by Peter Twohig
Everything was quiet. If I dropped down to the floor, I would be able to explore the whole house, which was a prospect that made me shiver with excitement. On the other hand, if there was someone home, someone who had not heard the roof cave in, like a deaf old lady, I could end up in jail. However, if I went back up through the roof I was going to end up in jail for sure, probably on bread and water, because that’s what Granddad said they fed kids, and he should know, because he was only a teenager when they bunged him in. I finally decided that as I was near the back door and there was a lane behind the house, I’d take a look around, and if worst came to worst, run out the back. But first I went back to the hole in the roof and pushed the corrugated iron back into place. Now, if I ever came back, I would have a way to get in, and that would definitely go on the map.
I let myself down from the attic, hanging from the rim of the manhole using the superhero dangle, then dropping to the floor like a cat. My leg was stinging like hell, but I had no time to stop and give myself first aid, though I made a mental note to bung on an army field dressing as soon as I got the chance. For a few minutes I stayed in my cat position, listening to the sounds of the house, and then decided that I would check out the escape route. The back door was in the kitchen, which was at the rear of the house. It led to the yard, which contained a laundry, a dunny and a clothesline with sheets hanging from it; then there was the gate, which I opened a little, to check the lane. The coast was clear.
I returned to the house and crept around, going from room to room. All the doors were open, and at first there seemed to be nothing much there besides the usual house-smelling furniture and wedding pictures in big oval frames. But I had discovered that there is always more than meets the eye in an old house, so I had a good look in all the bedrooms.
In one I found a pair of big black shoes, shiny ones, under the bed, and a box that had a lock on it. I would have to give that box some attention. On the dressing table there was a framed photo, a bit brown, of a lady with a kid. It reminded me of something — I couldn’t put my finger on it — but I looked at it for a long time before slipping it into my bag; it would come to me. In the wardrobe I found lots of white shirts, and lots of black trousers. I thought at first that I might be in a priest’s house, until I remembered that Father Hagen always wore a round priest’s collar (Why? I wondered — I would get to the bottom of that too, eventually.) The real find was on the top shelf of the wardrobe. I put my foot on a drawer and hoisted myself up to get a look — and what I saw almost made me faint. It was a black hat with a silver badge on the front that said ‘Victoria Police’.
There are times, you know, when you wish you had stayed home and played with your car collection, or gone swapping comics down at Charles’s place; this was one of those times. I now had that feeling in my fingertips and my lips, that burning, tingling feeling that tells you that all is not right with the world, and should you wish to get the hell out of there, your body will do its level best to help; in short, that it’s on your side.
Bugger the back door, I thought; the front door is closer. I was out of that room like a rat up a drainpipe. In the hall, I swung a hard left to where I knew the front door was. To my surprise it was open, and standing in the doorway was a bloke, a very large one.
He was holding a crate of beer in both hands, so I knew he couldn’t grab me. His breathing was kind of huffy, and the whites of his eyes were red — they matched his nose. He made no attempt to grab me, even though I ran right into him. He smelt of beer, as you do when you’ve been to the pub, and of Californian Poppy, the same hair oil that Dad used. He kind of grunted and hissed when I ran into him, or rather into his crate, then his eyes opened wide. But I was off down the passage and into the kitchen to where I had set up the escape route.
I had just stepped out into the yard when I realised that someone was opening the back gate; a bunch of blokes, judging from their voices. As the gate opened I ducked behind the sheets hanging on the line just in time to see them walk past. They were police in uniform and the best thing about them was that they were all carrying crates of beer.
As they walked into the house, the bloke inside yelled: ‘Stop that little bastard!’
‘What bastard?’ they asked.
‘That kid!’
‘We didn’t see anyone,’ they said.
And indeed there was no one to see, for yours truly, the little bastard, had cleverly slipped through their fingers, and out into the lane, into kids’ territory. As I cleared the parked police car, I heard one of the blokes yell out from the gate: ‘I’ll get you, you little prick! I know your old man!’ But I doubted it: Dad took a dim view of people who joined the police force, and wouldn’t have anything to do with them. If that copper had really known my family, I thought, he would have yelled: ‘I know your grandfather!’
14 The happy wanderer
I thought Mum was going to chuck a wobbly when she saw the blood all over my leg, though I was quick to assure her that it was just a scratch. Turns out, it was not.
Mum carted me off to see Doc Dunnett, who had probably been hoping that, after his last conversation with her, our family would give him a rest and find a new doctor. But the way I looked at it, Dunnett had offended Mum, and she was not finished with him yet. However, she was not finished with me, either, and it was obvious that she was not concerned about my feelings in the matter. As for Dunnett, he could hardly wait to get stuck into me, and sewed me up as if he was darning an old sock.
All in all, the day did not go well. The only good thing to come of it was the bandage on my leg, which was definitely worth points with the Commandos, and at school, especially when I told them the ridgy-didge story about how I got it.
I started putting the Orange Tree caper on the map the same day. It wasn’t as much a case of getting the job out of the way as being forced to do it as soon as possible; that’s how it was with me and the map. I always felt much better when it had had its way. But I couldn’t finish it straightaway. First there was Cup Day, one of those lovely days when we got a holiday and all the kids went to the pictures at the Gala. That Tuesday we went to see Hercules. The Commandos agreed to meet at the Gala and to sit together, and at the end Charles said that we ought to change our name to the Argonauts. Everyone thought it was a great idea until I pointed out that there had been no privates or corporals in the Argonauts, then the whole question was dropped. The ranks were the most important thing we had. I had a good look around for Flame Boy, hoping Stern hadn’t fried his brain and killed him, but I couldn’t see him. I felt that somehow I had let him down: that it might have been better if I’d incinerated Stern’s torture chamber, as I think he would have.
It took me a few days to finish putting the pub caper on the map, and I managed to include a drawing of the rooftops as seen from the top of the House of the Drunken Copper. I hadn’t realised how many roofs were made of red corrugated iron. I had planned to stick the photo of the lady and the kid onto the map but it looked just right in its frame, so I simply put it away. I wondered who the kid was, and decided that it was probably the cop’s kid, though I still wasn’t sure if cops even had kids.
From the roof of the copper’s house I had been able to see the back of the fish shop with the casino on top. One Sunday, Granddad told Mum that the night before, he had been arrested for playing pontoon in the casino, and had a run-in with the police. But he didn’t have a scratch on him, so I reckoned he must have forked over. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to tangle with Granddad: he was always showing us his muscles, and they looked and felt like they’d been carved out of solid rock. Besides, he raised his eyebrows at me for a second when he told Mum about the coppers, so I knew there was a bit more to that story than he was letting on. Of course, I knew all about the casino, having been there a few times with Granddad, though I never got into the playing room. It was always a good place to find out what was going on around the neighbourhood, Granddad would say with a wink, and I knew that when he winked wit
hout smiling he was talking about things that fell off the back of trucks. We had the worst trucks in Australia in Richmond. Luckily, when the things did fall off the trucks they never broke, or got run over by trams.
I had also seen from the roof of the House of the Drunken Copper something I had never noticed before: a very long ladder going up to the top of the funnel by the railway line. The funnel was a concrete one about the size of a small house and sat on top of a round brick tower with a door at the bottom and a special hose and tap used by steam locos in the old days for getting water. I had tried a few times to open the door at the bottom of the tower, of course, but I had never noticed the ladder, because it was around the back of the funnel. I drew the funnel on the map and added a ladder then made a note to myself in my Spirax notebook to get down there one day, climb up the ladder and take a peek inside. I decided that day had arrived.
Taking Biscuit, I went down to the railway yard behind the tannery and walked along the track towards the railway bridge across the river until I came to the siding near the funnel. A pair of long black sheds that were sometimes used to store locos crouched near the entrance to the siding. When I got to the sheds, I opened the wide door of each and went inside for a look around.
They were lit by large windows, and by openings in the roof. I guessed that the openings were there to let the rain in to cool down the locos, because they would have been hot. Anyway, there were no locos in there, but one of the sheds contained two huge boxes in the back corners, one with a lock on it, and one without. I opened the box without a lock and found inside it a wrecking bar, a five-foot-long iron bar with split ends, which Blarney Barney once told me you use for opening things that are locked when you’ve forgotten the key, as he often did; a pinch bar, which is the same but about half as long; and a pry, which is only about a foot long. Barney also told me that unless you worked for Whelan the Wrecker, it was a good idea not to let a copper see you with any of these tools, especially after hours.
Once, when Granddad was busy having a cuppa with Mrs Carruthers, Barney had taken me out to his new secondhand Ford Consul and showed me how to open the boot without a key, just by wiggling a pry around. I said: ‘I don’t get it, Barn. If everyone and his dog can come along with one of these things and open the boot, why do they bother giving you a key?’ And he just scratched his head and said: ‘I’m buggered if I know.’
Anyway, the box was so big that I couldn’t reach the bottom, so that I had to hop in to get the bars, and by the time I had hopped out again I had worked out what to do. I would open the other treasure chest by turning it over with the wrecking bar, and pulling off the bottom. Then, when I had finished sorting through the loot, I would put the bottom back on and turn it back over. That way I could keep coming back to collect every time the thugs topped up the treasure.
Even I was surprised at how smoothly the plan worked. The wrecking bar did turn the box over, and the claw on the end did pull the bottom off the box, and I was able to get the treasure out, and it was pretty good treasure too: a whole stack of boxes and tins with watches inside them. There were thousands of watches. I decided to take one full tin, to give to Granddad. I already had a watch, and anyway, it was the tin I was after. It had a picture of Lassie on the front. I only took that one tin, even though there were more tins and boxes than I could count, and I knew that as I was taking it from the bottom, it wouldn’t be missed. I turned the box back over and made sure that it was in the same place. But the pinch bar and pry I kept, the wrecking bar being too heavy to lug. Whoever owned the box had a key, and wouldn’t have left the tools in the other box if they had known they were there. So I thought: Finders keepers.
Outside, Biscuit and I sat down on the railway line and had a sherbet bomb and some cordial out of our canteen — at least I did. I gave Biscuit one of Mum’s ginger snaps, and told him it was a bone, which is the oldest trick in the world. Then I had a look in the tin to see what kind of watches I had found. They were all new and had shiny watchbands. Some were going and some weren’t. I gave a wind to one of the watches that had stopped and off it went. One by one I took the watches out of the tin, made sure they were going and laid them out beside me. They were all ticking at once, and I could actually hear them ticking, all twenty of them. Then I looked up at the funnel. That was a hell of a climb, but I could do it, though looking up at the ladder gave me a fright in the soles of my feet, and I wondered if I might have misjudged its height. In fact now that I looked at it from this angle, I wasn’t sure if this was even the right funnel.
But we were here, and the expedition had gone well so far, so off we went. I took Biscuit to the bottom of the ladder and tied him to it with a piece of cord I always carried ever since he’d wandered off and left me that night at the old cemetery. I had asked Mum to get Biscuit a collar but all she said was that she wasn’t made out of money and Biscuit did not need a collar and collars did not grow on trees, so I asked Granddad, and to my surprise he found one the same afternoon, one that was even better than a new one because new ones always hurt your dog’s neck. So Biscuit was now wearing a collar, and it had a metal ring in it for tying ropes to, and that is what I did. Biscuit liked trains a lot, and I didn’t want him getting creamed, like Johnno’s dog, Digger, who had got spread out all the way to South Yarra Station after being hit by one of the old red rattlers. I doubt whether the driver would’ve even noticed. When I told Granddad what had happened, he said that if Digger was half as thick as Johnno’s old man, he’d probably tried to take a piss against the train while it was going past. He wasn’t laughing, and he wasn’t winking either, so I could see that it was no joke.
So up the ladder I went, singing my favourite song, ‘The Happy Wanderer’, to take my mind off the height. See, whenever I sing that song I have to concentrate, because I always forget the words that come after ‘I wave my hat to all I see, and they wave back to me …’
And this time was just the same: ‘Tum-tum tum tum, tum-tum tee tum …’ No, it was gone.
But it didn’t matter, because I was at the top, and I was able to see into the funnel, and what I saw shook me to the core, as someone said — Larry, possibly. Inside the funnel was another ladder, leading down to the bottom, and it looked a lot further down on the inside. Now, there are two kinds of adventurers: those who see a ladder and think: Hmm, a ladder, this could be an interesting thing to check out. I wonder … and those who don’t think anything at all, and just climb down, and the Cartographer was one of these. But before I did, I took one last look around at the neighbourhood. After all, I had never seen it from this spot, and I might spy out something I could stick on the map. The most interesting thing was the brewery, of course, and as I stood there breathing in the warm smells that came from it, I wondered what it would be like inside the place. Larry Kent must have had breweries in mind, I thought, when he said: Blondes can be bitter, because that’s what they made in there: Bitter. Anyway, if I ever decided to find out for myself, I would leave Biscuit at home — he was too fond of the grog.
I looked in the other direction and saw my school on the other side of the pickle factory: St Felix’s, which was the place Felix the Cat was named after, and made a mental note to add it to the map. Normally, I would have made a note in my Spirax, but I wasn’t game to let go of the ladder, and besides, the mission came first. I also realised that if I could see the whole of Richmond from the top of the ladder, the whole of Richmond could see me, so I climbed over the rim of the funnel and down the ladder on the inside. At the bottom of the funnel there was another ladder that ran down to the bottom of the brick part of the water holder, and that’s where I went. There was no water, so that confirmed that like everything else in my neighbourhood it was old, and probably past it. I tried the door but it wouldn’t budge. So after a while I decided to go back up the ladder. I was halfway up the brick part when a train went past outside and the whole place shook like mad. I was used to trains, and we had lots of games that involved them, but being in
a water tower on a ladder that was shaking was a new experience. The ladder shook itself right off the wall and I fell to the bottom of the water holder, and landed still attached to a couple of yards of ladder.
Probably, at this point, Dick Tracy would have used his wrist radio to call Chief Brandon, or the Phantom would have beat out a tom-tom message on the wall to call his boyhood friend Guran, but I didn’t know drum language and my watch was not a radio, so I decided to try climbing out. That didn’t work either. So I decided to yell out using the emergency rescue request code invented by the Superheroes League for just this type of problem. I yelled ‘Help!’ about two thousand times. Outside, I could hear Biscuit occasionally doing the same thing in dog talk. Together, we were doing pretty well, and I knew that it was just a matter of time. Unfortunately, it was getting dark.
It actually wasn’t so bad for me down there: I had my emergency food supply, but the bikkies I had brought along for Biscuit were all with me, so he would have to wait. But after my own rations were gone, I finally got so hungry I hoed into Biscuit’s emergency bikkies, beginning with a slightly burnt chocolate one. Actually, ‘hoed’ is not the right word; let’s say I gnawed them — that’s all you could do with Mum’s bikkies unless you had teeth like a crocodile.
