From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (33 page)

‘Tell me,’ he said again.

‘Aaaaaaargh,’ snarled Obi. He actually bared his teeth. ‘It was a
game
, Maestro! Girl made the first zine and it was cool. We wanted to show it to someone. But who did we know? Except you two. So
we put it under that table. We didn’t really know if you’d find it. It was a
gamble
. But you did! Incredible. We sent you a zine-letter and far out, you found it!’

There was an almost furious sound to Obi’s voice. Not soft but firm. Wild, but not quite exploding.

‘We were rapt,’ said Girl. ‘We saw you find it. We saw you open it.’

‘We were so rapt we came back here and started the next one,’ said Obi. ‘We watched you like crazy. All the time. We dressed up, we changed the way we looked, but no one noticed us anyway except the crazy clock guy. But we
watched
you. We bet on the Museum and we were right. And then it was real. It was you
and
us –’

‘It was a full-on game,’ said Girl.

‘It was a
game
, Maestro. We came over to your house.’

Obi thrust his face out, towards the lens, surprising Barney. He jerked back, then righted himself. He wasn’t breathing, quite. He wasn’t
thinking
, he was hearing everything but not quite computing it, he was just making sure he got it all.

‘How do you mean?’ his voice said. ‘Over to our house.’

‘We just wanted to
play
, Maestro. We wanted to play in your house, in your Street. And we did. And you played back. And then we invited you over to ours to play some more.’

‘But we weren’t that good at it,’ said Girl. ‘You notice?’

‘We sucked,’ said Obi, ‘we’d never had people to
play
. And we didn’t go to anyone else’s house. We didn’t know the rules.’

‘There aren’t any rules,’ said Barney, hardly knowing that he was speaking.

‘We didn’t know that either,’ said Obi.

He looked at the lens, as if he was searching for Barney inside it.

‘You get it now, Maestro?’

‘Yes,’ said Barney, softly, though not at all firmly.

‘We just wanted to
play
.’

Barney put the camera down at that point. He surprised himself.

(‘One thing I know for sure, Slash,’ he had said –

Ren groaned. ‘I really hate it when you start a sentence like that.’

‘– is you
have
to keep the camera rolling.’

‘Is that why you nearly let me drown?’

‘Yes,’ said Barney, unrepentant.

‘I have nerves of steel,’ he said.

‘Barney Kettle,’ said Ms Temple-Ren, ‘you are beyond comprehension.’)

In the Post Office, Barney comprehended perfectly. He had seen the shine in Obi’s eyes. His nerves were not really so steely.

He put the camera down and rummaged in his backpack.

He waited until Obi had recovered, until Girl took her arm from around Obi’s neck.

‘Got you a going-away present,’ said Barney. ‘It’s from Ren, too.

‘She does like you,’ he added. ‘She just told me.’

It was the truth. It was a fact.

‘She’s just young.’

Also the truth. Though, once again, he only knew it when he said it.

‘Here,’ said Barney. He thrust the present at Obi.

‘Sultana Pasties,’ said Obi, with disgust. ‘What is it with you and these crap biscuits?’

‘Obi!’ said Girl. ‘Don’t be rude.’

‘Hey,’ said Barney. ‘When you said the crazy clock guy –’

It was at that moment exactly that the noise began.

It was a rumble at first, but then, almost immediately, it was a swelling roar, as if something of enormous weight and power
hurtled towards them at terrible speed.

A great convulsion took hold of the Post Office.

The weathered old building, so solid and grand, now jolted and jerked and shuddered, as flimsy and defenceless, suddenly, as a house of straw or sticks. It strained and grunted and seemed to moan as it was lifted from the ground for a long moment, then thumped to earth again.

Obi, Girl and Barney were immediately flung off their feet. Around them, the dismantled Post Office home hurled itself in every direction; planks, brittle beer cans, ceramic tea cups, books, ornaments, all flew up and sideways, and rained down again, so that the jolting and roaring, and the pitching of the floor, was accompanied by the sounds of banging and breaking, ringing and crashing. Window boards creaked and buckled and broke from their moorings and light poured suddenly into the lurching room bringing, too, the appalling sounds of the High Street being destroyed – brick, stone, glass, wood, chimney pot, roofing tile, vehicle, all launched and shattered, as if at the hands of a furious being. And through the window came the sounds of all the people, too, shouts and cries and frightened wails and, later, in the new, shocking quiet, someone not far away, on the kerb perhaps, whimpering, ohno ohno ohno …

(Moo. Do I need to describe the dreadful moments of the earthquake and the few seconds of haunting silence that followed? You may think it is heartless and unnecessary. You may think it indescribable.

But, this is Barney’s story, in part at least, and I have wanted to record as faithfully as possible Barney’s actions and feelings throughout my narrative. And, in the turmoil and terror of the shaking earth and the crumbling Street, Barney’s actions and feelings were very clear.

He did not follow safety procedures. (Not many of us did.
We hardly knew them, so unlikely was the event in our too-short memories.) He did not crouch and cover. No, Barney was roused by the uproar. He was highly alert. He was a veritable periscope. He may have been scared – I imagine he was – but he was also full of wonder. It was so
interesting
. Almost immediately, he picked himself up, grabbed the camera and began filming what was happening around him in the Post Office front room and beyond.

Moo, it is in the spirit of Barney’s determined recording of the chaos that I have tried an approximation of that shocking thirty-two seconds. The half-minute that changed all our lives. It is a matter of being faithful, I think. Not to every tiny detail. But, to the important parts of a story. To express something of what Barney saw and heard, as testified by his camera.

Two hundred metres to the north I was seeing and hearing much the same, though of course, as we have often agreed, the experience was both eerily the same
and
fundamentally different for all of us, wherever we were, on the Street, in the city, inside our buildings or outside, astonished and undone by the ground beneath us.

You, for example, remember no noise. You remember the shambles, the gushing water, and particularly the flowers, bent and flattened and broken, their scents released by their crushing and redoubled somehow, filling the air along with the dust, sweet and nostalgic and quite sickening.

We are nearly at the end, Moo. At the end of the story on the page, that is. Strange isn’t it, how life goes charging on?

In my case, with fewer fingers and a shorter leg. And a rearranged back. And a most persistent dream, where I am waiting for rescue, deafened and with a mouth full of dust and grit, the entire weight of the Wilson building, it seems, pressing on my back, my hands caught and immobilised. And somewhere, unable to be silenced, an alarm bell clanging time for lunch.)

Ren knew she would never be a famous film director. That – to quote Barney – was a fact. To quote Albert Anderson, she simply didn’t have the right set of coordinates. In short, said Albert, you are not enough of a megalomaniac.

But she could certainly be a film editor, Ren thought. If she wanted to. It could be her back-up, if being a philosopher didn’t work out. Greatness and fame optional. She didn’t have to decide any time soon. According to Mum there was plenty of time. That, said Ren, was not a rational statement. It was not rational because Mum couldn’t possibly know. Well, she was still young, said Mum. That was a fact. So she didn’t need to decide about her future, yet. Another fact.

Oh, but facts were overrated, thought Ren. She had gone off them. She was unsure about logic, too. She was planning
to explore other branches of philosophy.

Ren was twelve now. She supposed she was still young.

It was so hard to know.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and hot. Summer again. It was strange, but good, Ren supposed, that the seasons kept on coming around. It was reliable. And comforting. And also kind of poignant. In one way everything was the same. But also, terribly different.

It was very nearly the time of the year when the High Street retailers and residents held their Christmas Party.

The High Street occupants had been scattered to the four winds after the earthquake. The High Street had been mortally damaged. Only two buildings remained unscathed. The people who had lived and worked on the Street and in Luna Square had taken refuge in different parts of the city and country, at parents’ and cousins’ and friends’, at motels and baches, at boarding houses and caravans. Mostly, they had taken just themselves – and their pets if they could find them; they had left nearly everything else behind, all the things, all the
nouns
that had made up every aspect of their life on the Street. Almost all of this had been broken or buried or rendered useless.

The Kettle family had stayed on the west side of town for several weeks, with friends of Mum and Dad’s. They had made many consoling trips to South Island Gran and Granpa’s, where everything was green and nothing was broken and there were the comforts of jam and magpies and wood fires. They had been to North Island Gran’s too, where you could walk around a city free of orange cones and hi-viz jackets and cordons and army tanks and great hills of rubble, a city whose buildings were all, remarkably, intact.

Finally, they had come to Willy Edwards’s house to live – as long as they needed, said Willy – with him and his jury of alpacas (there were twelve of them).

It was Willy who had suggested they hold a High Street Retailers’ and Residents’ Reunion Christmas Party at his house. It was huge and sprawling, said Willy, and built for parties on a grand scale. It was built for dozens of people to bed down, too, if necessary. He had gone to work at once, emailing all the High Street and Luna Square refugees, seeking their views on this matter.

Funny, said Willy, it was as if everyone needed a day or two to think about it. For two days there had been silence, while, perhaps, they had all gingerly inspected their bruised spirits, their carefully filed memories, their tender new High Street-less selves. And then the replies came almost all at once, a little tsunami of yesyesyesyesyesyesses, pinging into Willy Edwards’s inbox.

That was in September when the heritage apple tree at Gran and Granpa’s was in heavy blossom, when the city’s spring bulbs burst forth joyously, as if unaware of the city’s cataclysm. It was when three of Willy’s alpacas gave birth to alpaca babies and the alpaca jury turned into a First Fifteen. It was when Ren had her birthday. It was when Albert Anderson and Gemma – formerly known as Ms Bloodworth – came for dinner and Albert asked Ren about
The Untold Story
.

The next day, Ren had gone to the wardrobe in her bedroom at Willy’s and stared at the shelf above the row of clothes. Barney’s camera bag and backpack sat there, staring back at her, it seemed to Ren, waiting for her to make a decision.

‘What do you reckon?’ Dad had asked, on the day they ferried their few possessions into Willy’s house. He had brought the camera and backpack into Ren’s room and suggested she look after them. Ren had not known at all what she reckoned. She had put the camera and backpack on the wardrobe shelf and very determinedly not looked at them whenever she opened the wardrobe door.

But on that late September day after the dinner with Albert and Gemma, after she had looked at the camera bag and the backpack for a long time, Ren had pulled both down from the
shelf, she had deposited them at the foot of her desk and then she had sat on the floor beside them.

She had discussed the matter most vigorously with Barney.

‘What is your problem, Slash?’ said Barney. ‘It’s all there, ready to
go
. Blimey! Just get on with it. Albert’s right! The waiting is driving me crazy!’

‘Well, Barney,’ said Ren Temple. ‘I think you might find that not everyone wants to go at your headlong pace. Some of us need time for careful consideration.’

‘What’s to consider?’ said Barney. ‘You’ve had
heaps
of time! That’s what! Either you’re up for it or you’re not.’

‘I don’t actually know how to edit,’ said Ren. ‘That’s a fact.’

‘Facts change,’ said Barney. ‘You can learn.’

That was true. Facts did change. Take the High Street. Just seven months ago it had been a solid fact. Now it was not.

Cut
.

‘You’ve watched me often enough,’ said Barney. ‘You know more than you think. C’mon!’

This was true, too. Ren had certainly spent a lot of time sitting beside Barney as he cut and pasted, cursed and deleted, reviewed and cursed and retrieved, sighed often and pushed away violently from the desk a good deal, too, so that the wheeled chair raced halfway across the room, propelled equally by frustration and excitement.

‘Spose,’ said Ren. She more or less knew which buttons to push, which keys to tap.

But editing, as Barney had often lectured her, was so much more than cutting and clipping and deleting and Special Effecting. Editing, Barney said – quoting Hal and Felix, of course – was the
refining tool of good storytelling
. Editing was the chance to shapeandsharpenandpolishyourstory.

‘But what exactly
is
the story?’ said Ren. She was confused about this. She had not replayed any of the hours and hours of film,
but she could summon it all at any moment, if she dared. It was in a small room inside her head, behind a closed door. Occasionally, Ren turned the doorknob and opened the door a fraction.

A great disordered cacophony pressed against the door, against her – a riot of sound and colour and words and words and words, mouths moving ceaselessly as the High Street poured out its stories. Ren always banged the door shut.

‘It’s
The Untold Story
!’ said Barney. ‘
US
! Remember. Your title!’

US
.

Well, it was certainly still untold.

‘And there’s more than one untold story!’ cried Ren.

But Barney would say no more at that point.

Ren had sat and sat, looking at the camera bag and the backpack, inside of which, Ren knew, was very little, because Barney never had much to carry. Just his water bottle, a school exercise book or two, and his hard drive. The hard drive was the real reason Barney carried a backpack. It was so he could have the hard drive with him at all times.

The entire unedited footage of
The Untold Story
was on that hard drive. Or, almost the entire footage. The last interview was still in the camera.

There was a new computer, too. The family computer and Dad’s laptop had been wrecked in the earthquake along with most objects of value in the Kettle’s apartment. But the insurance had provided a new computer, and it sat on the desk in Ren’s new bedroom. Mostly she used it for checking out webcomics or emailing Henrietta and Lovie and the other Street kids, who were spread around the city.

Albert Anderson and Gemma had given Ren new film-editing software, for her birthday. The software was called Final Cut.

‘All ready to go, Slash,’ Barney whispered.

‘Oh, I don’t
know
,’ Ren said. She had given the camera bag a little kick with her slippered foot. (Mireille had knitted Ren a
pair of slippers for her birthday. They were a cheerful red, with orange flecks. Mireille had knitted many pairs of slippers since the earthquake. Her florist business was in abeyance. She had a lot of spare time on her hands. Everyone’s feet were colder that winter, too. It was a fact.)

A fortnight later, two things happened.

First of all, Willy Edwards cleared his letter box one Saturday morning in early October and found an envelope addressed to Ren.

The letter was from Suit whose current address overlooked the big city park and gardens. He was enjoying the view, he said. Suit was currently out of the watchmaking business. The watchmaker’s shop had collapsed in the earthquake.

Dear Ren
, Suit had typed,
I hope you and the family are well. I hear there are baby alpacas. I do think alpacas are a cheering animal. They are a little absurd, don’t you think? So like an animated soft toy.

We are going along as well as can be expected. Mirielle has just completed her twenty-seventh pair of slippers. She may have some arthritis in her forefinger as a consequence, but she insists the pleasure outweighs the pain. (A belated Happy Birthday, by the way.)

Enclosed is a small package that was entrusted to me to pass on to you. It may surprise you that I am familiar with your correspondent. Perhaps you would like to chat about this some time. Or not. It is entirely up to you, of course. Meanwhile, I hear there is to be a Christmas Party reunion. I hope very much to be there. If you have any spare time before then, though, I would welcome a visit most enthusiastically. As you can see I now have a mobile number. Mireille has insisted. Do ring any time if you would like to visit.

Your friend, etc… .

The small package inside Suit’s envelope was another envelope. Its address was both familiar and shocking: YOU.

Ren had sat at the kitchen table for a long time, the YOU envelope unopened.

‘What the
hey
?’ said Barney, impatient as ever.

Ren had ignored him. She was trying to sort out the tangle of her feelings. Could your heart leap and sink at the same time? Ren wondered. Probably it was physically impossible. But that was how she had felt. The sight of the YOU had caused both a rush of the old excitement and also a wash of great sadness about the long-ago lost days – as Ren thought of them – the long-ago lost days of mystery and thrill and rather a lot of giggling.

But how very strange that the envelope had come through Suit.

‘C’mon!’ said Barney. ‘This is driving me nuts. There’s no one stopping you!’

It was true. Mum was having coffee with Mariko and Mireille at a new café north of the city. There were a lot of new places north of the city. Their city had bulged northwards. It was an accommodating amoeba, said Mum. It was changing shape to fit all the lost and the homeless. It was sprawling in a new direction. She hoped to do the same, eventually, she said.

Dad was helping Willy with the baby alpacas. The correct name for alpaca babies was cria, but everyone just called them the babies. Ren watched Dad through the kitchen window, feeding one of the babies with a bottle. Its mother had teat problems. Dad was besotted with those babies. He checked them every night before he went to bed. He went out in bare feet, first thing every morning; to make sure they had got through the night.

Ren took the envelope to the living room on the other side of the house. She stood in the doorway and considered the room’s envelope-opening suitability. But the sun didn’t reach there until the afternoon. She walked upstairs, her fingers pressing the envelope’s contents as she went.

She tried every bedroom upstairs and settled finally on the large one that had been turned into a living-room-slash-office for the Kettle family. The morning sun shone on the cushioned window seat. Ren sat there, opened the envelope, removed the zine, and read.
Second of all, later on that Saturday, after reading the zine, returning it to its envelope and then placing the envelope, along with Suit’s letter, under her pillow, and going outside to watch the babies and to see if the bird’s nest in the quince tree had any bird babies yet, and chatting to Dad and Willy, and wondering aloud if now was the time to get a puppy because she happened to know of some available, and eating a lunch of cheese and eccles cake brought home by Mum, and chatting to Mum about Kyle, the boy in her new class who could
taste
smells – Ren went back to her bedroom, and pulled out Barney’s backpack and camera bag from under her bed.

Without much more thought – because she had already done this fifty times over in her head – Ren unzipped Barney’s backpack and looked inside. There was a sweet rotten smell in there. Ren recognised it. Old apple. She inverted the backpack and gently shook its contents onto the carpeted floor. Hard drive, in its case. Thump. The half-full water bottle bounced gently; its surface was sticky because, yes, there indeed was an old apple, pulpy and leaking. Eeew. A maths exercise book, also sticky. A small blue soft fabric bag with a drawstring.

Ren leaned against the bed and opened the maths book. On the inside cover was written,
If found, please return to Maestro Kettle. Just kidding! DON’T RETURN! (Sorry, Nick)
. There were several pages of work in Barney’s unruly hand, with corrections in green pen from Nick, and, on the last page of work, in the same green pen, two cartoon faces, one with hair made of old-fashioned film roll, the other with hair comprised entirely of numerals:
Maestro Kettle and Professor Nick, at the Nobel Prize Awards
. Barney had crossed out
Nobel
and
Prize
and written
Academy
.