A BLOKE COULD DO A LOT WORSE

Ray had got his start hawking second-hand blockbusters and alternative bestsellers on the footpath – Vikram Seth and Michael Riley, Paolo Coelho and Dan Brown, Life of Pi and JK Rowling all piled in together in cardboard fruit boxes. From there he’d moved on to bigger things, of course: supply of rare alcohol and endangered luxury goods, getting his clients into the city’s most exclusive venues, and his least-proud venture, pimping out his friends. He’d hung on to the original business by doing a small but respectable line in rare and antique documents, usually for a higher class of clientele than used his regular services.

A couple of months ago Peira had hooked him up with a peacekeeper who was looking to sell off some maps his father had acquired on active service about thirty years earlier. The maps themselves had been printed sometime in the 1940s, by various cartographers working in disparate locations. The maps were of nowhere special – some were from the area around Melbourne, there was a topographic map of California, one of what was then India, maps of Poland and Prague and the Netherlands. There was no particular logic to the packet, but the soldier was asking for some fairly big money for them.

Ray liked the way they smelled, and because he’d had a really good week on the horses, and because sometimes he just did stuff because he felt like it, Ray bought them. The peacekeeper had told him that he could make a serious profit selling them to the right people, but that if he was the adventurous type he might gain more from using them himself.

That was pretty much what he’d said: ‘Are you the adventurous type, mate? Cause if you are, I’d recommend hanging on to those little beauties and giving them a try yourself.’

‘Giving them a try?’ Ray had asked.

‘Yeah, y’know. Take em out for a spin. Do a little – whaddyacallit? – orienteering with em. I guess you could probably flog the India one off for a bit – not much use to anyone but a historian these days. But you never know when you might get over to Prague, eh mate?’ At that point the soldier reached over onto Ray’s side of the table and pawed through the maps, pulling out one of the Macedon Ranges. ‘Like this one. I mean, things have changed a bit out there, no doubt about it, but it’s still mostly trees and hills and stuff, right? Might as well take the map out, have a bit of a gander, eh? It’s not like you’ll get lost or nuthin. Y’know, me old man used to take me out around here.’ The soldier tapped on a worn patch in the map, the crease where the map had been folded and refolded over the last ninety or so years. He looked up at Ray meaningfully. ‘Y’know what I’m saying? A bloke could do a lot worse than have a look around here.’ Tap tap tap.

Ray had no idea what he was saying, but he nodded anyway.

‘So why are you selling, mate?’

‘Aks no questions, sonny Jim, and I’ll tell you no lies,’ the soldier replied. ‘You fellas know what it’s like, right? Sometimes the booze just gets a hold of you, and nothing else much seems worth bothering with but a drink or seven.’

Ray let the comment go, though he could see Peira rolling her eyes at him. Instead of answering, he counted out a wad of money and wished the soldier well.

‘Wanna celebrate a sale well made, mate? You got yourself a real bargain there. I’ll buy you a beer or a rum or whatever it is you fellas like.’

‘Thanks, no,’ Ray replied. ‘I’ve got a business meeting to get to.’ Which he didn’t, of course. ‘I’ll get this one,’ he said, and while he was at the bar paying he asked Peira to give him a call once the soldier had gone so he could slip back and have a drink or two with Caddy.

‘What you got there, Ray?’ Jason had stopped him on his way out. ‘Something good, bro?’ Jason had aspirations to be just like Ray when he grew up.

‘Just some maps, mate. Nothing you’d be interested in. No electronics, no porno files, no mentholated cigarettes.’

‘Aw, come on Ray. I like the classy stuff too, y’know?’

‘Sure you do. What’s classier than a menthol? Hey, where’d you get those sunglasses from?’

‘These?’ Jason pulled his sunglasses off. ‘One of the little tackers stole them from somewhere, sold them to me for a dollar. You want em?’

‘Aren’t those Caddy’s sunnies?’

‘Yeah, might be. You want em?’

‘I’ll give you eighty cents.’

‘A dollar is my final offer, man. Best price.’

‘You’re a sharp dealer, Jase. I’ll take em.’

Later some rich guy he was doing a deal with had noticed the sunnies, offered him ten bucks for them (said they were just the look his daughter was into) and Ray had sold them. It wasn’t till he’d seen Caddy outside Library that he’d remembered whose they were. There didn’t seem much point mentioning it by then.

Anyway, business had been a bit slow over the following weeks, so on a quiet Wednesday Ray decided he might as well go out to the country for a few days. He’d taken his motorbike along the Western Highway and headed out to near Hanging Rock, to the spot the obnoxious soldier had shown him on the map. He folded the map up tight, so he could focus on the area that was worn down, the place where the image had creased into non-existence. He rode around, cruising slowly till he thought he’d found the place. He locked his bike up, hid it under some bushes, and started walking. He was just about at the place when he felt his feet slide out from under him and he threw his hands down reflexively, expecting to fall. But it wasn’t him that had slipped: it was the land around him. The shock of it gave him tunnel vision and he shook his head to clear his eyes, but the tunnel stayed. ‘It’s not my eyes,’ he realized. ‘It’s the world.’ He was being sucked through a tunnel of the world. He barely had time to register all this before it stopped. He was standing on firm ground again, clear eyed, full three-sixty-degree vision. He was standing among trees and rocks still, but he was sure right away it wasn’t the same place. There were tree ferns; he’d been in sclerophyll before, he was sure of it. This looked almost rainforesty. It was still the same temperature though, almost exactly. He looked up at the sky – same kind of sky, same clouds or lack of them. Hang on though: before, the grey haze of Melbourne had been on his eastern horizon. Now it was to his west. What the hell was going on?

Ray sat down on the soft leaf litter. OK, come on. There was no need to panic, he was pretty sure of that. He was in Australia still, to the east of a big city that was probably Melbourne, on the same day that he’d gotten off his motorbike near Hanging Rock.

He turned the map over and over in his hands. The map. He looked down. He’d managed to fold the map into a square about fifteen by fifteen centimeters, about twelve layers thick. On one side was Hanging Rock. On the other – he turned it over – the Warramate Hills, in the Dandenongs east of the city. In the left hand corner the ink had worn right away.

‘Well, fuck me,’ Ray thought. ‘I’ve taken a short cut.’ Not to anywhere he particularly wanted to be, but still. He looked around. Yep, it certainly looked like the Dandenongs.

‘So wait a second …’ He unfolded the map and found another worn patch, but it was down where Altona beach had been. ‘Not such a good idea,’ he thought, ‘don’t want to end up drowned in goop.’ More searching turned up a crease just to the west of Glenrowan. ‘Hey now! That’s more like it. Why don’t I go visit old Ned Kelly.’

Ray refolded the map so that the Warramate Hills were on the front and Glenrowan on the back. He pulled himself up and walked through the area where he’d been sitting. Nothing. He tried again. Nope. Dammit, how was he going to get back to his bike? He started thinking about the deal he’d hooked up for the next morning – he needed his bike! And that did it: the ground slipped away, everything went tunnelly, and a couple of seconds later he was on a hill looking down on a crummy little town. He could see the Big Ned Kelly even from there.

‘This is awesome.’ He’d said it out loud this time. It was kind of hard to believe the soldier had been telling the truth. The maps were an actual real-live bargain. He checked his watch. It was about twelve minutes since he’d been at Hanging Rock. He figured he had time to look around, so he started walking downhill, aiming for the Glenrowan Hotel and a can of VB.

Over the next few weeks Ray tried out a bunch of ideas, including gluing together the maps of Greater Melbourne and Greater Prague and folding them up so that he could theoretically step from the shanty town in Edinburgh Gardens, Melbourne, through to Vitkov Hill, Prague. He tried it plenty of times, but it never worked, even when he tried to distract himself by thinking about how he’d forgotten to put a bet on the 2.40 at Flemington, which was a sure thing, and he was going to kick himself when the horse came in. Even then it didn’t work. Seemed like unless he one day got on a plane to Eastern Europe, his jaunts would be limited to the area around Melbourne.

After a few trips, Ray started to look around while he was tunneling. That was what he called it: tunneling. The first couple of times it all seemed like a blur, but eventually he began making out what looked like coordinates superimposed on the blur as he raced past. When he did trips through the city, he realized he could see landmarks as he passed by. It seemed like he was actually physically passing through all the points between the front and back of the map. He experimented with folding the map so he could predict what would pass by, and he was pretty much right every time.

Still, though, Ray was at a loss to think of what use this was to him. He never really needed to travel around central Victoria at high speed. And it seemed like you had to be hanging on to the map for the trick to work, so he wasn’t sure he could set up any kind of commuter service (though he certainly hadn’t entirely given up on the idea). At any rate, work had started picking up again, and Ray became more and more focused on everyday life and thought less and less about the maps. It wasn’t until the Friday he was due to go to the football with Caddy – and due, he hoped, to forge some kind of lasting relationship with the carbon credit billionaires – that he started thinking again about how they might come in handy.