by John Marsden
He looked surprised. "I was hiding in the bike shed. I didn't think anyone would look there."
I laughed with delight. "I'm psychic! I always knew it!"
I told them about the message I'd written in the Hermit's hut. They weren't very impressed, but I thought it was great. I love weird things like that. But we were all so off our heads with excitement and nerves and hangovers and lack of sleep that the talk was crazy, jumping all over the place like a plague of locusts.
Gradually, though, it developed into a very intense serious conversation. It turned out there were three big decisions to make. How to arrange for Fi to see her parents was the first one. How to get ourselves to safety was the second. Stupidly I had thought that we could stop at those two, but it was Lee who hit us with the third.
How to attack the airfield.
Luckily he didn't mention it until we'd dealt with the first two. And they were fairly easy. Dr. K. was going to break the news to Fi's parents that she might be around, so they would look out for her. We'd have to get Fi in position during the night and she'd hide in the park until her parents were allowed out for lunch. It would be a long day for Fi but, of course, who cared about that? It'd be worth the wait.
It would be a long day for me, too, because Fi whispered that she wanted me to come with her, and you can't refuse a request like that, not that I'd want to.
The second decision wasn't so hard, either. We had to call Colonel Finley on Wednesday, and we all thought if the Kiwis hadn't turned up by then we'd return to New Zealand alone. There was nothing much more we could do to find them.
Then came the third topic, out of the blue. I think it took us all by surprise, not only me.
"We have to have a go at the airbase," Lee said.
He said it just like that, calmly and unemotionally. But very firmly. There was a stunned silence.
"We can't do that," Kevin said at last.
"Yes, we can."
"But a dozen Kiwis, with all the training and equipment they've got, if they couldn't do it, what hope do we have? None, that's how much. You've got to be bloody joking. No way, José. No way in the world."
"We can and we have to," Lee replied. "We can't go back to New Zealand with our tails between our legs. We can't go back without making an effort. For all we know the Kiwis might be dead. We have to do it for their sake. We have to work out some simple way, something we can manage."
"Do you know what their plan was?" I asked.
"More or less," Lee answered. "They had explosive charges to put on the planes."
As he had been all the time, Lee was talking without looking at us. It was like he was miles away. It was strange. Sure he was still exhausted, still recovering from the lack of food, and the loneliness and fear he would have felt during the days and nights on his own, but there was something more happening, something I didn't understand.
Homer joined in the argument.
"I wish you'd never suggested it in the first place," he said, quite bitterly. "God knows, I'm sick of hero games. But now that you have suggested it ... well, you've landed us in it, haven't you? It makes it pretty hard for us to walk away."
"Let's take a vote," Fi said. She was still very quiet, like she was in shock.
I was about to agree, but Lee beat me to it.
"Take a vote if you want," he said. "But it won't make any difference to me. I'll attack the airfield on my own if I have to. You can come or not, whatever you like."
We all protested. It was unfair of Lee to put us in that position. If we let him go on his own and he didn't come back, where did that leave us? If we went with him and we were all killed, well, that wasn't too good either. He was trying to impose his will on us, and none of us liked it.
Lee just couldn't see it, though. Or wouldn't. He kept saying: "It's my decision and it's my life. It doesn't concern anyone else. If you don't want to come, that's fine."
Lee was back in one of his revenge and honour moods, and I knew he wouldn't listen to us. The crazy thing was that he had no idea how to attack the airfield. Just a vague belief that he should do it.
The discussion broke up at about four o'clock with no result. Instead of being elated and excited about the news of our parents we were tired and angry. I went and had a sleep to make up for all that I'd missed the night before when I was on sentry. But again I couldn't sleep. I wriggled and twisted around on the narrow hard bed, thinking about it all—my parents, my father locked up and my mother having to wash other people's clothes, Fi's parents and the reunion she and she alone could look forward to, Lee's stubbornness, his mad ambition to kill himself and anyone who went with him.
And suddenly, in horror and guilt, I thought of the two questions that none of us had asked him. It seemed incredible then and it seems even more incredible now. I can only explain it by saying that we had too many things to think about: our brains were in overload. But that's really no excuse. I was mortified, disgusted, incredulous, ashamed.
But I realised.
I realised everything.
Sixteen
I found him after a long search. I'd gone through every room in every block: offices, classrooms, staff rooms, even the toilets.
Then I thought, "Oh, of course, stupid, how could it take me so long to work it out?"
I found the window unlocked. I went straight through it to the bike shed.
By then it was some time after nine o'clock and very dark, too dark to see anything. But I had no doubt. I knew he was there.
I stood in the doorway and asked the first question.
"Lee, what happened to your family?"
There was no answer. I stepped forward, three steps, trying to see in the darkness, trying to see where he might be sitting. It was impossibly dark. I tried again.
"Lee? Are they all dead?"
There was a kind of spasm away to my left, in the darkest corner of the shed. I turned towards it and using my hands in front of me to feel for obstacles I groped my way over there. The last few metres I was doing a kind of shuffle. It was his knee I at last bumped into. I put my hand on it. I felt a shudder run through him. I found his shoulder and made him turn a little towards me. Me kind of fell against me. He started shaking so severely I could hear his teeth rattle. I got my arms around him and held him tightly. I had the feeling that this was the most important thing I had ever done in my life, that if I didn't hold him with enough love he would fall apart, or he would slip away and never return, not just to me, but to anyone, to life itself. I prayed to God, to Robyn's God again, to give me enough love to keep him with us. I thought I'd hold him for as long as it took, even if it took forever. I was devastated by my sense of guilt: all the time we'd been talking about our parents and the airfield we hadn't thought to ask Lee about his own family. But gradually that feeling went. I started to realise that it didn't really matter, that love could overcome all those stupid misunderstandings; that if someone really loved you, they knew what was in your heart and it didn't matter if you made mistakes. They looked past your words and read your heart. If they liked what they saw there, if they recognised it as good, they'd forgive just about anything.
So that was what I thought sitting there in the dark, with my leg and left arm going to sleep under me as Lee and I hugged and tried together to hold off the forces of fear and loneliness and sadness.
It took a while, too. I suppose it's one of those battles that you never win. You have to keep fighting it forever. Maybe the best you can hope for is that you don't lose too much ground, that as long as you keep fighting you can at least hold your own, most of the time. You might have to call that a victory.
We were there for probably two hours before he quite suddenly started telling me the story. How his parents had been killed when his father attacked a guard at the Showground, and the man fired just as Lee's mother ran in to try to stop him. The same bullet killed them both. And it happened in front of Lee's little brothers and sisters. They were still at the Showground, being looked after
by the women who ran the creche.
About an hour after that I asked him the other question that had been plaguing me.
Lee answered me straightaway, to my surprise. But he didn't answer in the way I expected. He didn't use words. Instead he stood and took my hand and led me out of the shed, into the dry hot air of the night. After the bike shed it seemed quite light, quite easy to see. The smell of burnt trees and grass still lingered, and as we walked across the playground I caught a glimpse of trees glowing red on the hill that overlooked the town. They would take days to burn; each of them a mass of hot red coals that would have to be watched carefully for a long time. I hoped someone was up there doing just that. Bushfires aren't only dangerous while they're blazing.
I think we both felt bulletproof as we walked away from the school. I don't know why; no idea. But for about the only time since the invasion we didn't bother looking around or taking any special precautions.
We also didn't tell the others we were going, which was pretty rough. I can't make any excuses for that. We just didn't think of it.
Out in the streets we did get careful again. We didn't talk to each other. I guess I knew where we were going. We did all the usual things, sticking to shadows, going from garden to garden rather than along the street, taking special care at intersections. There was plenty of activity. I wasn't surprised: they knew we were in the district somewhere, and they might have started to realise we were in the town, not the bush. When we got back to school I'd tell the others we had to move. It was too dangerous to stay there any longer.
But the activity was mainly vehicles, and they were fairly easy to avoid. Cars and trucks went by at different times, some obviously in a hurry to get somewhere, others obviously patrolling. We saw a foot patrol too, but we hid in bushes until they had gone. I had no real fear now that I would fall apart when I saw them. Things had changed again since then.
It was about two o'clock when we got to the cemetery. Two o'clock's a cold time to visit a cemetery, even on a dry warm night like this one. Lee didn't hesitate though. He knew exactly where we were going. We walked down the centre path to near the end, then turned left. I was starting to cry already, and I took Lee's hand and held it tightly. We turned left again and came to the newest row of graves. They were just piles of raw caramel-coloured earth, seven or eight of them, and a little white cross stuck in each. A bit different to the ornate grey and white marble tombs in the next row. They were from before the war. Some of them were two metres high, and a couple had crosses twice my height.
Corrie's grave was the third of the little mounds of dirt. It had her name and the date of her death on the white cross, nothing else. Tears kept running down my face, but it was just water out of my eyes; I didn't feel I was crying in the way that people normally do. Like, sobbing. It's lucky Lee was holding me though, because I would have just folded into a heap on the ground if he hadn't been. And if I'd gone down, like a sheep in a drought, I don't think I'd have got up again. That's what war does to you. Either kills you in one go or destroys you bit by bit. One way or the other, it gets you.
In the end we didn't stay there long. I think we'd both had enough grief for one night, enough emotion. I pulled some flowers off a tree, reddish blossoms they were, and I said a little prayer and promised her I'd come back and spend more time there, and then we moved away a little, and sat on a tombstone in the next row.
And then the horror of it hit me. Corrie was my age, my friend, my best, best friend who I'd shared my childhood with. This was Corrie, whose mother found her crying in her bedroom when she was four and when she asked her what was wrong Corrie sobbed, "Ellie told me to go to my room, and I haven't even done anything wrong!" Corrie, who played school with me, when we used poddy lambs as the students and tried to make the poor stupid things stand in straight lines for their lessons. Corrie, who had conspired with me to be naughty one day in Grade 1, and we threw Eleanor's lunch in the rubbish tin and filled her lunch box with sheep droppings. We got in so much trouble that we were shocked. We hadn't realised how naughty we were being. But only a week later we threw our undies on the overhead fan when we were getting changed for swimming and one pair flew off into Mrs. Mercer's face.
We played dentists when we were seven and I actually pulled out one of Corrie's teeth. It was loose anyway, of course, and she didn't mind, but Mrs. Mackenzie was a bit flabbergasted. We'd put on puppet shows and magic shows for our families and charged them twenty cents to enter. We shared a bag of sherbet that Corrie knocked off from her Mum's shopping bag, then somehow convinced ourselves that it was Ratsak and we panicked and rushed to the tap and tried to wash it all out of our mouths. We lay in our tent on our first campout, sucking on tubes of toothpaste. Another time in the same tent we pretended we were married, and we kissed and felt each other the way we imagined married people did. And on another campout we managed to persuade ourselves that there was a boogie-monster outside the tent, until we got so scared we rushed into the house screaming and refused to go out there again.
We were mates, that's all there was to it. It was always Corrie's hand I held as we walked in a crocodile to the library or the pool or the art room. Like Fi, we went through the usual list of things that kids try: jazz ballet, swimming lessons, piano, pony club. Unlike Fi, we didn't last too long at any of them. There was too much to do at home, and our parents complained at all the driving. We went through the grades: 1, 2, 3, 4. We wrote love letters to boys, and decided the next day that we didn't like them after all. We played softball for the Wirrawee Under 10's but when Corrie got dropped for being rude to Narelle, our coach, I quit the team in protest. We tried to peep at the shearers through a little hole in the wall of their dunny. Wc had a competition to see who could last the longest without going to the toilet and nearly bust ourselves in the process. We dared the other girls in Grade 5 camp to run topless to the flagpole and back, and I actually did it, but Corrie, who by then was getting something worth covering, chickened out. Grade 6, Year 7, Year 8. We read in a magazine that sometimes girls who were close friends would menstruate at the same time, so we tried to synchronise ours but failed. For more than a term we kept a list of the colour of Andrew Matthewson's undies each day, because he wore wide shorts and always sat slumped down with his legs apart. It was a joke, but there was something I never admitted even to Corrie, and that was how I used to wish he'd forget to wear undies at all one day.
Corrie, who made herself sick worrying about tests. Corrie, who spent a whole lesson typing groups of As—just the letter A—into a computer, then blocked it, copied and pasted it, and did that over and over until she'd created a file eight megabytes long. Then we did a word count. It took twelve and a half minutes.
Corrie, who broke her collarbone when she fell off the back of the trailer as we picked up the posts from the old fenceline. Corrie, who talked me into following her on a crawl through the little gaps between the bales in their hayshed, then suddenly panicked and thought she wouldn't be able to get out and got total claustrophobia. Corrie, who fell so madly in love with Kevin, and so suddenly, that I was jealous and had to make myself like him. At first I'd even tried to talk her out of going with him but for once she was not going to be talked out of something: she had her heart set on him, and she got him, and in the end I had to resign myself to the fact that our relationship had changed forever.
We would have to bring Kevin here too, to the cemetery, because he had as much right as I did, maybe more after the sacrifices he'd made to get Corrie to hospital.
But no, I thought, I had a right to be here too. Come and I were mates. We were mates for life.
And now my best mate was under the earth, under six feet of cold heavy soil, separated from me by six feet and by eternity. How could it be possible? All those futures we discussed, all those plans to share a flat and go to uni, to travel the world together, to get jobs as pilots or jillaroos or teachers or doctors or governesses: in none of those plans did we ever consider for a moment that it m
ight end like this. Death wasn't on our agenda. We never mentioned the word. We thought we were indestructible. And what would happen to me now? Our plans had always been for two, but Come had left me and I was on my own. I felt like a Siamese twin who'd been amputated from her other half. Sure I had Fi, and sure I loved her dearly, but I hadn't grown up with her the way I had with Come.
The last time I'd seen Corrie was at the hospital and I thought I'd said goodbye to her then and I'd sort of known I wouldn't see her again, but now I realised I hadn't accepted that at all. There were so many more things I should have said, wanted to say, had forgotten to say. Now, how would I say them? If I lived for a hundred years I would never get the chance to say them.
"How did you know she was here?" I asked Lee.
He shrugged and put his arm around me.
I welcomed that, I wanted it, and I snuggled into him.
"I didn't know. I was just browsing. It got so boring hanging round here. I saw the new graves and thought they might be people who'd died since the invasion."
"Where are your parents?"
"They're buried at the Showground."
I sat up a little, and drew away from him and looked at him. "The Showground? Why? Why not here?"
"Anyone who's been executed—that's what they call it when they murder someone—gets buried at the Showground. I don't know why. I guess they figure they're too naughty to get a proper grave."
"How'd you find that out?"
"Dr. Krishnananthan told me."
"So that's how you found out they'd died? You haven't seen their graves?"
"That's right."
"Oh, Lee. It's all so sad."
We hugged for, I don't know, an hour or so, trying to comfort each other.
Finally I said, "We'd better go back."