Maybe

by Morris Gleitzman

  We scramble frantically down from the turret into the fuselage.

  Where I see that the others don’t need telling.

  They know. The stink of the burning engines is filling the plane. And the noise of screaming machinery and the yells of panicking men.

  Simmo grabs us.

  ‘Get these on,’ he shouts.

  He forces backpacks over our heads and straps them on. Round our tummies and round our legs.

  Which makes me realise they’re not backpacks.

  They’re parachutes.

  ‘We’re going down,’ yells Simmo. ‘The fuel valves are jammed. I can’t extinguish the engines. Rusty will try a hard landing, but it might be too hard. So you’ve got a choice.’

  I don’t understand a couple of the words, but I know what the choice is.

  I’ve faced a choice like this before.

  Ken is kneeling on the fuselage floor, shaking his head, staring in terror at the parachute pack in his hands.

  ‘You can stay,’ shouts Simmo to me and Anya, ‘or you can jump.’

  I look at Anya.

  I try to let her see I’ve done this before. That sometimes the scariest choice is the best.

  Behind us Simmo starts kicking at something with the heel of his boot. Something on the wall of the fuselage. Suddenly a section of the wall flies away into the night sky.

  Outside, darkness screams past the hole.

  Anya doesn’t flinch.

  ‘I’ll do what you do,’ she says.

  ‘After you’ve jumped,’ yells Simmo, ‘count to ten, then pull the cord.’

  He stuffs a length of cord into each of our hands.

  Anya’s eyes are still on me, not wavering.

  I take her hand.

  When I was ten, I had this choice. On a train to a Nazi death camp. Stay or jump. There were machine guns outside, and darkness. I was holding the hand of a friend then as well.

  We survived.

  ‘No,’ whimpers Ken.

  I look at Anya one more time, and we jump.

  Anya is behind me.

  I peer through the ropes of my parachute into the blackness of the night sky.

  Nothing.

  I can’t see her above me, or below. I’m alone, floating down through dark emptiness.

  ‘Anya,’ I yell.

  No reply. Even the wind has gone silent.

  All I can hear is the dying howl of the plane somewhere in the distance.

  I had to let go of Anya’s hand. I didn’t want to but I had to. As we jumped, Simmo yelled at me to let go. For a second I didn’t understand why.

  Then it hit me at the same time as the rush of air outside the plane. If I didn’t let go of Anya’s hand, we’d be too close when we finished counting to ten. When we pulled our cords, our parachutes would get tangled up together.

  Being too close would kill us.

  So I let go and she was swept away.

  ‘Anya,’ I yell again.

  The only sound in reply is one I don’t want to hear. A distant explosion. The plane making its hard landing.

  Very hard.

  I don’t want to look, but I do.

  Oh.

  Way down there, far off to one side, who knows how many miles away, tiny balls of flame.

  I think of Simmo, more concerned about us than himself.

  And Ken, too scared to jump.

  I hope the plane was empty when it hit the ground. I hope Simmo and Rusty and the others got to choose a soft landing. I hope their parachutes are out there somewhere in the darkness.

  ‘Simmo,’ I yell.

  I look around again, but I can’t see any of them.

  What I can see is something incredible.

  A thin crack of light opening up in front of me.

  From one side of my vision to the other. The crack is so long I can’t see where it starts or ends. The whole dark world splitting in two.

  Have I got concussion again?

  When my parachute opened, did the sickening jolt snap something in my brain stem?

  Slowly the crack starts to change shape. Becomes a hazy glow. As if light is spilling over the edge of something.

  Which it is. The orange rim of the sun appears over the edge of a huge horizon, throwing shadows across a vast landscape.

  I feel so weak with relief that if my legs weren’t dangling in space, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t hold me up.

  It’s not concussion, it’s Australia.

  ‘Anya,’ I yell desperately into the fuzzy sparkling air all around me. ‘Simmo.’

  Six parachutes, that’s what I want to see.

  But I can only see one. And it’s too far away to tell if hanging from the ropes is a precious pregnant person, or an engineer, or a pilot, or a terrified employee of the Australian government.

  What I can see is Australia.

  Below me.

  Everywhere.

  It’s huge. The beams of sunlight go on forever.

  I stare at Australia between my feet, and realise something scary.

  Australia is getting closer.

  Very fast.

  Sometimes it’s good to have weak legs.

  They buckle when you hit the ground and you don’t crack your pelvic skeletal structure and shatter your coccyx.

  It’s also good to have strong glasses that fit tightly. Thanks air base staff. I hope there are kind people like you in this part of the world.

  I crawl out from under the parachute cloth and undo the straps.

  Then I look around for Anya.

  I force myself to concentrate on another good thing. The possibility that she’s still alive.

  I can’t see her. All I can see is flat dusty ground with spindly bushes. And beyond that, more flat dusty ground with more spindly bushes. And, not too far away, one small hill.

  I head for it.

  As I plod over the flat dusty ground, I’m grateful the storm didn’t include rain. This would be a lake of mud after rain. Which is the last thing you need when you’re trying to find your special person in a new country.

  I scramble up the rocky hill.

  At the top I peer around. You’d think I’d see her. A parachute isn’t small. The amount of cloth must be about the same as five hundred pairs of underpants. You’d think even from this distance you’d see five hundred pairs of underpants lying on the ground.

  I don’t see anything lying on the ground.

  No parachute, no Anya.

  I have a horrible thought. Anya hasn’t got weak legs. I’ve seen her leg muscles. They wouldn’t have buckled when she hit the ground. What if she’s lying out there somewhere, half covered in dust with a shattered pelvic skeletal structure and a badly damaged tummy . . .

  I don’t want to think about it.

  I need something to attract Anya’s attention, even if she’s only half-conscious. Something that can reflect sunlight.

  I think of just the thing. I reach into my flight suit pocket and find it.

  Cyryl Szynsky’s gold ring.

  I give it a rub and hold it up in the rays of the dawn sun and twist it around so it gleams.

  I’m worried the gleam isn’t bright enough, so I do it for a long time.

  ‘Anya,’ I yell, over and over.

  I’m still doing it when suddenly, not far in the distance, a gleaming red ball shoots up into the sky and hangs there.

  A flare.

  The flare has burnt out when I arrive at the place where I saw it.

  Where I think I saw it.

  But I still can’t see Anya.

  All I can see are more spindly bushes. All I can hear are the very strange Australian birds.

  I start to yell Anya’s name again, then stop.

  In Poland, when you’re somewhere unfamiliar, you don’t go around yelling out loud so everyone knows you’re there. Not until you’ve worked out if it’s a safe place.

  Is Australia a safe place?

  Rusty and Simmo made it sound safe.

  I
open my mouth to call to Anya. Before I can, somebody grabs me from behind.

  A gunshot explodes so close I almost need the urine bottle again.

  Somebody appears from behind me. I’m so dazed I take a moment to realise it’s Anya.

  She points to the ground near my feet. In the dust is a snake. Blood is dribbling from where its head should be.

  ‘That was close,’ says Anya, her voice shaky.

  I can’t speak. Too much shock. Too much relief that Anya’s OK.

  She gives me a hug.

  ‘We made it,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ I croak.

  Because we’ve both still got our flying suits on, it’s hard to get our arms all the way around each other. So we hug extra tight with what we’ve got.

  Then Anya pulls away.

  ‘Mustn’t squash the baby,’ she says.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I say. ‘Your legs? Your pelvic structure?’

  ‘They’re fine,’ says Anya. ‘I’ve just got a few scratches. From the dry bushes I landed on.’

  She doesn’t look alright. She looks badly shaken up. I should have noticed that before, instead of getting carried away hugging her.

  I take a deep breath and try to focus, like Doctor Zajak taught me.

  ‘I should examine you,’ I say. ‘Parachute jumps aren’t good for unborn babies, medically speaking.’ Anya looks at me doubtfully.

  ‘Lie down on your parachute,’ I say. ‘Just a quick check.’

  ‘I buried my parachute,’ she says.

  I look at her, surprised.

  ‘That’s what you do with parachutes,’ she says. ‘I read about it.’

  Before she met me, Anya hadn’t read many books. It’s good she’s catching up now.

  ‘The ground’s soft,’ I say. ‘It’s mostly dust.’

  We check the ground for more snakes. Then Anya lies down on a soft patch.

  She empties the pockets of her flying suit.

  Several packets of dried beef. Her gun. The baby book. A flare pistol.

  ‘I’ll leave my flying suit on,’ she says.

  Carefully I feel her tummy with both hands.

  I’m not sure exactly how to do this because I haven’t got up to abdominal examinations in the baby book. I don’t want to refer to it now in front of her, so I go as gently as I can.

  ‘Where did you get the flare gun?’ I say.

  I’ve read how it’s good for doctors to start a conversation while they’re doing something that might make patients feel a bit embarrassed.

  ‘I stole it from the plane,’ says Anya.

  I feel something moving under my hands.

  ‘The baby kicks sometimes,’ says Anya. ‘Specially after parachute jumps.’

  I nod. It’s all I can do. I’m feeling a bit emotional at meeting Anya’s baby for the first time.

  As far as I can tell, the baby feels alive and healthy.

  ‘Felix,’ says Anya quietly. ‘The others didn’t make it, did they?’

  I don’t know what to say.

  If possible, expectant mothers shouldn’t get too upset. Nor should their doctors.

  ‘I saw it,’ says Anya. ‘The plane crashing and exploding. And I didn’t see any other parachutes.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean there weren’t any,’ I say, glancing up at the sky. ‘Let’s be hopeful.’

  ‘I’d rather be hopeful about the house,’ says Anya.

  I stare at her.

  ‘House?’ I say. ‘What house?’

  even if the people in this house are unkind and chase us away, they’ll give us a glass of water first.

  I croak this to Anya.

  She looks at me.

  ‘You’re thinking about bad things again,’ she says. ‘The people here might be nice.’

  She’s right. I’m slipping back into old habits. I think I’m suffering from heat exhaustion and possibly dehydration of the brain.

  It’s taken us hours to walk here. We’re parched. But only a couple of fields to go, dry and dusty ones with a few spindly cattle in them.

  And then the house. If we don’t faint first.

  I see something up ahead. I put my arm round Anya and help her towards it.

  A rusty cattle trough with muddy water in it.

  We drop to our knees and drink, gulping the water, not caring about the mud.

  As soon as my thirst goes, I feel starving.

  Anya does too. She pulls slices of dried beef out of her pocket and we stuff them into our mouths.

  Then we try to brush some of the dust off ourselves and smooth our sweaty hair.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ I say. ‘Why didn’t I see this house on the way down?’

  ‘There’s only the one,’ says Anya. ‘So it was easy to miss.’

  That’s one of the reasons I like Anya so much.

  She’s kind. A lot of people aren’t these days.

  ‘Have we got our story straight?’ I say to her.

  We rehearse it one more time, then we walk through the last fields to the house.

  There’s a battered old truck parked next to the house, which I’m glad to see. Somebody must be home.

  There are two front doors.

  The first one is a strange wire-mesh door, swinging loose. I open it and knock on the main door behind it. Both doors are as battered and old as the truck and as dry and dusty as the rest of the house and the rest of Australia.

  Nobody comes.

  I knock a few more times, then yell ‘hello’ a few times as loudly as I can.

  No reply.

  ‘Must be out,’ I say.

  We look around at the fields. Nobody working there. Where could the people be? There are no neighbours to pop over to for a game of cards or to borrow a hose to wash the house.

  ‘We’ll have to take the truck,’ says Anya.

  I look at her.

  ‘We haven’t got a key,’ I say.

  Anya rolls her eyes. I forget sometimes she used to have her own crime gang in the city.

  As Anya moves towards the truck, the door of the house swings open.

  An elderly man with white hair and a stubbly beard stares at us.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  I hesitate for a moment, partly because the man to get our story straight in my head.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ I say in my best English. ‘Can you help us please? We were camping nearby and the storm blew our tent away.’

  The man doesn’t say anything. Just stares at me and Anya like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.

  I don’t blame him.

  We probably do look a bit strange. We decided to leave our flying suits on. One of the English books our neighbour lent us was about the Bedouins, and how Bedouin people always wear thick clothes in the desert. They think it’s better to be a bit sweaty than sunburned to death.

  Before we set off this morning, I managed to smash a small rock into a sort of blade and trim the arms and legs of our flying suits down to size.

  We twisted the chopped-off pieces of cloth together to make hats.

  ‘We were wondering, sir,’ I say to the man, snatching my hat off my head, which I meant to do before I knocked, ‘if you could please give us a lift to the nearest town?’

  The man still doesn’t say anything.

  Just stares.

  Which I think is a bit rude. OK, our clothes are covered in dust, but it’s not as if he’s a very stylish dresser himself. His clothes are baggy and they look like he’s slept in them.

  ‘Please,’ says Anya.

  ‘Camping?’ says the man.

  I nod.

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ says the man. ‘Nobody goes camping around here.’

  Anya and I glance at each other.

  I knew this would be risky, telling lies in a new country. But we can’t tell the truth. ‘Hello sir, we just parachuted in.’ He wouldn’t believe us.

  ‘I reckon,’ says the man, peering more closely at our clothes, ‘that you two must have bailed out
of that plane that went down this morning.’

  I stare at him, stunned.

  Anya does too.

  ‘I spent most of the war in Darwin,’ says the man.

  ‘Japs bombed us a few times, but they didn’t always get away with it. When you’ve heard a damaged plane going down, you never forget the sound.’

  I’m barely taking in what he’s saying.

  ‘Well?’ says the man. ‘Am I right?’

  Suddenly I haven’t got the strength to tell any more lies.

  I nod.

  The man gives us a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so,’ he says. ‘You’ve had a rough day, wandering around in the scrub in that clobber. Feeling a bit sad probably about the poor bloke who was flying the plane. I reckon you two need a cuppa. Come in.’

  That was the most delicious pot of tea and pile of toasted cheese sandwiches I’ve ever had.

  ‘Good?’ said Jack as we ate. I nodded gratefully.

  ‘If I do say so myself,’ said Jack, ‘I make a tiptop toasted sanger.’

  I’m learning quite a lot of Australian now.

  Being allowed to wash our hands and faces in Jack’s kitchen was pretty tiptop too. But the best thing is that Jack is so friendly.

  ‘I reckon,’ says Jack, as we bump along in his truck, the three of us squeezed in the front, ‘that what you both need are some new clothes. Which is why I’m taking you to Mrs Tingwell’s shop.’

  I glance at Anya.

  She’s a bit concerned by this, just like I am.

  ‘That’s very kind, Jack,’ she says, ‘but we don’t have any money.’

  ‘No problem,’ says Jack. ‘This is drought country. Nobody’s got any money. Mrs T does credit.’

  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but when Jack says no problem he sounds like he means it.

  While we were having tea, Jack asked me and Anya about our life stories. We didn’t tell him much, because it’s rude to only talk about yourself when you visit someone. But we told him a bit.

  Jack’s a person who chuckles quite a lot, but a couple of times while I was telling him about what happened to Mum and Dad and Zelda and Genia, he wiped away tears.

  And when Anya mentioned the Russian soldier who made her pregnant, Jack got angry, but in a way that showed he didn’t blame her at all.

  Which I thought was very kind.

  ‘Nearly there,’ says Jack as we bump along the dirt road. ‘Only a couple of hours to go.’