Even Kevin and Corrie stopped what they were doing and came racing over. There was a wild debate, first about whether Homer was imagining things, then, when we all saw the snake move, about how to get it out with as little loss of life as possible. Kevin wanted to weigh the sleeping bag down in the creek with rocks until the snake drowned; Homer wasn’t keen on that. He liked his sleeping bag. We weren’t too sure that the snake wouldn’t be able to bite through the bag; as a kid I was told a terrifying story by a shearer about how his son had been bitten through a blanket as he lay asleep in his bed. I don’t know if the story was true but I never forgot it.
We decided to trust all those experts who’d been telling us since we were kids that snakes are more scared of people than people are of snakes. We figured if we were at one end of the sleeping bag and the snake came out of the other end he’d probably do a big slither in the opposite direction, straight into the bush. So we got two strong sticks; Robyn held one while Kevin held the other; they pushed them under the bag and started slowly lifting. It was a captivating scene; better than watching TV even. For a minute nothing happened, though we could see the snake clearly outlined as the material was stretched. He sure was a big one. Robyn and Kevin were trying to tip the bag so that the snake would virtually be poured out of the mouth onto the ground. They were doing it well too; perfect teamwork. The bag was at shin height, then knee height, and still rising. Then somehow the sticks got too far apart. Corrie called out; they realised and started to correct, but Robyn lost her grip for a moment. And a moment was all it took. The sleeping bag slithered down to the ground as though it had come to life itself, and one very mad snake came bursting out. The only rational thought I had at that moment was curiosity, that Kevin was obviously as nervous of snakes as he was of insects. He just stood there white in the face and trembling, looking like he was going to cry. I think he was so paralysed that he would have waited and let the snake crawl up his leg and bite him. It was funny, considering how tough he’d been when he had the stick and was lifting the bag, thinking he was safe. But there wasn’t really much time or space for rational thoughts at that stage of my life; my irrational mind was running the show. It told me to panic; I panicked. It told me to run; I ran. It told me not to give a stuff about anyone else; I didn’t give a stuff. It was quite a few moments before I looked around to see if they were OK ... and to see where the snake was.
Kevin was still standing at the same spot; Robyn was a few metres in front of me and doing what I was doing, standing and looking and puffing and trembling; Fi was in the creek, I’ve got no idea why; Lee was up a tree, about six metres from the ground and rising fast; Corrie was intelligently at the fire and using it as protection; Homer was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the snake.
‘Where is it?’ I yelled.
‘It went that way,’ said Corrie, pointing into the bush. ‘It chased me, but when I got here I jumped over the fire and it veered away.’
For someone who’d just been chased by a frenzied snake she seemed the calmest of us all.
‘Where’s Homer?’ I asked.
‘He went that way,’ said Corrie, pointing in the opposite direction to the snake. That sounded safe enough, even for Homer. I slowly stopped panicking and came in to the fire. Lee, looking a bit sheepish, began descending the tree. Even Homer appeared eventually, coming cautiously out of a dense patch of scrub.
‘Why were you standing in the creek?’ I asked Fi.
‘To get away from the snake of course.’
‘But Fi, snakes can swim.’
‘No they can’t ... can they? Oh my God. Oh my God. I could have died. Thanks for telling me guys.’
That was the end of our major excitement for the day, unless you count the Sausage Surprise that Homer and Kevin produced for tea. It certainly was full of surprises, and like the snake it was the kind of excitement I could do without. We went to bed pretty early. It had been one of those days when everyone was exhausted from doing nothing. I climbed into the sleeping bag at about 9.30, after first checking carefully that it was empty. By that stage only Fi and Homer were still up, talking quietly at the fire.
I sleep pretty soundly, pretty heavily, and this night was typical. At one point I woke up but I’ve got no idea what time it was, maybe three or four o’clock. It was a cold night; I needed to go to the dunny but spent ten minutes trying to put it off. It just seemed too cruel to have to crawl out of that snug sleeping bag. I had to give myself a stern lecture: ‘Come on, you know you have to go, you’ll feel better when you do, stop being such a wimp, the quicker you do it the quicker you’ll be back in this warm bag’. Eventually it worked; I struggled grimly out and staggered about ten metres to a convenient tree.
On my way back, a couple of minutes later, I paused. I thought I could hear a distant humming. I waited, still unsure, but it became louder and more distinct. It’s funny how artificial noises sound so different to natural noises. For a start, artificial noises are more regular and even, I guess. This was definitely an artificial noise; I realised it had to be some kind of aircraft. I waited, looking up at the sky.
One thing that’s different up here is the sky. This night was like any clear dark night in the mountains: the sky sprinkled with an impossible number of stars, some strong and bright, some like tiny weak pinpricks, some flickering, some surrounded by a hazy glow. Most views I get tired of eventually, but never the night sky in the mountains, never. I can lose myself in it.
Suddenly the loud buzzing became a roar. I couldn’t believe how quickly it changed. It was probably because of the high walls of rock that surrounded our campsite. And like black bats screaming out of the sky, blotting out the stars, a V-shaped line of jets raced overhead, very low overhead. Then another, then another, till six lines in all had stormed through the sky above me. Their noise, their speed, their darkness frightened me. I realised that I was crouching, as though being beaten. I stood up. It seemed that they were gone. The noise faded quickly, till I could no longer hear it. But something remained. The air didn’t seem as clear, as pure. There was a new atmosphere. The sweetness had gone; the sweet burning coldness had been replaced by a new humidity. I could smell the jet fuel. We’d thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn’t have to walk into a place to invade it. Even Hell was not immune.
I got back to the sleeping bag and Fi said sleepily: ‘What was that noise?’ It seemed that she was the only one awake, though I could hardly believe it.
‘Planes,’ I said.
‘Mmmm, I thought so,’ she said. ‘Coming back from Commem Day I suppose.’
‘Of course,’ I thought. ‘That’s what it’ll be.’
I started to drift into a kind of sleep, restless and full of wild dreams. It still hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything strange about dozens of aircraft flying fast and low at night without lights. It wasn’t till much later that I even realised they’d had no lights.
In the morning, at breakfast, Robyn said, ‘Did anyone else hear those planes last night?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was up. I’d been to the toilet.’
‘They just never stopped,’ Robyn said. ‘Must have been hundreds.’
‘There were six lots,’ I said. ‘Close together and really low. But I thought you slept through it. Fi was the only one who said anything.’
Robyn stared at me. ‘Six lots? There were dozens and dozens, all night long. And Fi was asleep. I thought you were too. Lee and I were counting them but everyone else just snored away.’
‘God,’ I said, starting to realise, ‘I must have heard a different lot to you.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said Kevin, tearing the wrapper off his second Mars Bar. He claimed that he always had two Mars Bars for breakfast, and so far on this hike he was right on schedule.
‘It’s probably the start of World War Three,’ said Lee. ‘We’ve probably been invaded and don’t even know.’
> ‘Yes,’ said Corrie from her sleeping bag. ‘We’re so cut off here. Anything could happen in the outside world and we’d never hear about it.’
‘That’s good I reckon,’ said Kevin.
‘Imagine if we came out in a few days and there’d been a nuclear war and there was nothing left and we were the only survivors,’ Corrie said. ‘Chuck us a muesli bar someone, will you please.’
‘Apple, strawberry, apricot?’ Kevin asked.
‘Apple.’
‘If there’d been a nuclear war we wouldn’t survive,’ Fi said. ‘That fallout’d be dropping softly on us now. Like the gentle rain from Heaven above. We wouldn’t even know about it.’
‘Did you do that book last year in English?’ Kevin asked. ‘X or something?’
‘Z? Z for Zachariah?’
‘Yeah, that one. That was good I reckon. Only decent book we’ve ever done.’
‘Seriously,’ said Robyn, ‘what do you think those planes were doing?’
‘Coming back from Commem Day,’ Fi said, as she had during the night. ‘You know how they have all those flypasts and displays and stuff.’
‘If you were going to invade that’d be a good day to do it,’ Lee said. ‘Everyone’s out celebrating. The Army and Navy and Air Force are all parading around the cities, showing off. Who’s running the country?’
‘I’d do it Christmas Day,’ Kevin said. ‘Middle of the afternoon, when everyone’s asleep.’
It was a pretty typical conversation I guess, but for some reason it was getting on my nerves. I got up and went down the creek, where I found Homer. He was sitting on a gravel spit, combing through the stones with a flat rock.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Looking for gold.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘Nuh.’
‘Found any?’
‘Yeah, heaps. I’m putting it in piles behind the trees, so the others don’t see it.’
‘That’s pretty selfish.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the kind of guy I am. You know that.’
He was right about one thing, I did know him well He was like a brother. Being neighbours, we’d grown up together. And although he had a lot of annoying habits he wasn’t selfish.
‘Hey El?’ he said, after I’d sat there for a few minutes watching him scrutinising gravel.
‘Yeah?’
‘What do you think of Fi?’
I nearly fell into the creek. When someone asks you that question, in that tone of voice, it can only mean one thing. But coming from Homer! The only women Homer admired were the ones in magazines. Real women he treated like beanbags.
And Fi, of all people!
Still, I wanted to answer his question without putting him off.
‘I love Fi. You know that. She seems so ... perfect sometimes.’
‘Yeah, you know, I think you might be right.’
He got embarrassed at admitting even that much, and spent a few more minutes scratching for gold.
‘Guess she thinks I’m just a big loudmouth, huh?’ he said at last.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue Homer. But I don’t think she hates you. You were chatting on like old buddies last night.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ He cleared his throat. ‘That’s when I first ... when I realised ... Well, it’s the first time I really took much notice of her. Since I was a little guy anyway. I always thought she was just a stuck-up snob. But she’s not. She’s really nice.’
‘I could have told you that.’
‘Yeah, but you know, she lives in that big house and she talks like Mrs Hamilton, and me and my family, I mean we’re just Greek peasants to people like her.’
‘Fi’s not like that. You ought to give her a chance.’
‘Gee I’ll give her a chance. Trouble is I don’t know if she’ll give me one.’
He stared moodily into the gravel, sighed, and stood up. Suddenly his face changed. He went red and started wriggling his head around, like his neck had got uncomfortable after all these years of connecting his head to his body. I looked around to see what had set him off. It was Fi, coming down to the creek to brush her perfect teeth. It was hard not to smile. I’d seen people struck by the lightning of love before, but I’d never thought it would happen to Homer. And the fact that it was Fi took my breath away. I just couldn’t imagine what she’d think or how she’d react. My best guess was that she’d think it was a big joke, let him down quickly and gently, then come and have a good giggle with me about it. Not that she’d laugh to be cruel; it was just that no one took Homer very seriously. He’d always encouraged people to believe he had no feelings – he used to say ‘I’ve got a radium heart, takes five thousand years to melt down’. He’d sit in the back of the class encouraging the girls to criticise him. ‘Yeah, I’m insensitive, what else? Sexist? Come on, is that all you can think of? You can do better than this. Oooh Sandra, get stirred up ...’ They’d get madder and madder and he’d keep leaning back on his chair, smiling and taunting them. They knew what he was doing but they couldn’t help themselves.
So after a while we started believing him when he said he was too tough to have emotions. It seemed funny that Fi, the most delicately built girl in our year, looked like being the one to bring him undone, if that’s the right way to put it.
I went for a walk back up the track, to the last of Satan’s Steps. The sun had already warmed the great granite wall and I leaned against it with my eyes half shut, thinking about our hike, and the path and the man who’d built it, and this place called Hell. ‘Why did people call it Hell?’ I wondered. All those cliffs and rocks, and that vegetation, it did look wild. But wild wasn’t Hell. Wild was fascinating, difficult, wonderful. No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell, that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying ‘Housing Commission’ or ‘private school’ or ‘church’ or ‘mosque’ or ‘synagogue’. They stopped looking once they saw those signs.
It was the same with Homer, the way for all those years he’d been hanging a big sign around his neck, and like a fool I’d kept reading it. Animals were smarter. They couldn’t read. Dogs, horses, cats, they didn’t bother reading any signs. They used their own brains, their own judgement.
No, Hell wasn’t anything to do with places, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.
Chapter Five
We got fat and lazy, camping in the clearing. Every day someone would say ‘OK, today we’re definitely going up the top and doing a good long walk’, and every day we’d all say ‘Yeah, I’ll come’, ‘Yeah, we’re getting too slack’, ‘Yeah, good idea’.
Somehow though we never got round to it. Lunch-time would creep up on us, then there’d be a bit of serious sleeping to do, a bit of reading or paddling in the creek, then it’d be mid-afternoon getting on to late afternoon. Corrie and I were probably the most energetic. We took a few walks, back to the bridge, or to different cliffs, so we could have long private conversations. We talked about boys and friends and school and parents, all the usual stuff. We decided that when we left school we’d earn some money for six months and then go overseas together. We got really excited about it.
‘I want to stay away for years and years,’ Corrie said dreamily.
‘Corrie! You got homesick on the Year 8 camp, and that was only four days!’
‘That wasn’t real homesickness. That was because Ian and them were giving me such a hard time.’
‘Weren’t they such mongrels? I hated them.’
‘Remember when they got caught bombing us with firelighters? They were crazy. At least they’ve improved since then.’
‘Ian’s still a dork.’
‘I don’t mind him now. He’s all right.’
Corrie was much more forgiving than me. More
tolerant.
‘So will your parents let you go overseas?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. They might, if I work on them long enough. They let me apply for that exchange thing, remember.’
‘Your parents are so easy to get on with.’
‘So are yours.’
‘Oh, most of the time I guess they are. It’s only when Dad’s in one of his moods. And he is awfully sexist. All the stuff I had to go through just to come on this trip. If I was a boy it’d be no problem.’
‘Mmm. My dad’s not bad. I’ve been educating him.’
I smiled. A lot of people underestimated Corrie. She just quietly worked away on people till she got what she wanted.
We figured out our itinerary. Indonesia, Thailand, China, India, then up to Egypt. Corrie wanted to go from there into Africa, but I wanted to go on to Europe. Corrie had this idea that she’d have a look at everything, come home, do nursing, then go back and work in the country that needed nurses most. I admired her for that. I was more interested in making money.
So the time drifted by. Even on our last full day, when food was getting short, no one could be bothered going all the way back to the Landrover to get more. Instead we improvised, and put together snacks that at any other time we would have chucked at the nearest rubbish tin. We ate meals that I wouldn’t have fed to our chooks. There was no butter left, no powdered milk, no condensed milk because we’d sucked the tubes dry on our first day. No fruit, no tea, no cheese. No chocolate – that was serious. But not serious enough to motivate us to get off our butts. ‘It’s catch twenty-something,’ Kevin explained. ‘If we had chocolate it’d give me the energy to get up to the Landie to get some more. But without it I don’t think I could make it to the first step.’
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