by Joanna Baker
I could feel my fear rising to panic. That wasn’t going to help. I tried to talk it down.
‘Well, Muggins old boy,’ I said aloud. ‘Looks like we’re toast. All except my feet which are wet and probably won’t burn. That might be all they find, you know — a charred corpse smelling of Rosemary and Lavender Massage Oil and a pair of feet in some knocked up black and tan Globes which my cousins will fight over at my funeral.’
Muggins pressed together his thin orange lips. He looked as if he had such a stomach ache that burning alive would be a pleasant relief.
Still, it was probably a good thing Muggins and I had that little chat because after that things started to get very serious and the panic took over, and I must confess I forgot about him.
Somewhere at the back of the cottage, part of the roof called it a day and collapsed, and a really bad blast of hot air came up the corridor, singeing my exposed cheek. My skin went tight. I could feel it cracking.
At the same time the smoke-factor went up about ten notches. And now it contained something worse. From the kitchen came the throat-cutting smell of melting plastic. There was a lot of plastic in the kitchen — bowls and jugs and sealed boxes for keeping things fresh. It smelt like poison. Mrs R’s Tupperware was going up.
Every breath coated my lungs in fumes. I could feel them clawing at my throat, making me gag and choke. Then things started falling from the ceiling: bits of paint and charred paper. I had to duck to avoid a small piece of wood that was still burning. It landed about a fist’s width away from my face. I started yelling.
No one heard me. Even before the second word my voice started to give out. My stomach did a big vomiting spasm. The air was burning my lips, the insides of my mouth, my eyes. I shut them, pushed the end of a sleeve over my mouth and wrapped the other arm over my head, trying to think — and then trying not to think.
There was a sound. I pushed myself up, letting more cutting fumes into my mouth, and squinted my eyes open. There was someone moving. Through tears and smoke I could see him standing in the doorway. He was still in black and still wearing the ski mask. I tried to shout but all that came out was a voiceless breath. I fell back to the floor, breathing through my sleeve and trying to work some saliva into my mouth.
Was this the one called Perry, the mastermind who knew the place? He didn’t see me but went quickly over to the counter on the other side of the room. It looked as if he was after something and had sneaked back for it without telling his mates. He held a cloth over his mask where his mouth and nose were and he wasn’t directly under the burning part of the ceiling, but still, he must have been pretty desperate for cash, to have come back into this.
Instead of trying to open the cash register, he squatted down. The counter was end-on to me and through the smoke I could just make out what he was doing.
Over here! Over here! I pulled my lips back, but started the dry vomiting again. The fire in the kitchen was roaring now and more stuff was falling around us. Furiously I pulled and kicked at the shelves. I banged the floor with my fists but he didn’t notice.
One last effort. I cleared my throat, forced my mouth open, dragged some air into my scorching lungs and half-forced half-coughed it up again.
‘Aaeerghh,’ I said.
No good.
He was desperate all right. The wall behind him was smouldering and he was coughing with each breath. He started scrabbling under the counter, pulling things out onto the floor. He snatched up two long narrow things and headed for the door.
No! No! My skin was burning, melting like plastic. I was blind. I was going to be left here. I was going to die! I had to do something. Then, inspiration. Muggins. Good old buddy, old dude, Muggins. I picked him up with one hand and hammered him into the floor. It wasn’t as loud as I’d hoped, but ski-mask heard it. He stopped and turned and saw me. He said something I didn’t hear. It would have had four letters. He wasn’t pleased to find me there.
He came over, tripping in the darkness and giving panicky choking coughs. Near the counter, part of the wall fell in. To free his hands for the shelves on my legs, ski-mask had to put his two little treasures down near my face. Through my sobbing choking relief, I saw that they were boxes of aluminium foil. With a rasping gulp of air and a big easy heave, mask-man lifted the shelves high enough for me to drag my legs and the spinning wheel out. Then he sort of hurled the spinning wheel aside. The relief was intense and hit me like a wave of sickness. I tried to get to my feet. Nothing seemed to be working properly. My head was spinning and pounding with pain and my vision blurred and I thought I was going to throw up. Ski-mask scooped his boxes up in one hand and helped me up with the other and together we lurched for the door.
His charity didn’t extend to staying with me to make sure I was going to live. He got me far enough away from the building to be safe from the fire and then more or less dropped me on a piece of wet grass beside the road. He half-whispered a message into my left ear.
‘Tell anyone and you’re dead.’ His voice sounded about as burned as mine was. Then he disappeared.
I couldn’t move. The world and I weren’t really connected, but I could feel enough of it to know that it was spinning and tipping wildly. My cheeks were being burnt now by the cold air. I couldn’t feel my feet at all. It didn’t matter to me any more if I fried or suffocated or froze. I just wanted to rest. Closing my eyes made everything swing around more, so I kept them open. But I hoped nobody else would come and try to make me move.
So I ended the little adventure as I began it, still as death, flat on my back, staring up into darkness.
***
I thought about ski-mask. A few things had intrigued me. He had a nice smell. A sort of sweet herbal scent that had mingled with the fumes when I fell against him. And he felt really soft. Not flabby — he was strong. Velvety soft. Whatever he was wearing had been silkier than anything I’d felt before. And I thought about the foil. I wondered how he’d known what he was after and where it was. Most people wouldn’t look for aluminium foil under a shop counter. Most people wouldn’t enter a burning building for it, either.
But I didn’t wonder why he wanted it so badly, because I already knew.
Chapter 2
I don’t know much about the history of mankind or anything, but I’d be prepared to bet that not many people have been whacked on the back of the head by a wooden postman, half-crushed by a spinning wheel and choked on the fumes of a kitchen full of melting Tupperware. At least not all at once. Personally I found it a bit difficult to get over.
Not long after I got to the street and had my little lie down there was a lot of action. It’s confused in my mind, but it involved, among other things, two cops from Beechworth and Mrs Dowling from across the street, who hadn’t heard a thing but who was woken up by the light of the fire. People carried me into my place. A doctor came. At some stage there was a phone call to my parents, who were at the funeral of an old friend. I also remember standing up and saying I was all right and then being sick on the carpet. At least that scared the cops away for a while. I was prodded all over by Jane Green our GP, and somehow she and I managed to convince Mum and Dad that there was no need to come tearing back from Griffith. I remember Dad’s voice on the phone sounding relieved and telling me how Aunty Nat had a lot of emotional issues at this sad time, and that they should be there for her, which, incidentally, I found more spew-worthy than anything the fire had done. Mrs Dowling insisted on staying with me for a while and I have a shadowy memory that she tried to make me eat some bananas with milk on them. Weird idea. Maybe I dreamt that bit.
And then I got some sleep. About fourteen hours.
When I finally did wake up, at about three o’clock the next afternoon, I was still in the evil clutches of the smoke-poisoning. I had a headache and I felt cold in the stomach and weak in the arms and legs. The only good thing was that I had an original excuse not to have my history assignment finished, complete with a doctor and two policemen as witnesses. I
could just see old Spearsey trying to argue with that one. It took me about an hour to get dressed and showered and during this time the picture of Spearsey is about the only pleasant thought I had. It was about the only thought I had at all. My brain felt thick and lumpy and ideas weren’t moving too well.
This was unfortunate, because a lot of what happened that afternoon turned out to be very important. A heap of people were about to swim through my life, and if only I’d had my wits about me and been able to absorb every event and everything they’d said it could have saved me a lot of agony later on. Because if I’d been able to remember it all in the right order, like Chess did, I wouldn’t have spent so much time on the wrong things. I’d have seen it all much sooner: who burned down the café, the meaning of that stupid necklace, who killed Debs, and the truth about what happened on Devastation Road.
***
But that isn’t the way it was. I don’t know what particular holiday my wits had taken that afternoon, but I was basically out of it.
The first thing I remember clearly is staring at a vase of flowers as they slipped in and out of focus. Those flowers were really bugging me. I did not like them. They had hundreds of narrow petals the colour of chicken noodle soup, sticking out everywhere, so that they didn’t look like flowers at all, more like demented pom-poms on stalks. I stared at them for a long time wishing they’d go away. Which shows I wasn’t thinking clearly. Because they were flowers.
I was in the Yackandandah Bakery and outside it was raining again. I’d gone there about three, mainly to hide from Mrs Dowling, who had been dropping in all morning, and the police, who would be wanting to ask questions about the fire. After what ski-mask had whispered to me, I wasn’t sure how much I should say to the police and I wasn’t in the mood to think it through. So there I was, hiding in the very back booth, staring at the flowers which were on a bench near the kitchen.
The Yack Bakery is part of our tree-lined, tumble-down main street that the tourists love. It has a wooden verandah over the footpath and a swinging sign painted with wheat and flowers. It’s not considered a cool place to hang. It’s OK to buy the pies, but at the age of fifteen you’re supposed to take them outside to eat them. I mean the place has lace curtains.
As usual in times of extreme stress, I was hoping to revive myself with a steak and onion pie and a coke or seven, and today I didn’t take them to the bench in High Street. For one thing, I knew I’d be spotted. But mostly my legs felt like cold plasticine and I didn’t think I’d make it that far.
After half an hour I’d eaten most of the pie and worked my way through one and a half cokes and this little cocktail was now bubbling around inside me, while in front of me the rest of the pie congealed under a sticky pool of sauce. The bakery phone seemed to be ringing a lot today, twanging on my headache.
I didn’t have proper control of my eyes. When I finally managed to drag them away from the scummy flowers, the only thing I seemed able to look at was a little blob of pie and sauce on the table near my right elbow. It was a solid blob, dark and knobbly, like a shiny black wart, floating around in a little red sea. Looking at it made me feel much worse. Strangely, I could smell smoke and fumes, as if I was still in the fire. I had changed my clothes and washed my hair. But somehow the smell was still there, stuck inside my nostrils. And there was something else I couldn’t shake — the rough grip under my arms, the soft soft jumper against my skin, the rasping voice, ‘Tell anyone about this and you’re dead.’
My mind jumped a track. The door to the bakery kitchen was three metres away. There was no way I’d make it to the sink if I was sick. I started to sweat and swallow.
And then, just to top off a perfect situation, Chess turned up.
Chess is an old friend. One of those people you get stuck with. There aren’t many kids our age in Yack and while the others are way better, Chess is the one who always seems to be around. We’ve spent a lot of Saturday afternoons together, and Saturday nights. She’s a family friend. In a way. I can’t stand her.
‘Golly, Matty. You look awful.’
This is the sort of thing Chess says. ‘Gosh, golly, Oh my goodness gracious me.’ I didn’t have an answer. I swallowed again.
She sat down, not opposite me, like any normal person, but next to me, as if she wanted to prop me up or something. I didn’t have the energy to move. Even edging away sent my brain into a downward spiral. So we sat there, both facing the same way, like two kids waiting for birthday cake.
She said, ‘The police are looking for you.’
I didn’t answer her.
She tried again. ‘Do you really think a pie is a good idea?’
What was she? A substitute mother? I stared past her to the back end of the bakery counter. I said, ‘I really hate those flowers.’
‘I mean it’s pretty obvious. Your whole system will be in shock. You don’t want to direct your blood supply to your stomach. All those fats and proteins …’
I slumped lower in the seat, praying that no one would see us together. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Chess. She’s a good person. Very well-meaning. It’s just that, like most well-meaning people, she’s a total liability.
She and her father, Alec, came to Yackandandah five or six years ago and everyone says he’s an alcoholic. No one ever says much else about Chess’s history. I know her mother is dead and her father has a lot of problems apart from just drinking, which means, as far as I can see, that he’s a moody creep and that Chess never knows where her next meal is coming from, except that most often it comes from us. And with my Mum seeing herself as a kind of one-woman community welfare department, Alec Febey is right up her alley. A single parent and inclined to substance abuse — Mum adopted him almost immediately as one of her causes. For a while he and Chess were around nearly every day, with Alec and Mum having long talks in the garden, Dad making the tea and then hiding in his pottery shed, and Chess and me eating toast in front of DVDs. She tried to teach me to play a few games — Scrabble and gin rummy — but I don’t concentrate well and I think I was a big disappointment. She never even tried to teach me to play chess.
Chess has somehow missed the last decade altogether. She still dresses as if she was six years old — little cotton shirts and baggy jeans gathered in with belts. Add to that a fringe cut two centimetres above the eyebrows and a little-girl ponytail tied in one of those scrunchie things, and the picture is complete. I’ve tried telling her about it, but she just laughs at me.
Chess is an intellectual. You would have guessed that by the name. She didn’t get it playing basketball. Her real name is Jessica. Chess is a thinker. She thinks all the time, which puts her on a different wavelength from nearly everyone in Yack. This is another thing she’s completely unashamed of, even when she can see how much it annoys people.
Living in a town the size of Yack a person has to work hard not to be classed as a hayseed, and in that regard Chess is not the sort of person you want to be associated with. Add to that the fact that I’m a bit of a talker and so in constant danger of being labelled girlie, and I really can’t afford to hang with anyone who’s a bit suss. I try hard not to hurt her feelings. Usually I manage to say something pally to her and then scoot away but it’s not always that easy. Some days I just wasn’t able to deal with her and this was one of them.
For one thing I didn’t seem able to get past the flowers. ‘Who would pick flowers like that? Who would grow them?’
Now we were both looking at them.
‘No one. They’re silk,’ said Chess.
I stared at them some more. Dully I wondered how she could see that. I looked at the lump of pie again. It slipped out of focus. I looked at Chess. The light from the street was behind the back of our chair. She was dim and grainy. I could hardly see her …
‘I can’t see!’ I shrieked. ‘My eyes!’ I looked back at the flowers. ‘I can’t see that, Chess.’
‘You don’t have to see it. It’s obvious.’
‘It’
s not obvious. They look real to me. My eyes are going!’
I started rubbing furiously at them. Chess pulled my hands away and explained slowly to me. ‘You don’t have to use your eyes. You have to use your brain. It’s obvious. They’re chrysanthemums.’
‘What?’ I blinked into space. My eyes were completely wrecked now that I had rubbed them so hard.
‘Chrysanthemums,’ repeated Chess. ‘Just think.’
She paused, waiting for some revelation to strike me. I completely failed to get the point. Chess was enjoying herself now. I could hear that much in her voice. I wasn’t deaf.
She went on. ‘It’s what you gave your mother last Mother’s Day, isn’t it? I remember buying them for you.’
I stared at the table. Somewhere at the front of the shop the phone was ringing. My focus was returning.
‘And when is Mother’s Day?’ said Chess patiently.
When Chess is in this mood it’s usually best just to pretend to listen. I gave myself a little hand massage and let her go.
‘May. Autumn. And today is the tenth of December. Chrysanthemums don’t flower in early summer.’
As if she’d proven something, my vision suddenly cleared. ‘OK, right. Thanks Chess.’
‘Their flowering is stimulated by the shorter days and the colder nights. Obviously —’
I slapped my hands down hard on the table. ‘Look! Let’s agree on one small thing. You don’t mention the word ‘obviously’ again. I think things will go a lot better.’
Chess gave me a caring and pitying smile. ‘Your elbow’s in the sauce.’
***
But it was her next words that really panicked me. There was a tinkle from the bell on the bakery door and Chess grinned. ‘Here comes Tara,’ she said.
I looked at Chess. We both had our backs to the door and even if we turned around all we could see was the wooden back of our own booth. So she couldn’t possibly know, by the sound of the door who was coming in. I could tell from her expression that she wanted me to ask how she knew it was Tara. I narrowed my eyes at her.