The Torch

by Peter Twohig

  Mrs S gave me a little smile and wrinkled her nose a bit, like when you taste turnip for the first time. That wrinkle meant she was on my side. Aunty Queenie, Granddad’s secret friend, often did the same thing. I thought of giving her a wrinkle back, then decided it was a ladies’ thing. In fact, making faces is altogether a girls’ thing. (Though my cousin Lewis in Sandringham — the interesting cousin — did it all the time. Something to think about, that.)

  Then there was a sort of whooshy vibration in the air, like in the cartoons, and Mrs Sanderson disappeared into the kitchen, magically. It’s a way of getting cake that ladies have. Mrs Noble over in Yarra Street is the same, but with her it’s lamingtons. When she reappeared, Mrs S was carrying some sort of orange cake, and I couldn’t help thinking that it matched her lilac floral dress and, oddly, her lollopy figure — you can’t work these things out. Tom and I compared the shapes of the ladies we knew all the time, but always ended up comparing them in terms of what kind of food they cooked, because it was easier. Mum was always at the zero end of the scale, because she couldn’t cook to save herself. In fact, Tom once told me that it was lucky for Mum she hadn’t been put in jail for her cooking, which I thought was a clever observation, coming from him. At the other end of the scale was Luigi’s mum, Mrs Esposito, who was a little skinny lady with a voice like a foghorn. But she could cook so well you wanted to learn Italian and get her to adopt you.

  ‘So, Mr and Mrs Sanderson, do you barrack for South Melbourne?’

  It was a test question, really, as these two had the look of a couple of non-Swans supporters. What I really wanted to know was: Are we going to keep talking about Flame Boy, or what?

  ‘Ah, the perennial footy question,’ said Mr S. ‘Alas, you’ve touched what is a sore spot in the Sanderson household, as I am a Hawthorn supporter, and we didn’t do too well last season, whereas Melbourne, my wife’s team, did slightly better.’

  ‘Did slightly better!’ said Mrs S, making the frog mouth. ‘Slightly better!’

  Footy. I knew this conversation was going nowhere. I waited.

  ‘We prefer you in your Olympic hat, don’t we, Russell? You know, I’m sure I still have a few Olympic pins tucked away somewhere. I’ll get them for you later.’

  See? What did I say about the hat?

  ‘So as I was saying, this friend of yours — Keith, wasn’t it? — I hope he’s all right out there.’

  Mr S gazed out over the park across the road, as if he was expecting Charles Kingsford Smith to turn up out of the blue, and Mrs S stared so hard at a crumb of orange cake that I half expected it to turn into a chilled shandy, which I knew was Mrs S’s particular poison.

  ‘Me too,’ was all I could say, unavoidably making the straw-sucking noise. But I had the feeling we were saying it for completely different reasons.

  ‘Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t ask you this, but I know you’d want to do the right thing’ — I suddenly felt as though some other kid had turned up — ‘and we feel that the Kavanagh boy would be a lot safer some place where his special needs could be met, if you see what I mean. And we couldn’t help wondering if you could have a word with him — if you should bump into him in your travels, that is — and help him to come home, perhaps to your grandfather’s place, where arrangements could be made to … to …’

  I shook the lemon. ‘No, Mr S, I mean Mr Sanderson, I don’t think I’d like to see Flame … Keith get his brain electrocuted again — that’s what would happen to him. I know: I saw them do it. Nobody wants to help him. All people want to do is lock him up and hurt him.’

  ‘Not everyone wants to hurt him. There are a lot of us who —’

  ‘No, there aren’t. And what if the fire at our place was a coincidence?’

  ‘I hope you aren’t thinking of taking up law,’ said Mr S, ‘as that is not a convincing argument.’

  ‘P’raps not. But anyway, I’ll think about it.’

  I said that to put a stop to the conversation. After what happened to Tom, there was no way I was going to let Flame Boy die. But I could see from what Mr S had said that he and everyone else had made their mind up. I didn’t like that, even if he did do it.

  But now I was wondering what possible interest Mr S could have in Flame Boy. He was just a kid, a kid with a few problems, just like the rest of us, who had got a reputation, and needed to lie low until the heat was off, like Ned Kelly, who I reckoned probably came from Richmond himself. Mr S on the other hand was the kind of bloke who was paid to chase seriously bad people, even though he looked like he couldn’t chase a one-legged duck with a bad cough. But surely not kids.

  Now that I knew Mr S was interested in Flame Boy, I knew he was really in strife. But surely not just for burning down the house of Mr S’s favourite kid — there must be more to it than that. I needed to find Flame Boy for another reason. He was in danger as long as he was out there. Whereas I could find my way around the local streets blindfolded, and knew all the secret spots, I wasn’t sure that he knew any of them, because he was, well, slow.

  I’d had no warning about what happened to Tom. This time I could do something.

  2 Flame Boy

  The first place I went to was Flame Boy’s old house, the one he burnt down the month before, which you could call his premiership month, when he established himself in my mind as a kind of super superhero, though, in the end, I think he went too far. Larry Kent, Detective, was always talking about the scene of the crime, and how criminals return to it. Even Blarney Barney was always returning to Richmond, even though Granddad said that he had got into trouble there more times than he’d had hot dinners, and that the local police even had a special cell at the lock-up with his name on it, painted blue and white, the colours of his favourite footy team (which I doubted).

  The house was down a lane and then down a narrow walkway between two houses. It was on a forgotten piece of land near the river: little more than a small paddock. Being wooden, the house had been burnt down to the floorboards; and no one had been back since, as there had been no valuables to retrieve, nothing useful to rescue. It had been built on brick foundations, which now stood like guards beneath the smelly black ruins, and as I walked around the house I saw that between them were fairly large crawl spaces. I had Zac with me, and as soon as he saw the burnt-out house he disappeared under it and began detecting like mad. As I came to each crawl space I got down on my hands and knees and peered into the shadows. Finally, I saw two pairs of eyes peering back at me, one with a tongue hanging out, one not.

  Flame Boy was not one naturally given to speech, though he could be talkative on the day. This was not the day. I crawled under the ruins of the floor with him and Zac, opened my explorer’s bag and took out an apple for him. While he munched I fossicked around, looking for a few other things I always carried: a Choo-Choo Bar and a few cream biscuits I’d nicked from the Bester’s biscuit factory, just up the street.

  There are some situations that don’t require discussing; they speak for themselves. Two kids hiding under a burnt-out house, both of whom had seen their house burn down in the last four weeks, was one. Flame Boy was reclining on a relatively unblackened patch of dirt with his back against a brick column. He had one arm draped over Zac, and the other around a filthy black briefcase. He reminded me of the Phantom sitting on his fabulous skull throne with his pet wolf, Devil — the Phantom on one of his off days. He was still wearing the same clothes, and smelt like a gumboot full of fish heads. I felt it was up to me to say something.

  ‘G’day, Keith.’

  ‘Torch.’

  I had missed something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Torch. That’s what they call me: “the Torch”, not Keith.’

  I should have seen it coming. Keith had done what every notorious kid does sooner or later, depending on the amount of attention he gets from the police, the newspapers and the nuns: he’d adopted a superhero identity. Dick Grayson had become Batman’s offsider, Robin; Wally West became Kid Flash; and
Jack Dawkins had turned himself into the Artful Dodger. I myself had recently been the Cartographer (I still liked messing around with maps), Railwayman (the same with trains), and the Outlaw (the less said, the better), depending on the occasion. With Flame Boy it had been a natural choice; the best superheroes get their names from the newspapers. I looked at him in admiration. I had questions, but they could wait. For a second I just wanted to gaze at him, to see if he had grown a light around him, like Green Lantern. Hard to tell. I think so.

  ‘So, how have you been getting on for food?’

  ‘People’ve been leaving it out for me.’

  ‘What, like Father Christmas?’

  He had to think about that, and I was immediately embarrassed, as I wasn’t sure he knew about him.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I could see a lot of local ladies and their alcohol-weakened husbands doing that; some of the older types would be a pushover. But I doubted very much that they would have been inviting him in, a house being something you tend to get attached to.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come back here. I looked around some other places first.’

  ‘I’ve been in different places. Where’d you look?’

  ‘What’s left of the Orange Tree pub. There were some good places to hide there.’

  He grinned a lopsided grin, which Zac took to be an invitation to lick his face. ‘Didn’ see any.’

  ‘It had a cellar.’

  ‘Didn’ know that. Maybe I’ll go there.’

  ‘You can’t now; they’re tearing it down. You wrecked the place.’

  ‘D’ja see it burning?’ His piggy eyes went all funny.

  ‘No. I was in strife at the time — I was somewhere else. Did you?’

  ‘You bet. I watched from the top of the old tannery.’ His eyes opened wide and swung wildly around in his head as he recalled it.

  ‘If you stay put I can find you and bring you food.’

  He stared at me. He wanted me to talk about the fire, but I didn’t think I could stand it. Just looking into those gleaming eyes again made me feel a strange weakness in my guts and my head at the same time, and I knew that if I didn’t stop talking about it I might have one of my turns. These turns – actually fits, according to Dr Dunnett – had begun just after Tom died. I had the last one on Christmas Day, which felt bad without Tom, there being only one of everything instead of the usual two; and New Year’s Eve, when I realised I was going to have another year without him, and we wouldn’t be able to look out for each other at our new school, which was supposed to be like a Jap concentration camp. In fact I had been hoping they were gone for good. But whenever I thought of Mum losing her house, I got that horrible feeling all over again. I would have to have a chat with Granddad, not a complete chat, just a half chat, just enough to stop the feeling. Granddad always knew how to fix the feeling.

  I suddenly realised Flame Boy was looking at me in a new way. I didn’t want him to see my weakness. He had enough problems.

  ‘Okay,’ was all he said. But he was looking around as he said it, and it was the look of a kid who is lying. I licked my lips. I was going to take a chance: I was going to make him a kind of friend. I was going to trust him.

  ‘Listen, I know a place where no one will ever find you, and you’ll be safe, and you can come and go wherever you please.’

  He spoke slowly, with a harsh sound in his voice, the special sound kids put on when they’re sharing deadly secrets.

  ‘Is it the place where you found that kid who was missing last year?’

  It was. I had found a kid who was missing. But it was a secret that only two other people knew: Granddad and the kid himself, the Harrigan kid. And the bloke who put him down there was now in prison, laughing on the other side of his face, and wondering where he had gone wrong. He hadn’t banked on the arrival of the Cartographer, the superhero I was last year. I suppose you could say I had a past. But I didn’t want to think about that, let alone talk about it. It just made me get that old feeling again. Suddenly I had only enough energy left to ask one simple question, but I had to know.

  ‘How did you know that was me?’

  His eyes slid all over the place. He didn’t want to say. Only seconds earlier I had been prepared to trust him; now I was having second thoughts. How could he have known?

  ‘I heard you tell your granddad … that day … in your bedroom. I was listening … at the window.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘You swore.’

  I could hardly believe I had just been criticised by a firebug.

  We sat there and stared at each other for a much longer time than would normally be polite, unless you were a kid, and I was aware that we were both breathing faster.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, finally. ‘I’ll take you there. But we have to go before it gets dark.’

  ‘Why? I’m not afraid of the dark.’

  He said it in a rush, because it wasn’t true. I remembered the way he behaved when he was staying at our place after burning his own house to the ground. He couldn’t sleep with the light off at all, which drove me around the bend, and wouldn’t go outside to check on Zac when it was his turn, which is just as well, really.

  ‘Neither am I. It’s not that.’

  How do you tell a superhero that you still believe in zombies?

  I took Flame Boy to my secret hideout via the big stormwater drain on the riverbank at the bottom of Fawkner Street, so we wouldn’t be seen. My hideout was really just a part of the drain that had a wide ledge halfway up it — wide enough to live on, if you were desperate, which Flame Boy was. I could tell he was impressed by the way Zac just followed me up the dark drain without showing any fear. Zac was the same colour as the dark, and was even hard to spot with the torch on. All the way over, Flame Boy hung onto the filthy briefcase as if his life depended on it.

  When we arrived I showed him how to light my hurricane lamp, which he insisted on turning up as brightly as he could, and how to avoid accidentally leaving by a wrong route, one that would end up with him falling into the power station pond and getting drowned. All the while, he was careful to keep the briefcase away from me. I felt around in my bag, found the last bikky, and gave it to him. It was like feeding time at the Zoo. I leant back against the concrete wall and watched him as he contemplated his real friend, the pale flame.

  A lot of my problems were due to this kid; indeed, I couldn’t think of any aspect of my life in the past year that he hadn’t touched. But in him was spirit, the spirit of the superhero. And his spirit took the form of fire, though this was not generally appreciated by all and sundry. Then along came me, who had been marking his deeds of daring (and his terrible trials) on my map and in my Spirax reporter’s notebook. I realised that my mission was to show people that he wasn’t a loony at all, just in the head.

  After all, where would we be without fire? There’d be no fire brigade, no fire hoses in schools for kids to turn on when no one was looking (though the whole school had been looking when yours faithfully pulled that stunt), and no way to light crackers. He, Flame Boy, had gone out and done what he did best, though it had got him electric shocks to the brain and a bad reputation. But to the one or two (actually, just one) who had not thought of him purely as a menace, he had been an inspiration. He had been more than just ‘that loony Kavanagh kid’: by demonstrating his superhero strength he had helped me finally accept that Tom was dead, and that I could carry on alone. And I knew in that moment why he lit fires. That’s all I want to say about that.

  Flame Boy looked at me warily. Time to remind him whose place this was.

  ‘So what’s in it?’ I asked, with a sideways nod of the noodle, as though I couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘Nothin’.’

  Which is kids’ talk for ‘only the best thing since Creamy Soda, that’s all’.

  ‘I’m lettin’ you stay in my hideout.’

  ‘It’s my dad’s. I’m keeping it for ’im. He’ll want it back.’

&nb
sp; ‘I only want to know what’s in it.’

  ‘Papers.’

  ‘Show us.’

  ‘Can’t; it’s locked.’

  ‘Then how do you know what’s in it?’

  ‘I know what paper feels like.’

  It was scary the way he said that.

  When I left him, Flame Boy was staring at the hurricane lamp as if it were the greatest thing he’d ever seen. I had seen Tom often look at Josephine Thompson the same way. But I didn’t mind, even though I (sort of) loved her too.

  I was glad I had helped Flame Boy, but I knew that it was all going to end up being a terrific headache. I decided to walk home past our old house to take one last look at the place, and at the same time have a think about the fix Flame Boy and I were in. As I walked past the house across the road, which belonged to Mrs Carruthers, Mum’s old friend, I heard familiar voices. It was the usual threesome from any time in my life up to a few weeks back: Mrs Carruthers, Mrs Hutchinson, the well-known witch from next door, and Mum, who must have decided, like yours faithfully, to revisit the old burnt-out house. Old habits, as Granddad says.

  Now normally I would have flung open the screen door and walked in, dog and all, and announced my presence with the Big Hello, as Mrs Carruthers had a soft spot for me, mainly because I was the grandson of Archie Taggerty, whom everyone from the river to Swan Street knew she had her eye on. But today I just crept up to the door and listened, because Mum had apparently just arrived herself and was having one of her big cries — lately she was as good at having a bit of a cry as Betty Cuthbert was at having a bit of a sprint. Mrs Carruthers and Mrs Hutchinson were doing their level best to get her to sit down and tell them all about it, as I’ve noticed women do.

  ‘Just let it all out, Jean,’ said Mrs C. ‘The house is gone and that’s that.’