by John Marsden
Despite all that, he was so graceful, so dignified, that I fell in love with him completely at that moment, in a way I never had before. I gave him a little weak grin and lifted Fi off my lap.
‘Come on guys,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Did you know that’s the most commonly used line in movies?’ Lee said. He had his head on one side as he looked at me. I had the uncanny feeling that he knew exactly what I was thinking.
But all I said was ‘What?’
Lee just shrugged. ‘That’s the most commonly used line in movies. It’s used in sixty per cent of movies, or something like that.’
He came over and lifted me as the others stirred into action. We limped over to the creek to start the trip I was dreading: the long uncomfortable struggle back upstream, hunched over, with the cold water constantly tugging at our legs. The only good thing – and bad thing – was that we no longer had packs to weigh us down. I spent quite a lot of the trip taking inventory of the things I’d lost. It was depressing. We’d had so much taken away already; it seemed unfair to keep losing more all the time. Maybe we’d lose everything eventually. Our happiness, our futures, our lives. Maybe we’d lost two out of three of those already. I cried a bit more as we battled our way up the creek into Hell.
The funny thing was that it was still only mid-morning when we straggled into the campsite. It felt like lunchtime at least. Before the invasion our days had hardly started at 9 am. We’d be sitting in a classroom, our hair rumpled, rubbing our eyes and yawning. Now we had been through more – had suffered more – before breakfast than we had a right to expect in a lifetime.
And that was another thing I had to learn, that expectations meant nothing any more. We didn’t have a right to expectations. Even the things we took for granted – we couldn’t take them for granted because those were expectations too. For one thing it had never crossed my mind that Chris wouldn’t be there. That never crossed my mind. But he wasn’t there.
At first we didn’t get too excited, just tore at food held in both hands while we called out for him. At least, that’s what the others did; I felt too sick and my hands hurt too much. I’d thought I was hungry but suddenly I couldn’t eat. I sat on a log watching Robyn wolf down baked beans and cheese, Lee get into biscuits and jam, Fi eating an apple and dried fruit, and Homer attacking the muesli. With her mouth still full Robyn went and got the first-aid kit and brought it over to me.
‘How are your hands?’ she asked.
‘All right. I think my knee hurts more.’
I’d let my hands trail in the water quite a few times as we’d laboured up the creek, so the gravel and dirt were washed out. Now the skin around my fingertips looked soft and tender, but the pads on the fingers were the dark strawberry red of blood, and little shreds of skin hung off them. Basically I’d sandpapered the pads off. I had gravel rash on both palms, which stung too but didn’t look as bad as the fingertips. Robyn smeared cream over all the bloodied bits, then carefully bound each fingertip in gauze and bandages. At the same time she fed me, like a mummy bird with her chick. Although I must have looked pretty silly by the time she finished, sitting there with my eight fingers sticking up in the air, each wrapped neatly in its own little white beanie, I did feel better, especially with some dates and sweet biscuits in me.
‘Where do you think Chris might be?’ I asked her as she finished wrapping my last finger.
‘I haven’t got a clue. We’ve been gone quite a while. I hope he’s all right.’
‘It must have been lonely here alone.’
‘Yes, but I don’t know whether that would worry Chris.’
‘Mmm, he’s a funny guy.’
After our meal we started looking for him in earnest. There wasn’t far to look, in Hell. We knew he wasn’t in the Hermit’s Hut because we’d passed that on our way back to the clearing. Homer and Fi checked the path all the way back to Wombegonoo, while the rest of us started searching the bush, in case he’d had an accident. I walked around holding my hands in the air, feeling useless. But there was no sign of him in the bush. When Homer and Fi got back with the same report from Wombegonoo our fear and tension levels started rising again.
It seemed so cruel, after what we’d been through. But cruel didn’t mean anything either; I’d learnt that ages ago.
We met again in the clearing.
‘I don’t think he’s been here for a while,’ Homer said. ‘The fire looks like it hasn’t been lit since we left.’
‘Maybe he didn’t bother to light it,’ Fi said.
‘It’s been cold at nights.’
‘All his stuff’s still in the tent,’ Robyn said. ‘As far as I can tell. His sleeping bag’s there, and his backpack.’
I went and had a look in the tent too. I was looking for Chris’s notebooks. If for some extraordinary reason he had gone away from Hell, I was sure he would have taken them. But they were all there. He had four. I peeked into the one on top and it was only half full, so I assumed it was the current one. Surely he wouldn’t have left that.
I came back to the group. Fi was looking scared and saying, ‘You don’t think anyone’s been here do you?’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Nothing’s been disturbed.’
Lee had checked the chooks and the lamb. ‘They’ve got water and food,’ he said. I went and had a look there too, not because I didn’t trust Lee, but because I knew that as a townie there might be details he wouldn’t notice. I came back to the others and reported, ‘Their water’s a bit stale. Hasn’t been changed for a couple of days.’
What else could we do? Seemed like we’d already exhausted the immediate possibilities. We sat there looking at each other.
‘I don’t think we can do any more today,’ Homer said. ‘If he’s left Hell he could be anywhere between here and Stratton. Or beyond.’
‘He could have followed us into the Holloway Valley,’ I said.
Fi gasped. ‘Don’t say that!’
‘Look,’ Robyn said, ‘let’s not freak ourselves out. There just isn’t anything we can do right now. We need sleep desperately. Like Homer said, he could be anywhere. If there was one specific place we could walk to and have a chance of finding him, well, I guess we’d shake ourselves up and go there. But we’re not in any shape to have an emu parade through the whole Wirrawee valley. Let’s go to bed.’
‘Easier said than done,’ Lee said. ‘We don’t have any beds.’
He was right. Our sleeping bags had gone, probably burnt by the soldiers by now, in the wreckage of Harvey’s Heroes.
We started scrounging around. We had a couple of blankets, half a dozen towels, and quite a lot of warm clothing. We all got warmly dressed, wearing balaclavas and thick socks, and, for the other four, gloves as well. Fi had to dress me like I was a shop dummy. Then we dragged ourselves off towards the tents, carrying all the extra bits we’d found. ‘No one’s allowed to make any noise for the next four hours,’ I called, as I waddled along on my jarred knee.
‘Yes mother,’ Homer called back.
Fi and I crawled in together. I lay down while Fi spread towels and a blanket over me. Then she did the best job she could of covering herself. When she’d finished we just lay and looked at each other. We were face to face and only about a metre apart. Neither of us spoke for a long time. Then I just said ‘Oh Fi.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Lee doing that,’ I said. ‘It was horrible.’
‘Do you know,’ Fi said, ‘with the soldier just lying there all that time, I sort of got to like him. I thought I knew him, sort of. I started forgetting how he’d been following me.’
‘So did I.’
‘How old do you think he was?’
‘I don’t know. No older than us.’
Fi shivered. ‘What’s this doing to us? What’s going to become of us?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m scared,’ Fi said. ‘I don’t know what’ll happen.’
‘I’m scared too.’
‘But you never look scared.’
‘Don’t I? Don’t I really? God, I sure feel it.’
‘When you fell down the cliff ...’
‘I was scared then. But there’s no time to get really scared when things like that happen.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Anyway, that was my own dumb fault. Homer offered me a lift up and I wouldn’t take it.’
‘Your fingers looked terrible, when you did get up.’
‘You ought to have seen them from my eyes.’
‘Do they hurt much?’
‘A bit.’
‘I wish I could be brave,’ Fi said.
‘You are, Fi. You don’t realise. You’ve done so many things. You’ve never let us down, not once.’
‘Those people on the road, Captain Killen and the others. We just saw about a dozen people killed, do you realise that? Dead, killed, dead bodies. And Sharyn and Davina and Olive, I bet they were killed too. I’d never seen a dead person before this started. The only dead things I’d seen were animals on the road. And our class guinea pig in Year 2 – GP he was called – he died, and I cried all afternoon. Now it seems like it’s all death.’
‘I wonder where Chris has gone.’
‘It’s weird.’
‘Did you know he drank a lot?’
‘What do you mean, drank a lot?’
‘Well, any time he could bring grog in here he did, and then he drank it all himself, I think.’
‘Well that wouldn’t add up to much.’
‘Mm, but the night we went out and attacked that convoy he was pretty pissed then I think. And the day we left, he was into it, at ten o’clock in the morning.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I don’t know. Just that I didn’t like it I suppose. The way he was doing it behind our backs.’
‘Are you saying he’s an alcoholic?’
‘No, not that. But I think he’s got some kind of problem with it maybe. And I think he’s a strange guy and getting stranger, and we don’t seem to be getting on with him like the rest of us do with each other. Don’t you think he’s getting harder to talk to?’
‘Yes, but I’ve never been able to talk to him that easily. He was so out of it at school.’
‘He’s interesting though. He writes so well. I think he’s a bit of a genius.’
‘God yes. But I’ll never understand him.’
‘If you could choose one person to have here, who would you have?’
‘My mum.’
‘Not counting relatives.’
‘Well, Corrie and Kevin of course.’
‘Yes, but apart from them.’
‘I think Alex Law.’
‘Alex? She’s so two-faced.’
‘No she isn’t. You just never made the effort to get to know her.’
‘She hates me.’
‘No she doesn’t. You think everyone hates you.’
‘No I don’t. Just every girl in the school. And every boy. And every teacher. No one else.’
‘So Mr Whitelaw likes you, huh?’
Mr Whitelaw was the school janitor and he really did hate me because I’d dobbed on him once for perving on the girls’ changing room. He was lucky he hadn’t got the sack, that time.
‘Oh sorry, I forgot about him.’
‘Who would you have?’
‘Meriam.’
‘Mmm. She’s nice.’
I was enjoying this conversation. It seemed like the first normal conversation we’d had for ages. It was like we’d gone back to the old days for a while, before the invasion.
‘What did you think of Harvey’s Heroes?’ I asked.
Fi thought for a bit.
‘It was strange, wasn’t it? Was Major Harvey really a Deputy Principal?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Where’d he get the uniform then?’
‘Who knows. Probably out of the costumes cupboard. He’d been in the Army Reserve, Olive said, but not as a major.’
‘I liked Olive.’
‘Yeah, she seemed OK.’
‘What about Sharyn?’
I considered for a moment. I remembered again that Sharyn was probably dead, and that made it hard for me to say what I really thought.
‘She wasn’t too bad. I mean, you wouldn’t choose her out of the whole world to be your best friend, but I got to like her. I sort of depended on her.’
‘Mmm,’ Fi said. ‘It was strange being round adults again. Good but strange.’
‘It wasn’t all good. They thought we were so immature. They didn’t give us a chance. They were so annoying. I mean, we’ve done twice as much as them, and they treated us like we were barely capable of drying the dishes. Do you know, Mrs Hauff wouldn’t let me heat water in a frying pan to clean it, because she said I might burn myself! And all that time Major Harvey’s sitting around talking about how short of men and weapons they were! We’ve got six people and practically no weapons and we’ve done really big things, we’ve made a real difference.’
‘Mmm. But adults. They’re always like that.’
‘Do you want to grow up?’
‘Yes, of course! What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking, adults often look so unhappy and depressed, as though life’s so complicated and so much trouble. And they seem to have stuffed the world up for us. I know being our age isn’t always fun, and we have problems too, but I don’t think they’re as bad as adult ones.’
‘We just have to do a better job, that’s all.’
‘Mmm, but that’s probably what they said when they were our age.’
‘You get so caught up in your own life.’
‘We should have taken more interest in stuff. Remember when Kevin was asking about what treaties we had with other countries? None of us had a clue. We shouldn’t have left everything to politicians.’
‘Politicians!’ Fi said. Suddenly she was angry. ‘They’re scum. They’re slime.’
I giggled. ‘Wow, Fi, that’s pretty radical for you.’
‘Those broadcasts. They make me sick to my stomach.’ I knew what she meant. Listening to our political leaders broadcasting from Washington, their lies and excuses and promises, made all of us so angry that we’d agree to turn the radio off when they started talking.
‘I thought you wanted four hours’ silence,’ Lee grumbled at us from the next tent.
‘Sorry,’ I said guiltily.
Fi was yawning, and shifting to a more comfortable position. ‘I’m going to sleep,’ she said.
‘OK, Good night. Or morning.’
She seemed to go to sleep quite quickly after that. I didn’t. I lay there all morning, drifting occasionally into a drowse, but waking up again almost straightaway. Sleep had been the last escape open to me, but even it was starting to close its doors. It’d been a problem to me ever since the Buttercup Lane ambush. For all I know it’ll be a problem to me for the rest of my life. For all I know the rest of my life won’t be long anyway.
Chapter Twelve
The next two weeks passed slowly; actually they didn’t so much pass as crawl along in the gutter. There was not the slightest sign of Chris, not the slightest clue as to where he might have gone. The others went out of Hell three times searching for him; the first time just to my place; the second time to Kevin’s and Homer’s; and the third time a long bike ride at night to Chris’s own house. They took a calculated risk and left a note there to say they’d been, because they thought that if he was anywhere that was the most likely place.
‘If he was anywhere.’ Of course he was somewhere. Everybody’s somewhere, aren’t they?
I finally sat down and read his notebooks, turning the pages awkwardly with my mangled fingers. I didn’t like doing it, but I’d asked the others what they thought, and they agreed it was OK, in the hope that it might give us an idea of where he’d gone. I thought it was quite ominous that he hadn’t taken his notebooks.
They were so precious to him. But perhaps he had taken some; perhaps he’d had more than four.
Chris’s notebooks were so different to mine. His were more creative; all kinds of jottings and ideas and poems and stories and thoughts about life, like this: ‘We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.’
Some of the pages I’d seen already, but none of the later ones. There were a lot of references to Hell, but I couldn’t always tell if that were our Hell, the one we lived in, or the other one, that we sometimes lived in too. Some of it was pretty depressing, but then I’d always known that Chris could get depressed easily.
A bad black horse
Steals into my head
And moves across the landscape
Of my mind, while I sleep.
He does what he likes in there.
Next day I feel
The damage.
In the quiet mist
I watch her go.
It feels like snow.
There’s a feeling that I get.
I walk back home
Sad and slow.
But they weren’t all depressing.
The foal burst into life:
A slither of wet limbs
And startled eyes among the straw,
And the rich wet smell of birth.
Then it was dawn; it was
The light of life.
This one I remembered from when he’d shown it to me in his first week with us. I’d liked it a lot. He often wrote things about horses; I guess because the Langs had quite a few on their place.