by John Marsden
I surprised him then. ‘OK,’ I said, dropping my eyes.
‘OK?’ he said. ‘Well, I didn’t think it’d be quite that easy. But I’m glad you’re showing some sense. Now, have you got someone you can stay with? My wife said you’re very welcome to –’
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll go back with Lee and stay at his place in Stratton.’
He peered at me more suspiciously. ‘I hope you’re not cooking up any silly plots. You realise there’s nothing you can do to find Gavin?’
‘No, no,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s fine. I really want to get off the place. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies at the moment.’
He seemed satisfied with that, and five minutes later I was shaking hands with the police, and thanking them, and then waving them goodbye as their cars headed down the driveway.
I went back into the house to start packing. The first things I grabbed were the firearms and all our ammunition, although I didn’t imagine I’d be able to carry them with me to Havelock, if that’s where I was heading. But I wasn’t going to leave them in the house either.
I’d just laid the shotgun on the dining room table when the telephone rang.
Since the kidnapping the ringing of the phone had been the most powerful sound in my life. It tingled through me like I was wired to it and we were both live. And I guess I must be psychic because I knew this was The Call.
I said to Lee, ‘Grab the phone in the kitchen.’ As he headed across there I called after him, ‘We’ll pick them up at the same time.’
He nodded, and when he reached the phone looked back at me. We nodded at each other then, and picked up the phones simultaneously.
‘Hello, Ellie Linton speaking,’ I said.
The line was crackly, and the voice was hoarse and had a heavy accent. It was a guy, probably only twenty or so. I felt I knew everything that he was going to say before he said it. A great heaviness came over me. ‘We have him,’ the man said.
‘Is he all right? Are you looking after him?’ I asked. I wanted to say, ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t get him back here within the next five minutes.’ But I held myself back.
‘He is all right. We don’t want. You have him back.’
For a moment I hoped Gavin had been so obnoxious and difficult that they were desperate to get rid of him. There was a movie where that happened but it was a comedy.
‘Where is he?’ I asked. ‘’I’ll come and get him.’
Lee frowned at me and I realised what a dumb comment I’d just made. No way were they going to let Gavin and me both go if I turned up at someone’s place to pick him up. We’d already discussed this. If they wanted me they’d be delighted to have me arrive at their front door, but there’d be no motivation for them to let Gavin go. The opposite. If they let him go he could give evidence against them.
‘Yeah, you come. We swap. Boy for you. And the other one.’
‘The other one?’
‘The leader. The one cause all trouble. We want him too. We give little boy for you two.’
My head rang like it had suddenly turned into a bell and someone had just smashed it with a sledgehammer. The Scarlet Pimple? They wanted the Scarlet Pimple? I had never thought of that. Judging by the look on Lee’s face he had never thought of it either.
‘But I don’t know who the Scarlet Pimple is,’ I stammered, then thought how stupid the name the Scarlet Pimple sounded. It was just a joke name to us, one we used among ourselves. ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel,’ I corrected myself. ‘The leader.’
‘You know,’ the man said.
‘I don’t, I don’t,’ I said wildly. Of course it was true, I didn’t know who he was, but I was trying to buy time. I could find out who the Scarlet Pimple was easily enough in a situation like this. Hell, by officially joining Liberation I could find out. But I thought that if I could sound convincing then I might be able to get a bit of breathing space while I – we – absorbed this news.
‘They won’t tell me,’ I shouted, trying to sound hysterical. It wasn’t difficult – I had been feeling pretty hysterical for a few days now. ‘I’ve asked a million times. I’ve tried a heap of ways to find out but it’s the biggest secret in Wirrawee. No-one’ll tell me.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line. I felt triumphant. I knew I’d shaken him. It probably wouldn’t be for very long but it was a tiny victory to me. The first one I’d had since this awful thing started.
The victory lasted maybe three seconds. Till he said, ‘You find out. You can find out if you want. You make it your business to find out.’
Then he hung up. I hadn’t expected that. I thought we were in for a fairly long conversation, that he’d start telling me conditions, meeting points, whatever. But I told myself, maybe with more desperation than anything, maybe it was good. It might mean that I had shaken him and left him unable to go on to the next step. I’d wanted to buy time and now it seemed like I had. The only question was what to spend it on.
The call did give me hope that Gavin was alive. And it turned an unknown force into a slightly more known force. I’d started with an equation that read x=a+b+c, but now I knew c was a positive number, somewhere between 0 and a few million, or whatever the population was across the border, so that was a step forwards. Wasn’t it?
If I’d shaken him, he’d shaken Lee. Suddenly Lee went crazy. I was about to sit down and talk this through with him and I wanted to do that, desperately needed to do it. The debriefing. My nerves were quivering from the phone call. My body, my emotions, my whole being, craved this conversation. Instead of which Lee bolted over to where the firearms were sitting on the dining-room table and practically threw the rifle at me.
‘What are you doing?’ I yelled at him. I thought he must want us both to go careering off to Havelock and find the group of terrorists and shoot the lot of them.
‘They’re watching the house,’ he yelled back. ‘They’re out there now.’
I was mystified, but only for a moment. Then I put together the same clues he had. The police had driven away, abandoning their watch on the house. Five minutes later the kidnappers ring me. What were the odds? Either this was an amazing coincidence or they were waiting till the moment when they could make contact and have no fear of the cops getting in their way. Nevertheless I grabbed Lee’s arm to hold him as he headed for the back door with the shotgun. ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Is this going to help Gavin or make things worse for him?’
When he paused I added, ‘They wouldn’t have Gavin anywhere near here. So there’ll just be a spy or two, probably two, watching us and reporting back to headquarters. If we get lucky and kill them, chances are whoever’s holding Gavin will take it out on him.’
I felt the pressure in Lee’s arm relax a bit, so I let it go. ‘That’s true,’ he said slowly. ‘But if we did get lucky and kill them before they got any message back that we were chasing them, well, what happens then? The rest of their organisation never knows what’s happened to them. They can’t know if they got killed in a car accident or committed suicide or defected or fell in love with you and you’ve all gone off to Fiji together. It’s like us with those New Zealand guys during the war. The ones who were going to take the airport apart. We still don’t know what happened to them.’
‘And,’ I said, feeling an all-too-familiar excitement, an excitement that was not always unwelcome, gathering inside me, ‘if we did get lucky and kill them, it would take quite a long time for their friends to realise that they’d gone missing, and quite a long time for their friends to organise a new way of getting in touch with me. So for that time they’d keep Gavin safe, because he’s their bargaining chip.’
‘We’d probably buy forty-eight hours, maybe quite a bit more,’ Lee said.
His face had hardened and he was inching towards the door again.
‘Better still if we caught them,’ I said. ‘We could hand them over to the police and they could ask them a few questions.’
‘Hand them over to Liber
ation,’ Lee said grimly. ‘We’d ask them a few questions. We’d get answers too.’
It seemed that we’d made up our minds. We each took a gun, Lee the shotgun and me the .22-250. I suddenly realised that if they were watching the house closely they’d see us straightaway, armed and dangerous. I ran and grabbed the first thing I could find that looked like it might be big enough to hold two guns. It was a funny old suitcase, long and battered and dusty, which was on top of the wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom. I knew that if there were a couple of terrorists out there and they saw us they’d think this long suitcase was pretty suspicious, but at least they couldn’t be certain of anything. It might confuse them a little, buy us an extra minute or two before they were certain of what we were up to.
We sauntered out to the machinery shed, chatting like old friends, making like we were on our way to the shops to pick up a litre of milk. Again this wouldn’t be very convincing to anyone, considering I’d just had a phone call from kidnappers who’d taken my brother, but anything to slow down their responses, keep them off balance, the way they’d kept me for a couple of days now. If it was theatre for an invisible audience, that was OK, but if it was theatre for an audience that didn’t exist, then we were wasting our time.
Once we got into the machinery shed we stopped acting so casual. ‘Let’s take the ute,’ I said.
‘No, the bikes,’ Lee said. ‘They’re more mobile.’
In a way I think it was a bit of a boy–girl thing, a Lee–Ellie thing. I wanted to be with someone, with him, but he was still like he’d always been – the lone wolf. Lee wanted to ride off on his own and battle the dark forces; I wanted to battle the dark forces too, but with someone I could trust, so we could fight it out together. Lee thought that being on your own made you stronger. He travels fastest who travels alone. I thought that being on your own left you exposed. I would have felt too vulnerable on a motorbike by myself. One for all and all for one, that was my motto.
It made me want to reach out to him and gather him in, not to bring him home and domesticate him, but to try to break through that shell he put around himself. Some people might say it was a hard shell, but I wouldn’t. I’d say it was a powerful one.
Instead I took charge and headed for the ute. This wasn’t something Lee liked but I knew I could get away with it because it was my territory and this was my business. We unpacked the firearms again, loaded both of them, and got in. We didn’t have a plan – I didn’t even know where we were going, let alone what we’d do when we got there – I just figured the best thing was to go for a cruise through the paddocks and see what we could see.
But I did do a bit of thinking as we went. Thinkdriving, there ought to be a law against it. I said to Lee, ‘They’ll be in a place where they’ve got a good view of the property but where the cops didn’t search. Where they’d be pretty confident no-one would bother to search. That could include the whole of Tailor’s Stitch.’
‘Long way away.’
‘It’s not the only place though.’
‘They’ve got to have mobile reception too. That’d rule out some of Tailor’s Stitch.’
‘Yeah, good point, I never thought of that.’
I drove slowly, both of us scanning the hills and paddocks as we strained our brains to be faster and smarter than our eyes. Apart from Tailor’s Stitch there were two places I thought were possible, both within a few kilometres. Of course it was silly to rule out Tailor’s Stitch because it was further away, like the story about the guy who loses his car keys on one side of the street but goes looking for them on the other side because the light there is better. But I hadn’t ruled out Tailor’s Stitch, I just thought it would be smart to check out the easier places first. I did think that the paddock we call One Tree was worth a look. I headed the car up there, going slowly, like we were enjoying a Sunday afternoon drive. I wanted to confuse anyone who was watching. Of course if they’d thought about it for a moment they’d have realised how ridiculous it was that I’d be going for a Sunday afternoon drive just after getting the phone call about Gavin, but this was again about sowing seeds of doubt, buying ourselves a few extra minutes. It did occur to me that if they were hiding close by and had a good shot at us they could kill me nice and easily right now with a well-directed bullet to my head, but then they’d miss the opportunity to get the Pimple.
Unless Lee was the Scarlet Pimple. I gulped at that thought. I’d already decided he wasn’t but I could have been wrong. ‘Lee, you’re not the Scarlet Pimple, are you?’
‘No,’ he said, eyes scanning the paddocks, gun resting across his lap.
We kept going, sticking to the track mostly, going off it only when there was a big mob of cattle ahead. They were heavy and lazy. Hard to believe they had stampeded only a short time ago. All the time we were searching but there was nothing to see. At the top I swung right, along the ridge, looking down on the house and the valley. It was a pretty sight. Hard to believe there’d been violence there too. Not the random violence of a stampede sparked by lightning, but cold, planned violence that had pulled my life out by its roots and thrown it up in the air, to fall where the wind blew it.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Feeling frustrated I swung around and went back along the ridge. This time I passed the top of the track we’d come up but now I kept going out towards Providence Gully Road. We were getting into some thicker bush here.
‘Stop the car,’ Lee said suddenly.
I hit the brakes. He got out, looked at his gun, hesitated, then left it there. He slipped across to the edge of the scrub and walked along the track about ten metres. He was trying to act naturally but not doing a very good job. He bent, picked up something, then came back to the car, got in and closed the door. Then he pulled it out of his pocket and showed me. A disposable cigarette lighter. The writing on the side wasn’t in English, wasn’t even in our alphabet. But I recognised that writing. I’d seen enough of it by now.
‘Gee you’ve got good eyesight,’ I said. ‘So they’ve been up here.’
‘What do you reckon? Where would you camp around here that would keep you out of sight?’
‘There’s nowhere that’d give you a view of the homestead.’
‘We might have been wrong about that. Maybe they had a camp up here and just snuck out to spy on the place when it suited them.’
‘OK, well I’d camp through here a bit further. Where the bush starts to clear again and you get to the boundary of Burnt Hut. That’d give you two ways of spying on the buildings.’
I drove on another fifty metres then pulled over so the ute was in a little clearing on the left, out of sight unless you were quite close to it. We bailed out. We’d done this kind of stuff so often that we didn’t need to say anything to each other. We got our weapons and began to walk along the track, one on each side, sticking to the shelter of the trees and scrub, using our eyes like they were swivelling security cameras, using our other senses too, all of them.
I never know how much attention to pay to my senses but sometimes I think we’d be better off if we did take more notice of them. It’s like they don’t get much of a look-in these days. Poor things. Seems like they always get pushed to the back of the queue. In our society anyway. I bet they didn’t in Aboriginal society, or any of those tribes who had to live in harmony with the environment, who didn’t see the environment as something they had to control or defeat. They would have had their senses working pretty well, I reckon. Too bad if they didn’t. Those crocodiles can have your leg off in no time. Sharks can bite pretty hard. And as for dinosaurs, man, they’d have you for afternoon tea and still complain they were hungry. So what are you going to do? You’re going to develop all your senses to the max, till the faintest change in the environment has your skin prickling and your tongue drying and your brain catching up a split second later and saying, ‘Wait a minute, something’s happening here.’
Then gradually we evolved. I’m not sure why, or when. Maybe it was when the scientists and accou
ntants and schoolteachers came along. Somehow our instincts had to make way for our brain and since then it’s all been ‘Better give it a bit more thought’, ‘Don’t rush into it’, ‘But have you really thought about it?’
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, that’s what they tell you.
I remember hearing how, during World War II, the guy in charge of the SS, the worst of the worst, went to see his soldiers executing Jews and anyone else they’d put on their list – gays, gypsies, people who loved peace – and when he saw all these rows of people being shot in the head and pushed into mass graves he collapsed and was sick and had to be helped back to his car. OK, so wouldn’t you think he’d go home and think, ‘Sheez, something’s wrong here . . . my instincts are trying to tell me something. Wonder what it could be?’
Instead, he goes back to Berlin, sits down at his desk, and lets his mind take charge again. Forget those dumb instincts, what would they know? He thinks, ‘I can’t let our nice young German soldiers be exposed to that kind of nastiness.’ He draws up plans for a new system that allows people to be killed in a clean, organised, scientific way. He establishes death factories. They’re called concentration camps. He didn’t follow his instincts and six million people paid the price.
The war sure developed my instincts. I definitely got better tuned to what was going on around me. My senses operated much more powerfully away from the distractions of TV and iPods and computers. And I suppose the senses feed the instincts, they give them the raw material they need, so I felt like I was operating on a different level a lot of the time. Growing up on a farm didn’t hurt either. I know farming nowadays is meant to be all science, all breeding blood lines and MYOB and crop rotations, but if you can’t tell when there’s rain on the horizon or the tractor doesn’t quite feel right or there could be a snake under the roofing iron you’re about to pick up, then you might as well sell the farm and become an auditor.
Of course sometimes you can’t trust your instincts. You have to override them. You have to know that even if your senses are feeding you the right info, your instincts mightn’t be processing them properly, and your brain better get involved fast or something tragic might happen. That time, not too long ago, when Gavin was stuck on the cliff face and I thought he was going to fall to his death and take me with him, I had to become a skilled rock climber in a hurry, and that meant ignoring my instincts and facing into the cliff, even though I couldn’t see what I was doing or where I was going.
