From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (35 page)

‘My goodness,’ he said, in a minute. ‘Goodness me. That is very good indeed. A back view is hard to capture. In pictures as in words.’

Suit pushed over the pages of the zine with his free forefinger. He looked at each picture carefully.

‘Well, goodness me,’ he said again, when he had finished. ‘How wonderful. And how sad.’

‘It’s Wednesday afternoon, isn’t it?’ said Ren. ‘The library portrait.’

‘Yes,’ said Suit. He reached with his good arm for the tissue box.

‘Excuse me, Ren.’ He wiped his eyes with a tissue. ‘Terribly sorry.’

Ren didn’t mind. She was used to adults crying these days.

She waited for Suit.

‘Your papers, Suit?’ said Ren. ‘Were you writing something? Is that what you did at the library? In your office in the evenings?’

‘Yes,’ said Suit, with a sigh. ‘Indeed. Scribbling away. Lucklessly. But somehow unable to stop! There is – there
was
– a tidy pile of returned manuscripts in my files.’ He gave a little grimace.

‘But never mind. Here we are.’ Suit crumpled the tissue in his good hand.

‘Terribly lucky,’ he said, after a pause.

Ren looked across at the cube of curtaining hiding the legless roommate, at the clean and clear surfaces of Suit’s hospital room, the instruments, cords and mysterious switches sprouting from the walls. Out the window you could see the new green leaves of the great park’s trees, the yellow and white and blue spring flowers. If you turned your head just a bit you could see the cratered buildings of the city centre, hillocks of rubble, the highrises that leaned perilously and the dozens of cranes, their long booms making a new geometry against the skyline.

‘I have an idea,’ said Ren. She stood up so that she could say it better.

‘I would like
very
much to hear it,’ said Suit. He crossed his bandaged hand over his good one and gave another half smile.

‘I can tell you everything, the story with pictures. But it will
take more than one visit. Quite a lot more. And guess what? It will need moving pictures! Eventually. I’ll have to bring the camera. And the hard drive.’

As she talked, Ren could feel a warmth climb up her legs and into her body. A small fountain began gently and then seemed to burst forth inside her.

‘We’ll need a computer. Oh Suit, your laptop! We can connect the hard drive to that!’

‘Yes?’ said Suit, his half-active face looking both interested and anxious.

‘It’s all right,’ said Ren. ‘I know how to do it all. I’ll work it. It’s just to help tell you all the story.’

‘Oh,’ said Suit. ‘Jolly good.’

‘But first,’ said Ren, sitting down again. ‘Why don’t you tell me about Wednesdays in the library. That will be part of the story. We can fit it in the right place later.’

(‘Oh Slash! I’m proud of you! Linear storytelling is so yesterday.’)

Ha, Ren said silently. Be quiet for a second. Suit’s turn.

‘Okay?’ said Ren. ‘You go first, Suit.’

(So I did, Moo.

I told Ren about about my Wednesdays in the South Precinct Library, the habit of several years. How I had tried to put aside three evenings and one precious afternoon a week in order to satisfy the old urge to write. The library, I told Ren, had been your suggestion, a way to refresh the undertaking.

‘Mix it up,’ said Ren (mysteriously to me, at that point. As you can see, Moo, I have been obliged to
mix it up
quite a lot during this narrative. To try out new ways of speaking on the page. New ways of telling a story).

I told Ren how on a Wednesday in mid-November, a young couple were at work at my table when I arrived. (I must say here,
Moo, that though you encouraged me to work at different tables each time, I never took to the practice. Hence
my
table.)

I told Ren that as I wrote, the couple drew: each of us, earnestly and intently, pushing pens or pencils across a page, and a kind of companionship arose between us; we nodded to each other, and then the next week we smiled, and after that we spoke sometimes. We never showed each other our work.

I told Ren that the couple were gruff and hesitant and not at all eager to share information, but that after Mass one Sunday I saw them in the narthex of the Basilica, making the most of the biscuits at morning tea. Fr. Barry, who misses nothing, later informed me that they used the toilet facilities for their ablutions and that he had provided them with towels and the occasional meal. He was pretty certain they were homeless but had no idea where they dossed down. As with me, they were reluctant to talk.

I told Ren that I never learned the couple’s names and, though I saw them on several occasions on the High Street, I never knew – I never suspected – that they were living and sleeping among us, as it were. And nor, though it seems incredible to me now, did it occur to me that the couple might be the Street thieves. And neither did I connect the androgynous thief of
Hark! A Vagrant
with the female half of the couple, despite my glimpsing the thief (though at a distance and from the rear). Mine, it seems, is not the kind of mind that readily puts two and two together and solves a mystery.

(You can be sure I have been asking myself whether this is an insurmountable handicap for a writer.)

I told Ren all this, Moo, and then I related the coda to my part of this story.

On October 3, in the late morning, after my first physiotherapy session of the day, I lay in bed with my eyes closed. (I was thinking about lunch, actually. I had ticked pumpkin soup on the menu the day before.)

When I opened my eyes a thin young man stood at the foot of my bed. I recognised him immediately, but it was so very surprising to see him I found myself with nothing to say, except a rather whispery hello. His clothes were shabby but his hair was trimmed. He was clean-shaven.

‘Sorry to interrupt your beauty sleep,’ he said.

I invited him to take a seat, but he declined.

‘Can’t stay,’ he said, in that clipped way of his. I had noted before how seldom he used the personal pronoun.

‘Where are you living now?’ I asked. He seemed at once to accept that I knew of his earlier residence.

‘Round about. Weather’s improving.’

He was as elliptical and guarded as ever. I could only imagine how they had both fared in the weeks after the earthquake. City Mission perhaps. Various shelters.

‘Can you do something?’ he asked. ‘For us?’ He brought the envelope from his pocket then, held it up to show me.

‘For Specs. We don’t know where they went. The family.’

I had heard about the envelopes by then, of course. The little Ren had reported to her parents. I was astonished, Moo. Perhaps even horrified. As far as I understood, it was an envelope from the library pair (as I had always thought of them) that had brought Barney to the Post Office on that fateful day. It seemed
horrible
to me that they would send another now to Ren.

Obi placed the envelope at the bottom of the bed where my lower leg would have been. He looked at me. Perhaps my face betrayed something.

‘We didn’t
know
,’ he burst out. ‘We didn’t know till days and days later. What happened. As soon as the first shock stopped we all got out. We grabbed our bags. But he was filming everything – he went for it. Filmed us, the mess in the room. And he kept going when we were outside. But we bolted. We went off across the empty lot, down Duncan. We got the hell out. We had no idea.
No
idea.’

He cried then, Moo. Not a boy accustomed to crying, I wouldn’t think. He was quite distressed.

‘How did you find out?’ I asked.

‘We heard. “What about that kid in the High Street?” You know. People were always going over what happened. To different people.’ He wiped his eyes and his nose on his sleeve, like a street urchin of old.

It was true. I had been part of those conversations myself.

‘It was terrible,’ said Obi. ‘Terrible.’

Yes.

‘We always wanted to do something,’ he said. ‘But we didn’t know how. Say sorry? Visit? How? But we
knew
them.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very difficult.’

He looked very young, standing there at the bottom of my bed. Back came the sleeve.

‘So we just did what we do best,’ he said. ‘We thought Specs would like it.’ He picked up the envelope; put it down again.

‘Ren,’ said Obi.

‘I will make sure Ren receives it,’ I said.

‘Gotta go.’ He walked towards the door, and then stopped.

‘Sorry about you, too.’

‘Thank you. I’m mending slowly.’

‘What about the clock?’

‘Alas,’ I said. ‘Under the rubble with all the other timepieces.’

‘We liked your clock,’ said Obi.

‘We liked Barney and Ren, too.

‘We liked your Street,’ he said at the door. He half raised his hand behind him, as he disappeared around the door.

Ren was quiet for some time after I finished. She sat very still in your chair, Moo, looking across the room at the closed curtains. They had been closed all day. Nurses came and went behind them.

‘Barney would have been very pleased,’ she said, at last. ‘About Obi coming. About the zine. I just know it.’

‘So the zine was all right?’

‘Oh, it was
molto
all right,’ said Ren. ‘But it comes at the end of the story. You’ll see.’

‘I look forward to it.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Ren. ‘You’ll need to take notes. There’s so much detail. But maybe your poor fingers aren’t fast enough yet. Maybe I should make notes, too. We should get it all between us – you and me.’

‘And Barney.’

‘Oh, of course.’

Ren said goodbye soon after that. But we had made a date for her next visit. And on the next visit she brought a notebook in which she had devised a timetable for our interviews! (They
were
interviews, she said. I was the interviewer. She was telling her story but I could ask questions at any point.) The timetable stretched over the summer and into the New Year. It stretched far enough into the future for both of us to feel good.

There is nothing like the balm of story, Moo. Ren told her story (with audio-visual aids, of course) and now I have retold it. It has been good for both of us.

How hard Ren worked!

During the weeks we talked and I tapped out four-fingered notes and Ren made notes in her new exercise book, Ren was also learning how to use Final Cut, and working on the editing of
The Untold Story
. And going to school.

‘Barney was right,’ she said, one afternoon in December. She had run inside from the car, she was a little breathless. ‘School gets in the way. It takes up so much time! But what can you do?’ She laughed.

‘Nearly there?’ I asked.

‘
Nearly
there,’ she said. ‘Albert Anderson is helping me film the last little bit.’

‘I can hardly wait.’

It was true. Waiting for the High Street Retailers’ and Residents’ Reunion Christmas Party was almost too much for me. It is interesting, Moo. I am not as patient as I once was.

The day arrived. You and Sally collected me. It was the wheelchair’s first outing. And only the second outing for my new suit.

Not quite the end, Moo.

All good stories have an epilogue, don’t you agree?)

On a warm December afternoon, a week before midsummer, the High Street began arriving at Willy Edwards’s. People had travelled from afar on planes and trains and boats and buses; they drove up Willy Edwards’s long drive in carloads. Henrietta, Edward and their parents arrived with Dick and Marie. Phil and Pete brought Li Mai, Ping and Bambi. A ten-seater van disgorged most of the west side of the Street, including Jack and Benjamin and JohnLeo and their parents. A taxi van delivered a small band of Poly jazz students along with Izzy and Gus, Darius and his girlfriend, Amy. Lovie and Bingo arrived with Hwan and Fern and Baby Soo, whose hair lay flat on her head now and who could totter on two feet and say
car
. Suit and Mireille came last, with Sally, who wore a festive beanie, knitted for the occasion by Mireille. Suit was driven in his wheelchair – his transport until a prosthetic leg could be fitted –
up the temporary ramp to the verandah where he would have a good view of proceedings.

It was almost a full Street complement. The only people unable to come were Claude, who had sent his apologies from London, England, the home of the original Beau Brummel; Dr Beverely, who was in Canada at a croquet tournament; and Kirk, the barista from Hole-in-the-Wall, who was working in Australia now and wouldn’t return until the aftershocks had stopped.

And Barney, of course.

Willy Edwards’s house and garden looked as splendid as any Hollywood Producer/Director’s.

Mum and Dad had hung paper lanterns along the driveway leading to the parking paddock and on bamboo poles around the garden. They had scrubbed and brushed the alpaca babies so they looked their very best. They had cooked food to feed a battalion.

There was a Christmas tree, too, sourced and felled by Dad who, when he wasn’t tending the alpaca babies, spent much time chopping wood for next winter. The tree was in a large barrel in the middle of the lawn, decorated with lights – and, of course, jalapeño chillis, and paua shells collected by Dale from a North Island beach and polished until they shone.

Willy Edwards and Dad had hung a huge white sheet along the side of the garage. They had borrowed a neighbour’s ute and transported chairs from the school hall. The chairs were in neat rows now facing the side of the garage, an aisle up the middle. Willy had looped fairy lights around the chair legs on the ends of the rows, so that, once the sun went down, the outdoor theatre would be as bedazzling as befitted a première venue.

Ren had surveyed it all from the verandah, just as everyone began to arrive.

Molto
perfect.

The jazz students played music until after dark. The Street children played badminton on Willy’s back lawn and painted each other’s faces on the front lawn with face paints supplied by Darius. Thus made over, they bussed trays of food around the High Streeters who ate and drank, talked and danced, laughed and cried and sang loudly and clapped every piece from the jazz students.

At sundown, Gus stood on the verandah and recited his villanelle, ‘Rook’, which was the most recent addition to his poetic celebration of chess pieces. It was received with much enthusiastic clapping.

Ren thought of the pawn haiku Gus had given Barney, just days before the quake. Barney had recited it to her and Mum, absurdly slowly, in a fake German accent.

She really did miss Barney making her laugh.

After Gus’s poem, Willy Edwards invited everyone to take a seat in the outdoor theatre, which was lit up now like a fairground. Like a gigantic version of the Ambulatorix, the High Street made its collective way in clumps to the other side of the lawn.

Albert Anderson wheeled Suit down the ramp.

‘All right?’ enquired Suit.

‘I think so,’ said Ren.

‘It’s a good ending,’ said Albert.

‘You mean the last zine?’ said Suit.

‘That too,’ said Albert, wheeling Suit away.

Ren sat on the verandah steps. It would take everyone five minutes to settle. Meanwhile, she would settle her nerves.

She imagined Barney sitting beside her, a low drone of excitement hanging about him.

‘Well, Slash!’ he might say. He would be pleased with her. It was a fact.

Barney did not talk to her so much now. But that was all right.
He had talked incessantly throughout the editing; sometimes he had shouted. But she had fish-eyed him and he had calmed down.

It had been good editing
The Untold Story
and, at the same time, narrating the envelope story to Suit. It had helped organise things in Ren’s head. The story of the Street and the mysterious envelopes story had always been bound up together. And now they helped each other to make the best sense. In hospital Suit tapped at his laptop transforming his notes into a story. At home, Ren sat in front of the computer, transforming the rushes.

She had watched and listened and made notes. She had clipped and cut and moved the scenes around and around. She had pushed and prodded the hours of rushes into their proper places so that the story emerged in its proper order. Just like a zine. She had placed scenes side by side and in the best sequences, so that
The Untold
St
ory
showed
all
the untold stories – the marvellous community on the High Street of town, the lost boy and girl who had longed to play, and the great and famous boy filmmaker who had gone after it all with such boundless cheer.

Ren had not included the very last moments of the great and famous boy filmmaker’s life, or the footage he had collected. It was too disturbing. And they all knew what had happened to Barney, they did not need to see it.

As Obi and Girl had raced away from the crumbling Street, across the empty lot, down Duncan, and into the rest of their lives, Barney had walked down Post Office Alley towards the High Street, with his camera to his eye. As he had emerged from the alley, masonry on the side of the Post Office had begun to crumble in one of the many aftershocks, catching Barney as it subsided. Instinctively, he had protected his camera. It was unharmed beneath him – it was still going – when Dad found Barney not long after.

Everyone was seated and quiet. Ren waited beside the projector.

She took the last zine from the pocket of her shorts. She wanted to hold it when she pressed the Play button.

With Albert Anderson’s help Ren had filmed the zine and then ‘played’ it, beginning with the title (and with the pages being turned!), in its entirety, in the film.

The zine was called
Barney Kettle Lives
and it showed Big-Hair Barney and his trusty camera at work in the world. She, Ren-slash-Specs, was in the zine, too, but Barney had the starring role. It showed Barney in all parts of the Street and Square, scoping scenes, checking the light, filming the residents, striding to the next shoot, zigzags of impatience pinging off him, and his mouth moving all the time, talking talking talking.

Of course, it was a wordless zine, but somehow, in every picture, you could hear Barney’s voice. It was Barney’s interview for the film. The zine story was at the end of the film, and its very last picture would be the last picture of
The Untold Story
: Barney, on the upraised green of Little Wilt, his arms spread wide in welcome, the High Street in all its glory, spooling out behind him.

It
was
a good ending. Ren agreed with Albert. Each of the untold stories was combined in that picture: the unseen artists, the famous filmmaker and the long-ago lost High Street of town.

C’mon
, Slash!

Ren pressed Play.