The Torch

by Peter Twohig

  ‘Will you please tell Mr Taggerty that my husband and I thank him again. We’ll never forget his kindness. Can you remember that?’

  As I reached the gate I looked up to the first-floor windows and saw Mona De Coney looking down at me. She wasn’t smiling, for the first time ever, but had a look like Jane Wyatt in Father Knows Best, when she’s just remembered that Father does in fact know best, which is every week. At least I hadn’t had to squeeze past her on the way out, which was just as well, as I was getting that funny feeling again.

  Now, I don’t know about you but when someone gives me a message to repeat and looks around first, then tells me afterwards not to forget, I begin to wonder what that message really means. And I thought it might be a secret signal.

  Granddad told us that when he was in the desert during the First World War, they were always posting picquets at night to stop the Thievin’ Bloody Arabs knocking off their supplies and cutting their throats into the bargain. And if the picquet thought he heard someone in the dark, he was supposed to say: Halt, who goes there? And when the other bloke told him who he was, he was supposed to say: Advance one and be recognised. And when the bloke did, he was supposed to say: Password! And the bloke was supposed to tell him. And if he didn’t know it, the first bloke was supposed to shoot him. But Granddad said they never did what they were supposed to. They just said: Who the bloody hell is that? And the other bloke would say something like: Turn it up, mate! And that would be that. But that would be their secret signal, because your average Arab doesn’t know it.

  Tom and I’d had our own little code words, which no one else knew, mainly various forms of warning about what mood Mum was in, or what to eat and what not to risk. We could have a whole conversation without anyone having a clue what we were on about, though I think Granddad always had some idea. But Tom was the worse of the two of us, and was always winking and elbowing me, and generally giving the game away like mad. Well, now that Tom was gone, and when no one was looking, I sometimes played the Secret Conversation With Tom game by myself, and did both voices, because then I didn’t miss him so much, at least not at the start of the conversation. So that was what I did while I was taking the books over to the Sandersons’, from which I planned to carry them home bit by bit. I only lasted a few minutes, then I had to stop.

  When I got to the Sandersons’, I started unloading the books straight away and stacking them on the living-room table so that I could have a closer look at them. Mr S came in and opened and closed them one at a time, and gave every second one a bit of a chuckle, though I couldn’t see anything to laugh about.

  ‘These books’ll keep you off the street.’

  ‘They certainly will,’ I replied, making it sound a bit, but not too much, like Stan Laurel.

  Mr Sanderson puffed away for a while at his pipe, and I could just about hear the wheels going round in his head, he was thinking so hard.

  ‘Penny for ’em, Mr Sanderson.’

  This was a special thing I sometimes said to Granddad to try to trick him into spilling his guts about stuff. Sometimes, it actually worked.

  ‘Oh, I was just wondering if this scheme of yours for tracking down the Kavanagh boy was going to bear fruit, that’s all.’

  I knew that Mr S had just said that to throw me off the scent of whatever it was he was really thinking about. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to work that out in a thousand years.

  Meanwhile, I had a mission to carry out.

  14 The Shamrock Street fire

  After getting the books I was flat out like a tapeworm at a factory picnic getting my life organised before school was due to start. I had been down to Rooney Park every day since Flame Boy and I agreed to meet. I had discovered that if I pretended Tom was waiting for me it wasn’t so bad at all. Flame Boy was never there, yet I always had the feeling he was watching me. This went on for a week, and generally didn’t do a lot for my image as a reliable and helpful kid. In the end I decided to check out his special entrance to the underground drain, in the bushes.

  There were tell-tale signs that he’d recently been there: a scrap of greased paper from the bottom of a piece of cake (some kind of vanilla and coconut thing) and a banana skin. He had feasted only recently, probably had a chuckle at his cleverness, and disappeared down the drain, perhaps while watching me. Fortunately, he was playing the game I had perfected when I was known far and wide as that devilishly tricky superhero the Cartographer, and sometimes as the Outlaw. Next minute, I was into that drain like a girl into a new tea-set.

  Though it was pitch black, I knew exactly where I was. If I went in the direction of the fence I would end up under the power station, where I had never been. I made a mental note to fix that sooner rather than later. If I went in the opposite direction I would come to the main drain that ran from the river up to Eden Hill, and probably further, all the way clear to Collingwood, for all I knew, where I imagined the rats were black and white. I had come prepared for this, and had my explorer’s bag. I pulled out my torch and went in the direction of the power station. Niente. I doubled back and went up to the main drain, and down to the river. Still niente. I climbed up to the bottom of the street and started walking. It was a long way to Eden Hill, and I knew there were no interesting places in the main drain until you got there, so I decided to go back and ride my bike up from the Sandersons’ place.

  I had just collected Zac and my bike when a very funny thing happened: I heard the bell of a fire engine coming from the direction of Swan Street. I had not had Zac for very long, but being a Labrador, and having attended two house fires already, and having been awarded the House Fire Medal, Third Class, which all the Commandos’ dogs had (bar MBF’s, of course), he knew exactly what was going on, and looked like he was keen to get a whiff of toasted house. As for me, I knew that Flame Boy would hear that bell, and react the same way Zac had. For a split second there was a kind of kid-and-dog-shaped blur, then we were off.

  We found the fire up in Shamrock Street, at MacMurrays Panel Beaters, a place that fixed cars that had been in bingles, something at which Richmond drivers excelled, as they were always drunk as skunks. When we arrived, the place was going up like a Roman candle because of the stuff inside, and there were already lots of kids hanging around keeping an eye on proceedings, though I didn’t recognise any of them.

  As everyone knows, it is the job of kids at fires to give advice to the firemen, who can’t be expected to know everything. The kids who were already there knew this, and had the situation more or less in hand, this being their part of Richmond. Zac was more concerned with making the acquaintance of the other dogs, though personally I wouldn’t have been caught dead with any of them. My job, which I gave myself, was to climb up the ladder on the back of the fire engine to get a better view.

  At the top I found a couple of souvenir fireman’s helmets, which had no firemen under them. I took off my bloke’s hat and shoved it in my bag, and put one of the fireman’s helmets on my noggin, and apart from it weighing about half a ton, it fitted. I was just about to get down when I looked up at the second floor of the East Richmond Chinese Church and Mah Jong Centre across the road, and saw a pair of bright, beady eyes peering at me and the fire, by turns.

  I knew — am I a mind-reader or what? — that the owner of those eyes was torn between the vision of me, a fellow doer of daring deeds, wearing a fireman’s helmet, and the cause of all the excitement, which he probably had something to do with anyway. I was particularly struck by the look he gave my new helmet: it was the look one superhero gives to another. But before I could decide on a course of action, he was gone. And I knew that he had probably taken some carefully planned escape route, and that he would disappear into the world beneath the City of Richmond once again.

  But he was close, so close, and I had to try to find him. So I clambered down from the fire engine and squeezed my bike and my dog past it, as it was taking up most of Shamrock Street, which was really no more than a lane, and headed for home.
<
br />   All the way home, Zac kept looking at me and laughing his head off, because I was still wearing my new fireman’s helmet, which was made of sparkling gold. But when I got to the Sandersons’ I stashed it around the back in the Olympians’ GHQ. No sense in inviting awkward questions.

  When I went inside I found the Sandersons listening to the news on their flash new Philips wireless, which they were glued to as if they’d just heard that a giant octopus had eaten Luna Park and was last seen paddling up the Yarra towards Richmond. It turned out that the fire that was going so well had now turned into what the bloke on the wireless called a conflagration. Just my luck. Oh well, at least I’d got a souvenir. The Sandersons turned to me, and looked in my direction without really seeing me. And that is because the bloke on the wireless was now talking about Mr Kavanagh.

  ‘There is reason to believe that the escaped convict, Fergus Kavanagh, may be behind the inferno, which is threatening the whole of Richmond.’

  What he meant was that it was threatening the Temperance Hall up on Church Street, which, according to Dad, had nothing much to do with temperance in any case. It was also threatening a pub, the King Brian, which, I’m sure Dad would have said if he was there, was the worst thing of all, especially as he had taken me to the Brian on many a Saturday morning and shouted me a lady’s waist of raspberry cordial and lemonade, my favourite drink of all time, while he caught up with his burpy mates.

  ‘Fergus Kavanagh,’ said the geezer on the radio, ‘recently escaped from Kew Mental Hospital after being declared insane and transferred there from Pentridge’s notorious H Division. He was to remain there at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. It is still not known how he escaped, but it is believed that he started a fire in the building in which he was being held.’

  ‘How could they give him an opportunity like that,’ said Mrs S to Mr S, ‘after what he did?’

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked, always keen to listen to a story, even if a couple of old fogeys were telling it. What I really meant was: What did he burn down? Much more juicy.

  Mr Sanderson had a go at putting on a fatherly voice, which was a complete failure, first because, as far as I knew, he was not a father, and second because his voice was clear and firm, and your average dad’s voice was generally tired and slurred.

  ‘They say he burnt down an important building. A man died in the fire.’

  ‘So what was he put in Pentridge for: lighting the fire, or killing the bloke inside?’

  ‘Neither. He was put in jail for treason.’

  Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. I knew that for treason they don’t put you in jail: they shoot you.

  ‘You mean spying or something? Then why didn’t they shoot him?’

  ‘They don’t shoot people for treason. They just lock them up and throw away the key.’

  ‘’Cept they didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what, dear?’

  ‘Throw away the key, Mrs S. They kept it.’

  ‘It’s just a figure of speech, dear.’

  ‘So what did he do, give secrets to the Germans?’

  ‘No, to the Russians. It was well after the war.’

  ‘What kind of secrets?’

  ‘No one knows. That’s why they’re called secrets.’

  ‘I see. Well, it seems to me that this bloke’d have to be a drongo to come back to Richmond, and start lighting fires as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But he didn’t come from Richmond — never lived here, in fact. Never started a fire here, either, as far as anyone knows.’

  ‘But that bloke on the wireless said —’

  ‘They’re just guessing. Don’t know what they’re talking about. No, I think this fire was an accident. Happened in a panel beaters’, didn’t it? Full of paints and solvents, those places. Death traps.’

  ‘But I saw —’ Too late. The words were out, and Mr S pounced like a lady on a knitting pattern.

  ‘You saw Keith Kavanagh, didn’t you?’

  ‘He shot through when he saw me. He’ll be halfway to Woop Woop by now.’

  Damn! I would never make that mistake again. And just to make sure, I was going to swear an oath on my dead cat’s skull as soon as I got my hands on it.

  ‘It would be much better for Keith if he were found, if he wasn’t running.’

  I didn’t have a reply to that. I wanted to find the kid too, more than anything. But dobbing him in was not part of my plan. Despite it being an Olympic sport with your average kid, I’d never dobbed on anyone in my life, no matter how rotten they were — apart from the time I dobbed on Matthew Foster when he blamed me for pulling Margaret Ryan’s hair at the end of play-lunch; and Jimmy Carson, for drawing dragons in red pencil all over our house (except that was me); and that bloke who kidnapped the Harrigan kid and set fire to his hair down the drain, though I don’t want to remember that, so don’t ask; and a rotten copper that Granddad used to know for doing something very nasty to a bloke in our neighbourhood, the bloke who used to own my bloke’s hat, which just goes to show what a funny world it is. And a few others who deserved it. That’s all.

  And Tom. I was always dobbing Tom in, and he was always dobbing me in, but with us it was a game, and we played it all the time.

  ‘All right,’ Mum’d say. ‘Which one of you two little swines pinched my last cigarette?’

  ‘It was Tom.’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. Blame Tom.’

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘And I saw him.’

  ‘Wait a minute, you’re not Tom, I am.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Nope.’

  And so on. We got the idea from Who’s on First, which was Tom’s favourite funny thing, he being a fan of Abbott and Costello (while I was more your Laurel and Hardy kind of kid). Our secret was that there were only a couple of ways to tell us apart, and we knew them all, so we could easily pretend to be each other. But not for long periods, as Tom always ended up laughing loud enough to wake up next door’s dog, Buster, who had a bark like a nun. Next door named him after Buster Keaton, which didn’t make sense, as I knew he was only in the old silent movies. Anyway, Tom and I only wheeled out our twins act when Mum’d had a few too many sherbets, otherwise she could tell us apart easily, just like the queen ant can tell all the other ants apart. It’s a mystery. But get Mum on the turps and she was a pushover.

  So that’s why I wasn’t going to dob Flame Boy in: because of Tom. His death had made me do some crazy things — superhero things, but still crazy. And Dr Dunnett (Good Old Who Dunnett, we used to call him) had said I had epilepsy and put me on pills that made me vomit blood, and had wanted to electrocute my brain. And he thought I had problems.

  I suppose he was right. I did have a few problems: I’d seen my brother die right in front of me, and times were tough without him. He was always the gamer of the two of us, and it was now extra hard trying to get into trouble without him, not that I didn’t bust a gut trying, which was the main reason why Old Man Dunnett wanted to have my brain fried. But they did it to Flame Boy, who had no mother to put her foot down like mine did, as Mrs K was blind, as well as being practically a metho and blind drunk from one Sunday to the next, only sobering up long enough to change flagons. But if Tom was still alive, he’d rather be dead than dob on Flame Boy. Besides, it was early days; he’d want to see a few more fires first. Flame Boy might have been a bit short up top, but he was still one of us. In the end I couldn’t do anything for Tom, but I was determined to make up for that as much as I could, which is why I had to find Flame Boy.

  And that’s why I was having ‘fits’, as Mum called them, because of what I saw at Rooney Park. Before that I was completely normal and had never done anything strange in my life. (I paused just then to see if I would be struck by lightning or anything, but nothing happened, which just goes to show that God really hasn’t got a clue what’s going on down here.)

  My head was in a bad way: I’d lost my house and, by the looks of it, my
mum; and Granddad wasn’t his usual communicative self, and hadn’t even looked like taking me to Flemington the week before (though I’m sure he went). Richmond had suddenly turned into a giant fire trap, and a lot of people were mentioning my name in association with a certain kid I’m not sure I even liked. It was a long time since I’d felt that my life had gone bung like this — weeks, in fact. I needed to consult someone; and Aunty Queenie was that someone.

  When I say Aunty Queenie, I don’t mean that she was a real aunty or anything; she was actually a friend of Granddad’s, his special, secret friend, who only I knew about. I knew that she was Granddad’s greatest secret, and I was under strict instructions not to tell Mum (who hated all of Granddad’s friends like the plague).

  Tom and I had met her a few times when we were out and about with Granddad, doing this and that, and occasionally had a raspberry vinegar and lemonade with her in the beer garden of some pub that was off the beaten track. Not that Aunty Queenie drank cordial: her poison was always top shelf, as she said with a wink. We weren’t allowed to tell anyone about these get-togethers, especially Nanna, and Granddad told us why straight out: because Nanna would put her foot down if she knew, and that would be the end of all our shenanigans, and we were partial to the odd shenanigan.

  I had seen Nanna Taggerty put her foot down a few times, mainly where it concerned Granddad being friendly to Mrs Morgan next door, who I think was the best friend he’d probably ever had, and to Mrs Carruthers, across the road from our place, who had a soft spot for him, and given half a chance would have taken him home and kept him there for good, like a pet guinea pig.

  But we didn’t really get to know Aunty Queenie until after Nanna died, when we got to visit her South Melbourne home, which was the same size as Buckingham Palace. Then we found out why Nanna hated her: Aunty Queenie had known Granddad since they were kids and thought he was the bee’s knees. But Granddad didn’t relax his rule about mentioning Aunty Queenie to Mum even then. Mum was a chip off the old block. She did not approve of the women who liked Granddad, and that was all of the women in Richmond bar none. Even the nuns at St Felix’s liked him. Once, when Mum couldn’t bear to face them one more time — I think it was after the unfortunate incident of the convent’s washing-machine mangle — she conned Granddad into talking to them instead.