by Peter Twohig
8 The Harrigan kid
The space at the bottom of the ladder turned out to be much further down than I had estimated, and much roomier. The drain was so large that I could see in four directions without bending, though there was hardly any light in three of the directions and the fourth was uphill a little. Still, there was a light in the distance, so I guessed it was coming from another grille, further up the road. The drain in that direction was slightly narrower than the others, but still easily high enough for me, so off I went.
As I walked along, my shoes made a sharp echo, like the sound of a rubber ball being thrown against a wall, and as I got closer to the light, the echo seemed to change its tone. Halfway there the drain offered me a left turn into a dark tunnel. I was tempted to try it, but after a few steps I instinctively stopped and peered into the darkness. Then I noticed that immediately in front of me on the floor was a large black hole. I felt around the inside rim and sure enough there was a ladder. Getting out would be an easy matter: ladder, corner, drain, ladder, out. So down I went.
Once at the bottom, I was able to see yet another distant light, so I knew there was another grille up ahead, and I thought: Why not? as an explorer does when in an underground drain. But this time I was concerned about the possibility of falling into a hole, like the one I was at the bottom of, so I stopped and thought about things. I had a torch, of course, but it had no batteries. I pondered this for a moment, and wondered what the Phantom would have done. He would have kept going, I reckoned. Members of the Explorers League — I made it up on the spot, and I was Member No. 1 — simply did not turn back without a really good reason. I therefore slid my foot out in front of me, to see if it was safe. It was. I took a step and did it again. And so on. Slow, I know, but inspired. Not even the Phantom had thought of that way of getting along in the dark. I wished the League had a few more members, so someone could award me the Order of the Drain, but that would have to wait. If worst came to worst, I could be given the award posthumously. When I got nearer to the light I saw that it was not coming from a grille at all, but from a lamp or torch of some kind, and I stepped up the pace.
By this time I was so close to the light that it was too late to do anything about my footsteps, and it was also too late to stop making that jangling sound your bag makes when it’s full of adventurer’s gear. But mostly, it was too late to stop singing ‘The Happy Wanderer’, though I did anyway, because I had run out of verses. What I saw was probably my greatest discovery since my exploring days had begun. It was someone’s secret hideout.
It was lit by an old hurricane lamp that had a low white flame and cast a lot of light in the pale concrete area. The hideout sat on a long wide concrete platform about three feet above the floor of the drain and under a low ceiling. You got up to it by climbing a few steps cut into the side of the drain. At one end of the hideout there was a stack of rusty iron things and a smelly machine of some kind. The hideout contained a mattress and a few blankets, a box with the lamp on top and other odds and ends you would find in any hideout, including some food and some eatin’ irons, as they call them in Marines in Action. I climbed onto the platform and took a look around. Not a bad little set-up, I thought to myself. Probably belongs to some murderer on the run — they’re all over the place this year. Best I get the hell out of here before I have a nasty accident. And besides, the lamp was still going and that meant the escaped criminal had not gone far. But as soon as I turned back to the steps, I heard the sound of someone coming, and I knew it was the murderer.
He arrived at the ledge so fast, I had no time to escape. I felt as if I had just fallen through the floor, and I got that taste in my mouth you get from sucking nuts and bolts. It was not a great combination. To make matters worse, I thought I was going to shit myself. I knew that if I did, he would not hesitate to ‘cut my bloody tripes out’, as the butcher’s pretend wife would say to all the kids. With a suddenness that grabbed me by the throat I realised that this was probably not just any murderer: this was my murderer. He had followed me down the drain! He had probably been following me for days. And now it was all over. So I crawled behind the old machinery and made myself into the smallest shape possible. As I crouched there, the murderer put a flagon of grog onto the ledge and hauled himself up after it. All I could see was a tangle of dirty light and shadows as he moved around, while he himself was a dark mass.
With an unexpectedness that nearly gave me a heart attack, the bloke lashed out with his foot at something in the far corner, that gave a frightened kid’s yelp.
‘D’ja miss me?’ said the kicking bloke, with a gravelly voice that made me wonder if the murderer had developed tonsillitis since I last saw him.
The kid, wrapped in darkness, made no reply but retreated further into the corner with a desperate shuffle that kicked one of his shoes at me.
‘You’ll keep, mate, you’ll keep. Don’t you worry, you’re my ticket, young Harrigan,’ he said roughly.
When I heard this my guts turned to electricity. I had solved the Case of the Harrigan Kidnap, and now the secret might die with me.
The thought crossed my mind that the bloke might have kidnapped this kid thinking he was me. On the one hand, I was slightly relieved to see him get it all wrong, but on the other hand, I was feeling the same old guilt all over again. I mean, how many kids had to die, for Christ’s sake?
The bloke gave the kid something to eat and I saw that the kid’s hands were tied in front of him. The kid ate, while the bloke turned back to the grog bottle. But I saw the twin gleams of the kid’s eyes, and I knew that he’d been watching me since I arrived. The bloke spent the next few hours singing quietly to himself and getting drunk. Songs included: ‘Let Me Go, Lover!’, ‘Mr Sandman’ and ‘A White Sports Coat’. I do like a song, so I was sorely tempted to join in when he came out with ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’, and in fact he was so pissed by that time, I think I could have got away with it.
When he finally passed out, I found my pocketknife then crawled over to the kid and cut the ropes on his wrists and feet and a rope by which his neck was tethered to a ring in the wall, like a cart horse. We had to climb over the bloke in pitch darkness, because the lamp had gone out. Well, to cut a long story short, we almost made it. But the kid fell on top of the bloke, and that was the end of the creeping-around-quietly part of the event.
With a roar the bloke grabbed the kid and dragged him back onto the ledge and gave him a smack so hard I heard the sound bounce up the drain like a ricochet. I shrank back into the blackness and waited, as he still had no idea that I had him surrounded. The kid started moaning after a few seconds, and I could tell that he had been knocked senseless as I had seen a few kids in that condition over the years. While he was perking up, the kidnapper relit the hurricane lamp.
The Harrigan kid was a lot like me, only shorter and skinnier. His hair was short and straight, like dry grass, and stuck out in all directions at once, just like mine. He was from my neighbourhood, from further up the hill, towards town. I had sometimes seen him walking to school and back with his annoying pest of a brother, Greg. I remembered that he always seemed to be sick, and I wondered how he was doing.
He recovered pretty fast for a little kid, and did not hesitate to give the kidnapper a lot of lip, despite having been knocked around. I was worried, because I thought he might tell the kidnapper that he was not alone but had been joined by reinforcements. What he did say was that his father was a copper — that would go on the map, even though I doubted it like hell, as I didn’t think that coppers had kids. He also told the kidnapper that his mum was expecting him home ages ago and would have the police out looking for him — a standard kid’s lie. Finally, he told him he was not frightened of him because, according to his father, men like him usually ended up getting caught and sent to Pentridge — for the rest of their lives. Now that was something you didn’t hear every day and, considering the general quality of kidnappers these days, was probably tru
e. However, the boy had gone too far.
The kidnapper said to himself quietly: ‘Ah, to hell with the bloody ransom,’ and took out his lighter.
He unscrewed the bottom and let some lighter fluid drip onto the kid’s head.
‘I’ll give you Pentridge, you stuck-up little bastard,’ he said, sounding like he had just taken a mouthful of Mum’s tripe and onions and wasn’t game to swallow it.
The boy took one look at the lighter and started to cry.
‘Go on, make as much noise as you want. No one gives a stuff.’
He touched the lighter flame to the kid’s dry-grass hair.
The kid fell back into the corner, beating the fire out with his hands. The bloke watched for a minute, then fell into a drunken stupor, a form of stupor the blokes down our way were hoping to have made into an Olympic event.
I stayed there, pretty much frozen stiff, until the boy’s screams had ceased and the bloke had passed out. I could still smell the mixture of kerosene and lighter fluid and burning boy, and … other smells — I still can now. I’d give that smell a number, but the scale wasn’t meant for that. When the bloke started snoring, we crawled over his legs and hopped down into the tunnel. It was pretty dark, but I knew the way out.
All the way to the Harrigan house I thought about what I had done. I had saved the kid. He wasn’t Tom, but he was a kid, and he had hair like Tom — well, when he’d had hair. I wanted to feel that my mission was over and that Tom was looking down at me from heaven giving me a wink, because he was the big winker of the two of us, but the fact is, I’d never been able to imagine Tom being happy about what happened to him and how I was going down here. And I still couldn’t. I had even tried filling in for Tom by being as bold as brass. But the truth was, I wasn’t as bold as brass: I was more like bold as rusty corrugated iron. And the harder I tried, the more my head hurt.
The Harrigan kid lived in a big two-storey house in Cremorne Street, which was one of the posh streets. Actually, the kids down our way don’t live in houses as much as appear, disappear and reappear in the streets when it’s not raining. An open door means an open house and the chance of finding a kid to play with. It was an arrangement that seemed to suit everyone. Even if you found a house with an open door and no kid, you stood a good chance of getting a slice of fruit cake or a bit of Boston bun left over from some aunty’s last visit. But the Harrigans’ house was not one of those houses that always had its door open. It had a high fence and gate, a long path to the front door, and a deep front porch, none of which suited my plan to knock and run — because I wasn’t going to leave the kid until I heard someone coming down to get him.
The doorknob was made of a kind of blood-red glass, with lots of corners, and the door had four tall glass panels in it, each with a set of frosted swirls, like smoke from a cigarette. The rest of the door was the kind of brown that you usually only saw in church: shiny and important.
The Harrigan kid had cried all the way home, and was still going at it as if there was no tomorrow, and Blind Freddy could see why. His head was hurting him, but he couldn’t touch it, and it was driving him mad. I knocked on the door and looked through the mail slot, but nobody came. The kid reached across the front of me and pushed a white button, as if I wasn’t there. Suddenly, there were footsteps only feet away, and someone began to turn the door handle from inside. With no time to run, I let go of the kid and flattened myself against the outside wall beside the door. Even at the best of times, a kid like me didn’t want to be seen knocking on a door like this, and any way I looked at it, this was not a good time.
The door was opened, and the kid rushed in, crying ‘Mummy!’ Mrs Harrigan screamed, then yelled ‘Brian!’ as she grabbed the kid, who immediately started howling with pain. Mrs Harrigan sobbed ‘Jesus Christ’, and rushed the kid down to the dark region of the house, leaving the door open. The kid made a clomping sound as he went down the passage with his one remaining shoe. I could hear the sound of the little bugger being soaked in water, and his mother crying and asking him one question after another. I couldn’t move: the whole scene reminded me weirdly of the Kid Down the Dead-end Street. I could smell floor polish, and a hint of something meaty cooking, and a hint of something else that took me a few seconds to identify: it was the house itself, telling me to get out.
When Granddad came over, all him and Mum and Mrs Carruthers from across the street could talk about was the Harrigan kid. He even got a mention in red on the front page of the Herald. And so did the mystery kid.
‘Hey, Granddad,’ I said, wanting to find out the truth of what happened and not the version concocted by Mum and Mrs Carruthers, ‘did they catch the kidnapper?’
‘Nah, he got away. But they’ll get him, the bastard.’
‘Did they find his hideout?’
‘Nah, but they spent hours looking for it. He probably shot through. Probably halfway to Woop-Woop by now.’
‘Yeah, probably,’ I agreed cheerfully. I was cheerful because, while I had no doubt that the bloke would move to a more peaceful part of town, one not infested with kids or coppers, I knew that his hideout was still sitting there, waiting for someone like me to come along and claim it.
‘But didn’t they get the kid to show ’em?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Mum put in. ‘The boy’s in hospital. He’s not going down any more drains. And neither are you,’ she added automatically.
Yeah, sure, Mum. I had made up my mind what had to be done. I gave Granddad the nod, and he met me down in my bedroom.
‘Granddad, I was the other kid, the one they’re looking for.’
‘Son, this is no joking matter.’
‘I know, and I’m not joking, I swear on my cat’s head,’ I said, grabbing a surprised Abbotsford by the scone. ‘It’s just that I’m worried that if the bloke knows who I am, he’ll come and get me.’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ he said, slowing me down. ‘Tell me the whole story. And you better not be pulling my leg.’
So I told him the whole story.
He took so long to think about what I’d said that I thought he might be getting paid by the hour.
Finally he says: ‘Let’s let well enough alone, boy. They’ll find that bloke eventually, and when they do, he’ll go to jail. I don’t think there’s much chance of him being the bloke you say you saw in that place in Kipling Street, though. You said that bloke had a gun. He did have a gun, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘the bloke who killed that woman had a car, and blokes who live down drains don’t have cars. Do they?’
I was feeling pretty miserable by now, as it seemed to me that Granddad thought I was spinning him a yarn, something Tom and me used to do all the time. In fact, you could say that in our family we were famous for it, even though Aunty Betty took a dim view of it, except when she’d had a few Dubonnets, which always made her loosen up. But I knew there was more to Granddad’s reluctance to appear on In Melbourne Tonight than the possibility that I was pulling his leg. Granddad liked to keep himself to himself. A big part of his day was spent nodding and winking at other blokes and not saying much at all. The last thing he wanted was publicity. So that was that.
But he was right about one thing, and I had to face it: the kidnapper and the murderer were two different blokes. Down our way, the odds in favour of two really bad bastards turning up at the same time were shorter than the odds that your Rice Bubbles would go snap, crackle or pop when you poured milk on them. I would just have to watch my step twice as hard.
The Harrigan kid became famous. A week later he turned up at the pictures with his brother, his head bandaged up like a war hero, and during the intermission everyone wanted to hear the story of his head, and how he got away. He was happy to tell them, of course, so I got close to him, being ready to whisper in his ear to keep my name out of it, as I needed my picture in the paper like I needed a hole in the head. But in his version, he escaped by gnawing through the ro
pes and creeping away, with the mystery kid merely being present for conversational purposes.
‘Tell us about the kid who rescued you,’ said a boy standing next to me, frightening the life out of me.
The Harrigan kid turned and faced me, as he thought I was the questioner, and said: ‘He was just some kid — I dunno who he was. But it was lucky for him I was there.’
I breathed out. The darkness, as usual, was on my side.
Everyone in Melbourne wanted to talk to the mystery kid. A copper even turned up at our school and asked the mystery kid to come forward to help them find the kidnapper. The way I looked at it, they had Buckley’s chance. Somewhere beneath our feet, the kidnapper still wandered the drains like the Living Dead, or the Id in Forbidden Planet. There was no way I was going down there until I heard that he’d been caught, had croaked or had run off to Greenland.
I turned my attention to the matter of the Dinky car, the mysteries of the Tri-ang train set, and the adventures of the Mouseketeers. That lasted about five minutes. To comfort myself, I made my conversations with Tom longer than usual, speaking in both voices, not that his voice wasn’t the same as mine, but there were subtle differences that only we knew about. And he had his favourite voices: the submarine commander (‘I said, “Up ’scope, Seaman Blayney!”’), the Texas Ranger (‘You go that way ’n’ ah’ll go this way and we’ll creep up on the varmint’) and Biggles (‘I say, look what those Jerry blighters did to my kite!’). I preferred the American PI (‘I knew right away this was no ordinary dame’). And I would always adopt his mannerisms as well, just because it seemed like the thing to do. Funny thing was, it didn’t make me feel sad the way it usually did. It began to feel a bit like having Tom back.
