The Ellie Chronicles (31 page)

Homer and Jess came back at high speed and then it was action action action. Within four minutes they were gone, leaving Pang, Gavin and me by ourselves. Suddenly I felt very funny. It was like the women and children being left behind while the others went off to war. It didn’t help that Jess was with them. Three guys and a girl. She shouldn’t be one of the tough ones, the fighters, the ones who get out there and take the risks. She didn’t have the experience. Officially she was going as a sort of back-up, because she didn’t know much about guns. But I knew how quickly that would change if they got into any hot situations. How would she handle it? She might jeopardise the whole thing. If she did she would jeopardise the lives of three of my friends.

I couldn’t decide how much of my emptiness was personal. Off went these three boys and maybe none of them would come back. Off went these three boys with Jess, one of the best looking girls at Wirrawee High School. I realised I was angry at being in a war situation again, mad at Homer and Lee for jumping into it, and furious at Jess for cutting across my tracks. I also realised that if it had not been for Gavin I probably would have signed up for Liberation and gone. Even allowing for Gavin maybe I should have gone. But the thought of Gavin without me was not good. I was all he had. If I got knocked off, Gavin’s best chance then would be to move into the dog pen with Marmie. I needed Homer and Lee, and of course Jeremy, to stay alive for a very long time to come, but Gavin needed me to stay alive for at least ten years. Funny, by then he’d be older than I was now.

Speaking of Gavin, it was time to round him up and organise the evening before it got any darker. At least looking after him and Pang would keep my mind off the danger that the other four were approaching. I called Pang. But just as she answered from the spare room, where she’d be sleeping, the phone rang.

It shocked me, because I wasn’t expecting it. I jumped, and then grabbed it, thinking, completely irrationally, that it might be Homer or Lee. It was Bronte, inviting herself to visit. She was only a couple of k’s away and calling on her mobile. Her mum had said she’d drop her off at my place and she could get the bus back to school tomorrow.

To be honest, even though I liked Bronte a lot, I thought I had enough on my plate already, but I could hardly say no when she was so close.

Pang was waiting in the doorway. ‘Let’s go find Gavin,’ I said. ‘There’s a friend of mine coming over, so we’d better think about some dinner.’

As we crossed the yard she took my hand. Funny how that little hand in mine made me feel all protective. Gavin wasn’t really one for hand-holding. It made me think, not for the first time, that it would be nice to have a sister. To have had a sister. I could never have a sister now. I would always be an only child.

I know some people would say I was irresponsible in the way I looked after Gavin. I know there are people in the Wirrawee district who are saying it right now, although of course they are the ones who have the least idea of what we do and the way we live. The most ironic thing that had happened to me in the last twelve months was that I had been put under a court-appointed guardian after my parents died, but the legal system that did that to me completely ignored Gavin. That was fine by me, and anyway, my guardians didn’t interfere much with my life except to bring around casseroles and give advice on farming. When your guardians are Homer’s parents and they’ve kind of been your guardians all your life, nothing has to change much. But it’s a bit strange when you think about it.

So, just to give people who think I’m irresponsible a bit of evidence they can use, I’ll say it straight out: I lost Gavin that evening. He wasn’t in the big shed. He wasn’t in any of the little sheds, not even the woodshed. He wasn’t in the woolshed or in the dog pens or over with the chooks. None of this might have mattered too much on a normal day. I mean, we were meant to be red-hot on security these days and taking multiple precautions every time we brushed our teeth or went on a picnic, but of course the truth was that most days there were moments or minutes or even hours when we forgot or made a mistake or simply thought, ‘Stuff it, can’t hide under the bed all day every day.’

This day though was different. There was such an atmosphere of tension that I couldn’t imagine even Gavin ignoring it and going off on his own into the paddocks. Not only that, but he wouldn’t want to be away from the action. Where there was Homer and Lee, there would be Gavin. Sure Pang’s arrival might have thrown him off balance, but not this far off balance. I cursed myself for not being more aware of him earlier, of thinking it was OK for Gavin to be missing when Homer and the other three set off.

I couldn’t hide my anxiety from Pang as I walked faster, searching a wider and wider area. She became silent, trotting beside me to keep up. I appreciated that she didn’t chatter any more. She seemed so different to Lee in every other way that I was almost surprised to find that she had the same sensitivity as her brother.

Running now, I went back to the big machinery shed. I looked more carefully. First thing I noticed was what I three-quarters expected to see. The motorbike was missing, the Yamaha that was Gavin’s favourite. I remembered Pang telling me how she’d seen Gavin fuelling motorbikes and I asked her which bikes. Where was he doing it? Did he say anything? How was he looking?

‘He didn’t take any notice of me.’

‘Did he know you were there?’

‘Oh yes, he glanced at me, but just looked away. He wasn’t very friendly. It was like he didn’t want me to be there. I thought, “Well, if you don’t want to be friends, that’s OK,” so I left.’

That didn’t prove anything. Gavin probably would have treated Pang that way at any time. Standing in the area where he’d done the fuelling – the area where we normally service the bikes – I looked around quickly. And I did notice something. The door at the back of the shed was open. Only by a metre, at the most, which is why I didn’t notice it before. I went over there. A cold breeze wafted through it. Pang slipped ahead of me and went outside as I looked at the gap. ‘Just enough room for a little kid on a Yammie,’ I thought.

‘Look here, Ellie,’ Pang said. ‘That’s from a motorbike, isn’t it?’

She was pointing to the ground. In the mud were the tracks of bike wheels. Pang was onto it. For a Thai-Vietnamese-Australian she would have made a pretty good Aboriginal tracker.

I heard a car and guessed it would be Bronte. Before going back to the house to meet her I ran with Pang along the road at the back of the machinery shed. The motorbike tracks were clear enough in the winter mud and wet grass. They were heading straight for the gate that led to the paddock that led to the lagoon that led to the next paddock that led to another paddock that led to the track that if you followed it all the way led to the border. This didn’t prove Gavin had set off for the border but it sure as hell suggested that he wasn’t thinking about his homework or making a sandwich or watching TV.

Panting hard now, from fear more than physical effort, I ran back through the shed to the other side of the building. Between the shed and the house was Bronte. Her mother’s car was already heading down the driveway. For a moment I thought of trying to call her mum back but then realised we had to deal with this on our own, for now anyway. I grabbed Bronte by the hand and tried to explain things to her. There was a problem though. I didn’t know how much she knew. But she was a smart girl, Bronte. I had the feeling she’d always know more than I expected.

Whoa, whoa, wait a sec, Ellie, surely he wouldn’t go off like that. What do you think, that he wants to be with the others? To be with Homer?’

‘No! Well, yes, but it’s not just that. He thinks they’re going off to have a look at the . . . well, to be honest, the other side of the border. And if Gavin thinks there’s any fighting going on, he’ll be there. He’s mad about it. Has been ever since the war.’

‘But Ellie, he’s only–’

‘Oh forget that. You know how adults love saying they’ve got an inner child? Well, Gavin’s got an inner adult.’

‘So tell me exactly what you think he might have done.’

I had to pause and work that out. What was I exactly expecting?

Carefully I said, ‘I think he’s most likely going to wait for them a long way down the track, and either join them there or, more likely, follow them right over the border and then pop up and say, “Here I am,” at a point where there won’t be anything they can do about it. If they see him too early they’ll send him back. With Jess maybe. He’s smart enough to figure that out.’

‘OK, so what are your options?’

I was impressed by Bronte, not for the first time. Even standing there I was thinking, ‘Gosh, she is just who I need at this moment.’ She didn’t ask any unnecessary questions. In fact she didn’t seem too surprised to hear what had been going on. I guess she was well aware how crazy people like Homer were, and she’d probably heard a few rumours. Not for the first time I wondered if she was a member of Liberation herself.

‘Well, to follow him, I guess. Or to stay here and do nothing. I don’t think that’s much of an option. But I’ve also got Pang to look after.’

‘I don’t need looking after,’ Pang said. ‘I look after the other kids all the time at home when Lee’s out.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘When he’s out chasing girls.’

‘Chasing girls?’ I was distracted for a moment and had to shake my head to get my thoughts back together.

‘I can look after Pang,’ Bronte said. ‘Or I can take her to Homer’s. I’m sure she’d be fine there. They’re your guardians, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. Already I was clearing my mind of the Pang Problem. I’ve noticed before how the brain doesn’t keep what it doesn’t need. If Bronte was going to take care of Pang I could erase Pang from my memory for now and concentrate on more important things. It sounds a bit brutal but I suppose it’s the way the brain keeps you functioning efficiently. In Year 9 I’d memorised heaps of stuff about the Myall Lakes Massacre and the Protector guy in Tasmania, but straight after the test all I could remember was the Protector’s name. Robinson.

I ran back into the shed, started up the four-wheel Polaris and moved it to the bowser. ‘Can you fuel it?’ I asked Bronte. She just nodded. I went back into the house and got some warm clothes, for both me and Gavin. I was pretty sure Gavin wouldn’t have thought of practicalities like that in his mad rush towards the action. I grabbed a couple of bananas, three hardboiled eggs and an apple, and filled my jacket pockets with biscuits. I shoved all the other bits and pieces into a backpack and then got the rifle and the ammo. My heart sank when I opened the gun safe, because one of the shotguns was missing. Bloody Gavin was way out of line. He had survived for so long that he thought he was invincible. I suppose the more people succeed, the more confident they become and the higher they stretch. But I knew something that Gavin was too young to understand. That the higher you stretch the closer you get to the crash. If you keep going higher forever you end up as a God. That’s not an option for most people, including Gavin and me. The time to take great risks is at the start, when you’ve got little to lose and you haven’t used up your luck. The time to get supercareful is when you’ve done brilliantly. Every success brings you nearer to the failure. For Gavin’s sake I had to hope and pray he had one more success, one more crop of luck still to be harvested.

Bronte had fuelled the Polaris, checked the oil, cleaned the headlight glass and, most amazingly of all, tied a full water bottle to the luggage rack at the front. I thanked her, said goodbye to her and Pang, and blasted out of the yard at maximum revs, wondering if I’d ever see either of them again.

BASICALLY I TOOK the fastest route I knew to Rawson Road, or, like Lee said, what we used to call Rawson Road. I stopped three times, when I got into muddy sections of the track, to see if I could figure out what was going on. And the third time, about two k’s past the border, I did get a beautifully clear picture of what had happened. It was like reading a story. The two utes were hidden behind a tree. In some places the track was better than the last time I’d come this way, but in most places it was starting to degenerate, and you could see where Homer and the others had swung off the road and parked. Up ahead was a rocky section that would have tested the utes beyond their limits. There was a whole chopped-up area behind the utes with footprints and motorbike tyre marks, where the four of them had obviously gotten on the bikes and ridden away. And although it took me three or four minutes, three or four minutes I couldn’t afford, eventually I found the marks of a third motorbike. They were on the left-hand side, away from the other two, which went down the middle. The same as I’d seen back at the machinery shed with Pang: a chunky tread but with bigger spaces between the chunks than the other bikes. It had made a lighter impact in the mud, as though it had less weight on it, and like the others it was fresh.

I ran a couple of hundred metres back towards my place, looking for more evidence. I needed to know whether Gavin had joined up with them or not. Near a huge gum tree, in another long stretch of soft ground, I saw where his tracks had left the road. I followed them and lost them almost straight away, but when I went to the gum tree I found where he had hidden. There were a couple of oil spots and part of a Fruit Tingles wrapper. I reminded myself to have a look at the bike sometime in the impossible future to see how much oil it was losing. My guess was that he had hidden somewhere further back, waited for the utes to pass him, and then followed. While they abandoned the utes he waited behind this tree then continued to follow. He was too close to home to let them know he was there. If they realised he was dogging their steps they would still send him back.

I set off again. I knew I was a long way behind but there was nothing I could do about that. I rode into darkness. The daylight failed fast. At least it seemed to get a bit warmer as the wind dropped away. At the first crossroads I went left. I had a feeling this road was called Sutherland’s but I wasn’t certain. It didn’t matter much, as I was pretty sure of my general direction.

I was trying to plan my strategy for when I got to Rawson Road. The whole idea of planning for something so out of my control was dumb but I suppose all planning is dumb in a way. Seeing you can’t predict the future, and seeing you can’t control other people, not to mention vehicles, animals, falling trees, the weather and your own self most of the time, planning has got to be . . . what? A kind of insurance policy. A way of trying to make yourself feel OK, because you can pretend you do have control of your life and the world around you. This is very reassuring when you’re heading into dangerous and horrible situations.

That’s what I thought about, riding along in the cold damp evening, trying not to use my lights. Generally I used a torch instead of headlights, which was not nearly as good of course. Safer in terms of attracting attention but violently dangerous when it came to road safety. I knew the others would be doing the same though, so at least I wasn’t losing more time.

I’d thought I would find Rawson Road pretty easily, but something basic had changed. I don’t want to sound too cosmic and psychic but because it wasn’t our country any more it seemed almost impossibly different. How weird that was, to be in a foreign country where such a short time ago it had been a part of our everyday world. The dirt road I was going down now for instance: not much more than a year ago I could have driven or ridden or walked down here without much thought. Just another dirt road lined with gum trees, a fence that badly needed fixing, a concrete-lined ford across a dip, and in the distance a farmhouse with lights on and people at home. I should have felt at home myself. But a new spirit had spread across the land and I trembled as I pushed forwards, knowing that although it felt like my land it was not. It smelt different. The energy was not the same. I was in alien territory. Instead of getting onto a plane and flying for a zillion hours to get somewhere else, now we could do it by wandering down a track for four hours.

Soon enough though I had to think about stuff that was more down-to-earth. Like self-preservation. All those days back in Wirrawee, going to school, looking after the farm, managing the cattle, trying to manage Gavin: all of that suddenly slipped off me and once again I was the hunter and the hunted. I felt like I’d turned into an animal, a fox maybe, and without any effort I was focused on finding the prey without being shot. I’d seen foxes do terrible things but I’d also admired their cunning. They could grab a duck in broad daylight, when I was working less than fifty metres away. They could find the only hole in the wire; they could tunnel into a chook yard; they seemed to know when you were holding a rifle and when you were only holding a stick; and on the one night when you’d forgotten to lock the gate into the poultry yard, they somehow knew and came sneaking in and killed everything that moved.

Well, I had to be the fox, and somehow I put on the skin of a fox and became a fox on a four-wheel motorbike. You can make a bike go pretty quietly if you keep the revs down and sneak along. I thought my problem at this stage would be more to do with finding Rawson Road than with aggressive enemies. I was trying to picture a map in my head and I thought Rawson Road ran from north to south, from my right to my left, across the flat monotonous country that I was in now. I forced the pace as fast as I could, but the noise of the bike got too loud when I went above thirty or thirty-five. I wondered how the others had done it. Would they have abandoned their bikes and gone on foot? With two bikes – plus one they didn’t know about – their noise problem would be more severe than mine of course.

Time was passing too fast and I felt under pressure to push on. Headlights travelling from right to left showed me I was coming to an intersection. It looked big and busy. Rawson Road? I waited for the headlights to pass, then had to wait for two more vehicles going the other way. Busy road. Maybe it was Rawson. I rode out onto the bitumen and looked around, feeling kind of bold. There was no way to tell what road it was. I rode cautiously down it, wondering how far I should go. If I’d got the wrong one this could be an expensive side trip. I suddenly remembered too that you’re not meant to ride four-wheelers on made roads. Well, not my four-wheeler anyway. It was something to do with the tyres. They ploughed up the paddocks any time I went off the tracks. Around the front of the machinery shed where I rode in and out, you could see nothing but muddy tracks. The grass was worn away in no time flat. They were heavy-tread tyres and I don’t know why they couldn’t tolerate bitumen but apparently they couldn’t.

Well, tough luck. For tonight they had no choice.

I’d gone about a k and a half when I saw one of those green and white direction signs ahead. Thank goodness. I’d been lucky no more cars had come. If I was really lucky the sign would tell me I was on Rawson Road. If I was really really lucky Homer and Lee and the others would be waiting there with Gavin to say, ‘Hi Ellie, the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm and we can all go home.’

I wasn’t too lucky. The sign was not in English but the numbers were the same as ours, and it looked like they’d kept the road numbering system we’d used. I didn’t know what number Rawson Road was meant to be but I knew it wasn’t Highway 3 and apparently I was on Highway 3.

Swear swear swear. Swearwords can be satisfying sometimes. I wheeled the bike around then had to go straight off the road because there was a car coming. In fact it was a truck with a string of cars behind it so I had to lie low for about four minutes while they all trundled past. As soon as there was a break I revved the bike back to the intersection. I didn’t have to worry about noise now, not out here on the highway.

I turned left and headed off on the dirt again. The landscape looked exactly the same. Sometimes it gets so boring, the way it just goes on and on. Sometimes it’s depressing. On TV ages ago they were talking about the Germans invading Russia during World War II, and how the landscape of Russia sent some of the soldiers crazy. It was to do with the way they woke up each morning and set out again and marched all day but nothing changed. Nothing ever changed! For day after day, month after month, they kept moving through a world where they felt like they weren’t moving at all. Walking and walking and walking and the horizon never moved and it all stayed the same.

No, I remembered, I didn’t see it on TV, I heard it on the car radio, and Mum was driving, because I remember her looking out at the bush and saying, ‘Yes, God, yes!’ when she heard this.

I didn’t agree with her – our landscape never had that effect on me – and I was worried by her saying it. For one thing I thought she was being disloyal. But still, I understood what she meant. At the same time if you knew the bit of bush you were in, or if you stopped and spent some time there, or if you opened your eyes and had a decent look around, you couldn’t see it as monotonous. It was only when we were driving that the endless miles got slightly depressing sometimes.

I sort of knew Rawson Road when I came to it. I’m not sure what it was, but something gave me the vibe of ‘Yes, I think this is it.’ It must have been three years since I’d come along here, and that was in the car, with my parents.

I turned left and rode fast on the gravel at the side, looking for another green and white sign. There wasn’t one, but after a couple of k’s I passed the entrance to a farm, and in paint on the front gate was the address, unaltered since before the war,
1274 Rawson Road.

What a relief. I pressed on. My next problem was to find out whether I was going in the right direction. I figured I was now on the hypotenuse of the triangle. The other two sides were from my place to the start of Sutherland’s, and Sutherland’s itself. The hypotenuse didn’t really lead back to my place, but it came out about eight k’s away. Close enough.

I knew that the square of the hypotenuse would be equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Thank you Wirrawee High for that piece of knowledge. But it didn’t seem much help right now. I needed something else. I needed the intuition and awareness of a fox. I remembered how foxes do this thing where they get a rooster to stick his head through the wire of the pen so the fox can bite it off. I didn’t know how they did it but I’d seen it a couple of times myself and the Yannoses had it happen to their chooks too. I don’t mean I actually saw it, but I saw the results. You go down to the chook pen in the morning and there’s a decapitated rooster lying inside the wire. How is it possible? We have quite a big pen and yet somehow the fox was able to get the rooster to come all the way to the wire and obligingly stick his head through so the fox could have it for supper.

I needed to find the trick, to know how to do it. I suppose it’s like using the energy in the ball and deflecting it to win a point. I vaguely remembered Robyn explaining something like this to me once when we were playing tennis. She understood sport in a way I never could. She said you don’t try to hit the ball hard. You let the other player do that, and you just put your racquet in the way and let the ball go back with the speed the other player has already put on it.

If a fox can make the rooster come to the wire and put its head out to be bitten off, the fox doesn’t have to do much work. I didn’t want to start a war here; all I wanted was to bounce Gavin back to the other side of the border.

I kept going but I could see I was heading into a serious problem. Rawson Road was quickly turning into a suburb. There were houses ahead, and they were close together. Being in a rural environment had been fine by me, but there was no way I could ride through settled areas on a four-wheeler. It was one of those mid-moon nights, where you could see well enough, not like a full moon, as good as daylight, but light enough to put me in a dangerous situation.

I snuck past the first group of houses, took the curve, saw another even longer row of houses and slipped past them too, but I was running out of nerves and I knew I’d soon be running out of luck. I didn’t want to wait until my last bit of luck actually fizzled out like foam on the sand. I pulled over onto a bit of broken ground and sat there trying desperately to think. I hated being in this position, where I had to make life and death decisions in a matter of seconds, with practically no information to go on. I like being in control. I was biting my bottom lip one minute and chewing on my knuckle the next. What to do? What to do? My mind threatened to break out and stampede, to knock down the fences and run wild, to go in a dozen directions at once.

‘All right,’ I told myself, ‘at least work out what you want most of all. What are you doing here?’ I knew the answer straight away. I was here with a mission and that was to find Gavin and keep him safe and get him home alive. It would be nice to help Homer and Lee and Jeremy and Jessica, and save innocent people from being attacked by a bunch of terrorists, and preferably to keep myself alive too, but this was a Gavin mission and it was as simple as that.

OK, so how was I going to do it?

No easy answer, just keep going and look everywhere and hope like hell or heaven I could find him.

I had to leave the bike though. I rolled it behind a tree. It wouldn’t be safe for long but if this was the beginning of the suburbs I couldn’t ride any further. I slung the rifle onto my back and trotted down the side of the road, keeping to the shadows, looking for something, anything, a clue, a prop, a guide.