Circle of Flight

by John Marsden

  ‘That was a close shave,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I nearly turned on the gorilla instead.’

  He thought he was so funny. When I groaned he said, ‘It’s no laughing matter. Have you ever been trapped in a kitchen with a turned-on gorilla? It could have been very ugly.’

  I wonder if people like Jim Carrey and Glenn Robbins have kids, and whether their kids groan and say, ‘Oh Dad,’ when their fathers make jokes.

  But Henry was still frowning and all I could say was, ‘Well, I wasn’t meant to see the map but it did give me the idea that someone might be after us.’

  ‘If you weren’t meant to see the map, how did you see it?’

  ‘It’s a bit awkward,’ I said again, going even redder.

  ‘Do you want to help us or not? Do you want this boy back or don’t you?’

  ‘I think the Army knows about the map,’ I said. ‘But I can’t really say anything, except that there was one, and I heard about it a couple of weeks ago and it made it seem like we were going to be a target.’

  Suddenly he exploded. It was so unexpected. He’d been so nice and mild and calm before that. He leant forward and shouted into my face. ‘You think you’re going to sit there and tell me you’ve got vital evidence but you won’t tell me what it is? Listen, I’ve got no tolerance for people like you who think you can run some kind of amateur war, and then when things go wrong you call in the police and expect us to clean up the mess. And you don’t even tell us what you’re up to!’ He stood up, scraping his chair back. ‘We’re not a taxi service, you know! You don’t just call us in and then send us away when we’ve done what you want. A major crime’s been committed here and it’s my job to deal with it, and if you obstruct me in doing that, then you become part of the crime. Is there anything about that you don’t understand?’

  I shook my head. I was too numb to speak.

  ‘Then where did you see the map? Who had it? Where did it come from?’

  His tone had changed again, back to calm and reasonable, so I started to think this was just part of his routine. An act he did when he wanted information. Good cop, bad cop. Maybe he wasn’t too angry at all.

  I was trying to weigh up the consequences of betraying Homer and Lee and Liberation but it was so hard to think. All I could do was decide not to betray them right now. I needed time. An hour, a couple of hours. Would that make a huge difference to Gavin’s chances? That was the bit I couldn’t get straight in my head. The possibilities ranged from ‘I’ve just sentenced him to death’ to ‘It won’t make any difference.’

  ‘I never saw the map. I just heard about it.’

  ‘Who did you hear about it from? We need to talk to him. Or her. Urgently.’

  ‘I think it was smuggled over the border. But I don’t know any more than that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t know any more than that. But the person who told you about it, I want to know what that person knows. I need to know who that person is.’

  ‘I can’t tell you. Not for now anyway. I need to check up with them.’

  That made him mad again. And so it went on for another ten minutes, him getting mad, being calm, getting mad. I was so tired and my head was hurting. I couldn’t make these decisions on my own. I wanted, I don’t know, not a too-hard basket but a too-hard silo.

  Then suddenly he stopped.

  ‘Well,’ he said, shrugging. ‘We’ll do what we can, based on the limited information you’ve given us. When you’re ready to tell me more I suggest you call me, and the sooner the better. I can tell you that if he’s on this side of the border we’ll find him, but if he’s on the other side of the border it becomes a matter for the Department of Internal Security and the Department of Foreign Affairs. We have no jurisdiction there of course. In the meantime, I’ll leave four officers here overnight to protect you, and we’ll resume our search in the morning. I want to put a tap on your phone in case they try to contact you. Based on previous cases, it’s not very likely, but it has happened occasionally.’

  He pushed a form across the table at me. ‘That’s a consent form to have your phone line monitored. I suggest you have something to eat and then try to get a good night’s sleep. There’s nothing more you can do. You can leave this to us now.’

  CHAPTER 5

  HOMER ARRIVED, LOOKING frantic. He took me into the study and listened in silence as I told him the story, but he was impatient for me to get to the end. Just as I finished Jeremy arrived and I had to go through it all again. I’d already decided that Liberation was my best hope so I didn’t need much persuading when they said the same thing. Even in the middle of the pain and the fear and the sense that we had to do something right now, I was still curious to know whether one of the two boys in front of me was the Scarlet Pimple, but they weren’t giving anything away.

  I told them about Henry, the policeman, and the pressure I was under to tell him about the map. Homer and Jeremy looked at each other. ‘We’d better make a few calls,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Not from this phone,’ I said. ‘The cops are listening in.’

  They raced back to Homer’s place while I started making tea and coffee for the cops. Two of them were women and although I think I generally get on better with guys I really liked having these two around. They took their mugs outside so they could keep guard and I went out with them and just hung around while I waited for Homer and Jeremy to get back. The two women didn’t talk much but they had a comforting manner, like they knew what they were doing and nothing too bad was going to leap out at me while I was with them.

  The only things that did leap out at me were Homer and Jeremy, out of Homer’s old ute. They hurried me into the house. But it turned out they didn’t have much to say.

  ‘Look,’ said Homer, ‘we’ve talked to a few people. They all say the same thing. Just try to stay calm, and wait at least twenty-four hours. I know this is going to sound cold-blooded, but the way they put it was that if he’s dead, he’s dead. And if they were going to kill him, they would have done that already.’

  This was close to what Henry had said, so I nodded and kept my lips firm, and tried not to tremble too much. I noticed Homer was trembling, although he tried to hide it by hugging himself as he talked.

  ‘There’s no point telling the police any more about the map. They can’t do anything about stuff that’s on the other side of the border, so even if they knew where the map came from they couldn’t go over there and arrest anyone.’

  Homer went on. ‘The Liberation guys think that if Gavin’s alive, he’ll be on the other side of the border. They think he almost certainly is alive, and you’ll get a message eventually telling you what they want. I know the cops said differently, but they don’t always get to hear about the messages.’

  ‘What kind of things would they want?’ I asked, gripping the table with both hands. I was as bad as Homer. It was the only way I could stop the trembles from breaking out all over.

  Homer flushed. ‘It could be you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It could be both of us. It could be the whole group. They probably have quite a high awareness of us.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said miserably. We hadn’t thought about this enough. It certainly hadn’t been part of our consciousness during the war, and only in recent times had I started to realise that yes, actions do have consequences, even actions that seem right and justifiable. I’d done nothing I’d been ashamed of during the war, or after the war for that matter, leaving aside a few personal things, like the party in New Zealand, but even so, I couldn’t expect the enemy to see it that way, and I was starting to realise that they definitely didn’t.

  I stood and walked up and down the room, hands under my armpits. Jeremy wanted to put his arms around me, but I threw him off. I didn’t want that. I wanted to go and do something. It seemed unforgivable to do nothing. It seemed like a betrayal. The one thing Gavin wouldn’t understand was inaction.

  No-one tried to go to bed. No-
one tried to sleep. We sat around, even though there wasn’t much point. I know we all dozed at times, because at one point I woke up and Jeremy and Homer were both asleep in their armchairs. One of the women cops came in twice and told me to get to bed, but I shrugged her off too.

  At last the room got a little lighter. I went to the kitchen and made more tea and coffee, as well as putting out heaps of cereal and bread and stuff, then asked the cops if they wanted breakfast. They looked grateful.

  They had that grey appearance you get when you’ve been up all night, tense, on guard, wondering if that piece of bark flapping in the distance is a human arm or a piece of bark. God I knew how they felt. There had been so many nights like that for me during the war.

  Anyway, they came in and hoed into pretty much everything I had. Then Homer and Jeremy wandered in, and by the time they finished I think we’d blown the breakfast budget for the next month and a half. I just had a few slices of toast. I hadn’t felt like eating, but the smell of toast is hard to resist, and I knew I needed to have something.

  Henry turned up again at about 7.45 am. He didn’t have any news. They’d brought some dogs, and I went outside and watched as they cast around for a scent. It didn’t work too well, but one of the handlers told me that they hadn’t expected much. ‘There are too many smells around here already,’ he said. ‘Not only the little boy, but other animals, and all the police who’ve been coming and going, as well as your friends.’ More cars arrived even as I was talking to him, and then a police minibus. Out piled a whole bunch of young cops dressed in orange overalls. They didn’t look much older than me. Henry came over and explained that they were cadets from the police academy, and they were going to search the paddocks. He took them away, and half an hour later I saw them in a line, slowly traversing the paddock we call One Tree, eyes down, scanning the ground. I knew that most likely they were looking for a body, so I wished them all bad luck, hoping they’d fail miserably.

  The day inched along at a desperately slow speed. To stop myself from going crazy I kept feeding people. Mrs Yannos arrived, and luckily she’d been to the supermarket. Actually it wasn’t luck. It was yet another example of how thoughtful she was, thoughtful in both senses of the word. She’d thought about how we’d need heaps of food to cater for the visitors, and she’d been thoughtful in the sense that she was kind as a saint.

  And so it went on. And on. Really, nothing changed for the next couple of days. It was just one long toothache, but the worst toothache I’d ever had. A throbbing intense pain that took all my strength and energy. I could focus on nothing else. Henry tried to persuade me to move into town, but I wouldn’t leave. He kept the patrols going every night, but as he said, he couldn’t do that forever, and sooner or later I had to make a decision about my own security. He was right, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t listen.

  Then, like water from a burst dam, everything rushed at me. It was Friday afternoon. I was getting exhausted by the flow of visitors. The full range, from friends to acquaintances to strangers like the police, from adults to kids, from neighbours to teachers to Fi’s mum who drove all the way out from the city. Fi had gone to Japan on a school trip. She wanted to pull out of it when she heard about Gavin but her mum had dragged her kicking and screaming to the airport.

  I talked to Lee a few times on the phone, but when he arrived at the house on the Friday afternoon I wasn’t necessarily pleased to see him. Well, I wasn’t unpleased to see him either. He just seemed like another visitor, but more welcome than most. He didn’t waste any time on greetings though. He nodded to the machinery shed, ‘Let’s go look at tractors.’ Those were his opening words. I’d never known that Lee had an interest in tractors, but on the other hand I was getting used to guys taking me away for urgent talks. So I led the way out there without asking any questions.

  He jumped up and sat on the workbench while I leant against the front right wheel of the John Deere. ‘The Scarlet Pimple thinks they might know where he is,’ he said, without wasting any more words.

  A great flower of something that could be called hope slowly unfurled inside my chest. It didn’t actually blossom, but it did unfurl quite a little way.

  ‘Where?’ I asked. How difficult it was to keep my voice steady, even though it was only for a one-syllable word.

  ‘In Havelock.’

  ‘Havelock? Christ, that’s hundreds of k’s away.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But it’s quite a reliable report. It may not be him, but it’s the best lead they’ve had.’

  ‘Why would they take him there? Has someone seen him? Did he look all right? Who saw him?’ I couldn’t get the questions in the right order, and I knew there were hundreds of them queuing up in my brain, jostling to get to the front.

  ‘No-one knows much about anything,’ he said. ‘But there is a nasty little group of bandits who apparently have their headquarters in Havelock. They’re quite professional at doing border raids, revenge raids. A lot of them are on the government list of war criminals. It’s the sort of game they’d play, grabbing a kid and using him to bargain.’

  ‘So how do we get him back?’ I asked, forgetting all the other questions, or at least sending them to the back of the queue.

  He paused then, for the first time, and frowned, and looked at the ground. I knew these signs as well as I knew Lee. Someone had made a suggestion, someone had a plan even, but it wasn’t Lee’s idea and he didn’t agree with it.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ I said with teeth clenched.

  ‘I think it’s crazy. The only part of it I agree with is that the government isn’t going to be able to do anything. Well, if they are, it’s going to take a long time, and bad stuff could happen in the meantime. These guys aren’t interested in negotiating with governments, and their own government can’t control them. I think it’s a situation that probably does call for a bit of individual action.’

  ‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked, trying not to grind my teeth.

  ‘It’s not a plan as such,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s just a concept, an idea. The beginning of a plan.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  He grinned then. ‘Yeah, well I kind of expected you’d say that.’ He paused. ‘Like I said, it’s not a plan, in fact it’s not even the beginning of a plan, but there’s quite a large population of expatriates in Havelock.’

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  ‘People from other countries. A lot of administrative and government stuff happens there. Not that they call it Havelock any more. They’ve given it some new name that I can’t even pronounce. But the United Nations has about a hundred people there, and there are a few consulates setting up. What I’m getting at, or what the Liberation people are getting at, is that someone like you could walk around some areas of Havelock without standing out. Not many areas, but where the consulates are, the locals are used to seeing foreign faces. You’d have to get identity papers, but Liberation could supply those. At least it puts you closer to the action, if that’s where the action really is.’

  ‘What does the Scarlet Pimple think of all this?’ I asked.

  ‘Not happy. Bad idea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too dangerous, too random. The Scarlet Pimple likes plans and structures and details. Admittedly it’s not the way we worked during the war, but it seems to work pretty well with what Liberation do. I guess they have to be pretty organised, seeing there’s so many different groups, and so many different projects.’

  ‘How would I get to Havelock?’

  ‘They’re working on that. And they are producing identity papers right now. Apparently that’s pretty easy.’

  ‘At least no-one really knows my face,’ I said. ‘Even if the guys who took Gavin read my books, even if they know my name, even if they think they know a lot about me, hardly anyone would know what I look like. Given how many people are living over there now, I’d be pretty unlucky to run into anyone I met during the war.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lee nodded.
‘That much I agree with.’

  ‘So what don’t you like about my going there?’

  He shocked me by suddenly exploding off the bench, long arms and legs flying. For a moment he looked like a praying mantis who’d been hit in the guts. ‘Because it’s only you,’ he said. I realised that he could almost have been crying. That really frightened me then, frightened me and shocked me. Lee? Emotion? Lee showing emotion?

  He went on. ‘They said that you could maybe get away with one new teenage face on the streets of Havelock, but you’d never get away with more than one. If two or three of us turned up, the word would get out within a few hours and there’d be no hope for anyone.’ He gave me a little shaky grin. ‘I kept telling them that I’d go, because I think I could get away with being out on the streets much more easily, but the truth is I knew you’d never let anyone else go.’

  I nodded. I’d already thought about the possibility of Lee going with me but realised his little brothers and sisters needed him too badly to risk him on something as deep into enemy territory as this.

  He smiled at me again. It was the saddest smile I’d ever seen from him. ‘I know Gavin’s yours, and I know you’ve only got each other, in a family sense anyway. It’s right that you go. That’s assuming anyone goes, and I’m guessing there’s not much chance that you won’t.’

  ‘You got that right,’ I said, although the unfurling flower in my chest was now growing from a cold, wet black swamp in my stomach.

  CHAPTER 6

  WE WALKED BACK to the house. Coincidentally the police were just leaving. Henry was looking for me. He emerged from the kitchen just as we got there. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Found you. Now look, Ellie, we can’t keep a police presence here any longer. We haven’t got the resources, and it’s become a pointless exercise, given that we’ve found no trace of the little fellow. But what you have to do, and I’m afraid this is an order, is pack a few things and move into town. This is not a safe place for you to be.’