From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (18 page)

Even Mum was partial to the wooden animals. Ren had given her a capybara for Christmas, mostly because she liked the name. She was planning to get Barney the black buffalo for his birthday; it looked just like him when he was in the grip of an idea – its eyes were a little crazed, its head was lowered, ready to charge.

‘Hey Slash,’ said Barney, dropping the camera to his side. The audience had drifted to different displays now and Mariko was bringing down the bamboo blind at the big window. It was closing time.

‘How are we finishing this one?’

‘It is
so
obvious,’ said Ren. She made a loose fist and shook it briefly.

Barney looked vacant. Then knowing.

‘Ha. Okay.’

Barney had decreed the interviews must not fade away, they must end with a signing-off scene, just a moment, but one that was somehow perfectly right for the interviewee. Ren had proven herself an excellent Assistant Director in this regard. It turned out she was very good at endings.

Phil and Pete simultaneously cracked Brazil nuts with their alligator nutcrackers.

Deirdre turned the sign on the shop door from Hair Today to Gone (till) Tomorrow.

Sylvie performed a
grand reverence
, which was an elaborate bow – a finale and a thank you.

Albert’s was still coming. They would film a comic strip that Izzy was drawing right now: Albert leafing through an Hernandez
comic, then closing it, and tucking it back into the shelf, perhaps giving it a fond pat.

Ren had known Mariko’s ending right from the start: not Mariko in kimono, or at the tea ceremony table or fashioning an origami crane, nothing so obvious. Mariko’s interview would finish the way a visit to her shop always finished: with Mariko saying
sayonara
(goodbye) and
gokoun o inorimasu
(good luck), and then – this was the good bit – lifting the slender brass bell on her counter and shaking it briefly. The bell’s sweet chime came with you out the door and down the Street. That was a very good ending.

But when they suggested this to Mariko she made a face.

‘Not possible,’ she said, and led them back through the rooms to her counter.

‘It has gone. Also my ogon koi.’

It was true. There were just Mariko’s laptop and desk pad and pencil jar on the counter.

‘Also some pencils. And a puchi puchi towel. And a glass ring.’

‘The thief,’ said Ren. She could feel her face going pink. It was an uncomfortable truth that the thought of a new robbery gave her a small thrill.

‘Yoko and I were on our holiday when the meeting happened. But Mireille told me.’

‘When?’ Barney asked.

‘Different times,’ said Mariko. ‘This is a busy thief, but a careful one. Some items before Christmas. But the bell and ogon koi were two days ago. Just before I closed.’

‘Stealing a bell,’ said Barney. ‘You’d have to be careful it didn’t ring.’

‘I have ordered a new one. But Yoko had the ogon specially made.’

The ogon koi was a fish ornament made of platinum. It symbolised good fortune in business. Yoko had given it to Mariko when she opened the shop.

Mariko laughed. ‘Bad fortune overcame the ogon.’

‘Did you see anyone suspicious?’ said Barney. ‘The day it was taken.’

‘Someone youngish?’ said Ren. ‘And not tallish but not smallish either?’

‘Yes,’ said Mariko.

‘
Really
?’ Ren and Barney could not hide their surprise.

‘Not so much suspicious. But the thief was certainly young and – perhaps a hundred and seventy centimetres.’

‘You actually
saw
the Thief?’ Barney’s hands were on his hips; his mouth a scandalised O. Ren suppressed a giggle. Barney didn’t realise how often he channelled Mum.

‘I think so,’ said Mariko. ‘She was my last customer.’

‘
She
?’ They were starting to sound like a comic chorus.

‘It was really a
she
?’ asked Ren. ‘A girl.’

‘A young woman,’ said Mariko. ‘She bought two sheets of gampi. It could only have been her. I realised a few minutes after she left. But there was no sign of her in the Street. She just disappeared.’ Mariko flicked her fingers daintily. ‘Like a puff of dandelion.’

Ren and Barney sat outside Busby’s on the leather sofa. The Street was quieter now, the shoppers leaving, the restaurant patrons drifting in. The nor’west wind rose up, nudging dust and old leaves along the gutter. Over the road, Claude wrapped his arms around Beau-the-Mannequin and took him indoors for the night. On the upstairs balcony of Montgomery’s, Gene blew a defiant plume of smoke. It had been five weeks without cigarettes this time. A record.

‘She’s gotta live near here,’ said Barney.

Ms Bloodworth and the prospect of maths seemed to have been cast out. Barney was in a fine mood once more, quite cheered up – they had Mariko in the can and more vital information about the Thief.

‘Yes,’ said Ren. She was reading Ms Temple’s book. She was allowed it overnight, as long as she didn’t skip ahead. ‘Maybe down Billens Street. In one of those big old houses.’

‘Poly students live in those,’ said Barney. ‘They would never steal from the Street.’

‘The
jazz
students wouldn’t,’ said Ren. ‘But who knows about all the others? Let me finish this.’

‘We should go there now, check them out. Pretend we’re filming.’

‘Dumb move. They know who we are. Shusssh.’

Barney was quiet, though in his singular way. He actually continued to talk; he just didn’t ask questions that required answers.

‘Mariko seemed positive she was a girl. That makes one positive, one negative and one nearly positive. Mariko, Suit, Albert. But I’m finding it
so
weird adjusting my mental picture. Especially the tallish bit. I just can’t get away from Orange Boy, and thinking of him as small. Hey,’ – he elbowed Ren – ‘watch Brown Betty.’

The tabby was a few feet away, outside Ping’s, engaged in a sudden and furious game of leaf juggle and chase. The leaf’s movements were abrupt and unpredictable, but Brown Betty’s punts and dribbles and headers were most impressive. The game climaxed in a somersault of such corkscrew complexity that Ren and Barney both burst out laughing. Brown Betty, on all fours once again, paid no attention to them. She walked lazily to the zebra crossing, whereupon a car instantly stopped to give her right of way.

‘Did you
see
that?’ Barney yelped. ‘Blimey!
Did
you?’

‘Yes,’ said Ren, watching the tabby but thinking about the boys in Ms Temple’s book.

Brown Betty made straight for the little alley between Hair Today and the old Post Office, her back end bobbing gently, her tail high.

‘Rushes after dinner?’ said Barney.

‘Mmmm,’ said Ren, returning to the book.

In the night Ren woke, a light on her face. The moon. It was almost full – just a top corner rubbed away – and hanging in the middle of the long, high window above her bed.

She reached for her glasses on the bedside table and checked the hands of the blue alarm clock. 2.35 a.m.

She reached for Ms Temple’s book. The moon was so bright she could see the words clearly on the pages. She re-read some lines at the point where Ms Temple had finished reading.

‘It’s a barber shop. The barber went. He left everything.’

And

The cellar was a home. There was a bed and a chair and a radio and a chest of drawers. Even an icebox.

Ren thought about the darting, ragged, streetwise boys in the story.

She thought about living in an abandoned shop, a place to which you could bring the comforts of home – a radio and a chest of drawers.

Or soap, shirts, a teapot and a potted poinsettia.

She looked up at the distant moon, its smudged edge. She thought about cows jumping over moons, dishes and spoons, a cat and a fiddle.

She thought about Brown Betty, her bobbing bottom and high tail disappearing down the Post Office alley.

Ren thrust the sheet aside and slid from her bed, book in hand. She went quickly and softly to Barney’s room and waded across the crowded floor to his bed, to his dormant form. His sheet was on the floor, his arms flung up over his head. He was smiling in his sleep.

Ren reached down and pulled at a clump of Barney’s hair, not hard, but insistent. She had often woken him like this.

‘Barney!’ she hissed. ‘Wake up! Barney!’

In a second his eyes were open and he sat up. His hair sat up, too, in every direction, thanks to yesterday’s liberally applied hair product.

Ren snorted. ‘You look like Professor Brown.’

‘What? You what?’ said Barney, befuddled. ‘Whass going on?’

‘Something
molto
amazing,’ said Ren. ‘I’ve worked it out. With the help of this.’ She held the book in front of Barney.

‘I think I know where the thief lives. It’s how she – he – can watch us and be on the Street so often. Though I can’t figure out how we haven’t seen her – him – but
Barney
,’ she said, ‘we should have
known
. Brown Betty. We should have realised when she came, back during the –’

‘Stop! Back up!’ said Barney, his voice seeming to boom in the dark room. ‘I don’t know
what
you’re talking about.’

So Ren told him.

How very strange it was then, the next morning, how
molto
uncanny, said Ren and Barney to each other, when they stepped out the back door, ready for school.

Were certain planets aligning? Were awesome cosmic forces in play?

How extraordinary, that at the moment they put all the pieces together, worked out where the semi-mythical Orange-Boy-Crimson-Girl-Thief was hiding and prepared to beard the devious stranger in her den, how incredible that at more or less
that very moment
the elusive zine supplier and larcenous Street visitor – that mysterious, maddening, dreamed-about, hoped-for phantom – boldly showed a hand.

There, at the back door, on the top step and weighted by a stone, was the fourth white envelope with its confident address: YOU.

Barney and Ren fell on the envelope. They opened it immediately and beheld
Orange Boy Lives IV
. Mum had left for school. Dad was down in the Emporium doing paperwork before
opening. There was no one to delay or frustrate their reading.

The brief story was gobbled in a minute. There was just a single panel to each page. They nodded and gaped at each other and exclaimed in unison.

On the final page was – but, how would you describe it? A tease? A challenge? An invitation? A summons?

In the last panel were Orange Boy
and
Crimson Girl; wraithlike and vaporous, pencilled so weakly they were hardly apparent. But there they were. And
there
was in front of the boarded-up doors of the Post Office – the old, emptied-out, abandoned building, chipped and shabby and more or less forgotten: the stately old Post Office at the northwest corner of the High Street on the south side of town.

(Oh, Moo. I believe I know what you are thinking. That last paragraph is a little overdone?

Forgive me. I feel emotional when I think about the invitation to the Post Office – when I think about the Post Office building itself.

It is hard not to wish that Barney and Ren might carry on forever in their fortunate world, cheerfully filming
The Untold
Story
, chasing down the diverting mystery of Orange Boy and his friend, Crimson Girl.

But, Moo, this is where Orange Boy must step off the page, as it were. This is where Barney and Ren’s story shifts gear and tone.

The sun still shines and shines in the pale blue sky. The temperatures are high, the air very close. The people of the High Street sell their wares and tell their stories. Kiwi Keith maintains a steady dribble. The Upside Down Catfish stealthily patrols her watery playground. Art sleeps on.

But nothing is quite as it was.

Moo, this is where Part Two begins.)

Barney and Ren sat in front of the computer. They were viewing the rushes – Rushing Time, as Barney liked to call it, which he thought a good joke since they sat quite still throughout.

The computer screen was large – twenty-eight inches – thanks to North Island Gran, who was a devoted supporter of Barney’s film career. She had witnessed him frothing and gnashing while editing
Red Riding Hoodie
on Dad’s laptop, a miniscule thing that did not assist thethrillingalchemy one little bit. Gran had brought her big screen south the next time she drove down.

Grandparents were so much more
helpful
than parents.

The screen was an expensive model of sleek design, the kind of computer product Dad declared extortionately priced
and further evidence of the triumph of design over utility. But Dad was a total dinosaur, said Barney to Ren. And also – you had to admit it – a total miser. Every time Barney looked at his wonderfully large screen a small but acutely pleasurable surge of satisfaction washed through him. It washed through him now as he and Ren sat before it with their Rushing Time equipment. Aside from Ren’s notebook the equipment was all food and drink. They had chips, crackers, carrots, chickpeas (roasted) and iced peppermint tea.

‘But we should have Coke or cocoa,’ said Ren. ‘Then it would be all Cs.’

‘Who drinks
cocoa
?’

‘Children in books. We should try a different letter of the alphabet each time. If it was B we could have biscuits and banana chips and –’ She paused, trying to dredge up another B.

‘Beer,’ said Barney. ‘Beetroot.’

‘Maybe A is better: apples, dried apricots … Or D … dates,
dark
chocolate.’ There was a longer pause.

‘Dhal,’ said Barney. He hated dhal.

‘Maybe C is really the only one. We could have cheese and chocolate right now, too, if –’

She stopped, registering the look on Barney’s face.

‘Just
saying
…’

It was Saturday night. Mum and Dad were at Albert Anderson’s playing Risk with a bunch of Street residents.

Barney and Ren had two days’ worth of filming to watch. Six hours. There had been no rushes watching last night. They had both fallen into bed, shattered, at nursery hour. Mum had witnessed this with great scepticism.

It’s a long story, Barney said, silently, to his mother.

One you’ll never, ever hear.

Sixteen hours after they had received
Orange Boy Lives IV
, Barney and Ren were crouched beside the bench in the lavender courtyard of the Mediterranean Warehouse. It was night time, but still very warm, and the full moon spread a cool white light over the Street.

The Mediterranean was in darkness, though Jack’s Mum would be awake, Barney knew. She was an insomniac. But also, fortunately, a classical music fan. She went to bed with earphones. Right now she would be plugged into something orchestral. She would hear only violins, trumpets and kettledrums, not rustlings down in the lavender garden.

For the umpteenth time Barney pressed the light button on his twenty-four-hour watch. 00.21. Nine more minutes. They planned to knock at the back entrance of the Post Office at 00.30 exactly.

‘I think I’b going to sneeze again,’ whispered Ren. ‘I don’t think it’s the lavender.’ She had begun wheezing and sneezing as soon as they had crept down the back stairs. ‘I think it’s a nervous reaction. Soldiers geddit.’ She was growing more nasal by the minute.

‘Are you dervous, Barney?’

Was he nervous? Barney did a rapid reconnoitre of his body and mind. He had a slightly odd sensation in his stomach, true. Similar to when he had overdone the Sultana Pasties. And something was going on in his chest. Was it a flutter? A tremble? It was a bit like the first day of filming. Though this crouching in the dark reminded him of something else.

‘Excited, I think.’

‘What if they’ve gone?’

‘They won’t have.’

‘What if we’re wrong about it all?’

This was uncharacteristically tentative. Ren half hiccoughed, half sneezed into her crooked elbow. Barney felt an unaccustomed flicker of brotherly protectiveness. He squeezed her arm.

‘We are definitely right. I just know it. About everything.’ He almost convinced himself.

What a day it had been. The longest day Barney could remember. And now the day was stretching on into the night. Who could say what time it would end?

He checked his watch again. 00.23. He was starting to feel wobbly-legged in this crouch.

Ren smothered another sneeze.

Tintin. That’s what it was.
The Black Island
. Tintin and Snowy crouching in the cave and peering through a slit in the rock. He wasn’t wearing a kilt – blimey, he would never wear a kilt – but he still felt like Tintin.

And Ren was definitely Snowy.

That morning, they had read
Orange Boy Lives IV
back to back several times. They had sat down on the top step then, silenced by the contents.

Cicadas clung to the worn wood of the handrail. They were revving up for the day, their wings shimmering and throbbing in the morning sun. Barney stared dazedly at them. The zine images replayed in his head.

He looked over at the scene in Luna Square. Café staff gliding back and forth with coffees and breakfast plates. Sally’s potted nasturtiums blazing along the wall of the Living History Musem. In the middle of the Square, Lovie waited patiently for Bingo who trailed, audibly truculent, fighting with her backpack.

How far things had come in less than four weeks. Just four episodes of
Orange Boy Lives
and they had been well reeled in. The zine author was clever indeed.

Did the fourth zine answer everything? Not really. But they had been told something startling, and – it seemed – they had been told where they should come to learn the rest.

‘Can’t believe it,’ said Ren. The words jerked out, through juddering teeth. Her chin was in her hands, elbows on knees. Her legs jiggled and her teeth chattered.

It was as if the author – authors! – had known just the right pace at which to communicate with them, had precisely timed the moment to most effectively play their ace … Blimey, it was spooky.

‘Ten to,’ said Ren. Jiggle jiggle. Chatter chatter.

But. Just once more.

The zine was eight pages. Seven wordless panels, each showing an interior tableau, still-lives from yet another Orange Boy home, recorded from several angles and this time in full colour.

It was a small domain, a domesticated space in one corner of a large room, like a bird’s nest on an empty beach. Two unseen occupants. A mussed-up bed on the floor; a chair; a table made from cartons and a plank of wood. The room was cloaked and dim in the first few panels, just chinks of light coming in from the covered windows. Then, a shaft of sun from up high bathed the inhabitants’ meagre belongings, the curious assortment of household utensils and knick-knacks they had gathered: a table-setting of rice bowls, chopsticks and teapot. A silken dressing gown draped across the chair, two pairs of slippers positioned neatly beneath. A stack of books. An ornamental fish. A bell. A Christmas poinsettia. Salt-and-pepper shakers: a rustic couple, bent forward in a loving kiss.

A cat curled up among the tumble of rugs on the makeshift bed – an unmistakeable tabby, a ball of russet and brown.

And then on the back page, where the true site of this improvised shelter was revealed, its secret tenants appeared like ghostly sentries at the barred door.

‘They want us to visit,’ said Barney. ‘It’s an
invitation
. Definitely.’

Barney pictured the covered recess behind the Post Office. Over the years, homeless people had dossed down there in the
winter – until they were moved along by brisk words from Dick Scully, the self-appointed Street policeman.

Barney had passed by the alcove hundreds of times in his life, every day on the way to school. Briefly, a couple of years ago, the Street kids had been on waving terms with one of the men who slept in the alcove. He was younger and friendly, his arms a swarm of tattoos. He liked to sit outside with his face up to the sun. Then one day he was gone.

And the Post Office itself had been a non-building in their midst for so long that Barney took little notice of it. It was like those huge saturated logs on the beach, carcasses of some old life, slowly succumbing to the sand. You just went around them and paid no attention, you never saw them properly.

‘We’ll go at night,’ said Barney.

They had sat there a moment more, swooping through the day in their heads, willing the sun across the sky, urging on the night.

Ren’s knees came to a standstill.

‘Blimey,’ said Barney. ‘
Blimey
.’

At 00.26 Barney stood up.

‘C’mon.’

They crept from the lavender courtyard and stood close in to the lean trunk of the olive tree, scouting the length of the Street. It was empty and more or less silent, just distant noises from the Saturn Bar. The apartments were all in darkness – except for Suit and Mireille’s, above Forget-me-Knot, where a light glowed behind the paper blind. Suit was in his small office, reading perhaps. The rest of the Street, including the starlings, slept.

Barney had been out on the Street at this time of night before, but always with adults, returning home after parties or dinners, or from holiday. It was very different now. Emptied of people and movement and noise, the Street revealed its secret self. It was a
shadowy, breathing entity, a great body with many parts, feeling and thinking, wide-awake and attentive.

Something soft banged against Barney’s bare legs and his heart turned over in fright.

‘Brown Betty!’ whispered Ren. The tabby mewed hello, pushed and slid between their legs. She trotted away, ahead of them, angling towards the alley.

‘She knows where we’re going.’

‘Impossible,’ said Barney. His heart thumped alarmingly. He held a clump of Ren’s T-shirt to keep her close. He was experiencing a sudden and acute longing for things well known to him: his bed, the living room sofa, his desk at the back of the classroom with the view out to the playground and the distant Port Hills.

The alley smelled familiar – dank and mushroomy, a hint of urine – but it was an altogether different experience after midnight, despite the moonlight. The dark had a smell, too, though it was impossible to describe.

They heard their own ginger steps, the raucous crunch underfoot.

Ren reached for Barney’s hand and he held it gratefully. Why had he wished for the day to go so speedily? He would honestly,
truly
, like very much to be doing integers right now with Nick Etherington.

Another extraordinary thing had happened that day.

Barney had arrived at school with a head full of Orange Boy and Crimson Girl. The six hours of class work had stretched interminably ahead, in accordance with Barney’s firm belief that time moved measurably slower inside the classroom. His body and mouth more or less participated in writing, maths, PE and a discussion about the Year 8 social studies projects, but his mind
stayed firmly with the Post Office and its secret residents.

At 3 p.m. Barney made with relief for the door, but Ms Bloodworth called to him. She beckoned with an elegant finger.

Would he mind staying for a chat? she asked, when Barney stood before her desk.

Yes, he certainly
would
mind, said Barney, though silently. Who ever
didn’t
mind Staying for a Chat?

But what could you do?

‘Just a brief chat,’ said Ms Bloodworth, cheerfully. ‘Fifteen minutes max. In the media room. Give me five.’ She and her full-skirted dress swished away in the direction of the staffroom.

Barney was fond of the media room. He’d spent much time in here and, last year, some excellent time helping with a short film about the new entrants.

He sat in a computer bay now and waited for Ms Bloodworth, staring at the blank screen, too preoccupied to start up the computer. The waiting felt familiar: a little bit dull, a little bit nervy. He’d done a lot of waiting for teachers over the course of his life at Kate Sheppard, from Ms Addington, through Mrs Newberry, Mr Minera, Miss Hargreaves, Ms Bishop (
two
years of her) to Ms Temple. What a sorry parade. It was a shame he could still list them all. And was he going to remember those names till the day he died? Was it possible that a great and famous filmmaker could be haunted at the height of his fame and greatness by the spectres of his long-gone teachers? Surely not.

Ms Bloodworth came through the door carrying a packet of biscuits. She pulled up a chair beside Barney, opened the packet and offered him one. Sultana Pasties. His very favourite. Barney regarded both the biscuits and Ms Bloodworth with considerable suspicion.

But what could you do?

He took one.

‘School makes me incredibly hungry,’ admitted Ms Bloodworth,
taking a biscuit too. ‘Shouldn’t eat such sweet stuff, though. Probably shouldn’t corrupt students, either.’

Barney chewed warily.

‘Barney,’ said Ms Bloodworth, saying his name as if she was trying it for the first time. ‘I’ll cut straight to the chase.’ She slapped her knees lightly, making a full stop.

‘Your legend precedes you – for better and worse.’

How gratifying, thought Barney. A legend already.

‘I know you’re not fond of school,’ said Ms Bloodworth. ‘But I also know you love filmmaking.’

She held out the packet and Barney took another biscuit. It was only polite.

‘I have sympathy with your position, Barney; believe me. I was no fan of school myself.’

An actual chill ran through Barney. Blimey! Imagine hating school and then somehow
returning
to it as an adult. How could that happen? Adults were supposed to be able to do exactly what they liked. He was looking forward enormously to that very thing about being an adult.

‘But the Education Minister decrees you must have schooling. And your parents have chosen this school. And here you are. And here am I. You see my point? I have certain obligations.’