Rat blushed pink and retreated behind the door. Taz, who has the most savoir faire, opened it, letting us in and crushing his housemate against the wall.
‘Come in!’ he invited. He himself was wearing a fetching sarong with purple hibiscus on it. The flat was clean enough, as they employed a cleaner. We had demanded that they do so
after the smell had made Mrs Pemberthy sick. That was to be expected, she being highly sensitive, as she says herself, but it had also made her rotten little doggie, Traddles, sick. Once it had been drawn to their attention that their deep midden of old pizza boxes and half-empty Coke cans and very antique underwear was rendering them prone to prosecution under the toxic waste laws, they had acted. More swiftly, perhaps, because Del Pandamus was threatening to thump them because Hephaestus is located next door to Cafe Delicious and the stench was ruining his customers’ appetites. They had hastily employed a cleaner who came every week. A woman who must have demonstrated that she was proof against conditions similar to that of Scutari hospital before Miss Nightingale arrived. A purge of appalling proportions had ensued. The rubbish men had to be specially bribed to take the suppurating stuff away. Since then her once-a-week visits served to keep the premises on this side of squalor.
No one could do anything about their tastes in food, of course, which inclined purely towards junk. If it didn’t have chilli sauce in it, they weren’t interested. Unless chilli sauce could be poured onto it. There were three of them, the Lone Gunmen, named after the nerds in the
X-Files
: Taz, who was relatively respectable; Rat, who was presently trying to get himself, his rat-tail hair and his boxers out from behind the door without indecent exposure; and Gully, who was the most plump and the most affable. Gully’s mum came every week and collected their dirty clothes, returning them pristine enough to get chilli sauce on again. Another one of our humble heroines.
But what they didn’t know about computers, their use and misuse, you could put in your eye without any impairment of vision. They had narrowly escaped being charged with an interesting collection of computer offences by offering free help to the Victoria Police Electronics Unit in any little computer puzzle
they might encounter. I used to do their accounts. They made a reasonable living from selling games and operating systems, supplemented with appearances at a nightclub dressed as witches (yes, it is confusing, but that’s life in Insula). Lately they had taken to opening the shop only when they felt like it and their lights burnt all night. I had wondered what they were doing, and hoped that it was sort of licit. They wouldn’t like prison, which seldom has wireless broadband.
‘Daniel!’ exclaimed Gully, looking up from a search for the last crumbs in a bag of corn chips. ‘We’ve got those phone numbers for you.’
‘Legally?’ asked Daniel, taking the piece of paper.
‘Of course, it’s all on the web somewhere, you just have to know where to look. We know where to look. But we’re still running that code. Rat’s dedicated a whole day’s run time to it and we aren’t getting anywhere. It must be a one-time or a book.’
He said this as though describing a strange and arcane piece of technology. The Lone Gunmen don’t read a lot.
‘Have a chip,’ offered Rat, now clothed in heavy winter-weight jeans. He had the look of a man who wasn’t going to take them off any time soon. I took one of his corn chips. I bit it. Bad idea. It was, naturally, chilli-flavoured.
‘Give it another couple of hours,’ Taz offered. ‘Since you’re an old customer.’
‘All right, boys, thanks,’ said Daniel.
‘You’ve been busy,’ I said as casually as I could. ‘Working all night. Something special on?’
‘Facebook,’ said Taz, just short of a gloat.
‘Facebook?’
‘People put all sorts of information on Facebook,’ Gully explained, as though talking to a very small and stupid child.
I tried not to be offended. Compared to them, I was a small and stupid child. ‘And then they grow up and regret talking about how much they fancied their English teacher and—boys do this all the time—how often they came that morning while they were in the bathroom. Or how big their … well, you know.’
‘Euw,’ I said, quoting Kylie.
Taz rescued his embarrassed friend.
‘Or the information is false—put on by someone else. And there’s no way to remove it. You don’t want to spend your whole life with a freely available picture of yourself vomiting over a dog at a buck’s night, for instance, which is the one I am working on at present. Or with a blue bow tied around your … well, you get the picture.’
Taz was silenced in his turn. They really were maidenly. It was a charming trait.
‘Or with the slogan
Cathy is a slut
or
William has herpes
,’ put in Rat. ‘Only way to get the info off the net is to employ the very best hackers—i.e. us,’ he said with justifiable pride. ‘We can’t keep up with the demand. We’ve brought in Taz’s little bro and his buddy for the easy ones. But Taz’s mum won’t let them work at night. Actually we were going to ask you for some investment advice,’ he added.
‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Stay out of property and buy superannuation—I can direct you to a very good accountant. Isn’t that Facebook thing the poison-pen matter you were working on, Daniel?’
‘Yes, and I must say that the Lone Gunmen came to the rescue with great dispatch. The client is delighted and the money is in your account. However, they still haven’t found out who did it.’
‘Matter of time,’ Taz assured him. ‘He or she will go online again, and then they will fall into our little trap, and then we will
have them! Ah ha ha ha!’ He began to emit big villainous manic laughs until silenced by the stares of the others.
‘Sorry, channelling Dr Phibes there for a moment. That all, Daniel? Only we have to get back to work.’
‘That’s all,’ said Daniel, and we refused the offer of another corn chip and left Hephaestus. Our own apartment seemed so spacious and cool in comparison.
There being some time available until I had to go to sleep and Daniel had to go hunting in the old brewery, we made good use of it. I eventually went to sleep with a mouth swollen from kisses as sweet as honey.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Trad.
Four am is such a ghastly hour that I didn’t really notice that Daniel had not come back until I had fed Horatio, sipped away two cups of coffee and eaten my sourdough toast with cherry jam.
Something was missing from my apartment, I thought vaguely. Furniture? All there. Horatio? Under the table retrieving yesterday’s chewed bacon rind (and I had the nerve to criticise the Lone Gunmen’s housekeeping). Ah, yes. No Daniel. I checked the spare bedroom, where he sometimes crashes if he doesn’t want to risk waking me. Nothing but the heaps of junk which are usually there. Ergo, he had not come back here last night after searching the brewery. He must have gone home to his own little flat. Ah,
well, I was not fit for company early in the morning, anyway. Into the baker’s overall and solid shoes, down the stairs, Mouse Police, litter tray, wash hands again, put on bakery coffee pot, greet Jason who was scowling furiously over several small red objects.
I was getting a little tired of Jason’s titanic struggle with the glacé cherry. So I barked, ‘Mr Midshipman!’ and watched him jump.
‘Sir!’ he saluted. ‘Think I’ve almost got them now, sir!’
I examined the little red sphere. Translucent. Shiny. Yielding but not soft. I bit. Tasted very good. But …
Jason anticipated me as I tried to form a sentence which wouldn’t offend him.
‘I know,’ he said, throwing up his hands. ‘I know! I’ve made a real genuine plastic cherry!’
‘Jason,’ I began, ‘it’s a good cherry. A very good cherry.’
‘But it’s like the bought ones!’ he wailed.
I was not in the mood to indulge anyone’s tantrums, including my own. I put a hand on his distraught shoulder and shook him lightly.
‘Enough of this. Midshipman, we have bread to bake. Tomorrow—not today—you can buy some more cherries and try another recipe. If it’s any comfort,’ I added, as we hauled out sacks and began measuring flour, ‘I once made a perfect commercial tomato soup out of totally fresh ingredients. I have never been so disappointed. But I got over it and so will you. That’s an order!’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ he mumbled.
We mixed. We baked. The morning grew lighter outside in Calico Alley. I was listening for hoofs, but Serena’s supply of rosewater muffins must have been secure. Heckle and Jekyll nosed out for Kiko’s tuna scraps, then nosed back, beating the paperboy. He never even slowed when taking the sharp right into Flinders Lane these days, knowing how I felt about people who maimed
innocent cats. Therefore it was not surprising that there was a yelp, a howl, and the crash of a bicycle hitting the cobbles.
‘Break out the first-aid box, Jason,’ I told him, and went out to the scene of the carnage.
It was, of course, poor Rowan on his morning run who had been flattened by the bike and was actually wounded, while the paperboy was uninjured except for his pride. I hauled the bike off the student and helped him, once more, into the bakery, to sit in the chair again and be tended. I told the paperboy that if he rode at that speed down my alley one more time I would have the law on him and he went away, the back wheel wobbling and a whole city full of papers to deliver. Which just about served the little ratbag right, though that didn’t help our fellow tenant, who had re-scraped his shin and skinned the other knee. He was also much begrimed by contact with the unswept cobbles and looked upset.
On the other hand, Heckle was sitting on his foot, licking his nearest injury, and was radiating comradely piratical affection. ‘That’s the stuff, m’lad,’ you could hear the evil-minded rogue cat saying. ‘Only next time, pink ’em in the plexus with a cutlass.’
While Heckle was shivering his timbers and Jason was rescuing the bread, I was mopping blood and dust off Rowan. He regained his breath and tried to smile.
‘You know, I’m beginning to wonder if all this exercise is really healthy,’ he quipped, which was a pretty good quip for six am, delivered by a boy with a heavy black and white cat on his foot.
‘Coffee, Coke, water or tea?’ asked Jason. ‘Muffin or roll?’
‘Water,’ said Rowan automatically, then grinned an unexpected wild grin. ‘Coke,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, we won’t tell on you,’ Jason assured him.
‘In that case,’ said Rowan boldly, ‘is that bacon I can smell?’
Well, that was a surprise. Jason turned out his tray of experimental bacon and zucchini mini muffins—a mouthful of delight, each one—and put two into Rowan’s hand. The one which didn’t have damaged knuckles. ‘I miss bacon most,’ he said sadly. ‘And salami.’
‘All the preserved meats,’ I commented, drying his knee so that the bandaid would stick.
‘Smoked salmon, beef jerky, ham, Uncle Solly’s salt beef.’ Jason sang it almost like a litany. ‘I’d hate to give them all up. Why did you?’
‘Have to do something,’ said Rowan through his mouthful. ‘Planet can’t afford us. Also, my grandfather used to eat steaks, terrible steaks oozing blood, and he’d cut off bits for me, and then he and my dad would make me eat them. And if I was sick they’d make me eat more.’
Just remembering this, the boy’s face was as white as milk and his eyes seemed very old. He gulped his Coke. Jason patted his shoulder. I patted the other shoulder.
‘Can’t think of a better recipe to make a vegetarian,’ I said. ‘There you are. Heckle, get off his foot, please.’
Heckle looked at me. He knew his name, all right. However, he declined to take any notice of my polite request. This was his old shipmate he was tending.
‘No, he’s fine,’ said Rowan, caressing the ticket-punch ears. ‘He’s a good old cat. And he likes the taste of blood. I don’t. Anyway, if he drinks my blood, he won’t go stalking out into the night, waylaying innocent victims …’
‘The curse of the cat!’ said Jason, delighted. He loves horror movies.
‘Eyes alight with demonic fire, he slinks out of a respectable bakery and finds his prey on the dark streets of a city called … Melbourne,’ Rowan went on.
By the time that Meroe and Mrs Dawson came past, arm in arm, the bakery was rollicking. Jason had taken instantly to work songs when I had taught him ‘Deep River’ on one memorably bronchitic morning. Rowan, naturally, knew all of them, and managed to sing whatever part we weren’t more or less covering.
When Meroe and Mrs Dawson joined in a spirited rendering of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, I was sure that Mrs Pemberthy was going to fling open her window and shriek at us, but we never heard a word out of her, though we did hear Traddles barking.
Possibly, Mrs P recognised the voices, and didn’t feel like exposing herself to another squish from Mrs Dawson.
The coffee pot being on, we all had a cup of our chosen beverage and a muffin from one of Jason’s experimental trays. I realised that I was happy. My fellow inhabitants were glowing with harmony. The coffee tasted wonderful, Jason’s drunken apricot muffin was superb. When Goss arrived to open the shop, she thought we must all have been imbibing far too early in the morning.
‘Like, Corinna, you’re partying hard!’ she reproved.
Mrs Dawson patted her cheek.
‘There are other reasons for singing, thank God,’ she told her.
The party broke up. Rowan limped off to Perseus, his apartment, to recover. Jason went back to considering new sub-forms of the species muffin. Meroe went to open her shop, the Sibyl’s Cave. Horatio descended to Earthly Delights to take his throne near the cash register and greet some old familiar clients.
‘How are you feeling, Goss?’ I asked as lightly as I could.
‘Like, all right, sort of,’ she said. That didn’t tell me much. ‘I had breakfast,’ she added. This was good. Goss reverted to a complete fast when she was miserable.
‘Good,’ I told her. ‘Can you make up a couple of platters when you’ve got a moment? Jason is cooking those little muffins for a corporate party.’
‘Do it now,’ she offered. ‘Those little muffins are wasted on all those suits.’