Darkness, Be My Friend

by John Marsden

  And so we started on that familiar journey. Again we became shadows in the night, dark dingoes slinking home to our lair. We didn't flinch when we heard the strange cackling noise that foxes make when they feed together, nor when we heard the oooooom of the tawny frogmouths or the clatter of bark falling from a gum or the sharp ripping and crack of a branch suddenly breaking. We slipped silently through the dry scrub when we could and at other times moved quickly and quietly across the bare paddocks. Cattle followed us curiously, sheep baaed and bolted when we startled them with our approach.

  Occasionally a bird, as startled as the sheep, would fly away with a wild shocked whirr of wings. We ignored them all and hurried on.

  The sun was well up and the land and air getting rapidly hotter when we climbed to the top of Tailor's Stitch. As was usual for us nowadays we had made a big detour around my own house. I didn't know who lived there now and I didn't want to know I felt more comfortable in Hell than around home.

  We did the same as we bad such a short time ago with the Kiwis: waited off the side of Tailor's Stitch until dark. Another of those delays that at times I thought would make me scream with boredom, but which at other times I spent quite happily, talking or thinking or daydreaming.

  This day passed at the pace of a day on a tractor, when you know at the end of it you'll still have three paddocks to go and each one will feel the same as the one you're in.

  I think it seemed all the longer because for once there was something to look forward to. If we could contact Colonel Finley from the top of Wombegonoo that night, we could maybe be out of there within three or four days. It was nearly a week —five days to be exact—since we were meant to have called him, so I figured he'd be keen to hear from us. And although we had no good news for him it would be a relief to hear his voice. It would make me feel I was back in New Zealand already. I longed for the moment when we could make the call, and hungrily counted the hours, the minutes, before we switched on the little transmitter.

  At nine o'clock we eagerly trekked to the highest point of Wombegonoo, to the spot where we could be sure of getting the best conditions for our broadcast.

  Epilogue

  I wouldn't say I'd ever trusted Colonel Finley. I quite liked him in some ways. He was so English, like an actor out of those old black-and-white British movies. He had a moustache, smoked a pipe, and worked in a study with tonnes of books in oak bookcases and nice pictures of things like horses and farmlands and oceans.

  Maybe it was all a bit too good to be true, a bit too much like an English gentleman in a film.

  I don't know. Fi and I argue about this. She says I'm too hard on him. She may be right. I still feel he's doublecrossed us though. Sure, I know times are hard, there's a war on, the New Zealanders can't afford to waste their resources, but I do think he should have sent the helicopter. I feel we've done enough to be given a bit of consideration. OK, maybe not on this trip, where we failed at just about everything. But we did quite a bit in the past, especially at Cobbler's Bay.

  They might come for us yet, of course. He didn't say they were dumping us here forever. He's not that ruthless. It was just the shock, I suppose. Or the disappointment. Being so keyed up to make our escape. Being so happy at the thought that we could be sale again, live normally again, eat and sleep and talk openly to people. Hot food and hot showers and clean sheets. That was all I wanted, all I looked forward to. It doesn't seem much to hope for, does it? Not much compared to what we once had, and what we took for granted.

  So I can't make up my mind about the Colonel. Is he a good man, trying to make the best of a bad situation? Allocating his resources without fear or favour? Sticking to his principle of "cost-effectiveness," no matter what? Or is he a cynical cold-blooded cold-hearted mongrel who used us and then dumped us?

  Maybe time will give me the answers to those questions and maybe it won't.

  I guess our fate is up to us now. And we've been there before, of course. There's something quite comforting about it in a strange way. We've learnt a few things. We know We've got a few things going for us. A bit of imagination, a bit of guts sometimes, a bit of spark. I remember our old dog, Millie, getting run over by a tractor then struggling up again and trying to keep mustering. That's us, I reckon. Some of the things that have happened to us were like being run over by a convoy of tanks.

  But we're still here, we're still alive, we're not giving up yet.

  It's like Homer said this morning when I was talking to him about our next call to Colonel Finley, on Tuesday, "Well, tell him, stuff him, we'll do it on our own."

  From the first day of the invasion I knew that if we were going to live with ourselves on the terms that we wanted, we'd have to pay a price. Like the man in the poem. And we've paid a price every day since. It's expensive. The man in the poem found that out. But I don't want to live cheap, or live for nothing. I never have wanted that and I've never liked it. That's one lesson my parents taught me. That's why I don't like what I did with the boy in New Zealand. That's why I do like my friendship with Fi and Lee and Homer and Kevin. It's why I love and respect the memory of Corrie and Robyn. It's why I feel sad that Chris never learned that lesson.

  When I think about it, I realise it was the same before the war. I was never so aware of it then though. Pity I needed a war to learn it properly. Believe me, I'd do a few things differently if we had those days back again. Even in peacetime it's expensive to be the kind of person you want, to live the kind of life you know is right.

  Well, I've learnt this much: it doesn't matter what it costs, it's worth paying the price. You can't live cheap and you can't live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you've paid it, that's what I reckon.

  Poems Appearing in the Text

  Page 228, "The Refined Man," by Rudyard Kipling, from A Choice of Kipling's Verse, TS. Eliot ed., Faber and Faber, London, 1963.

  Pages 2 and 227, "Here Dead We Lie," by A.E. Housman, from Up the Line to Death, Brian Gardner ed., Methuen and Co., London, 1976.

  Page 100, "Smoke curls up around the old gum tree trunk," Australian traditional.

  Page 45, "The Man from Snowy River," by Banjo Paterson.