The Cartographer

by Peter Twohig

  The reason Downyflake smelt so good was that they made terrifically scrumptious doughnuts, probably not as scrumptious as the ones at Victoria Market that the lollopy lady in the silver spaceship made, but I reckoned the judge would have to call for a photo. They also made tons of coffee, which I thought would be just the thing for a busy explorer, and James agreed (though Wonder Woman had different ideas). It smelt good for other reasons, too — warm, sweet and mysterious, like babies; though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But that’s okay: you see, in order to get a ten, a smell must have a certain something about it, so that you can’t just say: Oh yeah, that’s because it’s got whatsaname in it — vanilla or something — if you know what I mean. It has to have a lovely strangeness, like Josephine, to whom I hadn’t been able to get close enough to smell.

  On the wall was a curious sign — at least that’s what Sherlock Holmes would have called it. It had on it a picture of a court jester — yeah, like Danny Kaye — holding a doughnut and looking at it, and these were the words that were written there:

  As you wander on through life, brother,

  Whatever be your goal,

  Keep your eye upon the donut,

  And not upon the hole.

  It was called ‘The Philosopher’s Creed’. Not only that but every now and then they played Burl Ives’s ‘The Donut Song’, which was a song that Mum used to sing when she was in a good mood, in other words, in the old days. But as I listened it struck me that the song had nothing to do with doughnuts: it was a kind of riddle, one that I understood. I had never seen the word ‘philosopher’ before, but now I guessed that a philosopher was a person who understood something, something deep. I asked Wonder Woman about it.

  ‘What a funny question!’ she said. ‘Where did you see that word?’

  ‘Up there.’ I pointed with my doughnut, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

  ‘Oh yes. Well, it’s a person who thinks about things, all right. I’d say that one is thinking about lunch, wouldn’t you?’

  We all laughed, especially James, who was better at laughing than most kids I knew, but who hadn’t, I knew, got the riddle.

  ‘It’s a riddle, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  She looked at me and took a puff of her Benson & Hedges, and blew the smoke up in the air before answering. ‘Yes, I suppose it is a kind of riddle. Do you know what it means?’

  ‘Yes, it means: Watch out for things that count, not the things that don’t count.’

  ‘No,’ said James, ‘it means: Keep your eye on your doughnut, or someone might stick it in his pocket.’

  I laughed along with James, but Wonder Woman just took another drag on her B&H and looked at me with her hypnotic stare. I prayed that she would not make me float up in the air or something, but she didn’t.

  ‘I do hope James and I are going to see a lot more of you now that we are all friends,’ she said, butting her half-finished cigarette in the silver ashtray, and not looking at either of us.

  ‘I hope so too,’ I said. I could tell that she was happy that James had a new friend, but I knew that she really was using him to keep an eye on me. After all, she was a kind of spy. I looked at the cigarette she had just stubbed, and wondered what the lipstick on it smelt like. Probably, I thought, damn close to ten.

  The following day, I was reading Wanderlust Goes South, and I decided that that was just what I needed to do: go south. I was at home at the time, so I pulled out the map and had a look to see what kind of things were in that general direction. It’s always a good idea to check your map before you go into unknown territory: you don’t want to see someone doing something evil to someone else and scaring the life out of you, and getting you into all kinds of trouble. I’d had enough of that. I packed my map and compass, some victuals, and my pinch bar, and struck out for Josephine Island, leaving home before brekkie, so that no one would see which way I went, and how I got to the island. My plan was to explore the building I had seen there before setting off on my journey to the south.

  I would have loved to take Biscuit with me over to the island — he was due for an overseas trip; however, I couldn’t think of a way to get him down to the entrance to the power cable tunnel without breaking his neck, as the entrance was in the side of a cliff. So in the end I decided not to tell him about the trip, and left him dozing.

  It was not until I got to the island that I felt safe.

  One look at the building told me that it had gone to the dogs, so I knew it was empty, yet still it had padlocked doors and barred windows, and the doors were made of iron, so I knew my faithful pinch bar was not going to move them. As I got closer, I saw that it was protected by four anti-aircraft guns, just sitting there, pointing at the sky. Each of them sat on a wide steel ring, and had a deep concrete trench around it, and each of the trenches was connected by another trench, forming a square. After inspecting the guns, which looked like they still had a few shots left in them, I walked down the steps into one of the circular trenches, and found a good place to start a fire. With my frying pan I fried two eggs and a slice of bread. I got that frying pan from the back of Mum’s pots and pans cupboard. She hated opening that cupboard, because every time she did, everything would fall out, and she’d lose her temper. So I reckoned it was going to be a while before she missed it.

  After brekkie, I went down to the river and washed my eatin’ irons, and then came back to the fort and repacked my explorer’s bag. I was just about to leave, and was taking a look around the concrete ditch, when I discovered a low steel door in its wall with a rusty padlock, which told me that nobody wanted it any more, so I snapped it off with the pinch bar. Inside was a small room containing a lot of steel shelves, leading into a larger room. In this room was a small lift with no walls, but none of the switches worked. When I looked around I realised I was inside the old building, which was really a concrete shed with steel girders all over the place, and a set of iron stairs going up to a door in the ceiling. Up there was another room containing the lift engine and the winch that pulled the lift up. On top of the room was a platform, reached by a ladder, and once on the platform, I found I could see in every direction.

  Looking west, I could see across the river to the back of City Boys High and just to the right and further away, Government House; to the northwest, and much further away, was the city, and further to the right a piece of the river. Turning right again, I saw another sweep of the river and, on the other side, the buildings I saw every day, or every week: the brewery, St Felix’s Church and, to the north, the power station, including the exact spot I had climbed down to the entrance of the tunnel. Still turning, I got a view of the back of a river ferry that I knew was heading up near my Aunty Dell’s place at Fairfield, and, completing the circle, more river, and south, a view of Como House on the other side of Como Park.

  Back in the main building, I found a bolted hatch in the floor of the central room which opened to reveal a set of wooden stairs going down into the basement. In the basement I found the bottom of the lift shaft, and some tramlines, heading off down a tunnel that was big enough for a tall person to walk in. This was definitely as far down into the ground as I had ever been, and I was wondering who could possibly want to come down this far. Not a wanted criminal — their kind preferred the peace and quiet you get from a drain under a cemetery. An evil scientist? Probably. Evil scientists never lived above the ground, and preferred caves and the cities that other people had built before the human race began.

  I headed off down the tramlines. The tunnel here was wide and made of bricks with a low, rounded ceiling with electric lights in it, though they were all switched off. I switched my torch off and walked for about a hundred feet with my hand on the wall, then switched it on again. This part of the tunnel was cold and damp, and water seeped through the ceiling and down the walls, and disappeared down a drain. I hurried on a little way and found that it was dry again. Once more I had crossed the river.

  At that point, there was another tunnel
, without tramlines, branching off to the right, back in the direction of the river. On the wall beside it was a sign: EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. I walked through its bluestone mouth and let its gloom swallow me. With excitement in my chest I followed it back along the river and up some steps, and came out at the same padlocked gate I’d seen a few weeks before. I did a bit more padlock snapping with my pinch bar, as that had been my intention when I’d first seen it, then returned through the tunnel to the tramline, which was whispering my name. At least I could congratulate myself on one thing: I had discovered another entrance to the underground tramlines.

  After a few hundred yards, broken only by my passing another dark tunnel entrance to my right with the same wall sign as before, I heard a tram overhead, and it struck me that I was probably beneath Wonder Woman’s house. With that thought my head was filled with a completely different view of Melbourne, a map that had ups and downs, and underneaths and on-top-ofs; and I knew that moment would be with me forever.

  The rest of the tunnel was long and straight, and took me to an underground railway yard for little trains, one of which was parked there. The train — I call it a train even though it ran on tramlines — had no roof and the locomotive was only big enough for the driver to sit in, like the one at Albert Park. Behind it was a set of cars with nothing in them but little seats. Behind them was a vast chamber with more carriages, two cranes and a mountain of spare parts and old tools. In the back of the chamber was another lift with rails in it, and, at one side, a set of stairs that went around as they went up. A feeling rose in my chest as if I was full of burning air. I had struck not gold but trains! And according to the Finders Keepers rule, they were now mine, as they’d been left just sitting there in the dark. I ran my hand over the locomotive and felt its cold green armour. It was the most jump-in-able train I’d ever seen. And it had its own underground train shed. But there was more exploring to do.

  On the far side of the chamber, branching to the left and right, were railway tunnels that went round bends and disappeared. I cased the joint as best I could, switching the torch on for short bursts, as it was starting to lose its get up and go, and decided to tackle the twisting stairs. I was met at the top by a solid iron door. This time the door had no padlock, and when I loosened it a bit with my pinch bar, it opened. On the other side was a long room, about the size of my street, full of wooden boxes of all shapes and sizes that looked and smelt brand new. On their sides were letters and numbers; the numbers were different, but all of the boxes had the same two letters in black: US. The boxes were not padlocked but only nailed down, so I opened one of the biggest ones with my trusty pinch bar. It’s either us or them, Barney says. And that box had us written all over it.

  The box was full of books, maps, charts, letters, notes and stacks of paper tied together with khaki ribbon. Those papers and books reminded me of the back of the shop where I had found the Manual, and I immediately felt warm and happy. As for the maps, they were not like any of the maps I had ever seen, and were mostly covered in wobbly circles and Chinese-sounding words. But they were maps, so I grabbed one that had English words on it, and shoved it into my bag. Its title was Port Moresby, which sounded like part of Australia. I was pretty worried about the torch batteries now, so I ran up the other end of the room and had a quick look in one of the smaller boxes. It was full of straw, and inside the straw, held down by long wooden clamps with wooden wingnuts at the ends, were rows of hand grenades, the kind used by Rock Murdock in Marines in Action.

  I closed the box and swallowed a few times to get my throat going again, and looked around. I was at the bottom of a set of ordinary wooden stairs with a set of double doors at the top. Onwards and upwards, I thought. With a little encouragement from the pinch bar the two doors parted in the middle and swung away from each other with a gentle click. The pinch bar is man’s greatest invention after the pocketknife, which edges it out by a short half-head.

  This room was filled with junk. However, in one corner light was creeping in from a window that had a sheet of plywood balanced in front of it. I moved it, and the room was suddenly illuminated. The window was low enough for me to look through, and what I saw surprised me half to death: a large lawn spread out down below, a huge park stretching out into the distance, and on the other side the railway, and one of the new blue trains going past. I pressed my face to the window and looked to the left and saw a set of stone steps. To the right I saw the river, except that now I was on the other side of it. I turned around to replace the sheet of wood and noticed that it was actually a sign, and it said: CITY BOYS HIGH SCHOOL ANNUAL FETE. I was in a school with a cellar full of grenades.

  Unable to resist the temptation, one that was tailor-made for the Cartographer, I went to the door at the other end of the room and opened it. I found myself in a large office with desks and typewriters all over the place. This office had windows and they looked the other way, not towards the railway, but towards Chapel Street and, further over, to Como Park, where Dad and I used to watch the model aeroplanes on Sundays. I had penetrated the everyday above-ground world. Outside was the school’s main corridor with lots of light, containing the stairs at the centre of the school, which led down to the front doors. I had seen those doors from the train many times. It was so peaceful that I felt I could have happily explored there every day. But a sudden noise from the bottom of the main stairs made me first freeze, then run.

  It was only a short time before I was back in the railway tunnel, having carefully closed all the doors behind me and taking care to shove a souvenir hand grenade into my bag. At this point I was losing torch power so fast that the Cartographer knew he would have to return if he wanted to investigate the little train, the tunnel, the lot.

  After getting me safely to the edge of the tunnel that would take me back to the island, the torch batteries finally gave up the ghost, and I sat down on the floor to change them. I had no sooner made myself comfortable when the door at the top of the twisty staircase opened with a bang that echoed around the tunnels like a gunshot, and someone with a powerful torch started running down the stairs towards me.

  22 Abracadabra!

  All I could do was duck into the tunnel and run, knowing with the instinct of a kid whose luck has run out many times that I was not going to outrun an angry man with a torch. Though I could hardly run under the weight of my explorer’s bag of goodies, I went like hell.

  ‘I’ll get you, you bastard — there’s no way out.’

  I thought my legs were going to fold up under me when I heard this, not because it was true — it wasn’t, of course — but because it was the voice of Bob the Butcher.

  It was the first time he had spoken to me, though I was sure that he had no way of knowing who I was, only that I had disturbed him. As I ran I kept my hand close to the wall, yet I did not feel the water that would have told me that I was crossing the river. After a few minutes I stopped, and took stock of things. Bob had gone the wrong way. So had I. If I retraced my steps I would find the way out. If Bob retraced his steps, he might bump into me, recognise me, and it would all come back to him. I could still hear his footsteps, even if they weren’t directly behind me, so I decided to push on for a while, to increase the distance between us.

  Suddenly, I found the tunnel was broken by a turn to the left. It was the new tunnel I’d found, the one that led to the door that had been padlocked. I took it, still keeping my hand on the wall, and almost immediately felt the wetness of the leaking river above me. I hurried on until I had crossed the river. This time I had an idea where I was. When I came to the bottom of the steps, I sat down to assess my options. I could go back to the railway, and follow the tunnel to the island, a fairly long and now dangerous trip, or I could go up the stairs and exit through the dungeon door. The Cartographer knows when to let the darkness be his friend, but he also knows when enough is enough.

  I dragged myself up the cool steps, and let myself out into the main stormwater drain. A minute later I was sitting
on the lip of the drain, looking at the river and waiting for my energy to come back. The Cartographer had cheated death twice: he had denied Bob the Butcher that opportunity to throttle him, and he had escaped being buried alive. If I had been stuck down there I probably would have had to chew my hands off to survive, though I did have a couple of musk sticks and a packet of Juicy Fruit, and they could keep you going for a hell of a long time.

  As I replaced the batteries in my torch, I wondered how the murderer could possibly have been down there at the same time as me. There was no reason at all why he should have thought it was me down there, and there was something about the way he yelled that told me that he would have yelled the same way at any intruder. The only conclusion I could draw was that he had found the tunnels himself. After all, he was on the run. He needed a place to hide, had investigated the school basement, and … That was it! The school! His way into the tunnels was the school and he thought I’d used the same route. And that meant my island was safe. And, what was more important, my drains.

  A few minutes later I was back in the drain and looking for the entrance to the kidnapper’s hideout, as I planned to leave my pinch bar at that junction for safekeeping. Then I was heading north. Despite having been chased, I felt much safer in the dark stormwater drains than in the railway tunnels, which were getting to be a bit like Bourke Street during the rush hour.

  I headed straight up the drain towards the tip, knowing that I could exit at several points and still be able to get to a safe place, the one I had in mind being the Sandersons’. As I passed the exit to Kipling Street I realised that I was now beneath Rooney Park, where Tom had died, close to the spot he had lain. I felt thankful that I had the drain and didn’t have to walk past the park and see the thing that had killed him. I hated it. Yet I had not drawn it on the map as I tended to do with things I hated.