by John Marsden
‘Is he all right?’
‘Apparently. They’ve all had a hard time, and the youngster has been with your friends in an adult prison, so I don’t imagine he’d be in the best shape, but they’re being examined by one of our doctors today.’
‘When can I see them?’
‘We’re rushing them back. I’m not sure how far Wirrawee is from Absalom, where they’ve been held, but I’m told they’ll be in Wirrawee at 0800 tomorrow.’
Eight o’clock in the morning. Seventeen hours.
An afternoon and a night. One sleep. A sleep I wouldn’t be having. Seventeen hours.
It seemed so fast. One minute they were dead; the next, they were brought back to life, the next they would be standing in front of me.
I rang Fi’s parents, who were the only ones on the phone. I can’t remember what I said to them, can’t remember a word of the conversation. Then I stumbled out of the Shannons’ house and started running all the way to Kevin’s. The further I ran, the lighter my feet became, and the last three kilometres I didn’t even notice. I wish the Olympic trials had been on that day. I would have blitzed them.
It was two o’clock in the morning before I got home, and even then I only went back because I knew Mum and Dad would be out of their minds with worry. It was lucky my news got me off the hook. If I’d had any other excuse for being so late I think they would have really cracked.
It was funny being on curfew when such a short time before I’d been out all night launching attacks, killing people. I quite liked it though. Made life feel more normal again. Made me feel like I really was home, back with my parents, back to the way it had been before the war, when I was just a kid.
Mum and Dad wanted to talk, when I told them the news. But I’d had enough talking. I’d talked and listened and talked some more at the Holmes’ and again at the Yannos’. I’d never had so many hours of talking. We’d screamed and laughed and babbled and hugged and talked and talked and talked. God sure knew what he was doing when he gave human beings language. Without it we’d have been stuffed. Or we would have had to do a lot more dancing.
So I went to bed. I didn’t sleep, surprise surprise. I tossed and turned, I wriggled and squirmed, I tumbled and twisted. I rolled over to a new position every thirty seconds. One minute I was a tight little ball, the next I was sprawled across the bed.
Round about 3.30 in the morning I realised what I was feeling as much as anything. Terror. Terror? How could that be? Terrified of the people who were probably closer to me than my own parents? Well, that scared me for a start. I didn’t want anyone to be closer to me than my parents. I got a shock when I realised, there in the darkness, just how close Fi and the others had become to me.
But that was something to think about long-term. It wasn’t really that which had me kicking and flailing around the bed.
No, it was the fear that they would come back as monsters. That whatever had happened to them in those last few weeks of the war, and even since the war ended, might have been so horrible, so bestial, that they would come towards me out of a kind of hellish glow, with a green light shining from their mad eyes. Like the woman up on Tailor’s Stitch.
After going through so much together we had suddenly been separated. They had a whole lot of new experiences they’d shared, and all those experiences excluded me. The prison they’d been in might have set a new low. General Finley said they’d had a tough time. Just how tough was it? Enough to change them forever, so they would come back as strangers? Was it worse than Camp 23?
Worst of all, would they blame me for being caught? Had I done anything wrong? Should I have gone in a different direction, that night in the bush when I ran away from the truck stop? Should I have found Lee and the others again? Should I have led the soldiers away from our packs? Did I do the wrong thing by jumping onto the train? At the time I felt I had no choice, but maybe I was wrong about that.
I got up about 5.45 and sat in the kitchen shelling peas. Very good therapy, shelling peas. Normally anyway. This morning I felt too tired and heavy-eyed and sluggish and stupid.
Eventually Dad got up and came in, grunting something at me that sounded vaguely like ‘Good morning’. He put some toast on, put the kettle on, got out the poor variety of jams available these days. When the toast popped he spread me a slice with Vegemite. If I’d had to do it myself I wouldn’t have had any breakfast, but seeing he’d gone to the trouble, and seeing it was right there in front of me, I ate it. And I did feel a bit better.
‘Are you nervous?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Don’t know why. But I am.’
‘I thought you were. Guess you don’t know what shape they’ll be in.’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
There was much more to it than that, but I couldn’t be bothered explaining. Once you’re a teenager it’s like your parents so often just don’t get it, and that’s one thing that war doesn’t change.
Although when I came stumbling back from Tailor’s Stitch, bruised and grazed all over from the fight on the cliff top, they were great then. They held me and petted me and let me cry. Afterwards Dad took me into Wirrawee to report it. I had to write out this huge statement and answer heaps of questions, and I was glad I had Dad there. He’s good with stuff like that.
We’d only talked about the war a few times, I mean, like sat down and had a full-on serious conversation. That’s the kind of family we are. We talk about stuff, and always have, but there’s stuff we don’t talk about too. We referred to the war all the time of course, how couldn’t you? But apart from one conversation that went till after midnight, our second night back in the house, we didn’t go on about it. It seemed so incredibly unreal, so totally unbelievable, that I could have done the things I did, killed so many people. I think I was scared that if I started talking about it too much it would create a gulf between me and my parents that we would never be able to bridge. So we kind of played it safe, talked about other people, about the present and the future rather than the past.
Mum appeared and as soon as I’d cleared away the breakfast stuff I went and started the Land Rover, and drove it round to the front door, just to give them the hint.
The drive into Wirrawee seemed to take longer than any of the trips we’d done during the war. Even when we’d walked there. I drove, Dad sat beside me, Mum in the back seat. The only time anyone spoke was when Dad looked at a mob of cattle in a paddock on the left of the road and said: ‘You can’t beat hybrid vigour.’
I parked half a block down from the Post Office. We were way too early of course. A few minutes later Homer’s parents arrived, with George driving, then I realised Kevin’s parents were there already with their two little boys. They were parked on the other side of the street, another block up. Fi’s parents and Victoria were the last to arrive.
I felt sad that there was no-one I could tell about Lee. I’d still had no word about his little brothers and sisters.
Gradually, as eight o’clock got closer, we all got out of the cars, and gathered outside the Post Office. The mood was strange. I don’t think too many of us had slept. No-one said much. You could see the suppressed excitement in their clenched hands, in the way they gazed down the street, in the nervous dancing of the kids. Most of all in everyone’s eyes. But there were so many other things in their eyes too. So many shadows. All the parents looked about twenty years older since the start of the war. Everyone, adults and kids, looked thin and tired and sad and hungry, even on this special day. It was just the way people were now. Maybe it would change again as time went on, and they would start to look like they had a year and a bit ago. I couldn’t wait for that to happen. I wanted to wipe away the worry on their faces, and see their cheeks fill out again.
I still remember the screaming of brakes as the bus stopped. It was like a knife into my heart. I saw faces peering out of windows, but couldn’t see anyone I knew. Then I saw Kevin, looking gaunt and unshaven, waving at me from the back. Suddenly I knew it was going to
be all right. I waved madly at him then ran around to the door. I nearly knocked Fi over. She looked so exactly the same that it was disconcerting. Even with the scar on her face, it was like this war hadn’t changed her at all. We hugged, but only briefly, before Victoria, sobbing and wheezing, clutched her. Homer came off the bus but he was engulfed in people before I could reach him. He gave me a huge grin, then disappeared into a human knot of half-a-dozen bodies. Someone grabbed me from behind: it was Kevin, hugging me with his big hands and long arms. When he let me go I saw Lee behind him, waiting.
Perhaps that’s what had made me most nervous. With no-one else there to meet Lee I knew it had to be me. I felt like I had to be mother, father, sister, girlfriend to him, to welcome him home. It seemed like an awful lot of roles for one person. I didn’t think I could fill all those vacancies. He deserved to have all those people there, and then some. He should have had an avenue, a whole town of yellow ribbons on old oak trees. Instead he only had me.
I tried to be everything I could to him. I hugged him, kissed him all over his smooth face, held him tight. As I did, it struck me that Lee was in many ways our true hero. Lee was the one who did the dirtiest jobs, quietly, without fuss, without going into big emotional scenes. He was so efficient, so reliable, so brave. Wherever we fell short, he made up the gap. I’m not just talking about the red-hot moments, when enemy soldiers were shooting at us, when we were within a moment of death. I’m talking about the sourer times too, when we were so tired we could hardly remember to breathe, or we were so bored we’d pick at each other just for something to do, or so distressed we’d wish a soldier would come along and blow us into oblivion with an Ml6. At all those times Lee stood strong. He was like the Wirrawee grain silo. You could see the grain silo from miles away, tall and reliable. It stood for Wirrawee, and it gave you a safe comfortable feeling to know it was there. That was how I’d felt about Lee during the war. Most of the time anyway.
‘Do you know anything about your brothers and sisters?’ I asked when we separated. I was wiping my eyes.
‘More or less. I know they’re OK. They’re in a refugee camp, a couple of hundred kilometres away. I’ve got to ring General Finley as soon as I can. He reckons he’ll have the full details by the time I call him.’
‘What about Gavin?’
‘He’s been with us. Didn’t you know? They took him to Stratton this morning to see if they could find his rellies.’
‘Oh thank God for that. Is he all right?’
‘Gavin? He’s indestructible.’
‘So where have you guys been hanging out?’
He laughed. ‘How long have you got?’
I had plenty of time that day, but no-one else did. Three hours later Lee was whisked away in a car to get his brothers and sisters. It was three long days after that before the five of us actually got together. By then I think they were quite glad to get away from families that clung like scarves. For more than a year we’d dreamed of seeing our families again, but once we’d done it, well, three days was enough.
We met at Homer’s, down at the creek. It was nice there. I walked from our place; Kevin walked from his. Fi and Lee got a lift out with Fi’s mum, who had to inspect some new subdivisions. That was her excuse anyway. I think she could have inspected them anytime, but she took pity on us, and agreed to drive Lee and Fi.
It was funny. We were sort of awkward. An arranged meeting like this wasn’t the way we normally got together. We brought whatever food we could scrounge, but it was difficult with the rationing being so severe. All that time we’d spent during the war, having to live off the land; you’d think we’d be pretty good at scrounging food. But it was different now. Obviously we didn’t want to steal food off our friends and neighbours. I found some late blackberries and made a pie which went OK—the blackberries were all right, I mean you can’t really stuff up blackberries, but the pastry was kind of gluggy.
The highlight was some freeze-dried ice-cream that General Finley had sent from New Zealand, to Lee. It was in a pack called Astronaut Ice-cream, because it was supposed to be the same stuff the astronauts used on their space missions. The flavour, believe it or not, was Neapolitan. When you opened the pack—and that took about five minutes because it was sealed so tightly—you found these three separate packs, one pink, one white, one brown. They looked like pieces of chalk, and they sure were dry, about the driest substance I’ve ever picked up. I took a piece of the chocolate and put it in my mouth, while the others watched with interest. It was weird. It felt like fizzy stuff, like sherbet, until the moisture of my mouth gave it a bit more flavour. Then it tasted quite sweet and nice, but it didn’t taste like ice-cream.
On the pack they said it was ‘all natural’, but when I read the ingredients it had stuff like monoglycerides and diglycerides, potassium sorbate, ascorbic acid. They didn’t sound too natural to me.
After lunch I got up and wandered into the creek, up to my knees, then a bit further. Once I got used to the cold I dog-paddled down to a deep waterhole where Homer and I had often swum when we were little. Next thing Lee surfaced beside me, like a sly serpent from a burrow under the water.
‘Where are the others?’ I asked.
‘Asleep.’
He started undressing me, which wasn’t difficult, as I wasn’t wearing much. I watched my shorts float slowly away. I didn’t try to stop them. The water washed around my body like an endless loving caress. Like Lee’s tongue. I didn’t feel cold now. I didn’t feel passionate about Lee, like I had the other times, but my body was responding. God was it ever responding. When my undies drifted after the other bits of clothing I felt for the waistband of Lee’s shorts. They weren’t there. He was already naked. I slid up against him, and over him. I’ve never felt the pleasure more intensely. It was sweeter, stronger, sexier . . . and then disappointing. Without a condom I couldn’t keep him in me; I had to let him go and make up for it in other ways.
Afterwards was such a joke, trying to get my clothes back. It took about twenty minutes of deep-diving to find my T-shirt. While we were making love I’d had no self-consciousness about being naked, but now, after we’d both relaxed, I was half and half—half-embarrassed, but half just laughing because it all seemed so dumb and silly and funny.
As we walked back through the shallow section of the creek Lee tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I ran on ahead. I didn’t know what I felt about him or us or what we’d just done. This wasn’t the time or the place. I’d have to think about it later. The war was over. I wasn’t sure what else was over.
When we got to the others they were still sprawled on the sand, asleep or barely awake. Lee and I were in an extremely relaxed mood, and we spread this among the others, with generous lashings of sand and cold water.
And then, when they were sitting up and swearing and laughing and chucking anything we could find at each other, then finally we talked.
‘So what the hell happened at the truck stop?’ I asked Homer. He was making himself comfortable against a tree trunk, three or four metres away from Fi.
‘What happened to you? We’d thought you’d been killed out in the bush somewhere. We’d given you up as a hopeless case.’
‘I grabbed a train.’
‘On that train line we found with Gavin?’
I nodded.
‘You actually jumped onto a train?’
I nodded again.
‘Ah. We never thought of that. That was about the only thing we never thought of.’
‘So, come on, tell me, what happened? Did you stay together? When did you get caught?’
‘Well we got away from the truck stop, thanks to you.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They followed you, when you yelled out,’ Fi said. ‘That was wonderful, Ellie, that you did that.’
‘Yes,’ Kevin said. ‘We talked about that a few times after we were caught.’
I was blushing like a cherry.
‘I saw them chase you up th
e hill,’ Lee confirmed. ‘Nearly all of them went after you. We only had a couple left to worry about.’
‘But they followed us a long way,’ Fi said. ‘It must have been two or three kilometres.’
‘Yeah, I think even Gavin was getting worried,’ Homer said.
‘So how did you get rid of them?’
Homer took over, in one of his favourite roles, the storyteller.
‘We were belting along, but the more tired we got, the more noise we made. So I thought, “We’ve got to get a bit more creative here”. I dropped back till I was next to Lee, and I said: “You want to hide, let them go past you?” He’s quite bright, Lee; I think he’ll do well for himself. The next minute he ducked behind a tree, without another word said. I was a bit worried that I hadn’t mentioned the second part of the plan, which was that he’d get them from behind. I thought he might just stay around the back of the tree for the rest of the war, but luckily he worked it out for himself.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked Lee, feeling the familiar stirring in my stomach as I spoke, wishing I didn’t have to ask, but knowing we were in this together. I couldn’t leave Lee to spend the rest of his life with the knowledge of another dirty job that he’d done on his own, and no-one to share that knowledge with.
‘Used a knife,’ he said looking away.
And that was all I could get out of him. I don’t imagine it helped him much in dealing with it.
Homer described how they kept running as best they could for most of the night. Eventually it was Gavin who couldn’t go on.
‘He was disgusted with himself,’ Fi said. ‘But his little legs just wouldn’t work any more. We found a bit of a hollow, halfway up a hill behind some fallen trees. We had to carry him up there.’
‘When she says “we” she means “me”,’ Kevin explained.