Circle of Flight

by John Marsden

  But when I saw the big Greek wombat a couple of times the next day, and the day after that, I had the feeling that more than usual was being kept from me. Like there was a big rock in the middle of our conversations and he kept sailing around it.

  I wanted to know about that big rock.

  Well, I found out about it, and was sorry I had. No, that’s not true. Knowledge has got to be better than ignorance any day of the week, that’s what I believe anyway. I just wish I could have made better use of the knowledge.

  On Thursday afternoon Homer wanted to get off the bus at our place and come home with Gavin and me. His idea was that I’d feed him and then take him home. He’d probably have another meal at home, but that’s Homer for you. Never stand between him and a steak. But it was fine by me and we got off together and opened up the twin-cab, which was parked by a young sugar gum and nice and warm in the spring sun. Apart from anything else, it was good to have Homer to myself for a bit. Well, as much as Gavin would share him. We hadn’t had a decent conversation for ages, just a few words as we rushed past each other in school, or grunts as we fed cattle or serviced machinery together.

  ‘Place is looking all right,’ he said as we cruised up the driveway.

  ‘I don’t think Dad would have agreed with you.’

  ‘Nah, but it’s not bad. Mr Young’s cattle are getting some condition. I had a look at your lot the other day too, and some of them are coming on well.’

  ‘And some of them aren’t.’

  ‘Yeah well Miss Queen of Positivity, I’m trying to look on the bright side. If you buy a bunch of skeletons, at the end of the day you might have skeletons with meat but they’ll still be skeletons.’

  ‘The walking dead.’

  ‘Yeah exactly.’

  ‘They weren’t that bad.’

  ‘Nah, those Poll Herefords aren’t too bad.’

  ‘They’d want to be for the price I paid for them. Eleven hundred and forty bucks a head.’

  ‘The way prices are going you could get a grand a head for steers that died of starvation.’

  ‘That died three weeks ago.’

  ‘Only three weeks? Sheez, you’d get fifteen hundred if they’d only been dead three weeks. Hey, how about you turn right up there and go across the ford?’

  ‘Hey, this thing doesn’t have four-wheel-drive.’

  ‘It’s got four wheels hasn’t it? And they all go round at the same time? I’d call that four-wheel-drive.’

  ‘Why do you want me to go across the ford?’ But I could tell he was serious so I went right and eased the ute down into the gully, trying not to tear the sump out on the rocks. From the back seat Gavin started squawking in protest. When we didn’t pay him any attention he tried to climb through into the front, to find out what was going on. We shooed him back.

  We bumped up the other side. I could almost feel the relief of the suspension as the track flattened out and we accelerated to a dazzling fifteen k’s an hour. We drove along the side of the gully, the nastiest bit of erosion left on the property.

  ‘You wanna stop here somewhere?’ Homer asked.

  Obediently, I stopped. Obedience is not my usual attitude with Homer, but sometimes you have to play along to work out what he’s getting at. We sat looking at the view. We could see the house from here, quiet and comfortable in the afternoon sun. A magpie made a clumsy landing on the front lawn and taxied to a halt near a hydrangea bush. Gavin stirred restlessly in the back seat and poked his head between us.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Why are we here?’

  I turned a bit so he could see my mouth. ‘Ask Homer,’ I said.

  He asked Homer but he didn’t get much joy there. He got more restless and then gave up, opened the back door and got out, announcing, ‘I’m walking home.’

  ‘Watch out for snakes,’ I said.

  Off he went, sliding into the gully, eroding a few more clods along the way. His head disappeared. Homer and I sat there a bit longer. Eventually Gavin reappeared on the far side, climbing busily.

  ‘There’s a lot of different ways to get to your house,’ Homer said at last.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Like, if you go along here a k there’s another ford.’

  ‘That’s the truth.’

  ‘It’d be good to take the scenic route more often.’

  ‘Homer, what the hell is this about?’

  ‘If you took different routes all the time, it’d be harder for anyone to ambush you.’

  He said it so casually that it took me a while to realise how sinister his message was.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  When he didn’t answer I slowly understood that life was not the way I’d thought, that my life had a different shape to the one I’d imagined. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time I’d seen it so clearly. It’s hard for my brain at moments like that. The only way I can describe it is that I had a picture of my life as, say, a farmhouse with a veranda and a large chimney, and then suddenly it metamorphosed into, I don’t know, a stainless steel triangular prism sitting on top of a mountain.

  Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Then, so quietly that I surprised myself, I said, ‘Why?’

  He glanced at me, then looked away again, through the windscreen. ‘That raid we went on. To the –’ I’m not allowed to say the name of the place in case anyone finds this.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That envelope of papers he gave me.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’

  ‘I tipped them out on the floor to sort them out a bit, just, you know, to pack them better, neater.’

  ‘Cos you’re such a neatness freak.’

  ‘Well I wanted them in a bigger envelope where they wouldn’t be –’

  ‘Yeah yeah I know, I’m just kidding, go on.’

  ‘OK, well, first thing I see, well not the first thing, but in the middle of them is a map of your place.’

  ‘My place?’

  ‘A map of the district, with your place outlined, and the house marked, and a line drawn along the route we take over the border, more or less.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They didn’t have the boundaries of the property even halfway right, but you could see they were picking out your place, the map was to show someone where you live.’

  My body prickled like a thousand funnel webs were walking all over me. I felt as though I were rising in my seat even though I was still sitting behind the wheel.

  Homer didn’t say anything else, just waited for me to do the figuring-out by myself. It didn’t take me long. My place was being singled out, I was being singled out. I felt a spasm in my stomach, like a violent sickness, but I didn’t do anything as dramatic as vomit, like in novels, where everyone seems to vomit or faint when they hear bad news or cut their little finger.

  So they hadn’t finished with us yet. Before I thought to ask Homer the most important question, he gave me the answer anyway. He said quietly, ‘It was dated two weeks ago.’

  ‘You could read the date?’

  I didn’t know what they did about dates in their language, those aliens, those monsters, those horrible people who I suddenly hated with so much passion it scrunched me up inside.

  ‘It was a computer thing, you know, downloaded from one of those websites where you can get maps of your back yard.’

  I sat there, continuing to figure. It was like a sudoku. Mrs Barlow, my English teacher, had been saying the other day how when you write a story you should think sudoku. Give the reader a few bits and they’ll figure the rest out, no problem. She used me as an example. ‘If I say “Ellie got on the tractor” then you can figure Ellie’s on a farm, you don’t need to tell the reader that, they can work it out for themselves.’

  ‘She could be at a field day,’ Sam Young called out.

  I put him and Mrs Barlow out of my mind and tried to concentrate on my own sudoku. ‘So you think they’re coming back here,’ I said. �
��They’ve got unfinished business. How come you didn’t tell me this straightaway? They could have come last night. Or the night before. Gavin and I could have been murdered by now.’

  ‘We thought we’d wait till the right moment. And Dad and George and I have been hanging round here for a few nights.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know . . . with rifles. These raiding parties are always small. We thought we could take care of them. Dad was right into it. Never knew he was so bloodthirsty. Guess that civil war got into his blood.’

  I was dumbstruck. My first instinct was to say, ‘I don’t need looking after! How dare you do that without telling me? I don’t like people making decisions on my behalf.’

  But I had to recognise the generosity of my neighbours who would put themselves in danger and go without sleep to protect me. I had to recognise the kindness of it. ‘The highest wisdom is kindness.’ Where had I read that?

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, trying not to choke on the word. ‘Civil war?’

  ‘Greek Civil War.’

  ‘Oh. Was there a Greek Civil War?’

  ‘Ask him, he’ll tell you. For weeks. Anyway, the Scarlet Pimple did a bit of checking around with the experts from the Army and so forth, and they didn’t have any reports of anyone about to launch an attack. So we thought that you’d probably be OK in the short-term. And face it, if you can’t trust an expert, who can you trust?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  My mind was churning now, fit to match my stomach. I was just one big churn. You could have made butter in me, easy.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘The short-term. That’s all there is now, isn’t there? The bloody short-term. In the medium-term they’ll come in here and kill Gavin and me and burn the place down. And in the long-term we’ll be rotting in our graves. Well bury me with my parents, that’s all I ask. And Gavin too thanks.’

  Homer didn’t say anything. We sat there looking through the windscreen of the ute at the eroded gully, the ugly evidence of a landscape wrecked by humans.

  CHAPTER 3

  BEFORE THE RAID and the conversation with Homer things had actually been going rather well. Maybe the problem is that I don’t touch wood enough. Maybe the problem is that God likes to play with us. Teasing us the way a kid does with a spider, when he harasses it for a while then lets it crawl away into a hidey-hole, and after a few minutes the spider thinks he’s safe and comes out again and there’s the kid, waiting, ready for the next round. And so on and so on until the kid decides that he’s had enough fun now, he’s bored, and he squishes the spider.

  We’d been through a terrible experience in Stratton, Gavin and I, which was about as terrible as experiences get. Gavin’s my adopted brother more or less, and when we went looking for his little sister, we found her, but unfortunately the man who had been their stepfather found us first. No-one but Gavin knew the truth about him, that he had murdered Gavin’s mother. And when you’re the only person in the world who knows about a murder, you’re not in a very comfortable position. We found ourselves in a very uncomfortable position, getting wet and bloody, in a fountain in a park, trying to defend ourselves against a knife attack, and not making a very good job of it for a while. We both had the scars to prove that.

  What it did lead to was a new experience for both of us, going to court for a criminal trial. It was one of those things where you feel kind of excited, but guilty for feeling excited. Nervous as well of course, definitely nervous. OK, I’ll be honest, scared, but you can’t help having the other feelings as well. The trial was in Stratton. One thing that was good these days was that the legal system had been streamlined under the new constitution so things got dealt with faster. A law student I was talking to at the court said that in the old days it might have been a year before this case got heard.

  We stayed with Lee and his siblings again. I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced this was a good idea, given that Lee’s catering depended on how many pies were in the freezer, and his housework depended on whether the path through the lounge room to the front door was still open to traffic. When it was completely blocked he’d schedule a ten minute clean-up.

  The filter in the dryer had like three kilos of lint in it. OK I’m exaggerating again, but I don’t think anyone had cleaned it since they bought it. I explained to Lee about the fire hazard but I had the feeling it wasn’t going to make a substantial difference in his life, and I didn’t feel really confident until I’d found Pang, his little sister, and explained it to her. Honestly, without Pang that family would have to call in Meals on Wheels. Lee’s in his own world half the time. Phillip, the nine year old, is a bit obsessive. His three main interests are computer games, footy stats and reading Deltora Quest books. This does not necessarily make for good conversation. I mean, the kid collects light globes. Used ones. He has about twenty of them in a cupboard. Pang showed me.

  Paul, who’s seven, is the quiet one, with his nose in a book, quite like Lee in some ways but not as determined. Then every once in a while he just gets the devil in him and goes through the house looking for ways to create havoc. Intira, the smallest, is a four year old with anger-management problems. As all four year olds have anger-management problems I wasn’t too concerned about this, but in a small apartment it’s not so good.

  When we got to Stratton for the trial I suddenly thought that I should get them presents, but there wasn’t much time, so I grabbed a box of chocolates at a shop near the station. Stupid really, everything’s so expensive nowadays, and you only get about twenty choccies for thirty bucks. I’d have been better off going for quantity instead of a nice box with lots of packaging inside. Anyway, before anyone else realised, Intira had raided the box and wiped out half the chocs, and if that wasn’t bad enough she then had a monstrous tantrum when Lee took the box away and told her she was a greedy little guinea pig, or words to that effect.

  The one thing that didn’t happen while I was staying with Lee was a sudden romantic windstorm that blew us both away. Maybe I’m looking for excuses but I gotta say there’s not a lot of room for romance when five kids are bouncing off the walls of a flat that doesn’t have bounceable walls. That sounds so middle-aged, like a suburban mother in the Women’s Weekly explaining why the romance has gone out of her marriage, but for the first time in my life I had a bit of sympathy for suburban mothers living unromantic lives. Not that I wanted a relationship with Lee any more, now that I had Jeremy, but bloody Lee, something about him, we couldn’t be in the same building without my getting funny feelings inside. They weren’t even necessarily nice feelings – I got sort of squirmy in the stomach, plus my breathing changed – but there was still definitely something smoky about him.

  The last thing I wanted him to do was fall on his knees in front of me, red roses in hand, but I thought, without really thinking about it, that life would be more interesting if he did keep after me. I mean, face it, the more guys who are after you the more interesting life is, even if you aren’t totally rapt in some of them, and even if you’re making it hard for other girls by causing a bottleneck in the supply line. I was hardly in that league, but I knew I’d prefer Lee to have me for his first priority than some other girl who wasn’t good enough for him. No other girl would ever be good enough for Lee, in my opinion.

  Anyway nothing happened. Well, a lot happened of course. As well as attending the trial Gavin and I witnessed or were involved in Pang slapping Paul when he spilt Pepsi on her homework, Lee trying to make Phillip clean the griller when he left melted cheese all over it after cremating his sandwich, Phillip huddling in the broom cupboard for two hours when Pang said he couldn’t have his move back in a game of chess, kids refusing to go to bed, refusing to get out of bed, refusing to go to school, refusing to leave school in the afternoon, refusing to eat meals, refusing to stop eating junk, refusing to go to the park, refusing to come home from the park . . . refusing to put new fuses in when the lights went out . . . in other words refusing to refuse . . . that was a joke by the way .
. .

  It wasn’t all bad though. I mean, Lee would kill me if he read this. They really loved each other and they had a heap of nice moments together. When Paul discovered Phillip having his tantrum in the broom cupboard, he was really sweet, huddling in there with him for ages trying to talk him into coming out. Succeeding too, eventually. Intira and Paul spent many a happy hour at the kitchen table with crayons and coloured pencils and stuff. They had this game where they made up little cartoon creatures with special powers. One had the ability to grow wings and another could change into a worm and another could make himself invisible. I wouldn’t say I found it too exciting but the kids loved it. They were based on stuff they’d seen on TV, I think, and I hadn’t had much time to watch TV lately.

  So, action 24/7, but romance, no. If ever there was a moment when something seemed possible it’d be interrupted by a scream from one of the bedrooms or a crying kid demanding justice or a crash from the kitchen. After a few nights of this I realised that my relationship with Lee was still in the deep freeze. As long as I had Jeremy I shouldn’t have worried about that, because I didn’t want to two-time him, but I just wanted to keep a connection open between Lee and me. We stayed at Lee’s three nights and on the last I wrote a letter to Jeremy.