Tomorrow When The War Began (13 page)

Already we were approaching Meldon Marsh Road.
I slowed down and turned the lights off, leaning forward to
concentrate. Driving at night without lights is horribly hard and
dangerous, but I figured we’d lost the element of surprise that
we’d had with the trucks. These guys would have radios. We had to
rely on concealment now.

To drive directly to my place would have taken
about forty or fifty minutes. But we still had a couple of hours of
darkness left, and we’d agreed when making our plans, back at
Robyn’s, to use that time. It was a choice of two evils. To go
straight home would make it too easy for them to track us. To stay
on the roads would expose us to enemy patrols. We could have hidden
up somewhere and gone to my place the next night, but we figured
that with every passing day, the grip these people had on the
district would tighten. And after the damage we’d just done to them
they might well bring in more troops by the next night.

Besides, we all wanted so desperately to get
back to Fi and Corrie and Kevin, and to the sanctuary of Hell. We
couldn’t bear the thought of another day so far away from it. We
wanted to get as close as we could. It took all our self-control to
take a roundabout route now.

Homer’d had the time, as he sat silently
waiting in the BMW, parked in the shadows of Three Pigs Lane, to
work out a rough route, and now he started calling out instructions
from pencil marks he’d made on a map. ‘This takes us past Chris
Lang’s place,’ he said, as we drove as fast as I dared along Meldon
Marsh Road. ‘We’ll change cars there. If the keys aren’t in the
cars, I know where they’ll be.’

‘Why are we changing cars?’ asked Lee’s tired
voice from the back. I think he was dreading another painful
move.

Homer explained. ‘Our plan is to go up to Hell
in four-wheel drives and hide out there for a while. The
Landrover’ll be packed and ready, at Ellie’s. That means we’ll be
dumping whatever car we’ve used to get there. Now if, a day or two
later, a patrol arrives at Ellie’s and finds a shot up BMW, that
they’ve been searching the district for ... well, some very nasty
things could happen to Ellie’s parents.’

There was a pause, then Lee said, ‘Chris’s
parents have got a Merc.’

‘That did cross my mind,’ Homer admitted. ‘And
they’re overseas, so the Merc’s probably in the garage, not at the
Showground. I don’t think Chris has got his licence yet. If we’re
going to have a war we may as well have it in style. Next left,
El.’

We arrived at Chris’s ten minutes later,
racing straight past the house to the garage and sheds, about a
hundred metres away. We were getting tired, not just with physical
exhaustion but with the emotional intensity of the last few hours.
We climbed stiffly out of the car. The others went looking for the
Merc while I went to the back of the BMW to talk to Lee. I was
shocked by how pale he looked; his hair was blacker and his eyes
bigger than ever. He smelt even worse than we did, and there was a
new dark red stain on his bandage.

‘You’re bleeding,’ I said.

‘Only a little. I’d say a couple of stitches
probably came apart.’

‘You look awful.’

‘And smell it too. Lying there sweating for
twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t recommend it.’ There was a pause,
then, self-consciously, he said, ‘Listen, Ellie, thanks for getting
me out of there. Every minute of the twenty-four hours I could hear
the footsteps of soldiers coming to get me.’

‘Sorry about the wild trip in the truck.’

He grinned. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Towards
the end there, when you hit the brakes, I actually got thrown out,
but I did a sort of roll and landed back in. That’s when I bust a
few stitches I think.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. We needed to get rid of a
car behind us.’ I wiped my face. ‘God, I can’t believe the things
we’ve done.’

‘A couple of bullets hit the shovel. They
didn’t go through it, but the noise they made! I thought I was
dead. But I don’t think they knew I was in there, or they would
have sprayed it with bullets.’ Homer came backing out of the garage
in a large olive-green Mercedes. Lee laughed. ‘Homer hasn’t
changed.’

‘Yes he has.’

‘Has he? I’ll be interested to see that. He’s
a pretty smart guy, Homer. Listen Ellie, there’s one problem here.
If we leave the BMW sitting where it is, and a patrol finds it,
they’ll think there’s a connection between us and Chris’s family.
They might burn his house, or if they’ve got Chris as one of their
prisoners, they might do something to him.’

‘You’re right.’ I turned to the others, who
were getting out of the Merc, and repeated what Lee had said. Homer
listened, nodded, and pointed to the dam.

‘Can we do that?’ I asked. ‘To a nice new BMW
with only a couple of bullet holes?’

It seemed that we could. I drove it to the
upper side of the dam, put it in neutral, got out and gave it a
good push. It was a light car and moved easily. It ran down the
slope, holding almost a perfect line, and went straight into the
water. It floated out for a few metres, getting lower and lower,
then stopped floating, leaned to one side and began sinking. With a
sudden gurgle and a lot of bubbles, it disappeared. There was a
small cheer from Robyn and Homer and me.

And it was the noise of that small cheer which
brought Chris out from his hiding place.

He looked funny, dressed in pyjamas, standing
there, rubbing his eyes and staring at us. But we probably looked
funny to him, like scarecrows in shock, staring back at him in
astonishment. He’d come out of their old piggery, which these days
was just a row of old sheds, so obviously abandoned and derelict
that it was a good choice for a hiding place.

Time was getting short. We had to make some
quick decisions. It didn’t take Chris long to decide he wanted to
come with us. For a week he’d had no contact with anyone, just
watched from a tree, and later the piggery, as patrol after patrol
came through the property. The first group had taken all the cash
and jewellery; Chris had buried the other small valuables after
that, but had spent the rest of the week in hiding, emerging only
to check animals and pick up supplies from the house.

His story, told from the back seat of his
family Merc as we cruised the side roads, made us realise how lucky
we’d been to avoid ground patrols. His house was closer to town
than ours, and much grander and more conspicuous, and he’d had
daily visits from soldiers.

‘They seem nervous,’ he said. ‘They’re not
into being heroes. They stick close together. The first few days
they were really jumpy, but they’re more confident now.’

‘How did it start?’ I asked. ‘Like, when did
you first realise something funny was happening?’

Chris was normally quiet but he hadn’t talked
for so long that now he was the life of the party.

‘Well, it was the day after Mum and Dad left
for their trip. You remember? That’s why I couldn’t come on the
hike with you. Murray, he’s our worker, was taking his family into
the Show and he offered me a lift, but I didn’t want to go. I
didn’t think it’d be much fun without you guys, and I’m not heavily
into that kind of stuff anyway.’ Chris was a lightly built boy with
intense eyes and a lot of nervous habits, like coughing in the
middle of every sentence. He wouldn’t be into Commem Day or
woodchopping competitions; he was more into the Grateful Dead,
Hieronymus Bosch, and computers. He was also known for writing
poetry and using more illegal substances than you’d find in the
average police laboratory. His motto was ‘If it grows, smoke it’.
Ninety per cent of the school thought he was weird, ten per cent
thought he was a legend, everybody thought he was a genius.

‘Well, Murray never came back that night, but
I didn’t realise, because their house is quite a way from ours. I
didn’t really notice anything unusual. There were Air Force jets
racing around, but I just thought it was Commem Day stuff. Then,
about nine o’clock, the power went off. That’s so common I didn’t
get excited, just waited for it to come back on again. But an hour
later it was still off, so I thought I’d better ring up and see
what was happening. Then I found the phone was off too, which is
unusual – we often lose one or the other, but not both. So I walked
over to Murray’s place, found they weren’t home, thought “They must
have gone out to tea”, came home, went to bed with a candle – if
you know what I mean – woke up in the morning, found everything was
still off. “Now this is serious,” I thought, went back to Murray’s,
still no one there. I walked along the road till I got to the
Ramsays’ – they’re our neighbours – went in there, it was empty,
kept walking, found no one at the Arthurs’, realised there’d been
no traffic, thought “Maybe I’m the only person left on the planet”,
went round a corner and found a wrecked car with three dead people
in it. They’d hit a tree, but that hadn’t killed them – they’d been
shot up badly. Well, bad enough to kill them. You can imagine, I
freaked out, and started running towards town. Around the next
corner was the next shock – Uncle Al’s house, which had been blown
up. It was just a pile of smoking rubble. I saw a couple of
vehicles coming, and instead of jumping on the road and flagging
them down, which I would have done if they’d come along earlier, I
hid and watched. They were military trucks, full of soldiers, and
they weren’t ours. So I thought “Either I’ve been using some very
strange and heavy stuff or else this is not a typical day in the
life of Wirrawee”. It’s been pretty weird ever since. Waking up in
the middle of the night and seeing a BMW floating in the middle of
the dam was just another part of it.’ Chris kept us entertained for
a good half-hour by the time he’d told us what had happened to him
and we’d told him our story. And more importantly, he kept us
awake. But long before we got to my place Homer and Robyn were
heavily asleep. Chris and Lee and I were the only ones still
conscious. I don’t know about the other two but it was a terrible
struggle for me. I resorted to things like dabbing my eyelids with
spit, which might sound strange, but it did help a bit. It was with
deep relief that I saw the first soft light from the east
reflecting off the galvanised iron roof of home. Only then did I
realise I’d spent all that time driving the most elegant car I was
ever likely to have, and I hadn’t thought about it once. What a
wasted opportunity. I was quite cross with myself.

Chapter
Twelve

There’d been a few visitors in the short time
we’d been away. Looters had come, and like at Chris’s they had
taken jewellery and a few other bits and pieces. My watch, some
silver photo frames, my Swiss Army knife. They hadn’t done much
damage. I felt sick about it but was too tired to feel the full
impact. Corrie and Kevin and Fi had come too – all the stuff on our
list had been removed, and they’d left a message on the fridge:
‘Gone where the bad people go. See you were!’ I laughed and then
rubbed at it till it was completely removed. I was getting really
security conscious.

Homer and Robyn had Lee’s dressing off and
were inspecting his wound, Robyn with her newfound fascination for
blood. I peered over their shoulders. I’d never seen a bullet wound
in a human before. It didn’t look too bad though. Mr Clement had
done a good job, for a dentist. There were only a few stitches, but
there was heavy bruising all around it, lots of interesting blue
and black and purple colours. Some fresh blood had seeped out from
the bottom of the row of stitches; that was obviously the blood I’d
seen on his bandage.

‘It looks swollen,’ I said.

‘You should have seen it yesterday,’ Lee said.
‘It’s improved a lot.’

‘Must have been the physio I gave it in the
shovel.’

‘What’s it feel like to get shot?’ Chris
asked.

Lee put his head on one side, and thought for
a moment. ‘Like someone’s stabbed a big hot piece of barbed wire
through your leg. But I didn’t realise it was a bullet. I thought
something in the shop had fallen and hit me.’

‘Did it hurt?’ I asked.

‘Not at first. But suddenly I couldn’t walk on
it. That’s when Robyn grabbed me. It didn’t hurt till we got inside
the restaurant and I lay down. Then it felt like it was on fire.
Really killed me.’

Homer had washed the whole wound site down
with Dettol and now started putting the bandage back on. Robyn
inspected my face and found a gash above my hairline that she
Band-aided. Seemed like they were our only wounds. When she
finished I went looking for the Landrover, and found it, neatly
packed and hidden where we’d agreed, about half a k from the house,
in the old orchard where my grandparents had built their first home
on this land.

We had the whole day to waste before we went
on up into the mountains to join the others. Sleep was everybody’s
first priority, except for Chris, who’d had quite a lot of it
compared to us. He got dumped with the first sentry duty. And the
second, third and fourth. It was too dangerous to sleep in the
house, so we got blankets and set up in the oldest, furthest away
haystack. I made everyone nervous by going and getting the firearms
from the Landrover, but always in my thoughts now was what had
happened at Corrie’s and how Homer said we had to learn from that;
we had to learn new ways.

Then we slept and slept and slept.

They say teenagers can sleep all day. I often
used to look at dogs and be amazed by the way they seemed happy to
sleep for twenty hours a day. But I envied them too. It was the
kind of lifestyle I could relate to.

We didn’t sleep for twenty hours, but we gave
it our best shot. I stirred a couple of times during the morning,
turned over, had a look at Lee, who seemed restless, glanced at
Robyn beside me, who was sleeping like an angel, and dropped back
into my heavy sleep. For once, I can recall my dreams vividly. I
didn’t dream of gunshots and smashing into vehicles, and people
screaming and dying, although I know I’ve dreamt of those things
often enough since. That morning I dreamt of Dad barbecuing for a
whole lot of visitors, at home. I couldn’t see what he was cooking,
but he was working away busily with his fork, pricking sausages or
something. It seemed like all the town was there, wandering through
the house and garden. I said hello to Father Cronin, who was
standing by the barbecue, but he didn’t answer. I went into the
kitchen but it was too crowded with people. Then Corrie was there,
asking me to come and play, which was fine except that she was
eight years old again. I followed her and we went down to a river
and got in a boat. It turned out most of the townspeople were
there, and Dad and Mum were captaining the boat, so as soon as
Corrie and I were aboard they cast off and we sailed away. I don’t
know where we were going, but it was hot, everyone was sweating,
people were taking off clothing. I looked back at the shore and
there was Father Cronin waving goodbye – or was he shaking his fist
angrily because we were all stripping off? And I didn’t know now if
we were stripping because we were hot, or for other reasons. Corrie
was there still, but we weren’t eight-year-olds any more, and then
she had to go somewhere, with someone, and in her place Lee was
standing. He was undressing too, very seriously, as though it were
some holy ritual. We lay down together, still being very serious,
and began touching each other, gently and lovingly. We were still
doing that when I woke up, sweating, and found that I was now in
full sun. The day was getting really hot. I turned and looked at
the others, and the first person I saw was Lee, watching me with
his dark eyes. I was so embarrassed after the dream that I blushed
and began talking quickly.

‘Oh, it’s gone up about ten degrees. I’m
baking away here. I’ll have to move. I must have been asleep longer
than I thought.’ I picked up my blanket and moved to the other side
of Lee, but about the same distance away. I kept gabbling. ‘Do you
want anything? Can I get you anything? Did you sleep much? Is your
leg hurting a lot?’

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

I calmed down a bit now that I was out of the
sun. From my new position I could see right across the paddocks to
the bush, and on up into the mountains. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
I said. ‘Living here all my life, some days I don’t even notice how
beautiful it is. I still can’t believe we might be about to lose
it. But it’s made me notice it all now. I notice every tree, every
rock, every paddock, every sheep. I want to photograph it in my
memory, in case ... well, in case.’

‘It is beautiful,’ Lee said. ‘You’re lucky.
There’s nothing beautiful about the restaurant. And yet, I feel the
same way about it as you do about your property. I think it’s
because we did it all ourselves. If someone smashes a window
they’re smashing glass that Dad cut, glass that I polished a
thousand times, and they’re tearing curtains that Mum made. You get
an attachment to the place, and it becomes special to you. I guess
maybe it does take on a kind of beauty.’

I wriggled a bit closer to him. ‘Did you feel
awful when you found it all wrecked?’

‘There was so much to feel awful about I
didn’t know where to start. I don’t think it’s hit me even
yet.’

‘No, me neither. When we got here this morning
and I found they’d been here ... I don’t know. I’d expected it, but
I still felt awful, but I didn’t feel awful enough Then I felt
guilty about not feeling worse. I think it’s like you said, too
many things. Too much has happened.’

‘Yes.’ Only one word, but I’ll always remember
the way he said it, like he was really involved with everything I’d
been saying. I rolled around a bit so I was even closer to him, and
kept talking.

‘And then I think about Corrie and how it must
be terrible for her, much worse than for me. For all you guys with
little brothers and sisters. That must be terrible. And imagine how
Chris’s parents would feel, being overseas, probably not being able
to get back into the country, not having a clue what’s happened to
Chris.’

‘We don’t know how widespread this thing is.
It could involve a lot of countries. Remember that joke we made, up
in Hell, about World War Three? We could have been right onto
it.’

He put his arm around me and we lay there
looking up at the old wooden rafters of the hayshed.

‘I dreamed about you,’ I said presently.

‘When?’

‘Just now, this morning, here on the
haystack.’

‘Did you? What did you dream?’

‘Oh ... that we were doing something like what
we’re doing now.’

‘Really? I’m glad it came true.’

‘So am I.’

I was too, but I was confused between my
feelings for him and my feelings for Homer. Last night I’d been
holding hands with Homer, and feeling so warm and good about it,
and now here I was with Lee. He kissed me lightly on my nose, then
less lightly on the mouth, then several more times, and
passionately. I was kissing him back, but then I stopped. I didn’t
have any plans to become the local slut and I didn’t think it was a
good idea to get involved with two guys at once. I sighed and
shrugged myself free.

‘I’d better go and see how Chris is getting
on.’

Chris was getting on all too well. He was
asleep, and I was furious. I shouted, screamed, and then kicked
him, hard. Even while I was doing it I was shocked at myself. Even
now, as I think about it, I’m shocked at myself. The thing that
scared me most was the thought that maybe all the violent things
I’d been doing, with the ride-on mower and the truck, had
transformed me in the space of a couple of nights into a raging
monster. But on the other hand, it was unforgivable for Chris to
have gone to sleep. He’d risked the lives of all of us by being so
slack. I remember on our Outward Bound camp, talking one lunchtime,
someone had said that in the Army the penalty for going to sleep on
guard duty was death. We’d all been so shocked. We could see the
logic in it, but maybe that was the shocking part, that it was so
utterly logical. Cold-blooded, merciless, logical. You don’t expect
real life to be like that, not to that extreme. But I really felt
for a moment like I could have killed Chris. He certainly looked
scared of me when he rolled away and stood up.

‘Geez Ellie, take it easy,’ he mumbled.

‘Take it easy?’ I yelled into his face. ‘Yeah,
that’s what you were doing all right. If we take it easy any more,
we’re dead. Don’t you understand how it’s all changed Chris? Don’t
you understand that? If you don’t, you might as well get a rifle
and finish us all off now. Because you’re as good as doing that by
taking it easy.’

Chris walked off, red-faced and muttering
under his breath. I sat down in his spot. After a minute or two I
think I did go into some sort of delayed shock. I’d blocked off all
my emotional reactions because there hadn’t been the time or the
opportunity for those luxuries. But it’s like they say, ‘emotion
denied is emotion deferred’. I’d done so much deferring, and now
the bank had called in the loan. Most of that afternoon is a blank
to me. Homer told me much later that I’d spent hours wrapped in
blankets, sitting in a corner of the haystack, shivering and
telling everyone to be careful. I guess I went down the same path
as Corrie had, just in a slightly different way. I have a clear
memory of refusing all food and becoming very hungry, but not
eating because I was sure I’d be sick if I did. Homer said I was
ravenous and I ate so much that they thought I would be sick and
they refused to give me any more. Weird.

I was very upset when they wouldn’t let me
drive the Landrover, because I’d promised Dad so faithfully that I
wouldn’t let anyone else behind the wheel. Suddenly though I got
tired of arguing, crawled in beside Lee in the crowded back
section, and went to sleep. Homer drove it up to Tailor’s Stitch.
If I’d known that I wouldn’t have given up the argument so suddenly
and so completely.

Somehow I walked into Hell late that night,
crawled into a tent beside Corrie, who was hysterical with joy to
see us, and slept for three days, waking only for occasional meals,
toilet trips, and brief mumbled conversations. I do remember
consoling Chris, who was sure that he’d been the cause of my having
a nervous breakdown. I didn’t think to ask how Lee had got in to
Hell, but when I gradually got my wits back I found that they’d
made a bush stretcher and carried him in; Robyn and Homer taking
turns at one end of the stretcher and the lightly built Chris
carrying the other, all the way down in the dark.

So I guess he atoned.

During my three days I had the nightmares I
hadn’t had that morning on the haystack. Demonic figures ran
screaming from me, I felt skulls crush under my feet. Burning
bodies stretched out their hands, begging for mercy. I killed
everyone, even the people I loved most. I was careless with gas
bottles and caused an explosion which blew up the house, with my
parents in it. I set fire to a haystack where my friends were
sleeping. I backed a car over my cousin and couldn’t rescue my dog
when he got caught in a flood. And although I ran around everywhere
begging for help, screaming to people to call an ambulance, no one
responded. They seemed uninterested. They weren’t cruel, just too
busy or uncaring. I was a devil of death, and there were no angels
left in the world, no one to make me better than myself or to save
me from the harm I was doing.

Then I woke up. It was early in the morning,
very early. It was going to be a beautiful day. I lay in the
sleeping bag looking at the sky and the trees. Why did the English
language have so few words for green? Every leaf and every tree had
its own shade of green. Another example of how far Nature was still
ahead of humans. Something flitted from branch to branch in the top
of one of the trees – a small dark-red and black bird with long
wings, inspecting each strip of bark. Higher still a couple of
white cockatoos floated across the sky. From the cries I could tell
that there was a larger flock out of my sight, and the two birds
were merely outriders, strays. I sat up to see if I could glimpse
the rest of the flock by leaning forward, but they were still out
of sight. So I shuffled out of the tent, clutching my sleeping bag
to me like some kind of insect half-emerged from a chrysalis. The
cockatoos were scattered across the heavens like raucous angels.
They drifted on, too many to count, until they were out of sight,
but I could still hear their friendly croaks.