It was at that moment I saw properly what the coffin was made of.
‘That’s weird,’ I said, touching the side of it.
‘Cardboard,’ Enron said, coming up beside me.
‘Yeah. But shouldn’t it be wood or something. Gold? I mean, He is the Messiah, isn’t he? A cardboard coffin seems a bit … I don’t know, cheapskateish.’
‘Actually, it makes sense,’ Enron said. ‘If someone found a coffin in your basement, that would be hard to explain. Because it’s cardboard, we can pull it apart. So if anyone comes down here, all they’ll see are some boxes in the corner.’
I looked at Enron.
Maybe he wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. Or maybe he was.
Here’s what I love about guys. Even a guy like Enron, who I’m not even vaguely keen on.
Guys are strong and good to hide behind if someone scary comes along. This is particularly handy when you’re about to go down into the drains under Melbourne.
Guys are brave. Sometimes they’re stupid-brave, like driving too fast or swinging off railings at clubs, but when you need someone to be brave, guys are right there for you. And sometimes stupid-brave is exactly the right thing. That not-even-giving-consequences-a-second-thought braveness is a real guy thing.
Guys can read maps. I’ve tried and maps are hard. They only work if you’re going in the same direction the map is. It’s not just me – Mum and Coco are the same. Whenever we drive somewhere, Dad drives and navigates, because he says it’s not worth leaving any of us in charge of the Melways. So that’s another thing you’ve gotta love about guys. They blitz it at reading maps.
If Coco and I were going into the drains of Melbourne, I was glad a guy was coming with us. To be strong. And brave. And to read the map. And to protect us. Because there’s something you need to know – I couldn’t be relied on for any of those things. I was like the cowardly lion, the tinman and the scarecrow, all wrapped up in one girl’s body.
Plus, I’m scared of heights, scared of the dark, scared of enclosed spaces, and scared of Queensland theme-park rides.
Hello, Melbourne drains.
Enron untwisted the two gigantic bolts that kept the manhole cover attached to the floor, his twice-my-size hands working like a wrench. Once he’d worried them free, he dragged the bolts out and lifted the cover off. Coco and I looked over his shoulder, the beam from his headlamp showing what we were about to head into. It looked like a long drop, like at least a full normal-house roof-height down to the ground. And not only that, the ground wasn’t flat, it was curved. Being a drain, of course it would be.
‘Whoa,’ Coco said.
I turned away from the manhole and breathed deep, trying not to panic.
‘Bit of light, please,’ Enron said.
I turned back to where Enron was now sitting on the edge on the manhole, his legs dangling into the abyss, the headlight on his forehead shining first here, then there, as he moved his head around to see what was beneath our feet.
‘I’ll go and have a quick look,’ he said. ‘Just keep the light steady so I can see where I’m going.’
I pitched the light down the hole and watched as he put his foot on the top rung, imagining myself doing it next. Climbing down. It wasn’t like a normal full rung. Not like you get on a standard ladder. It was a one-foot-only rung, maybe a bit more than a hand-width wide. In staggered spacing down the wall was the next one-foot-rung. And then another. And another.
Enron jumped the last little bit off the final rung, then stepped back from where we could see him.
Again, I had to turn away and take a deep breath. Coco looked at me.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
I nodded, but she knew I was faking it.
‘Light,’ we heard Enron call out. I turned back and shone the torch down into the drain.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Coco told me, rubbing my back. ‘I know you will.’
And I wasn’t sure if she was saying it to reassure me, or to reassure herself.
Enron climbed back up and hauled himself into the cellar beside us.
‘Well, the good news is,’ he said, reaching up and turning his headlight off, ‘it’s a lot bigger down there than I thought it would be.’ He glanced towards the coffin, then walked up for a closer inspection. ‘I can probably carry Him down over my shouder. He’s not very big.’
Enron was right. You always get the impression from those Renaissance paintings that Jesus was a fairly imposing figure, but looking down at Him here in this cruddy cellar, He didn’t seem tall at all.
‘Nutrition,’ Coco said, looking shyly up at Enron through her eyelashes.
‘What?’ he said, meeting her eyes.
‘We’ve got better nutrition these days,’ she explained, her cheeks flushing. ‘A couple of years ago we went on an excursion to Captain Cook’s cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, and it was tiny. I could hardly stand up in it. And we were year eights then, so shorter than I am now. Back in the really super-olden days, like Jesus’s time, it would have been worse. They all would have been heaps smaller.’
Enron nodded, and I saw his eyes crinkle as he smiled at her.
‘What’s He wearing?’ Coco wondered out loud. ‘Isn’t He supposed to be in flowing robes or something?’
The clothes were the strangest thing about Him. Okay, that’s not strictly true. The strangest thing about Him was that He was in my basement in the first place, but once you put that to one side, His get-up was the next strange thing. He was wearing beige pants, quite tight, and flared down the bottom, with a beige shirt, and a brown, beige and white striped cardigan. His feet were bare.
‘Must be from last time He was moved,’ Enron said. ‘Maybe they dressed Him like that as a disguise for when He was travelling. Looks like He was moved here back in the eighties or something.’
‘Or seventies, even,’ I said.
‘Cannot believe that was ever the fashion,’ Coco said. ‘How bad does it look?’
‘Bad,’ I said.
‘No offence to the model, of course,’ she added.
Because whether or not you’re a believer, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of Jesus H. Christ.
Enron leant in to the coffin and gripped Him under the shoulder, as if trying to judge what kind of weight he was looking at carrying. It seemed weird to be lifting Him out of His resting state. Disrespectful even. Enron hauled Jesus over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold, and then leant back into the coffin to lift up the sheet that had been lying under Him.
‘Hello,’ he said. With his one free hand he pulled at the satin rope that ran down the sides of the sheet and it folded into a lopsided sling thing. ‘Clever. This must have been rigged up from last time. Grab either side.’ He looked at Coco and me. ‘To see how it works.’
Coco and I took the sheet from him and held it either end. It was very fine cotton, soft to touch, with ropes that ran down the sides and crossways through the middle, so that when you held the ropes taut it formed a perfect sling-like chair.
‘Transport. Tick,’ Enron said. ‘Can you guys take the coffin apart? If that’s okay? It’s just a bit tricky for me with Him on my shoulder.’
There was a shyness behind Enron’s question, as if he wasn’t comfortable making even the most reasonable request.
‘Yeah. Sure. No problem,’ I said.
Coco and I pulled the boxes apart, the coffinness of them disappearing as we folded them up and put them against the wall in a bunch. And then, with the last box folded, that was it. No more conversation, no more time wasting.
Enron walked over to the manhole, settled himself, feet dangling, into the hole, and carried Our Lord down into the drains of Melbourne.
I took a deep breath and sat beside the manhole, following Enron. Trying for brave, or even stupid-brave, to get me down those rungs.
I put my foot on the first rung, but the thing was, it was nearly a full-leg down from the top of the hole, so once I put my foot on it properly, I was going to
maybe fall in. And it was a long drop. I lifted my bum off the ground to test the rung with my weight, but I couldn’t do it. I sat back down again.
‘Do you want me to go first?’ Coco asked.
I shook my head.
I didn’t want to be stuck up there on my own. But then I changed my mind. She should go first, that way she always had someone with her. Me at the top, Enron down the bottom.
I lifted my legs out of the hole and stood back for Coco. She sat there, putting a tentative right foot on the rung. And then she put her other foot in, on the lower left rung and started climbing down to the floor of the drain.
She stepped off the last rung and looked back up the hole.
‘It’s fine,’ she called to me. ‘It’s not scary at all.’
She’s a liar, that sister of mine. I’ve always known it about her.
I put my foot on the top rung again, testing it, testing myself. I put my other foot on the next rung down. But I couldn’t move further. I was stuck at the top. Frozen. I got back out and stood away from the manhole for a moment, gathering myself.
Enron put his head up through the floor.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
I nodded, but my pulled-in lips told a different answer.
‘Do you want me to bring you down?’ he asked.
‘Like you did with Jesus? No thanks. No offence, but I think that would be way worse than coming down myself.’
‘Come here,’ he said quietly. ‘I wasn’t meaning I’d carry you down. I meant I’ll stay with you the whole way. Put your foot here.’ And he tapped the top rung. ‘I’m right behind you.’
I hesitated.
‘I won’t let you fall,’ he said, ‘because if you fall, I fall. Come on.’
So I put my right foot on the top rung, and my left foot on the next one, climbing down inside the barrier he had made for me with his body. I felt enclosed and safe inside his arms.
We descended rung by rung, until Enron stepped off, which was the cue for me to step off, and have my first look around. At the subterranean caverns of Melbourne.
Melbourne is founded on an illusion.
Our streets and buildings and schools and skyscrapers are built on a wafer-thin layer of soil. As we walk along the footpaths, as cars drive down avenues, as trams and buses rumble on their busy way, our sidewalks and roads are crusts of meringue.
Tread carefully.
Melbourne is stacked like Lego on an endless grid of tunnels, criss-crossing, intersecting, running parallel, and looping back on themselves. Some drains are large enough that you couldn’t touch the roof even if you were a pro-basketballer, while others are so narrow they require hands-and-knees crawling.
I should know. I’ve been there.
The smell of dirty socks hung pegged to the air, although strangely, the drains themselves were clean. No rubbish, no debris. If you expected to find rats and cockroaches or any number of other scrabbly rodents, you’d be disappointed. And it wasn’t cold, which you might have thought it would be. It was steamy – summer school-dress warm. A thin channel of water ran down the centre of the drains, and there were little rustmarks along the way where stormwater dribbled in from smaller drains. But aside from the odd bit of pooling, it wasn’t slippery.
There was a lot of graffiti. The drains are a mecca for graffing, as it turns out. From the simplest tags to massive pieces which would have taken hours to get up. Intricate 3D pieces, and simple one-colour lines that would have been chucked quickly on the wall. There were even poems. Like this one:
Roses are blue
Violets are purple
I’m sloshing around in these drains
Like a turtle.
Cute.
Getting Jesus into the sling wasn’t as easy as you might imagine. Not with the holding of the sling, the holding of the torch, the holding of the dead body, and the holding of ourselves upright.
Coco and I carried the sling between us while Enron lifted the Man of the Moment and foisted Him in, but the sling sagged because Coco and I weren’t quite expecting the weight of Him, and His feet slapped against the floor of the drains like sandbags. Coco and I grinned at each other. Looking back, I’m not even sure why, but something about holding Him in the sling made me feel optimistic.
‘He’s a lot heavier than He looks,’ I said. ‘A diet wouldn’t go astray.’
‘You might need to cut down on the junk food and fizzy drinks, my Man,’ Coco said to Jesus.
And then the three of us – me, Coco and Enron – were all hit with a severe case of giggles.
Putting Jesus into the sling seemed so momentous and important and sacred that there was no way of keeping a straight face.
And it felt good to be laughing. Great, in fact. It made me feel like things weren’t as bad as they seemed. We’d get Jesus to the Mover – it was only Port Melbourne so it wasn’t that far, 7 kays Enron reckoned, completely doable – Coco and I would get home, Mum and Dad would be there, I’d call Minty and Jools, sort out pranks for tomorrow at school, maybe fit in a bit of study, and the good thing to come out of this little adventure was maybe a new friendship with Enron.
Things could be worse.
Enron and I had been carrying Jesus’s body between us in the makeshift sling for I didn’t know how long. Me walking on the right-hand slant of the drain, Enron walking on the left, and Coco walking behind us.
Enron stopped to consult the map each time we came to a landmark, although it wasn’t easy to keep track of where we were heading. There weren’t street names like on a normal map; instead there were arrows and notations like, ‘massive steps’, or ‘Cave Clan tag’ or ‘tight squeeze’ or ‘this exit not safe’.
‘This exit not safe’. Not exactly designed to inspire confidence.
The good news was, even though I was crab-walking through the drains of Melbourne carrying a dead guy in a sling, my arms didn’t feel tired. I was fitter than I realised, even though I hadn’t done any sport for ages.
I used to be a swimmer. Trained every Monday to Thursday after school at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre. I’d liked the aloneness of swimming, getting into a rhythm and just turning my head and windmilling my arms and kicking my feet and breathing to the side every three strokes, completing a lap then turning, completing a lap then turning, completing a lap then turning, our coach at the end of the lane with his clipboard in hand, telling us that now we had to swim 200 metres breaststroke, or 800 metres freestyle, or 100 metres butterfly, or whatever took his fancy for our next few laps.
I’d solved plenty of problems in the pool. I’d had fights with friends and made up with them by the end of it. I’d kissed favourite boys and waited for them to call. I’d written whole entire essays from start to finish. Dyed my hair all different colours.
Lap after lap after lap.
But when my coach said I needed to come to morning training as well as afternoon, I put the kybosh on it. Dad had tried to keep me going, getting up at five thirty to get me there for the six a.m. starts, but three hours swimming laps had been quit-worthy so far as I was concerned.
And now I wished I’d kept it up, because it would have been twenty minutes there and twenty minutes back in the car with my dad, and I wasn’t sure that I was ever going to be able to make up those forty minutes every day which would have translated into three and a bit hours every week, sitting in the car with my dad. Just me and him.
We trudged in silence, each absorbed in our own thoughts.
I couldn’t imagine someone overpowering my dad. He was too strong. And too nice. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone hurting him. He’d never hurt anyone – it didn’t seem right for someone to potentially harm him. I hoped he was with Mum. If they were together they’d be okay. They’d look after each other.
I hoped they weren’t alone.
I looked down at Jesus in the sling between me and Enron. I could see the pulpy holes in His hands. I wondered how it must have felt to be nailed to the cross and lef
t to hang there. What would you die of? Would it be loss of blood, or pain, or starvation? Would you pass out from the agony of it, or would you stay conscious for the whole thing? What about when they were hammering the nails in? Ow. Into your hands. Into your feet. Ouch yow. I remembered reading somewhere that they used to tie the bodies to the crucifix as well as nail them in, because otherwise the weight of the body once the cross was raised might rip through the nails. Triple ow. Crucifixion didn’t seem an entirely reasonable way to kill another person.
‘You okay?’ Enron asked, looking over at me, as if he could hear my gloomy thoughts sloshing around in the drains.
‘Fine.’ I nodded.
‘How about you?’ He turned around to Coco.
‘Not bad,’ she said.
I looked behind at her. She smiled at me, a smile that expected a corresponding smile from me. She put her hand on my arm, just a light touch, and I could feel tears welling. I pushed my hair off my face, and rubbed the heel of my hand across my eyes.
I checked my phone, wondering how much longer we were going to be stuck down here. I couldn’t think too hard about all that soil piled above us. Or the fact that maybe those clouds had turned wet and rainy after all.
‘Omigod,’ I said. ‘Guess what time it is.’
‘Five thirty?’ suggested Coco.
‘Eight.’
‘Shit. That’s late,’ said Coco. ‘It’ll be way dark outside by now.’
It’s weird how time can surprise you. I’d been at plenty of parties where I’d been rushed by the realisation that it was three o’clock and my folks were going to freak because I wasn’t home yet. But then there’d been other parties where time had plodded along and I’d started thinking about going home but couldn’t because it was only ten thirty.
‘Can we stop for a minute?’ Coco asked.
Enron nodded and we carefully lowered the sling with Jesus onto the curved floor of the drain, the structure of the sling collapsing as we let go of the ropes.
Reluctant Hallelujah Page 5
