by Peter Twohig
But really, I think it was making me disappear.
9 The Cartographer
I wasn’t happy about discovering that I was disappearing, even if it meant that Tom was coming back, I suppose because I knew that something wasn’t right about it. And also because disappearing was what I did when I had one of my very funny turns. I don’t know where I went when this happened, but I always seemed to come back at a time when I was sicker than a sausage dog. On the whole, I’d had my fill of that.
But I was still happy to see Tom in the mirror every now and then. If I made my eyes a little bit brighter and curled up my mouth as though I was halfway through doing the frog mouth, then decided to switch to the aunty-kissing mouth, I looked so much like him it gave me a little tickling feeling, like the time I got the wooden spoon in the Commandos’ worm-eating competition. Pretty soon, I had to strain my brain to make myself reappear, though it seemed to work. But then something happened at school that gave my reappearance efforts a bit of a setback.
It was vaccination day at St Felix’s, as someone had decided that all the kids had to have polio injections. Now I’m not one of those kids who, on hearing that he has to have an injection, says: ‘What, just the one?’ No, I’m more like one of those kids who suddenly remembers that he has to be visiting his sick grandmother that day — I was always putting my old grandmother’s welfare ahead of my own.
The vaccinations took place in the church beside the school, as that was the one place big enough to hold all the kids at once. Beginning with the little kids, who apparently were the ones most at risk of getting polio, the classes snaked out of the pews and around the church aisles and passed in front of the sanctuary to where the Chief Torturer, Dr Dunnett himself, stood at a little table with a nurse who looked so much like a dead woman that I thought she might be a zombie of some kind.
There were only two objects on that table that caught my attention: a flame that wavered on top of a little bottle, and a hypodermic syringe with a needle on the end. I had heard from one of the big kids in my street that the polio needle was the biggest needle you could get, and now I could see why. I reckoned this needle could easily go right through your arm. Then there was the smell: it was medical and stank of fear. I had only ever come across it in hospitals, and doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries. I gave it a two, which is below vomit. Anyway, the little kids were all crying, of course, especially the one whose turn it was to be tortured; and Who Dunnett seemed to be enjoying himself enormously, as if all his Christmases had come at once.
In spite of the fact that I usually had no trouble pretending I was Tom, this was one time when I wanted to be him — no pretending — but couldn’t make it happen. We both hated getting needles, but for Tom the reason had nothing to do with fear — that was me — but with dignity, something that I’d heard Aunty Jem say the men in our family had a lot of, though I think that in the case of twins, only one of them gets it. So there I was, down the back of the church, straining every muscle to rustle up a bit of indignation, and wondering how Tom did it, when something snapped inside me and I was suddenly filled with a rush of warmth that felt like excitement mixed with a brilliant idea, and I knew exactly what to do.
At that moment I was shuffling past a fire hose coiled up on the wall. Above the hose was a sign that said: FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY. This was one of those times. Paying no attention to the stares of the kids around me, who were unsure whether they should call for Sister or witness the greatest stunt ever pulled by a kid, I quickly uncoiled the hose all over the floor and started turning the big red wheel. At first, nothing happened, then there was a trickle, then I began to feel a surge of power in my muscles, the surge I had prayed for when Tom was pinned under the monkey bar, but didn’t get. When the real water appeared, the hose became alive and started moving around like a hibernating boa constrictor that had been awoken before spring, and was a bit disoriented. The girls started screaming and the boys, some of them so-called friends, began yelling for Sister. Still I kept turning until the whole church was copping it left, right and centre. All I could feel was an exhilaration that was not mine. My own thought-voice, the one that I use to speak to Tom in, was gone, and in its place was the one Tom used to talk to me. I could tell, as I looked into the racket and the surge and the spray, that I was looking out of Tom’s face. I hadn’t felt so good for a long time, and as I turned the red wheel faster and faster I let out what I knew was Tom’s victory cry: ‘Haaaaah!’
What happened next was totally unexpected. A nun appeared out of nowhere — they have magic powers, some of them — and turned off the tap. Then, before I had time to give her my side of the story, she grabbed me by the hair and dragged me down to the altar, past the crowd of screaming kids, and held me in front of Dunnett, who looked at me with the kind of look you don’t want to see on the face of someone who knows thirty-five ways to kill a kid without leaving any marks. Long story short, he sticks the needle in my arm, and I tell him to get whatsanamed. I figure I’m probably going to be arrested and bunged in the Black Maria anyway, so what the hell.
I was dragged away and locked in Mother’s office. For a few minutes I could hear only muffled noises and the sound of people running. Then the door opened and in came the new teacher, to guard me until Mother showed up to kill me. She was the replacement for Sister Cornelia, who had been a novice and — according to Sister Benedict, who could keep a secret about as well as our Philips radio could — had withdrawn her entry into the Brigidine Invitation Stakes. And this new teacher was not a nun.
I had been making observations of her since she showed up at St Felix’s. I could tell by the way her hair smelt when she came over to look at my arithmetic that she smoked, and from the way that she drew pictures on the board with coloured chalk I could tell that she had been taught to draw. She had a way of doing it that looked like she couldn’t care less whether she got it right or wrong, yet the pictures were always perfect.
I noticed other things as well. She had no engagement ring, never smiled, and drove a black Morris Minor, the only woman I had ever seen drive a car. Everywhere she went she carried a briefcase, like Perry Mason. Her name was Miss Schaeffer, and, as none of us knew her first name, we decided to make one up for her. Douggie Quirk, who was a bit of a comedian, reckoned her name was probably Silly Schaeffer. The Commandos had a special meeting at the end of her first week and voted to find out what her name was, and in the meantime, to call her ‘Skinny’, because she was.
She sat down opposite me and lit a cigarette and frowned at me a little sadly, so I decided to strike up a conversation, the way Granddad did whenever he met someone he knew at the races.
‘Hello, Miss.’
‘Hello to you too, Master Blayney. You’re in a lot of trouble.’
Granddad’s first rule of conversation: mention something you have in common.
‘That your Morris Minor, that black one?’
She looked at me and blinked a few times, trying to keep up.
‘Yes, I just got it.’
‘My dad has one exactly the same, only green. He says they have the best engine ever made.’
Granddad didn’t say anything about the thing you have in common needing to be true.
‘Well, mine goes pretty well. I drive it from Heidelberg every day.’
‘I see.’
Granddad’s second rule: use their name.
‘Miss Schaeffer, when I tell my mother that I have a new teacher, she’ll ask me for your first name, in case she ever needs to write you a note.’
‘After what you just did, it wouldn’t surprise me if tomorrow you found yourself attending the state school.’
‘I was frightened. I thought something bad was going to happen to me.’
‘Yes, I hear you’ve been in the wars. You can tell her it’s Elizabeth.’
‘Elizabeth Schaeffer,’ I said out loud, sticking to the rules.
She nodded and smiled — her first — and a warm breeze flowed through my b
ody and collected somewhere in my chest.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
I answered but nothing came out.
After that, the worst thing about Commandos Club meetings was having to call Miss Schaeffer ‘Skinny’.
Needless to say, the Emergency Fire Hose brainwave had consequences. For a start, I became even more famous than Theo Love (his real name) who had recently kicked Sister Benedict in t he shins for donging him with a blackboard ruler, and for a while, even more famous, I would say, than Ned Kelly. Mother Sylvester said that there was something wrong with me, and there was, of course, though not quite what she thought. But she’d had it. It was bad enough, she told my mother, that I was frightening the other kids by having fits — they don’t put too fine a point on things, these nuns — but now I had become a juvenile delinquent, which is not bad going for a kid who is too young to even be a juvenile. The only reason I was not being expelled, she said, was because she didn’t want me going to the state school, where I would not get a Catholic education. But something had to be done.
So Mum and Granddad took me back to Dr Dunnett, who I could tell really didn’t want to see me again, unless it was through the bars of a jail cell. After pretending to give me an examination, he got down to the business of ignoring me completely. I didn’t expect to hear any light-hearted banter, not with the star of the show being an angry doctor, and the co-stars being a guy who doesn’t like being given advice by anyone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and a lady who is angry at just about everyone who is not a girl. And it’s just as well I didn’t.
‘Well now, how is the patient?’ asks Dunnett, being first out of the starting gate.
‘Well, physically he seems to be all right,’ says Mum, looking at Granddad, who, along with Dad, hated Dunnett, and all doctors for that matter. ‘But in other ways — well, that’s another matter. I mean, it’s these …“turns” of his. They seem to be having a bad effect on him generally. He’s moody and quiet, and misses his brother terribly. In some ways, they were more than twins.’
‘Well, that’s to be expected, of course. But there’s a lot more to this boy than just the odd seizure. There’s something deeply wrong with him, and it needs to be corrected. I’ve been giving the case some thought, and I think we ought to put him on a course of EST. Works wonders. I can book him in for four sessions a week with Dr Stern, a neurologist whose practice is just next door. He is fully equipped to perform the procedure, and I’ve referred lots of troublesome children to him. They end up as good as gold. Yes, four sessions weekly should do the trick — put an end to his stupid pranks and compulsive lying. All it takes is a phone call. Well then, that’s that, eh?’
He starts to get up, as if it’s all agreed. Mum starts to get up too. She doesn’t know what Dunnett’s talking about, but as far as she’s concerned the problem — that’s me — is solved. But Granddad doesn’t move a muscle, and he’s got a few muscles for an old codger.
‘So what’s EST when it’s at home?’ he asks.
‘Electroshock therapy — electroconvulsive therapy — just what the doctor ordered.’ And he laughs at his own joke, though no one else does.
‘What’s —?’ begins Mum. But Granddad didn’t come down in the last shower, and he’s heard of this stuff already.
‘Let me get this straight. You want to give electric shocks to his brain? Four times a week? Like he’s some kind of animal? And you reckon that’ll fix him?’
‘What!’ yells Mum, in a way that is bloody good to hear. ‘My baby? You can forget that right now, Dr Dunnett. You’re lucky his father didn’t hear that stupid bloody suggestion. Come on, Dad, we’re leaving. Electric bloody shocks!’
‘But it’s perfectly safe, and a very reliable treatment for psychiatric disorders of all kinds, including epilepsy.’
‘He’s a child, for God’s sake. No, that’s it. Goodbye, Doctor.’
Mum grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the room, stopping by the receptionist’s desk to tell her not to bother sending a bill. As soon as we were out on the landing, she let go of my hand; it had just been a demonstration of that old saying about possession being nine-tenths of the law, which is the grown-up way of saying finders keepers — a saying that Granddad swore by.
Outside Dunnett’s place the conversation continued, again as if I wasn’t there. Granddad didn’t think I should go on like this.
‘The boy is sick and could have a nasty accident.’
‘But all that bloody doctor has managed to do is make him worse. He’s not going back on those drugs, and he’s not having electric shocks, and that’s that.’
‘Well, I agree about the shocks —’
‘He needs to get over Tom. He’s bright; he’ll find a way. When that happens, he’ll be his old self again.’
‘I wouldn’t hold me breath, love.’
So I understood from these events that the family didn’t really think that I was mad, like my Uncle Maury, who’d had a nervous breakdown after being beaten up by Dad, and who now lived on a convict island called Tasmania. I was just me: a kid having a hard time.
After that I was left alone with my map. If you want to know, what was bothering me was that I looked a hell of a lot like the Harrigan kid, aka the Boy Down the Drain: I had straight hair that stuck out all over the place and looked like dry grass. I couldn’t stop wondering if my skin would melt like his, if my ears would crackle like his, if my …
Perhaps that was it — I don’t know. I no longer knew if I was a kid like other kids, and, sometimes, I wasn’t sure just which kid I was supposed to be. After Vaccination Day I could be Tom any time I liked. Sometimes I felt that if I strained my brain, the real me would reappear for good, and everything would be all right again, and at other times I felt that I was better off just being whoever it suited me to be. The one thing that I could be sure of was the map. We needed each other.
I spent the rest of the day reading the Manual, and I was so absorbed that I forgot all about the murderer and the kidnapper. As I read I began to see the world in a different light. It turned out that it was the Manual, and not the Bible, as the Sevvies who came to our door claimed, that was the Greatest Story Ever Told. What it lacked in the smiting and begetting department it made up for in sheer ingenuity. It solved every mapping problem I had ever had, and heaps I’d never thought of. It would help me strengthen the map’s main function: to give me a clear view of those parts of town where bad things had happened. I knew that, despite its beauty and richness — it was jam-packed with facts — it could never have protected me from the horrible things I had seen in those places. Obviously, the trick was to avoid those sorts of localities (a word I learnt from the Manual) in the first place.
As for all the horrible things that had happened to me, I guessed that they were tests of some kind. Every detective and explorer has to pass certain tests; so does every superhero. These had been mine, and I had passed — well, at least that was the view I took. I had not been rewarded with the Treasure of the Lost Tomb, or solved the mystery of some uncharted island. But I had obtained the Manual, and it was now teaching me the secrets of my craft, which I would use to create a world in which I could walk around without getting frightened half to death every five minutes. It was almost as if I was protected by a secret identity.
When the thought struck, it struck like a lightning bolt. It hit me in the head, travelled down my back and almost blew my feet off, the way Mr Wallace’s feet had been blown off when his crane touched the overhead wires. It was such a wonderful thought that it came with its own smell, a bit like a cross between Dad’s armpit, an old gumboot and Charles’s electric train set. If I could have put that thought in a bottle, I’d uncork it on special occasions, and have the tiniest whiff. Dunnett could stick his EST up his arse — ’scuse the French. I had my own electric shock therapy.
My thought was to harness the power I had been using to turn myself into Tom to instead turn myself into a brand-new super identity,
far more powerful than both of us together. I had noticed that the Manual referred to the person who used it as ‘the cartographer’. Then let it be so, I thought. Henceforth, I would go out into the world to explore, not as the exhausted remnant of what had once been the greatest twinship the street, or for that matter the school, had ever known, but as: The Cartographer!
I should have said the Cartographer and his Dog. For Mum and Granddad had agreed (with old man Dunnett) that I should have a dog, as I seemed to be in need of a replacement for Tom. I had in fact been a bit out of touch with my friends, except those in the Commandos. I missed them, of course, but the murderer was out there somewhere, possibly even dragging kids with straight hair to his secret opium den and torturing them for information about the treasure, so I was trying to lie low. So when the idea of a dog came up I thought: why not?
This new dog of mine was pretty fierce. He could bark, growl and scratch doors. He looked as though he would bite, but no one had been game enough to find out. He was a Labrador, which is a breed of watchdog famous for tearing the limbs off escaped criminals and howling in the night like a banshee, the worst kind of ghost on earth. Again, I had not heard Biscuit — well? — actually howl; however, I expected him to do all the right things on the day. Watchdogs can climb walls, even tear through them if necessary, and, as the Phantom’s dog, Devil — not a dog at all but a wolf — shows all the time, they can bring down a man who is escaping on a horse. Also, watchdogs are not afraid of fire. In fact, the fire brigade uses them to put out fires in buildings. And during the war they used them to stamp out fires in burning Lancaster bombers. It is also a well-known fact that a Labrador can beat the shit out of any dog except a German Shepherd, and they are as scarce as hen’s teeth since the Germans lost the war. In nothing flat I had trained Biscuit to kill on command, but had been forbidden by Mum from ordering him to actually kill anyone. But then, Mum didn’t know about the murderer. One thing everyone in my town knew was that if you wanted to live to see your next birthday, you kept your mouth shut. It was bad enough that Biscuit’s tongue was always hanging out; mine never would.
