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Fourth EstateAn imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

First published in Australia in 2012by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty LimitedABN 36 009 913 517harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Peter Twohig 2012

The right of Peter Twohig to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishersLevel 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia31 View Road, Glenfi eld, Auckland 0627, New ZealandA 53, Sector 57, Noida, UP, India77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, United Kingdom2 Bloor Street East, 20th fl oor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022, USA

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Twohig, Peter.The cartographerISBN 978 0 7322 9316 1 (pbk.)

A823.4

Cover design by Jane Waterhouse and Matt Stanton, HarperCollins Design StudioCover Illustration by Matt Stanton, HarperCollins Design StudioTypeset in 11/16.5 Baskerville BE by Kirby JonesPrinted and bound in Australia by Griffi n Press 70gsm Classic used by HarperCollinsPublishers is a natural, recyclable product made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations in the country of origin, Finland.

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We look at the world once, in childhood.The rest is memory.

Louise Gluck, ‘Nostos’

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1 The house down Kipling Lane

Mum and Dad did not take me to the funeral. They left me with Mrs Carruthers, across the street. Mrs Carruthers gave me lamingtons and lemonade, as if it was a party day. Later, I went back to my place and discovered it was chock-a-block with relatives, both the ones Mum and Dad liked, and the ones they hated. Nobody mentioned Tom’s name, so I thought perhaps it was a kind of game, and Tom would jump out of a cupboard and grab me, the way we were always doing to each other. But he didn’t. Finally, Blarney Barney, Granddad’s offsider, and not a relative, came over to me.

‘How’re you holdin’ up there, young feller?’‘Barn, no one’s talking to me, not even Granddad.’It was the fi rst time I’d spoken that day.‘Ah, no one knows what to say, that’s all. And besides, it’s

not every day you go to a wake and see the dear departed’s spittin’ image wanderin’ round the place. Tends to put people off their kidney punch.’

He ruffl ed my hair — about the twenty-seventh person to do that — and went off to fi nd a drink. Mum, who had been keeping an eye on Barney, as people were apt to do, stepped up and said in a fl at voice, ‘Comb your hair,’ then disappeared into a prickle bush of aunties and uncles. Dad appeared, ruffl ed my hair, and took me out to the kitchen, where he emptied his beer glass, put it down with a bang, and said: ‘Let’s go for a

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ride, what d’yer say?’ He was half stung, but you couldn’t say no to him.

So fi ve minutes later Dad and me were tearing round the Boulevard on his green Triumph Speed Twin, and I was feeling even worse than I had at the house. But you had to hand it to Dad, he was a better rider pissed than sober. I buried my face in his jacket and inhaled the leather. I gave it seven out of ten, as usual.

Now the anniversary of the funeral was coming up and my name was being mentioned more than I liked. See, I’m pretty good at making bad things happen. That’s why it was no surprise when Dad suddenly decided he’d had enough, in the middle of a fi ght with Mum, and walked out. I could hear them arguing clear out to the shed, where I was sitting in the dimness, on the Triumph, pretending to be a TT racer, like George Formby in No Limit, which was Dad’s favourite movie.

‘That’s right, walk out on us again. Go on, off to your girlfriend’s — thought I didn’t know about that bitch, didn’t you?’

I heard the screen door bang open so hard it barely had time to screech.

‘Don’t worry, I’m goin’,’ was all Dad could think of replying.‘And don’t bother coming back! You’ll be doing us a favour,’

yelled Mum, sounding a bit closer, and a bit angrier.Dad didn’t say anything else. He was a drinker, not a talker.He came down to the shed, yanked the door open and

looked at me sitting on the motorbike. There was no expression on his face, but he was wearing his leather jacket, and that told me everything I needed to know. I was half expecting to get a thick ear for messing around with the bike, but Dad just lifted me off and hopped on. While he jumped on the starter


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pedal, I ran to the back gate and swung it open for him. As he rode out of the shed Mum appeared and stood on the back porch with her hands on her hips and her jaws clenched. Dad gave me a wink as he rode past, and I gave him a quick smile, though both of us knew it was no laughing matter. Then he was off up the lane, and I was left holding the gate.

I had a choice: go back inside and put up with Mum, or take off, like Dad. I decided to take off, but fi rst followed Mum into the house to get my explorer’s bag. Mum tramped into the kitchen and started rummaging through the pots and pans cupboard as if she had just heard that the Queen was about to visit, though I don’t think the Queen would have thought much of her language. Whenever Mum tried to cook while she was angry, it was always a disaster, and I think she was still angry from Tom and me being born — in a job lot of two — and not entirely from losing Tom, as she let everyone think.

While that was going on, I went down to my room and found my bag. Though it had once been Granddad’s fi shing bag, it had the name ‘Hardy’ on the front, which reminded me of the Hardy Boys, so I knew it was always meant to be an explorer’s bag. I checked the inside pockets: one contained an apple, left over from my last trip; the other contained a Vegemite jar, in case I came across any interesting bugs. The outer pockets contained my old pocketknife, some string, a magnifying glass and a whistle that used to be Tom’s. It also contained my most beautiful possession, my Coca-Cola yo-yo. I took it out and checked it. It was one of the few things I owned that Tom had never seen, as they had just come out, and I was the fi rst kid in Richmond to get one, owing to Granddad knowing someone who could get his hands on the bottle tops without having to buy them. But I didn’t feel as good about it as I should have.


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Now I had everything I needed. I slung the strap across my chest, and put on my hat. Time to go. I walked right past Mum without a word, and out the back door. I said nothing — I thought it best not to interrupt her train of thought.

So, just as Dad had left on his Triumph, just like that, I went for a long walk, just like that. I’d heard Mum and Mrs Carruthers talking about how it was coming up to a year since we had ‘lost’ Tom, and Mum saying she didn’t know what she was going to do. Well I had an idea — more crying, probably. I put Tom out of my mind, a trick I’d learnt from Granddad, and kept walking.

I wandered all over the place, not caring much where I turned or which lane I went down. When I stopped and looked around I got a strange taste in my mouth, like I did last Cracker Night, when that threepenny bunger went off in my hand. I had got off the beaten track, and now I hoped, deliciously, that I was lost. In fact I prayed to God to let me be lost. I did not want to go home to a house full of screaming women. Okay, there was just my mum, but she was a house full of screaming women.

Actually, the women in my family were a tough bunch, the kind of women who kill Indians, fl y the Atlantic and write novels. Look at my Aunty Betty. She was the worst woman on earth. Mum told me once that Aunty Betty was not a real aunty, as much as a half-aunty, as if that explained everything, though it only raised more questions as far as I was concerned. It was a toss-up who was the best at talking, her or Mum, but it was generally agreed in the weighing-in room that Aunty Betty should receive the bigger handicap, though Granddad thought that making her carry extra weight would have been unnecessary. Then there was Aunty Jem, over in Hawthorn


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— who, by the way, has a rotten footy team — who believes that anyone who drinks is probably bad. Everyone thinks that is pretty weird given that her husband, Uncle Ivor, likes nothing better than to go to the footy with Dad and me and get a bit of a skinful, Uncle Ivor being Dad’s younger brother. Then there’s Aunty Dell, over in Fairfi eld, who’s as skinny as a rake and nearly died of TB, which is what eventually killed my Nanna Taggerty. She doesn’t say much, not because she’s got nothing to say but because she’s so weak she can hardly speak, though sometimes she pulls me to her and whispers secrets to me, and I can tell from those secrets that she, too, is a tough lady.

My other nanna, Nanna Blayney, is still alive and kicking, and living close by with two husbands at once, which works out well for me when it comes to presents. One of them, Uncle Mick, is a professional punter, so he and Granddad are good mates. The other, Uncle Seb, is a piano player, who makes a quid in the Hot Potatoes jazz band. Finally, there’s Aunty Queenie — well, she isn’t really my aunty, but Granddad’s secret friend.

Well, all that thinking about aunties takes my mind off what I’m doing, so that when I look around I discover that I’m well and truly lost. Buggered, that’s what I was, and feeling both safe and unsafe in an unfamiliar street, the sort with no footpaths. As I arrived at each of its cramped, grey intersections I looked for a street sign, but saw none. I was in a kind of grey grid, with grey skies overhead and old grey wooden fences beside me, and behind them old grey sheds, dirty greenhouses and the rear walls of houses that fronted onto streets further over. But I did fi nally come to a sign, and it swept me away like a page out of the old set of encyclopedias I


6

had at home. The sign said KIPLING LN.I had seen that name before, on a brass plate in our living

room.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

Rudyard Kipling. I always thought it was a silly name, and here it was again. Funny, I had always thought that Rudyard Kipling was a person of the past. But now I saw with a jolt that he had a life outside my parents’ living room. He had somehow asserted himself, a bit like the way he had spoken on the brass plate.

The name of that poem of his on the plate was If. I looked at the sign again in an attempt to fi nd some clues, but there were none. The sign was old and grey, like everything else. Granddad, who was a bit of a poet himself, called him Kipling, but to me he was always Rudyard Kipling. Anyone with a name like that deserved to be referred to by both bits. I decided right there that the reason he had a lane named after him was because he had written If. Well done, I thought. And yet, it was only a lane. That’s all you got for a poem.

So here I was, staring up and feeling a cold breeze, looking around at the back fences, at the tall houses with grey walls, some of which had old vines stuck to them, and a few even had turrets on top.

I’d reached the intersection of Kipling Lane and the nameless lane I’d been following, though I knew that if I stuck to the lane I was on, eventually I would fi nd out what it was called. That’s what happens when you’re out walking, and usually, that’s all that happens, unless, of course, a dog attacks you. I hadn’t seen or heard one, so it looked like I was safe. But


7

deep down I knew that it was just a matter of time.I was doing what I reckoned Dad had done, I was going out

to explore. Except that I suspected he had no intention of ever coming back. I, on the other hand, hadn’t made up my mind how long I would be away. I wasn’t hungry, so it wasn’t an issue.

I turned down Kipling Lane. I walked down the middle of the lane, not bothering to look out for cars as I would if I’d been walking down the middle of a road. There was one thing I knew about lanes: no one drove down them. They were just little streets for kids, dogs, cats and drunks. That’s all I had ever seen in a lane, that and junk. And that’s all I would ever see, though I once saw a horse in the lane at the back of our place. He was old. I could tell that from the way he ignored me. Only old people ignore kids. Everyone else either loves them or hates them.

I had left the sign behind me and was walking under a tree that reached across the lane and was so big that it turned the whole area into a cool tunnel. I stopped inside the tunnel for a minute, to soak up its mystery. There was an old gate in the fence, beside a bush. It had two halves. The top half was locked but the bottom half was ajar. That was the half for me.

On the other side of the fence was a jungle. That was something Mum had said about Kipling: he was the author of The Jungle Book. Now I was seeing the jungle. It’s a sign, I thought. The jungle was darker than the lane, darker and greener and in some places greyer. And in the middle of the jungle was a house, tall, grey, with a pointy turret on top: the Jungle House. I looked around. I was alone. I looked in through the gate. No dogs; in fact no signs that anyone had been there for a long time. The grass was tall, thick and green, and the jungle had vines. That settled it: Kipling would have


8

lived in a place like this, in a house like this. It all made sense.Should I go in? I wasn’t used to asking myself these

questions. Tom would have gone in. Everyone called us ‘the twins’, while those who could tell us apart always said he was as bold as brass, while I was as sharp as a tack. To each other we were just ‘TB’, for twin brother, while Mum said we were Double Trouble and sometimes Granddad called us the Daily Double. Now, because there was just one of us, I had to be as bold as brass and as sharp as a tack, but it wasn’t easy.

So I stooped and went in. For the fi rst time in my life, I noticed my own breathing. My own breathing was scaring me! I judged that it was much too loud for the jungle, where you had to beware! In the comics, the guys who went into the jungle always went into a waterside bar fi rst. In the bar they met another guy who had once lived in the jungle. They would ask him to guide them to the treasure. He would say no. But they would offer him lots of money. And then he always said, ‘Well, okay, but beware!’ He said it that way to show that he was frightened, but he’d go with them anyway.

Now it was my turn to beware. That was no problem — I was scared, I admit it. I mean, this was someone’s property. How many times had I been told to get off someone else’s property? Actually, I never had, if you don’t count the junkyard, and I don’t, and I now found myself hoping that this would not be the fi rst time. I turned around to check the escape route: jungle grass, gate, lane. I turned back to the house. I had reached a shed. It smelt sweet and meaty and dirty and kind of thick. And kind of wet and doggy and old and empty. On my smell scale I gave it four out of ten. I crept around the corner of the shed, keeping my eyes on the house with the turret, which was still in the jungle, and was, I realised, further away than


9

I fi rst thought. Nothing was moving, and there was no sound. I should have felt safe, but I knew that when the jungle goes quiet that’s bad, very bad, and it’s a good time to remember what the guy in the bar said. So I did: Beware!

I was now on the other side of the shed and found that I was standing on old grey stone slabs, like a wall, only on the ground. And they were slimy with moss. The shed had several doors that had a top half and a bottom half, just like the gate, but this time all the top halves were wide open while all the bottom halves were closed. I took a look inside the shed. There were leather and iron things hanging from the walls. It could, I thought, have been a torture chamber. I looked around for medieval torches, but there were none. Still, I thought, it could be a torture chamber. It was a chamber, all right, and it had weird things hanging up inside it.

So after rechecking the escape route I steadied my breathing and threaded my way through the jungle to the house. It seemed somehow silent, and I wondered if it could be deserted. It was a well-known fact that such a house could be a ghost house; that would be bad. People I could handle — you just ran. Ghosts were different: you couldn’t run; you were buggered. Dear God, I said, the way Mum said it just before she took a cake out of the oven, or when Dad walked out of the room, or when she was listening to the races. Dear God, let there be no ghosts. But Dad always came back angry, and the cake always went wrong, and the horse, who was always called Something Lad, was always in the group announced as ‘they’re followed by’, which was not what God was supposed to do. I didn’t know how good God was at ghosts, but I was prepared to give him the benefi t of the doubt. When it came to ghosts, I would try anything.

The house had a kennel behind it. I froze when I saw it, and


10

studied it in a state of near panic, remembering the way out. Every jungle had an exit track, but in the Phantom comics the bad guys from the town who went into the jungle rarely got to use it. Often, they never came back, and the jungle would claim another victim. I did not want to be a victim. But there was no sign that a dog lived there. There was just the same smell that the shed had. I knew what dogs smelt like because we’d had one for a few years — don’t ask.

The house had a path leading around the side, and it branched off to the right and led deeper into the jungle. Down the path a few yards was a little wooden house, not as big as the torture chamber, and more house-shaped. I opened the door and went in. It had large windows and a window in the roof that looked like it was covered in sugar. It was empty, but on the fl oor there were about a million drops of coloured paint. And it smelt exactly the same as the inside of St Felix’s Church, all candle-y and woody. I wanted to make the little house mine. Smells like that don’t come along every day.

Against the back wall of the big house, there was a ladder. It was wooden and grey, like everything else, but it looked strong. It went right up to the second fl oor, and I realised that it had been used to get up to a part of the roof that jutted out at the top. On the ground at the foot of the ladder was a stack of reddish roof tiles, big enough to hide behind, if necessary. Either side of the ladder were windows. My idea was that if this was a ghost house it would be empty, as that, too, is a well-known fact. I needed to know what I was up against, or rather, what I might have to retreat from. I had no problems with retreat, and it would give me an excuse to use the escape route. I took off my bag and started climbing up the ladder.

On I went, and looked through the window on the fi rst


11

fl oor. Inside was a large room with a fi replace covered by a copper screen with a couple of Irish setters on it. There were lounge chairs and the biggest sofa I had ever seen. There were several tables with newspapers, magazines and books all over them, and on one a typewriter. There were stacks of books on the fl oor too, and shelves of books against a wall. The door into the room was open, and through it I could see a passage, and stairs. This was not a ghost house: ghosts did not read the paper or type things. Somewhere, there were people.

I looked down and almost fell off the ladder with fright. I was high off the ground but still within the jungle. I knew that as long as I was on the ladder I was relatively safe. Barring boa constrictors. Had the guys who’d gone after the treasure known that … well, they didn’t. Further up I went, steeling myself, and found that the ladder had an iron bit in the middle — that looked as if it belonged in a torture chamber as well. I stopped and worried for a while, and decided that I had never heard of an outdoor torture chamber. And besides, there were still no fl aming torches to be seen.

Just as I was getting close to the second-fl oor window, there was a hell of a ruckus inside the house and someone — a lady — came to the window, while I hid myself under the ledge, and threw something into the garden — a book by the look of it — so that it landed in the bushes. Then I heard her go back into the room, then deeper into the house, where she started yelling at some bloke who was doing a bit of yelling of his own. It was too good to miss. I climbed up the last few rungs and had a look into the room. This window had white lace curtains tied back against the sides, and was wide open. Inside there was a bed covered with a white bedspread. There were neat wardrobes and sets of drawers, chairs, and a dressing table


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covered with pretty bottles of all shapes and sizes. I could smell the room, everything in it. Nothing about it smelt grey; everything was alive. I would have given it a high number on the scale. The scents danced invisibly for me and played with me. I had never smelt a room like this one. It was fresh. But it was not quiet.


13

2 The map

Somewhere in the house the man and the woman were fi ghting, and she was defi nitely keen for him to get out. It m ust be one of tho se days, I thought. She was yelling over and over at him to get out, and he was yelling that he wouldn’t leave until he got what he came for. It was just like Larry Kent, Detective. Larry said: ‘Dames are dynamite,’ and now I could see why.

The woman kept on screaming her head off, and the man was still growling and swearing at the dame, and losing his temper. I peered into the empty room and listened to the voices that seemed to be coming from just outside the door — it almost sounded as if they were on the wireless. Then, suddenly, they were right there in front of me, and he was pushing her over and pulling out a gun. That stopped her. One minute she was telling him she didn’t have what he wanted and he didn’t know what he was getting into, and the next she was as quiet as a mouse, which is an effect that pulling guns tends to have on people, or I don’t know my Larry Kent.

‘So,’ said the bloke. ‘That shut you up, didn’t it?’He put the gun to her head.‘Just tell me where they are and I won’t blow your fuckin’

head off.’‘If they were here, I’d give them to you, but they’re not.’


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‘Well, I can fi nd the bloody things myself — they can’t be far away. You haven’t had time to hide them. But fi rst we’ll have a bit of fun.’

He waved the gun at her.‘Take ’em off — or would you rather get shot?’So she does, because he’s a mean bastard. I’ve seen a few

when I’ve been out and about with Granddad, and I know what they’re like. She does as she’s told, but he hits her with the gun and splits her head anyway. So now she’s lying on the bed and there’s blood all over the place, and the bloke puts the gun down and gets on top of her and grabs her around the neck and starts choking her; and she’s making a hell of a lot of noise — she is dynamite! But then she stops screaming, because in the end you stop screaming and you just kind of give in, though she didn’t faint, but instead stuck her fi ngernails into the man, whose bum was white. And he just killed her by making her face purple until she stopped moving. But she never stopped staring, and she was staring right at me. But what could I do?

And then he got off her and sat on the bed with his face in his hands for a while. And there was blood everywhere; some bits of her were red, mainly her lipstick and her blood, and some bits were pink and some purple and some black. I looked at her and she looked at me, but I realised she didn’t really care about me being there. The man with the white bum just sat there and sort of breathed hard, while I watched him.

I was looking at another dead body, I realised, but what horrifi ed me was not that she was dead, but that she had stared at me the same way Tom had when the monkey bar had fallen across his throat, like she was trying to tell me something important, a secret maybe. I had tried so hard to lift


15

the monkey bar off him that my hands had stopped working, and were in pain for days. Nothing had changed. A year later people were still turning purple and staring at me, and I still couldn’t do anything about it.

I felt a kind of thickness in my face, and an odd sensation, like everything was wonderful and I was somewhere else; and when I snapped out of it I saw that the bloke had looked up and was looking straight at me. His face was red and kind of round, his hair was short and black and his eyes were blue and twinkly. His nose was a bit on the small side, I thought, but maybe that was only because all the grown-ups in my family — on both sides — have the kind of conks you see in a cocky’s cage. He did not look like a murderer, more like the kind of bloke you see walking up and down in the city, wearing a suit. Even when he saw me, he didn’t seem startled, but quickly pulled his pants up. All the while I could see that the wheels in his head were turning fl at out.

For some reason I couldn’t pull my head back; I just stared at him as if he was a snake getting ready to pounce. I must have looked like one of those fi sh Granddad once caught by throwing a stick of gelignite into Mordialloc Creek. Suddenly, he took a step towards me, then changed his mind and headed for the door.

The escape route! It was still there. I tried to take a step down the ladder — I didn’t want to be next — and I realised with a cold stab in my throat that I would never make it to the bottom before he got to me. When I reached the fi rst-fl oor window, I heard him thundering down the stairs inside, so I swung myself onto the window ledge like Jungle Jim and hopped into the fi replace room. I slipped behind the door, which was open — as good a hiding spot as any.


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I heard him run down to the back gate then return and go around to the front of the house, then through the front door and back up the stairs. He went straight to the Death Room and ransacked it. I knew he wouldn’t fi nd what he wanted, but I wasn’t so sure any more about getting out of this alive, and I asked God to give me a hand: ‘Please, God, make that bloke have a horrible accident, maybe shoot himself or fall down the stairs or have a heart attack — I’ll leave it up to you.’ It was the best I could do on the spot, but Granddad would have liked it. I don’t know about Tom. He probably would have yelled to the bloke that he was the police and he had the place surrounded. He liked taking chances, like on that last day, at Rooney Park.

But the bloke gave up looking and made a roar like a man who’s just put his shirt on a very promising mare in a distance event, only to watch her jockey take her out too early. He was running out of time now that he’d lost me; he had to get out of there before I came back with the police. So, deciding that the Death Room had nothing more to offer, he came back down the stairs, and I knew he was going to come into the fi replace room. I was at the window in a fl ash, and swung back onto the ladder and out of sight of the window, but I only got down a few rungs before I felt it slide sideways a few inches. I couldn’t move for fear the ladder would slide right over; all I could do was wait while he gave the place the benefi t of his gentle touch, then left — thankfully by the front door, and onto what I guessed was Kipling Street.

I thought it would be a simple matter then to climb down, but the whole situation suddenly caught up with me with the force of a brewery truck, and I found I was frozen to the ladder. I couldn’t move my hands or my feet. To make matters worse, I had wet myself without even noticing, and my shoes


17

and socks were soaked in pee. It got worse: my throat was totally blocked, and I felt as if I was going to suffocate. When I started to shake, I almost fell off the ladder. Suddenly it had got cold. And there I was: stuck, shaking, unable to breathe, wet, and wondering if I was going to be next. The man with the white bum was gone, but he had seen my face, and he still hadn’t got what he came for, whatever that might be. I should have read the comics more carefully. I should have listened to Tarzan more closely. Larry Kent had known. I had no place here. The murderer could be anywhere: he could reappear at the bottom of the ladder. He could be waiting for me around the corner, a popular place for bad bastards to wait. Jesus Christ, I thought, I’m going to die.

I stayed on the ladder for a long time, all the while expecting the bloke’s hand to grab me by the foot. I thought that if only I could cry, even if all I could make was a little squeak, I would be able to breathe, and move again, and I would be able to escape. But all I could do was stand there and hang on, holding my breath and shaking. I knew that the woman would still have her eyes open, and would still be watching the window for me. I thought that by now she would probably have become a ghost, and was using her ghost eyes to watch me. I realised with a fright that now she was a ghost she would know all about me, who I was and probably where I lived. And the bloke who killed her — oh, God! I mustn’t let him follow me home too. A ghost would be more than enough!

That galvanised me and down the ladder I went, slowly, and all the way down I could feel my limbs creaking as if I’d left them out in the rain for about six weeks, and they needed oiling. When I stepped off the ladder my legs went on strike and I slowly sank to the cold ground, and lay there shaking


18

and freezing, and wishing I could relieve the pain in my head. I turned over and looked back up the ladder and saw its top moving across the sky, as if it was alive and I had never noticed before. I expected the woman’s bloody ghost face to appear at the window any second and stare down at me, but it didn’t.

When the twitching began, it was as if my head was a giant light bulb, and someone was switching it off and on real fast. I knew what was going to happen next, and started to cry. The crying switched itself off and on.

After a long period of exhaustion and dim awareness, it occurred to me that I was waking up from one of my turns, and that I had probably been lying there for hours. I was as sick as a small hospital, moaning ‘Mu … mm … y’ in a way that was both embarrassing and uncontrollable, as if there was another kid inside me who was actually doing it and making my body follow like a puppet. To make matters worse, my mouth had blood in it. As usual, I tried not to heave, but there’s always a point where you just have to go: Oh, what the hell … so now my face was covered in spew. Apart from that I was having the time of my life.

My ‘turns’ — actually fi ts, according to Dr Dunnett, who liked to call a spade a bloody shovel — started a few days after Tom died. Everyone had their own way of talking about them, as if they were a new form of social mistake, like sneezing without covering your mouth, or farting, but, all things considered, nothing to be alarmed about. Blarney Barney, Granddad’s offsider, called them funny turns; Mrs Carruthers called them little turns; Uncle Ivor called them odd turns; Aunty Jem called them sympathy turns; Dad called them stupid bloody turns; and Aunty Betty called them silly turns, and said


19

I was pretending. Granddad didn’t call them anything, he just winked at me to let me know he was on my side.

I couldn’t do a thing about them, though when I felt one starting — whenever I got a sudden fright for no reason, or smelt fresh toast when there was none to smell, or my brain started to switch off and on — I’d begin to sing to myself, usually a few bars of ‘The Happy Wanderer’, followed by a bit of ‘Jolly Jack Tars’, a song about brave men we’d learnt for the school concert. But it wouldn’t do any good, and I’d start to shake and drop things until fi nally I’d sort of disappear, without even knowing it had happened, and wake up vomiting and crying like a baby.

Dr W. Dunnett — Tom and I were hoping the W stood for ‘Who’ — declared that I had epilepsy, and put me on some tablets that made me vomit blood. Mum said: ‘I don’t think we’ll give him any more of those, thank you very much.’ So it was back to plain old ‘turns’. Now I was not only the kid who’d killed his own brother — at least that’s what the kids said — I was also the local loony.

I lay there crying and feeling sorry for myself for about half an hour — I reckoned nobody else was going to do it for me — but in the end I knew I’d have to make the effort to go home. I pulled myself to my feet using the ladder. My body weighed a ton, but I staggered to a tap at the back of the house and washed my face and mouth. Then I forced myself to plod down the escape route.

A part of me remembered the way back perfectly, which was just as well, as I was so exhausted my mind had conked out. I found my way home like a dog, without thinking, just by smelling. I remembered all the street corners and all the stops and all the signs. Kipling Lane had come off


20

Empire Street, and that had come off Empire Lane, and that had come off Raglan Street, and that had come off Devon Street and then there had been a tangle of lanes: Carnival, Dress Circle, Strawberry (no strawberries), Fourmile (it was nowhere near that long) and Lancaster. Next was the tea-tree paddock, where I could follow a path completely hidden from view, confi dent for the fi rst time that I could not be seen by the murderer or the Ghost With the Bloody Face. I came out at Yorkshire Street, a street that was very familiar to me. I headed for home. When it began to rain, I walked around the block until I was soaked, so that Mum wouldn’t see that I’d peed myself.

When I got home I hopped into a hot bath and fell asleep, and when I woke up I was in bed and could smell dinner. I could have eaten a horse, even one cooked by Mum, so I got up and went to the kitchen to get some food.

When I got down there, Granddad had arrived. He was the only person — except for Aunty Queenie and his next-door neighbour, Mrs Morgan — who didn’t treat me worse after Tom died. In fact, he usually treated Tom and me as if we were separate kids, and not ‘the twins’, which he never called us, though he did like his Daily Double greeting. Mum says he doesn’t give a bugger about anyone, because he’s been around and he’s hard, but I’m not so sure about that. He was in the First World War, and fought the Turks, and even rode a horse. And he talks about it too, if you give him a bit of a nudge. He’s got a medal, and once he even showed it to Tom and me.

As for Mum, she had managed to transform herself into the Woman of Steel while I had been away, and was now acting as if nothing had happened at our place. But I knew things wouldn’t be the same for her with Dad gone.


21

*

After dinner, I went to my room and got out a huge sheet of butcher’s paper from the pile I’d nicked from Mr Klabber’s and started to draw a map. I had never seen a map of a town before, only maps of countries in our old school atlas. But I had no trouble remembering the details of my walk, and the map just spilled out onto the page as I watched it appear through teary eyes.

The map’s job was to remind me not to go that way again. At least that’s what I told myself. But there was another reason for starting it. I hadn’t been back to the park, which was hard for me, because I wanted to do something special to mark the spot where Tom died. But something always stopped me whenever I tried to head that way. It was like an invisible force-fi eld, the kind that superheroes have to put up, only a billion times stronger. Now I had a way to mark the spot without actually going back. It hurt me inside just to think about making that mark, and I didn’t want to make a cross, as that was the sign we put on our old dog’s grave down the back, and Tom was not a dog. So I thought about a big ‘T’, which stood for both of our names, and might make me feel a bit better about doing it. But the same invisible force-fi eld stopped me putting my ‘T’ on the map.

So I got stuck into the rest of the map. As it expanded I made little drawings to mark the places that spelt trouble, and why. When I came to the woman, I coloured one bit red, one bit black and one bit purple. The eyes of the woman were slightly different, one greenish blue and one bluish green. The bloke’s bum was white, but I coloured it pink, because the paper was already white.


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So that was how the map started. The map was my greatest invention, and I knew that as long as I had it I would always know how far I was from that house, so I would never wander there again. It never occurred to me that the route to the house was probably burnt into my memory. Everyone knows that there are only two ways to get to the Phantom’s cave: by accident or with a map. Either way, going back to that house could only lead to terrible things. Besides, the park — Tom’s park — was at the end of the street it was in.

When I sat back and looked at the map I was relieved to see that it included all the features it needed. First the streets, some wide and some narrow — those were the lanes. Then the map had two lots of tramlines: Church Street, where real trams went, and King Ralph Street, where there were tramlines that hadn’t been used for years. The map also had a lot of drawings, because a map needs them. I had never really drawn anything for a reason before. I had drawn a dragon on the laundry wall, and told Mum that Jimmy Carson from across the street had done it. I drew a dragon on my bedroom wall as well, and told Mum that Jimmy had drawn that one too. I also found a nice bit of wall in the kitchen that looked big enough for a dragon, though I hadn’t begun that one. The map had to come fi rst.

So the map contained a drawing of The House, a drawing of the dog that I feared would turn up and rip me to shreds — his name was Jack the Ripper — and a drawing of the above-ground torture chamber with the double-decker doors. I agonised over whether to include fl aming torches — after all, there hadn’t been any — and in the end decided to include one torch and a secret trapdoor in the fl oor that led to the kind of grey stone stairs that everyone knows lead to underground dungeons where torturing goes on. I included an arrow that


23

pointed to the sign that said Kipling Lane and at the other end of the arrow I made a print of If by painting on the raised brass letters with blue watercolour paint and pressing it against the map. Without meaning to I had created a secret, backwards version of If called fI, which was practically unreadable, but that was okay because it looked like a secret code. I made a separate map of the house, not only the bits I had seen, but the bits I had not seen, complete with a trail of blood and a purple face on the pillow that the lady’s face would have left when she turned into a ghost. The only thing missing from the map was the smell of the bedroom. It had smelt of … loveliness. It was a smell I wanted to possess. But I could never go back: I didn’t want to end up with a purple face.

The map had another purpose. I thought it might help me fi gure out where the hell Dad had gone. I knew it was no good asking. When you’re a kid there are three kinds of questions: the kind that get answered just to shut you up — they better not be important questions; those that are ignored altogether — this includes most of the questions I have ever asked about relatives; and the kind that can get you a thick ear — the rest. But maps could be used for fi nding all kinds of things — and maybe people — as well as avoiding them. I got Dad’s Triumph Manual and copied the picture of his bike onto the map. Then I wrote Dad, where are you? It was a start.

Somewhere, I could hear Mum crying, and I wondered if she was crying because I was. Then I remembered that Dad had become a kind of ghost too. It was a day for crying all round.


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