by John Marsden
She shook her head, tears in her eves, a sob in her voice. "I hate them. What are they doing here? Why can't they just go back where they came from?"
We watched for nearly an hour. Occasionally a soldier came out of one house and went into another. We were going to move in closer and have a better look, but as we started we heard a vehicle coming up the hill. We ducked back behind our tree. A large, late model jaguar cruised past and turned into Turner Street. In its headlights I noticed something else: that there were sentries posted inconspicuously outside a couple of the houses. We were very lucky that we hadn't gone sneaking along there. The Jaguar stopped outside Fi's neighbours', a brightly lit two-storey white wooden house with a high gable. As it stopped, a sentry came trotting out of the bushes and opened one of its rear doors, saluting a man in uniform who got out. Although this man wore jungle greens like everyone else, his peaked cap distinguished him from them. He was an officer, and we began to realise what the houses were being used for. This was the Executive Suite of Wirrawee. Snob Hill was still Snob Hill.
We retreated to the music teacher's house to report to the others but Homer was asleep, and so was Lee, to my secret relief. We were so wrecked ourselves that we didn't wake the two boys. Robyn, who was on sentry duty, was awake, so we talked to her for a few minutes, then headed for bed. I slept with Fi, which saved me from having to make any difficult decisions about my love life, and it wasn't till nine o'clock the next morning that we all sat down and discussed what the two of us had seen in Turner Street.
We sat in a bow window, where we could watch the street, and we talked. It was a good conversation, one of the best we'd had as a group for quite a while. I was lying with my head in Lee's lap, and from there I told the two boys what we'd told Robyn the night before. After Fi added her bit, Robyn started talking.
"I deserted my post for a few minutes last night," she said. "The only way I could keep awake was to go for a walk. So I went down to the park at the end of the street and came back again. It's funny, there's something there that I must have been past a thousand times and never noticed. But I noticed it last night."
There was a pause.
"OK," Homer said at last. "1 give up. Was it animal, vegetable or mineral?"
Robyn made a face at him.
"It was the war memorial," she said.
"Oh that," Homer said.
"Oh yes," Fi said. "I knew that was there. I had to put a wreath on it when I was in Year 6."
"But have you ever looked at it?" Robyn asked. "I mean, properly?"
"No, not really."
"Me neither. But I did last night. It was sad. There's so many names on it, with asterisks for the ones who died. There's four wars altogether, and there's forty men who died, just from this little district. And down the bottom there's a message, from a poem or something. It says..." Robyn looked at her wrist and with some difficulty read the lines of tiny writing that she'd jotted there:
"'War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
"And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.'"
"What's 'scourge' mean?" Homer asked.
"It's when something bad happens to you, isn't it?" Fi said to me. "Something really really bad."
"Mmm, Attila the Hun, they called him the Scourge of God," I said, with a vague memory of a History lesson in Year 7.
"Say the thing again," Lee said.
Robyn repeated it.
"I don't know if it's made us wise," Lee said. "And I don't think it's made us free."
"Maybe it has," I said, trying to get my brain enmeshed in the idea. "We're a lot different to the way we were a few months ago."
"How?" asked Lee.
"Look at Homer. At school he was like Attila the Wog. I mean, honestly Homer, you have to admit, you were hopeless, just lounging around all day with your shirt out, making smart comments. The day this started, you changed. You've been a bit of a star you know. You've had all the good ideas and you've made us do things we wouldn't have done without you. I think you've lost a bit of steam since the ambush of that convoy, but I don't blame you for that. It was an ugly scene."
"I was wrong about those guns," Homer said. "I shouldn't have had them on me without you Guys knowing. That was dumb."
Homer was quite red in the face and looking over our heads. It was so rare for him to admit he was wrong about anything that I bit back the joke I was going to make. In fact he hadn't been entirely wrong about the guns—he'd convinced me of that when we'd argued about it in Hell. But he had just proved how much wiser he was these days. I gave him a wink and felt for his hand, getting a good grip on it. I was now touching the two boys I loved most in the world, and I thought how lucky I was.
"Then there's Lee," I continued. "Before, you seemed so bound up in your own life. Violin and school-work and the restaurant and not much else. Now, well, you're still a very complicated guy Lee, but you're much more outgoing, and you're very determined and strong."
"And horny," Homer added quietly. I gave him a hard slap on the hand. I think Lee gave him a dirty look too, judging by Homer's expression.
"Robyn," I said, "you were always strong and you were always smart, so I suppose you haven't changed much. You still stick to what you believe in though, and I think that's amazing. You seem calmer and surer than the rest of us. I think you've got the wisdom that it talks about on that memorial."
Robyn laughed. "I'm not wise," she said. "I just try to figure out what God would want me to do."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I moved on to my last subject. "Fi, I think you've become more free in a way. I mean, you think about your life before, living in that big house, going off to your piano lessons, mixing with the rich and the famous. Now you've been camping in the bush for months, fighting in a war, racing round blowing things up, looking after chooks and growing vegetables ... It is a kind of freedom compared to what you used to have."
"I could never go back to that life," Fi said. "I don't want to keep living like this either, of course. But if the war ended tomorrow, I couldn't suddenly start worrying about flower arrangements for Mum's dinner parties, and having the right paper for answering invitations. I don't know what I'd do, but I'd try to find something useful, something that would stop this stuff happening again."
"Now it's your turn, Ellie," Robyn said.
"Oh yeah, OK, who's going to do me?" I asked; then, realising what I'd said, gave Homer my best "Don't you dare" look. I was just in time: his mouth was already opening to say the obvious.
"I will," Robyn said. She thought for a moment, then began. "You're better at listening than you were. You're more sensitive to other people. You're brave. In fact I think you're the bravest of any of us. You're still a bit pig-headed sometimes, and you don't like admitting when you're wrong, but you've been a tower of strength, El, you really have."
I glowed with pleasure. I'm not used to compliments. I've never had a huge number of them.
"I've been braver since that big speech of Homer's ages ago, down at the creek," I said. "I think about that now, when I'm in a scary spot."
"What speech?" Fi asked.
"You know. When he said that it's all a mental thing. When you're scared you can either give in to the panic and let your mind fall apart, or you can take charge of your mind and think brave. I agree with that."
"See, that's wisdom," Robyn said.
"Well, what are we going to do next?" Homer asked. He sat up a bit straighter. "It's time we did something again. We've had a long holiday. We did nothing with Harvey's Heroes, and it's time we got a move on. Those radio bulletins have been quite encouraging. There's lots of places where people have been fighting back, and the Kiwis have made a difference. We can't let Wirrawee become a stronghold for these scum, and we're about the only people who can stop it happening. So what's it to be?"
"You tell us," I said, grinning. I knew Homer would already have an idea.
"OK," he shrugged. "What Fi and Ellie saw last night gives us our first r
eal chance in a long time. It sounds like they might be using those houses as a headquarters. That's logical enough—they're the best places in town. We need to check it out more carefully though, till we know what's going on. I suggest we spy on them for a couple of days, or however long it takes. And Fi, can you draw up maps of the houses, using everything you remember? And then we'll add to those maps whenever we can."
We decided that we'd sneak into St John's, the church diagonally opposite Fi's, and use the tower for our lookout post. That was Robyn's church; she knew it as well as my mother knew her kitchen. She was sure she could get in there, through a small window in the vestry that she said was held in place by a brick because the church hadn't had the money to fix it. Using the tower was an unattractive deal in a lot of ways because we'd have to go in at night and stay there till the next night. We'd have to take food and drink and, because there was no toilet, we'd have to take a few containers for emergencies. I don't know what God would have thought of that.
Homer and Robyn wanted to do the first shift and we decided Fi and I would do the next one, then Homer and Lee. But we all went up there that first night to install Robyn and Homer. We waited till four o'clock. That was hardly a problem for us now. We were so used to functioning at night that I no longer felt tired during 3 am and 4 am operations.
We came up to St John's from the rear, climbing over the fence from Barrabool Avenue. It was safer that way, protected from prying eves in Turner Street. Robyn got the vestry window out with no problems; in fact it had fallen backwards and was resting against its brick. But getting through it was a problem. Robyn had forgotten how small it was. Fi was the only one who had any hope, so Homer lifted her and fed her through, head first. When it came to her hips she had to turn and twist and wriggle. We could hear her giggling and panting, then a thump as she hit the floor head first.
"Ouch," I squealed. "Are you all right?"
"Shhh," Homer went.
"Yes, no thanks to Homer," Fi whispered back.
She opened the door. We tiptoed in. It was very dark of course, but the thing that struck me most was its smell. It was so musty and dank and cold. Robyn led us out of the vestry and into the main body of the church. The stained-glass windows looked like dark etchings, but some light from the lamps in Turner Street lifted the gloom. I haven't spent a lot of time in churches in my fife—we live too far out of town, that's my excuse—but I like the atmosphere in them. They're always restful. I looked around this one, narrowing my eyes to try to see the details. The altar, up in the distance, did look kind of holy. It made me nervous. There was a crucifix, too, on a pillar near me. A square of light from a window crisscrossed the crucifix. I peered closer to try to see the face on it, but it was turned away from me, and in shadow. I didn't know what that meant.
Robyn called us to come into the tower. I walked down the aisle with Lee, wondering if we might do it properly one day. I didn't know what my parents would think of the idea and I knew from something Lee had said to me ages ago that his parents would never want him to marry an Anglo.
As we got to the back of the church Lee surprised me by saying, "I hate these places."
"Churches?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know. They smell of death. They're like dead places."
"Mmm. I quite like them."
Homer and Robyn found little windows halfway up the staircase, which they could use for spying. They made themselves as comfortable as possible. I couldn't help a little nasty thought, which had snuck into my mind like a worm, that maybe the reason Homer had been so adamant about doing this first day was Robyn's comment that I was the bravest of our group. Homer wouldn't have liked that. In his thinking, guys were always the heroes, always that little bit better than girls.
Maybe that was why I made sure I never let Homer get the better of me.
We'd brought paper and pens, to write down what we saw during the day. We'd been a bit nervous about doing this, lust like with the guns, a long time earlier, we knew the difference between a group of teenagers hiding in the bush and living off the land, and a group of armed guerillas collecting and recording information about enemy movements. We'd seen enough war movies and read enough books to know how that worked. But we found a gap in the stonework of the church tower where we could shove the bits of paper if we got busted, and once dropped in there we figured they'd stay lost forever.
We did want to get a good idea of the movements in and out of the houses, to see what was really going on in Turner Street. Although no one had spelt out details, we all had in mind that we were in the first stages of our next attack. It would be a tough one, our most difficult and dangerous yet, and we had to plan with maximum care.
At five o'clock Fi and Lee and I left the other two to it. They would have a cold and boring and uncomfortable day. But back at the music teacher's house we had a pretty boring time anyway. One of us had to keep watch there too—it was just unthinkably dangerous doing it any other way—so most of the time we hung round with the person on sentry, playing Trivial Pursuit and stuff like that. When Fi was on sentry, Lee and I went off to the sitting room and made out a bit. I wanted to go for it, full on, but Lee seemed distracted. I think the knowledge that we were building up to another attack on the enemy, another chance to get injured or killed, put him on edge. No bloody wonder. I was nervous too. But I seemed able to put it out of my mind better than him. It was strange: back in the old days I got nervous waiting to play Netball or give a prepared speech in English. Compared to that, what we were doing now should have had me in a straitjacket.
Homer and Robyn stuck it out till midnight, which really was heroic, as I realised when I moved in there a few hours later with Fi. But they came back with some interesting stuff. In fact, their notes were so dangerous that it proved how careful we'd have to be not to be caught with them. These houses were hives of activity. There was a fleet of expensive cars—two Jags and three Mercs—and they were coming and going at all hours. At least six different VIPs used them, all in officers' uniforms, all treated with great respect by the sentries. It seemed as if one house might be used as a headquarters and two as living quarters for the senior men and women. The other houses, including Fi's, seemed to be used only by the sentries.
The sentries guarded all the houses, but it was the one used as a headquarters that they guarded most heavily. They changed shifts every four hours. There were four of them guarding the main house, and two each for the others. The soldiers were a real mixture, Homer and Robyn said: some smart and slick, some sloppy and uninterested. "Most of them don't look like front-line troops," Robyn said. "It's like those patrols. The youngest ones look about fourteen, the oldest could be fifty."
Fi and I settled into the tower just before dawn. It was freezing in there: we had to take it in turns to go for walks round the church every half-hour. We were wearing so many clothes that we looked like Michelin men. Fi made me do aerobics for a few minutes, to warm me up, but it was too hard with all the clothing. There was no action in the street until eight o'clock, when they changed sentries. Fi wrote it down: "8.00, sentries."
"You should write 0800," I pointed out. "That's the military style."
In each house half of the sentries took up positions at the front and the others disappeared around the back. We could see some activity starting inside the houses too. On the upper floor of the place next to Fi's, a man came to the window dressed only in jocks, and stood there looking out for a minute. Fi collapsed in giggles as the man lifted one arm, then the other, spraving his armpits with deodorant. A woman dressed in a green and white tracksuit came out of another house and jogged off down the street.
It seemed that the officers kept office hours. Maybe that's why they were called officers. Anyway, at five to nine, people started coming out of the houses. Some were just dressed in ordinary soldiers' clothes, but six looked like big shots. One of them was the one Fi and I had seen in the Jaguar. They all converged on a big old bri
ck house halfway along Turner Street.
"Doctor Burgess's place," Fi said. "Nice house."
As the morning wore on it was hard to remember that we were doing anything dangerous. It was like watching a normal business in full swing. Cars came and went, people hurried in and out of houses, we could even hear the phones ringing sometimes when the street was really quiet. Lunch started at 12.30, when people wandered back to different houses. Some sat out in the street in the weak sunshine, eating from little plastic lunchboxes. Delicious smells wafted from kitchens, making our mouths water and our tummies make little snoring noises. Mournfully we turned to our own lunches: Vita Brits spread with jam or Vegemite or honey. It wasn't bad, although I missed little luxuries like butter and margarine. I longed for hot food, and for something with meat, like the meals the soldiers were preparing.
Not a lot else happened until 4.35, and then we saw something that made us nearly swallow our tongues. I was watching while Fi did a few laps of the church to warm herself up. She'd just returned and was leaning against the wall beside me, panting hard. "Oh Fi, nobody'll buy your fitness video if you don't lift your game," I said. "Hello, here comes another car."
Fi turned towards her window and watched with me as the car pulled up. It was one we hadn't seen before, a Range Rover. "That's the Ridgeways' car," Fi said indignantly. She sounded quite outraged, as though this was the most serious crime committed during the whole war.
"Go and make a citizen's arrest," I said, still watching the car. There was a driver, who looked like an ordinary soldier, and two people sitting in the back. One was another senior officer, wearing a peaked cap, and with gold piping on his uniform jacket. I couldn't see much of the other one.
The car pulled up outside Fi's neighbours,' and the two men in the back got out. An archway covered with a leafy creeper topped the front gate of the house and beyond it a winding path through the garden led to the door. This meant that once people went through the gate we only had one more glimpse of them. To make matters worse, the Range Rover had pulled up very close to the front gate. The man in the right-hand rear seat had to walk around the back of the car, so we got a good look at him. But the other man was out of the vehicle and through the gate without us having any view. There was just that moment when he was walking along the path towards the door and would pass between two redbud trees. I craned to get a good look. Then, with a horrified squeal, I clutched at Fi, who was just beyond clutching range.