That night, I sat on the bed and realised I’d never slept in a room on my own before. I missed having Astrid right there, in the bed next to mine. It felt weird. I didn’t know how I was supposed to fall asleep.
Z knocked. ‘You awake?’
I jumped out of bed and opened the door.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a sketchpad and pencil case, ‘you looked like you were about ready for a new one.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
We stood there for a moment cos I wasn’t sure what to say to him even though we’d just spent almost twenty-four hours straight together.
‘Awesome,’ I said, and immediately wished I’d come up with something, anything, better. Awesome? Why had I said that? I’d never said awesome in my life.
‘Goodnight,’ he said, and disappeared into his own room.
Of course. Goodnight. Idiot. That was what any sane, normal person would say in that situation. Goodnight. Or thank you. Or both. Thanks Z, and Goodnight, Z. Easy. Maybe a kiss on the cheek. A hug. Something. Idiot.
CHAPTER 15
In my dreams that night I was tangled up in barbed wire, just like the woman I’d seen at the wall. I woke, sweating and cold, and reached out for Astrid. It took a moment to work out she wasn’t there and I wasn’t at home. And the barbed wire wasn’t really ripping my skin apart.
We’d always shared a room. It was tiny, so I’d only have to reach across the gap between our beds to shake her awake when I’d had a nightmare. She would always tell me everything was OK and that always helped me get back to sleep. The older I got, the less I’d had to wake her. The nightmares stayed but I could deal with them knowing she was right there, next to me. She made me feel safe. Now I was on my own, in a room I didn’t know, on a bed that didn’t feel right, in a house that wasn’t ours. And I was thirsty. I felt shy about sneaking around the Drivers’ house in the dark. I didn’t want them to think I was snooping or stealing anything from them (except their goodwill) and my imagination went a little crazy with all these stupid ideas about what they’d think I was up to until I threw back the sheets and made myself get out of bed.
I tiptoed towards the kitchen, hesitating at Z’s door. His light was on and I imagined him sitting on his bed sketching, completely unaware of how late it was. I could have just slipped in. Said something like, You can’t sleep either? He would laugh, say, Come here, and I’d join him on the bed and … I stopped. Why the hell was I even thinking about stuff like that?
Diggs was sitting at the kitchen table. Next to him was a bottle of scotch. He downed a glass and, with shaking hands, refilled for another round. It looked like he’d had a few rounds already. I went to head back to my room. But he saw me.
‘Santee,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Sit down. Have a drink!’
‘No, thanks,’ I said.
‘You OK?’ he said, when really, I should have been asking him that.
‘Just wanted some water,’ I said, wishing I had stayed in bed after all.
He stumbled out of his chair and banged around in the kitchen for a glass. It took all his concentration to fill it with tap water and, in different circumstances, it might have been funny. But right then all I wanted was to get out of there.
‘Sit,’ he said. He thumped the glass on the table and sat down.
He looked so sad, as if his face belonged on a Lost Dog poster or something. I felt kinda bad for him, sitting there on his own, so I sat. He smiled. His breath smelled like booze. He said he wanted me to know something, and I thought, Hurry up with it so I can get outta here, but he was talking slow, as if it were a big effort to get the words out of his mouth.
‘It’s important,’ he slurred, ‘so you’ve gotta listen.’
‘Sure,’ I said, even though I wasn’t sure at all.
He cleared his throat and wiped his forehead before pouring another scotch. ‘The Regime took my wife.’
That word again. Regime. No-one actually said it, even if that’s what we thought of Varick and his party. It made me uncomfortable, hearing Diggs say stuff like that so loudly and so freely. But Diggs didn’t notice. Right then, he was in his own world, and I was just the unlucky audience.
‘She spoke out and they hated it,’ he continued. ‘They want to break us, control us, kill anyone who gets in their way.’ He slammed his glass on the table and the brown liquid sloshed over the sides.
I wasn’t sure what I was meant to say so I just nodded.
‘They’re greedy, power-hungry bastards and they, they want to destroy us, kill anyone who gets in their way.’ He started repeating himself, getting louder with every word.
I made a move to get Z but Diggs said, Listen, listen, listen, and I tried to tell him that maybe he should get some sleep but he just laughed in my face with that stinky, hot breath and kept going on and on, making zero sense until, thankfully, Z appeared.
‘Dad,’ Z said. ‘Time for bed.’
‘Zac, Zaccy, Zac,’ Diggs rambled.
‘Come on,’ Z said and tried to lift him from the chair.
‘Fuck off.’ Diggs swung out and pushed Z to the ground.
Everything seemed to go very, very still. I wanted to disappear. Vanish. Melt into the floor.
Z called Diggs all kinds of things I knew he’d regret later on. I didn’t know where to look or what to do. Z never looked at me, not once, but his face was full of shame and sadness and anger and I wanted to tell him, It’s OK, let’s just go back to our rooms and leave him out here. But Diggs wouldn’t stop ranting.
Z finally scrambled to his feet and moved close to his dad. ‘You are pathetic,’ he said in a voice that I didn’t recognise. Cold and removed and not the Z I thought I knew.
‘What did you say?’ Diggs stumbled.
‘You’re –’
But he never finished his sentence because Diggs slammed him into the wall, hard, and shouted, You little shit, or something and Z laughed and that made it worse cos Diggs raised his fist and I really thought he was going to punch him in the face and I wanted to go home so bad it hurt.
‘Dad.’
Standing in the doorway was Mila, ghostly, silent, arms folded across herself in a hug.
Diggs let go of Z and, as he did, let out a howl like I’d never heard before. And Z, silently, as if it was something he was totally used to, put his arm around his deflated father and half-dragged, half-carried him to his bedroom.
I was shaking as I tried to clean up the mess Diggs had left strewn across the table.
‘I can fix it up in the morning,’ Mila said gently.
I nodded cos words weren’t really working for me right then.
‘You wanna sleep in my room tonight?’ she said.
I did.
Mila pulled out a thin mattress from under her bed but insisted that was for her and that I had to take her bed. I lay down among the stuffed toys and cushions and stared up at the glowing stars on her ceiling. She reached out in the dark and squeezed my hand. Maybe she needed me there for her nightmares just as much as I needed her there for mine.
CHAPTER 16
I didn’t want to leave Mila’s room. I could hear them all out there, talking loudly like nothing had happened the night before, and for a second I wondered if maybe I’d dreamed the whole thing.
‘You coming out?’ Mila stuck her head in the doorway.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ I said, and scrambled out of bed.
‘You have nothing to apologise for,’ Mila said as she slipped into the room and closed the door. ‘But we do, and I am absolutely mortified that you saw that last night. I’m sorry.’
Mortified? What sort of ten-year-old says mortified? When I was ten I don’t think I’d have been able to spell it let alone use it in a sentence. But here she was. Mila. Staring at me with her kind, bright eyes.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah,’ I lied and smoothed down my hair self-consciously. It always looked a bit crazy in the morning.
‘You’re very brave,’ Mila said. ‘Jus
t thought you should know that.’
It wasn’t true. Not even a little bit. But it was nice to hear it, anyway. ‘How about you?’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Are you OK?’
‘You don’t need to worry about me.’
And there was something in the way she said it that made me think she was right. She gave me a quick hug before pulling me out of the room, insisting I had to eat breakfast.
Diggs kept calling it a road trip but, really, we were just going to pick up Z’s car. Or we were going to try to. I kinda doubted Red would be going anywhere, to be honest, except maybe the tip. We piled into Diggs’s car, which didn’t have a name but did have air-conditioning and windows that you could open and close. To watch the three of them together, you’d never imagine anything out of the ordinary had happened the night before. Mila called shotgun for the front seat, Z jumped in the driver’s seat as if he were going to drive, and Diggs told him, No way, buddy, and laughed. They all seemed perfectly fine. Normal. I wondered if, perhaps, Diggs’s drunken behaviour was their version of normal. That seemed to make it so much worse. Still, none of them were talking about it and I wasn’t about to bring it up, so I played along and pretended we were going on a drive.
The roads were deserted. The News had strongly advised that everyone stay indoors until further notice and it looked like everyone had listened. Except us. All I wanted to do was watch bad TV and try to contact Mum and wait for all of it to be over. But that wasn’t an option. According to Diggs, we needed to get out of the house or we’d go stir-crazy.
And so we went on Diggs’s road trip.
After a while, Z stretched his arm across the back seat and his fingers softly brushed my shoulder. Maybe a road trip wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Mila controlled the music because, One: she was Mila and, Two: those were the shotgun rules in this family. She filled the car with classical music, which is not the type of thing you’d expect a ten-year-old to choose but exactly the type of thing you’d expect from Mila. I’d never really listened to that sort of stuff before. Beth had wanted me to try it, For relaxation purposes. Just try it out, she’d said, for me. The next week I’d told her I’d tried but it didn’t help. She’d looked disappointed. And I’d felt a bit bad cos I’d lied to her. I hadn’t tried it at all.
But when I was there, in the car, I realised maybe Beth had been onto something. I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me, and while it didn’t make me relax (because who could relax in this situation?) it did seem to quiet down my mind. My brain had been on this non-stop loop of worry and questions and replaying everything I’d done wrong to end up in this situation and how and why and what the hell was I going to do … but Mila’s music kinda turned all that down for a bit somehow.
The waves of violins were interrupted by the whoop-whoop siren of a Unit patrol car.
Diggs swore loudly and pulled over. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. I couldn’t tell if he was reassuring himself or us.
He wound down the window as the officers approached. There were two of them, because they always came in sets of two. One of them stared in through the back window, right at us.
‘Good afternoon, Officer,’ Diggs said to the officer at his window.
‘You know why we’ve pulled you over today?’ She, like her partner, wasn’t smiling.
‘Nope, no idea. Why don’t you tell me?’ he said, and grinned. Like father, like son.
‘Step out of the vehicle.’ She sounded tired and over it.
‘Oh, come on,’ Diggs said, cos he didn’t seem to know when to give up. ‘We’re just out for a family drive. Kids go nuts stuck inside all day. You know how it is.’
‘Out,’ she demanded. ‘Now.’
Something about her tone made Diggs shut up and get out of the car.
‘Dad,’ Mila said, and reached for Diggs, but Z gently put his hand out to stop her. When she turned back to her brother, I could see she was trying not to cry. It broke my heart, seeing her look like that, and I squeezed her shoulder and said, It’s all right, even though I wasn’t sure if it was.
The officer walked Diggs over to the patrol car. We swivelled around in our seats to catch the action out the rear window. We could see the officers talking and Diggs nodding a lot, but we couldn’t hear what was being said. Diggs looked very serious, hands clasped in front of him as if he were posing for a formal photo. Mila sniffed loudly.
‘He’ll be OK,’ Z said.
‘Promise?’ she said, wiping her eyes.
‘Promise.’
Diggs’s laughter carried into the car. The scene had turned into something much friendlier. The officers were smiling and laughing with Diggs. It looked like they were old friends. Then he shook their hands and headed back to us, giving them a little wave goodbye before getting in the car.
‘Arseholes,’ he said, the smile still plastered across his face.
He waved again as the patrol car whizzed past us. As soon as they’d gone, his smile disappeared. He leaned over to Mila and gave her quick hug, murmured something into her hair.
‘What happened?’ I whispered to Z.
Diggs overheard me. ‘I worked my magic,’ he said as we pulled back onto the road.
‘It’s his job,’ Z said. ‘Cos he works at the studios.’
‘People are idiots,’ Diggs added. ‘I just have to tell them I’m a director. Give them my card. Name-drop a couple of celebrities. Give them a bullshit showbiz story. Ask them if they’ve thought about a career in television, because they have the right look for TV – “The camera will love you.” That kind of thing. They eat it up. Idiots.’
I watched him in the rearview mirror. He might have made it all sound like a big joke, but his face told a different story. The others laughed along with him. Maybe they didn’t notice the way he kept rubbing his temples, the look in his eyes. They’d got to him, those Unit Officers, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
As soon as we were on the windy tracks of the National Park we saw them. A group of people hiking through the long grass, their backpacks weighing them down. Diggs slowed the car to a stop and called out the window to check that they were OK. They gave the thumbs-up and kept walking, but Diggs wasn’t satisfied.
‘Stay here,’ he said, and got out of the car.
We looked at each other, then rushed over to join him. The hikers didn’t seem too thrilled about chatting with Diggs until they saw us. Once we arrived, they relaxed a little.
‘These are my kids,’ Diggs said. ‘I told them to wait in the car.’
‘But whoever listens to old Dad? What would he know, right?’ the man at the head of the pack said. He gave the kid standing next to him a playful punch and the kid said, Ouch, and looked totally embarrassed.
They were a family: a dad, his son and two cousins. He told us they’d been visiting their grandparents and stayed the night. Next morning ... well, we all knew that story. And now they were trying to get home.
‘Not trying. We actually are going home,’ one of the cousins said. She was older than the other kids, and she looked bored, as if talking to us was completely beneath her. I knew that look. I got it at school. A lot.
‘This is all my idea,’ she said. ‘It’s simple. They haven’t finished building the wall out this far. You can see it on the News. So, we’ll be able to get around it. Easy.’
It sounded good to me. I mean, if there was a way around the wall, maybe I could get home, too.
‘Could I come with you?’ I said.
The girl just looked me up and down like she was judging me.
‘What?’ I said, making myself taller and meeting her eye.
Z pulled me away. ‘You can’t go with them.’
‘Yes, I can,’ I said, and was about to return to the bitchy girl and her sneering face when Mila and Diggs stopped me.
The three of them surrounded me with this expression on their faces that said, Are you out of your mind?
‘Not a good idea, Santee,’ Diggs said
.
‘If they don’t die out here, they’ll get arrested at the wall, or worse,’ Z whispered. I suppose he didn’t want to hurt their feelings.
‘Look at them.’ Diggs gestured to the group. ‘You reckon they know what they’re doing?’
It was true. They didn’t look like the most experienced travellers with their overstuffed backpacks and sunburnt faces. But, still, they had a plan to get home. Surely that was better than waiting around for the unknown?
A drone buzzed across the sky, jolting me back to reality. Out there, surrounded by nature, it was easy to forget to be careful. In the bush there was no need to worry about interfering neighbours or security cameras or the Unit. And so you could forget people were still watching. They always were. Always. Even out there. Eyes in the sky. If not drones, then helicopters. Even the magpies seemed to sing out, We can see you.
I watched the drone disappear into the blue sky. Mum would want me to Be Careful. That was always her advice, even though I’d never really listened to it.
‘You coming?’ the girl yelled impatiently.
I told them no and that was that. The family waved goodbye and continued, single file, on their mission.
‘You know you can stay with us for as long as you need to,’ Diggs said.
‘That’s a promise,’ Mila added.
Red was where we had left her. Of course. Diggs and Mila worked under the bonnet checking oil and water and stuff like that. They told Z to stay away, that he’d done enough damage already.
We sat on a rock and looked over the bush that stretched out below us. I was looking for the family – I wanted to catch a glimpse of them, wanted to know they were OK and still on the right course. I really hoped Z was wrong. I wanted them to make it.
‘You made the right decision,’ Z said.
I shrugged. I still wasn’t convinced. I started to replay all the things I should have done differently. Maybe I should have taken the chance and gone with them. Why hadn’t I at least given them a message to take to Mum? Why had I gone off with Z in the first place? Once my brain started the why-didn’t-I? game it was hard to snap out of it. I thought of how Beth would say, It’s unhealthy to dwell in the past, and how I should, Focus on the future. It was a bit hard to focus on the future with a stupid wall blocking your way, though. I thought I’d ask her about that if I ever went back to school.
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