From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (10 page)

The community corkboard was always good reading. Ren sometimes pinned her own notices, too, usually in the Miscellaneous corner: a recipe for the one-bowl chocolate fudge she and Lovie had made. A list of recommended horror stories. An invitation to the massed funeral of the five Suckermouth Catfish found floating at the top of Coralie’s aquarium. Cause of death: overfeeding.

Sometimes Ren copied down other people’s notes from the Misc. corner. Ten Hints for a Tidy Kitchen. She had given that one to Mum. A knitting pattern for a possum hot-water bottle cover, for South Island Gran. Movie recommendations. Lines of poetry: ‘
Home. Where/the heart beats/hardest
.’

‘Do you want sugar in your tea, Mrs Distracted?’ called Barney.

‘You know I don’t have sugar,’ said Ren, though not loudly enough for Barney to hear.

She read the agenda for the upcoming South City post-natal group meeting. Fern was guest speaker. Her topic: Out and About with Baby.

‘Perhaps you need an afternoon nap before we go to Sylvie’s.’

Sometimes Barney just went on and on.

Ren read every word on the Irish dancing class poster, a little ache in her heart.

For three years she had coveted Henrietta’s dancing shoes and her blonde wig. The shoes were called ghillies and made of soft leather and they laced most beautifully around the ankle. The wig
was a great confection of lustrous curls. Ren had tried it on many times and stared at her fascinating self in Henrietta’s mirror. But Mum said Irish dancing was bananas and girls wearing curly wigs were downright freakish.

The Irish dancing poster was pinned askew and missing one of its drawing pins. Ren searched the corkboard for a spare.

‘I’m eating your share of the Gingernuts!’ bellowed Barney.

There appeared to be no spares, so she set about distributing pins between the notices in the same way she shared pegs between tea towels when she hung washing for Mum. Once you started this kind of tidying up, though, it could lead to reorganisation of the entire board. Ren stood back to carefully assess the situation, and doing so noticed for the first time the smallish poster near the left-hand side of the board – ‘
Rear View Mirrors
’, it said. And, ‘
Looking back over your year
’. And, ‘
How to make this year even better!
’ There was a photo of people star-jumping.

Ren’s quick eye took all this in without really registering it, because it wasn’t the poster itself that was interesting but the item tucked in behind. The item angled to the left and would eventually slide out from behind the poster because of its bulky innards.

The item was rectangular and white. It was an envelope.

Ren’s hand reached forward almost of its own accord, slowly and a little dreamily, and as it reached, Ren knew, she just
knew
, that when she pulled the envelope fully into view the address would be, YOU.

(Moo, dearest, are you sad reading about the Museum and the disappearing trails of history? I think you will be. I have sometimes found it hard to write.

But now the second envelope has revealed itself and the new trail pushes a little further forward. The new mysterious boy.

Of course, it was Orange Boy who floated at the edge of Ren’s memory that day in the Museum. It was Orange Boy, with his
oversized clothes and wispy hair and almost-wan face in the zine frames, of whom she had been reminded when she stared at long-ago Mysterious Boy – fixed forever in his own frame, in the Edison Hall, in the Yesterday Room, in the Living History Museum, on the High Street of town.

Read on, Moo.)

Barney tilted his camera minutely to better frame Albert Anderson’s face. It was quite a long face when you considered it through a camera lens, and made a little longer still by a newish beard. Albert grew a beard whenever he lost a chess game. On January 23 he had been beaten by The Unpublished Poet, an upset that had taken the entire Street, especially the victor, by surprise. The Unpublished Poet had since become quite a lot friendlier.

Albert sat behind the counter at Comic Strip, his hands clasped behind his head, relating how he’d chucked in his plumbing business ten years ago and opened a comic shop.

‘I loved plumbing; don’t get me wrong. And everyone loves the plumber! Naturally. Plumbers get you, literally, out of the – you’ll excuse the demotic – ess aitch eye tee,’ said Albert. He made quote marks with his fingers.

‘But the comics got me in the end.’ Albert sounded extremely cheerful about this fate.

Barney sat in front of the counter, the camera to his right, perched on the tripod. On the other side of the camera sat Edward, nursing Ren’s bulldog-clipboard and the list of questions for Albert Anderson.

Ren was somewhere on the Street, perhaps at Montgomery’s, perhaps at Coralie’s, who knew where?

She was sleuthing.

It was the last day of the holidays and a good deal had happened in the previous week, developments both big and small.

And now, it seemed to Barney, their lives had very quickly been carved into two distinct spheres: filming and sleuthing. They were governed now by two competing stories:
The Untold Story
and
Orange Boy Lives
.

Blimey. Life was more than a full-time job. In Barney’s view there would not be a single minute to spare for school.

It was quite incredible how long Barney and Ren had been prevented from opening the second YOU envelope. Sometimes being a child was insupportable.

First, they had been obliged to eat lunch with Sally. This was good manners, of course. And gratefulness. But never had bagels and cream cheese seemed so chewy, so resistant to a quick dispatch. Never had Sally plied them so generously, with second and even third helpings. Never had she seemed so full of time and goodwill, so expansively happy to chat.

There was no chance, either, to sneak a look before they had to clatter down the Street for the afternoon interview with Sylvie. For three hours, as Sylvie chattered and leapt and swooned, the envelope lay waiting in an exterior pocket of Barney’s camera bag. It had certainly been difficult to concentrate.

Barney held the camera steady on Sylvie’s angular face and
swan-like neck, he watched her pencilled eyebrows rise and fall as she related glory days at the Royal Ballet with Madama Guiletta. He zoomed in on the portrait of Madama looming overhead on the studio wall. She was august and imperious and swathed in dark fur. With us still, said Sylvia, huskily. (Mink slayer, thought Barney. Animal assassin.)

He tracked Sylvie with the camera, up and down and around, as she performed
grand battement avec pirouettes
and
grand battement en cloche
and cunning
sissonnes
. Normally this bravura display would have enthralled both Ren and Barney – blimey, those
sissonnes
were freaky – but instead, every few minutes Barney found his head turning involuntarily to peer at the camera bag – and there, too, oggled Ren, her swimmy eyes working overtime behind her spectacles.

And then, racing home, intent on a ceremonial opening in the sanctuary of a bedroom, they found Mum on the warpath, temporarily enraged by the state of Barney’s room and decreeing not another minute would pass,
not a moment of film
, until the room was put to rights.

At least once every holidays Mum bawled out Barney over the state of his room and his questionable personal hygiene – further evidence that she was best kept busy at her school: there was no problem of this kind during term time. At these times swift and collective action was called for. Ren was very cooperative. She actually enjoyed the organisational challenge of Barney’s bedroom.

‘You don’t deserve help!’ shouted Mum from the bedroom doorway. She had made temporary headquarters there, grim and squint-eyed, like a general observing the progress of battle.

‘You said families are best when they work together!’ Barney shouted back. He tried unsuccessfully to cram a wodge of comics, a supermarket bag bulging with
Feliz Navidad
props, and a pile of school stuff into his old blanket chest. The chest was already full of ancient toys, props and costumes Barney couldn’t bring himself to
part with. He was a hoarder. It was a fact.

‘It’s bad enough living over a junk shop,’ said Mum, ‘but why should my home look like a recycling dock?’ It was also a fact that Mum did not play fair in a fight. She was always shifting the grounds of an argument.

‘As you know, I like tidying,’ said Ren, in her television presenter voice. She steadily picked up Barney’s clothes from the floor and folded them into neat piles on his bed. She had already made swift work of the wadded bedclothing and the wet towels, the dusty clutter of his bedside tables.

‘And you have to admit I’m incredibly good at it,’ she added, smugly.

‘And yet another girl picks up after a feckless boy!’ said Mum. ‘It’s not right. I haven’t brought you up to pander to the male of the species.’

‘It’s only Barney,’ said Ren with admirable calm. ‘He’s a brother. That’s like a whole different gender.’

Mum remained in the doorway, arms folded and stony-faced, until the room met with her grudging approval. But then, for good measure, she made Barney sort the baskets of prospected laundry into loads for the washing machine. After that he had to shake his floor mats outside. After that, vacuum and mop.

Then it was dinner, made by Dad, who once full of spaghetti carbonara became full also of liberality and good humour, and keen to know every detail of their day’s filming. After dinner there were dishes, as always, and the maddening intractability of cheese that had melted gummily onto dinner plates. There was no dishwasher in the Kettle household; Mum didn’t believe in them. Barney scrubbed and scraped and splashed hotly until he thought he might explode into a thousand tiny pieces.

It was 9.20 p.m. before they met in Ren’s room.

‘Don’t you think waiting has made it
molto
exciting?’ said Ren. Her face was splotched pink with anticipation.

‘No I don’t!’ said Barney. ‘Just nutso. Quick, before I burst!’ He took the envelope from his camera bag and thrust it at Ren.

‘Since you found it.’

‘My heart is actually beating quite loudly,’ said Ren, clasping the envelope in the approximate position of that organ.

‘Ahrrrrrrgh!’ cried Barney.

Ren opened out the small nail file on her Swiss Army knife and eased it, oh so slowly, under the envelope flap.

And then, there it was.
Orange Boy Lives II
. It was just as they had hoped – even expected – though somehow it was infinitely surprising as well.

They sat side by side on the edge of the bed and read together, slowly, and with great attention.

Ten minutes later they had looked at each other, perplexed.

‘What the
hey
?’ said Barney. ‘What about his grandparents?’

Ren was silent.

‘And the dogs? And
every
thing.’

Barney closed the zine, then opened it again and stared at the first page, as if it might read differently.

‘Time’s passed.’ He pointed to Orange Boy’s puffer jacket. It looked shrunken, and so did his sneakers and nightshirt: he had grown.

They began to read again.

‘It’s a completely different world,’ said Ren, flatly.

Once more the zine was wordless, but Orange Boy’s little tale was clear enough. He had moved house and suburb, perhaps even town. The old storybook street with the little cottages, the flower-filled gardens, the park with the caterpillar slide, the kindly grandparents and pets – all had vanished.

The new environment was depicted just as precisely, but the soft pencil drawings had given way to harsher lines. The artist had used pen: the pictures had a stark sheen. The new street was
austere and uninviting – grand houses and trimmed lawns. Wintry trees. There were new adults in the new house, straight-backed and unsmiling.

‘Not parents,’ said Barney, because he didn’t want it to be so.

‘Uncle and aunt?’ said Ren. ‘Or a stepmother, or stepfather. Mr
Murdstone
.’

Ren had read
David Copperfield
last year and related to Barney the full horror of Mr Murdstone and his sister.

‘Maybe his grandparents’ was just a holiday. Maybe this is his real home.’

Real home or not, Orange Boy spent little time with the parent-people. He seemed sadly solitary now, shorn of his dog companions. He walked to school by himself. He sat alone and reduced in the back seat of the family wagon. He stood separate from the crowd on the sidelines of a rugby game. He waited for Subway at the mall, a little apart from the queue.

They looked for a long time at the last page, reluctant for the story to be over a second time, reluctant to admit the changes.

‘At least there’s new pets,’ said Barney.

The last page showed Orange Boy with a pair of white rats. He had bought them at a pet shop and sneaked them into his bedroom. They lived in a cage in his cupboard but he brought them out at night to scuttle around his room and his person. The final panels showed them all in bed, Orange Boy’s head at rest on his pillow, the whiskery triangles of rat noses peeking from under his nightshirt.

‘But he doesn’t smile,’ said Ren, her voice small. ‘Not once.’

Barney considered his sister once again. What a curious mixture she was. On the one hand, there were her grisly history books. On the other hand, she had refused ever to hear the end of
Charlotte’s Web
. Years ago, when Dad was reading the book to them, Ren had shouted ‘No! No!’ when it became apparent Charlotte would die. She had run from the room, her hands over her ears.

‘And what about these?’ Ren jabbed at a picture.

In many of the drawings small thought bubbles hovered above Orange Boy’s head. They were all empty. Orange Boy’s mind was apparently blank. You could certainly tell how he was feeling, though, because the outlines of the bubbles betrayed his mood: they were frail and wobbly, or solid and box-like and black, or explosively serrated like jaws full of savage teeth. Sometimes they were barely there, just ghostly contours of stillborn thought.

‘Okay,’ said Barney. ‘It is kinda sad –’

‘
Molto
sad,’ said Ren, funereally.

‘– but the rats are positive. Maybe the next one will be all about the new rat friends. You know, going about, doing stuff.’ Apart from the odd plunge over a filming disaster Barney was really a most optimistic human being.

Ren sat slumped. ‘Hope the next one’s soon. This has made me
molto
gloomy.’

‘And why
do
you love comics so much?’ said Edward to Albert Anderson.

Barney suppressed a wince. Edward’s on-camera voice was in the manner of Dick Scully’s. His delivery was a little too loud and a little too slow. Oh, but really, it didn’t matter. Edward didn’t know it yet, but Barney would be editing out all his questions. Delete, delete, delete. Barney loved editing. It was the megalomaniac’s ultimate playground.

He and Ren had viewed the rushes of the interviews so far. They did this at the end of each filming day – just as all film directors and editors did. They had watched Sally, Sylvie and all the others and they had decided everyone’s talking more or less made sense without the questions. The questions just got them going.

And listen, right now, here was Albert helpfully repeating the question:

‘Why do I love comics so much? Interesting.’

Albert thought for some time. Barney closed in on Albert’s
face so you could
see
his thinking. He was very still but his expression changed minutely over the next ten seconds. If this were a comic, thought Barney, Albert Thinking would be shown in four or five panels. And then there would be a panel where Albert leaned forward and said sheepishly:

‘Sounds banal, but it’s gotta be the pictures. Story and character in pictures. Or, as we say in the academy, sequential art narrative.’

Most customers didn’t know it but Albert was actually Dr Albert Anderson. He had a PhD in comic literature. He had written an 80,000-word thesis on the Hernandez Brothers. Barney had checked out the thesis once. It was an actual book, an imposing affair with a lot of phrases like sequentialartnarrative, and topographicalcartoontraditions, but it did have a gratifying number of pictures.

‘This place made my comic-buying tax-deductible,’ said Albert. ‘Also, I was running out of room upstairs.’

Albert was the
best
interview subject, thought Barney. He more or less interviewed himself – gliding smoothly from one aspect of his life and work to another. They had a full tour of the shop in the can – beginning with an introduction to Art, who spent much of his day sleeping in the entranceway to Comic Strip. The tour was accompanied by lively commentary from Albert who could pull out any book or comic at random and conjure a story about its author, or a piece of comic history, or an anecdote about a customer. Comic Strip attracted its fair share of unusual people, and that was the way Albert liked it.

‘This is one of the great neighbourhoods,’ said Albert. ‘Every kind of person. It’s a
world
.

‘And all the residents getting on so remarkably well.’

Albert gave an ostentatious wink at the camera.

‘Cut,’ said Barney.

‘Couldn’t help myself,’ said Albert, grinning.

Street residents did get on remarkably well. Mostly. Of course, small skirmishes broke out now and then. It was only natural, said Mum. The Street was just a bigger version of a school classroom. Or a staffroom. It was almost impossible for everyone to get on well with everyone else all of the time.