From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (15 page)

‘It must be a kind of orphanage,’ said Barney.

‘There aren’t orphanages any more. Mum said.’

‘There must be.’

‘Only in books.’

You could tell the couple were kind, but they were brisk and busy, too – cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, mending fences, on the computer, organising all the boys.

There were plenty of pets, though – several cats, guinea pigs, a dog. Horses. Orange Boy had a roommate: a boy with missing teeth. They played cards sometimes, or listened to music, or they kicked a ball around with others. Orange Boy spent a lot of time with the animals.

‘But he doesn’t seem lonely like the last one,’ said Ren. ‘I don’t
think he’s so lonely. There’s a different feeling.’

She took
Orange Boy Lives II
from her backpack and placed it alongside their new find.

‘
II
is kind of empty,’ said Barney. ‘And everything feels cold. This one’s busier.’

‘And warmer.’

The boys all went to school together in a van. After school they often drove to the beach; they swam and body surfed and cooked sausages on a campfire. At home they practised tackles in the paddock. They rode the horses bareback. Boys came and went, their belongings in bulging backpacks.

Orange Boy had a haircut. His roommate got new teeth. He and Orange Boy climbed a huge tree and tied a ribbon to the highest branch. Orange Boy learnt some chords on the guitar. He got a book for his birthday. The house-Mum made a cake to celebrate: thirteen candles.

‘I can’t tell if he’s happy.’

Once again the zine was wordless, but there were no empty, angry-sad thought bubbles.

‘He’s not
un
happy.’

Midway through the story, Ren turned a page and exclaimed at splashes of red in every frame. The sudden burst of colour was a little thrilling. The red was a jacket, and the jacket was worn by a girl at school. Her hair was short, practically a stubble. She was skinny like Orange Boy, but tall and brown-skinned. She neither smiled nor scowled. She stood to the side mostly, watchful and wary.

Orange Boy and the girl became friendly. They hung out during breaks. They talked. They did karate with a visiting tutor. They played touch. They played hopscotch, too, though it was the little kids’ game. The girl brought good stones to school and beat Orange Boy hands down.

‘He’s laughing!’ said Ren. It was the first time. Though, somehow, it was sad.

Often the girl missed school and then Orange Boy missed her. When she was at school they sat sometimes on the steps outside the classrooms, and while they talked the girl worked with a pen, drawing pictures on her hands and arms and legs, on all her uncovered skin. Orange Boy talked to a teacher and soon there was a pile of paper. Now the drawing accelerated; the girl covered sheet after sheet, at lunchtimes, in the classroom, at assembly, in the grass waiting for Orange Boy’s van and the school bus. The piles of pictures rose up, they blew in paper squadrons around her. She gave them away: to Orange Boy, to teachers or the little kids. To the bus driver and the karate sensei, to the boy with the new teeth.

And then Orange Boy picked up a pen. Slowly and a little diffidently, he began to draw, too. His pictures were mostly of animals, very occasionally people: a guy sweeping the floor. A kid on a flying-fox. A boy and his drum kit. Two small bent figures in front of a little house.

‘The grandparents,’ sighed Ren. It felt as if she had been reunited with old friends, people she had been missing without quite knowing it.

During a wet lunchtime, Orange Boy and the girl sat at his desk, a small island of two among the sea of bodies in the classroom. The girl took a sheet of fresh paper and folded it several times until she had a small eight-page book.

Barney and Ren looked wonderingly at each other.

‘This is giving me the weirdest feeling,’ said Barney. ‘It’s like I already know this story, like I’ve heard it before but …’

He thought about it.

‘A film,’ he said, finally. ‘It’s like a film – a replay – one you’ve already seen, only the camera angles and some of the scenes have changed, like there’s a different person directing it.’

After that Orange Boy and the girl made a lot of zines. Sometimes they exchanged them. Sometimes Orange Boy took his home and put them in the drawer beside his bed. Or he opened
them out and pinned them to the wall, to the ceiling, on his side of the bedroom.

Near the end of
Orange Boy Lives III
the girl fell awkwardly during touch and broke her left arm – her drawing arm. She sat glumly on the outside steps at school. Her arm was in a cast, white against her skin. The sleeve of the red jacket hung empty and awkward. Orange Boy came and sat beside her. He took a pen from his pocket. He pulled the sling fabric gently aside and began to draw on the plaster cast.

The final frame was a close-up of the plaster cast drawing: there were the two of them, close together on the school steps, cocooned and oblivious, as legs rushed past them in the late afternoon. They did not look at each other, though. They both stared out into space, out into the world beyond school, beyond that day and that moment, beyond the zine.

Underneath was written:
Orange Boy and Crimson Girl. Forever
.

Ms Temple’s voice wove in and out of Ren’s drowsy thoughts. She wasn’t really listening to the story. It came only in pieces, most of it crowded out by the seething thoughts that had colonised her head.

He took me to meet the others
, read Ms Temple.

Yesterday, when they had finished reading
Orange Boy Lives III
both Ren and Barney had been silent for some time, letting the pictures and their story sink in. And then, at almost the same moment, they had each drawn breath and burst forth with a salvo of words: butdoyouthinkthat, Idon’tunderstandhow, butwhatdoesitmeanthat, butthenwhoisandhowdoes … butbutbutbutbutbutbutbut, was how Ren thought of it now.

The horse pooped.

‘This is getting serious,’ Barney had said. ‘This has gone into a whole new gear.’

He turned the pages of the zine, back and forth, scouring it for extra wisdom.

Ren had reached for her backpack, for her notebook and pencil case.

Barney groaned. ‘Not the notebook! I’m
sick
of it.’

‘It helps me think. It keeps things orderly.’

‘Don’t write stuff,’ commanded Barney. ‘Just
say
it.’

‘I can do both,’ said Ren. ‘You know I am a highly skilled multi-tasker.’

They had sat either side of Albert Anderson’s counter and, conveniently, no one had come into the shop for some time.

‘I suppose it’s obvious, anyway,’ said Barney. He put the zine down. ‘If what you say is right.’

‘Which it usually is.’

‘Orange Boy – the artist – could be a girl.’ He sounded slightly disappointed. ‘
If
he’s the thief. And if the thief’s a girl, like Albert reckons.’

‘Maybe,’ said Ren. She wrote a heading and underlined it. ‘Probably.’

‘Why are you so sure the thief is Orange Boy, anyway?’

‘It was when I was outside Coralie’s,’ said Ren. ‘Filming.’ She thought of those long minutes, the mash of colour and movement, the whoosh and thud of Coralie’s swing door, the sun beating down on her neck, the ache in her arms after hours of holding the camera. ‘People going in and out. Stuff all around. It was the second time.’

Ren wrote as she talked. She wrote three lines of words, skipped a line, and wrote three more. She liked writing and talking about two different things. She liked the sensation of carving her mind in half.

‘Everyone looks so strange when you watch through a camera. It’s like they
are
actually in a film. Like everything is an actual film going on all the time. Not real life. Or, it’s at the same time as real life.’

‘I
love
that,’ said Barney.

‘I think it’s creepy,’ said Ren. She drew a line across the page.

‘Anyway, it made me feel strange, so I tried not to think about it. I started thinking about the thief – or thieves – instead. How they’d maybe been stealing since November. And how that means there’s been someone on the Street quite often who we haven’t noticed. And how we
also
haven’t noticed who’s been delivering
Orange Boy
. And, I don’t know why, but somehow that made me think that it might be the same person. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was right.’

It was a
terrible
explanation, thought Ren, her head on her desk, the faint smell of cleaning agent in her nostrils.

Someone had wiped all the desktops at Kate Sheppard School during the holidays. A cleaner. An unnoticed cleaner.

‘Someone we haven’t noticed?’ said Barney, his voice rich with scorn. ‘Plus someone
else
we haven’t noticed? Equals the same person?! Slash, that is
so
illogical!’ he crowed. ‘Even I can tell. That is
molto
nuts.’

‘I know,’ Ren admitted. ‘And it’s so unlike me. I’m kind of ashamed.’

‘But what about this?’ She pushed the notebook towards Barney.

Orange Boy is the thief.

The thief is a girl.

Orange Boy is a girl.

‘A syllogism! Eeew.’ Barney was disgusted. ‘Take it away!’ He shoved the notebook back at her.

Ren smiled, remembering Barney’s disgust. She could
feel
her smile, her cheek moving stickily on the desk. Beside her, Henrietta seemed to be asleep. Soft, even breaths and a small snickering
sound issued from the bundle of Henrietta hair.

I saw the thin flat face of a fox peering out.

Ms Temple had introduced the class to syllogisms last year. They had been doing a philosophy module. On the whiteboard, Ms Temple had written:

All mortals die.

All men are mortals.

All men die.

Ren had felt a little thrill of rightness. She knew logic when she heard it. It gave her the same very pleasant feeling she experienced when her bedroom was flawlessly tidy or when she had written up a complicated timetable for Kettle Productions. Or when she solved one of Ms Temple’s story maths problems.

But Barney loathed Ms Temple’s philosophy module, and syllogisms in particular. He had railed against all philosophical concepts and philosophy homework. He had raged from after school to after dinner about the syllogism homework. But then he had discovered a syllogism on the Internet that he could pass off as his own:

No homework is fun.

Syllogisms are homework.

No syllogisms are fun.

‘Your major premise is fallacious, Barney,’ said Ms Temple, when she read it. ‘Your big smirk disproves it. Clearly, this piece of homework amused you: therefore it was fun. Additionally, your grammar is poor.’

‘Your major premise is fallacious,’ said Barney to Ren in Comic Strip. ‘You’re just
guessing
that Orange Boy is the thief. You are making an
irrational
leap.’ He was incredibly pleased with this. He got out of his chair and did an actual leap. His hair lifted off his head. ‘Oh
yes
!’

‘I know,’ said Ren. ‘There’s got to be an explanation for it.
I’ll work it out later. But, what about
this
?’ Again, she pushed the notebook towards Barney.

Crimson Girl knew Orange Boy (the boy) + Orange Boy (the artist) is (probably) a girl

Crimson Girl can draw

Orange Boy (the artist) is really Crimson Girl

Barney had given one of his blood-curdling groan-cries, scraped his face, and pounded his head on the counter.

‘That is just
gibberish
!’ (Mum’s word, occasionally yelled at the television.)

‘I know it’s not a proper syllogism but it’s not gibberish.
Listen
, Barney.’

She had pulled his head sideways by its thick hair. Not hard.

‘Think about this –’ Ren waved
Orange Boy Lives III
at him. ‘It
could
be Crimson Girl who’s been drawing these right from the beginning – maybe she’s telling the story of her friend, Orange Boy. Just say. Maybe she’s just remembering him from school or something. And that would fit if we’re right and the thief
is
the Orange Boy artist-slash-delivery-person. And it would
also
fit if the thief is a girl.’

‘My head hurts,’ said Barney, sourly. ‘And not from banging it.’

At that point the doorbell had rung. Fern and Baby Soo had come into the shop, so Ren and Barney had been obliged to stop bickering and chat sociably with Fern. Ren had held Baby Soo. She was eleven weeks old now and conferred gummy smiles. Her head wobbled, her hands clenched and her hair seemed to tremble. It was most unusual hair for a baby. It was very black and abundant and stood straight up in spikes. She looked like a close-up of a caterpillar. Barney had said more than once that Baby Soo’s hair made her seem like an adult in a baby’s body, and that freaked him right out.

The fox fur flew.

But Fern and Baby Soo’s visit calmed Barney and Ren a little and when they were alone again, Barney spoke more reasonably.

‘Okay. This is what I think. Maybe the whole Orange Boy/Crimson Girl thing is completely made up. Could be a girl artist, could be a boy. Maybe the thief’s a girl but has nothing to do with the zines. We don’t know anything for sure.’

Barney pushed back his seat and stood as if to announce his next thoughts to the empty shop.

‘The thing I
really
want to know is
why
are the zines being left? And why are they being left for us?’

‘How do you know they’re for us?’ said Ren. ‘We could have just fluked them.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Barney.

It was then that he told Ren about the third envelope, how it had not been there when he’d browsed the zine stand earlier, while he was waiting for peppermint tea with Albert Anderson.

They had walked over to the zine stand to inspect it.

‘When I came back in,’ said Barney, ‘I looked for
The Seven Haircuts of Man
and it definitely wasn’t where I’d put it. I put it on the second shelf and then an hour later – when you came in – I found it on the fourth. And the only person who came into the shop was Albert’s thief. And Albert said he – or she – was at the zine stand so it must have been
that
thief who put the envelope there – behind
Seven Haircuts
. Which
does
mean that Orange Boy is the thief.’