The Cartographer

by Peter Twohig

  ‘I put myself in your shoes and came out at Mrs Morgan’s place.’

  ‘They reckon it was used to shoot some bloke up in Shamrock Street, y’know.’

  ‘Nah. He was already dead, Granddad.’

  ‘What the hell’re yer talkin’ about?’

  ‘He was already dead when I shot him. I saw those two coppers who nicked you kill him. They bashed him, and dragged him up the lane behind their car, and threw his body into the canal. I went back the next day and shot the bloke’s body. Might have got a bit of blood on the gun too, and forgot to wipe it off — though I didn’t really see any blood,’ I added.

  I thought Granddad was going to have a heart attack.

  ‘Why, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘So the p’lice’d be able to connect the gun to the murder.’

  ‘But that bloody gun was already as hot as hell, and now you’ve made it even hotter.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But we don’t have to worry about it any more, Granddad. I told you, I dumped it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the boot of that copper’s car — the black Zephyr. I took it there while they were giving you a hard time. They won’t be doing that again.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Also, I used your phone to make an important call … to D24 … to report something fishy down at my local cop-shop.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘You’re starting to repeat yourself, Granddad. Y’oughta watch that.’

  I spent the next hour helping Granddad put the place back together again. I didn’t go upstairs, but I wasn’t letting Granddad off that easy.

  ‘Granddad, about that photo by your bed.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Come on, Granddad, why’d you keep it? What’s the big secret?’

  ‘It’s not a secret. I just don’t want you worrying about these things.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that, Granddad. Worryin’s all I’ve been doin’ lately. One more thing’s not gunna hurt.’

  He sat down and looked at me.

  ‘Go and get the picture.’

  When I gave it to him, he pointed at the kid.

  ‘That’s the cop, Murphy, and that’s his mum. Her and me were keen on each other a long time ago.’

  A wave of heat ran through me, a bit like the time Luigi Esposito gave me a bite of his lunch.

  ‘Jeez, Granddad, you mean he’s …?’

  I couldn’t finish the question.

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ He gave me a clip on the ear. ‘Jesus! No, she married some bloke in America, and brought the kid back with her. We were only together for a few years.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She was a pretty wild girl, son — not that I wasn’t pretty wild meself. But she went the wrong way. We were meant to be together — there’s no doubt about it — but we were only meant to be together for a short time. And then that was that.’

  ‘But the copper hates you —’

  ‘Yeah, he blames me for what happened to him and his mum after we split up — and for a few other things as well — but in those days she was pretty good at messin’ things up all by herself. Anyway, I married your grandmother, and gave up the fight game once and for all — well, after the Depression ended — and here I am.’

  ‘Did she die?’

  Subtle as a car crash.

  Granddad laughed so hard he started coughing, and I thought he was going to choke to death, and had to start pounding on his back the way I’d seen Mum do it a few times.

  ‘All right, all right, don’t kill a man! Jesus … Thanks, boy. Did she die? And they reckon you were the sharp one of the two.’

  Normally, I hated it when people talked about me and Tom, but I could see Granddad was having a bit of fun with me.

  ‘Well, what happened to her?’

  ‘She achieved the pinnacle of her profession, then retired, and now owns her own house and is a lady of independent means — by that I mean she’s sittin’ pretty.’

  I thought about how close Granddad was to Mrs Morgan. I thought I could see the resemblance between her and the lady in the photo — they both had slender waists and had a determined look about them. I liked solving riddles, so I decided to take a chance.

  ‘Is she Mrs Morgan?’

  I thought Granddad was going to have another go at coughing himself to death.

  ‘Oh my God, Vera Morgan — that’s rich. No, boy, this lady doesn’t live next door. Your grandmother would’ve had a few things to say about that, I can tell you. No, she lives in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, yer dill.’

  I felt like my brain had gone on holidays, and left me behind, then suddenly remembered and come back for me.

  I smiled at Granddad and he smiled back, and he ruffled my hair the way I did to Zac, and I nodded that I understood. Granddad and me have a lot of conversations where neither of us says anything. This time neither of us said enough to fill a book.

  ‘Well, gotta see a man about a dog,’ I said. ‘I’ll call in later.’

  And the Outlaw vanished.

  31 Bob the Butcher

  To be more accurate, the Outlaw ducked out Granddad’s front door and shot off down to the tram stop. That tram trip down Church Street was one of the best on record. The clippie, a pretty, warm-smelling lady with a missing button on her shirt just where the Cartographer likes one to be missing, gave me a rare tuppenny-ticket docket, a lovely pinky-orange colour, and didn’t charge me for the ride. In fact she sat down beside me and we talked about this and that. I say ‘this and that’ because I can’t remember a word she said, as she sat so close to me that I could feel her warm thigh against me every time the tram rocked, which wasn’t often enough. I do remember her name though: Glenda. Glenda.

  Just as the tram was getting close to my street, a couple of fire engines roared past us on the wrong side of the tracks, and immediately turned right, while I saw a couple more coming from the other direction, from Windsor. That’d be Flame Boy, I said to myself. I wished him well, knowing that he was abroad that day and hoped that he would have the good sense not to bite the hand that took him and his lollopy mum in and fed them. A part of me wanted to postpone the mission and observe the fire — I’m only flesh and blood — but this was one mission that would not wait. Besides, I could tell that the fire was a few streets over, in the direction of the Orange Tree. I knew that the pub would be safe — Granddad once told me that no pub in Richmond had ever burnt down — but I wasn’t as confident about any of the houses in the vicinity.

  When I got off the tram at the end of my street, every man and his dog was standing outside to watch the action, which now took the shape of a blob of thick black smoke, so I went home down our back lane. When I got to the gate I went in and took a slow look around — just in case it was my last. The yard was just as I had left it. My trusty explorer’s stick was propped up by the door, next to my gumboots; a couple of my Dinky cars were parked in the part of the garden in which nothing grew; and my partly built cubby house against the fence was still partly built, and looked like it was falling down. I went into Dad’s motorbike shed. My bike leaned against the cold wall and looked at me out of the darkness. I wanted to use it on the mission, as it needed a ride. I pressed the front tyre with both thumbs, to check the pressure, and, thinking about what I was going to do, grabbed the handlebars and turned around to leave.

  I ran smack into Bob.

  I got such a fright that my body seemed to stop working and felt as if every part of it was being forced through some kind of giant meat mincer. If I could have made a noise, it would have sounded like ‘sque-e-eze’. But I could only think the noise. Bob put one hand on the handlebar of the bike, and the other on my shoulder. He was dressed as if he was off to work in his office, and was even wearing a tie. In his jacket pocket was a handkerchief showing three white triangles, and he wore a clean mushroom-coloured bloke’s hat with a feather in the side. Behind him, the shed door swung shut with its lonely tin bang, leavi
ng us in a gloom shot by bright rust holes.

  For a while nothing happened. We were like statues. On his nose was a pale patch, which every kid can tell you is the sign that a bandage has just been removed. Despite his closeness, and the fact that he had spruced himself up, I could not smell him at all. It was as though he had lost his right to smell. Or perhaps I had lost mine. No, I could smell the dirt floor of the shed, and Dad’s oilcan on the shelf. I could smell my fear, which stung the inside of my head like a match that has gone out but is still too hot to touch.

  I realised that Bob was paying no attention to me at all, but listening. Then he turned his head towards me, and spoke to me quietly, with a different voice than I had heard before. It was tired and worn, like Mum’s, I thought. I knew how he felt: it’s hard yakka being an outlaw. It was going to be even harder yakka being a dead one, I reckoned, and, as hard as it was to beg the bastard, I quietly asked God to make me have a fit, so that when Bob throttled me, I wouldn’t be awake.

  ‘Where’re the plates?’

  He might as well have been speaking Chinese.

  ‘What plates?’

  ‘Just give me the plates and we’ll call it quits. You give me the plates you pinched from Kipling Street and I won’t gut you and your mother with this.’ He whips out a knife and puts it an inch from my face.

  ‘I don’t know —’ I began. Then it dawned on me. ‘You mean the plates that print money?’

  ‘Where are they?’

  I reckoned that this was probably one of those rare occasions when the truth might do the trick.

  ‘They’re at my friend’s place over in Cremorne. I can get them.’

  He scrunched up his mouth, as if he had just tasted lettuce for the first time.

  ‘What’s the address?’

  I couldn’t see any way out of this one, except one that kept me alive.

  I told him.

  ‘If you’re not back in five minutes, I’ll gut your mother. If you tell anyone, or bring the police, same thing. Don’t forget, I’ve got a gun as well. You bring me the plates and we’ll call it quits. Understand? You’ll never see me again.’

  ‘It’ll take longer than that to get there and back.’

  ‘Don’t fuck with me, son.’

  I went like hell over to Charles’s place, which was just around the corner from St Felix’s, and didn’t even go to the front door first, but went straight down the back lane to the garage and let myself in. The plates were just where they always were, and I scooped them up and slid them into their leather wallet. Then I was back in the lane and on my bike. It had taken me five minutes to get to Charles’s place, and I guessed that as Bob was a local he’d know that the whole trip would take longer than that. He wouldn’t kill Mum. He knew I had the plates. He might kill me, though. I mean, I would.

  This was as far as my sense of reason went. It only got as far as ‘kill me’ then it played the same bit over and over, like Mum’s copy of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, after Abbotsford scratched it.

  On the trip back, I didn’t ride as fast, because I was trying to think, but all the way my mind was numb. The trouble was that I was trying to think like Tom. But Tom could never think his way out of trouble. He was the boy of action. Tom would have given the bloke the plates, then kicked him in the shins and run like hell. And I couldn’t picture myself doing that, not with Christmas just around the corner. And then there was the mission — I still had to carry it out, and that was for both of us.

  I turned the corner at the top of our back lane and looked down to my back fence, which was high, and made of tin with little rusty ripples in it, like corrugated iron from a distance. At that stage I was still letting the Tom part of me run the show — I could feel his strength turning the pedals where I would have been frozen. As I got near the back gate, it swung inwards and Bob suddenly stepped out into the lane. Tom was now slowing the bike. I knew what was happening without even thinking about it. The problem with Tom was he had to confront danger — he couldn’t not do that, no more than I could stop myself thinking up ways to get out of trouble. In the end, that was what killed him, and now it was going to kill me. In the time it takes to say ‘I’m sorry’, I let him go — once and for all — and became myself.

  Immediately, I felt a rush of excitement, a bit like riding down the Big Dipper at Luna Park. I had let Tom go, and it was all right. Now I was in charge, and I was accelerating. And I knew what to do, too — I saw it all in a flash, like a final scene from an episode of Captain Video.

  I tore past the gate going flat out, and avoided Bob’s swinging arm. He took off after me, letting out a swear word under his breath.

  There were no cars parked in the lane, not even Bob’s Wolseley, which must have been around the front, so he was going to have to chase me on foot — and I knew he would. As for me, I planned on taking the direction invented by the Cartographer himself: down.

  I turned right at the end of the street, as if I was heading for the river. My new entrance to the tunnels was beckoning, but I daren’t run straight down to the river, or I’d be exposed the whole way. So I turned left at the first lane. I knew he’d lost sight of me, and that there was no way in the world that he would guess what I was up to. Two more turns and I shot through the old cemetery like a sprinter with a snootful of bicarb. I didn’t have time to go down via the island, but I still had a few tricks up my sleeve.

  I dumped the bike beside the final resting place of Joel, beloved son of Judith and Festus Falk, and slid down into the drain that ran past Kidnapper’s Hideout. Once down there, I was at home. As tempted as I was to stop and reminisce, I took the right fork back down to the main drain, and from there, down the stairs into the tunnel. I passed the pinch bar in its hiding place, but left it in the dark, as it was much too heavy to take. I rested my fingers against the wall, and hurried forward. It was only when I reached the tramlines in the main tunnel that I felt the tightness in my chest relax. I needed Railwayman to help me one last time.

  At school, whenever Sister Malachi got sick and tired of some kid’s shenanigans, she would lock the kid in the torture cupboard — the press, she called it — for about half an hour. The press was as dark as an explosion in a liquorice factory, and some kids would make more noise in there than they made before they were put in. I was used to the place, and passed the time by singing my favourite Top 40 hits, which seemed to please the kids, but drove Sister round the bend. I mention the press because this tunnel reminded me of it, except that you couldn’t hear the muffled voice of a nun ear-bashing a bunch of kids over how many fish Jesus could catch without using explosives. And the blackness in the tunnel was friendly blackness, and touched me, just to remind me that it could, the way Zac did.

  It was a long walk to City Boys High, longer for being in the dark, but I knew there were no obstacles down there, and I had confidence in my memory. And although I had a torch, I dared not use it, as the last time I was down here, Bob the Butcher chased me. I still couldn’t imagine what he’d been doing in there, and right now I didn’t care. But one thing I knew — prayed — was that if he was going to chase me the same way again, it would take him at least fifteen minutes to get back to his car and drive over to the school and get down into the tunnels, and by then I would have completed the mission, and would be laughing all over my face. You will be surprised to hear that Railwayman did not burst into song to pass the time as he went along. ‘The Happy Wanderer’ beckoned, of course. But Railwayman had become, for once, the strong, silent type, not unlike Robert Mitchum in, well, just about everything.

  Once I could no longer feel the wall of the tunnel at my right hand I knew I’d arrived at the station under City Boys High and was going to feel more tram tracks under my feet. Two sets of tracks, then a switch, then a little railyard with a lift and set of stairs at the end. It had been here that I had run into Bob last time, so I paused, held my breath for a moment, and listened.

  All I heard was the distant, banging sound of a tr
am on its way up Chapel Street, not far above. Then nothing.

  I walked forward, holding my hand low in front of me until I touched the train, then felt my way around it and kept going until I reached the wall opposite. Up the stairs I went, keeping dead quiet.

  Once inside the ammo dump, I stopped and held my breath again and listened, smelling the heady aroma of the wooden boxes that I knew were only a few yards away. Somewhere, not far away, Bob was furiously trying to close in on me, with a view to shooting, stabbing and throttling me — fat chance. If he came anywhere near the inner door, I reckoned I would hear him, and would step into the darkness. I know adults: they’re afraid of the dark, and they think all kids are too, so he would never be expecting me to turn up in pitch dark, and he wouldn’t follow me in the dark, either. Nothing was going to stop me doing what I had to do.

  I turned on the torch and shone it at the far end of the room. The doors at the top of the stairs were closed. As I advanced into the space, I noticed that it had been tidied up, and the few boxes I had opened on my earlier trip were now closed. When I came to the grenade box, it was still there, and the lid was back on, but not locked. Inside were the rows of grenades, with a space for the one I had taken. I took out all the grenades and laid them on the stone floor in a large ‘T’. It could have stood for my name, but it did not. It was my way of saying that I had not forgotten, and was saying goodbye.

  I was also, as I said, going to show them that I was not the mad, evil fiend everyone thought I was, and that in my world, at least, I was not afraid to make my own destiny, and then live it. When I turned away, I was no longer the Outlaw. And immediately, I felt the vulnerability and terror rush in to fill the empty spot his going had left. For a moment I wanted his strength back, then I hung on to what I had. Railwayman, I thought, get me out of here. I swept the room with torchlight one last time, and, seeing nothing unusual, left.

  I got as far as the railway yard.

  When the lights came on, I have to admit I was impressed. I had never seen the railyard in full light, and it was much bigger than I had thought. On the wall to my left was a sign I had not noticed: US ARMY HQ. On my right were the tramlines that led back to Josephine Island, and to the great unexplored underground land to the east. In front of me was a tunnel entrance I had not noticed before, which seemed to lead straight to the river. To my left was the tunnel to VB, GH and USE, and all points west; beside me was my train. The lights had come on, but as yet there was no one around, no one shouting: ‘There he is! Somebody put a slug in him!’ So I had a few seconds to think.