Tomorrow When The War Began (7 page)

I wondered where Steve was now, and Mrs
Alexander, and the Mathers and Mum and Dad and everybody. Could we
really have been attacked, invaded? I couldn’t imagine how they
would have felt, how they would have reacted. They must have been
so shocked, so stunned. Some of them would have tried to fight,
surely. Some of our friends were hardly the kind of people who
would lie down and take it if a bunch of soldiers came marching in
to take over their land and houses. Mr George for instance. A
building inspector came onto his land last year, to tell him he
couldn’t extend his shearing shed, and Mr George had been summonsed
for threatening him with a tyre lever. For that matter Dad was
pretty stubborn too. I just hoped there hadn’t been violence. I
hoped they’d been sensible.

I stumbled along, thinking of Mum and Dad. Our
lives had always been so unaffected by the outside world. Oh, we’d
watched the News on TV and felt bad when they showed pictures of
wars and famines and floods. Occasionally I’d tried to imagine
being in the places of those people, but I couldn’t. Imagination
has its limits. But the only real impact the outside world had on
us was in wool and cattle prices. A couple of countries would sign
an agriculture treaty thousands of k’s away, on another continent,
and a year later we’d have to lay off a worker.

But in spite of our isolation, our unglamorous
life, I loved being a rural. Other kids couldn’t wait to get away
to the city. It was like, the moment they finished school they’d be
at the bus depot with their bags packed. They wanted crowds and
noise and fast food stores and huge shopping centres. They wanted
adrenalin pumping through their veins. I liked those things, in
small doses, and I knew that in my life I’d like to spend good
lengths of time in the city. But I also knew where I most liked to
be, and that was out here, even if I did spend half my life
headfirst in a tractor engine, or pulling a lamb out of a
barbed-wire fence, or getting kicked black and blue by a heifer
when I got between her and her calf.

At that stage I still hadn’t come to terms
with what had happened. That’s not surprising. We knew so little.
All we had were clues, guesses, surmises. For instance, I wouldn’t
allow myself to really consider the possibility that Mum or Dad –
or anyone else – had been injured or killed. I mean, I knew in my
logical mind that such things were logical outcomes of invasions
and fights and wars, but my logical mind was in a little box My
imagination was in another box entirely and I wasn’t letting one
transmit to the other. I guess you can’t really comprehend that
your parents will ever die. It’s like contemplating your own
death.

My feelings were in another box again. During
that walk I was desperate to keep them sealed up.

But I did let myself assume that my parents
were being held somewhere, against their will. I pictured them,
Dad, frustrated and angry, like a bull in a pen, refusing to accept
what had happened, refusing to accept anyone else’s authority. He
wouldn’t let himself begin to try to understand what was going on,
why these people had come. He wouldn’t want to know what their
language was, or their ideas, or their culture. Even through my
shock and horror I still wanted to understand; I still wanted
answers to those questions.

Mum would be different. She’d be concentrating
on keeping her mind clear, on not being taken over mentally. I
pictured her staring out over the bare hills, through the fence of
a prison camp maybe, ignoring the petty distractions, the
background voices, the deliberate irritations.

Then I realised I was just thinking of both my
parents as they were at home.

We’d reached the end of

Racecourse
Road

. I’d fallen a little behind Kevin and Corrie,
and they were waiting for me. We formed a little dark huddle
between a tree and a fence. Anyone seeing us might have mistaken us
for a strange black growth that had sprouted from the ground. It
was getting quite cold and I felt the other two shivering as we
crouched together.

‘We’ll have to be extra careful now that we’re
so close,’ Kevin whispered. ‘Try not to get so far behind,
Ellie.’

‘Sorry. I was thinking.’

‘Well, what’s the plan?’ he asked.

‘Just to get close enough to have a look,’
Corrie said. ‘We don’t have all that much time. The main thing’s to
be careful. If we can’t see anything then we just go back to
Robyn’s. If there’s anyone there the dumbest thing we could do
would be to have them see us and come after us.’

‘OK, agreed,’ Kevin said. He started standing.
That annoyed me. It was typical Kevin not to ask me what I thought.
I pulled him back down.

‘What?’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get a move on
El.’

‘That doesn’t mean rushing in like idiots. For
example, what if we do get seen? Or if we get chased? We can’t just
run back to Robyn’s place. That’d lead them there.’

‘Well I guess, separate. It’d be harder for
them to chase three different people than one group. Then, if we’re
sure we’re not being followed, make our own way back to
Robyn’s.’

‘OK.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No! If we’re being strictly logical, like
Homer was before, we shouldn’t all sneak in close to the
Showground. One of us should go and the other two stay here. Less
chance of being seen, and less loss if one gets caught.’

Corrie gave a little cry. ‘No! That’s being
too logical! You’re my best friends! I don’t want to be that
logical!’

Neither did I, when I thought about it. ‘OK
then,’ I said. ‘All for one and one for all. Let’s go. The three
musketeers.’

We slipped across the road like shadows and
moved around the corner. The light from the Showground reached even
here, faintly, but enough to make a difference. We stopped at its
edge, feeling nervous. It was as though a single step into that
light would immediately make us visible to a whole army of hostile
watchers. It was frightening.

That was the first moment at which I started
to realise what true courage was. Up until then, everything had
been unreal, like a night-stalking game at a school camp. To come
out of the darkness now would be to show courage of a type that I’d
never had to show before, never even known about. I had to search
my own mind and body to find if there was a new part of me
somewhere. I felt there was a spirit in me that could do this
thing, but it was a spirit I hadn’t known about. If I could only
find it I could connect with it and then maybe, just maybe, I could
start to defrost the fear that had frozen my body. Maybe I could do
this dangerous and terrible thing.

A small single movement was my key to finding
my spirit. There was a tree about four steps away, in front of me
and to my left, well inside the zone of light from the Showground.
I suddenly made myself leave the darkness and go to it, in four
quick light steps, a dance that surprised me, but made me feel a
little light-headed and proud. That’s it! I thought. I’ve done it!
It was a dance of courage. I felt then, and still feel now, that I
was transformed by those four steps. At that moment I stopped being
an innocent rural teenager and started becoming someone else, a
more complicated and capable person, a force to be reckoned with
even, not just a polite obedient kid. There wasn’t time then to
explore this new and interesting me, but I promised myself I’d do
it later.

I still felt light-headed when Kevin, then
Corrie, joined me, moments later. We looked at each other and
grinned, proud and excited and a little disbelieving. ‘OK, what’s
next?’ Kevin asked. Suddenly he was looking to me for directions.
Maybe he recognised how I’d been changed in those few seconds. But
then surely he had been too?

‘Keep heading left, from tree to tree. We need
to get to that big gum. That’ll put us opposite the wood-chop area.
We’ll get a bit of a view from there.’

I took off as soon as I’d finished speaking,
so psyched up that I didn’t realise I was doing to Kevin what I’d
objected to his doing to me, moments earlier. From my new vantage
point I could see human movement three men in uniforms emerged
slowly from the shadows behind the grandstand and walked steadily
around the perimeter of the wire fence. They carried weapons of
some kind, big rifles maybe, but it was too far to see them
clearly. Despite all the evidence that we’d had already, this was
the first confirmation that an enemy army was in our country, and
in control It was unbelievable, horrible. I felt my body fill with
fear and anger. I wanted to yell at them to get out, and I wanted
to run away and hide. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

After they’d faded out of sight again, behind
the trotters’ stables, I heard the quick rush of light feet as
Kevin and Corrie reached me.

‘Did you see the men?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes and no,’ Corrie whispered. ‘They
weren’t all men. At least one was a woman.’

‘Really? Are you sure?’

She shrugged. ‘You want to know the colour of
their buttons?’

I took her point. Corrie does have good
eyesight.

We kept going, making our little dashes from
tree to tree, until at last we were gathered, panting, behind the
big river gum. From there we peered out cautiously: Corrie,
kneeling, looking around the base from the right; Kevin, crouching,
looking through a low fork; and me, standing on the other side,
peeping around the trunk. We were in quite a good spot, about sixty
metres from the fence and able to see a third of the Showground.
The first thing I noticed was a number of big tents on the oval.
They were all different shapes and colours, but they were all big.
The second thing was another couple of soldiers, with weapons,
standing on the trotting track. They weren’t doing anything, just
standing, one facing the tents and one facing the pavilions. It was
obvious that they were sentries, guarding whatever was in the tents
probably. One was a woman, too; Corrie had been right.

The Showground was still set up for the Show,
even though it should have been packed away four days ago. But the
Ferris wheels and sideshows, the tractor displays and caravans, the
logs for the wood-chop and the trailers selling fast foods, all
were still in position. Away to our left was a silent ocean of
parked cars, most sitting like dark still animals, a few glinting
in the artificial light. Our car would be in among them somewhere.
Some cars would have had dogs in them too. I tried not to think
about their horrible deaths, like the dogs back at our place. Maybe
the soldiers had compassion and had rescued them when the fighting
was over. Maybe there would have been time for that.

We watched for eight minutes – I was timing it
– before anything happened. Just as Kevin leaned around the trunk
and whispered to me, ‘We’ll have to go’, and I nodded, a man came
out of one of the tents. He walked out with his hands on his head
and stood there. Immediately the sentries came to life, one of them
going quickly to the man, the other straightening up and turning to
look at him. The sentry and the man talked for a few moments, then
the man, still with his hands on his head, walked to the toilet
block and disappeared inside. It was only at the last second, as
the light above the lavatory door shone on his face, that I
recognised him. It was Mr Coles, my Year 4 teacher at Wirrawee
Primary.

So, at last we knew. A coldness crept through
me. I felt the goose bumps prickle on my skin. This was the new
reality of our lives. I got the shakes a bit, but there was no time
for that. We had to go. We slid backwards through the grass and
began to retrace our tracks, from tree to tree. I remembered from a
couple of years ago a big controversy when the Council had wanted
to cut these trees down to make a bigger carpark. There’d been such
an outcry that they’d had to give up on the idea. I grinned to
myself in the darkness, but without humour. Thank God the good guys
had won. But no one could ever have imagined how useful those trees
were going to be to us.

I got to the last tree and patted its trunk
gently. I felt a great affection for it. Corrie was right behind
me, then Kevin snuck in. ‘Nearly home free,’ I said, and set off
again. I should have touched wood once more before I did. The
moment I showed my nose, a clatter of gunfire started up behind me.
Bullets zinged past, chopping huge chunks of wood out of a tree to
my left. I heard a gasp from Corrie and a cry from Kevin. It was as
though I left the ground, with sheer fear. For a moment I lost
contact with the earth. It was a strange feeling, like I had ceased
to be. Then I was diving at the corner of the road, rolling through
the grass and wriggling like an earwig into cover. At once I turned
to yell to Kevin and Corrie, but as I did they landed on top of me,
knocking the wind out of me.

‘Go like stink,’ Kevin said, pulling me up.
‘They’re coming.’

Somehow, with no air in my lungs, I started to
run. For a hundred metres the only sounds I could hear were the
rasping of my own lungs and the soft thuds of my feet on the
roadway. Although we’d agreed, so logically, to split up if we were
chased, I knew now I wasn’t going to do that. At that moment only a
bullet could have separated me from those two people. Suddenly
they’d become my family.

Kevin was looking back all the time. ‘Let’s
get off the road,’ he gasped, just as I was starting to get some
wind back. We turned into someone’s driveway. As we did I heard a
shout. A burst of bullets chopped through the branches with
tremendous force, like a sudden short gale. I realised that it was
Mrs Alexander’s driveway we were sprinting along. ‘I know this
place,’ I said to the others. ‘Follow me.’ It was not that I had
any plan; I just didn’t want to follow someone through the darkness
if they didn’t know where they were going. I was still operating on
sheer panic. I led them across the tennis court, trying desperately
to think. It wasn’t enough just to run. These people were armed,
they would be fast, they could summon help easily. The only thing
we had going for us was that they couldn’t be sure if we were armed
or not. They might even think we were leading them into an ambush.
I hoped they’d think that. I wished we were leading them into an
ambush.