From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (8 page)

‘– because
like
Richard John Seddon I am a pub-lee-can, or as some people say, a ho-tel-i-er, or as many others say now, in these modern times … a
bar man
. With my wife, Marie, I have been running His Lordship’s Hotel in this High Street for twenty-three years and four months –’

Here, Dick briefly drew breath, winked at Marie – who, staring earnestly at the camera, sat very still and tight on her barstool – and gave an approving pat to Kiwi Keith – who, sure enough, now sported a long spool of springy dribble.

‘Those twenty-three years and four months have seen many and varied happenings here on the High Street, we can tell you,’ intoned Dick. ‘In the very first year of our stewardship, for example, two cure-ree-ous incidents occurred which have gone down in the annals of the Street. It has often been said by Street residents that I am the keeper of these annals – the Comm-une-ity Mem-or-ry, you might say – and it is my priv-ill-ege to relate them all to you now. The first incident came out of the blue on a frosty July morning …’

On and on and on droned Dick. The facts and events and
characters he related might have been interesting but Dick’s ponderous declaiming and his strange posture made it all interminable, deadly dull, and, at the same time, horribly comical. Somehow, it was impossible to interrupt him, despite Ren pinching Barney’s back several more times and sidling round in front of him to deliver a spectacular display of Fish-Eye.

At 8.45 a.m. Barney stood abruptly and held up his hand.

‘Sorry folks,
sorry
, I think something’s gone wrong with the tape.’ He flicked the camera button with a flourish. ‘We’ll have to take a break. Overheating, happens sometimes …’

Marie slumped on her stool. ‘Lordy, I’ve got cricks.’ She swung her arms and rolled her neck so that Barney and Ren heard the clicks and cracks.

‘Good stuff!’ said Dick, whacking his knee in appreciation of himself. ‘I’m enjoying this. Nearly at the Great Fire of 1985.’

The Great Fire was actually a very small fire with practically no flames. Barney and Ren knew the story. Dick and Marie’s grandsons, who all seemed to have been semi-delinquent, had climbed onto the roof of His Lordship’s to let off their stash of illegal firecrackers. They had taken up a bag of pinecones too, and made a small bonfire to cook sausages. Someone on the Street had seen the smoke and called the fire brigade. The fire risk had been minimal because the roof was concrete, but Dick liked to talk up the danger.

‘I’ll have to get this into a better light,’ said Barney, lifting the camera from the tripod. You guys just relax for a bit. You probably need it. C’mon, Ren.’

Ren followed Barney out into the corridor and down to the foyer of the hotel’s side entrance.

‘Over
heating
?’ whispered Ren. ‘A tape?’

But Barney was having an extravagant – though mostly silent – meltdown. He clutched and pulled at his great thatch of hair, raked his cheeks, put both hands around his throat and pretended to
throttle himself, then slumped to the floor and groaned piteously.

Ren got the giggles. Silent laughing was somehow always twice as funny as laughing aloud. And, twice as difficult to stop.

‘
Stop it, Barney
,’ she hissed. She felt helpless and a little crazed, the way such laughing made you. Barney was doing silly spasms on the ground. ‘
Stop it! They might come out
.’ Ren prodded his gyrating body with her foot and tried to take sobering breaths. She busied herself with the camera.

‘Oh I
see
,’ she said, loudly, in a voice that sounded horribly false. She opened the tape holder. ‘Oh,
that’s
the problem …
stop it, Barney
.’

Oh, oh, oh, it had been terrible and wonderful, smothering hysterics in the side entrance of His Lordship’s, peering anxiously around for signs of Dick or Marie, trying not to look at Barney playing the lunatic.

Eventually they managed a hushed and hurried conversation about Dick’s never-ending answer and went back to try a new question. But Dick was not to be swayed from his determined path. He had planned a blow-by-blow account of every event, little and large, that had occurred around His Lordship’s during the Scullys’ residence on the Street.

By 11 a.m. they had only reached 1986, which was years before Barney and Ren had been born. Prehistory.

‘This is going to be the most
boring
documentary ever,’ said Barney bitterly, as they trudged home. ‘It’s going to be a total and
epic
bomb.’

But now, just a day later, prone in Ren’s beanbag, Barney seemed to be cheering up. He was starting to see the funny side.

‘It’s like Marie was a mute. Or a blow-up doll. She was so
stiff
.’

Ren giggled. ‘She was a silent movie.’

‘We can
probably
use a couple of Dick’s stories,’ said Barney. He sat up. He looked decisive. ‘I’ll just do a massive edit.’

‘What if everyone goes strange in front of a camera?’

‘We have to explain better,’ said Barney. ‘Tell them not to think about it too much. Tell them not to prepare anything.’

‘Tell them to talk in a normal voice,’ said Ren.

Barney climbed to his feet. He pulled back his shoulders and stuck out his jaw. ‘My. Name. Is. Ri. Chard. John. Scul. Ly,’ he chanted.

‘Adults are so strange,’ sighed Ren.

The next morning the sky was blue and the air fresh and Ren and Barney sprang out of bed with renewed vigour and optimism. They had decided to postpone the rest of Dick’s interview. They could get his stories from 1986-until-eternity later. Or not at all. There were eight days until school started back. They would make some amendments to the timetable, and film in a different order – people who wouldn’t become living statues in front of a camera. That way they wouldn’t get disheartened.

‘Filming is all about staying optimistic,’ said Barney.

‘Did your ex-friends Hal and Felix say that?’ said Ren.

‘No!
I’m
saying that. I speak from experience. I’ve had two years of hard grind in the film industry,’ said Barney with wounded dignity.

The best person to start over with, they both agreed, was Lovie and Bingo’s mother, Sally. She was curator of the Living History Museum and had talked on television often about the Museum.

‘In a way,’ said Barney, as they walked round to the Square, ‘the Museum is the same thing as
The Untold Story
. It’s about life in the South City Precinct, and that includes the Street.’

‘It’s The
Told
Story,’ said Ren. She looked left and right as they walked, peering at every little thing, alert for white envelopes.

‘Film is always better, though,’ said Barney. He was back to full confidence. He was walking and talking at speed.

‘I love Sally,’ said Ren. ‘She’s the best out of all the parents. Her voice is so –’ she paused, searching for the right word – and
also to consider some paper sticking up out of the litter bin at the corner of Luna Square and the High Street. Should they be searching all the litter bins?

‘Deep,’ said Barney. ‘Her voice is kind of like a man’s.’

‘
Melodious
,’ said Ren. Sally’s voice was low and expressive and so good for reading aloud.

‘And she has great hair.’

‘Like a Standard poodle,’ said Barney. Sally’s hair was wild and curly and she tried to keep it flat with a variety of knitted beanies.

‘And she knows so much about so many
things
: archaeology and rock music and animals and politics and folk songs –’

‘Kazimierz knows all those things.’ Barney was being contrary for the sake of it; he thought Sally was
molto
great, too.

‘He doesn’t know about string theatre and worm farming and every Tintin book backwards.’

There was no argument with that.

The best thing about Sally was her reasonableness. Sally was democratic. She believed everyone should have his or her say. Including children. And she allowed a lot of time for this to happen. She was never rushed like other parents. She never said it was easier if the adult decided. She was always interested in what you thought.

‘But who wants to know what
Bingo
thinks?’ said Barney, who was holding a long grudge about
Red Riding Hoodie
. ‘Good thing she’s away.’ Lovie and Bingo were staying with their father over the other side of town. He had a big house with a swimming pool and some more children.

Sally was out front of the Museum when they arrived, drinking black coffee and reading the newspaper.

‘Lights! Camera! Action!’ she said, banging an imaginary clapperboard. ‘What do you think? A turquoise beanie or one with beads?’

Sally had known the High Street since she was very small. Her
father had run the Pancake Palace up the north end for thirty years and Sally had helped out after school. Now the Pancake Palace was a Korean lunch restaurant and Sally’s dad lived in a rest home. In the years between, Sally had been a rock musician, a nanny for a film star, a museum worker and a teacher aide.

‘Which is how I came back to the Street,’ she said, twenty minutes later, smiling into Barney’s camera lens. They were in the reception area, where there was a plaque about the history of the building. A hundred years ago it had been a textile factory.

‘I got a job at Kate Sheppard. About the time the Council began gussying up the Street. I got interested in the Precinct’s history and I thought we should document it, and
now
, while it’s happening. Take photos, collect things, record stories, talk to everyone who lives here or comes here, find out about people’s daily doings.’

‘Why?’ Ren asked, though she knew the answer.

‘Two reasons,’ said Sally. ‘So that in a hundred years people can see how we lived and what we did here. Things get lost and forgotten. People get lost and forgotten!’

‘What was the other reason?’

‘So we could see our own history now,
as it was being made
– things from last year, or maybe even last week. It’s amazing how quickly stuff fades from our thoughts.’

‘So,’ said Sally. She gave a little nod to the camera, to their future audience. ‘Welcome to our Living History Museum. Shall we have a look around?’

She walked through the door into the first display room. Barney followed, keeping the camera on Sally’s back. He turned his head and grinned happily at Ren.

‘
Living
history, don’t forget,’ said Sally, seconds later, turning and addressing the camera while walking backwards. ‘And
community
history. Not prime ministers and wars and the like – except where it’s relevant – but what people do for a living, or
what they do on the weekends, what they eat, what they buy. Annual events, community activities – like the South City Gala, or the White and Willis Sale, like the Street Easter Egg Hunt.’

Ren smiled to herself. She and Henrietta had been the winning team in last year’s Hunt. They had found the coveted carved egg, shelved between
The Golden Egg Book
and
A Day at the Playground
in the children’s section of Montgomery’s. That had been a very good day.

They stopped first in the Today Room where the display cabinets showed life and work right now – or last week – in the ten blocks of the South City Precinct.

‘Tell us about some of these things,’ said Ren. She sounded gratifyingly like a TV interviewer.

Sally unlocked the door of the tallest cabinet.

‘We rotate the displays every two months. You can’t store everything afterwards, of course, maybe just a single item. But we photograph everything and keep it in our digital archive:
yourlivinghistory.com
, where anyone, anywhere, can see it at any time.’

Ren and Henrietta and Lovie often logged into the archive. They liked to check out the photos of themselves. There were quite a few: at the Easter Egg Hunt, at last year’s Buskers’ Festival, at work in their classrooms at Kate Sheppard School.

‘This display,’ said Sally, ‘is about local cafés and restaurants. See, photos of signage – you learn a lot about typography fashion from them. Examples of different menus. Ditto. Some up-to-the minute cooking implements.’

Sally held up the menu from Melting Moment Tearooms. She held up a blue, silicon baking spatula. She held things long enough for a good viewing. She was a pro.

‘And there are bits of interesting information. For instance –’ Sally held out a file card – ‘this says that the fresh herbs at the Greenhouse come from McCullough’s organic farm down near the
hills. A little piece of trade and culinary history. Add it to all the others and you get a picture of a place and a time.’

Barney stepped closer to the cabinet and moved the camera slowly from item to item.

‘In fifty years,’ said Sally, ‘or perhaps just five, people won’t be eating the same way. Could be salads are different. Or cakes. Sandwiches. Maybe the muffin will have finally become extinct. Tastes change. Cooking methods, cooking tools, they’ll change, too. So will the interiors of cafés.’

Coralie’s Café had been made-over three years ago. The walls had been painted creamy white and hung with Poly students’ artwork. The hard chairs had been exchanged for soft-bottomed seats. The huge aquarium had been installed. That was when the Pigeon Blood Discus, the Blue Peacock Cichlids and the Upside Down Catfish had arrived and the Street children had become tropical fish experts.

‘For example, here’s the street view of Plato’s Fish Shack,’ Sally was saying, ‘but Plato’s going back to Greece because his mother’s sick, he’s shutting down. A real shame. He was only open two years and it was going pretty well.

‘But now we’ll always have a record of Plato and the Shack. We won’t forget him, and we won’t forget –’ Sally held up the Shack’s menu – ‘
Plato’s Psari Plaki
! We might have forgotten without all this. Two years is a mere blink of the eye.’

Sally and Barney moved on to the next cabinet, which showed work from artists in the South City Precinct, but Ren stayed looking at the Shack’s menu and thinking about Plato and his restaurant and his sick mother and the possibility of cakes or sandwiches disappearing. How sad.