by Paul Collins
He looked around desperately. On the wall was a large map of the world, made of paper. Quickly, he pulled it down, rolled it into a long tube, clambered back up on the chair and manoeuvred one end of the map onto Mrs Appleby’s chest, just where the heart ought to be, and pressed his ear to the other end.
Just as he thought. Dead as a doornail. Groaning, he jumped back down. No doubt about it. Mrs Appleby had suffered a cardiac arrest. Followed soon, Milo mused, by his arrest – unless he did something very quickly.
Fortunately he knew just what that was, as his fifth favourite TV show was ER.
Milo scrambled up onto the top part of the bed, near Mrs Appleby’s head, which was leaning over to his side. From this angle her corpse looked like a great deflated balloon. Reaching as far down as he could he pressed the heel of one palm over her ribcage and the other atop that, and started compressions: one – two – three – four – five – and –? He stared about . . . what had he forgotten?
Oh, yeah. Breathe . . .
He bent down and tried to blow air into her crumpled mouth, making sure his cheek was blocking her nostrils. He tasted peanut butter on her lips and sour milk.
Then more compressions, another breath.
He did this eleven times and was just getting dizzy when Mrs Appleby gasped, sucked in a great lungful of air, and opened her eyes.
‘I saw me Uncle Joseph,’ she said. ‘God Almighty, the man’s been gone fifty years and he didn’t look a day over thirty-five!’
Milo sat back, smiling and wheezing for breath. He climbed off the bed and sat in the chair. He would write a thank you letter to Dr Carter on ER.
To Mrs Appleby he said, ‘Was he glad to see you? Your Uncle Joseph?’
‘Ah, he was over the moon!’ There were tears in Mrs Appleby’s eyes. She tried to sit up and Milo hurriedly tucked a pillow behind her then sat back down. ‘You’re Milo,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. ‘I forgive you for murderin’ me but do us a favour, love. You know what DNR is? It’s on that show you like.’
Milo nodded. DNR meant ‘do not resuscitate’, which is what he’d just done. ‘Why?’
‘I want to see the rest of me family – without being interrupted, mind you.’
Milo said, ‘I didn’t mean to. Murder you, that is.’
‘I know that, boy. Stop your worryin’. Now what is it you’ve come to ask me?’
Milo blinked. ‘How’d you know I came to ask you anything? Maybe I was just in the neighbourhood.’
‘In the neighbourhood of my bedroom window and all, is that what you’re saying?’
Milo didn’t have an answer to this, so he said nothing.
‘Thought as much. Now be quick. What’s on your mind?’
‘I want to know where my mum’s gone.’
‘Oh, I see. Joseph said something about that.’
There was a noise upstairs. Was Mr Appleby coming down?
‘Don’t you worry about him,’ said Mrs Appleby, wheezing slightly. ‘He ain’t stayin’ long.’ Mrs Appleby’s colour didn’t look too good to Milo. He reckoned she wasn’t staying long either.
‘Are you going to die again?’
‘Like as not. Now, boy, about your mum . . .’
Heavy footsteps were coming down the stairs. Milo felt a surge of panic.
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve something of hers, ain’t’cha?’
Milo shot Mrs Appleby a suspicious look. Had she been peeking through his window earlier on? He pulled off his school backpack and took out his mother’s shoe.
She took it, held it to her chest, and sighed. ‘I had a pair just like this when I was younger. Danced all night, I did. Do you dance, Milo?’
‘I fall down a lot,’ he said, tentatively.
‘And the children laugh at you, I know. Well, you need to start lessons. Ballroom dancing will do. Get you all coordinated, inside and out. When all this is over, hear?’
Milo nodded. He wasn’t used to psychic detectives.
Mrs Appleby got a faraway look, then squinted at him suddenly. ‘You want to be a train driver when you grow up.’ It wasn’t a question so Milo didn’t answer it. ‘Like trains, do you? Kind of predictable, right?’
Milo immediately said, ‘My favourite is the California Zephyr. The California Zephyr follows a 3,924 kilometre passenger route operated by Amtrak in the United States of America. It runs from Chicago in the east to San Francisco in the west, going through the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. Before that it was operated by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad from Chicago to Denver and –’
Mrs Appleby held up her hand, like a stop sign. Milo’s mum did that when she wanted him to shut up.
‘About the shoe,’ she said. She peered closely at it, pinched the leather, then rubbed it back and forth, like it was Aladdin’s lamp. Milo was half sorry it wasn’t. He could have used three wishes right about now.
Mrs Appleby sighed. ‘She’s missing this, that’s for sure.’
Milo gulped. ‘Is she missing me, too?’
Mrs Appleby gave him an odd look. ‘’Course she’s missing you, what kind of fool question is that?’ Milo was about to ask what she missed most, him or the shoe, but thought better of it. He was a little afraid of Mrs Appleby’s sharp tongue and the fact that she’d just come back from the dead.
Mrs Appleby added dreamily, ‘Oh yes, she does miss this shoe . . .’
Milo said firmly, ‘I’m going to take it to her.’
‘You’re a good boy, Milo, but you’re as daft as a dingbat.’
A dingbat? He would have to ask Fluke about that. To Mrs Appleby he said, ‘Can you get an address –?’
Mrs Appleby chuckled. ‘An address! Would you like a phone number, too?’
‘Yes, please!’
Mrs Appleby gave him a look of pure exasperation, then got that dreamy look again. ‘There’s a street – it’s narrow, lined with ghost gums . . . I see an old fire station. Now what’s the name of that street?’ She made a harrumphing noise. ‘Lot of static today . . .’
‘Is that the street where she is?’
‘Take your accidental friend.’
Accidental? Did she mean Fluke?
‘And Milo, not too much blood, you hear? Oh, now I get it. See –’
Suddenly Mrs Appleby’s eyes bulged out, then rolled up into her head. She started wheezing, just like one of his asthma attacks. Milo stared at her. How could she die now? Just when she was about to tell him where his mum was! It was so – rude!
Angrily, Milo dug for his asthma pump, jammed it between Mrs Appleby’s lumpy lips, and pressed the cylinder. There was a hiss of escaping gas. Mrs Appleby’s chest rose slightly. Milo sat back and waited.
A minute later her face turned blue, a strangled sound oozed from her throat; then she sagged, like a beach ball with a puncture.
Milo eyed her desperately. ‘Mrs Appleby? Mrs Appleby –?’
He’d killed her again. With his luck, she was probably allergic to asthma medicine. Of course, she was probably more allergic to dying . . .
Suddenly the old lady’s left arm rose into the air, as though something was lifting it. The hairs on the back of Milo’s neck stood up. Slowly then, but getting faster, the hand began to weave back and forth and up and down. Milo frowned. What was Mrs Appleby doing? It looked as if she was conducting an orchestra, or directing traffic.
He watched the hand for at least two minutes. Some of the movements were repetitive but none of it made sense.
But as suddenly as it had begun, the arm stopped, froze in mid-air for a moment, then came crashing down on the bedside before slipping off the edge. As if this was a signal to the rest of her, Mrs Appleby’s shoulder began to slide off the bed. Milo rushed forward, grabbed her shoulder and heaved it back on the bed, propping a pillow under it. But he must have disturbed the delicate balance. A great slab of wobbly stomach spilled off the mid-section of the bed, drooping down onto the floor and threaten
ing to pull the rest of her body after it, like some oozy osmotic process.
Milo gulped and started grabbing handfuls of Mrs Appleby’s doughy stomach but it was very hard to get a grip. As even more flowed off the edge he got down on his hands and knees and with much grunting and groaning managed to wedge his shoulders under the main part of the overspill.
He’d never realised just how heavy someone’s stomach could be. Squinting with the effort, he tried, slowly, to stand up, half carrying and half bulldozing the old lady’s massive stomach back onto the bed. He’d almost done it when he lost his balance and dropped to his knees, sending two searing shafts of pain up his thighs. Then for a second he thought he was going to be smothered in tons of flab, drowned in flesh, and he panicked a little. But he clambered to his feet again, his entire head and shoulders draped under floppy folds of stomach, and tipped it all back onto the bed. It tried to flow off again and he slid his hands under it and kept shovelling it back, like he was trying to stop the ocean.
By the time he’d finished he felt giddy, and weak. He retrieved his mother’s shoe and strapped on his backpack. But when he tried to walk, his head swam, and he keeled over onto the floor with a thud.
Milo got to his feet seeing stars, staggered into a vase stand, and heard an awful crash somewhere close by. He stumbled back, banged into the TV: he felt a sharp jab in his left buttock and the television exploded into a torrent of noise.
He spun round and round: where was the window? Should he scream and shout? It was as if a fog had come out of nowhere to bewilder his brain. He heard loud swearing, pounding feet. Then he spotted what surely must be the window: a bright rectangle of light . . .
Without thinking, Milo threw himself at the light, felt fresh air, and landed in a rose bush, too frantic to care about the thorns ripping into his clothes and flesh. Trampling even more of Mr Appleby’s prize flowers, he jumped up and fled down the street.
As he’d dived out the window, Milo had had a brief glimpse of the startled face of Mr Appleby as he charged into his wife’s room.
Milo’s mum often told him he had to put himself in other people’s shoes (it had taken a year to work out what that meant) but it was always a mystery to him what other people were thinking. He would try to work it out from the expressions on their faces – for instance, his dad’s red blotchy look meant ‘angry thinking’ – but for the most part these made no sense to Milo, and his dad would tell him to stop frowning anyway.
Milo sat in his kitchen pondering all this as the sound of sirens grew louder. The sirens stopped in the street out front. Flashing lights strobed red and blue.
Fluke, sipping his ‘decapitated’ coffee, had once told Milo, ‘You’ve got the habit of being in the dumb place at the stupid time. For all intensive purposes, that’s your blot in life’.
It certainly felt like a blot. A great big inky one that kept spreading.
Someone pounded on the front door. Milo made no move to open it.
The knocking kept up. Irritated, Milo went and sat on the back porch. The knocking was just something in the distance now, like it was someone else’s door.
When it finally stopped, Milo breathed out. Then the side gate rattled.
Gravel crunched, gruff voices swore.
Milo tried to stand, but his legs were too wobbly.
‘Milo?’ came a woman’s harried voice. It was Mrs Hathaway from next door. ‘Milo? Where are you, boy?’ Mrs Hathaway’s voice was sweet and sickly. ‘It’s all right, child. The police won’t hurt you,’ she said, but when she came round the corner and saw Milo sitting there, his chin in his hands, her face contorted.
‘Milo! What were you thinking?’ she demanded. Behind her came two large policemen – or rather one policeman and one policewoman. For a moment the three of them stood staring at Milo, on the very spot where Milo’s dad had buried the chickens that the Effing Bloody Fox had killed last year. The policewoman had an ‘angry thinking’ expression on her face.
Milo said, ‘Be careful.’
The policewoman rested a hand on a pair of handcuffs strapped to her waist.
‘You’re standing on a grave site.’
The two cops looked down hurriedly. There was a makeshift cross that had fallen down. It listed four names and, underneath them, said: ‘All Good Chooks Go To Heaven’.
‘Never mind them, Milo,’ said the policewoman. ‘Chooks die all the time.’
‘No,’ Milo said, ‘chooks only die once. Old ladies can die twice, though.’
‘Don’t get smart with us, mate,’ said the other cop as Mrs Hathaway moaned in horror and crossed herself. She muttered something about poor Mrs Appleby, which was very odd, because she’d hated ‘that old cow’.
‘No wonder they call him Milo, he’s not Quik, is he?’ the policewoman whispered to Mrs Hathaway.
The phone rang inside the house.
Milo looked wistfully at the back door as the policeman lifted him off the ground. The phone always rang at this time, just as he’d be arriving home from school. It was his mum. She never said anything, of course, but Milo knew the sound of her silence as well as he knew her voice. Sometimes he thought he could even hear her heart beating.
‘Can’t talk now, Mum,’ he called out as he was carried away.
Paste makes waste
The neighbours were out in force as Milo was taken to the police car. The cops shoved their way forward like cowboys braving a gauntlet of Indians in an old movie. Milo wondered that if he came out the other end would he, like the cowboys, be okay.
It was a short drive to the police station. Too short really. Milo would happily have taken a tour of the city; it would have given him time to think up some really good answers to the really good questions he knew the police were going to ask him. Despite the brevity of the drive, he did manage to think up a few questions they might ask, but unfortunately he had no time at all to come up with the answers. But that was life, his mum often said: ‘More questions than answers. It’s what makes us human’.
Milo was interrogated in shifts. He found this very confusing because every hour or so his questioners would change. That meant he had to start all over again making a careful study of faces and gestures, the way the cops sat or leaned, even the way they thumped the table and went beetroot red. His mum had spent many long hours coaching him in such things but the change of interrogators bewildered him, though he tried his best to answer them. The only person in the room who didn’t keep swapping was the child advocate from social services, a dumpy-looking woman with thick glasses and iron-grey hair. She kept smiling at Milo, which frightened him a little.
‘Why’d you do it, Milo?’ asked Detective Barnes who, with his partner Detective Sergeant Aminta Kosta, was back for another round of interrogation. Confusingly, though, they asked exactly the same questions as before but pretended they were doing it for the first time. Milo wondered if they had short-term memory loss, like the man in Memento.
‘Do what?’
‘You know.’
‘Do I?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Why’d you go see Mrs Appleby?’
‘Oh. I wanted her to find my mum’s shoe.’
Detective Barnes raised an eyebrow. Milo ran through the list in his head. Raised Eyebrow: a quizzical or sceptical response. Well, that was helpful.
‘What shoe?’
‘The missing shoe.’
Detective Barnes sighed. ‘And where is the one that’s not missing?’
Milo smiled. This was a new question. ‘In my backpack.’ He pointed at his bag on the floor.
Barnes picked it up, and fished out the red sparkly shoe. He eyed it curiously, then looked up at Milo. ‘You like women’s shoes, Milo?’
Milo shrugged. ‘They’re okay, I suppose. You can’t walk in them. You need special training.’
‘You like walking in women’s shoes?’
‘No, I don’t have the special training.’
Another long sigh from the detective. Kosta, a so
lidly built woman with narrow eyes and dark hair, scowled.
Milo sniffled and wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve.
Kosta shoved a packet of tissues across the table. ‘Got a cold?’
Milo looked at her. ‘A cold what?’
‘Right,’ the detective said, and the others nodded in confirmation.
Milo delved into his mind for what all this meant, but came up empty.
Detective Barnes clicked his fingers to draw Milo’s attention. Milo knew that he was the designated ‘good cop’ in this interview but the knowledge didn’t seem to help much.
‘Where’s the other shoe, Milo?’
‘My mother has it.’
‘Where’s your mother?’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘You’re not helping yourself, mate,’ Detective Barnes said. He leaned forward. His face had turned dark.
The child advocate finally spoke up. ‘How are you feeling, Milo?’
Milo knew what he was supposed to say to that question. It was an easy one. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
Detective Barnes said, ‘Good, so let’s continue. Okay, you’re looking for your mum who left home a month ago. What did Mrs Appleby have to do with that?’
‘She’s a psychic detective.’
Detective Barnes stared at Milo. A new expression came onto his face, like he’d just worked something out. Milo was quite excited that he’d understood this. It fit a phrase on his list of looks: ‘the penny dropped’.
‘You thought she could tell you?’ Milo nodded. ‘And did she?’
‘Did she what?’
‘Tell you?’
Milo pondered the question. What had Mrs Appleby told him? Not much really. ‘She said my mum missed me and the shoe and she waved her hand in the air a bit and said not to use too much blood, but not in that order.’
Detective Barnes blinked. ‘Blood?’
‘That’s what she said,’ said Milo.
Kosta suddenly asked, ‘Why’d you kill the old woman?’
Milo turned in his seat and gave Kosta all his attention, trying to read the odd array of expressions on her face. After a minute he gave up on this and thought about her question. ‘Did I kill her? Both times?’