Desperate Measures



  Desperate Measures

  by R. B. Baxter

  Copyright 2012 R. B. Baxter

  For my Tai-tai, Jane

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - A Great Idea

  Chapter 2 - The Execution

  Chapter 3 - Oh, the Shame

  Chapter 4 - The Preparation

  Chapter 5 - The Great Man Cometh

  Chapter 6 - A Horrible Moment

  Chapter 7 - The Aftermath

  Chapter 8 - Epilogue

  Chapter 1 - A Great Idea

  As I stood there in the window naked and shivering I began to doubt the veracity of Nicky Burns’ information. A cold wind fresh off the Snowy Mountains was hammering Barclay and my resolve was diminishing by the second. I was freezing and as another bout of violent shivering rattled my thin body I began to think of packing it in.

  A horrible thought had crept into the back of my head a minute or so before; what if I was just another victim of one of Nicky’s stupid jokes?

  But that was hard to believe. I mean, surely Nicky would never do that to me. After all, I was his best mate and you didn’t do that sort of thing to your best mate. Although, with Nicky you could never be sure; he was a real prankster and was entirely capable of leading me on just so he could have a good laugh at my expense the next day at school.

  But what if it wasn’t a joke? What if this crazy idea of Nicky’s had some merit? I was cold and I felt miserable but surely I could hold on for just a few minutes more. I had to try.

  But even so, that insidious little doubt kept nagging at me. Was it possible? Had Nicky been playing silly buggers? Had he been setting me up to look the fool?

  I ran my mind back to earlier in the day—back to the events that had led me, Owen Finnegan, to stand on my bed in the middle of an open window, stark-naked and sopping wet at seven o’clock on a frigid Tuesday night in winter.

  * * *

  I raced full-bore across the playground of St Joseph’s Catholic School with Nicky hot on my heels. Chucking half-a-dozen zippy little sidesteps, I dodged the marauding nuns dotted here and there among the sea of students in the quadrangle and then barrelled around the corner of the church trying to not to slip over on the loose white gravel.

  We had just scoffed our lunches and were heading for our favourite place in the school-yard to play marbles. It was a good sunny position hard up against the wall of the old church where the ground was flat and firm. It was an especially good spot in the colder months as the century old, red brick wall reflected the winter sun and warmed us as we played. The angle between the wall and the thick abutment that jutted from it sheltered us from the cold wind that always blasted along the quadrangle kicking up a barrage of stinging gravel and knocking over kindergarten kids.

  But there was another reason we favoured this position, the most important reason of all. It was off the quadrangle and away from the nuns as they performed their endless circuits of the playground, prowling shark-like among the children. The nuns of Saint Joseph’s in Barclay were always on the alert, ever ready to leap in and prevent someone from committing a sin. They could zero in on a potential sinner in much the same way as a white pointer could pinpoint a drop of blood in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  The circle we’d etched in the hard soil at recess was still visible so in no time at all we were deep into our first game. Nicky, as always, was not doing well. He was a hopeless marbles player and since at his insistence we normally played for keeps, it meant that over the course of a week Nicky lost a lot of good marbles to anyone he played against. Today was no different and within ten minutes Nicky had lost a handful of his best shooters to me. It didn’t worry him too much though since it was only Tuesday. That meant his marble bag was still fairly full.

  Nicky’s father owned a successful car dealership and over the years business had been good. With the wealth came all the trappings such as the palatial family home with two cars in the driveway—an oddity in rural Australia in the sixties. The children of the family received generous allowances which meant plenty of the latest toys and games. But for Nicky, it meant he could stock up on new marbles over the weekend and gird his loins for the hidings he would receive over the coming week.

  A short, bandy, pugnacious little bloke, Nicky had a thick crop of loose black curls atop a head that bobbled about continually as he talked. Of all the children in the Burns’ household he was the one that had inherited his father’s quick wit and acumen. He fully embraced the world of the car salesman, and why not? He was a natural. He could talk underwater. He could talk the leg off an iron pot. If there was nothing to talk about then Nicky would talk about it. And he did too, constantly, and always at a million miles an hour. There was never any doubt about what Nicky Burns would do when he grew up. He would sell cars just like his father.

  Unfortunately none of this made Nicky a better marbles player and week in and week out he lost marbles by the bagful. But every weekend he would replenish his supplies and turn up at school on the Monday with a marble bag that was bursting at the seams. He didn’t stint either. There were none of the regular cheap and nasty bits of glass and paste from Coles we other kids had to put up with. No sir! None of that rubbish for Nicky. He bought his marbles from Mr Andrew’s toyshop in Barrow Road. Every Monday morning Nicky’s marble bag bulged with all sorts of new bodgies and glassies. He had Cat’s Eyes and Aggies. Bottle Tops and Froggies. Blue Moons, Sunsets, Beach Balls, Blood Alleys and Claypots; every sort of new marble you could ever think of. He even had Olympics which were hard to get and far too expensive for the rest of us.

  Then over the course of the week we would watch as Nicky’s marble bag steadily lost weight. He would bear these losses with good grace and a positive attitude until around about Thursday. Then he would decide he couldn’t take it anymore and would have to do something to stop the haemorrhage.

  That was when the rot would set in.

  I doubt there could be anything worse in the world than watching Nicky Burns, a sixth-class kid, trying to con the kindergarten and first-class kids into a game of keeps in order to bolster his dwindling marble supply. Anyone could see that he was only trying to take advantage of them. But even with these little tots Nicky found he had to be careful. Being five or six years their senior often made not one skerrick of difference when it came to marbles. They may have been barely out of nappies but some of these kids had eyes like a hawk and could shoot a fly off a dogs bum at ten paces.

  Nicky always kept an extra special eye out for a small girl with pigtails and a pair of thick, oversized glasses perched right on the tip of her freckled nose. Not much more than six-years old, she was a tiny little thing. She didn’t even come up to Nicky’s shoulder and he was built close to the ground as it was.

  The first time he had noticed her she was sitting alone on the church steps clutching a pink marble bag covered in little pastel teddy bears.

  Nicky smiled. He immediately figured that since she was only in first-class and judging by the specs she wore, as blind as a bat, she could not possibly play well. On top of that she was a girl! Girls were just not interested in marbles and if they were they were never any good. And she had teddies on her marble bag! Who in their right mind had teddies on their marble bag?

  With that sort of lopsided logic forming the basis of his reasoning Nicky challenged her to a game. He could barely conceal his excitement when she accepted and his confidence soared to heights never before attained. He began to strut around like a bantam rooster, throwing out his chest and proclaiming loudly just how many minutes it would take before he took every marble this little girl owned.

  “I’ll have no trouble cleaning out this little four-eyed, pig-tailed baby,” he yelled, not caring a whit a
bout the girl’s feelings.

  She didn’t seem rattled in the slightest however. She just stood there and watched him caper about like a lunatic. She studied him closely in much the same way as one studies a new species of stink-bug; with that cautious curiosity that compels you to keep looking but warns you not to get too close in case it farts.

  “I’m not gonna stop until that stupid pink bag with its stupid little teddies is nothing but a limp hanky in her hand,” Nicky bellowed.

  Attracted by all his noise a crowd formed which pleased Nicky enormously. All the more witnesses for what was sure to be a magnificent victory.

  Nicky told me later that before the game began he’d been planning what he would buy with his pocket-money on the weekend since for the first time in a long time there would be no need to spend it on marbles. Images of comic books and milkshakes, sherbet cones and musk sticks had drifted tantalisingly through his mind while the little girl squatted down to take the first shot.

  She cleaned him out completely in less than a minute. She was utterly ruthless. She fired her taw off the tip of her index finger, a method of shooting called knuckling down. Nicky’s marbles were flying from the circle as though shot from cannons.

  Knuckling down is a fast and accurate method of shooting and was common in the playgrounds of every school across the country. Most of the kids used it but Nicky had no answer for it. He never could learn to shoot in this fashion reduced instead to firing his taw from the crook of his curled index finger, a source of great embarrassment to him.

  Nicky had slipped up. His arrogant assumption that this little girl was an easy mark had cost him dearly. But he was gracious in defeat.

  “She played well,” he said to the appreciative crowd attracted by his initial bravado and all his big talk about reducing the little girl’s marble bag to little more than a hanky. Then he lifted his own now-empty marble bag up and after taking a huge breath, blew his nose into it.

  But today was Tuesday and that meant that Nicky would not be subjecting himself to the pain and misery of challenging any of the infants for a few days yet.

  While he was lining up a shot I told him how desperate I was to take the following day off. That was when the new Archbishop was coming to visit the school and I just knew it would not go well for me. These things seldom did. Our new Archbishop had a reputation. It was the worst sort of reputation; the kind that sent nuns into a panic of swirling habits and clattering rosaries and had the likes of me bolting for the horizon in outright panic.

  Our new Archbishop was the most educationally oriented Archbishop the Catholic Church had ever seen and he was famous for his scholastic excursions. He travelled from parish to parish visiting schools but he wouldn’t simply visit a school in general, he visited every classroom within the school. And if that wasn’t already bad enough, he would hold a quiz session in each class as he went along. Pointing at some poor unfortunate he would rattle off a quick question which the poor unfortunate had to answer and come hell or high water the poor unfortunate had better get it right because standing there right behind the Archbishop with murder in her eye was the poor unfortunate’s teacher. If the wrong answer was forthcoming then the poor unfortunate’s life from that point on would be a misery.

  I was certain that I would be the only poor unfortunate in sixth-class unable to answer the Archbishop’s question. And the question could be anything. It could be “seven times nine?” or “name the Patron Saint of children?” or “what is the fourth station of the cross?” These were all things I had no answer for and I just knew that at some point in his visit the Archbishop would jab an ecclesiastical digit in my face and demand a response of some sort.

  My teacher, Mrs Payne, one of only two lay teachers in a school populated by nuns, would be disappointed in me when I answered incorrectly but it wasn’t her that worried me. It was the principal, Sister Francis, who shook me up.

  Because of a few silly misunderstandings scattered across the earlier part of the year I was figuring pretty highly on her current hit-list. I could not afford to get into any more strife. Sister Francis saw anything like not knowing the answer to one of the Archbishop’s questions as a slight against her and even worse, against the school she loved so much. Answer incorrectly and I knew that while the Archbishop was present she’d be all smiles and bonhomie, but as soon as he was safely on his way she would go completely berko.

  For a while I had thought about bunging on another sickie but I knew that wasn’t going to work. Mum was wise to that now. The last time I'd tried it she was not receptive at all. I'd prepared myself as usual; I messed up my hair to make myself look ruffled and tired; I rubbed my eyes to make them red and weepy; I spent a good minute or so rubbing furiously at my forehead with the flat of my hand so the friction made it feel all hot and feverish. And then, I sallied forth.

  I staggered into the lounge room where mum was sitting on the sofa reading a magazine. I had a hand clutched to my belly and was moaning as though only seconds from a horrendous death. Mum looked at me for a few seconds and then leaping to her feet she applauded loudly. Then she grabbed the figurine she kept on the mantelpiece and presented me with an Oscar.

  I realised at that point she had twigged.

  With the chance of securing some sick leave being pretty much zero and no clear alternative presenting itself, I was getting desperate. So when Nicky happened to mention that he knew of a sure-fire way to get a couple of days off, possibly even a week, I scrabbled for it like a drowning man reaching for a life-preserver.

  “It will take an enormous commitment,” said Nicky, as he took a shot at my favourite Cat’s Eye and missed.

  I smiled at the way he said it. Being the product of the world’s best salesman and motivator a lot had brushed off, but I would listen to him since Nicky only ever spoke like this when he had something important to say. Even so, I tried to be cagey. It seldom paid to be too eager around Nicky. I waved my hand dismissively.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Regardless of my offhand manner a note of desperation must have crept into my voice because Nicky eyed me for a few seconds before saying anything further. As I squatted to play my shot he adopted a businesslike attitude and let his voice become a little more imperious than usual.

  “You know, this information is powerful stuff. You can’t expect me to give it out willy-nilly and get nothing in return.”

  He winced as I fired at a particularly nice Blood Alley of his, cannoning it sharply from the ring.

  “I need to get something out of this as well,” he continued.

  I looked at him. “Okay. Name your price.”

  His smile made me nervous and gave me an inkling of what was coming. He gestured to the twenty or so marbles in the circle on the ground in front of us, about three-quarters of which were mine and a good many of them, my favourites.

  “I want all the marbles you have out here on the ground and then I’ll tell you The Secret.”

  I had expected it but even so it shook me. It was a high price, one that deserved a quick snort of derisive laughter and a kick in the bum for the one cheeky enough to put it forward. I was desperate. No doubt. But was I that desperate? I looked down at the marbles on the ground between us.

  When playing marbles for keeps you normally play with your roughies; your older, less favoured marbles that are so battered and ordinary you don’t mind too much if you lose them. But Nicky was such a hopeless player you could afford to be a little arrogant and play him using some of your better marbles. That was what I’d done on this occasion and that meant there was a fair bit at stake. If I paid his price it would mean losing my favourite Cats Eye. The Orange Sunset I was fond of was also there along with the Sapphire Star I’d won from Frankie Allen in a hard-fought battle only the day before. The price was high, too high, and I started to protest but Nicky cut me off.

  “Well if you don’t want to know The Secret that’s up to you but my price is firm. I will not negotiate. This
very generous offer will be off the table at the end of lunchtime today.”

  I goggled at him. He had definitely been around his father too much of late. Nicky bent down and began to gather the few remaining loose marbles in the circle that were his.

  I frowned. He obviously thought he had me. To pick up his marbles halfway through a game of keeps showed an edge of arrogance and ruthlessness I didn’t know old Nicky possessed. He was trying to force my hand and I didn’t like it one bit. I was just opening my mouth to tell him to bugger off when, still squatting, he played his trump card.

  “Of course you could spend the whole night studying all there is to know about the saints; all their feast days and their history and all that sort of thing.” He looked up at me. “You might even learn enough to squeak by tomorrow when the Archbishop asks you a question or two.”

  He stood up and pulled the drawstring closed on his marble bag with an emphatic jerk. He had me this time and he knew it. The prospect of a night with my head buried in theological texts attempting to glean all there was to know about every saint that had ever lived from those dull and boring pages was enough to make me want to vomit. I knew I wasn’t up to that.

  I gritted my teeth. “Okay. Take the marbles.”

  Nicky grinned and squatting down, gathered all of my marbles and dropped them into his overstuffed bag. Only when they were safely inside and the bag securely tied did he tell me The Secret.

  It was so ludicrous that at first I refused to believe him and I threatened him with the most painful headlock in the entire world if he did not give my marbles back right away. But over the next ten minutes or so Nicky did what he did best. He convinced me. By the end of the lunch-break he had not only persuaded me that the plan would work, he had me champing at the bit, keen to get home and put it into action.