The Dead of Night

by John Marsden

  I hesitated another few seconds, then took a breath. I steeled myself, like I was at the School Sports waiting for the gun, then took off, running silently for the wool bales, using the tractor as cover. If I'd had a bit of white fluff on my bum I would have passed for a rabbit. But I got there safely and waited, trembling, pressed against the smooth skin of a bale. The voices kept talking, rising and falling like a river. I couldn't make out the words, but it sounded like English. I started sidling along the bales, glancing at the entrance all the time so I could see if anyone came in. At the corner of the bales I stopped again. Now I could hear the voices clearly. I trembled and sweated, and tears smarted in my eyes as I recognised one of them. It was Mrs Mackenzie, Corrie's Mum. My first instinct was to sit down and bawl like a little kid. But I knew I couldn't give in to such weaknesses. They were for the old days, the innocent days, when we lived a soft life. Those days were lost, along with paper tissues and plastic supermarket bags and jars of moisturiser—all the useless luxuries that we took for granted before the war. Not only had we taken them for granted, we'd even thought they were important. Now they were as foreign and far away as the luxury of crying with relief at a familiar voice.

  Corrie's Mum. Mrs Mackenzie. I'd had a thousand cups of tea and five thousand scones at her kitchen table. She'd taught me how to make toffee, how to giftwrap Chrissie pressies, how to send a fax. I'd told her about my cat dying, my crush on Mr Hawthorne, and my first kiss. When my parents got especially-annoying or frustrating I'd pour it out to her and she'd soak it all up, like she understood exactly how I felt.

  I peered around the side of the bales. I had a good view of the back corner of the shed. I was looking at the workbench, with the tools neatly arranged on the walls above it. With no power connected, the area was dark and gloomy but I could see the two people working at the bench." A man with his back to me was tinkering with something. I didn't recognise him from his back, and I wasn't so interested in him anyway. My enthusiasm was all for Mrs Macca. I looked at her hungrily, and felt at once the disbelief in my stomach. She was side-on to me, cleaning out a carburettor with a toothbrush. A shadow was on her face, but I could hardly believe she was Mrs Mackenzie. This person was old and thin, with silver hair, long and straggly. Mrs Mackenzie was middle-aged and nicely plump,' red-headed like her daughter. I kept staring at her, my disappointment giving way to anger. I really thought it wasn't her after all. But gradually, as I looked, I began to see traces of Mrs Mackenzie in her face, in the way she stood, and in the way she moved. Then she put down the toothbrush, wiped her hair away from her eves, and picked up a screwdriver. And in the movement of her hand as she brushed her hair aside, I saw Corrie's Mum. In shock and love I cried out, "Mrs Macca!"

  She let go the screwdriver, which fell to the floor, bouncing and clattering. She spun round, her mouth and chin dropping, which made her face even longer and thinner. She went very white and clutched her throat.

  "Oh. Ellie."

  I thought she was going to faint, but she leant quickly and heavily against the bench, putting her left hand to her forehead and covering her eyes. I wanted to go to her but knew I mustn't. The man, glancing out at the trucks, said to me, swiftly, "Stay there." I was annoyed, because I'd worked that out for myself, but I didn't say anything. I already knew I shouldn't have called out. Mrs Mackenzie bent down and picked up the screwdriver, but it took her three tries and she seemed like she wasn't seeing it properly. Then she looked across at me, yearningly. We were half a dozen metres apart but it may as well have been a hundred k's.

  "Corrie, are you all right?" she asked. I was shocked that she'd called me Corrie and hadn't seemed to realise it. But I tried to act naturally.

  "We're fine, Mrs Mac," I whispered. "How are you?"

  "Oh, I'm just fine, we're all fine. I've lost a bit of weight, Ellie, that's all, but I've needed to do that for years."

  "How's Corrie?" I felt that awful dread in my heart again, but I had to ask, and now that Mrs Mackenzie had called me Ellie again I thought it was OK. But she took a long time to answer. She looked half asleep, strangely. She was still leaning against the workbench.

  "She's OK, Ellie. She's lost a lot of weight too. We're just waiting for her to wake up."

  "How are my parents? How's everybody?"

  "They're all right. They're fine."

  "Your parents are in good shape," the man said. I still didn't know who he was. "We've had a bad few weeks, but your parents are fine."

  "A bad few weeks?" I asked. This conversation was taking place in urgent whispers, with many glances at the trucks.

  "We've lost quite a few people."

  "How d'you mean 'lost'?" I almost choked on the question.

  "They've got a new bloke," the man said. "How d'you mean?"

  "They brought in an Australian bloke from out of town. Some chalkie. He keeps picking people out for interrogation, and a lot of them get taken away after he's finished with them."

  "Where to?"

  "How should we know? They won't tell us. We just hope to God it isn't a firing squad."

  "Who does he pick?"

  "Oh, first it was all the people who'd been in the Army Reserve. He knew who they were. Then it was the cops', and Bert Heagney, and a couple of your teachers. Anyone who's a bit of a leader, you know what I mean? He doesn't know everyone, but he knows a lot of people. He does about five a day, and we're lucky if three of them come back in the evening."

  I said, "I thought there were informers at the Showground already."

  "Not like this bloke. There's people who suck up to them, but they don't do this kind of thing. They don't help with interrogations. Not like this mongrel."'

  There was so much anger in the man's voice at the end of his answer that his voice rose sharply in volume. I cowered down in the shadows for a moment, but no one came. I knew I'd have to go soon, but I wished Mrs Mackenzie would say more. She seemed so gaunt and tired and washed out. "How's Lee's family?" I asked. "And Fi's, and Homer's? How are Robyn's folks?"

  Mrs Mackenzie just nodded.

  "They're good," the man said.

  "What do you have to do here?" I asked.

  "Get it ready. There'll be colonists moving here in the next few days. You kids'll have to be careful. There are work parties out everywhere now. We're expecting hundreds of colonists soon."

  I felt sick. We were getting hemmed in. Maybe one day I'd have to accept the unthinkable, the unfaceable, that we'd be slaves for the rest of our lives. A future that was no future, a life that was no life. But I had no time for thought. I had only time for doing.

  "I've got to go, Mrs Macca," I said.

  To my horror she suddenly burst into wild sobs, turning away from me and falling forward onto the workbench, dropping the screwdriver again as she wept. She was sort of screaming and crying at the same time. My scalp felt like I'd had two hundred and forty volt's applied to it. It was like I'd been given an instant crew-cut. Frightened, I backed away fast, scurrying to the far end of the wool bales and ducking behind them. I heard a truck door open and a soldier come walking into the shed.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "I don't know," the man said. He sounded quite convincing, like he didn't really care. "She just started crying. It's those bloody Swedish carburettors, I reckon. They'd drive anyone to tears."

  I almost grinned as I crouched there in the darkness.

  Nothing seemed to happen for a while. The only sound was Mrs Mackenzie's sobbing, which had now become quieter. I could hear her gulping, as she tried to get some air in her lungs, get some control back. "Come on, love," the man said. I heard more footsteps, which sounded like the soldier again. They went out of the shed and faded away towards the house.

  "Go for your life Ellie," the man said in a normal conversational tone, as though he were talking to Mrs Mackenzie.

  I had to rely on his judgement, so I took off, without saying anything, slipping around the corner of the shed, past the water tank, and into the
bush. I greeted the trees like they were my friends, my family. I hid behind one for a while, embracing it while I got my breath back. Then I toiled on up the hill, to find my friends.

  Fourteen

  We saw our first colonists only two days later. More rain had blown in and we'd retreated to the shearers' quarters for protection, huddling there as the timber creaked and whined and muttered. The rain came in squalls, rattling on the galvanised iron as though we were being roof-rocked. We took it in turns on sentry duty, keeping a twenty-four hour watch, but the weather was so bad that the work parties didn't return. We went and inspected what they'd done: the house was clean and tidy and the beds made. It was all ready for strangers, aliens, to move in and take over. It scared and upset me, trying to imagine these people sleeping in the Holmes' beds, eating in their kitchen, walking their paddocks and sowing their seeds in the Holmes' earth. I supposed that our farm would go the same way soon.

  After two days the rain had stopped, though the sky was still grey, the air cold, and the ground wet and muddy. We'd decided to walk to Chris's place again when we got a chance, in case he'd turned up there. So at dusk, and despite the cold rotten weather, we took our gear and marched off across the paddocks. Roads were too dangerous, so early in the evening, but we knew we could bypass Wirrawee and strike Meldon Marsh Road without much trouble, and that would put us close to the Langs.

  It was a silent walk for a while. Being cooped up for two more days hadn't improved our tempers. But the open spaces were good: it was nice to be able to breathe again. I felt myself relaxing after the first couple of k's. I held Lee's hand for a while, but it was too hard to walk along in the dark like that; we needed both our hands for balance, after our frequent stumbles. I dropped back and left Lee on his own, and talked to Robyn about movies we'd seen: which ones we liked and which ones we didn't. I had a great longing to see a movie again; to be able to look up at a vast screen in the darkness and watch beautiful people, beautifully dressed, saving clever and romantic things to each other. I supposed that in other parts of the world people were still making these films and other people were still watching them, but it was a hard thing to comprehend.

  We skirted around Wirrawee and got onto Meldon Marsh Road. It was now well after ten o'clock and we thought we were safe on the road. It was a relief to be able to walk on it, and we made much better time. But about two k's from Chris's we saw a house with lights on. It was a shock to us; it was the first we knew that power was being reconnected to rural houses. We stopped and looked in silence. It wasn't a welcome sight at all. In one way it should have been comforting: to see something that was so like old times. But life was different now. We were used to being feral animals, used to roaming the dark country at nights, used to running wild in the wild. If the colonists spread through the farmlands, reclaiming them with their lights and electricity and their own form of civilisation, we would be forced further and further out to the edges, having to skulk in caves and burrows, among the rocks.

  Still without a word being said, we moved towards the house. We'd become human moths. The house wasn't one I knew, but it was a comfortable looking place, solid brick, with big wide windows and at least three chimneys. Shade trees grew around it, and a neat garden with brick borders made a geometric pattern at the front. The borders nearly proved my downfall; I trod on one of the bricks and felt a spasm in my knee, which had been free of pain for several days now. But I recovered my balance, and when I tested my knee it felt OK. I caught up with the others, who had bunched behind a tree and were looking towards one of the lit windows. Bad strategy, I thought. A soldier with a gun could wipe them all out in less than a second. I whispered that to them when I got to the tree; they looked startled, but quickly spread out to the cover of other trees.

  I went around the eastern side of the house and found a peppercorn tree with wooden slats nailed to it, leading up to a kids' cubby, a treehouse. I scaled the ladder and sat in the first fork. It gave me a dress circle view of the kitchen. I watched grimly. There were three women working in there. They looked quite at home. They were reorganising everything. They had all the jars and plates and saucepans and cans out of the cupboards and spread across the tables and benches. They were wiping things down and putting them away, stopping even now and then to take a closer look at something, or to draw the attention of the others to it. There was a gadget with orange plastic handles made for getting the lids off jars, and that seemed to fascinate them. I guess they couldn't work out what it was for. They were putting their fingers through the hole in the middle and waving them around, then trying to screw each other's noses off with it. They were laughing a lot. I could just hear their voices through the wall, sounding thin and high-pitched, almost a little nasal. But they looked like they were having a lot of fun; they seemed happy and excited.

  I felt such a mixture of feelings, watching them: jealousy, anger, fear, depression. I couldn't bear to see any more: I slipped down from the tree and went and found the others. Then we stole away through the garden and back to the road.

  Comparing notes as we walked along, we worked out that there were at least eight adults in the house. I'd been assuming that they'd put one family on each farm, but perhaps they thought we were extravagant, having so much land between so few people. Perhaps they'd build houses all across the Wirrawee valley, till there was one family in each paddock, farming the land intensively. I didn't know how the earth would cope with that. But then, maybe we hadn't been making enough use of it.

  We trudged on, each quiet with private thoughts and theories and dreams. It was after midnight when we got to Chris's place. There were no lights on, but we were being terribly careful, in case there were colonists asleep inside. But by then I was sick of tiptoeing. "Let's rock the roof," I suggested, thinking of the rain on the galvanised iron of the shearers' quarters back at Kevin's. The others looked at me pityingly, but I was in a dangerous mood, fed up with hiding and running and skulking around. "No, let's," I insisted. "What's going to happen? If anyone's in there, they're not going to rush out into the darkness with guns blazing. They wouldn't be that stupid. There's plenty of cover around, so we can get away fast if we have to."

  My powers of persuasion were better than I'd realised, because within thirty seconds I'd talked them into it. I wasn't sure that I'd wanted to talk them into it—I'd been half joking—but to turn back now was to lose too much face, I reflected ruefully, picking up all the stones I could carry. We agreed on a place to meet if we got chased, then surrounded the house. At the signal—a long, frighteningly loud "Coooeee" from Homer—I let fly. It was quite exciting. A squadron of possums wearing football boots and wheeling defective supermarket trolleys at high speed might have made as much noise, but they'd have had to work at it. I backed away fast, biting my bottom lip in amazement, and almost biting through it when I tripped over a garden seat. My shins and ankles certainly took a lot of punishment on these night-time excursions. One lone rock, an unexpected afterthought from someone, suddenly clattered across the roof, a full minute after all the others. There was still not a murmur from inside the house. It was impossible that there could be anyone there after that.

  We gathered again near the front door and sent Homer to go and look through the kitchen window, after he admitted to throwing the extra rock. "It's too dark to see much," he grumbled; then, after looking a bit longer, he said "I think it's the same as when we left that message for Chris. I don't think anyone's been here."

  And that's the way it was. It was a disheartening discovery. We checked the old piggery where Chris had hidden immediately after the invasion, but there was no sign of life there either. So we gathered around the dusty table in the musty kitchen, feeling tired and unhappy. The rush of excitement from the roof-rocking had quickly gone. We were so upset about Chris, yet so helpless. The only guesses we could make about his whereabouts were depressing ones. I was annoyed with myself that I hadn't thought to ask Mrs Mackenzie and the man in the machinery shed if they knew
anything about him. But I'd been too confused and nervous. My only consolation was Robyn's comment that if Chris had been caught and taken to the Showground, the two adults would have mentioned it.

  "Well, no news is good news," Fi sighed.

  "Honestly, Fi," I snapped, "that's a great help. That must be one of the most stupid expressions ever invented."

  Fi looked hurt. It was after one o'clock and we were all tired. Getting cold too.

  "There's just nothing more we can do," Homer said. "To tell you the truth, the most likely thing is that he's ... I hate to say this—that he's dead."

  We all squawked at Homer in outraged voices. We'd all thought of the possibility, of course, but to talk about it was to commit an obscenity. It was too frightening and horrifying to hear anyone say it out loud. Perhaps we were scared that our saving it might make it real, might make it happen. I'd already learnt a lot about the power of words.

  "Well, what are we going to do?" Lee asked. "We can't stay here."

  "Yes we can," Fi said.

  "I don't think it's too safe round here," Homer said. "Those colonists are just up the road. We don't know how far they've spread, this side of town. They could be at the Langs' tomorrow."

  "But it's so late," Fi said. "And I'm so tired. And cold. I'm so sick of everything." She put her head down on her arms as she sat at the table.