by Peter Twohig
But when I arrived at my old hideout, I found that Flame Boy had shot through with the hurricane lamp, and left everything else just as it was. In fact, it looked as though he had never stayed there. My first thought was that, worried I’d dob on him, he had taken off. It made sense, given the kind of life he’d had. But I had to find him before someone else did.
Next, I went down to the river, to see if he’d exited the same way I’d taken him in, but there were no extra footprints on the grey beach leading away from the stormwater drain. I walked up over the Tea Tree Paddock and to the cliff overlooking the power station pool, half expecting to see his body floating there, hurricane lamp in hand. Nothing. He was a survivor. And so I asked myself what a survivor would do. A few minutes later I parked my bike behind a bush and slid down my secret concrete entrance to the big drain at the back of the old cemetery, and turned uphill. As I walked in the near darkness I called to him occasionally, using his first name. I walked all the way up to the old underground station at Eden Hill, then I sat down on the deserted platform. There I found my Choo-Choo Bar wrapper. But no Flame Boy.
I left the station by walking up to the Eden Hill platform that was still being used, and was lucky enough to get a tram back down Church Street, where I picked up my bike. As I stopped at Dad’s new home — we Blayneys love our hideouts — I realised that we were only one street from Granddad’s street, though it was a longish walk, and I wondered if Mrs Bentley and Mum had ever walked right past each other in the street. The Post Office was somewhere in the middle, for one thing. I think I smiled my first real smile for the day at that moment.
Mrs Bentley was happy to see me, as usual, and was hoping I would stay, but I told her nothing had changed and she had better remove me from the form guide for the time being. It was bad enough that Mum was cheesed off with me twenty-four hours a day for reminding her of Tom; I didn’t want her thinking of me as a traitor as well. But before I left I had to submit to the usual grilling about the kid who had become Public Enemy Number One. I had to find Flame Boy, or Flame Boy had to find me, and he had no idea where either of my parents lived, which was probably a good thing when you think about it.
Next morning, the front page of The Sun said some horrible things about Flame Boy, calling him the Torch, just as he had said. I thought it was a pretty good superhero name, really; but to me he would continue to be Flame Boy.
See, to me, there was only one Torch: the Olympic Torch, which Tom and I loved almost as much as Josephine Thompson. Back then we only had one picture of Josephine Thompson, and that was the photo of our First Communion group, which had half the seven-year-olds in Richmond in it — she was different then. But we had just about every picture of the Olympic Torch ever taken, in our Olympic shoebox; also Olympic pins, Olympic swap cards and an Olympic cigarette holder.
I looked up from the newspaper.
‘Granddad, why do they call him that — is it something to do with the Olympic Torch?’
Granddad knew why I was interested, as he knew all about our famous shoebox.
‘Nah, a torch is a firebug.’
‘Like Uncle Pat.’
‘How do you know about your Uncle Pat?’
‘Mum told me the day Mrs Kavanagh’s house burnt down. She told me about all the uncles.’
‘They’ve been a weird lot, all right. Pat was one of the worst.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘They put him away — where he couldn’t do any harm.’
‘Where?’
‘Never mind where.’
‘What’d he set fire to?’
Granddad looked away for a second; he was wondering if I was old enough to be told — adults do that.
‘Hmm. You know the playground up near Kipling Street?’
So that’s why he’d hesitated: he was talking about the place where Tom died.
I nodded.
‘Well, it wasn’t always a playground.’
I tried to imagine a playground before it was a playground, but got nowhere. I wanted to ask Granddad what used to be there, but decided not to, in case Uncle Pat had set fire to a kid’s house while it still had the kid in it.
‘Granddad, it says here that they call Keith Kavanagh the Torch because that was what they called his father, the original Torch, “the man thought to be responsible for burning down Coghlan & Sons’ Emporium”.’
‘Yes, well they did call Fergus Kavanagh the Torch, and now they’ve put him in the loony bin. But as far as I know, he’s not a firebug. That part’s bulldust.’
‘Then why’d they put him in the loony bin?’
‘That was his own idea. It was his way of getting out of prison. He recently had himself declared non compos mentis and transferred from Pentridge to Kew Mental Hospital — it’s all on page two. You watch, he won’t be there for long. He’ll give ’em the slip, which is easy when you’re twice as bright as all the staff put together.’
I turned the page and found a picture of Mr Kavanagh wearing a suit; there was something about his head that reminded me of a duck, which was the impression I always got with Flame Boy.
I didn’t need to ask what non compos mentis meant, as it was the defence used by Granddad’s brief, Arthur Minto, whenever Uncle Seamus got hauled in for public nuisance, which was whenever he drank alcohol in any shape or form, or got a sudden fright, or thought he was fighting Rommel all over again. Nanna said he once got pinched after he got legless from scoffing a box of chocolate liqueurs, but I found that hard to believe, as Nanna has a tendency to stretch the truth.
‘I didn’t know you could put yourself in the loony bin. Why don’t all the blokes in jail do it?’
‘Because you can never get out again.’
I felt that I had lost the thread.
‘So who burnt down Coghlan & Sons’ Emporium, then?’
‘Coghlan & Sons.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
I went down to the Sandersons’ place in Kipling Street to get my map. I had for the previous few months been making a map of all the crimes in South Richmond — call it a hobby — and my intention now was to use that map to keep a record of all the fires I heard about.
You’re probably thinking that this would be a pretty boring way to spend the summer holidays, and you’d be right, if it wasn’t for two things: Richmond held the world record for dodgy fires, or what Mr Sanderson called arson (a real word, apparently); and second, the Commandos, the club I was in over at Charles Dixon’s place, had already agreed to help. On the way I called in at Charles’s place and asked him if he was interested in being the Club Manager.
‘Wow, would I! Why me?’
‘It’s your garage. And anyway, you’re the CO.’
This was true. Charles was the sergeant, but only because it was his garage. The rest of us were corporals, except Matthew Foster, who was a lance corporal, and James, who had just joined as a private. We knew all the ranks.
‘Oh, yeah. What do I have to do?’
‘Organise the meetings. You’ve got a phone, and you live near everyone else; and now I live up the hill, so I can’t do it.’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘Excellent, Sergeant. Let’s have a meeting first thing in the morning, followed by a trip to the baths: 0900 hours.’
‘Um …’
‘It’s gunna be a scorcher.’
‘Fantabulous! Want some lemonade?’
‘You betcha!’
When I got home I found the family and the visitor discussing old times like mad, and talking about lots of places I’d never heard of, some of them in other countries, from the war. But after a while Aunty Daffy ran out of petrol and threw in the towel, leaving Mum and Granddad to get on with the business of looking back over the day.
It was then that Mum let her guard down a bit, and showed that she was glad to be able to return to her old irritable self. Despite the arrival of Aunty Daffy, Mum was not a happy little Vegemite. She’d had to break the news of her pregnancy t
o people she’d rather not tell at all, just so that they wouldn’t find out from gossipers, and think worse of her than they already did. I knew how Mum ticked. She never did anything without thinking it through first, not counting giving Dad a smack in the ear the night he left for good. So I didn’t have to be told what had been going on at lunch. Usually, Mum didn’t tell Aunty Betty anything she didn’t already know, and let her think she herself knew very little. This time she was assuming control, which is what you do when things have already gone to the dogs, and there isn’t much you can do about it. Granddad was the same. It was the Taggerty way, and Aunty Betty would never understand that.
Once the dust had settled, Mum took to the TV, as Granddad had just had a gigantic Admiral delivered by a mate who owed him a favour. I was not allowed to stay up and watch, as Mum was still not impressed by the way I shoved my oar in during the conversation about Flame Boy. Also, Granddad wanted to have a secret talk to her, and probably, I thought, not about Sugar Ray just being beaten for the middleweight championship either.
As I lay on top of the bed waiting for the night to settle in properly and feeling the heat a bit, I heard a fire engine race down Church Street, then change direction and head over towards Hawthorn, and I hoped Flame Boy was safe, because I knew he liked to watch.
6 The Baked Bean Tester’s wife
Next morning’s news reported that the Hawthorn fire was the result of a domestic. We had a lot of hotheads in Richmond, where marriage was more often than not just a way for a bloke to get a woman to bash and a house to wreck, according to Barney, who was a confirmed bachelor and drinker. But I knew that if Flame Boy was in the area, he would definitely have been a spectator. I therefore decided to attend as many fires as I could. You never know your luck in a big city, as Granddad says. And this was where the Commandos would come in handy.
At nine we all turned up at Charles’s garage and started the meeting in the usual way: by making the garage dark, then lighting a candle behind the Skull of Our Forefathers (actually, my secret dead cat’s skull), and saying the Commando Oath (which I am not allowed to repeat).
Item One was New Members, and we had one: Zac the Dog. He was qualified because he was already a member’s dog. Also, he did not need to be initiated, as he had already done something heroic by dashing into our burning house to rescue Mum and Mrs Kavanagh. But because he never showed any interest in the meetings unless goodies were wheeled out, he was only allowed to be an honorary member, which he thought was funny as hell.
Item Two was Fire Tracking. Matthew Foster, unofficial Club Pain in the Arse, volunteered to be Fire Chief, something he’d heard about on The Mickey Mouse Club; so we agreed, not having a clue what that would entail. James volunteered to get a desk from his father, who was something to do with furniture. Charles had knocked off a tube of his mum’s Ford pills, and each of us stuck one in his mouth and crunched it up and waited to see what would happen, but nothing did. But we all agreed it had been a good idea. Luigi turned up with some watercolour paints from his Aunty Liliana, who was an illustrator of children’s books, probably about rabbits with blue coats on. The others helped me expand the map, and as it was something that I was already experienced in, I appointed myself Head Cartographer — it suited me.
Charles’s house was in Dover Street, which was just around the corner from St Felix’s School, where all of us, except James, had gone to primary school. In fact, though James had gone to a Catholic school, he explained to us as we were colouring some streets and lanes that it didn’t have the word ‘Saint’ before it. It was just called Royals, which goes to show what a strange world it is. As I had only met James recently, and had asked him to join the Commandos pretty much straight away, there was a lot about him we didn’t know. Luigi asked him where he had been going to Mass, and it turned out he had been going to St Felix’s, just like us, except we had never seen him, all of us being altar boys. But he had seen us millions of times, he said. The things you learn when you’re colouring in.
We all agreed to keep an eye out for suspicious fires and an ear out for fire engines, and every morning, to have a look in the paper in case there had been a fire in Richmond, so we could mark it on the map. All we needed was a fire.
Finally, Charles, who knew all about how to run meetings, asked if any of us had any interesting stuff to report, before we called it a day and got stuck into the Solo and bikkies. Douggie Quirk said his old man had decided to stop barracking for Richmond, who were pathetic last season, and start barracking for Melbourne, who won the Grand Final. You didn’t often hear of a man changing teams (a lady or a girl, yes, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with footy), so we decided to make a note of it. I said I wouldn’t change teams for a million quid, but Charles didn’t write it down. It’s getting harder to impress people.
But this will give you an idea how desperate the Commandos had become for decent news. We were therefore pretty happy when it was time to call it a day and shoot through, especially as we had used up all the vermilion. Also, although no one was game to admit it, as they had all voted to let him into the club, everyone was glad to get out of any small space they had to share with Matthew Foster, who drove us mad with stories about his father, who he claimed was a tester at Burnley Foods. It was: ‘Yesterday my dad tested spaghetti’ or ‘Last Thursday my dad tested baked beans’, and so on until we were practically round the bend.
The Commandos had spent many long hours sitting in Charles’s living room trying to work out what Matthew Foster’s parents looked like. I had known Johnno’s and Douggie’s parents all my life and long ago decided that they were interchangeable with mine (except for Mr Quirk’s farts, which were smellier than Dad’s, though not noisier). But take James’s mum, Mrs Palmer. If I had never seen her before, I would have thought from the way James talked about her that she was the Queen of Mums, who not only baked a mean roly-poly pudding but actually looked like one. That’s because whenever James spoke of her, his voice had large, warm, lollopy tones. But she was in fact a terrific-looking dame who smoked Benson & Hedges, could drive a car, and could put her husband in the Lasso of Truth whenever she pleased, just by staring at him — she had a stare you could scale fish with. It’s because of the Lasso of Truth thing that my secret name for her was Wonder Woman. Once, she had held me in her Lasso of Truth.
It was before we had been introduced and before I met James, when, owing to an unfortunate bit of bad timing, she saw me inside her house when the house was locked and she was on the outside. Luckily, years of hanging around Barney paid off on the night, and I remained calm (though I did set a new world record for getting out of a house the back way). But before I left, she paralysed me with her eyes — it was horrible. I’m pretty sure she had other magic powers, but I don’t like to think about it. It took her only twenty-four hours to track me down and give me the third degree, which mainly involved her threatening to have me put in jail. Ha! Anyway, she has had the wood on me ever since, something that only the two of us (and her husband, Ken) know about. The only thing that saved me from Wonder Woman using her magic powers on me after that was the fact that the Sandersons are friends of hers. When you’re a kid, it’s usually horrible luck that it’s a small world, but on rare occasions it’s not so bad after all.
Luigi Esposito’s mum, on the other hand, I had heard many times before I actually saw her, as for a while I never went deeper into his house than his bedroom, which was at the front, or his cubby house, which was out the back, while she was always holed up in the kitchen cooking something ending with ‘i’. From the sound of her voice, which you could probably hear from inside a helicopter, I reckoned she was about seventeen feet tall and said everything through an old foghorn she had found at the tip. The opposite was true. Also, while she sounded scary, she was really very gentle and kind.
Then there were the Fosters. Matthew Foster had a way of talking about his father, the Baked Bean Tester, as if he was a combination of Sir Malcolm Campbell and Gree
n Lantern. We were therefore left to form our own opinions, and we did, and that was something we never did with the other fathers, not only because they were not baked bean testers, but because they all had ordinary jobs, drank a lot of beer and called the cat a bastard (though I’m not sure if Mr Esposito had quite got the hang of swearing in English). My opinion had once been that Mr Foster was probably a cut above the rest, and might well have been the kind of giant who goes around devouring whole towns, though I would never have admitted it to Matthew, not even if you tied me down over quick-growing bamboo. In the end, the mystery had been solved by circumstances, the enemy of the growing boy.
I had been out with Peanut Hobson one day, looking for dud crackers — it was the day after last Cracker Night — and found a thrupenny bunger with the wick still in it, in other words, one that had just fallen out of someone’s cracker bag. This was way up the top of Fawkner Street, in an area where we were still not known.
‘Hello,’ says Peanut, spotting the cracker.
‘Hello,’ says I.
‘Let’s let it off right now.’
‘Gee, d’ya think we should?’ says I, holding the top of the nearest letterbox open. It was one of those pretty new coloured tin ones, daffodil, I believe.
So we dropped the lighted cracker in and just stood there and waited for the bang. In hindsight, we should have started running straight away, but Peanut always liked to stand around to see what would happen. So we waited for the bang. But some big bloke had just arrived in a brown DeSoto and seen the whole thing. He grabbed me by the hair, which allowed Peanut to run like hell, then threw me into his car and took off like a rocket. On top of which, I missed the bang.