The Cartographer (19 page)

All Lesley could say was: ‘He'll kill you, you bastard.'

But he had an answer for everything.

‘No he won't, darling, because in an hour I'll be on a plane — the flight's already booked. And besides, you wouldn't want the shame. Know what he told me when the Gordons broke up? He said if you ever did that to him he'd throw you out in the street and you could stand on corners for a crust —'

‘You're wrong, he'd never throw his own kids out —'

‘Who said anything about the kids?'

‘You bastard!'

She was crying but she had given in, and I couldn't make out what was happening for a minute, except that it didn't sound good. The Cartographer badly wanted to go down there and save the woman. But he had no idea how, as he has no super powers, getting by entirely on his wits. However, I had an irresistible urge to see more of the events, no matter
how scary it all was. I sneaked down from my hiding place and looked around the corner of the door. I shouldn't have, I know. What I saw split me in half, so that I didn't know which one of me I was for a moment. Part of me, the Cartographer, was peeking round the corner, and part of me, the kid who didn't want to die, was high up above the room, outside the house, looking out over the rooftops. I was not there, but at the same time I was. It was not the life of the woman I was worried about, that's what I remember the most: it was my own life. I looked out over the darkening roofs towards the city, parts of which were dying for the day, and parts of which were bleeding neon, like the top of Young and Jackson's, and wondered how the lovely
Pajama Game
sign was doing. I'm ashamed that I did that, but there it is.

But the Cartographer pulled me back and made me watch what the murderer did to the woman, and what he said — I saw it as if I had seen it every day before breakfast, as if it was normal for me. I knew in those moments that I was not going to draw what I was seeing: I wouldn't have to. Then suddenly, there was the sound of someone running up the stairs, and I shrank back behind the door just in the nick of time. Now there was a new voice, more of a roar, really.

A man shouted, ‘What the fuck's going on here?' or something like that. He might have said ‘hell', but I know a few people, Barney included, who definitely would have said ‘fuck'.

There was a moan from Lesley, a very tired moan that ended with her crying very loudly, and a lot of yelling from Ken and the bloke, which I wanted to see of course, but I'd already seen enough to last me about twenty-seven years. Besides, I remembered that my plan was only to listen. Then Lesley's
voice turned into a yell, and I could tell she was getting stuck into Ken for some reason.

‘Stop, Ken, for Christ's sake!'

But Ken sounded like he was imitating a wild bear.

‘Shuddup, you bitch — you're next!'

‘You're killing him!' she said a couple of times.

I had to see this. The ruckus was still going on in the main bedroom, so I gathered that everything was not going Ken's way, and that the bloke had found his second wind, which is what happens to a lot of boxers, just when the money had gone the other way, Granddad once told me. Granddad could even tell me which boxer was going to get his second wind, and sometimes in which round. I once asked him why he didn't bet on those boxers winning, and clean up, and he told me it was because he didn't want someone like Barney paying him a visit.

So I took another peek — peeking is the greatest power the detective has — and what I saw was that the fight had turned into a three-way affair, with Lesley wrestling with her own husband to stop him choking the bloke, which wasn't helping him much, because the other bloke was pretty big and was getting in some very good punches and looked like he might have broken the champ's nose, which was common in the fight game. I couldn't for the life of me work out why Lesley was trying to stop Ken, because only a minute before he had told her that it was her turn next.

There was blood all over the place, and Lesley could see that she was not helping anyone, so she pulled Ken's head back by the hair, and yelled at him: ‘Let him go. Why should you go to prison for something he did?' And he stopped, and relaxed his grip on the bloke, who lay there choking and coughing. Then, for no reason at all, he punched the bloke in the face
as hard as he could and there was a loud bang, like a paper bag bursting, and the bloke was out for the count. His face was pale and there was blood all over it, and in that moment I knew that I was looking at the Devil himself.

That noise was like the starter's gun signalling a brand-new fight between Lesley and Ken, which consisted of her yelling out: ‘It was him who messed up your engine; he only wanted to get me alone,' and him yelling back: ‘You bitch', and slapping her face so hard she flew through the air and landed on the floor, on my side of the bed, and stayed there, crying. I ducked back under the stairs, and could hardly stand up, my legs were shaking so hard. Ken came out of the bedroom walking fast, and went into the bathroom to wash his face. Then he yelled: ‘Shit!' really loud, and came back in. ‘You'll have to drive me to hospital,' he said. ‘My nose is broken.'

‘What about him?' she said. ‘I think you killed him.'

‘Fuck him. If he's dead, we'll dump him later. I'm not letting your arse wreck my bloody life. If he's not dead, well, he knows the way out. Come on.'

I watched their backs as they went downstairs, Ken holding a towel against his face, and went out without switching out the lights. I ran to the window to watch them get into the Chev. I saw Lesley help Ken into the passenger's seat, then go around and open the driver's door. Just as she was about to hop in she looked up at the window and saw me looking down at her. I couldn't pull my eyes away, and neither could she. It was as if she was Wonder Woman and she had me in her Lasso of Truth, against which I was powerless, and knew all my secrets, including my name and address and why I was there.
Jesus Christ, I was buggered!
For about as long as it takes to sing the first line of ‘Que Sera Sera', we were both frozen in
time and space, staring at each other. Wonder Woman and the Cartographer had finally met.

Then she was gone.

I had escaped this time, but it had been a near thing. Suddenly, I was tired, and not for lack of sleep. I went into the main bedroom, and looked at the body spread out on the floor, with his face all covered in blood. I was tired of being the Cartographer, and I was even tired of being the real me, though he wasn't around much. I was tired of the map, and the adventures, and the blood and the yelling and screaming. I was tired of running away from houses and rooms and pubs and drains. Trouble had found me again. Now it was trouble, not Wonder Woman, who had me in the Lasso of Truth, and I was spilling my guts by mental telepathy — that's what you do when trouble gets you.

I went downstairs and found a phone. On the front there were two phone numbers; the shorter one was 000. I dialled it.

Hello, Emergency, which emergency service do you want?

Be cool, man, be cool. What would Cookie say?

‘There'sbeenabigfightandonebloke'sgotabrokennoseandhe'sgo netohospitalandtheotherblokelookslikehe'shalfdeadandhen eedsadoctorassoonaspossibleorhe'llbleedtodeath!'

Hello, Emergency, which emergency service do you want?

‘How many have you got?'

Three: police, fire and ambulance.

‘Ambulance.'

And the address?

‘I don't know.'

I'm sorry. I have to have an address.

This conversation should have finished a long time ago. I mean, what if she was tracing the call or something?

‘I don't know the address.'

Is there an adult there?

‘Yes, but he can't talk; he's unconscious.'

Is he your father?

Mmm …

‘Yes, yes he is.'

Can you go next door and get one of the neighbours?

The postcards!

‘Wait! The address is 1067 Chapel Street, South Yarra.'

And your name please?

I looked at the back of one of the postcards:
Dear Ken, Lesley, James and Veronica …

‘James … Palmer.'

James, do you know what happened to your father? Did he have an accident or is he sick?

I was getting in too deep again — I was sinking. It was like when Dad did his impersonation of Hitler, and did the Nazi salute and yelled:
How high's der shit?!
And we'd all do the salute back, and yell:
Dis high!
Well that was about how high it was, right then.

‘Have you ever had one of those days,' I said to the lady on the phone, ‘when you made a plan, then began to feel that somebody else had made an even bigger plan, and you were in
their
plan? Well, that's how I feel.'

I was crying again.

James, do you know what happened to your father? Did he have an accident or is he sick?

I hung up, and went back upstairs, to take one last look at the body — you could call it a hobby, I suppose. Well, I'll come straight to the point: the body was gone.

One minute I had more bodies than you could shake a stick at, and the next minute I was one short. Normally, I'd be happy to see an injured fighter up and about again. But I couldn't remember a time when I wanted to be in the same house as a homicidal maniac who bore me a grudge. I spun around, expecting to find a gun staring me in the face, but Bob — the only name I had — was gone.

I rushed downstairs, missing most of the steps, and on the way my hand collected a fat slug of blood from the bannister. At the bottom, I hardly paused to look around, but headed straight to the front door, which was still open. As I stepped out onto the front porch, who should I meet but Bob, lying there, wondering if it had all been worth it, a feeling I'd had many times myself.

I stared at him, fascinated, and could see that he was down for the count, so he was hardly likely to spring to his feet and start throttling me, no matter how willing the spirit. When he became aware of my presence he opened his eyes extra wide and gave me one of those looks your Aunty Maisie from Wangaratta gives you when she hasn't seen you for the last two years. With Aunty Maisie — as with an assortment of lady relatives — the look says: ‘But haven't you
grown
!' With Bob, the look said: ‘Not you again!' — different thing altogether.

Much as I wanted to catch up on old times — ask him who he'd strangled lately and so on — it really was way past my bedtime, so I turned and ran through the house and out the back door. I took the side path back to the front gate, and looked back at the front porch to see Bob getting to his feet, so I shot through like a Caulfield tram, one of which happened to be going past at that moment. With a bit of luck, I thought, he'll stagger in front of one of those, and I'll have an early Christmas present. As I was hurrying across the bridge that separated the Haves from the Have Nots, as Mum says, I heard the ambulance coming. I asked God to give it a flat tyre, but he ignored me.

As if things weren't bad enough, I had told Mum I was going to stay over at Luigi's place for the night, and I was left without a hideout, and on a night on which the streets of Melbourne happened to be running with blood, too. Tom would have gone home anyway, woken Mum, and spun her a yarn about Luigi's mum getting one of her migraines and asking him if he wouldn't mind choofing off home. Then Mum would have said: ‘Yeah, and what about
my
bloody migraines?' and that would have been an end to the matter. I stood in front of our house for a minute, then I went over to Mrs Carruthers' front verandah — it was a warm night anyway, and I made myself comfortable on the sofa.

As I lay there with my hands behind my head and my feet up, I listened to the sounds of the suburb. Somewhere, there was a blue going on — it sounded like Curly Dobson was on the turps again, and upsetting Mrs Dobson, which was easy to do. Someone told them to shut up, for Christ's sake — some of us are trying to bloody sleep. A tram went past the end of the street. Something about its sound told me it was empty.
There's something lonely about an empty tram at night, I always think.

I wondered if Bob was in hospital getting his strength back for his next caper, or wandering the streets asking every second person he met if they knew a kid with hair that stuck out like dry grass, as he wanted to discuss the current political situation with him. This was definitely one of those incidents I couldn't discuss with Mum — awkward questions were bound to be asked. It was one of those occasions when I could have used Dad. He wouldn't have been happy, of course, but he would have known what steps to take. Suddenly, I had a new reason for missing him, and I told myself that I had to find him. I don't think I'd try to talk him into coming home, as Mum didn't want him, and anyway, there was his mission: that came first. But I'd be able to talk to him any time, if I knew where he was.

 

I was still thinking of all these things the next morning, as I got up and went home to get some brekkie and put on my good clothes for Mass. Then I went down to St Felix's, where I was an altar boy. Every Sunday morning I would serve at one of the four Masses; and on this particular morning, it was the eleven o'clock Mass.

Everything was going fine until Father Hagen stopped to give the sermon. At this point the six altar boys would all go and sit in a pew behind him, and basically have the next twenty minutes free. We all did different things with our twenty minutes. Matthew Foster would slip outside through the sacristy door to have a Rothmans and a drop of sacramental wine. Valentine Popovich would swing his legs and hum songs, even though you could probably hear him in
the next suburb — that day he was humming ‘Purple People Eater', not that you could tell. Christopher Muldoon, as usual, was trying to invent new ways of burping and making noises. Luigi Esposito always read a comic but never shared, and anyway they were usually Walt Disney comics that I'd already read. Dennis Shanahan always went to sleep, but always woke up at the end, and hardly ever snored, though once he had a nightmare — nearly everyone laughed their heads off. Me, I always looked for Josephine Thompson — I couldn't help it.

So there I was, looking for Josephine Thompson, checking each face in turn:
nope, not that one. This one? Nope, not that one
, and so on, hoping that I would see her face, and that she would see mine, not that she would, of course, but I might see hers, you never know; it depended a lot on which Mass she went to. You'd think that with the altar boys always changing Masses, I'd see her a fair bit, but I didn't. Sometimes I think I needn't have bothered becoming an altar boy at all. There must have been an easier way of seeing her. So it was while I was checking the faces that I saw her: not Josephine Thompson, but Wonder Woman!

I could hardly believe my eyes. What the hell was Wonder Woman doing at Mass? Wonder Woman doesn't go to Mass! Well, I mean, obviously, she does. But what was she doing in my bloody Mass? I looked at her and thought to myself:
That dame's dynamite
, because she was. Now that I saw her all dressed up, though not in her Wonder Woman outfit, I had to admit she was a knockout. Larry Kent would have had saxophone music playing in the background, music in the shape of curling cigarette smoke. She was not looking up, but fiddling with something, so I had time to observe her in secret, which was the Cartographer's favourite way of observing dames.

Suddenly, just when I was least expecting it, she looked up and locked me in her look of steel, just as she had the night before at her place, when she was getting into her car. She looked up as if she had known exactly where I was, as if she had already been looking at me. It's times like these I wish I was more serious about my smoking, then I would have been outside with Matthew opening the old flip-top box. But it was no good: I could feel the invisible strands of her Lasso of Truth tightening around me, especially around my throat, and cutting off my supply of vital oxygen. If only I had a couple of super powers.

For the rest of the Mass I was in the vice-like grip of the Lasso. Would she use it to force me to come clean? I was a bit out of practice; in fact, I wasn't sure I still knew
how
to tell the truth. During Communion, I ducked outside and went to the toilet. I wanted to run, but I thought:
What can she do? I'm just a kid. So I saw a few things, so what? I'm a kid, for Christ's sake: I'm not going to blab. Everything will be okay. Maybe she didn't even recognise me: maybe, like a lot of people, she was just staring at the altar boys — Valentine Popovich does have that effect on people, after all.
So I hung around in the vestry for a while, until the Mass was over, and started to take off my vestments with the other boys.

Father Hagen came into the altar boys' room, and stared at me while he was undoing his strings and things.

‘I hope the celebration of the Holy Mass wasn't too boring for you, young man.'

‘No, Father, I was sick.'

‘Well if the Lord could be flogged and tormented and crucified for you, perhaps in future you could do Him the courtesy of giving Him a little more of your precious time.'

‘Yes, Father.'

‘Now, was that your mother you were looking at during Mass?'

‘… Yes, Father.'

‘Good boy. I don't believe we've been introduced. If she's still here when we leave I'd like to meet her.'

‘I don't think she'll still be here, Father.'

He flung open the vestry door, letting in sixty different kinds of sunlight and spring smells that would normally have made my day.

‘Nonsense, there she is. Come on.'

I hung back, wondering if I should just run for it, but it was too late: he was off like a rocket. Father Hagen was one of those priests who can get a skinful on a Saturday night and still go running around after Mass waving and shaking hands with everyone — you had to hand it to him. I saw him talking to Wonder Woman and waving his arms all over the place, as he usually did when he was trying to impress someone, and, to my horror, she gave me a little wave and a smile, as if she really
was
my mum.

‘Darling,' she called to me, ‘come over here.'

I went over. My life, which only an hour before had had a kind of
solid
feel, was now taking place inside a blancmange. To make matters worse, Wonder Woman looked and smelt like a million bucks, and her scent took me back to the moment I had first seen her. It was the smell of her room.

Wonder Woman gathered me to her with a slender arm and kissed me on the cheek. That deadly kiss was designed to remove all of the Cartographer's mental powers, and it worked.

‘So, Father, what kind of mischief has he been getting up to?'

‘Actually, he is one of my better boys,' said Father Hagen, getting me mixed up with someone else.

‘Well, it's hard to believe, but I'm glad to hear it. Now, if you'll excuse me, we have to run off to see his grandmother. So nice to finally meet you, Father. You know he talks about you all the time:
Father this, Father that
. You might have a new recruit here.'

They laughed and shook hands, and I realised that I had been wrong in thinking that priests were immune to the hypnotic powers of women, or maybe it was just Wonder Woman.

She walked me to her Chevy, holding me firmly by the hand. Waiting in the car was Mr Palmer, with a huge plaster on his nose and looking at me as if he was going to murder me — a lot of people looked at me that way. She hopped in the back with me, and as soon as Ken opened his mouth to talk she shushed him. I could see that she had him in her Lasso of Truth too. Ken didn't start the car, but just sat there looking at me.

‘I told you I'd seen him before,' she said to her husband.

She turned to me. ‘Let's have a little talk, shall we?' she said. ‘About boys who break into people's houses and see things that God never meant them to see. And speaking of breaking in, how
did
you get in?'

‘Back door was unlocked,' I lied automatically.

‘Yes, well it won't be unlocked any more. Now …'

That was one of the hardest conversations I had ever had, coming a short half-head after the time I had to explain why I had turned on the fire hose in the church during School Vaccination Day. What made it even more difficult was the fact that I didn't understand much of what Wonder Woman
was talking about, though it was clear to me that it had less to do with break and enter than I thought it would, even though that was what she was threatening me with.

Go ahead,
I thought,
I've been threatened by some of the best.

‘I don't think your parents would be very happy if you went to jail, would they?' she said.

‘I s'pose not.'

‘So it's all agreed: you don't tell anyone about what you think you saw at our place, and I won't tell the police that you broke into our house and stole from me. All right?'

‘All right.' I was getting off lightly. The stealing part was bullshit, of course, but I hadn't expected her to play fair. Granddad once told me: ‘Don't let anyone get the wood on you, son, or they'll only chuck an extra log on as soon as they get the chance.' And he was right. All I had to do was forget I had seen something I had already seen lots of times anyway — well, some of it. So what if a few people got a smack?

‘Good. We'll drop you off at our place — you already know your way home from there, don't you?' she said cheerfully.

As I looked into her eyes, which reminded me a lot of Vera Miles in
Wichita
, I wanted to tell her that Bob was probably a lot worse than she or Ken thought, that he had a gun, and that he'd already killed a woman only a few streets away. The Cartographer wanted to save Wonder Woman.

 

When I got home I could smell roast, one of my favourite Sunday lunches. It also meant that someone was coming over for lunch — Nanna Blayney, I hoped.

Apart from having a lot of husbands, Nanna had a terrific collection of clothes, which Tom and me were always trying on. ‘Must run in the family,' she once said. And we knew that
she was talking about Uncle Bert, who once turned up at our place sozzled to the eyeballs and wearing a primrose dress that didn't fit very well. I was embarrassed without exactly knowing why, but in the end deciding that it was his choice of primrose that did it. So later, when Dad said to us: ‘Don't ever let me see
you
two show up looking like that,' we shook our heads hard, and he said: ‘Good men,' and that was an end to the matter. We had also tried on Mum's clothes, of course — all the Commandos had, except Luigi Esposito, whose mum's clothes were all black — but it never occurred to me that I might look like Uncle Bert. What embarrassed me the most about Uncle Bert's appearance (and his getting chucked out) was the suspicion that I might also look that bad in a dress. I made a mental note that if I ever decided to bung on a frock, it must not be primrose.