The Cartographer by Peter Twohig Page B

punch.
    Mum’s sweets had been the first thing to go. That happened last summer. One day, Mum started making her rum balls with real rum, which was a bit strong for yours truly, for whom a limit of one a day was set, but seemed to suit Mum down to the ground. Then the coconut ice, one of my favourites, began to get soggy, the kind of soggy that refuses to dry, even if you put it out in the sun, which was not a good idea, as our cat, Abbotsford — yeah, I know — was always on the lookout for kids leaving sweets lying around. I mean, soggy is better than soggy and inside your cat. The toffees then began to turn out either permanently stuck to the patty papers, like labels on a poison bottle, or with an explosive quality that caused them to disintegrate into sugary atoms when you bit them. Her toffee apples began to lack that ruby glow that tells you all is well with the world within, and the chocolate crackles did not set, but beat the fridge one-nil. The apple pie was not all pie, and not, for that matter, all apple, and the snowballs lost the springiness needed to qualify as balls, and ended up looking like wobbly powder puffs. The sponge became unspongy and the meringues began to taste like fish and chips and vinegar. By mid-autumn, Mum’s ice-cream, which had been last year’s hobby, had taken on a hardness somewhere between shoe polish and kippers, regardless of the weather.
    As winter arrived, so did the soups and stews, resembling the kind of concoction you might get from prising your watercolour tablets out of their pans and giving them a bit of a stir in a bowl of tepid water. As for anything whose first word in life was moo, baa or cheep, it was simply burnt. Ithought Kipling might have had something to say about that — something under the heading ‘If you can keep your head’. There was nothing. I guessed his old man was not an elbow bender. Or maybe his mum was Doris Day — I don’t know.
    The last thing to go was my school lunch, the low point being reached one freezing morning when I discovered that Mum had forgotten to pack my play-lunch, while seriously short-changing the lunch bag. It was only Johnno Johnson’s donation of a cheese and pickle sando that saved me, as I was able to swap it for a fair to middlin’ Beef German and dead horse from Douggie Quirk.
    Mrs Carruthers told me Mum had been having a hard time — and nodded slowly while making her chin disappear into her neck, which meant that I wasn’t going to get any more out of her unless I stuck burning bamboo shoots under her fingernails. But she had told me enough, as the rot had not set in until months after Tom died, so I knew it was all about someone else. That left Dad and me, and I was offering eight to five on me, but what did I know? I did know that the roly-poly pudding, which on Australia Day had been passable, if chewy, had by Anzac Day pretty much lost its poly.
    Mr Garnet had tips for Granddad, too — racing tips, which was a bit like giving Biggles tips on how to fly a Sopwith Camel. Granddad always listened politely, and said: ‘You don’t say, young George. I’ll owe you one for that.’ After I first saw him do that, and how pleased Mr Garnet was, I went home and stood in front of the mirror and said, about thirty-five times: ‘You don’t say, Matthew. I’ll owe you one for that.’ That would come in handy.
    I fretted about Mr G’s connection with our family all the way home. I kept telling myself that, whatever happened to Mr G,it probably had nothing to do with the murderer — or me. But the more I said it the more I imagined bad things. Mr Garnet might have been a harmless old man, but Granddad once told me that when he was young he used to be a real tearaway, a crazy bastard, and one of Squizzy Taylor’s mates. Jesus.

5 The Dead-end Kid
    Finding Old Mr Garnet was all I needed, even though I was able to help. I already felt bad