by Peter Twohig
Thinking about those things up there took me back to that day. When I realised I couldn’t help Tom in any way at all I got up and looked across the road to the houses sitting there waiting to see what I’d do next. I had to go to one of them, but that would mean leaving Tom. I hesitated. Tom had stopped struggling. I had no choice but to run. And I ran to the wrong house.
I bashed on the door until it was opened by an old geezer wearing a pair of striped pyjamas that looked like they hadn’t been taken off since April. His lower eyelids were droopy and bloodshot, like a couple of bits of tomato skin you might find in your stew if you were having dinner around at our place. I told him I needed help to lift the bar off Tom, and he told me to bugger off. Fair enough, I thought. You’ll keep, mate.
The next house didn’t even produce a man in pyjamas. And meanwhile, the seconds were ticking away, and I could feel myself losing control, and losing Tom. The third door was opened by an Italian lady, who pulled me in and started screaming out to her husband. He comes out, a big bloke built like a brick shithouse, and runs across to the park with me in tow. He lifts the monkey bar off Tom with an ease that causes a shock of guilt to my guts — it’s still there: Father Hagen says, ‘Ego te absolvo’, and I think, Yeah, pull the other one. So then he rushes Tom, who is now a big rag doll, back into the house, yelling for his wife — it could have been Maria — to keep us all in the living room. The kids appear — there are about fifty-seven of them — and I see that one of them is Tony Capra, who I know from school. The family stares at me as if I am the Jack the Ripper diorama at the museum, and I become aware that I am less than an inch away from going troppo right there in the living room, in front of Pope Pius XII, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour and a very old man who, it turned out, was not a picture.
When I thought I was closest to that spot I stopped for a moment, out of respect for Tom, the way the nuns told us to stop as we passed the part of the church where the tabernacle was — not that we did, as we soon worked out that if you tried to run and stop at the same time you were liable to break something. For a moment, in the near pitch dark, I was with Tom again. I could hear him singing his favourite nursery rhyme, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son …
I could hear his funny laugh, which everyone said was the same as mine, but wasn’t because it was Tom’s laugh and it was a little louder, a little wilder.
‘Tom, that nursery rhyme is dumb.’
‘Come on then, let’s hear yours.’
There was just me in the dark, in the drain, saying both parts of the argument we’d had heaps of times. I had to laugh.
At that moment I knew that this was my talking-to-Tom place, and that I could come back any time and find him here, even though he was really buried at Parkville, on the other side of Woop-Woop. It was funny how things above the ground were usually all mucked up, but down below, if you didn’t count the kidnappers and murderers, everything was usually apples.
I emerged well past the rubbish tip, at the top of the drain, at a place where it suddenly became a whole lot of smaller drains heading in different directions, none of them big enough to walk in, except for one big drain that went straight up, and had a ladder in the side. I climbed up the ladder and found myself in a drain with a sign in the wall: EDEN PARK, which meant I was close to the Eden Park railway station, which was inside a steep hill, and actually under the ground. The way to catch a train after you bought your ticket was to go down about thirty-five flights of steps until you were halfway to China. Dad and Tom and I always caught the train there whenever we went to see the Mighty Swans play the Hawks at Glenferrie Oval, which was where Hawthorn played, though this year we didn’t go. It was also the nearest station if you wanted to catch a train to my Aunty Jem’s place in Burwood Road. It hit me that I’d started out wanting to go south, but I’d gone in every other direction, and since leaving the fort I’d been travelling north instead. I thought: What the hell, I’ll just keep heading north.
I plodded up the drain, having to use my torch every now and then, but not really worried as it had fresh batteries in it. After a while the drain began to slope downwards a little and also became big enough to stand up in without banging my head against the top. I was as hungry as hell, and thirsty because of all the stuff I was carrying, so I decided that as soon as I came to something interesting, or to some light, I would stop and have some water. Well, what I came to was an open space that was about the size of St Felix’s Church.
It was empty, except for a whole stack of railway sleepers and some bits of track. To the right, there was more tunnel, and to the left I could see a curve disappearing into the darkness. I decided to go right, and followed the hard dirt floor for a long distance until I came to an underground pond that was wider than the torch’s light would reach. The water’s surface was slimy and smelt of grease. Well, that explained what happened to the tunnel. I headed back to where I had seen the railway lines, and I was just down the tunnel a little way when there was a sudden cool breeze that quickly turned into a gale-force wind that nearly blew me over. I was pondering this when the whole place started to roar and shake and I copped a shower of dust from the ceiling. For a second I was paralysed with terror. I was in a tunnel and I could hear a train coming.
I ran to the wall and pressed myself against its cold hardness, but the train never came my way. Instead it squealed to a halt somewhere out of sight and the tunnel breathed a puff of brake-dust at me.
Cautiously, I went around the bend and saw a long line of lights that told me I had reached the main tunnel, and probably Eden Park Station. On the right, as I walked along, I saw several little dark rooms, some of which had windows. I investigated a few of these and found that they were underground offices, though why they were under the ground and not on the station was a mystery. Nevertheless, I memorised their location, size and number, just as Kim would have done. When I came to the fork that should have gone north, back to the station, all I saw was another tunnel, but this one had two sets of rails in it. I knew the station was here somewhere because I had heard the train stop and start again, but I couldn’t see it. I walked along the tunnel, keeping to the wall, just in case, and listened as trains came and went. Just as I was about to give up and go back, I came to the station; only I had a feeling it was not the station I had been looking for. This station had four platforms, each with a row of signs at one end that said WHITE, and a row at the other end that said BLACK, and instead of big round signs in the middle announcing that the name of the station was Eden Park, long rectangular signs announced a completely different name: KANSAS.
As there were some lights on, I sat down on a bench on the platform called A, and had a musk stick. Until that moment, ever since going to my very first movie, The Wizard of Oz, I had thought that Kansas was in America. Now I realised, with some embarrassment, that I had been mistaken, and probably should look it up in my atlas as soon as I got home. Clearly, movies were not as trustworthy as radio and TV. After swinging my legs and singing ‘Everything’s up to Date in Kansas City’ for a while, I think I knew how that bloke felt when he sang: ‘ They’ve gone about as far as they can go’. But I felt that I couldn’t give up until I found out where the real station was, so I got up and started walking along the platform in the dim light. I came to a sliding door, which I opened, and found myself looking at a staircase that went up and down. The sign pointing down said: PLATFORMS E, F, G, H (EDEN PARK STATION), and the sign pointing up said SWAN STREET. I walked down the stairs, and found myself looking through a heavily barred door, like a prison door, right at the end of a platform, and as I looked, a train came along. As it pulled up, the guard’s door drew level with me, and as he swung out to look down to the station bloke, the guard’s eyes connected with mine and told me what I already knew: that I was up to no good. Then he smiled in a way that reminded me of Luigi Esposito’s father, and the train was on its way to the next station, and everything was apples again.
The gate was locked, but that didn’t worry
me: I knew I could get onto the station just by walking back where the railway line branched, in the direction of East Richmond Station. And that is just what I did. Once I was in Eden Park I was free to explore, and had resumed my above-ground identity as the Cartographer. I didn’t feel like taking the drain home so I thought that after my adventure was over — it was still early days — I would take a tram, as it was pretty much a straight run home. My aim, as usual, was to find a place that would be easy to get in and out of, that looked big enough to have places to hide and eavesdrop, and that didn’t look as if anything nasty could happen. Sounds easy, as I had told myself a few times already. What could possibly go wrong? I asked myself. The more information I get, the safer I will be, said a little voice.
But this time I was prepared to break all my own rules. I checked my Spirax notebook, and confirmed that I was quite close to one of the addresses I had found on Granddad’s phone pad, so off I went. As usual, I went for the lane approach; it had stood the test of time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, Dad says.
The house I arrived at was old and very large. It was perfect, even though I didn’t pick it at random. Around the back it had had an extra bit added on, and even that was run down and had busted bits. It was like a little bit of house that no one cared about any more. Perfect: that would be my way in – a few things stacked up against the window and Bob’s your uncle. Once inside the add-on I opened the door into the main part of the house; the key was conveniently in the lock. Open Sesame! — I was inside.
I had an idea that there was no one home, because I had listened very carefully before I opened the door. Even so, I stood quietly for another minute before I took a look around, just to make sure. The perfect place to listen, I decided, was a closet in the hall that was pretty much in the centre of the house, like the hub of a wheel. It was not coat-wearing weather so when the people who lived here turned up they would be spared the embarrassment of opening the closet door and going: ‘Hello! What’s this then?’
Well, they came home just in time for tea, and there were two of them. They went straight to the kitchen and, as usual, the captain of the team, the bloke’s wife, was doing all the talking, and you could tell that she was pretty ropable about one of the ump’s decisions, which I gather had been crucial to the outcome of the match, in which the local eleven had ended up getting beaten like an egg flip. This is understandable, of course, as everyone knows that all umps are drongos and would be better off getting a real job, instead of trying to stop decent hard-working players doing theirs. That was the general view down at the Orange Tree and it was the general view in this house too, as far as I could tell. There was the sudden clinking of glass and the fizzy sound of a bottle of beer being opened — I would give you eight to five it was Abbots Lager — and the two settled down to analyse the match, as you do.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of those magician shows — Tom and me went with Mum to a matinee of Mandrake the Magician at the Coliseum Theatre in town a few years ago — but if you have you’ll know that feeling: the pretty girl has just been sawn in half with the giant circular saw, and is screaming her head off, and there’s blood all over the place, and some old lady passes out and they have to lug her into the foyer to get some fresh air, and then Mandrake pulls the bits of body apart to show you that this is for real and you may now feel free to barf on the person sitting in front of you. And then he sticks the bits of girl back together and taps on the box with his magic wand and shouts: ‘Abracadabra!’ And suddenly she’s back in one piece again, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Well that’s how I felt right then when I heard those two discussing the match.
And that’s because the bloke’s voice belonged to my father.
23 The bloke’s hat
I always wondered what I would say to Dad when I saw him again. But I should have known that when it comes to people, things never turn out the way you think they will.
In this case, I didn’t actually see him – well, the front of him anyway – because when I peeked around the door about a thousandth of an inch, he was facing away from me. Also, I didn’t actually get to talk to him either. All I got to do was listen, and when I wasn’t listening — most of it was dead boring — I would go Geez! and Wow! and Jesus Christ! to myself every few seconds, because of what was happening to me.
Also, I was thinking that it was quite a coincidence to be in the same house as Dad, when all I had been doing was exploring, though I did come here because this address was on Granddad’s phone pad. Granddad! Jesus, he knew! But — and I couldn’t get past ‘but’. So all I could do was listen, which was what I had come to do, and see if there was anything interesting for the map.
But Dad hadn’t changed: he always liked to have a drop of bitter on a Saturday after the footy, and he hadn’t let the fact that the footy season was over get in the way of him having a glass or two. You could say Dad loved to drink — more than anything or anybody. And he liked to talk politics, which I knew would be coming up shortly. And he hated half of the blokes at work, and all the bosses, who w ere all Poms, and that was always next though by this time he tended to get a bit predictable and repetitive. If he was still awake at this point, things started to get a bit blurred. It was usually at this point that Mum would go bonkers and start to take over, like in the tag-team matches at the Tin Shed, when Big Chief Little Wolf would take over from Cowboy Jack Bence.
So there goes the tag, and Cowboy Jack’s out of the ring, and Mum’s in. Is she going to do what she always does, sports fans? You bet she is! She’s going straight for the sleeper hold. Yes, sports fans, she will now talk flat out for about a week, which will put her opponent into a coma. And now you can see how his eyes, which were already red from the grog and the match, are going kind of glassy, so that he is now a lot more interested in the colour of his beer than in what Mum is saying, which is the whole point of the sleeper hold. Normally, this would be the end of the match, folks, because the sleeper is a submission hold, but Mum will, if she is running true to form, ease off a bit, so that Dad doesn’t die or anything even though he probably wants to, which allows her to switch to a more subtle hold — I call it the creeper hold because it sort of creeps up on you. And it’s started. In case you folks up the back can’t hear, she is saying something like: ‘You’ll never guess who I saw the other day’ — sounds harmless enough, doesn’t it, folks? Apparently, this other woman she’s talking about has just got something new — sounds like it could be a vacuum cleaner, folks … yes it is a vacuum cleaner! Dad’s now staring at the bottom of an empty beer glass and all his concentration is focused on who the hell drank his beer, and on avoiding death. All he is hearing at this point is: ‘… so I said … it only costs … we should get …’ and so on. It must be sheer hell inside his head. And that’s the beauty of the creeper, folks. Suddenly she’s on her feet and into the fridge and as quick as a flash opens another bottle … Oh my God, she’s offering him more beer! Without knowing what he’s doing he has submitted to the wallet lock, wrestling fans, which is an automatic submission hold. And now the ref is waving her off, and it’s all over bar the shouting.
And that’s because there are two kinds of lady talkers: bossy ones and, I would say, conversationalists, and this new lady was definitely not one of the bossy kind. For starters, she didn’t try to take advantage of Dad’s inebriated state at all — maybe she already had a vacuum cleaner — the house did look a lot cleaner than our place, but then it had no kids or dogs. All she did was continue to say: ‘Oh yes, that’s what I said,’ and ‘You are so right,’ and ‘Of course you did,’ and so on and so forth. She was agreeing with him without using any of the tried and tested holds that guarantee submission, and I could see she wasn’t going to get anything — except, maybe, as drunk as a skunk.
I’d begun to imagine that Dad was on a secret mission for the government, spying on commos or trying to stop some lunatic from taking over the world with his giant ray gun, or wo
rse, that he’d been sent on a mission to Tasmania or one of those other places around Australia that it was hard to get away from. I hadn’t imagined that he was in Eden Park, with a lady who was not giving him a hard time, as Mum would have been if he had still been at home. The sheer unexpectedness of the whole event was unfair, I thought — simply, I had not been given the opportunity to prepare for it. You would think that he’d be carrying on uncontrollably about his loved ones down the hill, about how much he missed me and Mum and Biscuit — then I remembered that he didn’t know about Biscuit, only the cat, and the cat was not around much since Biscuit turned up — cats and watchdogs don’t mix. And as for Biscuit, whenever he saw Abbotsford he turned into a real watchdog, and looked as if he would like nothing better than to get his paws on him. But he never did, and Abbotsford would sit on the dunny roof and watch the world go by from his ivory tower, like that Gale Storm song.
So that entire arvo Dad talked about the things he always talked about, and I could see that even though the lady’s patience was getting a bit frayed around the edges, she wasn’t going to jump up and throttle him. She wasn’t at all like Mum: she didn’t want to be the boss; she just wanted to have a fair dinkum chat. But she was sick of hearing about some bloke down at the baked bean factory who wanted to give Dad a good price on a used Morris Cowley. She was fighting a losing battle, though; she didn’t know Dad like I did. Dad had been Chief Sparring Partner at Blayney’s Talking Gym, and had been worn down by Mum and Aunty Betty, who between them could talk the back wheels off a semitrailer.
Also I knew what a real conversation was because me and Granddad had had about two thousand of them, and me and Barney had had about a hundred, and me and Charles always started one up as soon as we saw each other, so there was a million conversations right there (because Charles was basically a gasbag). Then there was James Palmer, of course; he was very keen on conversation. I did a quick mental sum, and reckoned that I’d had about five million of them, which pretty much left Dad at the starting gate, especially as he was well on the way to getting plastered.