From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (6 page)

Ren lay, curled and content, on top of the knitted blanket on her tidily made bed. Her head was propped on her pillow. She was reading
Hark! A Vagrant
by Kate Beaton who was her favourite webcom artist. It was Kate Beaton’s first book and just that afternoon Ren had brought it home from Comic Strip. Albert Anderson had been keeping it for her behind the counter until she could pay it all off. It had taken five weeks and some energetic spring-cleaning to earn the money from Mum.

Barney was down in the Emporium working for Dad. He was earning money to pay off a tripod. Essential for the doco, he said.

While Barney worked, Ren had custody of the envelope. Barney had been most proprietorial about it over the last week. He had carried it round in his back pocket. He liked to look at it often, he told Ren; he liked the surprise of seeing YOU all over again.
He liked to pretend he didn’t know what was inside, then open the envelope and …

Ren leaned
Hark! A Vagrant
against the pile of books on her bedside table. It was open at ‘Radium Eyes’, which was just about Ren’s favourite strip: Marie Curie’s eyes pinging deadly shafts of radium.

‘Why do you enjoy the macabre so much?’ Mum had asked, yet again. ‘It’s a most unattractive tendency.’

‘But it’s
funny
,’ said Ren. She had followed her mother round the apartment, shouting out ‘Who aaa ha ha!’ like Marie Curie, ‘Who aaa ha ha!’ She had tried a version of Radium Eyes. ‘See!’

Her mother looked pained. She got like this in the holidays. She had spare time; she scrutinised Ren and Barney and decided they had developed troublesome traits. It was better during term time when she was busy with her class at school; it was altogether better when she had twenty-five other children to scrutinise.

Ren took the white envelope from under her pillow. It would not do to leave it lying on her bedside table or dresser where Mum and Dad might see it.

She lifted the envelope flap and pulled out the contents. Barney was right. It was surprising every time.

Inside the envelope they had found a zine. It was an A4 piece of paper folded cleverly to make a little eight-page book that needed no binding: ten centimetres by seven.

Ren and Barney had recognised it at once. They knew all about zines. Albert Anderson had a considerable collection at Comic Strip, all sizes and subjects, all made with basic tools (pens, paper, glue, stapler, a little photocopying, perhaps), and all selling for $2. Barney had bought one for Ren’s last birthday. It was called
Things I Definitely Don’t Want for My Birthday
. The things not wanted included: a rag doll with one eye, a hair shirt, a sugarless cake and a Hello Kitty floor rug. The author had sketched each item and
provided descriptions of their histories. It wasn’t Kate Beaton, but it still made Ren laugh.

At school last year, they had made their own zines. Barney and Ren had been in the same class: it was a composite, plus Ren had skipped Year 5. All year, Edward had been outraged about this on Barney’s behalf.

‘You just shouldn’t have your
sister
in your class,’ he said. ‘It’s not natural. You should refuse to go to school. I would if Henrietta skipped.’ He said this in front of Ren, but she wasn’t offended. Edward was a bit like her: he spoke his mind.

‘So, she’s smart,’ said Barney. ‘I’m used to that. But I’m still older.’

‘It’s true,’ said Ren. ‘And still a megalomaniac.’

It was interesting being in Barney’s class, mostly because of Barney’s very frequent disagreements with Ms Temple.

Take, for instance, the zine project. The striking thing about a zine, Ms Temple had told the class, was its brevity. They could write or draw what they pleased but they had
no more
than eight pages in which to do it. This would be an excellent discipline, said Ms Temple, who was a big fan of regulation. They would learn how to select, refine and edit.

As so often happened when faced with Ms Temple’s directives, Barney had found that, somehow, the confinement of eight pages was the very thing he did
not
want to abide by. It was only really six pages, anyway, he complained to Ren, because two of them were the front and back covers. Instead, Barney had folded four eight-page zines and stapled them all together, making thirty-two pages.

This was was not at all in the spirit of the zine exercise, according to Ms Temple. Barney had argued straight back that both his idea and thethrillingalchemyofthecreativeprocess were bigger than eight pages. Ms Temple had stared at Barney longer than was comfortable. Then she had sighed heavily and remarked that Barney had never yet met a condition or rule he didn’t feel obliged to flout.

‘But,’ she added, walking away, ‘this disappointing tendency is
your
funeral, Barney, not mine.’

This was representative of many of Barney and Ms Temple’s exchanges. Ren didn’t hold it against Ms Temple; she knew what Barney was like. She appreciated Ms Temple who was wonderfully organised. Also, a fan of reason and logic. Ren was perfectly happy to be in Ms Temple’s class for a second year. Barney was extremely pleased to be rid of her.

Barney’s zine had been an intricate storyboard for a little film called
Alien Invasion
. It was called that because of Barney’s very limited drawing ability – bulbous alien figures with oval heads and bug eyes were his specialty.
Alien Invasion
had exotic settings, an unsolved mystery and some excellent explosions – something else Barney could draw without too much trouble. Ms Temple had given it a C- and suggested:
A
, he should offer the reader the satisfaction of a
solved
mystery.
B
, he should avoid gratuitous violence and mayhem in future creations.

The rest of the class had happily worked within the eight-page rule.

Benjamin had written six haiku about (Organic) Iced Rodents.

Lovie had drawn six pen-and-ink portraits of Street characters, including Izzy who had a long golden plait like Rapunzel, and Darius, the jazz student who moonlighted as an occasional living statue.

Jack had written a six-step instruction for authentic Neapolitan pizza, with small photos.

Ren had composed a six-verse poem about a family perishing in the Black Death; she had illustrated it with photos of fleas magnified under a microscope.

You could donate your zine to the school library if you wanted, so that anyone at the Kate Sheppard School could read it, but Barney had declined this opportunity, and Ren knew why. He didn’t want anyone seeing that C−.

It was possible, of course, that the zine Ren held now in her
hands had been made by someone from Ms Temple’s class.

‘And if it is someone from our class,’ Barney had reasoned, ‘it’s gotta be a High Street kid, don’t you think?’

‘No,’ Ren replied. ‘
A
, the other kids come here all the time.
B
, everyone’s away except Jack and Benjamin.
C
, if it was Jack or Benjamin you would know. They can never keep a secret.’ Impeccable logic.

The zine was called
Orange Boy Lives
. The cover title was written in tidy block capitals but there was not a word between the covers: the story was told in illustrations, small, careful pencil drawings, which Ren and Barney knew now practically by heart.

Ren enjoyed a good wordless story, but Barney was a devoted fan. His favourite book of all time,
The Arrival
, told its story entirely in pictures. It was a silent movie in a book.

‘That’s the best thing about wordless books,’ he had told Ren, more than once. ‘They’re practically a film.’

The great thing about film, Barney always said, was that you didn’t have to
read
anything – not counting sub-titled movies, of course. He avoided those like the plague. He wanted to listen and look, but not at words, if he could help it; he particularly liked
not
having to bother with written words.

Orange Boy Lives
was Barney’s kind of zine.

‘This gives me the strangest feeling,’ he said, that first evening when they read it over and over. ‘Every time I look at it I think I really
am
the You on the envelope. It’s spooky.’

But
why
? Ren wondered. They couldn’t say.

Orange Boy was a skinny kid with wispy hair and a small face. He wore a puffer jacket that came nearly to his knees. It was unclear why he was called Orange Boy because the pictures were black and white. Maybe it was his jacket. Maybe it was his hair. Maybe it was his sneakers: they were outsized, too, like gravy boats at the base of his spindly legs.

‘Maybe he eats oranges,’ said Ren.

She didn’t go in for strange feelings, but Orange Boy interested Ren, all the same. Every time she looked at the zine she liked him more. She liked the little gap between his bottom teeth. She liked how he wore a nightshirt, rather than pyjamas. She liked his knobbly knees showing beneath the nightshirt.

They had pored over the pages together, trying to make sense of it all. Each page was divided into small panels; each panel showed a scene from Orange Boy’s days and nights. Orange Boy with his sleepy cat. Orange Boy and his two long-legged dogs striding down a suburban street. Orange Boy kicking a rugby ball with his friends. Orange Boy painting a face on a rugby ball. Orange Boy playing the drums. Orange Boy at home with two adults who sat in chairs either side of a fireplace, reading. Orange Boy at night, a sliver of moon showing in his window, two teddy bears stashed beneath his bed.

There wasn’t an orange in sight, though there was plenty of food: Orange Boy eating a chicken dinner with his folks. Orange Boy and a mate, on a park bench eating Subway. Orange Boy on Christmas Day, eating a candy cane from the bottom up.

‘So,’ said Ren, summarising, which was how she always approached a puzzle, ‘Orange Boy lives. He has a cat and two dogs, and secret teddies. He lives in a little house with his parents –’

‘Grandparents,’ said Barney. ‘They look grandparenty.’

‘They don’t look like our grandparents,’ said Ren, which was perfectly true. North Island Gran was tall with bobbed hair and chic dresses; she worked in a government department. South Island Gran and Granpa were well built and hardy and mostly wore outdoor gear because they were orchardists. Orange Boy’s grandparents were small and a little bent and they wore spectacles. Their clothes were old-fashioned. The man sometimes used a walking stick; the woman often carried a basket.

‘They’re like
story
grandparents,’ said Barney, and immediately Ren saw that he was right. And then she saw that the long-legged
dogs were story dogs – Dalmatians. And the sleepy cat and the teddy bears were like every slumberous cat and glazed-eyed teddy you’d ever seen in the dozens of picture books about cats or teddies.

‘But who
is
he?’ said Ren.

‘Orange Boy? Or the artist?’

‘They could be the same,’ said Ren. ‘It could be an autobiography.’

‘Non-fiction,’ she added, as if Barney didn’t know it. ‘My favourite form.’

‘That would
definitely
mean a Street visitor. But we haven’t seen anyone who looks like him, we haven’t seen any Dalmatians.’

‘We don’t see everything that happens on the Street.’

Back and forth, back and forth they went, speculating wildly about the pictures, the identity of the author, a
true
Orange Boy or a made-up one?

And, what about the possibility of secret couriers? Perhaps it was a game dreamt up by the ever-cunning Albert Anderson – who, after all, had organised Street Easter Egg Hunts for the last five years, and certainly knew all about zines. Or, could it be one of the Street’s artists? Or a chess-playing Polytech student? But Izzy was away on holiday with her boyfriend, The Unpublished Poet. So was Thomas, the designer who lived above the Map Shop in the Square. So were all the Poly students who melted away at the end of term; it would be another fortnight before they reappeared.

‘It could be someone we’d never think of,’ said Barney. ‘Someone with a hidden talent. Someone who does a completely different kind of job. Someone like –’

‘Dale?’ said Ren. They found that very funny. Dale was the owner of Dale’s Copy Centre and mostly talked about things like thermocratic ink and risograph printing or the Studio-3055c-with-65-ppm-Full-Colour-and-65-ppm-BW-Digital-MFD. Dale didn’t seem at all interested in art and especially not Xerox art, which
Barney and Jack had once attempted by photocopying their hands and faces on Dale’s prized ColorQube 8900.

On the whole it was unlikely Dale could be the author of
Orange Boy Lives
. There were plenty of people on the Street who were unlikely. Marcel from Toto’s, for instance, who was painfully introverted and stayed out the back of the shop where no stranger was likely to address him. Or Dr Beverley from the Medical Centre who, when he wasn’t doctoring, spent his time playing or watching or thinking about croquet. Or Marie Scully, who had fifteen grandchildren but didn’t know much about things like smartphones or Snapchat or online shopping or zines.

‘But,’ said Barney during one of these lengthy discussions, ‘really,
really
, what do we know? Who knows what Marcel is doing out the back of Toto’s? He could be a secret zine genius.’

‘He orders new films,’ said Ren. ‘And reads film magazines. And does cryptic crosswords.

‘He mostly gets them out,’ she said, as an afterthought.

‘See,’ said Barney. ‘People probably don’t know that about him.
I
didn’t know that about him.’

Ren knew because she sometimes went out the back of Toto’s and did a crossword with Marcel. Ren’s crosswords always came out.

But it was true, too, that while Dale talked almost exclusively about photocopying equipment and sprayed his machines fastidiously every morning with a specially concocted spirit cleanser, he did also know a surprising amount about old Westerns. He’d amazed everyone at Albert Anderson’s Mini Western Festival. Barney was right. You never
could
tell with people.