St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(29)
Was that what Peter’s Saturday nights had been like? Berlin wondered. Was breaking and entering easier for a pimply fat boy than asking a pretty girl for a dance?
Jim took a long drag on his cigarette and dropped the butt at his feet. He crushed it into the dirty floorboards with the tip of his right boot. ‘Look, we don’t sell booze, so if these teeny-boppers’ mums and dads don’t mind them coming into town and staying out late, what can I do? You can’t really tell how old they are by the way they dress and most of them reckon they’re on the pill anyway, and they always say they’re old enough. If they tell you they’re eighteen and they look it, no bloke in his right mind is going to knock them back. Would you? You must have been young once.’
Berlin shook his head. ‘No, Jim, I don’t think I ever was.’
THE MISSION
Dessert was some sort of preserved fruit he didn’t recognise served with a runny custard. After the meal one of the brothers on the raised platform performed a benediction. While the girls who had served the meal gathered up the bowls and mugs, the boys scampered outside to play in the last of the fast-fading daylight. Those who had spent the most time wriggling on the hard benches of the dining room moved quickly in the direction of the privy.
The moon was just beginning to rise when the clanging of a hand-bell indicated it was time for bed. Several of the brothers herded the boys in the direction of the dormitory and, once inside, began calling out names. Those who were called picked up towels from their beds and went into the bathroom. The rest of the dormitory’s inhabitants changed into their nightshirts and sat waiting on their beds under the flickering light of the hurricane lanterns. He could hear running water in the bathroom and shouts from the brothers who were supervising the washing session. Several brothers lounged by the bathroom area smoking and talking and occasionally looking in to see what was happening.
He carefully checked the contents of the small cupboard beside the bed and noticed that several items had been rearranged. The empty kitbag had been moved away from the back wall but a surreptitious check showed that the dagger still remained hidden. He pushed the kitbag back against the wall. Finding a better hiding place would be his first task tomorrow.
The freshly scrubbed boys came back into the dormitory, and he noticed a couple were crying. Brother Brian came into the room and the boys climbed off their beds, kneeling beside them on the hard, bare boards with hands clasped. While Brother Brian led them in a prayer, another brother lifted the hurricane lamps down from the ceiling using a long pole and lifted the glass on each to blow out the flame. The room was dark when the prayer was over and the boys scrambled into bed. Brother Brian walked the length of the room holding a lantern and the boy noticed that the approved sleeping position appeared to be with both hands outside the thin blanket. Brother Brian winked as he passed the boy’s bed and left the still-burning lantern on a chair by the dormitory door.
The boy was still awake an hour later. The bed was uncomfortable and he heard coughs and sniffling and the sound of muffled weeping. There were footsteps on the path outside the dormitory and the lantern by the door was suddenly lifted up high. All the noise in the room stopped. The lantern slowly moved along the line of beds and stopped at the one opposite his. He heard the rustle of a blanket being pulled back, then the sound of small bare feet on the wooden boards as someone was led out of the room.
The lantern moved through the dormitory a half-dozen times that night and then again towards dawn when the boys were led back to their beds. He could hear snuffling and sometimes sobs. He could guess who had been chosen, even from his brief time looking around the dining room. He would need to be careful now, careful to not look like a victim but careful also not to look like a threat. The dagger was close, but was it close enough? He would need a hiding place where it was safe but still accessible. If the lantern ever stopped by the end of his bed he wanted to be ready.
After a breakfast of cold water and lumpy porridge, Brother Brian produced clippers and trimmed the boy’s hair right down to the scalp. He gave him a new-arrivals tour of the mission and then led him to a small room at the rear of the administration building. It had a large overhead skylight and wooden filing cabinets set against one wall. There were big, boxy contraptions with leather bellows mounted on three-legged stands, and Brother Brian explained that they were his cameras. Behind the studio and behind a locked door was a strange room, windowless and full of nasty smells. Brother Brian explained it was his darkroom, a place where films were developed in total darkness and photographic prints made on special paper under the weak orange glow of a kerosene safelight.
His new job, it was explained, would be assisting Brother Brian in his work. This entailed keeping a photographic record of the mission’s work to be submitted annually to the order’s headquarters in Germany. Brother Brian also kept photographic records of the many documents related to the running of the mission. When new children were brought in, their birth certificates and passports, if they had them, and all their other documents, were photographed on glass plates to be submitted annually to the Adelaide office along with a set of prints on photographic paper.
Brother Brian was pleasantly surprised by the boy’s aptitude for photography. He quickly learned how to operate the bulky press camera and to develop the glass plate negatives with hardly any breakages. He was also most helpful in the making of the black and white prints under orange light in the windowless darkroom with its door locked against intruders who might ruin the photographic paper by exposing it to light.