by John Marsden
The Stratton area didn’t seem to be colonised like the land around Wirrawee. That was a big disappointment to Homer, who still dreamt he would walk down a road and run slap bang into his parents. But we saw no evidence of work parties. The trouble was that the Stratton district covers hundreds of square k’s, so really, Homer wasn’t much closer to his mum and dad than he had been in Hell. A fluke meeting was his best hope, probably his only hope.
I’m sure the reason there wasn’t much colonisation was that Stratton had suffered so many air raids. Apart from the last few months, when the New Zealand Air Force had been driven out of the skies, Stratton had copped a beating. We passed many bombed blocks in the suburbs, and even out in the country there were huge craters from bombs that had missed their targets.
At one point we saw the dark outline of a crashed plane, in a corner of the next paddock. Without much of a moon we couldn’t tell if it was ours or theirs, but we gave it a wide berth. There was no point going over there. It probably wasn’t dangerous, but we didn’t want to see any more death or horror.
The buildings around Boucher’s were dark too, and we approached mega-cautiously, at about a centimetre a minute. It was the kind of place that settlers might have occupied. And in fact we didn’t ever check out whether they had, because we didn’t need to go to the main buildings. Fi and Kevin led us to the shed where the gear was kept, and we helped ourselves. Most of the good stuff was gone, but there were some old rods and lines. Kevin had a nice assortment of worms and witchetty grubs and crickets from Grandma’s garden. My father would have turned his nose up – he was a fly fisherman who thought that any other fishing was cheating – but we weren’t in the mood to be fussy.
I didn’t know if there’d be any trout left in the dam, or if they’d bite in the middle of the night, but I guess they were hungry, because the first one hit my line so hard I dropped the rod. We reeled in ten in twenty-five minutes, and we were laughing so much that if there were colonists up in the house I think they’d have heard us.
‘This is madness,’ Homer said, when Kevin pulled in the tenth. ‘We’ll never eat all these. We’ve got no coolroom either. We should quit and come back another time, now that we know they’re here.’
We agreed with that, but the night was spoilt when we had a fight about where and how to cook them. I thought it was safer to make a fire in the middle of a paddock, and Lee backed me up, but the others wanted to do it at Grandma’s. Lee and I won, but it did sour the whole thing a bit.
Still, the trout were beautiful. I’d brought lots of foil – one thing Grandma had plenty of – and salt and spice, so we reduced the fire to coals as fast as we could and cooked the fish in the foil. The flesh fell off the bones, and the flavour was strong and tangy. After we’d pigged out there was even enough left for us to carry a decent supply back to town.
So despite the argument it was one of the better nights. In this war the bad kept outweighing the good, but a night like that kept us going for a while. In the air there was plenty of action, jets streaking backwards and forwards. Some were ours, some were theirs. It seemed like things were definitely more equal than they had been. But one night a whole armada of aircraft passed overhead. I don’t know whose side they were on, but there were heaps of them. They were big and fairly slow, so I think they were bombers, which made me hope they were from New Zealand. It reminded me of that time up in the mountains when we were camping in Hell and we’d heard the first wave of invasion planes, without realising what they were. Maybe these were the first wave of the re-invasion planes. I know the New Zealanders had been lobbying for new planes from the USA.
Stratton didn’t get bombed again but I think that was because there wasn’t much left to bomb. The city seemed almost demolished, and down along Melaleuca Drive, the main factory area, you’d be lucky to find one brick that was still full-size.
So our ‘blear’, as Fi called it – where we just went ‘bleary’, doing nothing but sleeping and talking and scavenging food and scouting around – lasted a week, and then some. We didn’t see any soldiers, and we made certain we didn’t get in a position where the kids could ambush us again. We caught glimpses of them from time to time but when I say glimpses, it was usually the sense at night-time that we weren’t alone, that someone was following or watching. I only got a good look at them twice.
The first time was one afternoon when I saw a boy climbing out of a window of a smart-looking white house halfway up the hill in Winchester Heights. He saw me, but he was at the point where he couldn’t go back; he was too far out of the window already. He hesitated for a moment then jumped. When he did, three other kids came out of the garden and they ran off together. I guess they’d been waiting for him. They ran like they were scared of me though, like they thought I’d shoot them, because they spread out and zig-zagged, the way we did sometimes.
None of them looked back.
I thought they were pretty crazy to break into houses in Winchester Heights, because there were always people around there.
The other time I saw them was kind of the opposite – they were going into a building, not coming out. It was an old milk bar on Railway Road, which had long since been looted of everything. But right on dusk I saw what looked like a tall skinny person going in there. When I looked harder I realised it was a boy with a little kid riding on his shoulders. This time they didn’t see me.
I waited a while but they didn’t come out, so I sneaked a bit closer, watching carefully for trip-wires. There was something about the way they went in that made it look like they were going home: just the relaxed way the boy walked I suppose, even with a kid on his shoulders. From time to time I heard voices, at one point a laugh, and much later the world’s most aggravating noise: a young child crying on and on, like there’s no particular reason but it’s not going to shut up anyway. I don’t know if it was the same child I’d heard before, near the old stables, but I was convinced I’d found their new hiding place.
For an experiment I tried leaving out some food, like I’d discussed with Fi. I didn’t put it too close to the shop, because I thought it might freak them out if I made it obvious that I knew where they were, but I left it at the other end of the block, in the middle of the footpath, where they could hardly miss it. I had to protect it from possums, so I put it in a big yellow Tupperware container from Grandma’s kitchen, with a sign saying food – help yourself.
It was nothing much, just potatoes and grilled lamb and some beans I’d boiled a little the night before, to make them crunchy. To my great disappointment, when I went back the next morning, it hadn’t been touched. And the same thing that night. I gave up then and took it away. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t eat it.
Chapter Eighteen
That week passed, and most of another – altogether, twelve days in limbo. Stratton seemed peaceful enough. The Kiwis finally bombed again one day, late in the afternoon, but on the other side of town. We didn’t know what the targets were.
West Stratton stayed dark at night and quiet in the day, unlike the closer-in suburbs. Occasionally a vehicle raced past, but we hardly ever saw foot patrols. I should have liked the silence of the streets. Somehow though, I developed a hatred of them. Hatred and fear. They were so still, so dark at nights. It was a ghost town. Normally there’s a background of noise that you don’t even notice; the hum of traffic, the buzz of lawn-mowers, the giggling of kids, the chatter of neighbours, the feet of pedestrians. People calling to each other. TVs muttering, CDs humming, phones screaming. Even a rural like me knew what suburbs sounded like.
But now there was nothing. Most of the time anyway. There were the noises we made of course: that was OK. Apart from them the whole suburb seemed closed off from the world, sealed in a time capsule.
I quite like solitude in some ways, at some times. Solitude and silence. But this was different. It was such an empty silence. Like the end of the world. It wasn’t of course, just the end of our world. Sometimes I tho
ught it would go on forever. Sometimes I stood on the back steps listening, kind of begging for a noise, a sign of life.
I don’t know how those kids had stood it for so long without going mad. Maybe they were mad. Or maybe they hadn’t been in West Stratton for long.
We saw no sign of any other squatters, so in the end I assumed that it was the kids who’d camped in Grandma’s house, and thrown the poker. They were certainly capable of that. Sometimes it made me angry that we had to be scared of the little mongrels. I felt insulted that we worried about being attacked by kids of that age. But when I wasn’t angry I felt desperately sorry for them, and worried about them. If adults were here I’m sure they wouldn’t have let them run around wild. I was worried about the kind of people they would grow up to be. How would they ever get used to normal life again? How would they learn to live peacefully, go to school, be friendly? If I was honest I’d have to say that most of what I’d learnt about life had been from my parents. It’s not like they sit you down and give you big talks. Some families might do that, have family meetings or whatever, but that was hardly our style. I learnt by watching and listening. You drink it in with your mother’s milk, with your first baby’s bottle of OJ, with your homemade lemon cordial and your water full of wrigglers from the tank, and the little sips of beer that your father jokingly gives you and the little sips of wine that your mother lets you have, and the cups of tea around the kitchen table where you relax and talk about the day, and how you have to move the small mob from One Tree tomorrow and why Mr Rodd’s wife has left him and how at the age of seventeen Dad got his driving licence by taking Sergeant Braithwaite to the pub so he could collect a slab for after work and whether Roundup’s a better herbicide than Sprayseed.
All that stuff. You just pick it up.
But these kids, how would they pick it up? Not by running wild around the streets of Stratton, smelling of months of living wild; snot hanging from their noses, and faces unwashed. Not from attacking the people who could have been their friends, who could have helped them. Not from stealing. Not from knowing that death could be waiting through the next doorway or just across the street.
I began to think the damage to our country, to us even, went so deep now that it would never fully be repaired. I realised the worst damage wasn’t the bombed buildings, the burnt-out cars, the shattered windows. It wasn’t even the neglected farms and the holes in the fences and the crops gone to seed. It was the damage deep inside us. Words like spirit and soul started to mean more to me now. I felt closer than ever to Robyn, if that were possible. She understood that there are some things worse than physical injury and physical death. If your spirit and soul are damaged beyond repair, then what does it matter that you can still react to stimuli, respire and excrete, and do all the other functions of living creatures described in Chapter Four of our Year 9 Science textbook?
We had to start healing some of the damage. Maybe we couldn’t do much about the kids, but I had to try not to let myself get too damaged by the awful things that had happened. What I’d done with Adam, in New Zealand, or what he’d done to me, that was the kind of thing I could control, should have controlled. I had to try harder with that kind of stuff in future. I wished I knew more about religion and church. It meant so much to Robyn, gave her so much strength. I envied her that.
As I thought about all of this, I decided it was time I started to take more care of Lee. I’d never looked at Lee from that point of view. Perhaps I should have. ‘Take care of’, that sounded funny applied to Lee, but I suppose in some ways that’s what we’d been doing all this time. Taking care of each other. Not always taking enough care of ourselves though. Lee definitely didn’t look after himself, and, I must admit, I neglected myself a bit sometimes.
So I started doing a few things to improve the atmosphere. I chucked a few flowers in vases and put them through the house. I raided some neighbourhood fruit trees, and made a fruit salad. Just stuff like that. It felt very weird in one way, to be doing these things in the middle of a war zone. But in this war there were no rules. We made it up as we went along. The whole thing was surreal, and you had to accept that as early as possible, or you were in trouble.
I also started talking more, which probably sounds weird, but with the pressure of Kevin’s problems, and the terror and wild thrills of the airfield attack, we’d all done much less talking. Now, in the relative safety of Grandma’s, we were having more conversations, but not enough. Fi and I had always talked, though still not much lately, and Homer and Lee talked a bit. They had a lot of respect for each other these days. No-one really talked to Kevin.
So I tried to be more outgoing. I remember Robyn saying once ‘Talking about yourself can be selfish or generous’. When I asked what she meant, she said: ‘If you never talk about yourself, about your problems and stuff, that’s selfish, because you’re not giving your friends a chance to help you. And if you talk about yourself all the time, you’re selfish and boring.’
I was still conscious though of the way Lee attacked me over my comment to Kevin. ‘Ellie, why do you use that primary-school-teacher voice,’ or whatever he’d said. Ouch. Robyn had been good without making a big thing of it. I mean she wasn’t good all the time – hardly – but when she was nice to people, it seemed natural. With me it didn’t always come out that way. Maybe because I wasn’t naturally nice. I hoped that wasn’t the reason.
What I’m saying is, I didn’t go around being Pollyanna, or a refugee from the Brady Bunch. I wasn’t, like, ‘Hi everybody, how are we today, isn’t it great to be alive?’ I’m not that stupid. But I did try to be not quite so into myself. And that’s all I want to say about that.
Chapter Nineteen
Suddenly, one day, the motorbike soldiers appeared. They were scary. They hunted in packs of four at a time, and they threatened us in ways that jeep patrols and foot patrols never could. For one thing, they were so quick, suddenly appearing at the end of the street. For another, they were very mobile, able to go up and down driveways and across lawns and gardens. For a third, they were professionals.
They came through West Stratton every two or three days, and we learnt to fear them. Luckily the fence around the back garden was high and solid, so from the front, or the driveway, no-one could see the work we’d done cleaning up the place. But it’d be a dead giveaway if they ever got off the bikes and came in. All Kevin’s spadework looked highly suspicious. So we rushed to disguise the work, covering the soil with leaf litter as though it had been blowing down for months, sticking dead things back in the earth to hide the new growth, unstaking the vegetables and letting them sprawl again. And we put in a homemade alarm system, a string trailing from the peppercorn to the kitchen window, so the person on sentry could alert the others. Each time a patrol appeared we only had about thirty seconds to shut down – that’s how quick they were.
I felt the war was closing in on us again. We made the decision to stop calling Colonel Finley. We tried four nights in a row, then skipped two, then tried for another two, then quit. It spooked us all to stop, but it would have spooked us more to keep going. All we ever got was the static, the funny static, not normal at all. It sounded just too electronic for me. It made me even more paranoid than normal.
My efforts to be more involved, more outgoing, improved some things I think. Homer said I was easier to get on with. Maybe everyone was trying harder. Despite the new tensions there were more jokes than we’d had for a while, more conversation about stuff other than the war. It sure was a relief to hear that.
But one thing didn’t change. Lee still went wandering at night. I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like my fears about what might be happening, what he might be doing. Some instinct told me he was getting into danger, going too close to the edge, taking physical risks, and maybe other risks as well.
He didn’t go every night, only every second or third night. Sometimes he came home exhausted, sometimes grim and tensed up, sometimes pleased with himself. Bu
t always there was that sense of alertness, something powerful being suppressed. Whichever mood he was in made me edgy. I had a dream where he was a panther leaping out of trees and grabbing babies and swinging them onto his back, then streaking away. When I woke up and lay there remembering it, I couldn’t work out if he was saving the babies or taking them away to eat.
Of course my real fear was that he was staging one-man raids, launching attacks on enemy soldiers. At some dark level I imagined him as a silent killer, stalking the streets, savagely striking people down from behind: a dangerous panther.
So I started following him. Not like a detective. I don’t think I’m being dishonest when I say that: I wasn’t trying to stick my nose into his business. It was more what I said before: he didn’t have parents any more and it made me more – I don’t want to say the word but I will – more protective.
I followed him three times. The first two were a wipe-out. I lost him badly; once when I let him get too far ahead, and once when a small convoy of trucks cut between us, and I had to wait for them to pass. By the time they’d gone Lee was nowhere to be seen.
The third time was very different. It was a cool clear night, refreshing after a long hot day. No sign of the storm I was walking into. A light breeze tickled my face, whispered against it, except I didn’t hear its message. Lee was a shadow in the distance, a movement between buildings, somehow not a person any more, certainly not the person I’d come to know so well during this long year. I couldn’t think where he might be going. I couldn’t work it out. The night before, when the first rumbles of the convoy came down the street, Lee seemed disinterested. He didn’t even look around, just increased his speed and faded into a dark patch at the end of the block. I don’t know where he went after that, but if he was staging a private guerilla war surely he would have taken a good look at the trucks of the convoy.