I Am (Not) the Walrus (4 page)

4

Wednesday

We play until Mom comes home from work, then we pack up and Zack heads home. Back in Shawn's room, I tidy up, stack all the cables away, and then I take the p-bass back out of its case again. I sit on the bed and lay the instrument across my knees.

The first thing I try is jiggling the volume and tone controls. They're tight. So is the jack socket.

I flip the bass over. On the back of the body is an oval-shaped plastic panel, about six inches along. I hold the bass sideways. The panel is right underneath the volume and tone knobs, and it's fastened to the underside of the body with three little Phillips screws.

I hate going through Shawn's stuff, but I know he has some tools in the top drawer of his nightstand. I pull the drawer open, take the items out of the drawer one at a time, and then place them on top of the stand.

Socks, handkerchiefs, a Swiss army knife, pencils, ball-point pens, pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, a lock of hair fastened with what looks like a length of shoelace, a Sandman comic, a pack of Durex condoms.

I have to stop.

I shouldn't be doing this.

There's probably a screwdriver downstairs in the kitchen or something.

The last thing I take out is a wallet. I open it up. It's empty. Not that I care. I open the drawer wider to put the wallet back, and my fingers brush against something else. Another wallet. The first one was brown leather. This one is black, and made from a kind of nylon material. I open it, and a third wallet drops out. A red one. I shove them all to the back of the drawer, and then I notice two more wallets. Another brown leather one, and a black one with a zipper. Shawn had a thing for wallets.

Who would have guessed?

Funny the things you learn.

If only he'd had a thing for screwdrivers.

I open the drawer wider and scoop everything back until I reach the Swiss army knife. I weigh it in my hand for a moment. I pull open the blades. There is no Phillips-head screwdriver blade, but there's a very narrow, normal screwdriver in the knife. I try it in one of the screws.

It fits.

I twist it.

At first the screw is stuck fast, but then it creaks and shifts to the left so suddenly that the screwdriver slips out of the screw and scrapes across the panel, leaving a tiny scratch.

Dammit! I can't get anything right.

I blow out a long, ragged breath.

I borrow Shawn's bass, and just to show my gratitude, I damage it.

As it eases counterclockwise, I wonder how long the screw has been fastened. The p-bass is at least ten years old. Fenders are well made, the electrics are good, and there's probably never been a need to undo it before now. The screw begins to turn freely, so I put down the knife and use my finger, but just as I touch the tip of my finger to the head of the screw I notice a tiny scratch, thin as a hair, and about a half-inch long, radiating out from the next screw.

I can barely suppress a sigh of relief. Not only has the panel been opened before, but whoever opened it probably also used the wrong kind of screwdriver.

I use the tip of my finger to finish unfastening the first screw, and then with great care so there are no more scratches, I use a combo of the knife and my fingertip to remove the other two. I balance the three screws on the top of the nightstand so I can put them back later. It turns out that I need the knife again, as the plastic panel is recessed into the wooden body. I hold my breath as I use the tip of the knife to pry it up.

Underneath, the body is hollowed out to make room for the drum-shaped pods connected to the volume and tone controls. There's also a little bird's nest of wires that flip upward when I take away the lid. I lean forward and blow away some old sawdust, some of which goes in my eye.

I wipe it away, and blink.

The drum-shaped pods and the wiring I understand. I've seen the same kind of thing before when we opened the back of Zack's guitar. But there's something else I'm not familiar with. Under the cables is a pale-blue tube, more or less the exact size and shape of my little finger. I use the knife blade to poke the tube, and it squashes easily.

I'm just about to prod it again when something scuttles across the floor. I freeze with the knife blade a fraction of an inch above the tube.

A mouse?

A moth?

Just my imagination?

No. That's crazy. There really was something there.

It's so quiet that the loudest thing is my breathing, so I hold my breath. I can hear the faint clatter of plates downstairs as Mom makes supper. I can hear seagulls squawking outside the window. I can hear the distant rumble of traffic on the bypass. But nothing more from inside the room. Whatever it was stays put.

I breathe out, lower the knife blade back into the wiring, and test all of the connections. Apart from one wire, which has now come completely adrift, the rest of the soldering all seems to be pretty sound. The one connection that is adrift is the one that is holding down the little tube.

Why would Fender put a tube under a wire that would create enough pressure to break the connection?

But even as I put the thought together in my head, I know that I'm wrong. It's not a design fault of the guitar. The blue tube has nothing to do with the guitar. It was put in by some previous owner long after the guitar was made. Maybe even the person who used the wrong kind of knife and scratched the panel.

Now the question is, why would someone put this tube into the electrics?

Was it some kind of modification to improve the sound?

The Swiss army knife has a set of tweezers. Once again I hold my breath and use the tweezers to finagle the tube out from under the wires, without breaking any more connections.

I swallow hard. As the tube comes free I realize what it is. At almost exactly the same moment there's another flash of movement on the floor and I drop the knife into the wiring. With shaking fingers, I fish out the knife, then once again use the tweezers and draw the tube free from the wires.

I can just make out faint blue lines.

It is a rolled up Post-it note, a couple of inches square, held into a tube shape by the sticky strip.

A message in a bottle, except that it's a message in a p-bass.

A draft of icy air wafts in through the window.

I wish I'd put on a sweater before I started on this escapade, but I'm too curious to get to the bottom of it to stop now. When the note was put in here, it was probably bright blue, but now it has faded and yellowed with age. When I was in primary school we made white paper turn yellow by leaving it on a sunny windowsill. It took a couple of days. We put blocks on the paper, and under the blocks the paper remained white. I don't know how long it would take a piece of blue paper to fade, sealed up in the innards of
a bass.

The sun has set, and Shawn's room is almost totally dark. I lower the bass onto the bed beside me, move close to the nightstand, and flick on the desk lamp.

A hollow feeling spreads across my chest as I unroll the paper. The faded script reads:

PLEASE. If you find this note inside the bass, then the instrument has been stolen. Please, please, please, return it to me as soon as you can. This instrument is everything to me, and without it my entire existence will be meaningless. I am Julie McGuire, 48B Mariner Street, Brunswick, BK57SA, Tel: 554553. I am prepared give you a reward of two hundred pounds, no questions asked.—Kisses, Julie.

All of the letters' “I's” have little circles over them, apart from the “I” of Julie, which has a little heart over it. A sort of numbness runs down the underside of my arms. I turn the note over. Nothing is on the back.

I hold it up in front of the lamp so the glow of the bulb shines through it, but nothing more is there. I close my eyes. Maybe I'm hoping that when I open them, the note will have vanished. Just an illusion.

But it is still there.

I return my attention to the little hollow on the back of the bass. I hold the body of the instrument under the light and tip it back and forth to get a better look inside, then I freeze.

Whatever it is scoots across the floor again. I take long, steady breaths as I tip the desk lamp up and cast the beam over to the other side of the room.

I shake my head.

Nothing.

What was I thinking?

That the bass was haunted?

I lay the bass on Shawn's bed, then turn my attention back to the note. Even though the script swims in front of my eyes, I can still see that each letter is big and carefully rounded.

It's nice handwriting. Much better than my own. I've never really thought about analyzing anyone's handwriting before, but the way this is written I can almost see this Julie person's hand as it moves across the page.

I look across at the bass lying next to me. I can see her fingers moving across the strings. What am I supposed to do? Should I follow the instructions in the note and give it back to this Julie McGuire?

Or should I scrunch the note up, toss it into the garbage, and never think of it again?

“Shawn, mate,” I say to the dark corner of the room. “Tell me. It's your bass. Do you want me to give it back?”

But there's no answer. Not from the cables, or the mike stands, or even the amplifier.

Even the thing on the floor stays where it is.

I take a long breath, fold the note into a one-inch square, and slide it into my wallet.

I plug in the soldering iron, and wait for it to heat up. Once that's done, it takes less than a minute to re-connect the broken cable, and not much longer to screw the plastic panel back on.

With that done, it's time for something to eat.

On the way out of the door something catches my eye. I scoop it up off the floor. Zack's napkin, with the chords for “Day Tripper.”

Right. Of course. Zack will know what to do. I'll ask him tomorrow.

5

Thursday

Horoscope: April 15, Aquarius:

Sharing your deepest secrets could be especially romantic today when you unexpectedly run into an old acquaintance. If someone has been buying into your optimistic predictions about the future, then you may need to face
the music when the facts are discovered.

“How about the Nowhere Men?” says Zack, when I meet him on the seafront the following morning. “I've been thinking about it all night, and I think it sounds good.”

“Maybe,” I say, as we jog down the long flight of steps into what was once the Municipal Air Raid Shelter, but is now the Port Jackson Aquarium. “I found something weird in the bass, yesterday.”

This is our annual field trip. I should be psyched to spend a morning wandering around the spooky, dimly lit galleries. But now I have to make a decision as to how to deal with the note. Luckily, Zack ought to know the answer.

Before we even have time to glance at so much as a goldfish, we're ushered into an auditorium so we can spend our first hour being lectured by our spooky, dimly lit biology teacher, who is none other than Mr. Frost, or
Frosty
to those in the know.

“Did you fix it, though?” Zack slides into a chair near the door and dumps his backpack on the desk in front of him.

“Yeah. It's fine,” I say. I throw down my backpack next to his, and watch the rest of our class file in. “But guess what?”

Frosty marches to the front of the class and tosses a pile of clipboards onto the lectern.

“I think the Nowhere Men could work as a name,” says Zack. “It's Beatles-related and it's kind of surreal.” He crouches behind our two backpacks like a soldier under fire. “Guess what, what?”

“Morning!” Frosty clamps his paws onto either edge of his desk as if he's about to snap it in half.

“Morning,” comes the chorus of reply.

I sit up straight, but Zack sinks even lower behind his backpack.

Frosty turns to the blackboard and chalks the word, F-I-S-H. “A fish,” he says, “is a gill-bearing, aquatic, vertebrate animal that doesn't have any limbs with digits.”

“Zack, mate,” I mumble. “Something weird happened after you went home.” I pull my exercise book out of my notebook, jot down limbs with digits, and then lean closer to Zack. “I opened up the bass. I found the loose wire, and I soldered it back together, but guess what else I found?”

“I don't know.” Zack takes out his own notebook and a chewed-up pen. “The Lost City of Atlantis is actually located under Shawn's bed?” He tries to scrawl some words, but the pen just makes empty furrows in the paper. “What do you think of the Nowhere Men as a name?” He leans over to me. “You got a spare pen? This one's knackered.”

“Right.” Frosty pivots around to face us. “Unlike groupings such as birds or mammals, fish are not a single clade but a paraphyletic collection of taxa, including,” he counts on his fingers, “hagfishes, lampreys, sharks, rays, ray-finned fish, coelacanths, and lungfish.”

“This might be pretty important as well.” I dig the note out of my wallet, slide it under the metal pocket-clip of my spare pen, and hand both items to Zack. “Shawn's bass was stolen.”

Frosty leans on the top of an empty desk. “What was that, Toby Holland?” He flexes his elbows as if he's about to spring.

“I was just telling Zack that I'm really interested in fish,” I say.

“I don't object to you talking in class, Holland,” Frosty takes off his jacket, “as long as you don't mind me failing you.”

“Sorry, sir,” I say.

Frosty hangs his jacket on the back of the chair. Most of the teachers wear shirts that are tight across the stomach, but loose around the chest. Frosty's shirt is baggy round his waist, and so tight across the chest that any sudden move could probably split it.

Zack unrolls the note from the pen, fishes his John Lennon glasses out of his pocket, and slides them on. “Do these make me look interested in fish?” He looks down at the note.

“Only in lungfish,” I say as I watch him read.

When he's finished he puffs up his cheeks and blows out a long breath.

“That's weird, right?” I say. “I mean, Shawn is no thief. He paid for the bass, but maybe the person he bought it off stole it. What do you think that means legally?”

Zack gives me an odd look, then he turns back to his exercise book and copies down the notes from the board. “Legally?” he says. “It means nothing. I think that if you have the bass in your possession for more than a year, it becomes your property. You've had the bass for more than a year, right?”

“Yeah,” I reach over and take his glasses off his face. “About eighteen months.” I put the glasses on and squint from side to side as if I can't see anything. “Do I look cool yet?”

“On the other hand,” says Zack as he retrieves his glasses, “you could argue that if you discover it's stolen, then you have a kind of moral obligation to give it back.”

“So I should give it back?” I say.

“No.” Zack shakes his head fiercely. “It would be Shawn's decision anyway, but there's another factor.” Zack throws his pen down onto the pad. “This Julie McGuire might have sold the bass and forgotten to take the note out.”

“Seems a bit far-fetched,” I say.

Frosty glances toward me so I duck down behind my pack and draw squiggly lines on my pad. Hopefully it looks like I'm diligently taking notes.

“It's not,” says Zack. “There was a bloke who left a note like this one in his car when he sold it, and he got sued.” Zack picks up the pen and puts in it his mouth. “It could also be a prank, but worse than that, it could be some kind of scam. It might have been left there deliberately.”

“But look at the handwriting.” I point at his mouth. “Do you mind,” I say. “That's my pen you're chomping on.”

Zack pulls the pen out and stares at it. “Bloody hell,” he says. “Sorry.”

I say, “It's obviously a girl's writing.”

“Girls do scams and pranks as well.” Zack hands me back my pen.

“But it's nice writing.” I make a big show of wiping the pen on my sleeve. “That note was written by someone who was honest and sincere.”

“Look how old it is though.” Zack hands me back the note. “It's yellow around the edges.” I glance toward the front of the auditorium. “Like some biology teachers. It could have been there for a decade.”

“You can say that again.” I take the note from Zack. I'm just about to slide it back into my wallet when the dimly lit room seems to get a little dimmer. I look up. The light is being eclipsed by Frosty leaning over my desk.

“Holland!” he snarls. “You are a vile little man. Did you know that?”

For a second I consider telling Frosty that my ex-girlfriend Katrina had called me something similar, but then I change my mind. “No, sir,” I say as I shove the note into my wallet. I'm not sure this is the right answer.

Frosty holds out a hand the size of a small tennis racket. I reach over and shake it. The hand remains rigid. “The note, you noxious clown,” he says. “Give me the note.”

I'm about to protest that I don't know what he's talking about when he says, “The note you just put in your wallet.”

“It's very private, sir.” I resist the urge to take it out.

“Nevertheless,” he says, “I would like to take a look at it. When I have read it I will return it to you.”

I blow out a long breath and reach back into my wallet.

“You will then go straight back to school with your note,” says Frosty, “plus another note that I will write.”

I place the note on the desk between us.

“Then you will take both notes to the head.” Frosty unfolds the note, and pushes his glasses onto his forehead to read. The crimson color of his face turns to orange, then pale pink, and finally back to deep vermillion. He grunts. “What is this?” He tosses the note back onto the desk.

“I found it in something I bought,” I say, skirting the truth. “I wanted to show it to Zack. His dad being in insurance. I thought he might know what to do.”

Frosty grunts again. “Don't do it during class.” He takes two clipboards from under his arm and hands one each to me and Zack. He prods the clipboard in front of me with his finger. “These are multiple-choice questions,” he says. “Bear in mind that we're looking at fish.” He points out toward the galleries. “Not everything out there is a fish.”

We shoulder our packs, file out of the classroom, and line up in front of our first dappled, blue-green exhibit: an underwater rockscape that at first glance seems empty, and then from behind a boulder glides one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. It's a harbor seal, looking like a flying dog with no ears.

“Get a load of this fellow.” Blue light ripples across Zack's face as he turns to me. “Stop worrying about the bass. Be happy. Like him.” He points at the tank.

A few more glide out from behind the rocks. Are seals happy? I watch them zip up and down the tank. They seem fairly at ease with the hand the universe has dealt them, but does that make them happy?

“They might be happy,” I say, “but they aren't really fish.”

“Toby,” says Zack. “Why do you have to split hairs. I think I'm going to go and search for a happy fish, and then study it.”

“Later,” I say.

“Later,” he says, as he walks away, “and think about calling us the Nowhere Men.”

Attached to my clipboard is a sheet with twenty questions about fish. I read though them until I get to one about the number of gills that sharks have, so I trundle off to the shark tank. Sharks are at the top of the food chain, so if there's a happy fish it's probably going to be a shark.

I follow the signs through what seems like several miles of tunnel until, almost by accident, I stumble across a group of motionless, shadowy figures with staring eyes and gaping mouths. And those are just a group of ten-year-old kids standing around watching the sharks. I join the circle, and within moments I'm totally mesmerized by the long, dark shapes gliding around the drum-shaped tank. The thing about sharks is that they never look quite the way you expect them to. They look more fishy. More real.

Or maybe it's just that I'm used to seeing sharks in films, and they look less real, which might be partly due to their being made from plasticine and cardboard. Difficult to know if they're happy, although it's probably unfair to judge by these ones, as they're probably the equivalent of sharks in prison.

After some unknowable amount of time, all but one of the ten-year-olds wander away. The kid who stays behind is tiny with floppy hair and a pair of spectacles with lenses almost as thick as the glass of the shark tank itself.

He uses these spectacles to scrutinize the information board. In fact, he's studying it so avidly I get the impression he's looking for errors.

I need to answer the question about sharks, so I close my own gaping jaws, wander over to the board, and skim the text from over the kid's shoulder.

All I get to read is that the tank contains sand tiger sharks, nurse sharks, and a blacktip reef shark, and they all have jaws that open and close automatically. Then the kid sneers at me, shakes his head in disdain, and moves in front of me, blocking the section I was reading.

I check my front for spilled food, and my fly, but there's nothing. I have no idea why this kid has taken an instant dislike to me. I suppose he just wants to indulge his fascination with sharks in private. I'm sure one day he will have his own shark-infested swimming pool, and if anyone tries to read over his shoulder they will be going for a dip in the deep end.

There are some other kinds of fish swimming around the tank with the sharks. I can't really tell if the sharks are happy, but I think it's a fair bet that the other fish are pretty stressed out. In the realms of reincarnation, I wouldn't want to come back as a fish that shares a tank with a shark, even if the shark is a nurse shark. They look like they have long memories and bear grudges.

I wander around to the other side of the tank. Partly to see if there are any other sharks, and partly because the geeky kid is giving me the creeps and I like the idea of having about a dozen sharks between me and him.

The opposite side is uninhabited by humans with the exception of a girl who's sitting cross-legged on the floor, drawing.

As usual, my first thought is that she looks like Katrina, then I immediately bang my clipboard on my forehead because she's nothing like Katrina.

I can't account for what I do next.

Maybe it's my last hundred or so conversations with Zack about girlfriends.

Maybe it's reading about how sharks look scary but they're not really.

Maybe I actually concussed myself with the clipboard.

But anyway, I do something completely out of character for me.

I wander over to the girl, check out her picture, and say, “Sand tiger shark. Looks pretty good.”

“Thanks,” she says. She half-glances around at my knees, then goes on with her drawing. I study the dark hair radiating out from the crown of her head. I have no idea why she made me think of Katrina. Katrina was blonde and tall. This girl is dark-haired, and looks to be quite short, not that it's easy to tell when she's sitting on the floor.

Not my type at all.

I flip through my activity sheet until I find the question about the sand tiger shark's gills. “Carchiarias taurus,” I say, more to myself than anything else.

She stops drawing, twists right around, and looks up at me. “Bloody nora!” she says, and leaps to her feet and crouches into something that looks like a kung-fu stance. “You've got a flipping nerve. I'll give you that!”