The Cartographer (4 page)

I knocked on Mrs M's door and yelled ‘Hello!' so she wouldn't have a heart attack when I walked in on her. She called to me to come in, and I found her and Granddad in the living room, sitting in the lounge chairs and having a sherbet, which is something Granddad rarely did when he was out and about, but mainly when he was at home or at Mrs Morgan's. In fact, I'll lay odds that few people had any idea that he liked a beer.

‘What's up, young feller?' asked Granddad.

I sat on the sofa and looked at them. I didn't know where to start, or even if I should tell Mrs Morgan.

‘Rough day,' I said, flicking the leaves on a new pot plant.

‘Well, let me tell you, they don't get any better,' said Granddad, who never misses an opportunity to give the young feller — me — a bit of wisdom.

‘Don't tell him that, Archie. Don't listen to him, dear. And go and get yourself some lemonade out of the fridge.'

I went into the kitchen, and could hear Mrs M giving Granddad an earful about the things he says to me — I swear I don't know if she's more like a mother or a wife to him. When I got back into the living room, she had a pleasant look on her face and started again.

‘Looking forward to the last term of school, love?'

I wanted to tell her that I was looking forward to just about anything that would keep me from being murdered, but I controlled myself, and looked at Granddad and her over the top of my lemonade glass. They were obviously having one of those rare moments when absolutely nothing is going wrong, and the beer is cold, and the glasses are chilled, which is the
right way to drink beer, and they both had their feet up, and Granddad even had his tie off.
They've settled in for the night
, I thought,
like they've been married for years
. And I didn't have the heart to tell them about my adventure, and how I might be dead by morning. I could see I'd have to wait until I got Granddad alone.

‘You bet, Aunty … Mrs Morgan. I reckon school is terrific, 'cept next year I'll be leaving St Felix's, 'cos it only goes up to grade six.'

‘Then what? St Dominic's, I suppose?'

‘Nah, I'll probably go to City Boys High; it's closer.'

This was, strictly speaking, true, but I really wanted to go to St Dom's, as all the other members of the Commandos were going there. Also, we had a few of the big kids from City Boys living in our street, and they'd told me of the terrible things the teachers do to the boys, like tying them up and whipping them for talking in class — I'd last about half an hour, I reckon. Also, my parents were worried about the fees.

‘So you like school — that's good.'

Actually, I did like school. At school I got to play alleys every day, not to mention swapping comics, swap-cards and stamps. Swapping was definitely the main reason any of us went to school. When I first told Granddad about the swapping, he was very interested, and gave me a few tips for making sure I always got a fair go with the big kids. Naturally, the tips came in pretty handy for swapping with little kids, as well, though I never mentioned that to him, as he could be a bit touchy about being fair and I didn't want him to throw a fit.

Mrs M had reached the two-furlong post and was heading for home.

‘But you're enjoying the holidays, too, aren't you?'

‘The holidays are all right, but, except for the Commandos — that's our club — and some of the kids who live around here I've hardly seen any of my friends.' That was a fib, which is okay if you're a kid. It was only Josephine Thompson I wasn't seeing.

‘But you've got a television. I don't know where your granddad got it, and I don't want to know, either, but I hear it's a beauty.'

‘It's a beauty all right. It's just that Mum hasn't been too happy lately, and she won't let me watch it before six. Anyway, I'm better off out of the house.'

‘Then you must visit more often,' said Mrs Morgan. ‘You're always welcome here, as your granddad knows, and you can even stay the night, if your mum agrees. And it looks like your granddad might be able to get me a TV too, though I don't want to know how he does it and I've insisted on paying, haven't I, Archie?' she finished sternly.

The fact is, Mrs Morgan likes electrical things the way other ladies like shoes, and has everything you can think of that you can switch on and off. Her pride and joy is an Electrolux vacuum cleaner that was presented to her last year when she retired as Electrolux's book-keeper. She's as brainy as hell, and much brainier than the nuns at school, who couldn't tell you anything about comics, film stars or singers. Every now and then, Mrs Morgan gives me a comic — always new — and it nearly always turns out to be the latest
Century
. I always have a feeling it's Granddad who's really choosing them, but I'm pleased that she wants to do it.

‘Vera, I told you, a bloke owes me a favour.'

But Granddad wasn't kidding anyone. Mrs Morgan's TV was probably going to fall off the back of a truck, and still
arrive at the door in mint condition. She knew it just as I knew it. Her money was no good with him. It was true that when it came to women, he could be a charmer — that's what Mum always said. But something told me he didn't have to be. He was just as good at being a friend.

 

I dropped my stuff off next door, at Granddad's, then decided to go back to the Murder House to get my bag, Granddad's special bag, but knew I'd have to wait until it was dark. I spent the in-between time drawing on my map.

Everyone I knew got a mention, or at least their houses did, and where a place didn't fit, like the City, I just drew an arrow on the edge of the map, showing where you'd have to go to get there. Mrs Morgan was so interested in the map she went and got an old street map she had and showed it to me. It was not a map of Melbourne, but of Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, so it was pretty useless. Except for one thing: it had something called a legend at the bottom, a little space full of symbols. I was so excited I immediately pinched the idea for my own map.

Pretty soon I had symbols for railway stations, tram stops, churches, doctors and pubs. I also invented a symbol for the homes of people I knew, and for dogs I'd spotted. I made a black dog symbol for dogs that were dangerous, and a yellow dog symbol for dogs I liked, though there weren't many of those. I also marked some of the places where Tom and I had had adventures. They included the Gala picture theatre, the Richmond Baths, and a back yard from which Tom had pinched a chook one afternoon. We took the chook to the pictures and let it loose during
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.
And they say crime doesn't pay.

The other thing Mrs M's map had was a large arrow showing the direction of north, which was at the top of the sheet. I loved that idea so much, I pinched it too, only my north was off to one side.

After dinner — fish and chips that Granddad and me went for down the corner — I waited until they were enjoying something corny on the radio, and wandered casually to the front door.

‘Where d'yer think you're going?' yelled Granddad.

‘Just goin' for a walk around the block,' I yelled back, not waiting around for the next episode of
Granddad and The Kid
.

I jumped on a Prahran tram and rode on the running board for a few blocks, until the clippie collared me and hauled me inside like a trout. Then I went a few more blocks until we got near Kipling Street and I pulled the tram's cord to let the trammie know I'd had enough of his rotten driving. When I got off I walked a bit further down, to the lane, and turned left. The lane had no lights in it, and was as dark as Sugar Ray Robinson's armpit, as Dad says. That didn't worry me a bit, because I was born unafraid of the dark. I walked slowly at first, feeling for the flat part that told me where the centre was, until I was aware that I was under the overhanging tree. Then I backtracked a few yards with my hand on the fence, and found the double gate. Once I had ducked under it, I could see the house outlined against the lights of Kipling Street, and I could even make out the jungle path. The house seemed asleep, so I went to the spot where I knew I had left my bag. I found it, put my head through the strap and left, all the time feeling the ghost watching me, trying to suck the breath out of my lungs to have for herself, as they do.

I did try to tell Granddad the next morning, but he wasn't that keen on hearing about it. But at least I think he believed me.

‘Hey, Granddad,' I said, ‘I've got a problem.'

‘Well, what is it?'

‘You know that murder over in Kipling Street the other day?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Well I saw it happen.'

He looked at me for a long time. If I'd been Tom, I think he would have laughed.

‘What happened, then?'

I wasn't sure what it said in the papers, because I didn't read them, and I knew that Granddad knew that, so I reckoned he would know I was telling the truth.

‘I was 'splorin' in someone's back yard and there was a workman's ladder against the wall, so I climbed up and looked through the window on the second floor, and I saw a bloke hit a lady and split her head open and then … kill her.'

I didn't think there was any point mentioning the money stamps.

‘And how did he kill her?'

‘He choked her until she turned purple.'

‘And did you see anything else?'

‘Nope, that's all, 'cept he had a gun.'

He stared at me for a while, then he said: ‘I want you to forget you ever saw that. It won't do any good to tell anyone.'

‘But I saw his face.'

‘Was it anyone we know?'

‘Hell no, Granddad —'

‘Then that's all right. It could have been anyone.'

‘But he saw me too.'

‘He saw your face?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Then how come you're still alive?'

‘He couldn't catch me.'

‘Does he know where you live?'

‘Nope.'

‘Then you're lucky. If you see him again, let me know. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

Not what I'd been hoping for.

 

A few days later I was out and about again. But this time I had the map, folded up in the biggest pocket of my bag. I had folded it so that the inside was on the outside, and the beginning was on the front, just in case I took a wrong turn right at the start. My house was marked
HOME
. It was comforting to see it there, and I knew that no matter where I went, it would be there when I came back. Just as my father had gone into The Wilderness, I too had to go. Who knows, I thought, I might bump into him.

On this particular day I felt equipped as I left home. I had no idea how long I would be gone, but I never missed one of Granddad's trips, and today felt like one of his trip days. Of course, there were days when he didn't show up, and there
were days when he showed up but left without me. Usually he would look at my expectant face, then turn to Mum and say in a grave voice: ‘Best I don't take the boy today; got a few things to do.' And he would wink at me and give me a shilling. I would wink back and we would go outside together. Outside, he would give me a few shillings more and do some more winking before he took off. It was a private language that only the two of us shared. We could wink right there in front of Mum, and she wouldn't have a clue what was going on.

Of course, going out with Granddad was where the real money was. He was always bumping into old mates who could ‘give him the drum' and put him onto a good thing, or pay him some money they owed him. And a lot of people owed him money, him and his mate Blarney Barney, a big bloke, bigger than Dad and twice as big as Granddad. Barney liked everyone, and everyone liked Barney. As soon as they saw him coming, they would ‘fork over', as Granddad put it, and we'd all laugh.

And that's where I came in. Every time someone forked over, I'd get a cut, sometimes in the form of ice-cream in a cone, sometimes in the form of a sherbet bomb or a Freddo, or, as often as not, in the form of a few shillings to shove in my pocket. ‘A man's always got to have a bob or two in his pocket,' Granddad would say. But whenever we arrived back at my place it was always the same: he'd stop me and wait while I took the money out of my pocket and stuck it down my sock. Again we'd exchange winks. Granddad liked doing things on the sly, and so did I.

On this day, instead of turning left at the bottom of the street, I went in the other direction, and turned right up Church Street. I didn't really think I'd need my map. It was
just my insurance, like Barney's knife was his. It was a big knife and he carried it in a leather sheath strapped to his leg. On that leg he wore no sock, just the sheath, and he could hoist the leg of his trousers, yank out the knife and pretend to stick it into a bloke before I could blink. I always thought I could blink faster, but whenever he did his knife trick, my eyes refused to blink, so I guess he won. Sometimes when we met one of Granddad's old mates and they seemed to have nothing to say after the usual ‘Who's the kid, Arch?', Barney would pat his leg and the conversation would jump back to life with everyone laughing and me ending up with a sherbet bomb rolling around in my mouth.

‘Everyone needs insurance,' Barney would say.
He's right,
I thought. A man that big, one with a knife, has a certain
rightness
about him.

I decided to take a route that would make me hard to follow, as I did not want the murderer seeing me and thinking to himself:
Well, well, what a stroke of good luck, and here's me not having killed anyone all day
. I walked past the cardboard factory, the post office and the police phone box, crossed into Balmain Street and went past the Friends In Need pub, then turned down Tannery Lane behind the old tannery, which had been closed as long as I could remember. Mum said they were forced to close it because of the smell, though who ‘they' were was never mentioned. I did think that it was a strange reason to close a factory, as we were surrounded by factories with odd smells, and some of them were pretty damn good. As for the tannery — Fegan's Tannery — I used it for short cuts. Around the back of the place, in a yard off Tannery Lane, there was an old rusty tin trapdoor in the ground. I had discovered ages ago I could lift it just enough to get inside, and once inside
there was a pair of sloping ladders, about a yard apart. It was a long way down, but there was light at the bottom, and after climbing down a million rungs you came to a room big enough to hold a couple of houses.

Inside there were iron things, and big rusted drums and huge wheels, and lots of water covering the floor, but it was possible to walk from one end to the other along a skinny iron footpath with wheels in it. At the other end was an iron door, which was always open, and on the other side was a lift with no walls, and a ladder behind it. I always went up the ladder and into the ground-floor area. The ground floor was covered in broken glass and smelly machinery. It always felt as if there was someone there, so I never hung around to explore, but crept to the far end and let myself out through a series of doors. The outer one was chained on the outside but could be pushed open enough to let a kid squeeze through. Then I would be on the tannery's railway line.

The tannery line started at the chained door and stuck close to the main railway line to town for a while before branching off to the timber yard that belonged to Kavanagh's Timber Co. The timber yard had a large dog that liked to bark. I would never go through the timber yard unless the dog was chained up and in view. It wasn't worth it — kids had been torn to shreds. I heard kids at school say that they had only survived being chased by the dog by throwing it chops and sausages, but I never went out with chops and sausages — my mother would have killed me — and anyway, the chops and sausages theory was one that I had no intention of testing. I mean, I didn't want the dog to grow even bigger. It could starve for all I cared. So this morning I climbed to the top of the old red freight car that was sitting on the rails in the yard
off Fegan's and looked over the fence. I couldn't see any dog, but that meant nothing to me, as I was born afraid of dogs.

That meant a detour around the timber yard and along the main railway line. I didn't mind the detour, but I hated the idea of walking along the train line. A lot of kids had been killed that way, according to Matthew Foster, whose house overlooked the railway lines. How he knew I didn't want to guess. Anyway, I survived the railway line and Dead Man's Curve, which is where all the kids were killed. As I walked around the curve — ran, actually — I looked up quickly to see if I could spot Matthew's house, but all I saw were the backs of a dozen long, narrow houses in a row, pretty much like my own. But I
think
I saw it. And I managed to get off the tracks a few times to let trains pass: three trains heading for the city; and two heading out to the suburbs, one to Dandenong and one to Sandringham, which was where my cousin Lewis lived — the one who bites.

Once off the railway line I was in uncharted territory, though I knew from the last time I had taken a train from South Yarra, to visit Aunty Gerrie and Uncle Nick in Mordialloc, that at the back of Kavanagh's was a fence that could be crawled under to get into the tramyard, which had a wall as high as a giraffe pen around it everywhere else. I found a way into the timber yard just where this fence started and followed it until it turned behind the tramyard, listening and watching for dogs, then I was home and hosed. The territory is now charted.

Over the years, I had learnt two things about yards that have vehicles in them: they never have dogs in them, and the things that are parked in the yards are always left open. That's because there's usually a caretaker or guard somewhere. The last bit of information came to me from my Uncle Clive, a man
who drives a bus and knows his yards. And he was right. The trams were all open — of course they had no doors — except for the green and orange striped blinds that were rolled down to cover the doorways. The important thing was that they
felt
as if they had been left open, which allowed me to explore them and, more importantly, to explore the drivers' cabs. After years of watching tram drivers and wondering if I would ever get to see the inside of one of the cabs, I was finally there.

I threaded my way through the long lines of trams to the centre of the yard and hopped onto one whose sign showed that it had been heading for Moreland, which was no surprise, as most trams have
Moreland
on the front, even those that look as though they're going to completely different places. Once on board, I sat in the inside compartment and slid the inner door shut. I needed to make notes for the map: the tannery; the timber yard (I wished I could put its smell on the map, it was delicious and I rated it a six); and the tramyard. I also decided that from now on I was going to take home a treasure from each trip, for my treasure chest. The Phantom had a special chest and I would get one too.

Outside, it was now raining, not the kind of rain that makes you run like mad and say
Shit!
, but the kind that sticks to your clothes on the outside while leaving them dry on the inside; the kind that smells wet: thin, cold rain. Luckily I had my hat on. That hat was my exploring hat, and there was no way I would ever leave the house without it. Dad had a lucky hat; it was a grey bloke's hat. Granddad had a lucky hat that was brown. And even Blarney Barney had one, a hat with no particular colour. Mine was battleship grey, at least that's what I told everyone. Hell, I just liked the words:
battleship grey
. The hat had my flag-pin collection on it. For every team
that had come to the Olympic Games there had been a flag, and I had collected most of them, and eaten a hell of a lot of chocolate in the process. But it was worth it. My favourite pin was Denmark: I had to swap three pins for it, but it gave me a chance to unload another one of my USAs.

My work was interrupted by a nasty voice outside.

‘Get out of there!'

Tram bloke. I grabbed my stuff and jumped down.

The bloke raised his hand as if to cuff me across the head, but changed his mind. If he'd known that I knew Blarney Barney, he wouldn't have even gone
that
far.

‘Whaddya think you're doin'? This is private property,' he growled.

Granddad always says honesty is the best policy.

‘My dog ran in here and I think he probably jumped on one of the trams because when we brought him home from the lost dogs home we took the Camberwell tram, and he liked it a lot.'

‘Well, when I see him I'll put him on a Camberwell tram and send him home. Now piss off.'

Funny bugger.

I headed for the entrance, leaving the bloke to board the tram, to see if I'd nicked the seats or something, and keeping an eye out for a dog — you never know. Just inside the main gate was the guard's room, and I ducked in for a quick squiz. I'd been in a few guard's rooms, and this one was typical, and even had a few really nice pens and pencils just lying around. On the desk was a newspaper. I could tell the bloke had been looking up the race information, because he had folded the newspaper back in the middle and that was what Dad always did with the Saturday paper, and Granddad, and Mr Platte,
down at the shop, and Mr Curran, who always had jam on his chin, and who lived down the corner. There was also a packet of Juicy Fruit on the desk, so I helped myself — both explorers and detectives think best when they're chewing. The guard had a nearly full packet of Viscounts, too, so, as I have been known to enjoy the odd puff, I fossicked around in the bin for the empty packet I knew I'd find there, slipped in one — make it two — of the weeds, and stashed them in my bag for later on, with his matches. He'd have no trouble getting more matches, as there was a whole match factory next door.

As I walked out of the room I noticed a bin with an umbrella in the Tramways colours sticking out of it, and, as it was still raining lightly, I grabbed it and put it up. Just then a tram swung into the driveway and trundled past the guard's room. The trammie couldn't see any reason why I shouldn't be there, and I couldn't see any reason why he shouldn't be driving a tram, so we just waved at each other and said ‘G'day', and I kept on walking.