by Nick Earls
He lectured Paul about how he had to do it, but Paul just wanted to have a go. Mr Macleish told him we weren’t gangsters, there’d be none of that shooting from the hip rubbish. And no thrashing around, since his turn would be up in seconds that way, and it wasn’t how you were supposed to do it. You had to fire bursts of two to three shots only, and use them to walk your fire to the target.
Paul gave it a try, and Mark and I stood well back and behind Mr Macleish. Paul never paid enough attention to instructions and he’d already done a gearbox in the tractor because of it, so we weren’t going to take any chances. But he did all right. And the silencer didn’t make it silent, but it wasn’t noisy either, certainly not like you’d expect a submachine gun to be.
Then Mr Macleish handed me the Webley, and he took three bullets from his pocket and told me he’d give them to me one at a time. He told me to keep steady, and to use both hands and keep both eyes open. He said there would be a kick, but I’d be okay.
I missed the can with the first bullet, and we all laughed since I wasn’t too close, but I hit it with the next two.
There was never one clear moment when it turned serious – perhaps it was the afternoon in the cellar, perhaps shooting at the cans, perhaps not. Each step seemed small, and also exciting, and the natural successor to the step before. We were eight, we’d read about these things, here they were and we were getting our chance. We’d read Commandoes, we’d played at being commandoes but we couldn’t get caps for our cap guns any more and now, once in a while with Mr Macleish, we could use the real thing instead.
I wondered where the bullets went, into the dirt in the potato field. I wondered if, one day, someone might dig there and find them, and we’d all be in terrible trouble. They’d tell my parents, for a start.
I picked up the three empty cartridges, and the last one still felt warm. I gave them back to Mr Macleish and he put them in his pocket and said, ‘Good girl.’
Perth — Saturday
WE TRAVEL NORTH and inland, through the suburbs. There are twelve of us, nine men and three women, and I’m sitting next to Terri, a location scout who has been working with Elliott somewhere outside the city for the past two days. They’ve been searching for beaches that have the features their script calls for, and a place that can look like a fishing town that’s down on its luck.
‘I’m probably only here because you need a minimum of twelve,’ she says, ‘but I thought I might as well come when Elliott asked me. You never know what these things are like unless you give them a go.’
She sits with a water bottle between her knees and tells me that she saw in the paper this morning that I’d been busy lately. She asks about Canada, and says she’s always wanted to go there, particularly to the Rockies and to that very grand old hotel that’s in either Montreal or Quebec City.
There are fewer houses now, and more dry bush. Elliott has the radio tuned to a commercial station with a playlist that owes a lot to the soundtrack of The Big Chill. He keeps turning around and telling anyone he makes eye contact with how great this is going to be, like someone trying to create nostalgia from scratch, and too early in the process. The two men from the network head office in Sydney are sitting behind him, but most if not all of the others are locals – the Perth station general manager, a sports reporter, the producer of a local travel and lifestyle show.
I remember how quiet I was in the car when my mother picked me up from the Macleishes’ after my first turn with the Webley. Not quiet but silent, actively not speaking in case the new secret came out, sitting saying nothing and remembering how the gun had felt to fire. ‘What’s got into you?’ she said, since we usually talked a lot. ‘Are they tiring you out with all that homework?’ And I told her that was it exactly and she should get them to give me less, and she messed my hair around with her hand and laughed and said, ‘Next you’ll be telling me they’re sending you home from school with specific instructions to watch more television.’ I had wanted to keep the empty cartridges, to take them home and hide them in my room, but I knew that wasn’t possible.
I had wanted them because they could remind me always of where I stood, and what I was part of. I could have hidden them in plenty of places. And they were mine really, since I’d fired the bullets.
Mr Macleish had seemed proud of me for hitting the target twice, and for knowing not to leave the spent cartridges lying on the ground. ‘But I’m sure your ma’s always been one for tidiness,’ he said. ‘She’s always nicely presented.’ It was the only time I can ever recall him mentioning her.
Close to twenty years later, when the movie JFK came out, my mother said to me, ‘Do you know what Mark Macleish’s father said about all that when it happened? When Kennedy got shot? It must have been the day after, and I said how terrible I thought it was and he said, “But sure he was only a Catholic.” And that was it for him. “Only a Catholic.”’
We turn off the road and drive through an open gate. There’s bush on either side of us, but it thins out after a couple of minutes, and we come to a large dirt carpark with open land beyond it. There are maybe ten cars and another minibus there already, and a row of demountable buildings marking the far side of the parking area. A man waves to us and starts walking over. He’s wearing a black T-shirt, camouflage pants and a black Oakland Raiders cap over buzz-cut hair.
The first thing he says to us, in a rousing kind of way, is, ‘So, is everybody ready to have fun?’
He must be twenty or so, and up close he looks less like someone in a militia and more like a student on a weekend job. He introduces himself as Trent, and says it’s up to him to show us the ropes. In the distance, a whistle blows three times, and a group of male voices cheers.
Trent leads us to one of the demountables, where he takes us through the rules. He uses words like ‘tagging’, ‘opponents’ and ‘markers’, instead of ‘shooting’, ‘enemies’ and ‘guns’. He says paintball is ‘like a living chess game’, probably knowing that he’s saying it to a roomful of people who are mostly half-listening and fantasising already about leaping into enemy bunkers and blasting the bejesus out of each other. All the way here on the bus, not one person thought to liken it to chess. Not that Elliott would have made it easy.
The analogy is hardly helped when Trent drags a boxful of camouflage overalls from the corner of the room.
‘These are optional,’ he says as he starts handing them out, ‘but most people like to wear them, more because you can get dirty out there than anything else. But don’t be worried if your own clothes get tagged, because we use a biodegradable dye, rather than a paint, and it comes out easily. There’s also a pair of gloves for everyone and some personal protection equipment that you have to have on before you can go out on the course.’ He lifts another box onto the table in front of him. ‘And in here we have the mask–goggle system that we use for face and eye protection.’ He pulls one out and shows it around. ‘As you can probably tell, it’s adapted from something similar that’s used for motocross, but it has enhanced visibility without compromising on safety.’
As soon as he’s got his overalls on, Elliott starts being irritating and saying he wants to get out there shooting people. He looks like a gardener, but he starts talking in a way that I think is supposed to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. A couple of people laugh politely. If he moves on to say he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, I will probably kill him.
The room feels different now, with everyone in their camouflage. The padded vest I’m wearing flattens my chest and bulks me up. Outside I can hear noises, someone running through nearby bush, the rapid-fire gas discharges of shooting.
Trent puts two markers on the table, an Automag Semi and a Tippmann pump-action. He explains the different ways they work, and Elliott picks up the Tippmann.
He holds it waist high, pointing it out in front of him, and he says ‘Just like a Tommy gun’ and he puts on a stupid scowling face and goes ‘eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh’ in a fake machine-gun noise, raking the
room with pretend bullets and shaking the gun in his hands as he does it.
I grab the barrel as it’s about to swing my way. He looks at me as if I’ve spoiled his fun, and I find myself saying ‘Except for not being like a Tommy gun at all’ and some of the others go ‘ooooh’, as if I’m about to start a fight. Elliott stops pushing against me, but I can’t let go of the barrel, not yet. The room goes quiet. ‘It’s nowhere near as shapely as a Tommy gun. It’s got that ugly functional thing happening, more like an Uzi, or a Sten. Not that the Sten was brilliantly functional. Anyway, it’s more like an industrial glue dispenser than a gun.’
The others come back at that with a louder longer ‘ooooh’, and Elliott smirks at me and lowers the barrel.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he says to the rest of them. ‘Didn’t I tell you how good she’d be at this stuff?’
But we don’t choose the Tippmann. We choose the Automag Semi. It can fire eight shots a second, and that’s more like what Elliott had in mind. Trent takes us to the firing range for some practice shots, and he says, ‘This is also where we execute people who shoot referees.’
He gives us each a large bulbous black paintball hopper which fits on top of the marker and feeds paintballs down into it for firing. Once that’s attached it doesn’t look like a gun at all. Elliott blasts from the hip and a couple of others do too. Paintballs spray around, bursting in the dirt and against trees and sometimes on the targets. The targets are black silhouettes of people.
I get the feel of the trigger and I lift my gun and look along the barrel under the hopper. There’s a row of eight targets, standing still and waiting for it, black silhouettes against a white background. There are paintballs buzzing in the air around me and splattering against everything in front of us. I take aim at a gum tree over to the right, and fire a single-shot. There’s almost no recoil, and the paintball seems to dip a little and goes slightly to the left of where I’d expected. I take another shot, and it’s almost corrected, a couple more and I have the feel of it.
Trent leads us to the first course, and we divide into teams of six. We’re fighting for a village, he tells us, but it turns out to be more an arrangement of high corrugated-iron fences, with gaps and some holes cut for windows and doors. There’s no time to get a sense of the layout, so no real chance to plan how to handle it. Elliott takes his team down one end and I’m with the others.
Someone says ‘What do you reckon we should do?’ and I tell them I’m pretty sure Elliott’s going to go mad. We should fan out in good defensive positions and let them attack.
I check my equipment. I take a slow breath in and out. My heart rate’s up already.
The whistle blows, the game starts. There’s whooping from the far side of the village as Elliott and his team charge into action. They appear in the distance around a wall, in a clump and running bent over. We should hold our fire, but of course we don’t. The shooting starts, and they don’t scatter quickly enough. They return fire, and keep running our way. I’m crouched on one knee at the edge of a sheet of corrugated iron, and paintballs start clanging everywhere.
I fire a burst of a couple of shots and they go wide to the left. Another couple of shots and I’m closer, and the next burst collects someone in the chest. I aim to the right as he falls, and I fire again. Dye splatters from the next guy’s visor.
I roll back fully into cover as two of the others start shooting at me. There’s a crack in the sheeting further along, and I lie down and fire through it. Three of them make cover, and the shooting stops.
It’s quiet for a moment, then I can hear them running in the dry grass behind the fencing. They’re coming to our right. I signal to the others, pointing that way. They’re circling us. I signal to listen, and to move quietly.
They burst out of a doorway firing, most of their shots slapping into metal, and the first of them is hit so many times he recoils against the wall and red dye splatters all across his front and he drops to the ground shouting out, ‘You’ve got me already.’
We take out the other two at the same time, and lose only one of our own. The whistle blows to end the game, but my heart’s still racing. We’ve got them, all six of them, I counted as they were hit, it’s over. I wipe my palms on my overalls. The others are laughing, pushing back their masks. Terri reaches a hand down to the sports reporter, who is still on the ground. He pulls himself up in a B-movie wounded-soldier way and leans back against the wall.
‘That really hurts, you know,’ he says. ‘When you get hit by about twenty of them at once. How did I get to be the one coming out of the doorway first?’
A gust of wind blows through the village and rustles the grass. Trent hands around a bottle of water. Elliott tries to brush dye from his overalls with his hand, but only spreads it around. The band from his mask has pressed his dark wavy hair flat, and there’s sweat running down his neck.
‘New teams,’ he says indignantly, looking mainly at me. ‘You used a strategy.’
I remind him that it’s a living chess game, not a day out for rampaging maniacs, and that draws a third ‘ooooh’ from some of the others.
He takes me aside on the way to the next course and says, emphatically, ‘I love what you’re doing. Love it.’
The second game is ‘Woodland Sniper’, and it sends one person alone into the trees to evade capture for twenty minutes, while sniping at pursuers. The first two times we do it, it lasts about five minutes. The sniper claims a couple, then starts shooting crazily as they’re encircled and brought down.
I’m sent out third, and I go far into the bush and up a small rise. I have good cover, and can only be attacked from the front and one side. At first I’ve still got the chess-game analogy in my mind, but then I see them advancing in a line, moving from tree to tree, eleven people unrecognisable in their camouflage and masks. There’s no shooting, just the sound of them brushing past bushes and low branches, moving in and out of shadows. They’re not even talking. I’m their target, and they’re coming my way.
Like the first two snipers, I suppose, my nerves start to fray.
I want to run, to see if there is better cover further back. But they’d see me, they’d get me. They’re crouching, running between trees, closing in, and I can never see them all at once. I try to get lower, but they’ll find me anyway. I can’t be small enough, I can’t hide.
Their line breaks up as they get closer. They’re almost upon me. I have no choice but to shoot now.
I take out one, two, and the others go to ground. But I keep shooting, hitting trees, and they’re onto me, returning fire. Firing through the bushes all around me and moving again, coming forwards. I’m firing almost blind, staying low and firing. I hit another one, but it won’t be enough. I’m feeling sick, and hot.
I manage to get six of them, or seven, before they storm my position.
‘Eighteen minutes,’ Trent says. ‘That’s as close as we’ll get, I reckon.’
He gives us sandwiches and bottles of soft drink, and we sit around in the patchy shade at the edge of the course. I wipe my visor against my overalls to get the dye off. I drink, but I’m not hungry. I’d be happy to go back to the city now. I’d prefer that.
For the third game we’re on the same course, with two teams each fighting to claim the enemy’s flag. Our tactics quickly go wrong, and I get separated from the others. I’m down on the ground behind a log when two of the enemy come past. I can see their boots but nothing more. They’re talking, whispering to each other. I can’t hear what they’re saying. Until they’re gone I don’t even breathe.
Shots are fired, one or two hit a tree, more than that I don’t know. I get up on my knees and then run to the next piece of cover when it’s all clear. There’s a long burst of fire in the distance, another in reply.
My heart rate is up again, I can feel it.
I run to another tree. To the left, in the distance, the two who passed me before are searching. I don’t know who they are with their masks on. They’re goi
ng from tree to tree, holding their guns waist-high and ready, sweeping their guns in front of them, ready to fire.
It’s not like the first game, not any more. In the first game they just charged at us, shooting for the sake of it.
I run harder but there are more of them than just those two, and they could be anywhere. The treetops bend in the wind and the light comes through and the shadows move. They’re closing in on me again, I know they are. And I could be the last. I could be the last of my team, and maybe they’re all after me now, sweeping through the trees.
I go faster, but it’s getting hard to breathe in this vest. It’s constricting me, I’m getting dizzy. There could be one of them behind any tree, behind anything. I’m making too much noise. I know I’m going to be caught, and they’re going to shoot me. I keep running, dodging around bushes, pointing my gun at shadows. There’s something red on the ground in front of me. I see its eyes and its teeth and I jump over it, trip and fall. I look back and it’s a tree root, bulging up out of the ground. I thought it was a fox, just for a second there, but dead already.
I pick up my gun and I run again. I want to be out of here, out of the trees. I can do better if I’m out of the trees.
I jump over a branch and between two bushes to a patch of clear ground, and someone in camouflage turns and brings their gun up to fire but I fire first. But my gun’s jammed. I’m upon them already, our guns clatter together, their shot goes wide. I kick, stomach high. Breath grunts out of him – it’s a man – and he falls to his knees and drops the flag. I swing my gun at him like an axe at a tree, two-handed, and his head snaps back when it hits, his visor split down into his face, into his right cheek. He flops to the ground and lies on his back looking up at me. It’s Elliott, Elliott King.