by Peter Twohig
While all this was going on, and while Dunnett was writing a note to Stern, the kid took no further part in proceedings but twisted around to check out the room, no doubt looking for something flammable. When he saw my eye in the crack of the door he got up and walked over to a set of scales and pretended to weigh himself. While he was doing this he looked in a mirror beside the scales, in which we were able to see a bit of each other’s faces.
His expression did not change. It was as though he was seeing nothing in particular, yet there was a gleam in his eye. We had one of those silent conversations, like Tom and me used to have when something really good was happening, like when we both saw Josephine Thompson at the same time; or when something bad was happening, like when we both got caught being late for Mass. That kid and me said to each other: ‘Yes, that’s right: it’s me, a fellow superhero, having a risky day, just like you. I hope we meet again.’ In that moment I realised who I was truly talking to: Flame Boy!
The copper suddenly grabbed Flame Boy and wrenched him off the scales so hard that he flew across the floor and hit the chair he had been sitting on really hard. He immediately started fighting back, and giving the copper and Dunnett a piece of his mind, and he was pretty good at it, too, so that Dunnett had to help the cop get him out of the surgery and into the street.
They were going to take him to Dr Stern, just like they were going to do to me, until Mum and Granddad put their foot down. They were going to give him electric shocks. I didn’t want to see Flame Boy suffer; and though he wasn’t really a friend, he was a kind of brother, now. But I couldn’t make myself stay away. So I told myself that I had to stay with him, no matter what, that I wouldn’t give up on him. That made it easier for me to do what I knew I was going to do anyway.
While the travelling ruckus was making its way to the front door en route to Dr Stern’s, I slipped across the hall into the laundry and let myself out the back way. I planned to see if I could listen in somehow, but once I was over the side fence and into Stern’s back yard, it was easier than I thought. The side door of Stern’s garage was open, and through it I could see that the window of a Jaguar was wound down, so I knew he had either just arrived or was going out. The back door to the house was open too, and I could hear the doorbell ringing all the way from the other end of the house. As I looked in I saw Dr Stern opening the door to the policeman, who was accompanied by Flame Boy in a headlock.
‘Yes?’ said Stern, sounding as if he hated coppers, too.
‘Ah, Dr Stern, I’ve just been to see Dr Dunnett with this boy, who has been starting fires all over the neighbourhood. Dr Dunnett was hoping you might be able to help … I’ve got a note —’
‘Look, Constable, I’m not seeing patients this morning. Where are the child’s parents?’
‘There’s only a mother, and she’s blind and drunk most of the time. She was in no fit state to come.’
‘I was on my way out. Let me see the note.’ He read it while the copper and Flame Boy struggled with each other.
‘Do you have a car, Constable?’
‘Yes, Doctor. I can wait and take him home.’
‘All right, then. Follow me.’
I ducked out of sight while they came down to the room nearest the back door and went in. Flame Boy started to give them an earful, but got a smack in the head for his trouble, and decided to shut up. I couldn’t tell what was happening just by listening, so I got an old garden chair and put it under the window, and looked over the ledge.
Dunnett had told Mum that Stern was going to shock me every second day, so I knew they hadn’t been planning on killing me straightaway, and I was hoping they were going to give Flame Boy the kind of shock that wouldn’t kill him either. When I looked in, Stern and the copper were strapping Flame Boy to a narrow metal table. The doctor said something to the copper, and he went outside, and I heard him going down to the waiting room.
The doctor went around to the back of Flame Boy’s head, where the torture machine was, got a big pair of tongs with a rubber handle, put the ends of the tongs on Flame Boy’s temples and screwed them on tight. Then he went back to the machine and started fiddling with the knobs, and dialled a number with a phone dial that was on the front. Finally, he stuck a short bit of black garden hose in the kid’s mouth. Flame Boy started to gag and look around in terror, and just then his eyes and mine met, and he seemed to be paralysed, just the way he went when I saw him on the floor of his house that day his mother cut him. If he hadn’t had the hose in his mouth I think he might have smiled his lopsided smile at me.
Stern turned a knob, and suddenly Flame Boy bent back and went rigid, and his eyes slammed shut in pain. There was a roar from somewhere inside him that trumpeted out through the hose, then nothing. His face, at first pale, turned blue, and his body seemed to stay stiff and bent forever. It was the woman in the house in Kipling Street all over again. He was turning purple. He was going to die. Stern just stood and looked at his watch, and back to the kid, as if the kid was holding him up.
Finally, instead of slumping dead in a heap, the way the woman had, the kid began to shake so hard that I thought he was going to shake himself loose and wreck the table. A pale citrine stream of urine flowed delicately down one of its legs, like a spiralling metallic Christmas decoration. When the shaking stopped, after long minutes, the doctor relaxed the straps a little, turned the kid on his side, and pulled the hose out. Then he looked at his watch again, and left. I heard him say loudly: ‘Look, Constable. I really can’t wait any longer. The boy will wake up in twenty minutes or so. Pay no attention to the mess; my girl will clean it up later. If you could take him home, and close the front door after you, that would be wonderful.’
I climbed down from my perch and hid inside a shed behind the garage, while Stern opened the garage door and backed out into the street. He left the garage door open and drove off.
When I climbed back up and looked in the window, Flame Boy’s eyes were open, but he was still out cold, and twitching every now and then. I had heard of that happening to boxers when they had brain damage. He was lying with his head turned towards the window, and his mouth on the edge of the table, and was drooling all the way down to the floor, in one long sticky bit, a lot like Biscuit when he knows it’s dinner time. In his pants there was a big wet patch. The wires Stern had used to shock Flame Boy’s brain were still hanging out of the nearby electrical machine.
My body suddenly felt very heavy, so I just let it sink to the ground and when I got there I put my head in my hands because I didn’t have the strength to hold it up. I wanted to cry so badly that I had a headache, not just for Flame Boy, though he deserved someone to cry for him, and, for once, not for Tom, though the whole thing reminded me of Tom’s death. I wanted to cry for myself. But I couldn’t shed a single tear, and for that I was ashamed. But, as usual, I came up with a solution. Granddad always says that the best cure for the blues is work. And I had my work cut out for me now. I dragged myself to my feet and pulled myself back up to the window ledge. When I looked in, Flame Boy was gone. I stared at the empty table for a few seconds, then I heard the slamming of the front door.
I spent the next half-hour looking in nearby back yards for an axe, and when I found one, I took it back to Dr Stern’s place. I let myself in through the back door, using my set of Allen keys, a little trick I learnt from Blarney Barney, and performed a bit of surgery myself — on the torture machine.
For a minute there I ceased to be the Cartographer and became Rex Barrow, saving Professor Dorn and his daughter from the evil doctor in The Lost Planet. I looked at the machine, and it looked at me. It had two words on it that grabbed my attention: SHOCK and, in a little diamond, BOTH. I felt as if the machine was trying to tell me something, as if it was telling me that it had beaten us. But it hadn’t.
I had never broken anything electrical with an axe before, and I loved the glassy, squeaky screams it made. They were the sounds of vengeance.
13 A taste of Burnley
Bitter
Though the Manual made no mention of it, I reckoned that there must be a whole town under the real town, one made of tunnels, drains, steps and ladders, and so I began to include the underground part of Richmond on my map. Apart from that, the Manual described just about everything of importance: the houses, the streets, the railway lines, the bridges, the Yarra River and other spots where there was water. I had marked them all on the map using a mixture of symbols: the ones from Mrs Morgan’s map, army symbols and even some I invented on my own.
For example, there was no symbol in the Manual for a riverboat, yet there were riverboats on the river, so I drew my own. It was only when I was fishing down at the Drake Street wharf with Biscuit one day that I realised there was a picture of a riverboat on the timetable they put in the timetable box. So I took one home and cut out the picture of the boat — it was the Lonsdale — and stuck it on the map with Clag. After that I stuck as many things on the map as I could.
Nothing was safe from the Cartographer’s Clag of Mystery and Notebook of Doom. I even began to mark addresses from Mum’s address book and the backs of envelopes on the map. Granddad kept most of his addresses in his head, as he once told me that he never wrote anything down that he wouldn’t want to have read out in court, which was fair enough. However, he did have a phone pad with a few local addresses on it, so on they went.
The map had always been big, and each journey took up a whole page of the book I made out of butcher’s paper — the mapster, as I called it. I think that’s what Captain Video would have called it if he ever saw a map, but he seemed to have no use for them.
I could never really keep the map a secret from Mum, so what I did was let her see me constantly gluing things onto it at the dining room table, until she got used to it. Every now and then I’d point to some incredibly boring bit that I’d created just for Mum to see, and say something like: ‘Hey, Mum, come and see my drawing of Balmain Street; it shows that cat that’s got three legs.’ After coming over and pretending to be interested a few times, I knew she was thinking: Jesus, if I have to look at that map one more time, I’ll scream. I’ll tell him I’m a bit tired. And she did, and after that I could have been sitting there stark naked and she wouldn’t have noticed. I wished Tom could’ve been there. He would have laughed his head off.
Biscuit liked the map a lot, especially as there was a photo of him glued to it, one that Mum had taken with her Brownie Box camera. The picture was a good one, though it made Biscuit look friendly when, secretly, he was a vicious mongrel. I wouldn’t have minded the picture, except that his tongue was hanging out.
Basically, if Biscuit could tread on the map he would. He also liked licking the Clag, which didn’t make sense to me until Mum told me that they made it from horses’ hooves. Then I remembered that watchdogs love to tear horses limb from limb — that’s what they do, for Christ’s sake, as Mum would say.
I couldn’t do much about Biscuit: he was my sidekick, and needed to be around when I was working on the map. Though it didn’t look like it, Biscuit could read maps quite well, and could in fact take in vast stretches of houses and buildings and roads with a casual glance. A good watchdog never shows that he has skills, however; you just have to know these things. I said as much to Mum one day, and she replied that she knew Biscuit was clever because he always seemed to know when the biscuits were ready to be taken out of the oven. He would suddenly wake up — during the day, when he was not out on an adventure with me he was always saving his strength like mad — and come in and sit in front of the oven. That was a very handy skill to have.
So now that the map was looking great, and Biscuit was trained to the point where he had been promoted from Watchdog to Detective Dog, I thought it was time to embark on the greatest adventure of my life. Nearly all my time had been spent mapping the streets of my neighbourhood, but I had also been inside a few houses, like old Who Dunnett’s, and I had drawn maps of the bits of them I had been able to see. For the Sandersons’ place, I ended up drawing my favourite part last: the spot I was standing on when I saw the Honey Warm and Hungry Girl.
So now I was off to explore the Orange Tree pub.
When I got to the pub, my intention had been to enter through the Ladies Lounge door, and quietly slip up the stairs to the mysterious first floor, as I had long wondered what was up there. But I changed my exploration route before I even got in the door. The pub had a trapdoor in the footpath around the side that was used for delivering barrels of beer, and the trapdoor was open. Also, there was no one around. I looked into the darkness, and heard nothing, but I did see a ladder. So down I went — as Granddad says: You gotta be in it to win it. At the bottom the whole cellar was full of beer barrels: large ones. Those barrels had come a long way, all the way from just around the corner — that was where the Burnley Brewery was. It had a huge glass of beer on top that lit up at night. The barrels in the cellar all had BURNLEY BITTER stamped on the side. I had tasted Burnley Bitter many times, and so had Biscuit. I was not allowed to drink it myself, but I used to take a sip from Mum’s glass when she wasn’t looking. It’s important for a detective-explorer to know the difference between the various brands of beer. For some reason, Biscuit was allowed to drink the stuff, and Mum used to put some in his bowl whenever she was having a drink. Biscuit loved beer. He never ceased to amaze me, that dog; I doubt that even Devil, the Phantom’s pet wolf, was a beer drinker.
So there I was, down in the cellar, surrounded by tall barrels that had a very woody, grimy smell, and looking up the ladder to make sure I could get out again if something went wrong. This place would make a great addition to the map, I thought. There was another set of steps leading to another trapdoor, and when I walked up towards it I could smell beer and hear the mob in the bar. I went back down the steps and walked right around the cellar and finally found a third set of stairs leading up to a doorway, not a trapdoor. That door was made for opening. So open it I did. On the other side was a passage, and the back of the bar was just a few yards away. If I went in the opposite direction I could do some serious exploring.
I came to a staircase, which went up to the mysterious first floor. It creaked horribly, but the noise in the bar was so loud, I wasn’t all that worried. The main thing was that at the top of the stairs there was a lot to see. There was a passage that ran around the pub and had two corners in it. On the outside of the passage there were doors, and these, I discovered, were all made for opening too.
The first door on the left opened into someone’s bedroom. It was pretty messy and had a few clothes flung here and there, though nothing that looked like it would fit me. It had a bed about the same size as mine, which had a dull grey blanket on it. Beside the bed was a chair with a clock on it and a copy of the Sporting Globe. Hanging on the back of the chair was a hat, the kind worn by blokes, blokes being men who went to the pub, the races, the dogs and to work. My dad was a bloke. He only had one bloke’s hat and he took it with him when he left. I had had my eye out for a bloke’s hat of my own ever since I had become a superhero, but I thought that it was one thing to find one that someone had forgotten somewhere, and another thing to find one in someone’s bedroom.
I had a look out the window, to get my bearings. A bloke who was crossing the street and heading for the pub looked up at me and suddenly quickened his step. It was time to move, as I knew that it was bad enough just being a kid, but being a kid in a pub and in someone else’s bedroom couldn’t work out well for any kid, not even if he was Prince Bloody Charles, so I ran like hell — again.
Out in the hall, I had two choices, and going down the stairs looked bad, as that was where the bloke was going to come from, probably with the police, so I turned the other way and opened a door marked ‘Toilet’. Now on TV a toilet is always a perfect escape route, as everyone knows — but the one we had at our place would have been a death trap, and this one was no different. Outside, I heard someone coming up the old carpeted stairs, so I tried the door next to the toilet
. It opened into a bathroom, one with an open window. I went in and closed the door behind me and locked it from the inside. Outside, I saw the roof of the house next door just a few feet below me. I hopped out the window and walked along the roof, and around the tall house-shaped bit at the back that hid me from the windows of the pub. I was safe, and as for the pub, I would be back. I needed to get to know the layout of the place, that was all, and then I could stick it on the map. As it was, I had a pretty good idea what it looked like. I was now in my element: the roof is the friend of every kid, as grown-ups never go onto roofs. On a roof a kid can be free, can look down on the world, and can find places to stash things.
I was just taking in the view when the roof gave way.
It’s a funny thing about roofs: you never know when you’re going to fall through one of them. I landed in the attic of the house, with my head still sticking out of the roof, and my eyes still taking in the view. There had been a bit of a racket when the roof gave way, as it was made of corrugated iron, but I reckoned that down below, in the house, it must have sounded like a bomb had gone off. So I pulled my head in with the rest of me and had a listen with my ear to the floor, which was actually the ceiling of the house, if you can picture it.
There was no sound at all, which told me that either the house was owned by a deaf old lady, or there was nobody home. My next task was to find out what had happened to my left thigh, which was stinging like hell. I discovered that it had been badly slashed and was bleeding all over the place. There would be questions when I go t home. And what if the police saw me leaving? Talk about looking suspicious. Oh well, I’d have to cross that bridge when I came to it, as the Fightin’ Gyrenes say. But I did have one thing going for me: there was lots of light, owing to the hole in the roof, so I went for a little exploration trip around the attic, and soon had worked out where the living room, bathroom and kitchen were, from clues — mainly pipes and chimneys. I also found a manhole leading to the house below, quite close to where I had fallen. In fact, I had just missed falling through that as well, and getting killed. It was just made of a thin piece of tin, so I opened it carefully and looked down.