The Night Is for Hunting (13 page)

As it happened Homer and I sandwiched him. Or we would have done. We arrived either side of him, simultaneously. He’s lucky we didn’t sandwich him. We would have broken every bone in his body. He deserved it too. Bloody Gavin. A steak tartare sandwich, that’s what he deserved to be. And the worst thing was, he thought it was funny. He laughed when we grabbed him. A nervous laugh, sure, but a laugh, no doubt about it. He was a tough cookie, but sometimes I wondered how much the war had stuffed up his common sense and judgement. That particular night I wondered in a big way.

‘What are you doing, you moron?’ Homer said, shaking him like he was a clogged up tomato sauce bottle. Homer was even angrier than me. I was angry, but probably more relieved than anything. It could have been someone much worse than Gavin.

I don’t know how much Gavin could lip-read in the dark, but you wouldn’t have to be Einstein to work out what questions we were asking. He grinned at Homer and said, ‘I followed you.’

We didn’t have to be Einsteins to have worked that out already. ‘Why?’ I asked, but Gavin was looking at Homer and didn’t see me, so Homer repeated it.

Gavin shrugged. ‘I’m not a baby. Whatever you do, I can do. I wanted to come.’ I realised he was actually very nervous. Close up you could see his body trembling. And behind the grins he did look anxious.

Homer looked helplessly at me. ‘What do you reckon? What do we do with him?’

I’d already made my decision. ‘We have to take him along. Otherwise he’ll just follow us again. The only choice is for us all to go back to Hell.’

‘No way,’ Homer said, to that last suggestion. He rubbed his chin with his hand. ‘Have we still got time to do it tonight?’

‘Well, I guess. Depends how far we go. I was thinking of the Whittakers’ place. We’ve got time to get there, but we wouldn’t get back to Hell by dawn.’

‘I guess that’s not such a big problem. We can hang out around here somewhere.’

So the decision was made. We set out again, going as fast as we dared. Gavin, give him his due, kept up without a complaint. He was second last, between Fi and me, so I got a good view of him, and he seemed able to go the pace. We went past the outlying buildings of our property – just the old machinery shed and the barn – but we were too far away to see the house. Perhaps that was for the best. I could get by most days without the grief that had paralysed me so many times since the war began, but I never knew when it would strike next, and seeing the house in the middle of the night, with strangers living in it ... it was better not to go too close.

By road the Whittakers’ place would be fifteen k’s from ours, but that didn’t mean much. We cut straight across the paddocks. Homer and I both knew the way, and once we got out there, away from other buildings, we relaxed, mentally at least. In this open country, at two in the morning, we knew there’d be no-one else within cooee. For kilometre after kilometre our only company was four-legged or two-winged – or two-legged in the case of the kangaroos. The light was better too, with no more trees in the way of the stars and moon. We walked so fast – we had to, thanks to the time we’d lost – that we could hardly get enough breath to talk. I don’t know about the others but I was red in the face and puffing.

We kept the pace up pretty well. Of course we slowed down after a while, but we didn’t stop. Twice Homer tried to persuade Gavin to sign off: to hole up somewhere and wait for us. Both times he turned us down flat. Maybe he thought we wouldn’t come back for him. Homer didn’t press it. There wasn’t time for that either.

The Whittakers’ place was a big sprawling house surrounded by a famous garden. We were sure it would be occupied: it was such a beautiful house that it would have been one of the first to be taken over.

I thought the garden would give us plenty of cover. It had all these big bushes and garden beds and stuff. I wasn’t sure exactly how we’d break in. Back in Hell we’d talked about it quite casually, as if that would be the easiest part of the job, but now that we were closer it suddenly looked a bit more difficult.

At 3.05 we came over a ridge and saw the Whittakers’ house, the galvanised iron roof shining in the moonlight. It sure was big. It was a single-storey place, but it covered about a hectare. Well, that’s what it looked like. At least there were trees going almost to the house, so that suited us.

We dropped flat on the ridge and wriggled forward to have a look. Gavin was right beside me and for a few minutes all I could hear was his panting. Seemed like the effort to keep up cost him more than I’d realised. One thing I’d noticed about him though, he was very good at keeping quiet when necessary. It must have been hard for him, because he couldn’t hear whether he was making a noise or not, but somewhere along the line, maybe in Stratton, maybe before the war, he’d learned. Lucky he did. It would have been a matter of life and death for him and his mates, and now it was a matter of life and death for us.

Homer’s big body came around behind me and he dropped down on my left.

‘What do you reckon?’

This was the same question I’d been asked a thousand times since the war started. ‘What do we do now?’

Not for the first time, I didn’t have an answer. I said rather doubtfully, ‘It’s not going to be easy. But we have to work out where the kitchen is.’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Nuh. Why should I?’

‘I thought you knew the place.’

‘Why’d you think that? I’ve never been here before in my life. I’ve just heard my parents talk about it.’

He sighed, as if to say, ‘Well, you’re a great bloody help,’ and moved away again. I could hear the rumble of his voice as he complained about me to Fi.

I wriggled over to them. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s check out the other side. That’s where the kitchen should be. I’ve just heard my parents talk about it.’

We set off on a wide circle around the house. It was soon obvious enough which room was the kitchen. The Whittakers had extended their house quite a long way out the back, on the right-hand side, using the same colour bricks, so you couldn’t easily tell it was an extension. But in the moonlight you could see that the reflection on the new bricks was shinier. Plus there were bigger windows. Through the three middle windows I could see kitchen-type stuff, especially the gleam of a stainless steel sink.

I stole a little closer, first on my stomach, then bent low and running. The house was silent, so I took my life in my hands and went all the way to the windowsill. After all, how much danger should we expect at 3.30 in the morning? I stood on a pot-plant and peered over the sill. It was the kitchen all right. I saw two large refrigerators, like solid white ghosts, and I drooled a little at the thought of what they might contain. A hand grabbed my shoulder and I jumped, with a shocked squeal. ‘Shhh,’ Homer said. ‘What can you see?’

‘It’s the kitchen. I can see the fridges. And a big fruit bowl.’

Homer tried lifting the window, but either it was locked, or too stiff to move without a lot of noise. I went to the right and tried that one, with the same result. Time was going fast, and we had to get in this house. I took off my jumper, held it firmly against the window, and punched hard and cleanly with my fist, a bit like I’d done at Tozer’s. The glass broke easily this time but it fell inside the room with a tinkling sound that seemed to go on forever.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Homer gasped.

We both moved away fast, until we got to where Fi and Gavin were watching, from behind a silver birch. There’d been no movement inside the house but we figured we’d better wait a few minutes before we went back to the window.

For me there was something chilling about that wait. I kept imagining I heard footsteps behind me. Perhaps it was the memory of Homer’s hand grabbing my shoulder. Or the memory of Gavin stalking us on the way from Tailor’s Stitch. I looked around so many times that I made the others nervous too, until Fi said, ‘Ellie, are you expecting visitors?’

After ten minutes Homer and I went back in. By now it was so late that I accepted we had zero chance of getting to Hell before daybreak. I’d been clinging to the hope that we might still manage it. I knew now that we’d have to find somewhere safe during the day. That irritated and frustrated me. I was sick of hiding, sick of the boredom of those long hours spent in holes or dark rooms. The thought of doing it yet again distracted me. In fact I was concentrating more on that than on the job ahead.

We got to the window and I waited while Homer pulled out the jagged bits of broken glass left in the frame. Everything seemed quiet, so I called Fi in, with a quick wave. To my annoyance Gavin came too. I didn’t realise until I heard a little muffled cough. I looked around and there he was, a few metres ahead of Fi, like an enthusiastic dog who hates to have you in front of him. I couldn’t believe it and I waved furiously at him to go back. What a waste of energy. Gavin pretended not to see me and Fi rolled her eyes and whispered, ‘He’s impossible.’

Obviously having a fight with Gavin right here, outside the kitchen window, was not a good idea. We were stuck with him. It wasn’t part of our plans, but on the other hand if he could carry out some food – well, every bit helped.

The bottom of the window was at the height of my chin and the pot-plant was too small. Homer had to give me a leg-up. I perched on the windowsill for a moment like a trained monkey and checked out the dark room. There was no noise except the shudder of a fridge. A couple of red lights gleamed at me. They could have been the eyes of a deadly reptile. They were probably batteries charging overnight – on a torch or telephone maybe. I ignored them and dropped as lightly as I could to the floor. Fi followed, really lightly, then Gavin, lighter again, and finally Homer, as heavy as a hippopotamus. Something in the fridge rattled when he hit the floor.

I went to the door on my left, and squeezed it open. The long corridor was dark and silent. I stood there for three or four minutes, while behind me the others waited. But the house slumbered on. I closed the door again.

So there we were, the four of us, in the kitchen, with no time to lose. We had three backpacks to fill, but I thought if I could find a bag for Gavin then at least he could pay his way. I went to a tall cupboard at the end of the room, and checked that out. It was the broom cupboard, like I’d thought, but there were no bags in it. I started opening the big deep drawers down at ankle level and in the second one found a heap of supermarket plastic bags, stacks of old junk mail, and a couple of string bags. The Whittakers were pretty glamorous people but this was their less glamorous side. I gave Gavin the string bags and half-a-dozen plastic ones, then joined Homer and Fi, who were rifling through the pantry.

It was a good score. Sure a lot of the stuff wasn’t any real use to us. Spices, pickles, herbs, sauces: they were luxuries, and we couldn’t afford to waste space in our packs or be weighed down by them. But there were some nice nuts: cashews and almonds and macadamias. And there was a big bag of rice, full – a twenty-five kilo bag – and another one half full. And quite a lot of cans. Some tuna and some pineapple and some baked beans. Homer eyed the twenty-five kilo bag of rice as though he’d like to hoick it over his shoulder and make off with it, but even for Homer that might have been a bit much. However we did manage to get the half-full bag into his backpack, with some shoving and remoulding. The trip was worth it for that alone, I thought, as Homer did up the buckles. Fi was enthusiastically stocking up with cans. ‘Wait a second,’ I whispered. ‘You won’t be able to carry them all.’ I repacked some in mine then gave a few to Gavin. I added lots of bags of stuff: polenta, borlotti beans, cannalini beans, kidney beans, split peas. Then a dozen packets of rice snacks, some packets of spaghetti, and a few other bits and pieces.

We were there only six or eight minutes. As we headed back to the window I started grabbing fresh fruit and shoving it at Homer and Gavin. I was pleased to see Fi get some vegetables from a stack of red plastic shelves near the microwave. ‘Couldn’t be better,’ I thought. ‘This has gone really well.’

It was at that moment that the door burst open.

Chapter Nine

We didn’t have a hope. ‘Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.’ If I’d heard Dad play that song a thousand times I’d heard it a million. We were caught between the door and the window and we might as well have been a mile away from each of them.

They burst into the room like cattle when you let them out of the crush. They came through the door so hard and so fast that the fourth man was hit by the door swinging back in his face. Every time anything really appalling happened in my life there always seemed to be a funny moment with it. Or a moment that would have been funny in a different situation. Like Kevin farting when we were captured. This guy went stumbling to the floor when the door hit him, but I only noticed it out of the corner of my eye, because there were more important things to worry about.

I grabbed Gavin and held him to me. Things got pretty wild. Homer was bigger than any of them and he charged straight through the crowd, towards the door. I don’t know if he had any particular aim, maybe to get the door shut and barricaded and then deal with the guys already in the room. More likely it was just a reflex to go that way. Two of them tackled him then a third joined in. He flung the first guy off into a stand of antique saucepans, black cast-iron things. At that moment someone turned the light on, so I got a good view of the saucepans rolling over the floor and the man sprawled among them. But Homer was falling backwards as the other two wrestled him down. Then a third guy did a flying dive across the room right onto Homer’s head and for a minute I couldn’t see anything except a mess of writhing bodies. I let go of Gavin and picked up one of the cast-iron saucepans, a medium-size one. I took a swing at the nearest head but missed, and got the guy’s shoulder instead. I think I hurt him though. More people came running in. Two of them grabbed my arms and that was the end of my contribution; By now the kitchen was almost full, mostly men in their twenties or thirties, but a few teenage boys and three or four women. Gavin, as soon as I’d let him go, had thrown himself onto the pile of wrestling bodies and was clinging to a pair of legs like a human leech.

They hauled him out of the way, but as they did, Homer rose up out of the ruck. It was one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. He had blood all over his face and his hair was red with it. But he towered above them. All he needed was a torch in his hand to be the Statue of Liberty. He threw two more guys off, one in each direction: just threw them like they were stuffed toys. A man came at him and Homer head-butted him with a dull thunk, like a breaking watermelon. He headed for the door again, kicking people clear with every step. I fought desperately to get rid of the guys holding me but I wasn’t as strong as Homer, and they gripped my wrists so hard their hands felt like steel bands. A bloke jumped on Homer’s back and tried to ride him down to the ground. He managed to get his hands around Homer’s throat to pull his head back. With his huge paws Homer started ripping the hands off his throat, but in doing that he tipped backwards, and two young blokes realised that they had a good chance at last. They drove in simultaneously at his stomach and down he went again. This time he didn’t come up.

I saw a couple of boots go in and some fists fly, but the next time I had even a glimpse of him was five minutes later when they started standing up and counting their own bruises. First I could see Homer’s legs, and then one arm. Inside I was feeling hysterical but no way was I going to give them the satisfaction of knowing that. I had no idea if he was alive or dead.

When I did see his face I realised at the same time that he had been neatly trussed up; his arms and legs tied behind him, like a sheep in the back of a ute. But I wasn’t very interested in that. All I wanted was to see his eyes, for any sign of life. But his eyes were closed and his head had rolled to one side.

I mightn’t ever know a more terrible feeling than the one I had then. I felt a bomb had gone off inside me. It was like my heart had been ripped in half in the middle of my chest. I seriously thought I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t get my breath, and the pain seemed to grow all the time. The only way I was going to get relief was to see Homer’s eyes open. I was dimly aware of Gavin on the other side of Homer, being held by two men, and across to my left Fi was also held by someone. But I had no real interest in them, just a terrible all-consuming desire to throw myself onto Homer’s blood-covered body and breathe life back into him.

Then suddenly I was lifted off my feet and bustled out of the kitchen. I got my breath then, and started screaming, ‘No, no.’ They thought I was scared, but I wasn’t really, just angry, and desperately worried about Homer.

I found myself in a long corridor, quite narrow and dark. They raced me along there at quite a speed. They were very angry and very excited and no-one seemed to be in charge. Half-a-dozen different people were yelling and every time we came to a room they’d hesitate and then one person would say something and someone else would say something else and away we’d go again. I guess they were looking for a safe room to store me in. Then someone, quite a young voice, suggested something, and they all laughed and it was like they’d made a decision, because now they pushed me along like they knew exactly where they were going.

To my surprise we went through a door into the cool outside. I could have wept with relief to feel fresh honest air on my skin again. I lifted my face and let the dew touch me lightly, like the rain of life. Still the men did not slow down. The shadow of a roof came over me and I realised we were in a large machinery shed, open front and back with a concrete floor. There were all the usual working vehicles you find on a big farm – tractors, headers, Ag bikes, four-wheel drives. They took me to none of those. I still didn’t have a clue what they had in mind. They frogmarched me down to the end of the shed, where the cars were sitting. I hardly had time to take them in, but there was an old blue Falcon, a very old Renault or Citroen or something, and a fairly new grey Alfa. I wasn’t given any time to think, but I suppose if I’d had the time I would have assumed they were going to drive me into town, with the other three, and hand us over to the authorities.

Then they opened the boot of the Falcon.

I still didn’t understand. The boot? But they soon cleared up my misunderstanding. With a lot of pleased laughter and little jokes they signalled me to get in. I backed away, as much as my escort would let me. I couldn’t believe they could be so barbaric. ‘No way,’ I said. ‘I’m not getting in there.’

I got hit on the back of the head so hard it almost knocked me out. I don’t know what hit me: not a fist, it was too solid for that. Maybe a block of wood. If they hadn’t been holding me up I would have fallen. And I got no chance to recover. With a quick rush they virtually lifted me and carried me the half-dozen steps to the car, threw me in, then slammed the boot shut.

In the old days, BTW, before the war, Mum and Dad joked about how their friends used to hide in the car boot to get in the drive-in movies for free. Mum shuddered when she talked about it and said, ‘No way would I ever do it. If they charged a hundred dollars for the movie I still wouldn’t have got in the boot.’

I shuddered and shivered when I heard the story and thought, ‘Yes, me neither.’

I don’t think I’m exactly claustrophobic but I definitely don’t like feeling trapped. Maybe it goes back to a terrible moment I had in Corrie’s hayshed, years ago, when we’d been crawling through the tunnels left by the little gaps between the bales. I was way inside the haystack when suddenly I panicked and thought I’d never get out, I’d be suffocated in there. I started backing up, and of course eventually got out, but I’ll never forget the terrifying few minutes of struggling backwards through the bales.

And if I did develop a few claustrophobic feelings, they weren’t helped by my time in maximum security in Stratton Prison.

So for the first few minutes in the boot I lost it completely. Almost completely: I didn’t scream or beg or go hysterical. There was still a little thing called pride that was powerful for me. But I went hysterical inside. The trouble was, I couldn’t do anything with my hysteria. I sort of writhed and twisted about, biting on my knuckles. I shoved half my right fist in my mouth and bit into it so hard I expected blood to flow down my arm. The back of my head, where they’d hit me, was numb and felt like it didn’t belong to me any more, like it had been removed by a surgeon but might be put back later with no anaesthetic – if I was lucky.

Somehow I had to calm myself. Even in the middle of going hysterical I knew that. Like a spoonbill searching the water in a billabong, I scanned my brain for something, anything, that might help. And gradually a memory emerged. It was Robyn’s voice, and suddenly it wasn’t a memory any more; she could have been in the boot with me. I remembered her telling me the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and how they’d survived: when the King chucked them in the furnace and an angel or someone went in with them. The furnace blazed all around them but they didn’t burn.

And it did calm me. I don’t know if Robyn or an angel or even God himself was in the boot, but I was starting to suspect that whenever I wanted God, he was there. Only not necessarily in the form I wanted, or doing what I wanted. Very inconvenient and self-willed of him: I was fairly sure I knew better than everyone about everything, and when I say everyone I include God. But in the pitch black of the boot I clung to the image of a fiery furnace, and it wasn’t the furnace of Hell either.

It was ironic to think of such a place, because the boot, as well as being cold, was the blackest, darkest place I have ever been in. For an experiment I held my hand in front of my face. Nothing. I couldn’t see a glimmer of my own fingers. Nothing but that awful blackness, that seemed to be inside me as well as out, so much so that I couldn’t tell where me ended and the air began.

My first fear was that I’d suffocate, that there simply wasn’t a way for air to get in. Gradually though, I realised it was getting in somewhere. I’d probably been in here ten minutes already and although the air was getting stale I wasn’t desperate for oxygen. Maybe there were some little holes where air entered, but as it was the middle of the night there was no light to show them.

As I started to get control of my mind again I tried to work out what I could do. It seemed like they weren’t about to drive me straight into Wirrawee. Maybe they’d do that in the morning. They probably weren’t too keen to go all the way in there in the middle of the night.

Somehow I had to get out of this boot before they handed me over to the authorities. By groping with my fingers I found the lock mechanism and pulled desperately at it, hoping there’d be some way of working it from the inside. But it was a tightly sealed little unit, and seemed impossible to open. I let go of it and sank back on the hard floor.

There was so much to think about. The sheer panic of being in the dark, with no room to move, and the air getting worse: that was enough. Yet they were almost little worries. On top of it were the real worries: what had happened to Homer and Fi and Gavin, what was going to happen to me when they came and got me out, or drove me into town, what chance did we have of escaping death? Not much point solving the little problems of being squashed and uncomfortable in the boot, when the death sentence waited at the end of it.

All I could think to say to that was, ‘Ellie, you can only deal with what you can deal with, and right now all you can deal with is this horrible black hole.’

It was as much use worrying about Homer and death sentences as it was about the schoolwork I was missing, or the price of petrol in New Zealand, or the number of repeats on Bulgarian television.

Anyway my body was starting to take up so much attention that I had no choice: I had to concentrate on that. My legs were pushed into my chest, making my back ache. My head had some feeling back again but I wished it hadn’t. Every minute or so a pain grew in there, then exploded like a huge flowering plant. I remember reading about some palm tree in Kakadu that flowered every seventy-five years then died. I felt my head might do exactly that. Right then I would have given every dollar I had – not that I had many, only $423 in the Wirrawee branch of the ANZ, which I’d probably never see again – for a couple of glasses of water and some fresh air. And a couple of Panadeine.

Twenty minutes later I would have given even more than my $423. It was indescribably awful. The first few minutes had been bad enough: the quick rush of terror at being locked in, the first violent anxiety. But a million times worse was the long slow stale horror of time passing in a black nothing. My eyes received no signals, my ears received no signals. If you sat staring at a TV screen with no picture and no sound, you’d go a bit crazy after a while. Now I was inside the TV, and my whole world was reduced to that.

The air was certainly bad: hot and heavy. It was like breathing cotton wool. It made my headache worse and worse, and although I kept wriggling around into new positions, there was a limit to the number of ways I could rearrange myself. My legs went to sleep and my back got more painful.

Worst of all was the fear that I’d go mad. If only they’d told me how long they were going to keep me here. Then it might have been tolerable. But my mind played tricks. I felt like I was in infinite space for infinite time. One infinite I could have put up with, maybe. Not two.

I didn’t really have any idea how much time was passing. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, I still used those words but I couldn’t tell if they meant what they used to mean. A minute could have been an hour. I felt like I might have been there one hour, or twenty-four.

At one point I passed out. Maybe it was sleep but it didn’t feel like sleep. I woke up after – how long? – and immediately panicked. What if I hadn’t woken up? I didn’t get the impression these people had put me in here to die a slow and horrible death. But how did they know what would happen in a car boot? How did anyone know?