always surprised by the quiet. And then, when she got out of bed and looked out the window, there
were only tree tops as far as the eye could see, all the way to the stark white Alps in the distance.

Ren always turned her eyes quickly from the Alps. Though she had noticed that the snow on the Alps was melting, now. Soon they would be the unsnow-capped Alps of summer, and that was a development Ren was looking forward to. It was a good thing about summer. A less good thing about summer was that it would be hot again, eventually. Oh, it was all so tricky! And, how strange it was that two quite opposite things: snow-capped Alps and very hot days had become so mixed up in her head –

‘Excuse me, Slash, but could you really say that snow-capped and hot days were actually
opposites
? I think you may have made an irrational leap.’

Barney knew perfectly well what she meant. Snow and hot did not belong together, usually. They were at opposite ends of the temperature spectrum.

But the earthquake had forever mixed up the two in Ren’s head. It was a shame. One of them would always be happening, since it would always be either winter or summer. And, could that mean, Ren wondered often, that she was going to be reminded of that terrible day all year round, forever and ever?

When the earthquake struck, Ren, Henrietta and Lovie had all been upside down on the bars, laughing and laughing at the absurdity of each other’s inverted faces. (It was actually hard to laugh upside down. It was a fact.) Henrietta and Lovie looked eighty per cent familiar and friendly, around the wrong way, but also as if their features had been reproduced by an inept and spiteful artist.

Upside down was such a
molto
strange way of seeing the world that when the world began heaving and rolling it had taken the three of them some seconds before they had noticed what was happening. By the time they noticed they had been
thrown from the bars to the spongy rubber surface and nearby one of the teachers was yelling to everyone to
stay stay stay where you are
.

After that everything was either blurred or exaggeratedly vivid in Ren’s memory. A kaleidescope of images accompanied by a most alarming soundtrack: the Basilica’s dome sliding from its base. The asphalt parting like fabric under South Island Gran’s pinking shears. A new entrant trying to do a handstand! Ms Quinn’s chin trembling. Teachers and students pouring out of the school building when the first long quake was over, and joining them in the middle of the playground.

It was Mrs Newberry’s idea that they all sing the School Song to keep calm. She began the first lines in a rather wobbly voice and they had all joined in bit by bit, encouraged by their teachers. The shocked and shaken Kate Sheppard school body had stood close to each other in the playground, hot, hot, hot, under the midday sun, their collective heart hiccoughing as the ground continued at intervals to surge and swell.

In the middle of the song, three things had happened.

Lovie had whispered to Ren.

‘I’ve just thought of the question!’

Too-eee and be-e-e-el-buuuurd

‘What question?’ hissed Ren.

Plains and braaay-did

Rivers and hi-i-i-i-ls

‘The question for the answer
grease
.’

Kauri and ooooak

It was certainly strange what people said in times of crisis, thought Ren, much later.

‘It’s “
What is your favourite musical film
?” ’

‘Yes,’ said Ren. ‘You’re right.’

It was as she said this that Ren suddenly remembered Barney, not here at school, not safe in the throng of the Kate Sheppard
school body, but inside the Post Office, though nobody knew it except her.

She had frozen then, not singing, but not moving either. She must tell somebody, she thought, but still she did not move.

And then – how crazy it all was – everyone where they shouldn’t be, singing madly and the ground making you seasick – and then Dad appeared! His fist was banging at his heart, his mouth doing something strange.

Around them everyone sang.

In the ga-a-a-a-ze

Of the

Snow

Topped

Alps!

‘Dad,’ Ren had said, tremulously – confessing to him, as she had done quite often in the past after a Barney-inspired jaunt – ‘Barney’s not actually here.’

Suit was sitting upright in his bed. The last time Ren had seen him he had still been prone, unable to sit up for any period because of his back. The Kettles had visited Suit often since the earthquake, in ones, twos and threes, but Ren had not been for a while.

‘Hello, Suit,’ she said.

Hospital sheets were so
white
.

‘Hello, Ren,’ said Suit. ‘It is so very good to see you.’

He gave a crooked smile. The damaged side of his face did not move so well. Suit’s face and body were very changed. But, the biggest change was seeing Suit without a shirt and tie. It was hard not to notice that he had some chest hair peeking above his hospital nightgown.

‘Thank you for the letter,’ said Ren. ‘It was a surprise.’

‘A good surprise?’

Ren thought about that.

‘Mostly,’ she said.

Suit shared a room now, which was, he said, evidence of good progress. His roommate was asleep behind a curtain.

‘Lost a whole leg,’ said Suit, very quietly.

Suit himself had lost a lower leg and two fingers, which he had said – these things being relative
indeed
– felt like astonishing good fortune.

‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘Mireille has knitted at least half of her slippers in that chair.’

Ren placed the blue drawstring bag on the white sheet of Suit’s hospital bed.

‘I have a lot to tell you,’ she said. ‘And to show you. It’s a story with pictures.’

‘There is nothing better than a good story with pictures,’ said Suit, solemnly.

Ren pulled Mireille’s chair close to the bed. ‘I have a feeling Barney would disagree with that.’

Suit chuckled.

‘All right. A story with
moving
pictures. And sound.’

There were two stands either side of Suit’s bed. On one was a plastic jug, a glass of water with a straw and a box of tissues. On the other was a laptop.

‘Suit,’ said Ren, ‘have you gone digital?’

Suit held up his right hand. It was still bandaged, but the bandages were greatly reduced and his first two fingers and thumb were uncovered. He wiggled them.

‘Needs must,’ said Suit. ‘I can now hunt and peck with these two and with two on the other hand. The speed is about the same.’

Ren pulled the drawstring on the blue bag and took out the portrait zine. She opened it to the library picture and showed Suit.