From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (29 page)

Barney considered the last page of the zine.

‘Do you think it means they’ve gone already, or that they’re going?’

‘See, wondering already,’ said Ren. She took the zine from him and turned the pages.

Izzy and The Unpublished Poet (
Gus
, it was
Gus
) came out of their building and waved hello. Barney returned a weary wave. The big sea worm reared up for another go.

On top of everything he was having the usual post-filming let-down, too.

Filmmaking was such an emotional roller coaster.

Coralie’s and the Street shoot had been a blast. Different to the Post Office. That had been intense, but quiet and almost still. Today had been kind of frantic: mad, even. Barney loved that feeling of being in the middle of something huge, of being in
charge
of something huge. But he could do the quieter times, now, too. He wasn’t a one-trick director, no way. They had captured quite different moods during the
The Untold Story
. The moods had been there, all of them, waiting for his camera.

But
The Untold Story
was coming to an end, too.

The worm roiled and heaved.

And he
was
tuckered out. Great and famous filmmakers, Barney was starting to think, must always be tired.

On the other hand, they didn’t have to go to school. Surely that would help. If only that prospect wasn’t so far in the future.

‘I think they’re
going
,’ said Ren, ‘but they haven’t gone yet. I think they’ve made up their minds, but it might be a few more days. I think they want you to go back.’

‘I’m going to check,’ said Barney. Good. He hadn’t quite known he was thinking that, but there, he was.

‘Now?’

‘I’ll knock. It’s Saturday. No one in the offices. Willy’s at home with his alpacas. Worth the risk. You coming?’

Sometimes Barney hated going home after filming. Home could seem small, all of a sudden, and even the things he usually enjoyed – Tintin, say, or Toast-Cake, or back-to-back episodes of
Battlestar Galactica
with Dad – could feel almost irritating, like clothes that were too tight, or those old prickly jerseys from South Island Gran. Sometimes he went to Albert Anderson’s instead of going home, had a chat, read comics, checked out the zines. Or just reclined in the La-Z-Boy and rewound the day’s filming in his head.

Ren was different. She liked home at all times. She liked her room. She was always happy to be there.

‘No,’ said Ren.

Case in point.

‘Rushes at seven p.m.,’ said Ren. She gave him a half-hearted Fish-Eye. She was tired too.

‘Yes sir! Yes, Slash! Can you take the camera?’

‘Yeeeehhs,’ said Ren, sighing.

She was a good old Slash, really.

Barney typed
Teusday
. He deleted the word and tried again. Spellcheck was gold.
Tuesday
. U, E. Would he remember that next time? Probably not. In one eyeball and out the other.

He was writing his daily log, as required by Ms Bloodworth. Itinerary. Aims. Outcomes. Positives. Negatives. Analyse. Draw conclusions. This, apparently, would help develop his strategic thinking skills. Analyse where things went awry; learn from it for next time.

Monday. Aim: Complete two-hour interview with Li Mai and Ping. Positive: Sequence with sewing machine. Good stills; maybe Ken Burns effect
later
? Negative: Mike off for first fifteen minutes. Conclusion: Turn on mike next time.

Nuts.

Maths was mostly nuts, too, though it had become a fraction (ha!) more interesting since Barney had decided to try to make Nick laugh at least once every lesson.
Aim: Make Nick laugh and do less maths. Positive: Nick laughed at my talking Dickish. Negative: Still did a lot of maths. But Nick was okay. He was just deadly serious about maths
. It was baffling. Barney was continually surprised by the ludicrous things that spun other people’s wheels. Sports, for example. Or knitting. Marine biology.

‘Let’s go over this again, Barney,’ said Mum, when he expressed astonishment that someone could spend a lifetime working with seaweed. Barney was immediately sorry he had given breath to his idle thought.

‘Remember what I explained. Other people are
different
to you. They have
different
thoughts and
different
feelings. And
different
interests. Strange but true.’

Mum’s humour was so heavy it laid you out.

Yes, yes, it was all a matter of tolerance. Barney knew that. She didn’t have to go on. Blimey, school taught you that, if nothing else. It taught you to tolerate whole battalions of dreary things (readingwritingmathsnaturestudysocialstudiesswimmingsportsathleticsdetentionassemblysomeonesfathertalkingaboutgoodonlinehabits until you could get to the real purpose of your life.

He, Barney Kettle, was an A++ student in tolerance. It was a fact. He had learned to get through a school day with (mostly) good grace, to wait patiently for the moment when he was released back to MAKING FILMS. Just how loud did he have to shout it?

Of
course
he understood that other people felt that way about their own true lives. He really did. Nick, for instance. He had seen it in Nick’s eyes, heard it in his voice, when Barney, eager to distract him, had meanly asked: Nick, what exactly is
calculus
?

‘Calculus,’ said Nick, enthusiastically, perhaps even reverently – the way Barney might have said
Twelve Monkeys
, which was up there in his top three of all-time best movies.

‘Calculus,’ said Nick, ‘is the mathematical study of
change
.’

Barney had been a little ashamed then. He had watched Nick’s mouth moving and his hands gesticulating and he had heard the happiness in Nick’s voice as he explained how
essential
calculus was to engineeringscienceandeconomics. The actual sense of Nick’s explanation read something like !@#$^#¨˙Δ∫©√†¬æ≥≥!@#$%^*()%* in Barney’s brain, but he clocked a familiar note, nonetheless. It chimed exactly with the sound he had heard in his own voice from time to time, when he explained to Ren or Jack or Benjamin, or anyone who would listen, why
Back to the Future 3
shouldn’t be thought of as less good than
BTTF 1
and
2
, no, no,
no
, it was an essential part of one continuous story, a story that could never make true sense without its third, unloved episode. Barney had heard that sound in his voice, as he had heard it in Nick’s, and he knew it for what it was: obsession.

He understood Nick then, all shiny-eyed and hands cutting the air. He just didn’t relate to the object of his obsession.

Barney read his log so far. Good enough. The spelling seemed really excellent. As far as he could tell. It wasn’t his way of doing things, the log. But he would do it for Ms Bloodworth. She was okay too. Not an obsessive. But sympathetic to people who were. Albert Anderson, for instance. And himself: Barney Kettle, CEO Kettle Productions. It was such a novelty being liked by a teacher. It was causing him to break out in reasonableness. Even Ren had remarked on it.

The bell rang. Barney saved his log. He watched out the window. The little kids were trying to line up. This was always entertaining; he had edited footage of it last year. Some of them were like wind-up toys gone AWOL. They turned round and round, aimlessly; they wandered off; they sat down abruptly. They
had to be corralled by teachers, hands on their shoulders, pushing them back to the line. Face
this
way. Good girl.

‘Barney Kettle!’

Ms Bloodworth in a crisp red dress. White sandals. Barney wondered if she’d consider a part in his next film. He had an idea gestating. A long-lost family member returns home. But is he who he says he is? It wasn’t original; the originality would be in the way he showed it …

‘You’re here first! What’s happening?’

Good question. It was true he was never in the classroom before anyone else. What
was
happening to him?

He smiled at Ms Bloodworth, just a little guiltily.

He was pumped up, that was what. It was an important day. He had wanted everything in place, Ts dotted, Is crossed, as Mum said.

‘Getting organised.’

Three hours till lunchtime. He was allowed to go as soon as the lunch bell went today. 12.15. Ms Bloodworth had okayed it yesterday.

Barney and Ren had not in fact been able to book anyone for
US
filming. The timetable for Tuesday showed only one session between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.: Stephen and Doris at the Sacred Fig; two-hour interview; then filming in the kitchen. On the timetable between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Tuesday, it was blank.

But Ms Bloodworth didn’t know that.

‘Organised is good,’ said Ms Bloodworth. She was writing on the whiteboard, clear confident letters in a dead straight line.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world
. Ludwig Unpronounceable. She wrote a new quotation up every day.

Organisation was good.

And
confidenceandpurposeandvisionandactionandinstruction
. Barney thought about Felix La Marche and Hal Nicholas, rusticating on the bookcase. He imagined them sitting in directors’
chairs, side-by-side, sipping cocktails. But they weren’t really directors. They just wrote books about it. Perhaps he would do that himself, one day. Or, Ren could write it and he would dictate:
Barney Kettle: My Early Years in Film
.

But he didn’t want to think of Ren just at the moment. He hadn’t told her his plans for the afternoon. She would be hurt when she found out. Not that she would have wanted to come. She was holding the line against the Post Office residents. She maintained they didn’t like him, Barney, and her, Ren, or anyone else in the Street. Not really, said Ren. Not deep down.

‘They like our life,’ said Barney. ‘They said so. On film.’

‘Yes, but not
us
,’ said Ren. She had been mulish and insistent. She had fish-eyed him defiantly and refused to agree.

So he hadn’t told her his plans for the afternoon.

But, Barney told Ren everything, usually. She always knew what he was doing. She mostly knew what he was feeling. He felt peculiarly uncomfortable keeping something from her.

He would not think about it.

His classmates trickled in. Ms Bloodworth was attending to her domain, stapling new artwork to the walls, straightening chairs and desks. Turning over her sand-clock. The sand began its steady trickle, making today’s pattern on the bottom of the container.

Ms Bloodworth sure liked things shipshape. Funny to have silver hair but not be old. She and Albert Anderson had met at the beach. Walking their respective dogs. Ms Bloodworth’s dog was a black Lab called Toad.

What, Barney wondered, would Ms Bloodworth and Albert Anderson make of Obi and Girl?

How bizarre and wonderful it was to have two separate worlds running in your life.

In assembly with the rest of Kate Sheppard School, Barney’s
head could run separate compartments, too. It was such a useful talent. He could watch Ms Quinn on stage, hear her words, and think about more important things at the same time.

‘And because of that,’ said Ms Quinn, ‘we’ll now have –’

Two worlds on the very same street! For six weeks he and Ren had been frantically busy in the real world, and simultaneously preoccupied by another. A story world that had become a real one. Or
unreal
. Depending on how you looked at it.

‘So, let’s all give them a big round of applause.’

Barney clapped vigorously. The act of applause allowed a pleasant waft from his armpit. On Sunday Mum had bought him a deodorant stick. It was called Mitchum Advanced Antiperspirant & Deodorant for Men. He was expecting facial hair any day now.

‘– because it’s the time of the year when we want you all to think about which event you’d like to participate –’

Swimming Carnival. A grossly deceptive title since it suggested a party, not the bloodthirsty competition it actually was, with parents going insane in the stands. Barney could swim just fine and if he wanted to he could swim quite fast, probably even beat Edward. He just didn’t want to. Ever. School sports were ridiculous.

‘It’s so puzzling how your megalomaniacal tendencies don’t stretch to competitive sport,’ said Mum. Barney was famous for having stopped to wait for his friends in his first few school cross-country races.

Contemplating the impending trial of both Swimming Carnival and Athletics Day, Barney had, on the weekend, been struck by yet another ingenious idea. He would suggest to Ms Bloodworth that he be official videographer for both events. He was very optimistic about her agreeing.  

Ren was under-twelve backstroke champion. Barney had been strictly forbidden by Mum to make fun of backstroke, even though it was an event just
asking
to be ridiculed.

How very very different he and Ren were.

Once, Ren had asked Mum if they were truly siblings. Was Barney perhaps adopted?

‘No,’ said Mum. ‘Although it is possible he was swapped in the hospital. I’ll look into it.’

‘– teachers will be helping you with that. And please don’t forget the notice for –’

But, not counting backstroke, he and Ren nearly always found the same things funny. Dickish, for example. Aunty Linda’s lazy eye that seemed to be looking at a different part of the room while she was talking to you. South Island Granpa singing (more terrible than funny, but eventually the terribleness made you laugh). Mum’s hair when she was young (so big, like her head had exploded). Han Solo and Princess Leia kissing. Marie Scully’s stomach rumbling. North Island Gran’s friend, Dorsa, in her sports car.
The Simpsons
. Calvin and Hobbes.

And of course he could always make Ren laugh himself. Always. It was his secret weapon. Whenever she was cross with him. Whenever she went into heavy-duty Fish-Eye he could just roll out one of the elaborate take-offs he’d fashioned for her entertainment. Dick. Claude. Mia. Ms Quinn (
Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sure you’re all blahblahblah
).

And look, here was Ms Quinn with the actual original!