From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (22 page)

They would go to bed early – though not so early Mum would
be sceptical. And they could sleep in. Saturday tomorrow. They would have to plan future visits to the Post Office very, very carefully.

Of course, there was absolutely no doubt about going back.

In Montgomery’s, Gene, Sarah and Billie sat in wicker chairs beneath the Writer Gallery. Gene had begun the gallery forty years ago when the shop had opened. He had hung photos of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Pember Reeves and Virginia Woolf and he had been adding faces ever since. Sometimes people donated portraits. They tore them from magazines or found posters when they travelled. There were dozens of pictures now, all sizes. Barney’s favourite was Truman Capote who was poking out his tongue and making rabbit ears. He made sure Truman was in the frame for the interview and that Gene’s rather large stomach – which rested in front of him like an entire other curled-up body – was not.

The Montgomerys were good interviewees. They answered Ren’s questions expansively. They had good stories about shop regulars and odd goings-on over the years: Old Mrs Norman, who loved science fiction and who worried away at the problem of the time-space continuum. The loud Communist Party meetings held in the history and politics room in the days when there was still a Communist Party. The guinea pig that had been loose for a week in the fiction shelves. The homeless guy, Arnold, who waited at the door for opening time on winter mornings, then parked up in the back room for the day reading books on theology.

Sometimes Gene and his daughters disagreed about the people and the past – how and why things had happened – but that was fine. Barney was all for it. A lively discussion, even an out-and-out dispute, was good doco, he told Ren.

This was after the vigorous argument provided by Clifford and Ellen, whose otherwise tame interview had taken a sudden turn when they disagreed about the proper execution of Salute to the
Sun. Barney and Edward (posing the questions that day) had found the whole spat enormously entertaining.

Afterwards, Clifford had asked for the argument to be edited out, but Barney had sorrowfully informed him that, in his talent release form, he had signed away rights to the filmed material; the decisions about final content rested with the Director. Clifford had looked mightily displeased about this, but Ellen had saved the day.

‘Oh, forget it, Cliff. Everyone knows we argue. Barney’s the final judge. No correspondence will be entered into.’

Ellen was
okay
, Barney told Ren.

And
molto bella
, said Ren, who had just come from the

Mediterranean and a biscotti-tasting focus group with Battista.

At Montgomery’s, customers drifted in and out. Billie and Sarah came and went from their wicker chairs, serving people. Sometimes Barney filmed the customers, their queries and their book purchases, which were often interesting. Sometimes they invited a customer to come and sit in the vacated wicker chair and talk – were they a regular? Ren asked. How long had they been coming here? What was their favourite section? And what had changed in the Street over the years?

Barney was especially pleased with this aspect. It was a further adaptation of their customer-audience. It showed they were developing all the time, he said. Their documentary technique was becoming more cutting-edge by the day. He made an entry about it in his Filmmaker’s Diary under the heading Narrative Innovation, a term he had picked up from his former mentors, Hal Nicholas and Felix La Marche.

The last customer to sit in the wicker chair was Suit who had unexpectedly deviated from his weekly schedule and was buying his book a day earlier than normal.

‘I devoured last week’s title,’ he said to Gene. ‘Metaphorically speaking, of course. As well as the volume I ordered through Albert. I have been burning the midnight oil.’

You and me both, thought Barney. But especially me. He recalled the light in Suit’s office last night. It had been dark up there, though, when they had crept back out of Post Office Alley and across the Street at 4.30 a.m.

‘Hey Suit,’ he said, ‘tell us about your books, what you buy here.’

‘Oh,’ said Suit, self-conscious suddenly about the camera. ‘Well.’ He smiled bashfully. ‘Let me see. Well.’ He cleared his throat and blinked rapidly.

Then he fixed the camera lens with a steady eye.

‘You could say, I suppose, that I am exploring the lives of the poets. The great constellation of writers, past and present. Gene has a most inspiring collection of biographies and memoirs. Volumes big and small. It is so interesting to discover how the, ah, muse affects each artist. How the obsession is worked around. Last week it was a slim volume, but such a good one.
Blue Remembered Hills
, by the marvellous Rosemary Sutcliff. So restrained, yet moving. And informative. And now I have my eye on
Charles Dickens: A Life
. There are shelves and shelves, I am happy to say. Have you tried film directors’ memoirs, Barney? Much encouragement to be found there, I am sure.’

Gene winked at Barney and Barney yawped back.

Old
Suit
! He had forgotten the camera almost immediately. He was off and away. He had been hiding his light, as Mum said. He was so fluent!

Ren gave Suit an enthusiastic thumbs-up. One non-fiction reader to another, Barney supposed. He crouched and considered Suit through the viewfinder.

‘What else do you like about Montgomery’s?’ Ren asked.

‘Oh, it’s the ambience,’ said Suit, not a trace of shyness about him now. ‘But that is so tricky to pin down, isn’t it? It is partly the décor, I suppose. Then there is the endless potential in the books, the warmth they seem to exude, their heady aroma. The filtered light. And the hush of absorption. The holy feeling of a republic of
readers. And the presiding magus –’ Suit gestured to Gene, who looked astonished at this lavish salute – ‘the person who brings us all this. Without Gene’s dedication, and Sarah’s and Billie’s, of course, where would we be? We would be a lesser Street. We would be in despair, that’s where we’d be!’

Suit sank back into the wicker chair, spent by this passion. Sarah and Billie and the customers, brought forth from the shelves by Suit’s soliloquy, broke into raucous applause.

‘Look what you unleashed, Barney!’ said Gene. He patted Suit on the shoulder, took his hand and shook it. ‘Can I have that in writing, mate? What a paean!’

Barney didn’t know what a paean was, though he could guess. But he was in ecstasy. His tiredness had fled. This was
gold
. He hadn’t understood everything Suit had said, but he knew a great speech when he heard it. And Suit’s face through the viewfinder? It
held
you. Suit! Who knew?

Barney mimed applause at Suit and Suit smiled, cautiously.

‘A little purple, perhaps,’ he said. ‘I must watch that. And shorter, I’m assured, is generally better. If you have any more questions, I’ll try harder to be brief.’

‘Long is good!’ said Barney. ‘Long is great!

‘From you,’ he amended, thinking of Dick Scully, all those weeks ago.

‘You are too kind,’ said Suit. He sat up.

‘Another question?’ he said, hopefully.

Barney and Ren had eaten their way through their line-up of C foods and viewed four hours of rushes. Their eyes were watery again with tiredness.

‘We’re still in sleep deficit,’ said Ren. ‘Growing bodies need eight to ten hours of sleep a night.’

‘Thank you, Nurse.’

‘We could do the Square tomorrow. Get up early.’

Barney thought of his bed, the sheets wonderfully cool when you first got in. But then in five minutes you were all hot and bothered again.

‘Nah, let’s finish. Or we’ll get behind.’

They had filmed in Luna Square most of the day – quick interviews with Kirk at Hole-in-the-Wall and Ted with his Fruit and Veg cart, and then hours in the Map Shop with Jan and Rob who were geographers-turned-map-nuts. The Map Shop sold up-to-date satellite navigation equipment – ‘bread and butter,’ said Jan – and the two were happy enough to show off their Tom Toms and Garmin Nuvi units or talk knowledgeably about current global positioning systems. But it was the art of the printed map that really got them excited.

‘CARTOGRAPHY IS AN ANCIENT URGE,’ read the giant lettering on the back wall of the shop.

Jan and Rob had gathered every kind of map to feed the ancient urge. Maps from the antique world, with dragons and sea serpents and wind cherubs with puffed-out cheeks. Maps of the British Empire, all pink and pretty. Mecator maps and Peters projection maps and the map of America with only thirty-eight states. (
Very
controversial in the seventies, said Jan.) Biblical maps. Street maps of ancient cities and modern metropolises. Topographical maps. Barthometric maps. Survey maps. Maps of rivers systems and mountain chains; maps of Romano-British pathways and American Civil War battles.

There were maps of imaginary places, too – treasure islands and lost worlds, Narnia and The Hundred Aker Wood, the mountains and valleys of Prydain and the Kingdom of Reason.

The camera toured them all; it fastened on Jan as he explained the politics of map projections; it followed Rob into the wide drawers and sliding filers and out to the back office where personal favourites adorned the walls.

They looked at the precious early surveyors’ map of their own city, before it was a city, the swamp and forests and fault lines, out of sight now, covered over, buried beneath buildings and motorways and scurrying humans.

‘Too many people!’ said Rob, and he unveiled his long-term, semi-secret cartography project,
Unmapped Pasifika
, a world of undiscovered isles, archipelagoes, atolls and reefs, all carefully plotted according to latitude and longitude (and integers! thought Barney) so that the dreamed-of places dwelt between and among the known lands.

You could get lost in the Map Shop, Albert Anderson had said once, and it was certainly true that you lost track of time, so absorbing were Jan’s descriptions, so hypnotising Rob’s ever-present dividers. These, although metal and inanimate, seemed nevertheless to have a kind of personality, a confident and purposeful one: they strode across the complicated face of a street map – of Paris, say, or Amsterdam or Cairo or old Peking. They drew you in and in and in until you were
there
at the name Rob had been in search of, at the beginning of the story he wanted to tell.

You got lost and you forgot your own world in the Map Shop, things ordinary and extraordinary. It had been so good that morning, listening and looking, that for whole minutes at a time Barney forgot about the night they had just passed, about the lost world of the Post Office interior and the strange, unmapped territory of their new acquaintance.

Then he would move the camera’s gaze from a map detail, or there would be a few moments’ silence, and the night would rush back in, a surreal black and white film showing more or less nonstop at the back of Barney’s head.

The Map Shop was altogether wonderful. They almost forgot their other task for that day: filming the Square itself when it was most alive with activity: in the middle of the day, when the market was at its peak.

On Saturdays it was as if the whole city came to the Square and the Street. It was like a bazaar or a carnival, or a crowd scene on a film set, with a great cast of extras, a multitude of people, ceaselessly moving.

Barney and Ren had emerged from the Map Shop and plunged into the goings-on.

They had filmed the musicians, jugglers, chuggers and open-air traders: the bracelet braiders, the Thai foot massager, Tina-the-face-painter, the guy whom Izzy called Mondrian but whose real name was Ewan. He laid his treasure out on a black blanket: plain grey beach stones, lopsided spheres or flat planes of basalt, all streaked with thin white lines or circles. Barney and Ren had bought stones from Mondrian before. They were good presents.

They left the camera static on the tripod sometimes, so it recorded the ragged march-past of people, the mad snatches of conversation. Or Barney hand-held the camera, and Ren the tripod, and they spied out people, tapped them on the shoulder and asked for a quick chat. They found two elderly sisters-in-law, Annie and Jen, enjoying an ice cream after a visit to the Basilica; a little girl in a Spiderman suit, eager to demonstrate forward rolls; four Irish tourists, all claiming to be called Kevin; a deaf couple, who answered questions with signing; a flash footpath-portraitist who sketched Ren in red and yellow chalk on the asphalt around the side of the Living History Museum. They had dozens of vox pops. Perhaps scores.

They had finished up with Darius, whose living statue that day was Captain Cook, a punishing undertaking in the heat. Captain Cook’s clobber was heavy and tight fitting. Darius’s friend, Amy, hovered nearby ready to swab the sweat that gathered under his naval hat and at the base of his reddened sailor neck.

Captain Cook was silent throughout the interview, of course, but he gestured grandly on occasion in response to Ren and Barney’s questions. At the end he drew his telescope and fixed it on
the middle distance, where the top of the horse-chestnut tree was just visible. It was a noble pose and Barney held the camera on it as he moved slowly backwards and away, through the crowd, past the lunch revellers, past Shota’s trombone quintet, back and back to the southwest corner of the Square, until all that remained of Captain Cook was the blurred peak of his naval hat.

Barney and Ren sighed in weary unison when the last image of the Square faded. It was a good day’s work, perhaps one of their best days of sustained filming. They were such a smooth doco team now. There was no doubt about it. They had every reason to be pleased with their efforts.

But there was also no doubt, Barney admitted to himself, that this Rushing Time, these six hours of viewing, had felt different to the ones before. Something had changed. He could not put his finger on what it was.

He ejected the archive disc and gave it to Ren. She wrote the relevant details on it with her black Stabilo Permanent.
#28: Luna Square
. There was a box on Barney’s bedroom bookcase where the discs were stored. Each interview was backed up on the computer, too. And on a hard drive. And, of course, the original cassettes. And they were all stored in different rooms, or in the case of the hard drive, in Barney’s backpack which went everywhere with him. Ren insisted. She had been vigilant about backup since the time they lost two hours filming on
Red Riding Hoodie
. Barney’s fault. Carelessness. He didn’t like to think about it.