by John Marsden
‘That’s a big question.’ He made circles around my belly button with his middle finger, then went a bit higher. My skin felt alive at each point where he touched me, though the rest of me was still cold. Then he said, very slowly, ‘I like you with all your faults Ellie, and I think that’s love.’
I was a bit angry at first, thinking of all Lee’s faults – his brooding silences, his flashes of temper, his hunger for revenge. But I knew I had faults too – my bossiness, my tactlessness, and the way I was over-critical sometimes. And then I began to realise what a big compliment he had paid me, what a big statement he’d made. He was right, there’s a difference between the way you feel before you know a person and the way you feel after. I’d had those rushes of heat that I’d thought were love, when you see someone so beautiful you want to follow them for the rest of your life, just so you can keep staring at them. That kind of love didn’t mean much. It was like some of my friends at school saying they ‘loved’ a film star or a pop singer. That wasn’t love. Lee was talking about feelings as big as these mountains. For a moment a new world opened in my mind, where I was an adult, working hard, holding a group of people together, being a leader. With a shock I realised I was thinking about parenthood. Forget it! That was not on my agenda. I sat up and peeled Lee’s hand from my breast.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want this to get too serious.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘Lee! Don’t tell me what my feelings are.’
He just laughed. ‘Well you don’t know what they are, so I might as well tell you.’
‘Oh! Excuse me!’
‘So you do know what they are?’
‘Yes! Yes, of course.’
‘OK, fire away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you’re so sure you know how you feel, go ahead and tell me. I can’t wait to find out.’
‘Oh! You’re so annoying. All right, how do I feel? Um. OK. Um, um, um. OK, got it. I feel confused.’
‘See! I was right! You don’t know how you feel.’
‘Yes I do! I feel confused. I just told you that.’
‘But confusion’s not a feeling!’
‘Yes it is!’
He wrestled me down again. ‘Ellie, you’re up to your old tricks. Too much thinking, not enough feeling.’ He kissed me hard, for a long time, till I was kissing him back just as hard. Then the kisses became slow and soft, kind of messy, but nice. But I was still bothered by a few things. So when we paused for breath and Lee was nuzzling my shoulder I started again.
‘Lee, I know you’re trying to kiss me into silence, but seriously, I am worried about us, about you and me. I don’t know what’s going to happen, how we’re going to end up. And don’t say something dumb like “no one can predict the future”. Tell me something I don’t already know.’
‘Well what else can I say? The future is ... I don’t know, what’s the future? It’s a blank sheet of paper and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held and the lines we draw aren’t the lines we wanted.’
Lee said this in a dreamy way, gazing up at the canopy of branches above us, but I was deeply impressed.
‘Far out, did you just think of that?’
‘More or less. I mean, I’ve thought of it before but that’s the way it came out this time. Anyway it’s true, and that’s all that matters.’
‘Mmm, I suppose it is. But here in Hell we get to draw the lines how we want most of the time – or much more than we ever could before. There’s no adults around holding our hands.’
‘No, but we’ve got our own thoughts, which do the same job. The way we’ve kept our heads together proves that. I bet a lot of people would have expected us to be into an orgy of sex, drugs and chocolate, but we’ve been pretty straight. So far.’
‘Oh yes? What does that mean?’
‘You know.’
‘Are you referring to sex, drugs or chocolate?’
‘Well, I know which one means the most to me, and it sure ain’t chocolate.’
‘You think we should do it, don’t you?’
‘“It”,’ he teased me. ‘What’s “it”?’
‘You know.’
‘OK, yeah, I think we should do it.’
‘I knew you did,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure if he was serious or being funny.
‘And you want to do it too.’
‘Sometimes I do,’ I admitted, going a bit red.
‘That’s what this conversation’s really about, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe it is.’ I sighed, and brushed my hair away from my face. ‘Christ, Lee,’ I said, turning to him suddenly and grabbing him by the top of his shirt, ‘sometimes I want to do it so badly my skin’s swollen with it.’
‘Do you think Homer and Fi have done it?’
‘Nuh. Fi would have told me.’
‘Girls are funny, the way they tell each other all stuff like that.’
‘And guys don’t? Come on, give me a break.’
‘Anyway, after she read what you wrote about them, she mightn’t tell you so much.’
‘After what I wrote about them they’ve hardly touched each other.’
‘Yeah, they did go a bit funny. Hey, wait a minute, are you going to be writing down this conversation?’
‘If I do I won’t be showing anyone.’
‘You better not. So.’ He turned to me and picked up my hand and began to stroke the back of it. ‘So, what’s the story El? What’s going down? Why are we having this conversation?’
‘I don’t know. I’m crazy with worry about so many things. For instance, sometimes I think maybe we’re with each other just because there’s no one else around. If we were back at school and we’d never been invaded, we might hardly be friends. So, is this meant to be, or isn’t it? It might be like one of those summer romances they have in American movies, and somehow it doesn’t seem real if that’s all it is.’
Lee went to say something, but I stopped him. ‘OK, I know what you’re going to say, I think too much. I admit it. But I guess I’m dodging the big issue. And the big issue, well it’s sort of what you said. We’ve been together a while now and we’ve been pretty good. But there’s something in me wants to go further, and I don’t mean only physical, although there’s definitely that’ As I talked I began for the first time to get an inkling of what it might be. ‘I think it’s to do with all the things that have happened to us. The invasion and being here and going out and blowing things up and killing people. I’m sort of asking, is that all our life is going to become? Just sitting here, spinning our wheels? Every few weeks go out and kill a few more soldiers? If that’s all life has to offer for the next fifty years, then forget it I want to go forward, no matter what else is happening around us. We haven’t gone forward one space since we got here. We haven’t built anything, except a few crummy chook yards. We haven’t learned anything. We haven’t done anything positive.’
‘We’ve learned a heap, I reckon.’
‘Oh, about ourselves and stuff. But I don’t mean that kind of learning. I mean stuff that’s useless for its own sake and so it’s beautiful, if you see what I mean. Like, the names of constellations and the shapes they form in the sky. Like the way Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, on his back with paint dripping in his eyes. Like, oh, Fibonacci sequences or the Japanese tea ceremony or the French word for railway. They’re the kind of things I’m talking about. Can’t you understand?’
‘I guess so. You mean, if we lose those things we’ll be defeated, no matter what else happens, no matter what military victories we win.’
‘Exactly. You do understand! We have to do things that say yes, not just things that say no. Planting all those seeds, that was a good thing to do. But we should have planted flowers too. The Hermit understood that. That’s why he put in these roses, and when he made that bridge he didn’t just shove a few logs across the creek. He made it beautifully, so it’ll last hundreds of years. W
e have to create things, and think in the long term. Leave stuff behind us for others. Life rules! Yeah!’
And I leapt away and did a dance through the Hermit’s dark little house, coming back with dozens of rose petals that I scattered generously on Lee’s face. But that wasn’t nearly enough. I’d suddenly built up so much energy that I could have planted a thousand trees, kissed a thousand guys, built a thousand houses. Instead I ploughed my way back down the creek at high speed, ran in zigzags through the clearing, then jogged on up the track to watch the sunset from Satan’s Steps.
When it was dark and the flies had gone to bed for the night, Homer and I killed one of the lambs. I knelt on it while he cut its throat, then I jerked back its head to break the bone and let the blood run out, the life flow away. We skinned it between us, Homer using his big fist for the belly and brisket. I hadn’t been looking forward to doing all this. I’d thought that I mightn’t be able to; that it might bring back the terrible memories from the ambush. But it didn’t. I don’t know if the conversation with Lee had cleared the sky of my menacing shadow, but as soon as I grabbed the lamb I automatically started doing what I’d done in the old days. We’d always kept our own killers. You never get blasé about slaughtering an animal; for instance taking out the warm heart, which feels like the life is still held in it, is a powerful experience, no matter how many times you do it. It is for me, anyway. So you don’t do it like you’re a robot, or like you’re peeling spuds. But to my relief I found it went pretty much as it always had done – and that really was a relief.
We cut off its head and chucked it into the pit Fi had dug for the leftovers. I’m not into brains, and that particular night I couldn’t bring myself to skin its face or cut out the tongue. Then we strung the carcass up over a branch to gut it. We were under so much pressure from the others to provide a barbecue that we went ahead and butchered it straightaway, even though it’s better to wait and let it cool. But we hacked off the first chops, with some rough bush butchering, and onto the fire they went. It was midnight before our hungry mouths closed on the hot pink meat, but it had been worth the wait. We ate well, grinning at each other as our blackened greasy fingers tore at the food. The death of one thing can be the birth of something else. I felt new determination, new surety, new confidence.
Chapter Seven
What happened after that was my idea, I admit it. The buck stops with Ellie. It came out of being so restless, feeling that we weren’t doing enough, weren’t making a difference. I’d always thought that there must be a route out the other side of Hell, using the creek as a path. After all, it had to run somewhere, and it couldn’t go uphill. In the next valley was the Holloway River, and Risdon. I had no idea if the route would be passable for humans but I thought it was worth a try. I longed for new fields, new scenes, new people maybe. It was like wanting a holiday. Despite what the radio and our own common sense told us, there was some vague feeling that things would be different there, that we’d walk out of the mountains into a new and green land, a peaceful land, leaving the ugliness and despair of Wirrawee behind. I didn’t tell the others of my dream. I just said we needed to establish a line of retreat, and it might be important for us to find out what was happening in the Holloway. Knowledge is power, after all.
They were quite keen. They didn’t need much persuading. Homer had suggested a few times that we needed to find more people, to meet up with other groups, and there was a chance we could do that in Risdon. Besides, I suppose we all were ready to try something new. It helped us feel that we were being constructive. Only Chris wanted to stay behind. It was useful to have someone stay back, to look after the chooks and the remaining lamb, but I wasn’t sure if leaving Chris alone was a good idea. He was becoming increasingly solitary, writing in his notebook and sitting on his own, gazing at the cliffs. He drank all the beer we got from the Kings’ I think, because when I looked for it I couldn’t find it, and Lee said he didn’t know where it had gone. But there was no more grog then, as far as I knew, and I thought maybe that had put him in a bad mood. Occasionally he had bursts of activity – for instance, he built us a good big woodshed for keeping our firewood dry. That took him three days and he wouldn’t let anyone help him, but once he’d finished it he didn’t do much more.
We knew we might be away for a few nights if we did get through to Risdon, so we packed proper backpacks, with sleeping bags and jumpers and japaras. Instead of tents we took a few flies and ground-sheets, which were lighter, and good enough for what we wanted.
There was a big argument about how to walk the creek. Homer, who was gradually returning to his usual assertive self, said we should wear boots because we’d be less likely to slip on the rocks. I said we should use bare feet so our boots would be dry and warm when we finally got out of the creek. Walking through that cold water for a long distance, with autumn coming on fast, wasn’t something that appealed to any of us.
But that argument at last led into the one we should have had ages ago: the one about Homer taking guns on the Buttercup Lane ambush.
It went like this. Homer said something typically domineering, like ‘Well I’m wearing my boots, I don’t care what the rest of you do.’
I said, ‘Great. And when you get blisters we’ll have to carry you I suppose. Homer, if we don’t look after our feet we’ll be good for nothing.’
‘Yes mother,’ he said, flashing his brown eyes at me.
I’ve always had this feeling with Homer that I must never back off or it’ll be the end of me. He’s so strong and he intimidates so many people, and then I think he despises them because they’re too weak to stand up to him. So I always stand up to him, and I did it again this time.
‘How come when I tell people what I think they should do, you make comments like “Yes mother”, and when you tell people what to do you expect them to jump into action? You wouldn’t be just a tiny bit sexist would you Homer?’
That was like asking a fish if it was a tiny bit wet.
‘Ellie, I know you hate it when you don’t get your own way on every little thing ...’
‘Oh yes? And when’s the last time I got my own way on anything?’
‘Oh oh! You’re asking me? Try this morning at breakfast, when you stopped Chris lighting the fire. Try two hours ago, when you wouldn’t let Lee open a can of peaches.’
‘Yeah, and you notice something about both those times? I’m trying to do the right thing by us, by this group! I’m trying to keep us alive! If anyone sees smoke out of here, we’re dead. If we pig out on all the food we’re in big trouble. I’m not just saying stuff for my own sake, because I like to hear my own voice, you know.’
‘You ought to listen to others more Ellie. You keep wanting to be a one-man band.’
Now I was really mad.
‘Thanks very much, I’d never want to be a one-man band; a one-woman one maybe. You’re just proving what I said before. And by the way, this is pretty good coming from you. You’re the moron who secretly cut down the shotguns and secretly took them with you after we’d all agreed we wouldn’t have firearms. You put our lives at risk Homer, by being a one-man band, and you did it in cold blood. I’ve never done anything like that. You’re so sure you’re right on every little thing, you don’t care what anyone else thinks.’
‘And I was right, wasn’t I? Chris and I’d be dead now if I hadn’t had those guns. All of us might be dead. I saved your life Ellie. Hey, I’m a hero.’
‘Trust you to cash in just because you got a lucky call. You were so bloody lucky Homer, you haven’t even started to figure it out yet. If those blokes had taken their rifles with them when they went into the bush, there’s no way you’d have had time to get your precious shotgun out.’
‘I had it in my hand Ellie. I’m not that slow. I was ready.’
‘And suppose a patrol had jumped us? Suppose we’d been caught with sawn-off shotguns? We’d have been put against a tree and shot and you’d have five people’s blood on your hands.’
‘But that didn’t happen, did it? That proves I was right.’
‘That doesn’t prove anything! That was a fluke!’
‘No, because the fact that it didn’t happen proves that we’d covered ourselves properly. There’s no such thing as a fluke. It’s like that golfer said, good players always have the luck. As long as we keep being careful, and smart, we’ll keep being lucky. I don’t believe in flukes. I figured all this out before I decided to take the guns.’
‘Homer! You’re crazy! Anything could have happened out there! Don’t believe in flukes? You don’t understand life. It’s all flukes. You’re acting like you can control everything. You think you’re God! Jeez, even in golf, the ball can hit a tree and bounce off into the hole. How do you explain that? Anyway, that’s not the point,’ I said quickly, in case he could explain it. ‘The point is that you’ve got to go along with group decisions. You can’t ignore us and do what you want. We’re all in this together. Don’t go calling me a one-man band. You’re not only the band, you’re the roadies as well.’
‘Break it up, guys,’ Chris said. The others had been reacting to us in their different ways. Robyn had been standing leaning on a mattock, watching and listening with great interest. Fi, who hated conflict, had gone off to our current dunny, fifty metres away in the bush. Lee was reading a book called Red Shift and had not even looked up. Chris had been whittling a piece of wood into the shape of a dragon. He’d been doing a lot of stuff like that lately, and was getting really good at it. But he looked upset and angry at the way we were fighting, and a few minutes after he interrupted us he went off to the creek, while the rest of us started getting organised for the expedition.
I was packing in a bit of a rage, throwing things around, growling at everyone. It wasn’t till Fi came back from the dunny that I calmed down a bit. Well, to be more accurate, she calmed me down. She picked up a stick that I’d knocked over, one that we used for drying clothes, and tried to put it back in its position. One end of it sat in the fork of a tree and she couldn’t quite reach it, so I went to give her a quick lift. To my horror she flinched slightly as I grabbed at her. It was only the slightest movement, but for that second she looked like she thought I was going to hit her.