The Cartographer (26 page)

We didn't have a conversation: we were both busy. I was busy being in a daze — my eyes were kind of locked in front of me, like when you find yourself staring and you have to shake your head, or blink to unlock your eyes. I had been like that since leaving the house in Eden Park, but I didn't feel like unlocking them. And Flame Boy was busy building a bonfire, which he now turned back to. I don't like to interrupt a person when they're flat out like a lizard drinking, much less a fellow superhero, so I kept on walking. It did occur to me that I had seen some damn good pictures at the Gala over the years, but the only one I could think of just then was
The Treasure of Lost Canyon
. Oh yeah, and that other one William Powell was in:
Mister Roberts
, but it wasn't a patch on
The Treasure of Lost Canyon
.

A little further on I came back to the canal. The bit of the canal I was looking at was about fifteen feet wide, and just appeared from under one building then disappeared back under another. I looked down into it, but it was too dark to see the bottom. But I could smell it: it wasn't too bad as canals go, like a cross between the toilet on Richmond Station and the tip, though I knew that it would have rats in it — all these canals did. My first thought was that the canal needed exploring and needed it bad, but it was dark and the rats … well, I was unarmed, and for rats you needed a lump of wood at the very least.

I decided to see where the canal turned up next, and went around a few corners, following the sound of rock'n'roll music. During the day, I could take or leave rock'n'roll music. It didn't have the sadness the part of me that hurt seemed to like. Figure that out! It wanted to force me to be disrespectful to the way I felt. But at night it drew me like a magnet and the quick dark bits of it shot into my body like a lot of little frights and made me want to be a bad kid, just the way lots of people thought I really was. It made me feel like I could do anything or be anyone. It reminded me that I was a secret superhero. It was about me. So I let it draw me.

I came to a small patch of grass that might have been a lawn, but I could tell straightaway that it was actually one of those back yards on the corner of two lanes that only had a fence on each side to separate it from the neighbouring houses. The people who lived in those corner houses sometimes tore down their back fences so they could get their cars in. This was one of those little back yards, and very comfy it looked too. It contained three things: an old lounge suite, a green and white Ford Customline, and a crowd of bodgies and widgies having a party. The car radio was going flat out, and I reckon you could probably hear Eddie Cochran singing ‘Summertime Blues' in Alice Springs. On the top, the bodgies had elephant trunk haircuts, brushed back at the sides, and on the bottom, bright socks and long pointy-toed shoes. The widgies had ponytails, petticoats that stuck out, and blue and white gym boots. Some were dancing, but most of them were just lounging around drinking, and brushing their hair.

I knew the bloke who owned the car. It was Gary Turner, though everyone except me called him Chain, because he always kept a bike chain in his glove box — just in case. Granddad told me he was going to end up in jail, but I liked
him, because the year before, when he got his car, he took all us kids for a ride, and Tom and me had sat in the front.

I entered the yard as if I belonged there, and no one stopped what they were doing and made a face at me or told me to fuck off. A few of them saw me — must have — but did nothing. The breeze was warm and the cigarette smoke was not like Mum's and Dad's, but in the fresh night air and combined with the gorgeous scents and aromas was more like meeting a good friend. I placed my hand on the car and seemed to be able to smell the very colours of it, to feel it humming to the music, even though its motor wasn't running.

While I was standing there, taking in the blokes' socks, which seemed to come in every colour except dark anything, and wondering where I could get a pair for myself, a car swung into the lane, lighting up half of the yard. I took a quick peek around the corner and saw the car lumbering down the lane towards us. It looked like the car I'd seen pulling the bloke along. Jesus, it was.

‘Shit, it's them!' I yelled at the crowd, without knowing why. I guess I just assumed that if the coppers were after anyone, it was probably Gary. He didn't hear me, so I ran up to him, and grabbed his sleeve. It was a moment made of sensations: excitement that stung inside my nose, the smell of Gary's girlfriend's perfume — Tabu, the same as Mum's — the unexpected softness of Gary's coat sleeve, his perfectly Brylcreemed black waves. There was no movement, just a long still look between us. It was me who broke it. I pointed. ‘Gazza, p'lice.'

That's all I had time for. I turned and ran, wildly, almost blindly, across the lawn and across the lane, in the only direction I could: straight over the rails of the canal.

It was a long, dark drop and I half expected to land on something nasty at the bottom, like the chopped-up remains of some old brain-shocking machine — the joke would have been on me. Instead, I landed on a huge pile of rubbish; I would never speak harshly of rubbish again. Then I was off like Betty Cuthbert. That night I set a new world record for the Underground Handicap, being both underground and handicapped and, as far as I could tell, the only starter; I was certainly the only finisher. I had my torch, so I got it out and followed its light.

Matthew Foster once told me that he rode his bike along this same canal, from his place right down to the river. I thought that if he could do it, so could I. But it soon became obvious that he couldn't have because the canal was chockers with rubbish, including a car bumper bar, which I tripped over. So much for Matthew Foster. I picked myself up and rubbed the sore spots and kept scurrying along the underground part of the canal. I could hear nothing except the heavy rumble of trams passing somewhere overhead. When I shone the torch above me I saw the underneath part of a building, with a trapdoor in it. Five minutes later, I was through.

I was in a workshop of some kind, surrounded by the yummy smell of oil and grease and petrol and vehicles. I could see enough to work out that I was in the army workshop
in Church Street — the same one I had visited some time ago. It had everything, that place, including lots of tools. Also it had light switches, but thanks to Barney, I knew a few things about these s orts of situations, and one of them was:
Never turn the light on
. In fact, it was a rule, like:
Look to the right and look to the left and look to the right again
. Barney told me that he once switched on the light in a house that he wouldn't have known his way around in the dark, and the door opened and several coppers walked in and said: ‘Thanks, Barn, we couldn't see a bloody thing.'

So you see, it pays to remember these basic rules as you go through life. Anyway, there I was, surrounded by khaki vehicles. I hopped into a Ford ute and reached down and turned the ignition key. It started instantly and sat there purring like a cat. That car made one hell of a beautiful sound — smelt good, too: I gave it a six, though I think I might have been a bit biased; I just love all those workshoppy smells. So I just sort of leaned back and let the motor run while I considered my position.

One time, I went fishing off Port Melbourne with Dad and a boatload of uncles, all hell-bent on getting as pissed out of their brains as was humanly possible in one morning and hoping to catch a flattie or two for lunch. Well, I won't award any prizes to anyone who guesses what happened, but I will say that a couple of my uncles, Uncle Maury being the worst offender, got so rotten that they chucked all over everything, and the only reason they didn't get heaved overboard was that they wouldn't have lasted two minutes once the sharks got a whiff of them, and believe me, you'd have to be one of those sharks that has a really rotten cold or something
not
to get a whiff of them. I reckoned I was doing pretty well until the chucking began, then
I felt this really bad feeling coming over me, until eventually I felt like I just wanted to die, and I started begging them to throw me to the sharks; I really couldn't have cared less.

Well that's just how I felt when I woke up and found myself lying on the floor of the workshop. What I really wanted was for some kindly army motor mechanic to come along with a shifting spanner and put me out of my misery. The motor had stopped, and I had had some kind of attack — the usual, I guessed — and had fallen out of the ute and landed on my head on the concrete floor and was now dribbling into a pool of blood and vomit. I noticed without caring that something was licking my head and face as if I was a Dairy Queen in a Dixie Cup. ‘Good boy, Biscuit,' was all I could manage for a while, and I heard my voice sounding pretty slurred and soft. It was ages before I was able to look up and see that it was not Biscuit but an Alsatian the size of Phar Lap.

I expected him to start hopping in for his chop as soon as he saw that I was awake, but he seemed to prefer a lick of fresh blood to a mouthful of Leg of Boy, and I put that down to the possibility that he might have been out for a night on the grog with the army mechanics, and, feeling a little fragile, was planning on giving brekkie a miss.

So there I was, feeling about as bad as you can feel without having just had lunch at my place, and getting licked by a dog that was probably a sergeant or something, and therefore the kind of dog that
other
army dogs are scared of, and stuck in some place where, if I didn't get my arse into gear, I was going to get into about two and a half tons of trouble — again. It was dawn and the sun was starting to come through the tops of the windows, and turn everything a golden colour, even things that had no colour of their own.

Dog or no dog, I climbed to my hands and knees and looked around for a bathroom. I needed to take care of a few things unless I wanted my appearance to start World War III. The dog was okay about me, and I wondered if that was because he knew I'd been in that place before, and had even talked to one of the mechanics. He let me do whatever I wanted to do, and then leave by the back door. The army definitely does not buy its dogs at the same place junkyard owners do. Dawn was early at that time of the year, and it would be a few hours before anyone would be at work. Also, I would be able to sneak into the house without waking everyone up. At least, that was the theory.

As it turned out, nothing could have gone wronger. I must have had another one of my turns, because I half woke up in the back of what I half knew was an ambulance — there was an ambulance guy in the back — and had a ride to hospital, though it was all pretty dreamy. The next thing I knew I was lying in one of those hospital rooms where everything is made of stainless steel, and they have kidney dishes to chuck in, and stomach pumps — I'd seen them use one on a bloke once, the last time I was in one of these places — and lots of glass things all over the place, probably to put bits of dead kid in. My face had a mask on it, and when I looked at my arm I saw that they were filling it up with something in a bottle — I'm pretty sure it was tomato soup — and it had a bloody great needle stuck in it. I didn't remember telling them to do any of these things, but that's how it is when you're a kid. Basically, you're stuffed no matter which way you look at it. And if that wasn't bad enough, I was stark naked and lying on a steel table that was as cold as hell, and in a room that was also a bit chilly, in spite of the time of year. To top it all off, my head felt as if it had just been split with a meat cleaver.

I turned my head slowly to the right, to see if I was still alive more than anything else, and I saw that the only person in the room was a cop. He was sitting in a chair reading the
Sporting Globe
, and he was holding it close to his eyes, so I knew he hadn't seen me. The sight of that cop did two things to me: it gave me an electric shock as if I was being tortured like Ron Randell in
O.S.S.
; and it jolted my Kimball O'Hara-like memory back into action, so that I was no longer some poor bastard on an operating table waiting to be tortured with a stomach pump then tied up and dragged around the hospital carpark by the cops. I was once again in possession of all my faculties and had summed up the situation: trapdoor, workshop, ute, trouble.

In that moment I did something that I had sworn never to do again, though come to think of it, I never did swear it on my dead cat's skull: I would pray for assistance from God. So I did. I don't know which feeling was more powerful in that moment: my shame at asking God for help, or my relief that I had probably turned to the one person who could get me out of this damn mess.

Of course, God doesn't go around helping people for free, I know that. You have to make a deal — you have to sacrifice something, and it has to be something that's worth almost as much as the thing you're asking for. It has to be something you don't want to lose. So it wouldn't have done any good to sacrifice Aunty Betty. I mean, apart from the fact that I hated her, God's not that stupid, is he? If she died, she'd be in heaven with him. Unless she went to hell, which had been my original plan, but then the Devil would have to put up with her, and somehow you knew that would get right up his nose. Lying there, it struck me that when she eventually did die, she
was
really
going to be stuffed. Anyway, in the end, I couldn't choose, so I left it up to God. As long as I got out of this Nazi torture chamber.

So I opened my eyes again just a fraction and I could see in a reflection of one of the steel torture instruments that the cop was looking at his watch, then folding up his paper, then walking out the door. When the door opened, I heard someone tell him to go and have lunch and they'd let him know when I woke up. Then the door closed, and I was alone. You little ripper!

I took the mask off, and let it dangle, and I could see it was attached to a tank of poison gas, the kind used to get the truth out of people, but I reckoned there wouldn't have been enough gas in that tank to get all of what I knew out of me. Then I ripped the tape off my arm and pulled the needle out.
No truth serum, no truth
, that's my motto. I was feeling a little bit worse, straightaway, so I slowly got up and stood there for a minute holding onto the operating table, as weak as widdle, and looked around. My clothes were all there, on a chair nearby, and I sank to my hands and knees — the best I could manage — and crawled over to the chair like a Labrador who's just had some bad news. I grabbed my clothes and slowly put my bloke's hat on, hardly daring to move my head. I had to get out of there, even before I got dressed. There was no telling when the Gestapo would walk in, and start the interrogation. I eventually spotted my bag under the cop's chair, thanks to having the vantage point of a blue-tongue lizard. I just grabbed the lot and pulled myself to my feet. At the back of the room there was one of those sets of doors that swings in both directions. Not caring that I was wearing my birthday suit, I pushed them open and disappeared into the grey December daylight.

Outside, there was a concrete and iron verandah with a covered ramp on one side and a long walkway on the other. At the bottom of the ramp an ambulance was parked with its back doors open and facing me. I went the other way, and found a linoleum-floored passage with toilets and bathrooms in it. In I went, struggled into my clothes and emerged as:
The Outlaw!

 

Yes, the Outlaw, who laughs at the police, scoffs at and gives cheek to the grown-ups who threaten and frighten the life out of him. The Outlaw, who robs banks and back sheds. They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek that daring
, no, make that …
interesting, young man everywhere
.

 

Time to go. I knew about ambulance bays: at the other end there was always the Outside, which was usually some little German village called Dusseldorf, where the farmers helped escaped secret agents get back to England. I could hardly wait to get to Dusseldorf. I wasn't that keen on going back to England, however.