by Peter Twohig
Dedication
To Lois
Epigraph
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
Louise Gluck, ‘Nostos’
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
1 The house down Kipling Lane
2 The map
3 Finders keepers
4 Upstream
5 The Dead-end Kid
6 Spotted
7 The Manual
8 The Harrigan kid
9 The Cartographer
10 The Sanderson caper
11 Zombieland
12 The lost planet
13 A taste of Burnley Bitter
14 The happy wanderer
15 Smokey
16 White lies
17 Wonder Woman
18 The kiss of death
19 The boy who knew too much
20 Should old acquaintance
21 Wanderlust goes south
22 Abracadabra!
23 The bloke’s hat
24 The Outlaw
25 A tale of two dogs
26 Portia faces life
27 Railwayman
28 Flame Boy
29 Josephine Island
30 Squaring things
31 Bob the Butcher
32 There should have been zither music
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Maps
1 The house down Kipling Lane
Mum and Dad did not take me to the funeral. They left me with Mrs Carruthers, across the street. Mrs Carruthers gave me lamingtons and lemonade, as if it was a party day. Later, I went back to my place and discovered it was chock-a-block with relatives, both the ones Mum and Dad liked, and the ones they hated. Nobody mentioned Tom’s name, so I thought perhaps it was a kind of game, and Tom would jump out of a cupboard and grab me, the way we were always doing to each other. But he didn’t. Finally, Blarney Barney, Granddad’s offsider, and not a relative, came over to me.
‘How’re you holdin’ up there, young feller?’
‘Barn, no one’s talking to me, not even Granddad.’
It was the first time I’d spoken that day.
‘Ah, no one knows what to say, that’s all. And besides, it’s not every day you go to a wake and see the dear departed’s spittin’ image wanderin’ round the place. Tends to put people off their kidney punch.’
He ruffled my hair — about the twenty-seventh person to do that — and went off to find a drink. Mum, who had been keeping an eye on Barney, as people were apt to do, stepped up and said in a flat voice, ‘Comb your hair,’ then disappeared into a prickle bush of aunties and uncles. Dad appeared, ruffled my hair, and took me out to the kitchen, where he emptied his beer glass, put it down with a bang, and said: ‘Let’s go for a ride, what d’yer say?’ He was half stung, but you couldn’t say no to him.
So five minutes later Dad and me were tearing round the Boulevard on his green Triumph Speed Twin, and I was feeling even worse than I had at the house. But you had to hand it to Dad, he was a better rider pissed than sober. I buried my face in his jacket and inhaled the leather. I gave it seven out of ten, as usual.
Now the anniversary of the funeral was coming up and my name was being mentioned more than I liked. See, I’m pretty good at making bad things happen. That’s why it was no surprise when Dad suddenly decided he’d had enough, in the middle of a fight with Mum, and walked out. I could hear them arguing clear out to the shed, where I was sitting in the dimness, on the Triumph, pretending to be a TT racer, like George Formby in No Limit, which was Dad’s favourite movie.
‘That’s right, walk out on us again. Go on, off to your girlfriend’s — thought I didn’t know about that bitch, didn’t you?’
I heard the screen door bang open so hard it barely had time to screech.
‘Don’t worry, I’m goin’,’ was all Dad could think of replying.
‘And don’t bother coming back! You’ll be doing us a favour,’ yelled Mum, sounding a bit closer, and a bit angrier.
Dad didn’t say anything else. He was a drinker, not a talker.
He came down to the shed, yanked the door open and looked at me sitting on the motorbike. There was no expression on his face, but he was wearing his leather jacket, and that told me everything I needed to know. I was half expecting to get a thick ear for messing around with the bike, but Dad just lifted me off and hopped on. While he jumped on the starter pedal, I ran to the back gate and swung it open for him. As he rode out of the shed Mum appeared and stood on the back porch with her hands on her hips and her jaws clenched. Dad gave me a wink as he rode past, and I gave him a quick smile, though both of us knew it was no laughing matter. Then he was off up the lane, and I was left holding the gate.
I had a choice: go back inside and put up with Mum, or take off, like Dad. I decided to take off, but first followed Mum into the house to get my explorer’s bag. Mum tramped into the kitchen and started rummaging through the pots and pans cupboard as if she had just heard that the Queen was about to visit, though I don’t think the Queen would have thought much of her language. Whenever Mum tried to cook while she was angry, it was always a disaster, and I think she was still angry from Tom and me being born — in a job lot of two — and not entirely from losing Tom, as she let everyone think.
While that was going on, I went down to my room and found my bag. Though it had once been Granddad’s fishing bag, it had the name ‘Hardy’ on the front, which reminded me of the Hardy Boys, so I knew it was always meant to be an explorer’s bag. I checked the inside pockets: one contained an apple, left over from my last trip; the other contained a Vegemite jar, in case I came across any interesting bugs. The outer pockets contained my old pocketknife, some string, a magnifying glass and a whistle that used to be Tom’s. It also contained my most beautiful possession, my Coca-Cola yo-yo. I took it out and checked it. It was one of the few things I owned that Tom had never seen, as they had just come out, and I was the first kid in Richmond to get one, owing to Granddad knowing someone who could get his hands on the bottle tops without having to buy them. But I didn’t feel as good about it as I should have.
Now I had everything I needed. I slung the strap across my chest, and put on my hat. Time to go. I walked right past Mum without a word, and out the back door. I said nothing — I thought it best not to interrupt her train of thought.
So, just as Dad had left on his Triumph, just like that, I went for a long walk, just like that. I’d heard Mum and Mrs Carruthers talking about how it was coming up to a year since we had ‘lost’ Tom, and Mum saying she didn’t know what she was going to do. Well I had an idea — more crying, probably. I put Tom out of my mind, a trick I’d learnt from Granddad, and kept walking.
I wandered all over the place, not caring much where I turned or which lane I went down. When I stopped and looked around I got a strange taste in my mouth, like I did last Cracker Night, when that threepenny bunger went off in my hand. I had got off the beaten track, and now I hoped, deliciously, that I was lost. In fact I prayed to God to let me be lost. I did not want to go home to a house full of screaming women. Okay, there was just my mum, but she was a house full of screaming women.
Actually, the women in my family were a tough bunch, the kind of women who kill Indians, fly the Atlantic and write novels. Look at my Aunty Betty. She was the worst woman on earth. Mum told me once that Aunty Betty was not a real aunty, as much as a half-aunty, as if that explained everything, though it only raised more questions as far as I was concerned. It was a toss-up who was the best at talking, her or Mum, but it was generally agreed in the weighing-in room that A
unty Betty should receive the bigger handicap, though Granddad thought that making her carry extra weight would have been unnecessary. Then there was Aunty Jem, over in Hawthorn — who, by the way, has a rotten footy team — who believes that anyone who drinks is probably bad. Everyone thinks that is pretty weird given that her husband, Uncle Ivor, likes nothing better than to go to the footy with Dad and me and get a bit of a skinful, Uncle Ivor being Dad’s younger brother. Then there’s Aunty Dell, over in Fairfield, who’s as skinny as a rake and nearly died of TB, which is what eventually killed my Nanna Taggerty. She doesn’t say much, not because she’s got nothing to say but because she’s so weak she can hardly speak, though sometimes she pulls me to her and whispers secrets to me, and I can tell from those secrets that she, too, is a tough lady.
My other nanna, Nanna Blayney, is still alive and kicking, and living close by with two husbands at once, which works out well for me when it comes to presents. One of them, Uncle Mick, is a professional punter, so he and Granddad are good mates. The other, Uncle Seb, is a piano player, who makes a quid in the Hot Potatoes jazz band. Finally, there’s Aunty Queenie — well, she isn’t really my aunty, but Granddad’s secret friend.
Well, all that thinking about aunties takes my mind off what I’m doing, so that when I look around I discover that I’m well and truly lost. Buggered, that’s what I was, and feeling both safe and unsafe in an unfamiliar street, the sort with no footpaths. As I arrived at each of its cramped, grey intersections I looked for a street sign, but saw none. I was in a kind of grey grid, with grey skies overhead and old grey wooden fences beside me, and behind them old grey sheds, dirty greenhouses and the rear walls of houses that fronted onto streets further over. But I did finally come to a sign, and it swept me away like a page out of the old set of encyclopedias I had at home. The sign said KIPLING LN.
I had seen that name before, on a brass plate in our living room.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
Rudyard Kipling. I always thought it was a silly name, and here it was again. Funny, I had always thought that Rudyard Kipling was a person of the past. But now I saw with a jolt that he had a life outside my parents’ living room. He had somehow asserted himself, a bit like the way he had spoken on the brass plate.
The name of that poem of his on the plate was If. I looked at the sign again in an attempt to find some clues, but there were none. The sign was old and grey, like everything else. Granddad, who was a bit of a poet himself, called him Kipling, but to me he was always Rudyard Kipling. Anyone with a name like that deserved to be referred to by both bits. I decided right there that the reason he had a lane named after him was because he had written If. Well done, I thought. And yet, it was only a lane. That’s all you got for a poem.
So here I was, staring up and feeling a cold breeze, looking around at the back fences, at the tall houses with grey walls, some of which had old vines stuck to them, and a few even had turrets on top.
I’d reached the intersection of Kipling Lane and the nameless lane I’d been following, though I knew that if I stuck to the lane I was on, eventually I would find out what it was called. That’s what happens when you’re out walking, and usually, that’s all that happens, unless, of course, a dog attacks you. I hadn’t seen or heard one, so it looked like I was safe. But deep down I knew that it was just a matter of time.
I was doing what I reckoned Dad had done, I was going out to explore. Except that I suspected he had no intention of ever coming back. I, on the other hand, hadn’t made up my mind how long I would be away. I wasn’t hungry, so it wasn’t an issue.
I turned down Kipling Lane. I walked down the middle of the lane, not bothering to look out for cars as I would if I’d been walking down the middle of a road. There was one thing I knew about lanes: no one drove down them. They were just little streets for kids, dogs, cats and drunks. That’s all I had ever seen in a lane, that and junk. And that’s all I would ever see, though I once saw a horse in the lane at the back of our place. He was old. I could tell that from the way he ignored me. Only old people ignore kids. Everyone else either loves them or hates them.
I had left the sign behind me and was walking under a tree that reached across the lane and was so big that it turned the whole area into a cool tunnel. I stopped inside the tunnel for a minute, to soak up its mystery. There was an old gate in the fence, beside a bush. It had two halves. The top half was locked but the bottom half was ajar. That was the half for me.
On the other side of the fence was a jungle. That was something Mum had said about Kipling: he was the author of The Jungle Book. Now I was seeing the jungle. It’s a sign, I thought. The jungle was darker than the lane, darker and greener and in some places greyer. And in the middle of the jungle was a house, tall, grey, with a pointy turret on top: the Jungle House. I looked around. I was alone. I looked in through the gate. No dogs; in fact no signs that anyone had been there for a long time. The grass was tall, thick and green, and the jungle had vines. That settled it: Kipling would have lived in a place like this, in a house like this. It all made sense.
Should I go in? I wasn’t used to asking myself these questions. Tom would have gone in. Everyone called us ‘the twins’, while those who could tell us apart always said he was as bold as brass, while I was as sharp as a tack. To each other we were just ‘TB’, for twin brother, while Mum said we were Double Trouble and sometimes Granddad called us the Daily Double. Now, because there was just one of us, I had to be as bold as brass and as sharp as a tack, but it wasn’t easy.
So I stooped and went in. For the first time in my life, I noticed my own breathing. My own breathing was scaring me! I judged that it was much too loud for the jungle, where you had to beware! In the comics, the guys who went into the jungle always went into a waterside bar first. In the bar they met another guy who had once lived in the jungle. They would ask him to guide them to the treasure. He would say no. But they would offer him lots of money. And then he always said, ‘Well, okay, but beware!’ He said it that way to show that he was frightened, but he’d go with them anyway.
Now it was my turn to beware. That was no problem — I was scared, I admit it. I mean, this was someone’s property. How many times had I been told to get off someone else’s property? Actually, I never had, if you don’t count the junkyard, and I don’t, and I now found myself hoping that this would not be the first time. I turned around to check the escape route: jungle grass, gate, lane. I turned back to the house. I had reached a shed. It smelt sweet and meaty and dirty and kind of thick. And kind of wet and doggy and old and empty. On my smell scale I gave it four out of ten. I crept around the corner of the shed, keeping my eyes on the house with the turret, which was still in the jungle, and was, I realised, further away than I first thought. Nothing was moving, and there was no sound. I should have felt safe, but I knew that when the jungle goes quiet that’s bad, very bad, and it’s a good time to remember what the guy in the bar said. So I did: Beware!
I was now on the other side of the shed and found that I was standing on old grey stone slabs, like a wall, only on the ground. And they were slimy with moss. The shed had several doors that had a top half and a bottom half, just like the gate, but this time all the top halves were wide open while all the bottom halves were closed. I took a look inside the shed. There were leather and iron things hanging from the walls. It could, I thought, have been a torture chamber. I looked around for medieval torches, but there were none. Still, I thought, it could be a torture chamber. It was a chamber, all right, and it had weird things hanging up inside it.
So after rechecking the escape route I steadied my breathing and threaded my way through the jungle to the house. It seemed somehow silent, and I wondered if it could be deserted. It was a well-known fact that such a house could be a ghost house; that would be bad. People I could handle — you just ran. Ghosts were different: you couldn’t run; you were buggered. Dear God, I said, the
way Mum said it just before she took a cake out of the oven, or when Dad walked out of the room, or when she was listening to the races. Dear God, let there be no ghosts. But Dad always came back angry, and the cake always went wrong, and the horse, who was always called Something Lad, was always in the group announced as ‘they’re followed by’, which was not what God was supposed to do. I didn’t know how good God was at ghosts, but I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. When it came to ghosts, I would try anything.
The house had a kennel behind it. I froze when I saw it, and studied it in a state of near panic, remembering the way out. Every jungle had an exit track, but in the Phantom comics the bad guys from the town who went into the jungle rarely got to use it. Often, they never came back, and the jungle would claim another victim. I did not want to be a victim. But there was no sign that a dog lived there. There was just the same smell that the shed had. I knew what dogs smelt like because we’d had one for a few years — don’t ask.
The house had a path leading around the side, and it branched off to the right and led deeper into the jungle. Down the path a few yards was a little wooden house, not as big as the torture chamber, and more house-shaped. I opened the door and went in. It had large windows and a window in the roof that looked like it was covered in sugar. It was empty, but on the floor there were about a million drops of coloured paint. And it smelt exactly the same as the inside of St Felix’s Church, all candle-y and woody. I wanted to make the little house mine. Smells like that don’t come along every day.
