by Peter Twohig
‘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.
It turned out that half of Melbourne was coming over. There was Nanna Blayney, my idiotic cousin Brendan, and Uncle Frank and Aunty Betty, who came from a better part of town, which, believe me, was easy to do.
Uncle Frank and Aunty Betty had stopped off at Nanna Blayney’s on the way over and had a cuppa with her, then brought her over to our place. This was a common Sunday arrangement, and no one saw any reason to change it just because Dad had gone bush. His big brother still turned up, and his mum, so the Blayneys and the Taggertys were evenly represented.
Though Dad and I visited Nanna on the Triumph every now and then, Mum rarely went to her house for the simple reason that she couldn’t stand her. I had worked out that this was because Nanna had more husbands than Mum (at the last count, two-nil), even though they were both pretend husbands, which was fairly common in our neck of the woods. But Dad couldn’t have cared less, and besides, he turned out to be a chip off the old block. However, Mum kept her feelings to herself, apart from stamping her feet when she walked, smashing the crockery and going completely nuts whenever Nanna Blayney’s name was mentioned.
On top of that she would only let Nanna bring one of her pretend husbands into the house at a time (and she made no secret of the fact that she preferred Uncle Seb, the one who could play the piano). But Barney, who had a mysterious connection to Nanna that was unclear to everyone (even, I think, Granddad), told me that as far as Nanna was concerned it was both or neither. Mum could be relied on to relax the rule every Christmas Day, and had also made a special exception when we had the wake for Tom, which turned out well as Uncle Seb set up camp at the piano and played all the tunes Tom liked — or so he said. Meanwhile, Uncle Mick organised friendly games of chance for pennies, which he said Tom would have approved of, it being well known that the twins had a fondness for pontoon that, while it could easily have come from either side of the family, was generally blamed on ‘bad influences’, which meant Mrs Carruthers.
It sometimes seemed to me that Mum was jealous of Nanna Blayney for another reason too — Nanna had more fun than two ladies rolled into one. I told myself that couldn’t be right, as Nanna was old and could keel over any tick of the clock. I just know that her house was one hell of a happy place, where there were no rules and the toast was always buttered thick.
The reason I’m telling you about Nanna Blayney is because every Sunday morning, starting at ten sharp, she bunged on morning tea, and certain people — an odd crowd — were apt to be there. There was Father Jackman, the scallywag curate from Saint Ignatius’s, who turned up with the excuse that he had to give Nanna Holy Communion as she wasn’t well enough to travel (despite her being unofficially excommunicated), but whom Nanna made sure never went home without all the sporting gossip. There was a bookie’s clerk and a retired steward, both friends of Uncle Mick; there were mysterious blokes in suits; women who did not seem to realise it was Sunday; and men who always seemed to know who was doing what to whom around our little slice of Melbourne long before the papers and the radio did, and often before the police. And then there was Barney, though no one knew the story, but which will give you some idea of what a small town Richmond is. I only found out about the Barney connection when I visited Nanna one Sunday morning with Dad, and found Barney sitting there in his suit, drinking tea.
‘Hello, Barn,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Same as you, young feller: I came for the free beer.’
I looked around at the guests sipping their tea.
‘I can’t see any beer.’
‘Looks like you missed out then, doesn’t it?’
So this was the kind of gathering Aunty Betty and Uncle Frank had just come from. And it was therefore no surprise to anyone that their table talk was far more interesting than the usual chat about Mr Menzies, Graham Kennedy and Chips Rafferty. If you ask me, I don’t think it’s a good idea for people like Aunty Betty to have morning tea at Nanna’s. For Uncle Frank it’s the stuff of his childhood, of course; but for Aunty Betty it’s like giving metho to an alcoholic.
I hated Aunty Betty, and not just because she had a fat neck and shouted a lot, but because she liked to kiss me, and I seemed to be copping twice as much now that there was only one of me. What Mum had in the nose department, Aunty Betty had in the voice department. But she knew everything about everybody. She knew more than the Sun News-Pictorial, 3UZ, and all the kids and nuns in my school put together. And, of course, she’d come fresh from a top-up at Nanna’s. So it was no surprise when, halfway through the main course, she pipes up with this little gem: ‘Wasn’t it terrible about the murder over here?’
Well, let me start by telling you that we lived in a part of Melbourne where if you didn’t have a murder every five minutes or so, the silence started to get on your nerves, so we didn’t all suddenly choke on our Brussels sprouts or anything. Granddad was there, and I looked at him to see how he’d take the news, because it was a well-known fact that if anyone was murdered, he’d probably be the first to know, but he kept on chewing as if the roast beef was boring him to death, which, believe me, would not have been possible.
‘What happened?’ asked Mum calmly, not wanting to let Aunty Betty think she had said something amazing.
‘I heard it on the news. It was just around the corner from here. They say he was horribly bashed and left to die on the side of Chapel Street — probably dumped there.’ She got some peas and mashed potato on her knife: how she could stick that knife in her mouth I don’t know — if I tried that stunt I’d be given a thick ear and sent to Tasmania for about ten years.
‘So who was it?’ asked Granddad, as if he didn’t know, and he kept looking at his roast as if it was more interesting than the conversation, though I could tell by the way that neither Mum nor him looked up that they both already knew all about it.
‘I can’t believe you haven’t heard about it, Dad,’ Aunty Betty said, making ‘you’ sound as if it was the most important word in the dictionary. Aunty Betty thought Granddad was the bee’s knees, because of the poetry bo
oks he had written. As far as she was concerned, it more than made up for the fact he used to be a boxer, and was still a bit of a roughnut. She took a quick look at Nanna. ‘I heard it was Bob Herbert, the bookmaker.’
‘Herbert, oh yeah,’ said Granddad. ‘I did hear something about it. But I didn’t hear anything about him being murdered — they reckon he’ll live.’
‘Course you did: it was on the news … well, some of it, and it’ll be in the papers tomorrow.’
‘Never read ’em meself,’ said Granddad, though that was definitely a porky, and by rights his nose should have grown about a foot long, though by the looks of it, that wasn’t his first lie. The truth was, Granddad read everything he could get his hands on, anything that had anything to do with the races, the footy or boxing. In his heyday he played as a rover for Hawthorn, until he got the sack for laying out the other team’s fullback, Stan Begby, who was built like a brick dunny. He told me he probably would have got a suspension, if he hadn’t jobbed the ump a few seconds later. Footy’s a funny sport.
And as for Granddad’s boxing history, Tom and I were always at him to tell us about it, but you’d reckon it was a flamin’ military secret or something. According to Mum, he wasn’t proud of those years. I found that pretty hard to believe, but could never get him to talk about it. Blarney Barney told me Granddad killed a bloke, but I didn’t believe him, and I told him so — Barney just laughed and shook his head. So all in all I suppose you could say that Granddad was pretty keen on sports.
As for racing, he always called it a ‘mug’s game’, though I don’t think he was one of the mugs.
But of course, Aunty Betty had just been warming up and was now under starter’s instructions.
‘Well, apparently the police have questioned Ken Palmer, that furniture chap, and he only lives a stone’s throw from here, just over the bridge, so you see he could have done it. Also, he’s a bit of a gambler — you should know that, Dad.’
Granddad seemed to be a lot more interested in his pumpkin, though God knows why.
‘Oh really?’ was all he said, with a quick look up and back to the pumpkin. ‘Bookies always have enemies, everyone knows that.’
‘Well,’ says Aunty Betty, moving over to the inside rail, ‘it seems his wife was the last known person to have seen Bob Herbert before, you know … what do you think of that?’
‘Then why’d the police question her husband?’ Granddad asked, showing that he knew a thing or two himself.
He had finished his food and for a minute I thought he was going to ask for seconds, just to give him a reason not to seem interested. But he had done the wise thing and packed it in.
‘Well, apparently, he dropped her off at her house on the night he was murdered —’
‘I told you, Betty, he wasn’t murdered —’
‘And that was the last she saw of him. They found his car at the airport. Also, according to a little bird —’ She looked at me, then at Mum as if to say: This is going to be strong stuff, and I’m not sure if that kid of yours should hear it, ‘– her husband was with Herbert’s wife at the time of the … well, whatever it was.’
Now when Aunty Betty starts talking, I usually go to the beach. That is, my mind goes to the beach, and my body stays behind and minds the fort. So I wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to the conversation, and just catching the odd word. But somewhere in the middle, about halfway down the back straight, it dawned on me that they had been talking about the bloke I saw at Wonder Woman’s house.
I had put two and two together, as they say. But had I been asked for my opinion – and there were two chances of that happening: Buckley’s and none, as Mum says – I would have pointed out that, regardless of what it might say or not say in the papers, the fact was that Bob had gotten his just deserts — and they were pretty just from where I had been standing — by being beaten half to death with a blunt object, namely Ken’s fist, then left to die — whether he died or not. It all reminded me of that Perry Mason episode: ‘The Case of the Runaway Corpse’. It was lucky for Ken and Wonder Woman, I thought, that Bob’s wife had provided an alibi for Ken. You never know who your friends are, Granddad says.
But as fascinated as I was to hear all these details of the Wonder Woman caper, I wished they’d talk about something else. I felt as though I had fallen into a blancmange quicksand again, and it was scaring me. At one fell swoop, as someone said, my secret identity was threatening to come unravelled like one of Mrs Gibson’s cardigans. But Mum and Granddad were still strangely controlled, as if all this was old news to them, though they kept on nodding and clicking their tongues and saying: ‘Go on!’
Then Aunty Betty said something that I thought would probably cause the roof to come crashing down and kill the lot of us.
‘Apparently someone called the ambulance to pick up Mr Herbert’s body, and no one has the faintest idea who it was, only that it was a child, a young boy, they say.’ Her eyes were bugging out of her head and her voice was hushed and dramatic.
‘The real murderer?’ asked Brendan, who had been hanging on every word, as if we were sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories.
‘Strike me pink,’ said Granddad, putting down his knife and fork. ‘There was no murder —’
‘No dear, a witness!’ said Aunty Betty, as if they were her dying words.
‘Wow!’ said my half-wit half-cousin.
‘I bet the police are scouring this part of Melbourne for that boy right now.’
Mum and Granddad reacted to all of this as if Aunty Betty had just told them Dr Mannix was a Catholic — in other words, they just nodded like a couple of grazing cart horses who were about as full of hay as you can get and were now looking forward to a bit of a lie-down, all of which made me feel as if my feet were filled up with electricity and my stomach with molten lead, because I knew how their minds worked, and I knew they didn’t miss a trick. Then my Aunty Betty, whom I had always suspected of being the person who started World War II, came across with a body blow that would have put Sugar Ray on the canvas.
‘It’s just a matter of time; they’ve got the boy’s fingerprints.’
Granddad didn’t even look up; Nanna was ready for dessert. ‘I heard it was just a domestic,’ Granddad said. ‘No harm done, no charges.’
Dad used to say that when Aunty Betty died, they would have to beat her mouth to death with a stick. Just then I couldn’t see the point in waiting.
But Aunty Betty loved to reminisce, and her favourite subject was life in Melbourne before and during the war. I was keen to find out about Mum in the war, because she would never discuss it when Dad was around, and I knew that she and Aunty Betty knew each other in those days.
‘Mum, Granddad showed me his medal from the war. Did you have medals?’
‘Medals? She’s got more medals than General Blamey,’ says Aunty Betty, beating her to the punch.
‘Betty —’
‘You have, Jean. Don’t tell me you haven’t shown him! You’ve got them somewhere, haven’t you?’
‘Betty, I’ll show him when he’s ready.’
‘Well I hope you do.’ She turned to me and half winked, so that for a moment she looked like Margaret Rutherford in Just My Luck. It made me wonder if she thought I looked like Norman Wisdom. I’m still wondering.
‘Your mum had a very important job in the war.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘Very hush-hush.’
I looked at Mum expectantly, but she only sighed and shook her head at Aunty Betty.
‘Your Aunty Betty has had too much sherry, I’m afraid.’
Everyone laughed.
But she hadn’t. When it came to the McWilliam’s Royal Reserve, Aunty Betty was a bottomless pit.
Tom would have known what to say next, but as I didn’t, that was that.
So I imagined how things would have gone if Tom was here. I couldn’t imagine it out loud or Mum and Granddad would have known I was pretending to be Tom. And I don’t think that would have
gone down too well.
‘Come on, Mum, let’s see ’em. Have you got one like Granddad — what was it, Granddad, the horse-saving medal? You know, the red and blue one.’
That was how Tom would have done it. Only louder. Fishing, that’s what Granddad called it, but nobody minded, really. You never know when you’re going to catch a fish, though you stood a better chance of catching a cold. I didn’t bother pushing Mum about the medal because these days she was happier if I just sat still and kept my mouth shut, like a normal kid. Still, I would conduct my own enquiries, secret ones, and I would get a look at the medals eventually — the Cartographer has a way with medals. Didn’t he have the Cartography Cross? In fact, I think he was just about due for another. For saving the Harrigan kid. I called it the Rescue Medal. But then I remembered with shame that I hadn’t rescued Tom.
19 The boy who knew too much
Sunday’s lunch conversation concerning Bob’s run-in with Ken was just like the notes the nuns wrote in the ‘Handwriting’ section of my school reports: Highly unsatisfactory. For a while there, Aunty Betty had me thinking that Bob’s number really was up. But I knew that Granddad was right. So it was back to screwing my head around like a kookaburra everywhere I went.
I had finally done it: I had become the Boy Who Knew Too Much. I had rolled the dice and they had come up snake-eyes, and now I was a wanted criminal, or at least I would be when the coppers caught up with me and Wonder Woman’s secret came out, and she would think I had blown the whistle on her and would tell the coppers, and Mum, and Father Hagen, and Mother Sylvester, that I was a burglar.
After the Woman Who Started World War II left, I asked if I could go for a little walk, and I was told, to my amazement, not to go too far. Too far! I was planning on going to Costa Rica, or maybe Heligoland, because I had no idea where those places were, so I reckoned no one else would either.
I had to find a place to lie low. It was plain to see that no one was going to bring up the subject of Dad and his secret hideout, and no one was going to do anything to help me get rid of the pain in my head that reminded me of Tom. So off I went, this time down to the power station pool, to investigate the terrific entrance I had seen the night the kidnapper almost got his comeuppance. With a bit of luck, I was thinking, I might find a place to hide out. Fact is, I had only a rough idea what such a place might look like.