by Peter Twohig
Luigi, who came from Roma — that’s in Italy — could only keep his mouth shut for about two minutes. I didn’t think James would blab, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Besides, his mother was Wonder Woman, who could hold grown men in her Lasso of Truth, and who could scare me any time she liked with one of her dame’s glances. As for Johnno Johnson and Douggie Quirk, I had never seen either of them speak to their parents, but there was always a chance that they talked in their sleep. I know I did, because one morning Tom told me.
‘Hey, you said something in your sleep. You said “Josephine”.’
‘You mean like this: “Jo-seph-i-i-ne …”? Or like this: “Josephine!”?’
He munched his Weet-Bix. ‘Dunno, somewhere in the middle. It was more like: “Josephine: … loves … Tom-m-m”.’
I don’t know why I asked, really.
I suppose I could only trust two kids completely: I was one, and the other was Tom (even though he was, technically, not a kid anymore, but probably an angel or a zombie). I was thinking of including Raffi, even though I hadn’t known him very long, which was funny, because I’d known some of the other kids all my life. In fact, Mum had a photo of me and Peanut Hobson in a playpen together.
I wanted to discuss the next meeting of the Olympians with those Commandos who were members, but Matthew Foster was hanging around like a cold sore, so I had to give it a miss. I had also intended to disband the club altogether, but the way Matthew was raving on about being a fireman, I didn’t want to take the moment away from him. He wasn’t going to have another. I didn’t hate him: I just couldn’t stand him. In the end, I couldn’t stand it any longer — none of us could — and I shot through.
As I turned the corner at the top of Charles’s street, who should I catch a glimpse of but good old Flame Boy himself, scuttling along Balmain Street like some kind of stray cat, which is pretty much what he was. I followed him, and saw him duck into St Felix’s Church. Everyone knows that the police can’t touch a crim while he’s inside a church — I saw it in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
When I crept up to the door and peeked in, the church was empty. I quietly crept all over the place, but there was no Flame Boy. I even crept up into the balcony and sat there for a while, looking down on the quiet church, awash with light the colour of honey. Nothing. I went down to the altar and tried the sacristy door. It was unlocked. I went in and looked around. These rooms were part of my territory: the grog cupboard, the vestments cupboards, and all the other cupboards, I knew them all inside out. But Flame Boy wouldn’t, as he was never allowed to join the altar boys, not with all those candles and matches all over the place. Father Hagen might have been a little bloke, but he wasn’t born yesterday.
I went back out into the church, which was cool, and dead quiet despite the noise and heat outside. I stayed for a while, sitting in the altar boys’ pew in the sanctuary, and thought about my life. On the whole, if you didn’t count the time Tom and I took a chook to the pictures and threw it off the balcony in the middle of Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, it had been a quiet life. And if you didn’t count the time Tom and I pinched Melbourne’s smallest riverboat, The Little Lonsdale, and floated it all the way from Burnley to Cremorne (where we jumped off and let it go on down the river to Tasmania) while the bloke who ran it was wetting his whistle up at the General Gordon. And if you didn’t count the Street Sweeper Incident. And if you didn’t count everything that happened to me in the past year, when I set a new Australian record for getting into trouble without any help from Tom at all.
I became aware that I was not alone when I heard a little sigh to my right. Because I was in my own territory, I felt safe and peaceful, and experienced no surprise. I turned my head and saw that it was Father Hagen. He was standing in the sanctuary doorway, wearing his warm-weather shirt: short sleeves and an open neck. His eyes were closed, so I guessed that he was praying, as the only other time he closed them was when one of the altar boys had done something so bad that he didn’t know what to say or do, a problem the nuns never had. I just got on with thinking about how quiet my life was if you didn’t count certain things. Finally, Father blessed himself and turned to me.
‘Ah, young Blayney. While it does me heart good to see you here, shouldn’t you be out and about enjoying the good weather with your friends?’
‘Been doing that, Father. Just thought I’d drop in here for a while. I wanted to think.’
‘Yes, well I heard about the terrible accident at your house. I’ve been remembering your family in my prayers. Please give my regards to your parents.’
‘They’ve split up, Father.’ I don’t know why I said that, but it was always okay to tell Father Hagen what time it was. He wasn’t a blabber-dog.
He got that look you get when you strike a vanilla jelly bean.
‘Well, fire is the devil’s own instrument, it is. I’ll pray that they find their way back to each other. Now I’ll leave you alone.’
He sort of disappeared like the ghost in the Mrs Muir movie, and I heard him close the outer door behind him (not that he would if he was a ghost).
No sooner was I alone again than I heard a noise from inside the altar. At first I thought it was God, you know: sick of me being there and getting ready to throw me out. Then I thought it was a church-rat, not that I’d ever seen or even heard of one. Then I suspected that it was my nemesis. I went round to the back of the altar and found a little door I had never noticed before. I opened it. Inside was a small room, the inside of the altar itself, and under that an opening leading to a larger space, the raised area that was the bottom of the sanctuary, and beneath that a large trapdoor that led to the area beneath the church. Flame Boy was not present, but his belongings were. And so was the briefcase. I undid the straps and started to open it. A hand stopped me.
19 The Destroyers Caper
The hand had a Flame Boy at the other end. He had been there all the time.
‘That’s mine.’
‘What do you mean, yours?’
I said it but I couldn’t find a way to mean it, because he spoke with ownership in his voice, the way I would have said: ‘Zac is mine.’
‘I mean mine.’
‘What if I say it was just lying there? What if I say you shouldn’t have let go of it?’
I was trying out the old ‘finders keepers’ rule that kids live and die by — well, live by.
‘What if I say if my dad finds out that someone touched it, he’ll burn them alive then eat their guts for fun.’
He looked at me with bright, gleaming eyes, and I imagined that his father, who was probably a bob short of a quid, would look at his victims the same way as he made a pile of Australasian Posts around the chair they were tied to, just before lighting the blue touch paper and standing back. I couldn’t as easily imagine the guts part, but it made sense.
‘I saw the coppers looking for this.’
‘I saved it.’
I had a think: someone had to do it.
‘If the coppers get their hands on you, they’ll torture you until you spill your guts.’
‘They won’t get the time of day out of me. My dad’s coming back for this, and now that there’s no house, and Mum’s locked up, it’s up to me to keep it for him.’
It was so tempting to point out to Flame Boy that he was the reason for that whole situation, but the time and the place were wrong, as Dad said to Mrs Bentley one night when she asked him why he hadn’t told Mum about him and her. In fact, I’d heard him tell Mrs B that on numerous occasions, so I guessed it must be one of those sayings that’s hard to wear out.
I released the briefcase to Flame Boy’s grip, and sat back in the gloom of the sub-altar space, noting that it smelt the same as the above-altar space, up in the church: strange but not bad.
Flame Boy slowly closed the trapdoor in the back of the altar, and plunged us into the kind of darkness that has little arrows of light shooting through it, from holes and cracks. Luckily, I had never been afraid
of the dark, something that may have saved my life once or twice when I was being chased around Richmond in the night, the town having more weirdos than the Yarra Bank on a Sunday morning. Flame Boy, on the other hand, was. I could see his beady eyes in the near-black, and I could tell it was an ordeal for him to be there, and it showed me just how much that briefcase meant to him.
‘Your old man won’t know how to find it now that you’ve moved it.’
‘I’ll find a way to let him know.’
I wasn’t sure whether to ask him the next question, but I figured it might be important, so I thought: Here goes.
‘Do you know about your dad, what he did, what he’s like … what people say?’
‘I know all about him, ’cos when Mum’s had a bit too much to drink she talks about him all the time, and even tells me as well. She told me about all the places he torched, and how he was the best torch in Australia. She always said that I would have been proud of him, and how no one could hold a candle to him, ’n’ stuff like that. She said he was the Devil incarnate.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Dunno. Sounds shit-hot, but.’
I had to agree. I mean, my old man had his faults, but he didn’t come anywhere near being the Devil incarnate, whatever it was. But now I knew that Flame Boy had completely swallowed the popular story about his old man, and wouldn’t be talked out of it, so that saved me the problem of breaking the truth to him gently. But I still felt obliged to remind Flame Boy about certain rules of etiquette regarding his superpowers.
‘You can’t burn down the church.’
‘Why not?’
I could see what was going to happen before the next words were out of my mouth.
‘Because you’d go to Hell.’
‘They have fire all day and all night in Hell. They issue you with a big box of matches when you turn up. And everyone gets a tin of kero and a free copy of the Saturday Sun. My dad’s going to Hell — that’s what Sister said — and so am I.’
I could see he had his heart set on a blissful afterlife, and I could tell that he’d be nothing but trouble in Heaven, which was chock-full with fairies and angels, who had long dresses and fluffy wings, which were bound to be highly flammable.
‘Anyway, if you burn the church down you’ll have to move the briefcase again. And sooner or later you’re bound to be spotted. I spotted you a mile off.’
‘You were just lucky.’
‘Lucky nothin’. Father’ll find you eventually. Probably in the middle of Mass, in one of the quiet bits … there are lots of quiet bits.’
‘Keep your shirt on. I’ll move, maybe back to the underground hideout.’
It was the first sensible thing I’d ever heard him say.
Suddenly, as if he had made up his mind, he got up and pushed the trapdoor open, then, thrusting the briefcase before him, climbed out, looking a lot like a chimpanzee on his way to the office. This time I was determined not to let the briefcase out of my sight, but before I could follow, he slammed the outer trapdoor shut and snibbed it. I could tell even without there being any light down there that I looked like a real idiot.
Try as I might I couldn’t break open the catch — don’t let anyone tell you Catholics can’t build trapdoors — so I had to bang on it for half an hour before I finally heard someone fiddling with the snib. The door was opened by a lady with eyes the size of saucers, like in The Tinderbox.
‘Hello, Mrs Foster.’
‘What are you doing in there?’
They should have a special name for that kind of question.
I climbed out. ‘Just checking for mice. It’s one of the altar boys’ jobs.’
‘But you were locked in.’
‘Altar boys’ joke. We do it to each other all the time.’
She made her voice soft.
‘Was someone being cruel to you?’
What an opportunity. I looked at my feet.
She hugged me to her with one arm, and buried my head in a big bunch of flowers with the other. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I prayed like hell she hadn’t brought MBF with her. Then the moment passed. Mrs Foster was definitely one of your lovelier mothers. I wanted to tell her so, but all I could think about was hiccups — I had them.
Mrs F made me sit down while she got me a glass of water from the sacristy. I had never seen a lady go into the sacristy before, and I wondered if she was committing a sin, then I realised that she had probably been in there a hundred times, to get vases and water. And besides, most ladies I knew didn’t really give a stuff about sins as, unlike the rest of us, they weren’t afraid of God. After all, Jesus probably copped a rap round the earhole from Mary every five minutes when he was twelve.
‘It’s almost tea time,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you have tea with us? You could call your mum and ask her if it’s okay.’
I realised two things: first, that she knew I now lived up on the Hill, and probably knew a lot more about my life than I thought, and also that I wanted to say yes. There was something about her that was different from the other mums and aunties I knew, and even from the Sandersons. For a split second, I envied Matthew. I was confused. I wanted to get away, back to my secret lair in Kipling Street.
‘Thanks, Mrs Foster. But I’m staying with Mr and Mrs Sanderson over in Kipling Street tonight, and I probably should get over there.’
Mrs F leant over as if she had a secret — I thought she leant over way too far.
‘If you’re ever passing our house, feel free to drop in. Mr Foster and I know you’ve had a hard time. And Matthew talks about you non-stop. Just remember that you’re always welcome.’
On the way out I suddenly remembered that Flame Boy was still around somewhere, and as I dipped my fingers into the holy water I said a little goodbye to the church, in case I never saw it again.
Mum had told me that I could stay at the Sandersons’ for the weekend, but she reminded me as I went out the front door that I had to be home at a certain time — I missed what she said — on a certain day — I missed that too. I was going through the screen door at the time, and she was down in the kitchen yelling, which is the worst way to tell someone something, unless you are telling a girl that you love her, when it is the safest, except that you don’t want to yell, of course. Anyway, I’d had the Commandos meeting on my mind, as I was wondering how to break up the club without MBF wanting to form a new club. I didn’t have to wait long for the solution.
Later that night, after I had done the dishes, and the Sandersons had settled in to their television for the night, I went out the back to make sure Zac had enough water and hadn’t finished his bone. It was while I was peeing on the lemon tree to make it grow that I was hit by an idea that would have just about blown my socks off, except that the last time I’d had socks on was the Sunday before, when I was serving at the seven o’clock Mass, the best Mass to serve in the middle of a heat wave. I was always glad when Mass was over, despite Luigi being in my altar boys’ group, because Matthew Foster was also in it, and once during the sermon he even waved to his parents, though they didn’t wave back. Now you know the sort of thing we have to put up with. I decided to call my brilliant idea The Destroyers Caper.
I shot upstairs to the library, where there was a typewriter, and typed the following:
DECLARATION OF WAR
To the Commandos
The Destroyers hereby declare war on the Commandos. From now on, any Commandos we see will get bashed up and their bikes will get smashed up as well.
Yours Truly
The Captain of the Destroyers
I folded it up and put it into an envelope and typed on the front: To the Commandos Club. The Destroyers was a club over in Balmain Street. Their captain was Leo Thompson, Josephine’s brother, and someone who was known to hate anyone who liked his sister. I had therefore never made friends with him, as I didn’t think I could pretend not to like her, and I knew that if I ever ended up in his house and saw Josephine, I would never get ou
t alive. Apart from all this, I had nothing against any of the Destroyers, who included some of my friends, like Christopher Muldoon, who was in my altar boys’ group, and Shane Purvis, who was Peanut’s over-the-back-fence friend, and could play the ukulele. Matthew would have known who Leo was, as their houses were pretty close together. I thought I would deliver the Declaration to Matthew’s house after dark, quietly. No sense in disturbing the inmates, who probably had enough on their plate, what with the mozzies and the quality of late-night television, which I imagined was probably not violent enough for Wozza, to say nothing of having to put up with young Matthew waving at them night and day.
As soon as it was dark, I stuck my head into the living room and announced that I was going over to Matthew’s house to tell him there was a Commando meeting in the morning, a fib that really didn’t count as one at all, if you see what I mean, and took off on my bike. On the way over I was so excited I could hardly breathe. Tom would have been proud of me, not only because it was a cool idea, but because he had never seen me use a typewriter. I’m pretty sure that if he’d ever got his hands on one he would have given up handwriting forever. I know I was thinking of it. I always had the most wonderful feeling whenever I used that typewriter, like I wanted to kiss it. Oh hell, once, I did kiss it. Rem-m-i-ng-ton-n …
I knew the Fosters would not check the letterbox next morning, as tomorrow was Saturday, so I pushed the gate open, already being aware that it moaned loudly, and slipped the envelope under the front door. Then, just for good measure, I knocked and ran like hell to my bike. The Phantom couldn’t have done it better, except he would have run to his horse. And no matter how you get on a horse it doesn’t look as cool as getting on a bike, because you can’t do the double scoot.
