The Cartographer (16 page)

‘Yep, just over there.' I waved vaguely in the opposite direction to my house.

‘Well, you better be getting home — your parents must be worried sick.'

I reckoned it was a long time since that had happened — I could probably work out the exact number of months and days — so I didn't share his concern. Besides, what he had said had been one of those things you say to kids pretty much automatically, like, ‘I think you should climb down off there.'

When I got home on the day Tom died, the house was empty. Mum had gone with Tom to the hospital in the ambulance, though I think it was too late for that, and Dad had made himself scarce that morning following a difference of opinion with Mum about one or two of her relatives — I thought both sides put their cases fairly. The Capras — it turned out it was their house I had gone to for help — bunged me in a bedroom as if I had rabies or had swallowed a live grenade and needed to be kept away from the kids, when what I really wanted was to be surrounded by real people, live people, so that the feeling that was creeping over me, the feeling that I was dissolving, wouldn't eat me alive. They extracted Granddad's
phone number from me, but I couldn't face him. I just had to get out of there so that I could think.

I opened the window, trying hard to remember if I had ever seen Tony Capra with a dog, and dropped into the night. I did not go straight home, but to Mrs Carruthers' place across the street, to the sofa on her front verandah, where I stretched out. That's where I was when Granddad came over to our place to hold the fort after they discovered I'd nicked off from the Capras'. It didn't take him long to find me as he knew my secret haunts. He didn't say anything for a while, just sat down beside me and put his arm around me, which was not a thing he only wheeled out on special occasions, like when something rotten had happened, but something that came naturally to both of us.

‘Are you gonna tell me a war story, Granddad, or a boxing story?'

‘What makes you think that?'

‘'Cos it's one of those quiet times, and that's when you tend to remember them.'

‘Nah, I don't have to remember 'em, boy. They're never out of my mind. Like you and Tom.'

‘They took Tom away in an ambulance — Mum went with him.'

‘I know, boy.'

‘Granddad, if I were you I wouldn't expect to see him again. I saw him —'

‘I heard —'

‘The monkey bar —'

‘Yeah, I know —'

‘We were just muckin' round —'

‘That Tom, he's a bit of a tearaway.'

‘Granddad, I feel funny.'

‘It's okay to feel that way. Maybe I will tell you a war story. Did I ever tell you about the wells we dug in the Sinai Desert?'

‘You told me that one.'

‘How about the time I knocked off General Grant's horse?'

I'd heard it, but Granddad needed to talk, I could tell.

‘Nope, can't say I've heard that one.'

‘I see. Well, this Grant bloke was the biggest officer you've ever seen. Big bastard.'

‘So big they gave him a draught horse for a joke.'

‘Thought you hadn't heard it?'

‘Sorry, off you go.'

And that's how we spent the next few hours, until Mum turned up with Dad. After that, I was pretty much the kid with no name, though I did learn to answer to ‘Hey, you'. Except to Granddad. Granddad stuck with me.

Next morning, me and Biscuit went back to collect the loot, twenty gleaming watches, all ticking their heads off, because it had been really dark when we were rescued by The Sleeper (an old codger who patrols the railways late at night looking for superheroes who've got themselves into a jam and been forced to eat their mum's bikkies to survive). Well, the watches were still there, right where we'd left them, and they would be there for good, too, because I had laid them out on the bloody railway line.

I could tell that Biscuit was even more disappointed than me: the look on his face said it all. There was only one thing for it: collect another box of loot. The pinch bar was still lying beside the railway line, and the box with Lassie on the front — I still hadn't showed it to Biscuit; no point in upsetting him. So back into the shed we went, like the six hundred. Soot to the right of us, soot to the left of us, soot in front of us.
Someone had blunder'd
, and it had been the Cartographer — I admit it. But this time the going was smoother for the practice run we'd had, and we had the box upside down and open in a jiffy. But somebody had beaten us to it, and there was only one box inside it, a cigar box with a foreign superhero on the front with his horse: Ritmeester. Was that him or the horse? It didn't matter: they would both end up on the map. I opened the box to see what was in it, and it was full of watches, just like the
others had been. I winked at Biscuit, who was half inside the big box sniffing for all he was worth, and stuck it into my bag. Together we used the pinch bar to bang down the bottom of the box again and then right it. When I turned around I got such a shock, I heard myself yell
Shit!
And you would have too. In the doorway was a man with a short fat gun that had two barrels, side by side.

I had never seen such a gun before, and was slightly thankful that it was not a machine gun — they have a handle near the front so that you can hold onto them while you're spraying people with bullets. And I knew it wasn't a revolver, because they have a little round thing full of bullets in the middle. And it wasn't a rifle, as they are long and skinny and you usually have to hold them with both hands as well, and they come with a telescopic sight to make them deadly accurate at a mile, like the one in
The 77th Bengal Lancers
. It always helps to know what kind of gun the thug was using when you are doing a drawing on your map later. And this gun wasn't square either, like Dick Tracy's, or the Phantom's twin pistols. But it
was
a gun.

I could see what had happened right away — that's my job. I reckoned this guy must have spotted us walking along, and thought:
Hello!
and decided to follow us to see where we were going, and we were going to collect the loot, of course. And he had watched us as we collected the loot, and then he had decided to rob us.

He was wearing old shoes and an army greatcoat and underneath that a shirt like the one Granddad wore when he was getting over the night before: with buttons that only went halfway down. His pants were baggy and grey, and had a stripe down the side, like the kind tram conductors wore,
though I couldn't see him selling tram tickets. But he wasn't moving: he was looking at the bag and at Biscuit, and he seemed to be weighing up the pros and cons of the situation — one of Granddad's expressions.

He had a very strange look on his face, as if he was drunk, but it was only about seven o'clock in the morning. When he tried to talk his whole face twisted up, as if he had something very hot in his mouth making it hard for him to speak — it reminded me of the time Aunty Jem had tried one of Mum's sausage rolls, then tried to talk while she was eating it, except the sausage roll hadn't even been hot. After about a fortnight, he sort of exploded, and shouted, with his face all red and his body folded over: ‘S-s-s-s-so!'

It wasn't much, after all that effort, but it was enough to send Biscuit over the edge. With a snarl he shot forward like a cannonball and flew through the air at the Train Shed Thug — it's all on the map — grabbing him by his gun hand. The thug fell back with a loud animal noise and for a minute all I could see were army-green and Biscuit-coloured arms and legs going round in the middle of a tornado, like two cartoon animals. Then there was a loud bang, and they both stopped moving — the Train Shed Thug on top and Biscuit underneath, whimpering some kind of message to the Thug: probably telling him to get the hell off. But he was not going to get off, and I had to roll him over to save Biscuit from being squashed. At first I thought he'd been killed, but the gun was lying between them pointing out the door; when it went off it had been pointing at the brewery windows. The Thug had been knocked out, and the side of his head was bleeding all over the place — what the Sarge would have called a flesh wound. But I knew that when you break someone's windows,
they eventually stick their noses in, just out of curiosity, and I wasn't hanging around for the brewery crowd to turn up. The only question left was: who gets the gun?

Biscuit and I looked at each other. We couldn't go home covered in soot and dirt — well, Biscuit couldn't. We had to go down to the river and have a wash. So I grabbed the gun, and took the bloke's spare ammo out of his pocket, and we hurried down to the river: past the brewery, along the railway line, past the yeast factory, past the engineering works, past the bakery and down the steep bank that took us under the railway bridge. As we washed I made a mental note to give the train sheds a miss for a while. With a bit of luck it would take ages for the brewery guys to work out where the shot had come from, and by then the bloke would be up and about, and gone. I reckoned it would take the neighbours about a week and a half to start talking about it.

It took half an hour.

When we got home, Mum said: ‘I don't want you goin' near the railway line any more.'

When my tongue finally came unglued from the inside of my mouth I said: ‘Someone get hit by a train?'

‘Just stay away from the railway,' she said.

It could have been worse; she could have said: ‘What's that you've got in your bag?'

Jesus, the things Biscuit gets me into …

 

After the Railway Shed caper, I fixed the map, hid the loot and changed Biscuit's name to Shadow, in case anyone had heard us talking down at the railway shed. But Mum and Granddad just kept on calling him Biscuit anyway. Also, I decided to get rid of the gun. I waited until Friday night, when Mum was on
the afternoon shift, and Granddad came over with some fish and chips for us, and I said to him: ‘Hey, Granddad, wanna see what I found?' And he did, of course, and I took him into my room, and took up the secret plank — he said it used to be
his
secret plank — and showed him the gun. I didn't take it out … it was just lying there.

‘Want me to take it out?' I asked.

But he acted as if it was a tiger snake and slammed the plank down, then pulled the carpet back over it.

‘Blimey!' he said. ‘It's Smokey's gun. Where the hell did yer find it?'

I had been feeling all right until I saw the look on his face, then I was about twenty miles from all right. But Granddad was the one person I could trust, him and Biscuit, though I suppose Biscuit didn't count as a person. I thought I'd tone down the story a bit and break it to him gently — he was old, after all.

‘Biscuit nearly killed the bloke in the train shed who stuck us up with this and tried to nick our treasure, but he shot the brewery instead,' I said, hoping there would be no awkward questions.

Granddad walked over to the bed and sat down, and patted the place beside him. That worried me like hell, as grown-ups only did that when someone had died, and I already knew the bloke in the train shed was okay,
so what now
? I wondered. But no one had died. He just wanted to talk about the situation.

‘Listen to me,' he said.

But there was no need for him to tell me to listen as I was straining my ears so hard I had a pain in my face.

‘You must never say a word about that thing to anyone as long as you live. D'yer foller me?'

I nodded pretty hard.

‘I'm going to get rid of it for you, but not tonight and not tomorrow either. Tonight I'm going somewhere where they take a dim view of blokes turnin' up with sawn-off shotguns. And tomorrow we're meeting up with Barney for a drink, and a few of the rozzers from down the station. My God, if Barney got his hands on that bloody thing …' He was almost talking to himself. He rubbed his face the way Dad used to before he had a shave, but I knew that Granddad always had a shave before he came over. Then he came to a decision, and slapped his knee.

‘Okay, you leave everything to me. Now, tell me again what happened.'

So I told him the whole story, about the box and the treasure and the trains squashing the watches and how this bloke tried to hold us up and nick the treasure but he couldn't talk, and how he frightened Biscuit, who decided that enough was enough and tried to kill the bloke, and how the gun went off, and what we did afterwards.

‘Now listen,' said Granddad, ‘did anyone see you down there, either on that day or the day before, when you first went there?'

I'd left out the bit about getting stuck in the water tower because I hoped he didn't need to know that, but now I mentioned it to see what he thought. I expected him to laugh at me, but he only rubbed his chin and nodded to himself.

‘Alf,' he said. ‘I'll have a word with him. But don't worry, he won't tell the p'lice about you; he hates the bastards. Now, let's have another look at that shotgun.'

Quickly we pulled back the carpet and lifted the floorboard. Granddad reached in and pulled out the gun as if it was a
live grenade. He gave it a little yank as if he was going to try to bend the barrel down and it almost broke in half. In the front end of the barrel were two metal objects that looked like gold coins. Granddad extracted one with his fingernails and showed it to me.

‘It's called a cartridge,' he said. ‘It's been fired; that's why it's open at one end.' He pulled the other cartridge out. It was closed at the end. ‘This one hasn't been fired,' he said. ‘It could have gone off at any time, while you were carrying it, and blown your bloody head off.'

I must have looked the way I felt because he patted me on the shoulder and smiled for the first time since I had shown him the shotgun.

‘I'm taking these,' he said, ‘for your own safety,' and he put the cartridges in his pocket. ‘Have you got any more of 'em?'

‘Nope, I didn't even know they were there,' I said, which was about half true: a white lie, as I still had two, and I was hanging on to them. After all, I found them fair and square.

‘Good,' was all he said, and I knew that meant:
then that's that
.

Then I remembered the treasure in the Ritmeester box I'd collected for him. That was in there too.

‘Oh yeah, and I got these out of the box in the train shed for you,' I said, giving him the watches. ‘These were the replacements I got for the ones the train ran over.'

‘Strewth!' he said. ‘I can't leave with these. Look, wait until you get a quiet moment over the weekend when your mum's not around, then take 'em out of the house — have you got a bag? — and dump 'em.'

‘In the river?'

‘That's the shot. If anyone sees these, we've all had it. Have you touched any of these? If you did —'

‘Fingerprints, I know: Dick Tracy's always lookin' for 'em. No, only the box and the gun,' I said, ‘and I wiped 'em.'

‘Okay, then make sure you take a hanky with you and wipe the box all over again before you chuck it away.'

‘Okay,' I said solemnly. By then I had second thoughts about not telling him about the cartridges, but he was looking pretty cheesed off about the whole thing. I knew what he was thinking:
Shotguns under the floorboards — what next?
So I held my tongue.

 

Next morning, before anyone in the street was up, I put the Ritmeester box in my bag and went down to the river, but before I could find a good spot to throw it in, I remembered a large concrete pipe that I'd meant to explore for ages, so I walked up the riverbank until I found it, then I told Biscuit to lie down and wait.

These days I took a long stick with me wherever I went, not to whack people with — I had Biscuit with me in case anyone wanted to give me a hard time; I had even started to call him Blarney Biscuit — but to kill zombies, and to use as an adventurer's staff, something that more and more adventurers were taking with them these days. Inside the pipe it was pitch dark, which was unusual, because all the streets had one of these big pipes at the bottom, and if you went down one of them and looked up the street you could usually see little patches of light that marked the gratings at the street intersections. Anyway, off I went, fumbling for my torch and making no noise at all, in case the Hurricane Lamp Torturer was a half-wit and had decided to settle into the neighbourhood. But as this wasn't his drain, I was pretty sure I was safe.

In the dark I could feel the drain take a bend to the right and then to the left and then suddenly straighten. I could tell that we were under Fawkner Street, because that had been the next street over from my entry point. In the distance there were those little patches of light that told me there were intersections overhead, and, most importantly, escape shafts. There would also be other, smaller, drains coming in from the sides, and on a rainy day they would be carrying water. In fact, in rainy weather, you couldn't do what I was doing unless you felt like giving drowning a bit of a whirl. But there was something else down this drain: two large branches, left and right, that looked like they didn't go anywhere.

I turned into the left branch, and after only a few steps realised that the wall my right hand was resting on was not concrete, but stone — what we called bluestone — though I never thought it was blue, and that meant it was probably old. And a little further on I came to an iron gate — the kind they have in torture chambers and dungeons and on the front of castles — that went from the floor to the ceiling and had a lock on it. I felt all around it in the pitch dark, then decided I would have to come back with a torch that worked and my pinch bar, which I'd hidden on top of the house next door, the home of Mrs Hutchinson, the well-known witch.