The Torch

by Peter Twohig

  ‘I don’t want you going near that girl … or any other girls, for that matter. Anyway, you’re far too young to be carrying on like that. You don’t know what could happen.’

  She was wrong about that last bit: the kisses could go on forever, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t care what happened to my lips … or my chest.

  ‘Jean, he’s — what? — twelve?’ said Aunty Daffy.

  ‘He’s going to be an early bloomer, like his father.’

  Uncle Seamus shook his head and gave me a wink while Mum concentrated on cutting up a lemon.

  ‘And you can stop encouraging him, or you’ll be out on your ear — it wouldn’t be the first time.’

  Aunty Betty was always saying that Mum had more war medals than General Blamey, probably for killing Japs. Tom and I had a theory that after she killed them, she ate them. Slowly.

  ‘So, Seamus, to what do we owe the honour? If you’re looking for Dad, so is half of Richmond.’

  ‘No. Actually, I’ve come about the boy.’ He dunked his lemon slice as if it was a biscuit, and gave a wink to Our Lady.

  Mum didn’t even look at me. Half of Richmond had used that line at some time or other.

  ‘Okay, hit me.’

  ‘No, not Romeo: I’m talking about the young feller whose mission in life is to incinerate the Good Ship Melbourne and all who sail in her.’

  ‘That boy is Daphne’s nephew. She’s come down from Wodonga to take him and his mother — I don’t know if you know Molly Kavanagh — home with her.’

  ‘Ah. And the boy is where?’

  ‘Gone bush.’

  ‘I like what you’ve done with the Queen’s English, Jean. It would have gladdened Our Ned’s heart. Actually, I know he’s gone, but the sire of his flesh is abroad and could use a bit of assistance from a certain larrikin of mutual acquaintance.’

  ‘You — upstairs!’

  ‘Mum, everyone and his dog knows about it. I heard about it down at the milk bar.’ That’s what Tom and I used to say when something was common knowledge. We invented it, and now I owned it.

  ‘I said out!’

  I grabbed a few bikkies and went upstairs. I tried to eavesdrop but got nowhere. Uncle Seamus had a voice like a string bass in a bathroom, and its vibrations turned all the words into ooms. I could tell that Aunty Daffy was practically getting a hernia trying to keep her voice down to a shout, but it was no good. Not that she said much, just laughed at everything Uncle Seamus said. I couldn’t believe he was that funny.

  When Uncle Seamus left, I went back downstairs. Mum had her talking-to-visitors face on but underneath I could tell she was in a rotten mood, thanks to something he’d said, and I knew that if I asked I’d get a thick ear — and Mum was an Olympic-class ear thickener. Aunty Daffy, meanwhile, was looking like all her birthdays had come at once, and was off with the fairies.

  When Mum gave me one of her looks, I told her the bread-and-butter pudding was ‘fabulous’ (even though I only knew what it was by spotting the recipe) in the hope that she might soften. I made a mental note to start collecting tips for complimenting ladies about their cooking. I thought I might start with Mrs Camponi and Mrs Esposito, as I wouldn’t have to lie. And Mrs De Coney.

  I have noticed that the more you get around and the more people you talk to, the more connections happen — connections that have a life of their own. In the year after Tom died I got around a fair bit, because I had to make up for Tom not being part of the act — he was the more energetic of the two of us — by doing a lot more things. The result was that I got into trouble a lot more than the two of us together ever did. It was the connections. Even Mr Sanderson had noticed it: I had a habit of attracting them. I had tried to put all the connections on my map by drawing lines between all the people I knew, but it only ended up looking like a cobweb made by a spider who was on the turps.

  Now I was thinking of doing the same thing again. It was getting hard to think of people I knew who didn’t have connections to each other. But there was always Wonder Woman — James’s mum — a lady who had no connection at all with Flame Boy, just some kind of connection with the Larsons. But I didn’t think that meant much; she was an old friend of the Sandersons’, so she would have known all about them. So all in all I was happy to see her again, despite her once threatening to tell the police that I broke into her house, a standard threat and one that most kids hear from time to time.

  I was in the Sandersons’ living room on Saturday morning when Wonder Woman and James turned up and I went to the front door to meet them. To my surprise, the Palmer Platoon also included Veronica, who gave her knockout smile to everything that moved, and Barbara, who couldn’t have had more of James’s attention if she’d been playing a trombone. Once I had stopped exchanging smiles with Veronica, something made me take a quick glance — it’s a secret way of looking that we superheroes have — at Wonder Woman to see how she was taking things in general. She was already looking at me with half-closed eyes, which told me not to even think about it (whatever ‘it’ was). But I had noticed from Disneyland that the ranger is always extra careful when the grizzly cub has its mother with it, and usually cocks his gun, just in case. But I don’t think a gun would have worked against WW. My plan was to fall back on the Blayney charm for the rest of the day. It had been tried and tested, at least on aunties, and was almost ready for bottling and selling.

  When we got into the city, Mrs Palmer and Co had to go into Darrods to get something that James and I weren’t allowed to see, so as Darrods sold only girls’ stuff we assumed it was something we didn’t want to see anyway, and said we would go around to Bernard’s Magic Shop and be back in half an hour. But before we left we decided to have a go at riding up and down in the lift. The lift driver took us to the top floor, and down to the bargain basement, then threw us out, which was fair enough. But when we got out I asked James if he’d noticed that there was another floor below the basement, which the lift driver didn’t seem to know about, and he didn’t, so off we went down the stairs.

  There was nothing down there but junk, so we took the stairs down one more flight, because we could. Down there was pitch black, but the light switch was in the same place on every floor, so I switched it on. In front of us was a heavy metal door that you opened with a lever. The door had a big sign beside it that said: DANGER. HIGH VOLTAGE. DO NOT ENTER, which was what adults write when they don’t want kids opening doors. I’d seen that sign a thousand times, and there was always something terrific on the other side. James was smiling so hard his dial was practically squeaking, as we pulled the big lever and opened the door. On the other side was a metal staircase that went down a long way. In for a penny, in for a pound. We switched on the light and closed the door behind us, and went down the steps. At the bottom was a coolish room with tunnels going off in all directions. It smelt so much like my underground hideout that I felt like I was actually there again.

  The first tunnel on the left had a sign that said FOYS; the next one said MAIN; then in front of us M/U; then RIVER; and on the right was one that said GPO. There were no doors, so off we went to MAIN; you gotta be in it to win it, as they say. MAIN, about fifty yards down the tunnel, turned out to be a gold mine, with another big room with doorways, except they were archways; and running through each one was a little tramway with overhead wires. This time there were more HIGH VOLTAGE signs than you could shoo pigeons at. And this time I had the feeling they weren’t kidding. There was distant noise in these tunnels, but nothing to see, just rails and wires. But the best things were the signs over the archways: MINT, EXHIBITION, RMH, LA TROBE, PARLIAMENT, VB VIA HQ, SPENCER VIA GPO. It was as if I had been run over by a tram and gone straight to kids’ heaven, defying the odds.

  I had come across tunnels like this before, in my exploration of the drains down by the river, and I now knew (because I had pinched a secret map off the wall of one of them) that VB did not stand for Victoria Bitter but for Victoria Barracks, which was down St Kilda Road a
nd just a brinnie’s throw from Aunty Queenie’s place in Dorcas Street. I had no idea what MINT stood for, only that it had something to do with food. Spencer and La Trobe I knew. The rest were a mystery. James was all for going back, but I was all for taking a peek into one of the tunnels. After all, I had once been the superhero Railwayman, and I didn’t get that name by being a chicken.

  I was just about to stick my head into the tunnel called VB when a small train appeared out of the darkness and roared by, almost taking my head with it. It had no driver, and was towing a wagonload of big sacks in a cage. It was playing my song.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said James, grabbing my arm in his Grip of Terror (forgivable in a new boy).

  ‘Young James,’ I said, using my Blarney Barney voice. ‘How would you like to be the first Olympian to win the Olympic Cross?’

  ‘I think we should get back.’

  ‘That sounds mighty like a “yes” to me.’

  ‘All right: yes. Now let’s get out of here.’

  We hurried back the way we came, while I explained the rules to the new member.

  ‘First, no blabbing, otherwise these tunnels will end up chock-a-block with kids whose fathers are baked bean testers, and that will be that. Okay?’

  James was hurrying and showing signs of panic, despite the lights being on.

  ‘What’s second?’ He glanced at me.

  ‘That’s it: no blabbing. There’s no second.’

  We came to the room at the bottom of the Darrods stairs. Somewhere above I heard the banging of a tram and realised that we were beneath Bourke Street.

  ‘Come on.’ I grabbed James’s wrist and towed him up several flights of stairs and into the ground floor of the shop, where we met Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl and friend.

  ‘We met Mrs Dixon!’ said Barbara. I could understand that, not only because she was famous, but because she worked there every day. It wasn’t exactly inexplicable, like the loaves and fishes. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Our clubhouse is at her house,’ said James, scoring an easy goal.

  ‘Did you have fun?’ asked Mrs P of both of us.

  ‘Did we?!’ said James.

  I said nothing: Rule One.

  Mrs P looked at me with a straight face. She had James’s and my numbers, and she knew that they were not the same number.

  33 The Briefcase of Doom

  The Number One mission of the Olympians’ Mole Patrol — that’s James and me — after that Saturday was to explore the tunnels underneath Darrods, to find ways in and out that didn’t involve actually going back to Darrods, where we had stuck out like a banjo at a funeral. My plan was to sneak into Darrods one last time, go down into the secret tunnels, and stay there until we had found a way out that was safe, even if it meant spending the rest of our lives under the ground and turning into half-human half-moles.

  We decided to do it the following Saturday. That left Sunday for training.

  With Zac the Spy Dog by my side, I took James down into the drains under Richmond on Sunday, and showed him my underground hideout, which he thought was ‘sensational’, a word I hadn’t heard all that much, but which James got off television, which shows that television really is a kind of dictionary on legs, and Mum had been doing all that sneering for nothing. Zac was happy to be down in the old stormwater drain again, and sniffed his way along in front of us all the way up to the hideout.

  I also took James to Josephine Island through the underground power-cable tunnel that ran from the power station under the river, though it took a fair bit of convincing him that he wasn’t going to die, because the whole experience is a bit like that. Even I had been worried when I had first done it, but then, at the time I had been the Cartographer (I don’t like to brag about my exploits, but as they were all secret, if I don’t who will?). James was never going to be a superhero, not in a month of Sundays, but he was going to be a valuable lieutenant, as he tended to keep a high class of victuals in his goodies bag, which every spy and explorer needs to carry.

  I had been amazed to find that my trusty pinch bar, the tool for all occasions, was still in its hiding place just inside the entrance to the big stormwater drain at the river. I showed James how I used it to remove rusty padlocks, though I did not snap off the padlock to the door that led down to the old railway tunnel under the river, as I had done the year before, as a new padlock had been installed, and somewhere there was a copper just itching for me to exercise my rights as a pinch bar owner.

  Instead, I took the pinch bar with me to Josephine Island. I couldn’t take Zac, as the entrance to the power-cable tunnel was impossible for a dog to climb down to. Instead, I tied him up to a bush near the entrance to the stormwater drain, on the grey beach at the end of Fawkner Street. I tied him up because I knew he’d be able to see us once we reached the island, and I didn’t want him trying to swim the thirty yards across to us the way his uncle Biscuit had once done, nearly drowning in the process.

  When we got to the island, I had to sit James down and tell him a few things. First, never call the island Josephine Island, but Blood Island, after the movie (which we weren’t allowed to see). I didn’t want Mona getting the wrong impression, which she was apt to do. Also, he was not to tell his mother where he had been. That was because the year before I had been chased while I had been exploring down there, and the bloke who had chased me turned out to be someone his parents knew, though they hated him like undercooked tripe. I thought it best to let well enough alone, a saying that Granddad swore by. Finally, I told him that Mr Sanderson knew about the tunnel we had come through and that if he wanted to, he could have a gate put on it, and that’d be that.

  He accepted all this with the usual wide-eyed enthusiasm, and I reckoned that if I’d told him I was keeping a pet sea monster on the island, he would have believed that too. So, after raiding the victuals, including some of Mrs S’s finest chocolate crackles, made with too much of everything, which is just the way I like them, we went for a bit of an explore. I knew we’d never get inside the old fort in the middle of the island, as it had been freshly padlocked, thanks to yours truly sticking the Blayney conk in where it wasn’t wanted on an earlier adventure. But we did have a good look at the anti-aircraft guns that sat at each corner of the fort.

  If the guns were a temptation to me, they were a temptation to any kid who had seen them from Alexandra Avenue, but there was no way of getting onto the island, and the riverboats never stopped there. We were therefore pretty happy about our discovery, and enormously surprised when we heard the shouts of kids. We looked up the river and saw a bunch of kids paddling a raft made of planks and twenty-two-gallon drums — I wondered if they were the River Rats, a secret club from Durham Street. They had emerged from the old wharf at the power station, and were heading across the river to the island as swiftly as they could paddle.

  But the river was fast-moving just there, and they had underestimated it. They began to turn and bump around in the current as they paddled, and yelled and swore like ditchdiggers. The whole thing just slowly fell to bits, and collapsed under them so that they all slipped into the brown water in a tangle of rope and timbers and rusty drums, some of which bobbed on down the river straight away.

  As we watched, they screamed and fought and scrambled to the bank they had been close to, and dragged themselves out of the water onto the little grey beach where Zac was tied up. It looked like a near thing.

  In the mouth of the big storm water drain, Zac was barking and pulling on his leash; if he’d been free he would have dived into the water in a second.

  Some of the kids were crying, and one of them went into the nearest house and brought some grown-ups. It quickly got busy on the edge of the river.

  Watching the accident – in slow motion, it seemed to me – was horribly familiar, and gave me a sickly fright. I could tell that James wasn’t used to seeing kids in strife, as he’d gone quiet, and instinctively stuck close to me, as if he’d be safer there.

&n
bsp; ‘Come on,’ was all James needed to hear, and he trotted along behind me back to the entrance to the tunnel, and back to the other side of the river. At Fawkner Street, I stopped and faced him.

  ‘Look, I’m going down to get Zac. You might as well go home.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And for God’s sake, don’t tell your mum what happened, or she’ll stop you from hanging around with me.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘And don’t tell her about the hideout, the secret tunnel, or the island.’

  ‘What can I tell her?’

  ‘Tell her it was boring, so you came home early.’

  ‘Yes: Mum, it was boring, so I came home early.’

  ‘Good. See ya.’

  Having James as a friend was like having two Zacs.

  I went down the river to untie Zac and take him home. It was only ten minutes since the raft had sunk, but a crowd had gathered where the boys had come ashore. No one seemed to know what to do. It was a place where no one ever swam, because of the danger. I walked past the crowd, which had congregated right on the water’s edge and was still paying a lot of attention to the river, and went over to Zac, who was still barking and trying to get into the water. I wasn’t game to untie him until I could settle him down, which took a few minutes, during which everyone looked at us.

  I knew what had happened without being told. But I needed to hear someone say it. It was the one thing that no one ever said to me.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked a lady: a man would have told me to shut up and bugger off.

  ‘One boy …’ She didn’t know how to say it. ‘Didn’t come up.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  I thought she said, ‘The Radion boy,’ and my feet turned to concrete.

  I grabbed her sleeve.

  ‘Who was he?’

  She looked at me, without speaking. She looked shocked. Then she made an effort, and nodded towards a little kid, who was crying.