I guess there were about twenty people down there. They were street people. I’d seen most of them before, at free food places. They huddled around a pile of smashed chairs they’d set on fire for warmth and light. The roller doors on Sam’s shop and all his neighbours’ were locked. The shiny, silver containers were empty, the warming lights were off and the television screen was blank. I wondered where Sam was. Would he come back another day, when all the mess was cleaned up?
The bins hadn’t been emptied, but as usual there weren’t many leftovers in the one outside Sam’s Kebabs. Even the Chopstix bin didn’t have much in it that night, but I found a Number 51, which was lucky because that’s my favourite. It’s lemon and honey chicken and there was nearly half a large serve. A good thing about Chinese leftovers is that they’re in plastic containers. Billy doesn’t care about odds and evens. He had some Number 38, which was pork in black bean sauce, and we shared some special fried rice.
The people around the fire were talking about what had happened and trying to figure out why and what they were going to do. I didn’t want to listen. I sat outside Sam’s place to eat. Billy was reading a newspaper. It was two days old. I didn’t mean to read the headlines but they were there, in bold black letters. I could see them afterwards, even with my eyes shut, as clear as if the words were stamped inside my eyelids: ‘ARMED FORCES GEAR UP AS PEACE TALKS FAIL’. I got down from my seat. I needed to walk.
‘Too much fried rice,’ I told Billy.
As soon as we left the arcade, the sounds of war invaded my ears and I started making a list in my head to block them out. It was a list of the sounds I couldn’t hear: buses, brakes, banging bin lids, buskers, bells and footpath sweepers. I was thinking about Archimedes when Billy grabbed me and pulled me into a doorway. A truck pulled out of a side street. The driver looked right at us. We stood still. He changed gears and drove around our corner, looking hard at Billy and me, then he pointed two fingers at us like he was aiming a gun. There were soldiers in the back with real guns but they didn’t shoot us.
We watched the truck till it disappeared, then Billy said, ‘Come on, let’s find ourselves a place to stay.’
‘Can we go to the library?’
‘There won’t be any heaters on, Skip,’ Billy said.
‘I know.’
‘And Michaela won’t be there.’
‘I know.’
‘She’s probably home, somewhere out in the suburbs, safe and sound.’
I hoped what Billy said was true but I couldn’t help wishing we’d see her again, just to make sure she was okay. I didn’t tell him I’d seen the broken columns on the ground, in case he said we musn’t go.
The library steps looked like a river of rocks, and only three columns were left out of the eight. The roof had caved in over the halls at the front of the building and the windows were smashed, but the dome over the reading hall looked okay which meant there must still be places inside where we could go. I was glad it was pretty dark and we couldn’t see any dead people.
When we got inside the reading room there were a few lights on, but they were far apart and dim, like candles in a fog, and I kept blinking to make sure the people I could see weren’t ghosts. Even the sound of their crying was ghostly. It was thin and high and made you wonder if you’d really heard it or just imagined it. Billy shone his torch around and I saw someone curled up under one of the tables. He wore a grey jacket and old-man pants with pleats, and a belt to hold them up. At first I thought he was dead, he was so still. Billy knelt down on the floor and rolled him over, like a slater, on his back. He was holding a book even though he was asleep. The book was big and his hands were small like the rest of him, and I saw that he was a little boy. The writing on the cover of his book was made from letters cut out of magazines and newspapers. It said: ‘Max Montgomery’s Book of After-school Activities’. The boy was wearing glasses, and when he opened his eyes they were big and round and shiny, like a possum’s.
‘Are you Max?’ Billy said.
The boy sat up and stared at us for a while, like he was trying to decide if he should talk to us or not, and then he said, ‘Yes. Has my mother sent you?’
‘No,’ said Billy. ‘Are you expecting her to come?’
‘Yes, and she said I mustn’t go outside until she gets here.’
‘How long have you been waiting?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Max. ‘Mummy’s taking such a long time, so I had a nap. I woke up when I heard the noise and I thought it must be someone with weapons of Max destruction. People started screaming and pushing each other, trying to get outside to see what was happening, and other people were trying to get inside. I hid under the table. That’s what you’re supposed to do when there’s an earthquake. Nobody told me what to do when someone’s coming after you with weapons. Then the front of the library fell down and after that I did some more colouring in and waited under the table for Mummy until I fell asleep.’
‘Best thing you could have done!’ said Billy. ‘Skip and me are going to have a nap soon.’
‘We’ve got blankets,’ I said.
‘Have you got anything to eat?’ asked Max.
Billy hung his torch from a chair so it shone down on us like a proper light. I hoped the batteries wouldn’t go flat. Then he took something out of the pocket of his overcoat. It was wrapped in a Chopstix serviette. Slowly he unfolded it and the boy’s mouth stayed open the whole time.
‘Ta-da!’ Billy said. A half-eaten banana fritter sat in the middle of the serviette. ‘I was saving this for breakfast, but I suppose I could let you have a bit.’
I felt like smiling because Billy was being so kind and funny to Max and he never even met him before. It was the first time I felt like smiling since the day Billy pretended he was my grandpa and Michaela talked to me and I drew Monet’s pond on the footpath, which was really only yesterday but seemed much longer.
‘What is it?’ Max asked.
‘Never seen a banana fritter before?’ Billy pretended he was shocked. Max shook his head. ‘Well then, you’re in for a treat.’
Max put down his book and nibbled away at the half-eaten fritter, and Billy got me to help him arrange some tables and chairs into a sort of cubbyhouse. We even put a roof on it.
‘It’s a bunker,’ Billy said. ‘We’ll sleep in there.’
I guessed he was thinking we might get bombed in the night.
When I started to untie Bradley Clark’s bootlaces, Max licked the sugar crystals off his fingers and said, ‘I’m six now and I can tie my own shoelaces.’
We let him help us undo the knots but we didn’t tell him the laces came out of a dead man’s boots. When we finished we crawled inside the bunker and covered ourselves with the blankets; Billy and me with Max between us.
‘I’ll switch the torch off now, Max,’ Billy said. ‘Maybe when we wake up your mother will be here.’
Outside our bunker, people were still talking in their soft library voices, others were crying and some were snoring. From the foyer came the sound of chalky bricks shifting, clinking together as they tumbled. I wondered what the Prime Minister was doing. Was he lying in his bed thinking about the headlines and weapons of mass destruction, or how to get peace? Or maybe he was trying the visualisation technique to get to sleep. What if he was dead? Who would make up the rules about war and peace and other important things then?
Next I thought about the people flying around in planes with bombs in them, and the soldiers in the back of the truck, and I wondered why they didn’t shoot Billy and me. Whose side were they on? Once, when I lived with my dad, some boys asked me to play with them at school. They were playing war and they asked me whose side I wanted to go on: the Americans or the Enemy. I said I wanted to go on the other side.
‘Whady’a mean?’ they said. ‘There’s only two sides: the Americans or the Enemy.’
‘My dad says there’s three sides.’
‘Who’s on the third side?’
‘All the
people who don’t believe in war. Dad says there’s more on the third side than the other two sides put together, but the ones on the third side don’t have weapons.’
One of the boys yelled, ‘Your dad’s crazy, everyone knows that!’
From then on the boys never asked me to play anything with them.
6
A thief’s prayer
When I woke up the next morning, it was like a dream come true. Billy and Max were asleep beside me and there were books all around us. I felt like there was a song inside me, even though there was a war going on outside. The feeling was a bit like when you’re curled up in bed and the rain is bucketing down. But it was even more than that. Because of the war, I had Billy. Before that I knew he wouldn’t stay. I was always thinking, tonight’s going to be the last night, once his eye’s better, once the warm weather comes, once he finds a place where they’ll let me stay, he’ll be gone. But now there was Max.
I squeezed out of the bunker, so I wouldn’t wake the others. Light poured through the coloured glass in the high-up windows. The dome looked like a giant bicycle wheel with cellophane woven in and out of the spokes. I held my hands up, and green and pink light got all over my skin. Then I did a bad thing. I shut my eyes and prayed to God that Max’s mother wouldn’t come to the library for him. Max was only six years old. I was sure Billy wouldn’t go away and leave him.
Other people in the library were waking up. Some of them never went to sleep in the first place. I heard them talking in the night; about what had happened, what they saw, who they’d lost, where they were going, where the tanks were and what to do next. Twenty-four hours after the first strike they were saying the same things.
The others weren’t street people, like Billy and me; you could tell by their clothes. Two days ago, people with nice clothes and shining hair wouldn’t have looked at you, except for Michaela and the Salvos. Sometimes you might catch a stranger’s quick sideways look that tripped your heart up and then it would be gone faster than a falling star, making you wonder if you’d only imagined it. But that morning, people looked long and slow at strangers’ faces. I used to look at faces that way. I thought that maybe if I looked hard enough and long enough I’d find the person I was looking for. I imagined that if I saw my mother I’d know her, even though I can’t remember what she looked like. And anyway, if I didn’t, I was sure she’d know me because of my eyes.
When Max woke up I saw him looking for his mother and I tried not to think about what I’d asked God. The only person I looked for in the library was Michaela, but she wasn’t there.
Billy followed Max out of the bunker. ‘We’ll have to find something to eat,’ he said. ‘C’mon, the sooner we go the sooner you’ll get fed.’ But Max wouldn’t go outside because of his mother telling him not to. ‘Well, you stay here with Max, Skip, and I’ll go and get food.’
I wished Max would come along, so we could all go, but then I thought about what the boys at school said: that people on the third side got shot at by both the other sides.
Billy limped through a jagged hole in the wall and crossed the lawn where Michaela sometimes ate her lunch. He left his trademark tracks in the dewy grass: a perfect footprint on one side and a half-moon on the other.
Not so long after Billy left the library, it seemed like a lot of other people had gone too, but I didn’t see where they went. The ones left in the reading room all looked old. One lady was knitting, some were reading, others just sat there hunched up, staring out through the smashed windows at the smoke and broken buildings. The sound of tumbling bricks that I’d heard the night before started up again. After a while I figured out it was coming from the foyer, so when Max got back in the bunker to find his Book of After-school Activities, I went to see what was making the noise. I discovered that’s where some of the other people had gone. With scraps of rag tied over their noses and mouths, they climbed the rubble, shifting smaller pieces of brick and concrete with their hands and levering huge chunks out with pieces of pipe or timber. Suddenly I knew what they were trying to do. I raced back to the reading room and Max.
‘Where were you?’ he said.
‘Do you want to go upstairs and look at the high-up books?’ My legs were shaking.
‘No, I’m going to do some cutting and pasting.’
I knew he wanted to be there to see his mother, but I didn’t want him to see her if she was under the bricks in the foyer. And if she was, I felt like it would be my fault. Maybe I’d get sent to hell for the prayer I’d said.
Max opened his book and the small wooden box with the sliding lid where he kept his crayons, his coloured pencils, his glue stick and his blunt scissors. He mostly drew animals with big teeth and bellybuttons. I wished he could have seen the leopard on Archimedes’ chest, so he’d have a better idea of muscles.
I got a dictionary and looked up ‘max’, and I found out it’s short for ‘maximum’. Then I looked up ‘maximum’ and it said: ‘the greatest possible number, amount or intensity’. This means that if someone has weapons of max destruction they have weapons that can cause the greatest possible destruction, like bombs. Max had been right and he didn’t even know it.
Billy was taking forever. I went and stood with a bunch of other people where there used to be a wall. We all stared out between the splintered planks and plastic-coated electrical wires; the bones and arteries of the library. The city was a rubbish dump. Machines crawled over it like scavenging rats. From where we were, they sounded like blowflies. Compared to what the city was like before, it was deserted, but there were still some people wandering around, watching the machines, dodging the army jeeps that prowled the streets, and ducking for cover when they heard the planes getting close.
I wondered if I’d been wrong to think Billy would stay because of Max. After a while, a lady with drawn-on eyebrows came by with a king-size coffee tin. She took the lid off and let me choose a biscuit.
‘Are you waiting for your father?’ she said.
‘I haven’t got a father.’
‘My mother will be coming soon,’ said Max. ‘I think she might have gone shopping.’
It was like he couldn’t see or hear what was going on outside. The lady held out the tin to him and stroked his hair with her grandma hands, and the only part of her face that looked happy was her beautiful bird’s-wing eyebrows. ‘Take another biscuit to keep you going,’ she said.
Suddenly the people by the wall rushed back into the room like a wave on a beach. ‘Keep back!’ they said, but I wanted to look. A black van crept up the hilly street towards us. Even the windows were black. Weaving in and out to miss flattened cars and smashed columns, it climbed the jumbled stone steps and stopped where the foyer used to be. The tumbling noises in the foyer stopped. The driver jumped out and rushed around to the back of the van and I catapulted myself across the room.
‘Come on, Max!’
‘I haven’t finished my Tyrannosaurus Rex.’ His voice echoed loudly through the reading room. The knitting woman frowned like it was a normal day at the library. I didn’t care. I grabbed Max and pulled him off the chair. A rainbow of pencils rolled across the table. I looked back at the noise of them falling onto the floor. Then I saw inside the back of the van. There were only boxes and trolleys and normal-looking people. The other people in the library started talking again. I guess they’d thought the same as me.
‘Sorry, Max!’ I whispered and I gathered up his pencils. ‘See, they’re not broken.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Why did you grab me?’
‘Sorry, Max,’ I said again and he climbed back onto his chair. I never had anyone little to take care of before, but I thought it would be a good idea not to say anything about the soldiers with machine guns I had imagined sitting in the back of the van.
The people from the van wheeled the boxes inside on trolleys and started taking books off the shelves. Not just a few books for reading at home after dinner; they were
taking a lot of books, and even though they weren’t soldiers, I felt like something bad was happening. The State Library was not a lending library. You were only supposed to look at the books while you were there.
I remembered what Billy said about getting an education. The only thing I wanted to learn about was art, that’s what I was good at. I couldn’t go back to school now, so I figured I’d have to learn from books. I went to the art section and got three big books, one about Monet and one about Vincent van Gogh, and then I saw one about Leonardo da Vinci so I took that too. I hid them in a cleaner’s cupboard next to the men’s toilets, and got one of our blankets to cover them. When I’d finished I sat down beside Max and I heard one of the people from the van telling the eyebrow woman that she was from Friends of the Library. She had a box full of books on her trolley.
‘We’ll take as many as we can and keep them safe until it’s all over,’ I heard her say. My heart was beating fast and I felt sick. I’d pinched plenty of other things, but never anything so valuable. These books were gold. They had dust jackets and shiny pages and plenty of coloured pictures. I told myself I needed them, like the food I’d pinched and the coins I’d used to make my getaway and the chalks for my education. But deep down I knew I’d stolen them because I wanted them. I’d become a thief.
Max turned a page. ‘They’re Grandpa’s cows,’ he said like he hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone.
I looked down and saw a picture of some white cows with black spots. They were standing in long green grass and the sky was pure blue.
‘How many has he got?’ I said, trying not to think about the books.
‘A lot . . . more than ten, I think.’
‘Where does he keep them?’ I hadn’t asked anyone this many questions for a long time. Once I started I couldn’t stop.
A Small Free Kiss in the Dark Page 4