The Cartographer (25 page)

I had an idea that there was no one home, because I had listened very carefully before I opened the door. Even so, I stood quietly for another minute before I took a look around, just to make sure. The perfect place to listen, I decided, was a closet in the hall that was pretty much in the centre of the house, like the hub of a wheel. It was not coat-wearing weather so when the people who lived here turned up they would be spared the embarrassment of opening the closet door and going: ‘Hello! What's this then?'

Well, they came home just in time for tea, and there were two of them. They went straight to the kitchen and, as usual, the captain of the team, the bloke's wife, was doing all the talking, and you could tell that she was pretty ropable about one of the ump's decisions, which I gather had been crucial to the outcome of the match, in which the local eleven had ended up getting beaten like an egg flip. This is understandable, of course, as everyone knows that all umps are drongos and would be better off getting a real job, instead of trying to stop decent hard-working players doing theirs. That was the general view down at the Orange Tree and it was the general view in this house too, as far as I could tell. There was the sudden clinking of glass and the fizzy sound of a bottle of beer being opened — I would give you eight to five it was Abbots Lager — and the two settled down to analyse the match, as you do.

Now, I don't know if you've ever been to one of those magician shows — Tom and me went with Mum to a matinee of
Mandrake the Magician
at the Coliseum Theatre in town a few years ago — but if you have you'll know that feeling: the
pretty girl has just been sawn in half with the giant circular saw, and is screaming her head off, and there's blood all over the place, and some old lady passes out and they have to lug her into the foyer to get some fresh air, and then Mandrake pulls the bits of body apart to show you that this is for real and you may now feel free to barf on the person sitting in front of you. And then he sticks the bits of girl back together and taps on the box with his magic wand and shouts: ‘Abracadabra!' And suddenly she's back in one piece again, and you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Well that's how I felt right then when I heard those two discussing the match.

And that's because the bloke's voice belonged to my father.

I always wondered what I would say to Dad when I saw him again. But I should have known that when it comes to people, things never turn out the way you think they will.

In this case, I didn't actually
see
him – well, the front of him anyway – because when I peeked around the door about a thousandth of an inch, he was facing away from me. Also, I didn't actually get to talk to him either. All I got to do was listen, and when I wasn't listening — most of it was dead boring — I would go
Geez!
and
Wow!
and
Jesus Christ!
to myself every few seconds, because of what was happening to me.

Also, I was thinking that it was quite a coincidence to be in the same house as Dad, when all I had been doing was exploring, though I did come here because this address was on Granddad's phone pad. Granddad! Jesus, he
knew
! But — and I couldn't get past ‘but'. So all I could do was listen, which was what I had come to do, and see if there was anything interesting for the map.

But Dad hadn't changed: he always liked to have a drop of bitter on a Saturday after the footy, and he hadn't let the fact that the footy season was over get in the way of him having a glass or two. You could say Dad loved to drink — more than anything or anybody. And he liked to talk politics, which I knew would be coming up shortly. And he hated half of the blokes at work, and all the bosses, who w ere all Poms, and
that was always next though by this time he tended to get a bit predictable and repetitive. If he was still awake at this point, things started to get a bit blurred. It was usually at this point that Mum would go bonkers and start to take over, like in the tag-team matches at the Tin Shed, when Big Chief Little Wolf would take over from Cowboy Jack Bence.

 

So there goes the tag, and Cowboy Jack's out of the ring, and Mum's in. Is she going to do what she always does, sports fans? You bet she is! She's going straight for the sleeper hold. Yes, sports fans, she will now talk flat out for about a week, which will put her opponent into a coma. And now you can see how his eyes, which were already red from the grog and the match, are going kind of glassy, so that he is now a lot more interested in the colour of his beer than in what Mum is saying, which is the whole point of the sleeper hold. Normally, this would be the end of the match, folks, because the sleeper is a submission hold, but Mum will, if she is running true to form, ease off a bit, so that Dad doesn't die or anything even though he probably wants to, which allows her to switch to a more subtle hold — I call it the creeper hold because it sort of creeps up on you. And it's started. In case you folks up the back can't hear, she is saying something like: ‘You'll never guess who I saw the other day' — sounds harmless enough, doesn't it, folks? Apparently, this other woman she's talking about has just got something new — sounds like it could be a vacuum cleaner, folks … yes it is a vacuum cleaner! Dad's now staring at the bottom of an empty beer glass and all his concentration is focused on who the hell drank his beer, and on avoiding death. All he is hearing at this point is: ‘… so I said … it only costs … we should get …' and so on. It must be sheer hell inside his head. And that's the beauty of the creeper, folks. Suddenly she's on her feet and into the fridge and as quick as a flash opens another bottle … Oh my God, she's offering him more beer!
Without knowing what he's doing he has submitted to the wallet lock, wrestling fans, which is an automatic submission hold. And now the ref is waving her off, and it's all over bar the shouting.

 

And that's because there are two kinds of lady talkers: bossy ones and, I would say, conversationalists, and this new lady was definitely not one of the bossy kind. For starters, she didn't try to take advantage of Dad's inebriated state at all — maybe she already
had
a vacuum cleaner — the house did look a lot cleaner than our place, but then it had no kids or dogs. All she did was continue to say: ‘Oh yes, that's what
I
said,' and ‘You are
so
right,' and ‘Of
course
you did,' and so on and so forth. She was agreeing with him without using any of the tried and tested holds that guarantee submission, and I could see she wasn't going to get anything — except, maybe, as drunk as a skunk.

I'd begun to imagine that Dad was on a secret mission for the government, spying on commos or trying to stop some lunatic from taking over the world with his giant ray gun, or worse, that he'd been sent on a mission to Tasmania or one of those other places around Australia that it was hard to get away from. I hadn't imagined that he was in Eden Park, with a lady who was not giving him a hard time, as Mum would have been if he had still been at home. The sheer unexpectedness of the whole event was unfair, I thought — simply, I had not been given the opportunity to prepare for it. You would think that he'd be carrying on uncontrollably about his loved ones down the hill, about how much he missed me and Mum and Biscuit — then I remembered that he didn't know about Biscuit, only the cat, and the cat was not around much since Biscuit turned up — cats and watchdogs don't mix. And as for Biscuit, whenever he saw Abbotsford he turned into a real watchdog, and looked
as if he would like nothing better than to get his paws on him. But he never did, and Abbotsford would sit on the dunny roof and watch the world go by from his ivory tower, like that Gale Storm song.

So that entire arvo Dad talked about the things he always talked about, and I could see that even though the lady's patience was getting a bit frayed around the edges, she wasn't going to jump up and throttle him. She wasn't at all like Mum: she didn't want to be the boss; she just wanted to have a fair dinkum chat. But she was sick of hearing about some bloke down at the baked bean factory who wanted to give Dad a good price on a used Morris Cowley. She was fighting a losing battle, though; she didn't know Dad like I did. Dad had been Chief Sparring Partner at Blayney's Talking Gym, and had been worn down by Mum and Aunty Betty, who between them could talk the back wheels off a semitrailer.

Also I knew what a real conversation was because me and Granddad had had about two thousand of them, and me and Barney had had about a hundred, and me and Charles always started one up as soon as we saw each other, so there was a million conversations right there (because Charles was basically a gasbag). Then there was James Palmer, of course; he was very keen on conversation. I did a quick mental sum, and reckoned that I'd had about five million of them, which pretty much left Dad at the starting gate, especially as he was well on the way to getting plastered.

So that was what this lady wanted, and I wasn't surprised when, after sighing a few times and putting her beer down with a glassy clunk, she made this quiet little speech.

‘Look, love, I know you don't want to see your wife again, but sooner or later you'll have to, if you want to see your son,
and that's something you have to do. He's been getting into all kinds of mischief, and he spends a lot of his spare time with Archie at the races, hanging around pretty unsavoury characters, like that standover bloke of his. It's all bound to end in trouble. Saw it with my sister's kids. That's how it starts off: a flutter here, a few bob there, and before you know it you've been nicked for consorting. So, during the week, go over and have a talk to him; tell him what's going on over here, and say anything you need to say to Jean. Then come back. And don't be too long about it.'

There was relative silence for a while after that, that's if you count the sound of beer drinking as silence, and we did at our place. I said to myself:
Looks like I'm here for the duration
— that was one of Mum's favourites — and settled down to think. On the one hand, I wasn't all that happy about her summary of the lives of Granddad and myself, which made us sound as if we were a couple of common crims — I say nothing about Blarney Barney, who had, after all, been in and out of jail — but on the other hand, I was pretty surprised to hear that she cared about me. I half expected her to turn on the wireless, and to hear the Teddy Bears singing ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him'. Oh, what the hell — I hummed a few bars to myself anyway.

So I stayed and listened for what I knew I'd hear eventually: the sound of two people who've been on the turps, having a snooze on a lounge suite. Then I left, knowing that I didn't even have to sneak out: I could have walked out in a pair of football boots. In fact, I reckon I could have pulled out a couple of their teeth without waking them, if I felt like it.

But I did need to take something with me, a souvenir for the map — the Cartographer always does that: it's his signature move. Of course, the map already had quite a few things
stuck to it: tram tickets, which I couldn't get enough of, and newspaper clippings of Guess Who, and the photos that I'd taken with Mum's Brownie Box and a few that she had taken of me and Biscuit. There were betting tickets from the track, and a playing card, the deuce of hearts, that fell out of a punter's pocket after he was chucked out of the Greek casino. It was one of two that he had, but the blokes who chucked him out said they only needed to see one, and let me keep the other, because I asked for it ‘for luck', which made them all laugh themselves silly, I guess because it hadn't brought the bloke who had it much luck. I heard that after I left, that bloke fell off the Collingwood tram. And I'm not surprised, him not having his lucky cards on him.

It was evening when I switched on the light in the main bedroom and looked around. In the end I decided to souvenir a photo of Dad and the lady, whose face I hadn't seen until that moment. There was a big bunch of photos in a kind of silver boat on the mantelpiece in the bedroom, and most of them were better than the ones Mum and me got out of our old camera. After sorting through them, I settled on that particular one because it was taken at a place I'd been to, St Kilda Beach, one of those places you went to when you wanted to have a day out. I especially liked that place because Luna Park was there, and I especially liked Luna Park because it smelt of a mixture of fairy floss, dairy whip and hot waffles. You can't
make
smells like that — I give it a nine.

The lady was the same height as Dad, and in the photo wore her hat tilted to one side, the same as him. Her face was relaxed and kind-looking, like a lady who worked in a milk bar. Her eyes seemed to be laughing, even though the rest of her wasn't. She had her arm through Dad's, as though that was
their normal way of standing, and not just to have their picture taken. Dad had on his serious face. He looked like he wouldn't have smiled even if he'd had a skinful and Jimmy Durante was singing ‘Inka Dinka Doo' right there in front of them. I looked hard at the picture, trying to find a clue in it, you know, a clue as to what had happened to Dad, but I got
niente
. So I turned it over, because most people write things on the back of their photos, you know, like:
The kids' birthday party
, or
Biscuit getting licked by Abbotsford —
I made that one up; it never happened — or
Uncle Hank on his Norton
.

This one said:
At St Kilda Beach on our anniversary
.

 

When I left I decided to take the tram down Church Street. But it still involved a bit of a walk, so I decided to do some more exploring on the way. I was feeling very strange after everything I'd heard. I felt as if I had run out of energy, the way I did before I ‘disappeared', as I now called it when I had one of my turns. As I've said, it wasn't the disappearing that tended to get me down so much as the waking up. So that's how I was feeling as I walked along. It wouldn't have surprised me — not that anything did any more — if I'd suddenly woken up lying on the cold concrete looking up at the stars and thinking … well, not thinking anything at all, actually, just having a big question mark in the place where my mind used to be. It's at times like this that if someone came up to me and told me the biggest porky ever, like:
Your Dad worships the ground Bob Menzies pisses on
, I swear I would have believed him, and probably thought to myself:
What a nice bloke, and he knows so much, too!

I was in a daze, like Our Gang when they nicked all the dogs — I made a mental note to myself to go into the dognapping
business — and walked along without paying much attention to what was going on around me. The first thing that happened was that I came across Granddad's two plainclothesmen mates down the lane behind the Masonic Lodge putting the boot into some poor bastard, except they weren't just teaching him a lesson, they were killing him. When they were finished, they got a rope out of the boot. One of them tied one end to the bumper bar, and the other bloke tied the other end to the bloke's feet — I don't know why they bothered really. I just stood in the shadow against the wall and watched, not wanting to be next. I'd seen blokes giving other blokes a little tap before, and I knew which side my bread was buttered on — none of my business. They hopped in and drove down the lane as fast as they could. It was a long lane.

The bloke's hat was still lying on the ground, so I picked it up and bunged it on, and it fitted me perfectly. When I got to the end of the lane, I looked over the edge of the canal, because that's where I was guessing they had dumped the body. But there was nothing but darkness. Dad says that the last thing a bloke'll give away is his hat. I want to say thanks for the hat, but I can see there's no point.

Back at the other end of the lane I took a kind of zigzag around the back of a few streets, and ended up behind the Gala picture theatre. There was a kid behind the Gala busily stacking cardboard and paper against the wall in the near darkness. The Gala was painted a kind of maroon in the front, but not at the sides, and maroon was the colour of the back wall as well. It already looked lurid even without the fire, because that's what was going to happen. Flame Boy — it was he — turned around and saw me and I could tell that he recognised me. It looked as though the electric shocks hadn't
done him any harm: he was still determined to set fire to something. He stopped what he was doing — he looked as if he could use a break — and looked at me, and I at him, and when he noticed my new hat he smiled that shy lopsided smile of his, and I could see that he was impressed that a kid was wearing a bloke's hat.