by Peter Twohig
Everyone looked at Raffi.
‘Um, I like it.’
They kept looking.
‘… like hell.’
That did the trick.
I was glad they liked the name, as any kind of disagreement would have made me look a bit of a nong.
The meeting began with the customary interrogation of the new member, as no one had a clue who Raffi was, and clubs always submitted new kids to some kind of ordeal in the absence of an initiation. Raffi was a big hit with the Olympians. For a start, there was his distinctive hair. There had been a lot less of that around since Tom died, and I guess the time was right for some more of it to turn up. I had been a bit worried about how the meeting might go, because I thought they might take one look at him and run like mad because he looked so much like me. But they didn’t. I’m not even sure they noticed. Also, there was something else about him that was far more interesting to them.
‘Hey,’ said Douggie Quirk, who had been the most disappointed by the ‘no initiations’ rule, ‘if you just live around the corner, how come we’ve never seen you around?’
‘I’ve had a contagious disease ever since we moved here from Queensland two years ago, and I haven’t been allowed out of the house.’
When they heard this they all moved back a little.
‘It’s cured now. It’s only a problem when someone worries me.’
‘Oh yeah, I forgot to tell them about that,’ I said. I was full of admiration for this born liar, who obviously had a special talent of some kind, like Harry Houdini, only with words. I had always fancied myself as a fair starter in the Bullshit Stakes, but now I saw that here was a kid you could bet your Coca-Cola yo-yo on.
As the crowd remained stunned, Raffi carried on, obeying one of the rules of being a kid: Never quit while you’re ahead.
‘In Queensland, the whole town caught this disease, and most of them died. It was only because we moved to Melbourne that my mum and me survived.’
‘What was the name of this town?’ said a wag, exposing a common weakness in the amateur liar: lack of preparation.
‘Burra Burra.’
They all nodded, even me, amazed at the hide of this kid. Plainly, he was no amateur.
‘What happened to your dad?’ Same wag.
‘One night he disobeyed the doctor’s orders, and kissed me good night. Next morning he was dead.’
Death in the family was a subject that kids avoided, so the questions dried up on the spot, which was clever, I thought. As Granddad says, if there’s a Smart Alec in the audience, best to call it a day and go home with your winnings.
‘We buried him on the golf course where he once got a hole in one.’
None of us knew what a hole in one was; none of us would have spoiled this deeply personal moment for Raffi. It was an intimacy for a kid to treasure.
‘Now,’ says I, after a respectful pause, ‘the Sacred Oath.’
Everyone took the sacred oath that James and I had drafted, and swore on my dead cat’s skull. I made sure that the oath included the words: ‘And not tell Matthew Foster about the Olympians, on pain of death.’ There was an uncomfortably long discussion — Mum would have called it a debate, but there was no debate, just discussion — about whether the oath should be a blood oath, and in the end the members decided by a vote of five to one to do it. I voted against the motion — someone had to. But as no one wanted to go first, we postponed the pin-sticking.
Next we had a discussion to see if dogs could be members. It was decided in the end, by a vote of four to two, that they could. The catch was that they couldn’t be little dogs, and Johnno Johnson’s dog was a smallish bitzer, and Douggie Quirk’s dog was a foxy, and as noisy as two galahs in a biscuit tin, to boot. So they were ruled out. Also they couldn’t be cocker spaniels. In fact, you couldn’t even join the Olympians if you had a cocker spaniel. Matthew Foster had two cocker spaniels. They had learnt from our other club, the Commandos, that once you let Matthew Foster join your club, everything goes to the dogs.
Finally, we had a discussion about St Dominic’s, up on the Hill, the school most of us were going to attend this year.
For this bit, James was allowed to go for a wander, and have a chat to the Sandersons, so that he wouldn’t get bored, but he decided to have a look around the library instead.
The question we wanted to discuss was: What have you heard about St Dom’s? We shared what we had heard from our parents and from the big kids around the neighbourhood: that it was a horrible place, with guard dogs and Gestapo dungeons, and special torture rooms where the teachers were allowed to do anything they liked to you, as long as you didn’t actually buy the farm, and they didn’t have to go to Confession or worry about God giving them the flu or anything, because they were officially in his secret society: the Brotherhood. And if they went too far and you did happen to croak no one would do anything about it, as the police had all gone to the same school, and couldn’t give a bugger what happened to you.
James couldn’t stand missing out on all this, so he came and sat in an armchair and listened with his eyes big and round, like the time both of us had seen his Aunty Maude naked at the same time. (I think one of my eyes is still crook from that.) Anyway, none of us was looking forward to going to St Dom’s.
‘Sounds terrific,’ said James, after hearing all about it, which made me wonder what was happening to the word terrific.
Everyone looked at him.
‘So what school are you going to?’ asked Luigi.
‘St Kevin’s.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s in Toorak.’
‘Never heard of that either,’ said Luigi, and we all laughed, because everybody knew that Toorak was one of the posh places across the bridge.
‘So, are the teachers allowed to kill the kids at St Kevin’s?’ asked Luigi.
‘No,’ said James, sounding a little disappointed. ‘But I think they’re allowed to torture them,’ he said, chirping up.
The fact is that it was known far and wide that St Kevin’s was a bit of a girls’ school compared with St Dominic’s, who regularly beat the crap out of them at footy. At least that’s what Johnny De Coney told me, and he was the one big kid I knew who I trusted. Especially since I had seen his sister, Mona, who was always smiling at me, and was not skinny everywhere like most girls her age. I would have asked Johnny to join the Olympians, except he was a big kid, and I would have asked Mona, except she was a girl. But she was the first girl I ever thought of as being different from the rest.
She was not as beautiful as Josephine Thompson, but she stuck out in more places. I made a mental note to find an excuse to visit Johnny De Coney. If I was desperate I might even ask Barney how to go about talking to her. On second thoughts, that was no good. I had never seen Barney with any girls, so he probably didn’t have a clue about them. But Granddad would. He knew more about girls than Larry Kent and Superman (who was always avoiding them like they had school sores) rolled into one. He knew everything.
‘What school are you going to?’ Charles asked Raffi.
‘City Boys High.’
‘Why?’
It was an odd question, because boys do not have to explain themselves to each other, and can’t possibly explain the decisions of their parents.
‘Dunno. S’pose because I went to the state school.’ He had a think. ‘S’pose.’
We all stared at him. The only thing we knew about the state school was what the nuns told us: that the kids who went there would probably end up in Hell. We tried to imagine Raffi on fire. All I could think of was his hair on fire, because I had seen that happen to the Harrigan kid the year before. I had to say something.
‘Did the teachers give you the strap for messing around and making mistakes?’
‘Not on your life: you’d have to murder the Queen before they gave you the strap. City Boys High’ll be the same, they reckon.’
‘Maybe I’ll change schools.’
�
�Did you get the strap?’
‘Not on weekends.’
Finally, just as the meeting was about to break up, and as a sort of afterthought, I asked my fellow Olympians to keep reporting fires and any information about Keith Kavanagh, who had shot through, and whose parents were worried about him, and whom I wanted to see safe and sound at home again. I got out my class photo from last year, and pointed out young Keith, who had his mouth open, as if he was telling the photographer to wait because he wasn’t ready. They all studied the picture. Raffi looked at me with a question in his eyes.
‘We haven’t seen him for ages,’ I said, in a worried voice. ‘Have we, Raffi?’
‘Nuh.’
The Spirit secretly chortled.
So that was the gist of our first meeting. I could see that everyone was happy to hear James’s contribution about St Kevin’s, even if it was generally known as a school for rich kids from the other side of the river, the kind of place where boys took ballet lessons and played tennis. I was relieved that no one asked James about these things, as he was as honest is the day is long, and might have made himself look bad. Not to mention me.
As for the main reason I had formed the Olympians in the first place — to find out about the Larsons — that had gone nowhere, and now I could see that it probably never would. But a dedicated group of secret agents, who would stop at nothing to stick their noses in where they weren’t wanted all over Richmond in order to find Flame Boy and his filthy briefcase: that was another matter.
After the meeting, when the crowd had dispersed, the Sandersons asked me if I wanted to stay for lunch. I knew what was coming, of course, and was all ears.
‘So you’ve decided to call your club the Olympians. Has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?’
‘Dignified yet dramatic,’ said Mrs S.
‘Classical yet cool.’
‘Strong yet spirited.’
‘That’s right. I wanted a name that was cool. And speaking of names’ — the Spirit can be as smooth as Gravox when he wants to change the subject — ‘I met the Crawleys yesterday.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs S. ‘I haven’t seen Flo for a while now. How are they?’
‘They’re terrific. They were telling us all about the people who stayed here, the Larsons.’
‘Us?’ Mr S said it quietly, but it made me remember that he was really a copper of some kind.
‘Me and Raffi. He lives down around the corner. His mum knows them.’ You can get out of heaps of situations by mentioning someone’s mum. Hitler should have tried it.
‘And what did they say about them?’
‘They were talking about the little house out the back, and about how Mr Larson sold Volvos and Mrs Larson was a painter.’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs S. ‘They stayed with us for a while when they were looking for a new home. Mr Larson was a bit of a handyman; built most of the shelving in the library as well. Lovely couple.’
‘Yes, well, I’m sure the Crawleys meant well, but they are getting on, and really, they had no business talking to you about our visitors.’
Mr S was looking over his glasses at me, which is a way adults have of telling you you’re either in strife, or bloody close to it. It was actually the only way a lot of nuns ever looked at a me, even when they weren’t speaking.
‘And we would have told you that yesterday, if you had come straight to us, instead of using Mrs Palmer as bait — nice try, though. Now, how’s your Coke going?’
I had given the Sandersons my listening-to-adults look, but really, I thought I was onto something. Mr S’s little speech had let me know three things: one, he was not a happy little Vegemite, but not too unhappy; two, he had secrets, and I love secrets; and three, there was more Coke in the fridge. Part two was so delicious that it made me feel like inventing a deliciousness scale and giving it a ten. Oh, what the hell, I did. I then put two other things on the scale, just to get the ball rolling, and because scales have to have a bottom, a top and a middle:
10 The Sanderson Mystery
5 Vegetable soup
1 Cod liver oil
Also, I didn’t believe a word they said about the Crawleys being past it. Weird, yes; past it, no. There might have been ample evidence of clockwork failure, but I could detect no bats in the Crawley belfry.
13 Mona De Coney
I now had lots of leads — that’s what we detectives call them — and went home to have lunch with Granddad and think about them. I also wanted to get Granddad’s advice on the Mona de Coney situation.
But what happened, just as I was settling in to a lovely Akta-Vite sandwich and wondering how the hell I could get my foot into the De Coney door, was that Granddad suddenly short-circuited the whole wondering process by speaking as follows:
‘Do you know a boy called John De Coney?’
It was like a penny bunger going off in my hand. The old codger had been mind-reading, and not for the first time, either. But he knew me inside out, and knew I wouldn’t dong him or anything. And besides, if I did there would probably be undesirable consequences, like getting donged back.
‘Yeah, he lives over in River Street.’
‘Well, I was talking to his mother the other day, and she told me that you can have all of his textbooks from last year, practically unopened, if you like. Same books you’ll need for this year.’
‘Gee, what was the damage?’
‘There was no charge. John is apparently happy to see the last of them.’
I was not supposed to know it, but I heard one bit of the grapevine (Mum) telling another bit (Dad) that Johnny had been done for something that was so bad they wouldn’t even say what it was, but something that had caused the brothers to instantly inform him that he had changed his mind about going to St Dom’s and would henceforth be a feature event at the Tech, and the only reason he wasn’t going to jail was because Granddad had had a word in somebody’s shell-like.
I couldn’t for the life of me work out why Granddad would be interested in the welfare of a De Coney, but I knew that sooner or later some kind of connection would crop up; it was the story of my life.
‘You saved Johnny from going on a holiday, didn’t you?’
He made a face like corrugated iron, and sighed.
‘I heard Mum and Dad talking about it.’
‘Well, I suppose I did help him out. Santo De Coney is a mate, and he knows I’ve occasionally helped a few people around the place, that’s all. So if you go round, you can pick them up. I’d take my billy-cart if I were you.’
‘Roger.’ I was trying out my Biggles talk. He didn’t smile — I would have fallen over backwards if he had — but I think he got it.
‘So what’d Johnny do?’
‘Never mind what he did. And I don’t want you repeating what I just told you.’ He sighed again.
‘It’s okay, Granddad, I won’t.’
My billy-cart was still over at the Sandersons’, where I took it loaded with my treasures after Flame Boy burnt his house down and moved into ours, just before Christmas. Call me psychic.
When I got there I heard Mrs S messing around in the kitchen, and stopped by the window to say hello so she wouldn’t think she had burglars, then, after collecting my billy-cart and Zac the Wonder Dog, I defongulated. We took the long route over to the De Coneys’, because Peanut had rung me that morning (they had a phone because his dad worked at a phone factory) to tell me that they had just finished laying a brand new cement footpath down in May Street, and I’d better hurry if I wanted to drag my billy-cart over it, to make a permanent impression of its wheels — it was practically a rule down our way. Well, I made the tracks, and Zac even made a few himself, and I even signed my name in the cement: Matthew Foster. You’d think that would settle me down for the day, but no.
By the time I turned up at the De Coneys’ I was as nervous as a racing pigeon. What if I bumped into Mona — frontwards? What if I didn’t? What if she wasn’t even there? What if she’d heard that I w
as coming over and shot through like a beauty? What if she hated me? These questions and others along the same lines may have passed through my mind once or twice on the way over. By the time I got there my feet were so heavy I felt as if I was wading through quicksand with a man-eating anaconda wound around one leg. I reminded myself to get the Olympians to invent a medal for Actions Beyond the Call of Duty (I was thinking of something simple, like the Secret Agent’s Medal, 2nd Class).
The door was opened by Mona De Coney, who was wearing a yellow T-shirt and some other stuff. She smiled at me, but forgot to open the door wide enough for the two of us, so I had to squeeze past. It was already about ninety-five degrees, so I nearly passed out. I’m a bit funny about enclosed spaces — at least I am now.
Mona took me into the lounge room, where Mrs De Coney had organised a stack of textbooks, then ran upstairs, probably to check on her gollywog’s birthday party.
Granddad had been right: they looked in mint condition.
‘Where’s Johnny?’ I said.
‘Off with his friends somewhere,’ said Mrs De Coney. ‘I think you’ll find them all there. John did use them. He’s just very careful about his books — very neat.’
She laid an unnecessary stress on neat, so I guessed it was a bit of an issue in De Coneyland, though I could have told her that it wasn’t in Blayneyland.
‘How are you going to get the books up the hill?’
I hadn’t told her where I was staying, but I suppose a sheepdog could have worked it out, seeing as our house had burnt down, and she seemed to know Granddad.
‘Billy-cart.’
‘I’ll help you take the books out.’
We each grabbed a pile of books and took them out to the billy-cart. I noticed that the top book on my stack said A First French Reader. I opened it up and looked inside. What I saw was not good.
She had a bit of a look round, as if she half expected a policeman to appear and ask her if the books had fallen off the back of a truck.
‘Mona!’ she called.
‘Yes, Mum,’ came a distant reply.
Satisfied that Mona had not run off to become a nun or anything, and, what’s more important, I think, was not standing right behind her, Mrs De C turned quickly to me and leant close enough to be touching me, so that I thought it might run in the family.
