The Cartographer

by Peter Twohig

  First stop was the lane at the back of the Gala to find out how much damage Flame Boy had managed to inflict. There was quite a bit to see, but the flames had not burnt the picture theatre down for the simple reason that the wall I had seen him setting fire to was not that of the picture theatre, but was actually a wall surrounding a small yard behind it, and probably belonging to it, because it was painted the same lurid maroon. In the daylight it was all painfully clear, and, indeed, I was embarrassed for him, as he struck me as the kind of bloke who likes to see a job done right. Also, I always like to see a fellow sportsman get a few runs on the board. And neither had occurred.

  But the whole area had been wrecked, some of it by the flames — there were black bits all over the place — and a lot of it by water, which the fire brigade loves to squirt. Dad says that if the brigade gets called out to a false alarm, and they’d been enjoying a pie with sauce when the alarm went off, they’d always make sure they’d hose your house good and proper before they shot through, so that it would be a miracle if your house didn’t fall down five minutes after they left. In this case, the wall had fallen over, then been blown to bits by water. I reckoned the brigade blokes had probably been having a Four’N Twenty or two.

  Things were a little different with this second visit to the lady’s place. For one thing I now knew who lived in the house, and I knew a few other things too. I knew that she had not been to the footy today, as that was over for the season, and the Swans had been done like a dinner, if you must know. That meant that anything could happen, and I had to be extra careful. I went around the back, as usual, and what did I see but Dad’s Triumph parked in the little back yard, with his leather jacket hanging on the handlebar. When I entered the yard I could hear it ticking as it cooled down, and I could see the little waves in the air around the cooling fins. That meant he had been for a ride, and not come straight from work, because his factory wasn’t far enough away for the motor to get that hot. I bet he’d gone for a burn up the Boulevard to Heidelberg and back, because that was one of his favourite rides, especially when he just wanted to get away for a while and think of nothing but the twists and the turns and the fat sound of the bike. He had taken me on a ride around there a couple of times, and I could see why he liked it, even though it scared the life out of me.

  Inside there was the sound of Dad and his girlfriend having a barney; she was very browned off about something, and you didn’t have to be a fan of Portia Faces Life to figure out what it was.

  I didn’t want to listen: I’d heard blues before. You could say I was an expert on the subject. They were always caused by the same things: men messing around with other women; grog; gambling; and unemployment — and there was a hell of a lot of that about. But Dad wasn’t a gambler and he had a job, and his friend was a beer drinker herself, so that left other women. And though I wasn’t exactly sure who the other woman might be, something told me she was Mum. I think this was what Granddad meant when he said that the men in our family tended to affect their women in a certain way. Well, they were going at it hammer and tongs. I had never heard Dad say so many words in my life. He was practically setting a new record for making excuses.

  His case seemed to be based on the fact that she had told him to go home and chat to the natives. Even I could remember her saying that. Her case seemed to be that it was supposed to be a bloody visit, not the renewal of his bloody marriage vows. Dad was relying, too much I thought, on the word ‘but’, but women love buts because it gives them an excuse to carry on for another half an hour. Don’t you but me, Bill Blayney seemed to be one of her favourites, and she stuck it into him like an Olympic fencing medallist. Dad was hopeless; I was almost ashamed to be his son. I put it down to lack of match practice. He should have been kicking goals, but he was barely getting points and I thought he was lucky not to be disqualified for failing to fight at his best.

  In the end, they both gave up at the same time, because this was one of those blues that wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Listen, love,’ she said, ‘all I want is for you to make your bloody mind up about your wife, and say something to your son. He can always come over and visit. He’s old enough to catch the tram up here by himself, and there’s plenty of room if he ever wants to stay for the weekend.’

  ‘She’ll never agree. She hates you.’

  ‘’Course she does. But she loves him, that’s what counts, and I think she’ll agree. Anyway, it’s either that, or we’re finished. We can’t go on like this. I mean, you still haven’t got used to Tom being gone. You need your son. So go back there and tell her what you want, and don’t forget to come back. This is where you belong.’

  I wondered if he’d do it — I hoped he would. Life with Mum was bad enough when he was gone, but when he was there, it was just one blue after another, and that was even worse. Also, since we lost Tom, life with Bill and Jean was not all beer and skittles for me, as I was having to be two bloody kids, and it’d been getting me down wholesale. At least this way, one of them would be happy, and maybe Mum would meet some nice bloke who was half deaf and had no taste buds.

  I felt like running in and yelling: ‘Do it, Dad, do it!’

  ‘Okay,’ was all he said; but he made it sound like a mouthful.

  After I left I took a stroll down the lane where I’d seen the police drag the bloke behind the car, and where I had found my bloke’s hat, which I was now wearing. There was nothing much to see except the rope the cops had used, which had been cut where it was tied around the bloke’s ankles. I guess no one had been interested in that, nor, I’ll bet, in the bloke either. That was the way things were round here. Granddad always said that this was one of those areas where it paid to watch your arse, but that wasn’t always possible if you were a kid. If you were a kid, there was often someone not that far away with his eyes on your arse, and you couldn’t expect to get paid for it either. So that was that, I thought, and headed off to Granddad’s place. I had looked back and it doesn’t pay to look back. So I would look forward.

  A few minutes later I arrived in the lane behind Granddad’s house. It used to be Nanna Taggerty’s place as well, till she died, and now the place seemed quiet, and the garden was a bit overrun with weeds. The flowers were still there, but with all the weeds they didn’t look as good. I made a mental note to come around tomorrow and do something about it, though neither I, the Cartographer, nor the Outlaw knew much about gardening. In fact, all of us put together would have had more chance of figuring out how Captain Video was going to get out of the fix he was in the last time we saw him. But I had helped Nanna in the garden tons of times, and knew that the best thing you could do was pull the weeds out and bung on plenty of water. How hard could that be?

  I knocked on the back door, but there was no answer, so I thought I’d let myself in, because I knew where the key was, and Granddad had always told me to let myself in if he wasn’t there, and I had a few times before. It had been quite a while since my last visit, and I’d forgotten how good the house smelt. It still smelt a bit like Nanna, even though she’d been dead for a couple of years, and the kitchen still smelt of the way Nanna cooked, and I guessed that was because Granddad had carried on cooking pretty much the same way. The house was quiet except for the ticking of Nanna’s old clock, and the living room was full of her pictures. Nanna had once told me that she was damn lucky to have Granddad, because he could have had any girl in town, even though to look at, he was no Victor Mature. She said that was because he had style. Well, he had that all right.

  So I thought: No Granddad — and here’s me with nothing to do but wait. I went for a walk around the long thin house that I knew as well as my own, and climbed the skinny stairs to the first floor. Granddad’s bedroom was tidy and the bed was made — he told me he promised Nanna he’d keep the place neat for her, because she liked that — and beside the bed on his bedside table there were two photos. One I’d seen a million times: a picture of Nanna in the garden wearing a big sun hat with her
arms full of gladdies and a lovely smile on her face. The other I’d seen before too, but not for a while, and not here, either.

  It was the photo I’d nicked from the copper’s house, down by the Orange Tree pub, the one of the lady and the kid.

  27 Railwayman

  You know how just when you think you’ve got a firm grip on your raspberry ice-block, and the next thing you know it’s in your lap, or worse, on the ground? It’s like that with a lot of people. I reckon Mr Sanderson was one of those people. Only a few months ago, he was just an old fogey with no blood in his face and a fridge full of creamy soda. Now he was some kind of special rozzer with super powers. And he was living in that house. Wonder Woman was another one. One minute I was putting as much space as possible between her and me, and praying I would never see her or Bob again, and the next my life had got so mixed up with hers that I had practically become part of her family.

  Now I added Granddad to the list. It seemed to me that he was a lot more mysterious than I had thought, and I would have to keep a close eye on him for any interesting information that might come my way. I would have thought that he’d be the last person on earth to have a picture that belonged to a copper beside his bed, apart perhaps from a copper’s relative, which I reckoned no one would own up to being anyway. Later, when I got home, I drew a dotted line between Granddad and the copper’s house, which I had previously copied onto the map. Finally — reluctantly — I continued the line to myself.

  And it was lines of another sort that I was now preparing to explore. If you’re one of those people who thinks that the last thing a kid who’s been chased by a homicidal maniac in an underground tunnel would do is revisit the old haunt to reminisce and do a bit more exploring, then you don’t know much about kids, and not a lot about the Cartographer, either. The Cartographer likes nothing better than to follow underground tramlines to wherever they may lead, and get his hands a little dirty in the process, and cares nothing for murderers. Besides, I had to get a closer look at the underground train I had found. And anyway, Tom would have gone back down there.

  Actually, at that moment, the Cartographer did have a knot in his stomach, like he’d had one too many of the lollopy-lady-in-the-spaceship’s doughnuts, but he knew this time it was a good knot, not a bad one. I’d had a similar feeling — the bad one — the day Tom climbed up on top of the monkey bar, and stood up. I’d never seen anyone do that before. The soles of my feet were thrilling in pain just watching. We’d had our play, we were finished. We should have been off home. But Tom hadn’t given me the word, and I liked to hear him say it, because nobody said ‘home’ like him. Nobody cared enough about it. But I was allowed to say whatever I liked to him, so I did.

  ‘No, don’t. Let’s go.’

  But with a bad feeling I realised that I hadn’t opened my mouth, hadn’t said anything at all, just thought it. I had thought of the words shooting out like snooker balls — click, click, click … plock. Done, or rather, said. The words were in my head, waiting for the word chute to open. But it didn’t. Anyway, I didn’t know what he was going to do, or what the monkey bar was going to do. Later, I told myself he would have done it anyway, eventually. He wouldn’t have paid any attention to me. He wouldn’t have even understood why I was telling him to stop. That was something we didn’t do. But I could tell that he could read the concern in my face, and didn’t mind a bit. He was allowed to have one more play, do one more trick. He enjoyed the one-more game a lot more than I did: one last bit of cake, one last joke, one last comic swap, even though he knew we were going to miss the tram, be late for Mass, whatever. I was more your enough-is-enough type of twin.

  He read my mind.

  ‘One last swing,’ he said, looking down at me. ‘One last trick, then we’ll be off home.’

  Home. That was the last word I heard him say.

  The Cartographer shut his ears and concentrated on today. I’d made sure I was carrying an extra set of torch batteries, but not the pinch bar, which I had left behind, in case I had to run like hell. I had also prepared special rations for the trip, consisting of a few Bester’s cream biscuits, some jelly beans — good for any caper — and a cold sausage roll, even though I knew it was going to taste like Zac had slept on it. There was one other difference about this expedition: I was careful to be as quiet as a mouse with not a lot to say. I swear I nearly broke my brain trying not to burst into ‘Sixteen Tons’.

  When I got back to the turn-off in the tunnel where I had made the wrong turn when I was running from the bloke with the torch, I could see how easy it was to do that, as the tunnel had forks all over the place. When I came to the little train, I stopped and had a good look around, knowing that, once I was past this point, I could not be sure of outrunning an axe murderer unless he had accidentally gone for a stroll with an extra-large axe. The coast seemed clear so I eased myself into the driver’s seat, and checked the dashboard. There was an on/off switch and I gave it a little flick, just to see what would happen. What happened was that a red light came on and a couple of little needles on the dashboard moved. On the floor were pedals, like a car’s, so I pressed one of them to see if it did anything and the whole train moved a few inches. This was one of the greatest discoveries I had ever made in my life! I had a train of my own! There was a click in my brain, and the Cartographer made way for … Railwayman!

  Yes, Railwayman, who lives underground and drives his jet-propelled train around the tunnels deep beneath the city, spoiling the plans of evil men and helping the police to send them to Pentridge to rot or to hang. Railwayman, who is often armed with a pinch bar that he found in a railway shed, and who has his own secret supply of hand grenades; and who, with his faithful companion, Shadow the Wonder Dog, has taken a solemn vow to explore underground railways everywhere, and to make maps of them, so that he won’t accidentally have the same adventure twice.

  I pushed the pedal a little more and as the train edged forward, I could feel its power all around me, pushing and pulling me at the same time. It was like driving a tank. The only sound it made was a click as the cars behind it got pulled along. I kept my foot on the pedal until I was at the beginning of the tunnel. Then I found the reversing lever, and the little train started going backwards. The only problem was that the cars made a bit of noise banging against each other. So I hopped out and went to the back of the loco and had a look at the coupling. It was a bit like my Tri-ang train set, so I pulled out a big pin on a chain, then a little lever, and I was free of the cars behind me. Back in the driver’s cab, I pushed the forward pedal down as gently as possible. As we glided into the tunnel like a phantom train, I looked down at the dash and found the switch that turned on the headlight, which lit up the walls and track ahead. In for a penny, in for a pound, Mum says — one of her best.

  So there I was, Railwayman in his train, tearing down the tracks like Casey Jones on the Cannonball Express. At first I was taking it easy, just to get the feel of the tracks, then the clicking of the wheels as we went over the cracks kind of got to me and I accelerated to cruising speed, Railwayman’s favourite speed. Then I thought: Hmm, I wonder what this baby can really do, and I opened up the throttle. She hummed along like a little beauty: I must have been doing ninety! I had time now to take in my surroundings properly. The tunnel had tiles all over the walls and ceiling, like the connecting tunnels at Flinders Street Station, and they rippled with light as I tore along almost silently. I thought to myself: Biscuit would have loved this. Next time I came down here, to the underground, I would bring Zac. Luckily, he was one of those dogs who believe that actions speak louder than words.

  The ride was a long one, and the headlight lit up the tunnel only a short way ahead of the train. I was relieved when I hit civilisation — a sign on the left that said simply USE, and another on the right that said GH, followed by a turn-off. I was all for going to USE, as that was the straight line, but the switch had been set to the right. USE would have to wait.

  After a little way, I c
ame to another turn to the right that was, according to its sign, going to HQ VIA VB. Finally, I thought, a sign that not only means something, but is also pointing to a brewery. I would check that out later. It wasn’t long before I came to a sign that told me I had arrived at GH, a dead end. GH was not a big deal, but it did have both a lift and a stone staircase. It had something else too: two sets of neon lights that were switched on.

  I knew that whoever left those lights on could be back at any minute, so I prepared for a quick getaway. I rolled the loco onto a small loco turntable, then I turned the engine around so that it was facing back the way I’d come and headed for the stairs, holding my torch like a weapon, in case I should be surprised by a smugglers ring, or stumble into an opium den or a bank robber’s hideout — God knows what was up there!

  There was a train with a few cars behind it parked at this end, facing down the tunnel the way I had come.

  I scrambled up the old stone steps to a heavy iron door at the top. It had a handle but no lock. I pulled it a little bit and looked in, and what I saw was a room made of stone with a couple of dim light bulbs in the ceiling, switched on, and rows of shelves with thousands of bottles on them.

  I went into the room, leaving the door open, in case I needed to escape, and walked around slowly. When I came to another set of steps I went up them, but couldn’t open the door at the top, which had a newish lock, the kind you need a front-door key for. I went back down the stairs but there was still nothing but bottles, so I was just about to leave when I noticed in one wall a box-shaped hole, and when I looked more closely I saw that it was a little lift in the wall, about waist-high. I knew what it was: a dumbwaiter, the kind Charlie Chaplin hid in, in The Count. I had never seen one in real life before. This one didn’t have a rope to pull; instead there was an electric control panel on the wall beside it. I wanted to hop in and go for a ride — of course! — but I didn’t know what was up top: I mean, what if it opened in the bar of a pub full of coppers? They wouldn’t be too happy if I suddenly showed up — no one ever was.