From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (23 page)

What was it though? What had been different about looking at the rushes? Montgomery’s, the Yoga Room, the Map Shop: all great. Nothing wrong. Tick. Interviews in the Square also awesome. Tick. They had travelled a long, long way since the train-wreck with Dick Scully.

But why then was he not feeling his usual world-conquering, chest-expanding wonderfulness? Why was he not experiencing
the reliable gush of confidence about his great and famous film-directing future?

Barney tentatively probed the deeper recesses of his mind. It was something he tried not to do too often.

Perhaps it was just the tiredness.

Perhaps he was getting pickier, demanding more of himself. According to Hal and Felix, this was the way one
grew
as a filmmaker.

Or was it something to do with the night in the Post Office?

In his interior memory-film of that night Barney could see them all at the makeshift table, four uncertain actors, thinking furiously, improvising their lines.

‘When you were watching,’ said Ren, slowly. She gazed at the screen saver. It was a picture of the planet Earth, floating in starsprinkled space.

‘Did you secretly think we might see Obi and Girl in the Square?’

How very eerie Ren could be.

‘In the rushes, I mean.’

Barney looked at his sister in quiet amazement. There she was, so entirely different to him, but somehow often thinking the very same things he did. And, often knowing it before he did.

He
had
scanned the crowd in Luna Square – while they were filming, and during the rushes. It had been almost unconscious in the Square; he had not quite admitted it to himself. But tonight he had peered carefully, combing the throngs and the small spaces between – for that striking nose, for a tuft of corn-coloured hair.

They had not been there, or at least, they had not been
visible
.

Most likely they were sequestered in their strange lodgings, away from all the eyes, drawing something or playing one of their unconventional and discomforting games: Bird Fludo or Pedo, or Dominos with those tiny freakish faces instead of dots. They were inside a lot now, they had told Barney and Ren. It had got risky going out in the day. Even to the library.

But.

‘I kept looking for them,’ said Ren. ‘I’m sure they weren’t there. Which is sad, don’t you think? That they couldn’t be there, too. With everyone.’

Sad. Yes. Was he feeling sad?

Maybe.

‘Just
one
question,’ Barney had said, wheedlingly, in the Post Office, as he and Ren had got up from the table after Charades. Obi and Girl had risen, too, as formal as hosts at a dinner party. In that moment of goodbye and departure, Barney had felt briefly bold. He had felt somehow closer to Obi, suddenly hopeful that he would relax his peevish rules.

Obi had merely looked irritable and then blank. Barney held his breath.

‘One then,’ Obi snapped.

‘How come …’ said Barney. But he wasn’t sure how to frame this question.

‘I don’t get, I mean, apart from Albert and Mariko, I don’t get …’ He tried again.

‘I mean, how come you didn’t …’ Blank.

‘Spit it out, Maestro,’ said Girl. She was all flat voiced and unlovely again.

‘Howcomenoone
ever
seemedtoseeyou?’ said Barney, in a rush. ‘How did you not get
noticed
? When you were in the shops, stealing and hanging around? Or anywhere? How come
we
never saw you? How did you find out so much stuff about us and we never noticed?’

The silence following had been long. Barney had swayed with tiredness. He had felt unreal, like his head was beside his body, not on it.

‘That was five questions,’ said Girl.

But Obi was thinking seriously about his question.

‘Talent,’ he said, finally. ‘Talent for stealing.’

‘We’re good at not being seen,’ said Girl. ‘We’re genius at it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Obi, ‘we blend in. We’re genius blenders.’

‘General geniuses.’

Silence again. But they were going to say something else, Barney knew. Ren was beside him, poking once more.

‘People never look,’ said Girl. ‘People like you, people on this Street; you’re never looking at people like us. Which is fine by us.’

‘Yeah,’ said Obi. ‘You never
looked
, Mr Big Hair. You’re all into your own stuff. Talk, talk, busybusy. Suits us, though. Makes us invisible.’

There had been nothing to say to that. Barney had felt ashamed.

‘
Invisible
,’ hooted Obi, softly, as he closed the door on them, and disappeared.

That was the last word of the long night. It had followed Barney and Ren into the moonlit dark, down the alley and across the Street, through their own back door and into their beds. It had followed them through the next two days, so that they had each wondered, as they scoured the Square and the rushes, if Obi and Girl could actually
be
there, part of it all, but somehow not able to be seen. Not able to be seen by them, Barney and Ren, talk, talk, busybusy, never looking,
all into their own things
.

‘They’re
on
the Street but they’re not part of it,’ said Ren. ‘They’re like Typhoid Mary.’

‘Yes,’ said Barney, slowly. Something was coming, something at the back of his head, pushing its way to the front, like a new shoot muscling up through the soil.

‘They’re kind of like prisoners,’ said Ren. ‘Invisible prisoners. No one can know.’

‘Oh,’ said Barney, softly. The something – a new and perfectly formed idea, served up once again by the trusty thrillingalchemy – was flowering before him, right now, in full technicolour.

‘Oh but they
can
,’ he said.

‘
What
?’ said Ren, seeing his face.

Now it was his turn to tell her.

It was not a surprise then – because this was how their universe seemed to operate now – it was not at all startling, to find, propped against the back doorstep the next morning, a new envelope.

YOU.

Barney thought his heart actually stopped beating for a second, though it was not with shock; it was the sweet pleasure of confirmation. He stood still as a statue, a plate of peanut butter toast in hand, and stared at the pristine white rectangle nudging the dusty doormat.

Ren picked up the envelope and opened it.

They read the zine quickly.

‘Wow,’ sighed Ren, ‘great minds.’

‘Mind-
melding
,’ said Barney.

(Moo, did you perhaps think the envelopes would stop? I confess I did.

But, of course, it makes much more sense that they would continue. The zines made the best sense all together. For all of them. Ren has helped me see that. The zine exchange – the making and then the reading – was always the easiest and the truest communication between the four children. Those wordless scenes made
the best sense
. It was so much more difficult when they were all together, as you will have observed.

Communication was altogether better with a medium.

Pen and paper.

Or, a camera.)

Ren sat in the sofa at Dale’s Copy Centre.

The sofa was deep and high off the ground, so you had to decide either to be right
in
it: all the way back against the cushion with your legs sticking out in front of you like a pre-schooler, or to be
on
it: perched on the edge with your feet not quite touching the floor, your legs dangling bloodlessly. Both positions were undignified, in Ren’s view, but sitting
in
was more comfortable.

The woman sitting beside her was clearly new to Dale’s sofa. She sat, initially, somewhere between in and on, a most uncomfortable midway, a position best described as ‘
neither
h
alf-past eight nor Cashel Street
’, a handy phrase invented by South Island Gran. The woman, whose name was Rosebud (she was wearing a name badge) had been trying unsuccessfully to adjust her position for some minutes. The hefty writhing and
rearranging and copious sighing was getting right on Ren’s nerves.

It was a great shame you couldn’t tell adults off.

Distraction was the best remedy in these situations, Ren had found. Thinking about something else. The next meal, perhaps. (Dinner: Wednesday, Dad cooking; he was in love with tofu.) Homework. (Maths, science and three paragraphs on national flags: all done by 4.30.) Projects. (A letter to Parks and Recreation about the prickles in Little Wilt’s grass? The circular scarf she was planning to knit?) Friends. (Would there be time for Henrietta and Lovie to come over on Saturday? And – unpleasant thought – were they a teensy bit annoyed with her?)

But the truth was there was no time at all for letters or knitted scarves or watching movies or checking out webcomics. Or friends. Every spare moment in Ren’s life right now was spent on filming and rushes, or production organisation, or, in the last week, furtive scavenging for food, soap, toilet paper and other life essentials. Among everything else, Ren and Barney had become an exclusive aid organisation, serving just two people in need.

And Henrietta and Lovie
were
cross with her. Ren could tell. There were various subtle signs, known only among friends. The way they had departed today from the Ambulatorix: the way they walked, the way they said see ya. The angle of their close-together heads. She knew what they would be saying to each other, too: how
weird
was it to spend so much time with your
brother
? Henrietta had said it before.

Nor had Ren’s thoughts turned anywhere for the last two weeks other than to the shrouded interior of the Post Office and the unfolding story of Obi and Girl. It was all
molto
interesting and thrilling and even pleasantly nerve-wracking, but it was true, too, that a treacherous whisper had begun to assert itself in her head:
it would be good when it was all over
.

But, just how
would
it be all over? This thought had been
preoccupying Ren for some time now.
The Untold Story
would be finished, of course, when the timetable said so: when the interviews were in the can and the editing done.

But Obi and Girl? How would –

Here was Dale at last, steaming out from the back room, a little breathless at the counter.

‘Ladies,’ he exhaled, addressing Rosebud alone, ‘my sincere apologies for the wait. Not how we like to do business. Very sorry.’

Rosebud wriggled her way off the sofa and brought a wad of papers from her bag.

‘My junior assistant has had to leave early for a personal matter,’ said Dale. He had two assistants, Jilly and Hamish. Jilly was new and Hamish was famously unreliable. Dale often complained about him.

‘How can I help you, Ms –’ said Dale, peering at Rosebud’s name badge. ‘Ms Rosebud?’ He sounded frankly disbelieving.

Well,
actually
, Dale, shouted Ren, but silently. I was here first!
I
actually have a small photocopying job that I have been waiting patiently with.

It was really so maddening the way adults just
ignored
children in queues or at counters.

Oh, but it was nothing new. Don’t get mad, Mum always said. Get even.

It was unclear to Ren quite how one got even in this particular situation. She supposed she could take her business elsewhere, but would Dale even notice? Plus the nearest other copy centre was blocks away. She contented herself instead with taking the small photocopying job from her backpack and inspecting it. Yet again.

The five
Orange Boy
zines in their envelopes.

Ren pulled the green ribbon with which she had tied them just that morning. Not a rubber band! Barney had said, when Ren went hunting in the kitchen drawers. Eeew, no. They must be kept in a
bundle and tied like an ancient package, he insisted; like something immensely valuable, something unearthed just recently in a dusty archive.

She spread the five little books across her lap, selected the most recent one, pretending she had never seen it before.

She had done this about fifty times, but it was always good.

Orange Boy Lives V
was the standard eight-pager. The story was told simply across six pages of strips. Once again, the setting was the Post Office, though now there were four characters: Obi and Girl, Barney and Ren.

There was no action as such: just as last time there was the same tableau in each panel, and again from varying angles: Obi and Girl sat on two chairs in the uncolonised part of the Post Office front room. Before them, like an interview committee, sat Barney and Ren.

Ren sat in a chair, holding a bulldog-clipboard and a pen.

Barney sat on his fold-up canvas stool, the camera, immediately to his right, on the tripod.

The camera was trained directly on Obi and Girl.

Miraculously –
how
did it happen this way? – the zine scenario was precisely the same idea that had bloomed in Barney’s head at the end of their Saturday night rushes. It was almost exactly as Barney had explained it all to Ren in the seconds after inspiration had overtaken him.

It was all so totally and perfectly
right
, Barney had said. It was the stroke of genius that made a good film a
great
film. It was the X-factor that all directors longed for. It was what documentary should be and must be. It was – he said the next words as though savouring something very delicious – a
masterstroke
.

‘It is so good,’ said Barney, ‘that I feel insanely calm.’

It was true that he spoke with conspicuous composure in that
moment – certainly more than was usual when he was in the grip of thethrillingalchemy. Slowly, almost dreamily, he had begun to tell Ren why it was they must film Obi and Girl.

‘They’re part of the Street,’ said Barney. ‘It’s a fact. Almost no one sees them, or realises they’ve seen them, but the Post Office is their home, so the Street is theirs as much as it’s ours.
Obviously
they should be interviewed.

‘But, more importantly’ – Barney stood and began pacing now, his words speeding up – ‘filming Obi and Girl will make them properly part of the Street. And the Street’s story will become the full story.
Really
warts and all. If we film Obi and Girl that makes them visible and then the doco is
fully
true. Without them the documentary is’ – here Barney stopped and grabbed Ren’s arm in the usual way – ‘it’s as good as a
lie
.’

Ren had boggled obligingly at this, just as she knew Barney wanted her to. It was all part of the way they worked. Barney was all mobile face and theatrical gestures now. Thethrillingalchemy was reaching boiling point. Barney’s hair was at its Professor-Brown maddest. She always half expected to see steam coming out her brother’s ears.

‘Obi and Girl’s is the
real
Untold Story,’ said Barney. ‘It’s our duty as serious documentary makers to tell Obi and Girl’s story.
That’s
a fact.

‘You see, you
see
?’ he said, beating Ren’s forearm about like a fleshy baton.

‘Well, yes,’ said Ren. (Well, she
did
see.) ‘But isn’t there a big fat problem –’

‘No!’ said Barney, categorically. He raised a traffic warden hand – like Obi! – shutting down potential
As
and
Bs
or 1s and 2s. She could hear his exasperated thoughts.
Blimey!Why can’tpeoplejustdowhatISAY
?

‘How can –’

‘No! Stop! I’ve thought of everything! I really have! We go
there at night
or
– I go there on the afternoons Ms Bloodworth says I can have off – she said
for
the doco, anditis, so I won’t be
lying
or anything – it’ll be a bit riskier, but we can work out how to cover it, schedule another interview on the same afternoon only make it short, and we’ll just do a couple of hours at a time and it won’t be any more than eight hours, forsure and youandIwill work out the questions, then we’ll check the rushes, it’ll be justhesameasalltheotherinterviews and –’

Barney was no longer calm. That was a fact, all right.

Ren waited for him to finish. She had drifted off, momentarily, thinking about her bed. She
yearned
for her bed.

‘– and are you even
listening
to me?’

‘Yes,’ yawned Ren. She could almost feel the crisp fabric of the pillowcase on her cheek, the cool corners of the bed when you sent your feet foraging for relief.

‘Well,
what
then?’

‘Well. How can we show their faces? And how can we show the Post Office? What happens when people watch the doco? We’ll blow their cover.’

Ren had felt a tiny prickle of pleasure at that. Honestly, how often did an eleven-year-old girl get to say
blow their cover
?

‘How dumb do you think I am?’ said Barney, loftily. ‘Of
course
I’ve thought of that. We just keep the shots very tight, but it’ll be so dark anyway – the background won’t be clear –’

‘But how do you film in the
dark
?’ said Ren, and was then sorry she’d asked.

‘Blimey, don’t you remember anything I tell you? We did it in
Silent Movie
, in Henrietta’s bedroom.’

So they had, though Ren did not remember Barney telling her. She must have zoned out. She usually did during his technical explanations. They were full of jargon and dull dull dull, so Ren had perfected the art of nodding with interest but thinking about something else – schedules or props, or where they had to be next
and at what time. That was a Slasher’s job after all. A Slasher did not need to know about –

‘– crank up the iso and increase the sensitivity or crank up the gain – which would be better actually because that would give a grainy effect – and obviously a slower shutter speed
and
a fully open aperture. I’ve told you this a million times –’

‘But as soon as Albert sees Girl’s face, or maybe Obi’s – we don’t know – he’ll recognise her as the thief. She could get arrested or –’

‘Obviously, I’ve thought about that. We pixelate their faces of course, so they can’t be identified. Maybe their hands, too. Easy. There’s great software –’

‘
Money
,’ said Ren. ‘We haven’t got any.’

They were in housework-hock up to their ears after begging advances from both Dad and Mum.

‘Won’t need it,’ Barney shot back. ‘Get an Open Source plugin. Easy.’

Oh yes,
easy
, thought Ren. How many times had she heard
easy
and it had turned out to be
crazy
? So many times. Take the bleeding corpses in No-Man’s-Land. The blood had been a mix of golden syrup, red food colouring and water inside small balloons – a low-budget standard, according to YouTube. The balloons had been made to burst at the moment of bullet-riddled death by means of a small explosive squib – a cunning prop ordered online by Barney after the usual haggling with Dad.

Easy
! said Barney, as he and Edward and the other boys gleefully prepared the balloons. Of course it had been bedlam, not to mention revoltingly sticky, and somehow it had got over their own clothes as well as the costumes and all the parents had been cross.

Easy
! was also how Barney had described the escape scene in
Silent Movie
, the scene in which, in the heat of drama, Benjamin had wrenched himself too violently from Jack-the-kidnapper’s
grasp and accidentally fallen out Barney’s bedroom window. By incredible good luck his fall had been broken by a line of full rubbish bags on the path below, but even so Benjamin had nursed a bruised back and a headache for a week. They had kept this accident from the parents; Benjamin had been instructed not to let Kazimierz see him naked under any circumstances, or to complain about his headache. Barney had supplied him with Panadol from the bathroom first-aid box.

Ren had also kept secret the time Barney had made her stand on a large flat rock in the middle of the storm-swollen river down the back of South Island Gran and Granpa’s property while he filmed the climax of an early – and never-released – Kettle black and white Short.
Easy
, he had said. See the stepping-stones? Onetwothreefourfive and you’re there. Onetwothreefourfive had worked fine on the way to the flat rock, but the return had proved much less straightforward. Ren had hesitated and misstepped and wobbled, and then – BLIMEY! came the yell from the riverbank – she had slipped into the water, which had been frighteningly swift and so very cold.

Fortunately, she had been able to grab hold of the horizontal tree trunk whose sodden, mossy length stretched from the bank to the middle of the river. Barney had charged back to the house and found towels and a rug, and then had distracted Gran and Granpa as Ren slipped inside to change. All the same, for months afterwards Ren maintained a winning hand in every one of their disagreements.
Easy
! She had merely said that if he didn’t do things her way she would tell their parents that not only had he convinced her to cross the river when it was in flood, but he had
continued to film her when she went into the water
.

Oh yes, there was a long, long catalogue of
Easy
! episodes describing the history of Kettle Productions. It would be no different in the matter of Obi and Girl. Ren just knew it.