by John Marsden
I think he didn’t want to tell me anything personal because he didn’t want me to know too much about him if I got caught. That was fair enough, especially as he now obviously expected me to get myself caught at the first available opportunity, but it was annoying, cos I like to know everything about everyone. Still, I did find out that he had two sisters, both older, and his mother was a tailor. There wasn’t much more than that.
When it got dark enough he came bounding down the stairs. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said.
I had thought that we’d be on the motorbike again, with the wig and the sunglasses, but he took me out into the street behind his place and told me to walk ahead of him for three blocks and then turn left, go two and a half blocks, and wait outside a fire hydrant. ‘I’ll go past you then come back then you follow me.’
It took us a while to work out what he meant by fire hydrant, cos he didn’t have the word for it, but eventually I got the message.
I set off. A couple of glances behind showed Toddy at a safe distance. At an extremely safe distance. Like, a hundred and fifty metres behind. I had no illusions. I knew that if I got caught Toddy would become about as solid as an illusion. ‘Ellie? Paula? She said that? Never heard of either of them. C’mon! Man, that’s one crazy girl you’ve got yourself there!’
He’d got me nervous, along with what had happened that afternoon, and now I walked along like I expected to be shot at any moment. Like there’d be snipers in the trees and on the roofs of buildings. He’d sent me down a quiet street, which was fine by me, and I got nearly a full block before I passed anyone. One man, in dark clothes, was walking towards me, but as he approached I became aware that there was a second person coming up behind, walking quite quickly. I risked a glance and saw another man in a dark suit. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘This is where the whole game ends.’ I fully expected to be arrested. I took another glance, this time across the street, and thought, ‘I’ll try to make a run for it, if one of them puts his hand on me.’
The man coming towards me seemed to veer a little as he got closer, as though he were getting ready to grab me. Then he straightened up again and went on by. A moment later the man behind overtook me and went on.
Had there been a signal between them? Since the girl on the motorbike that morning I’d felt watched, suspected, threatened.
I kept going, but with my eyes on the man in front as he continued to accelerate. Was he an agent of the police or the government? Or just an office worker making his way home after a late finish? Toddy was a long way back and I felt very alone. I could almost see myself from behind, through his eyes, a solitary figure walking in darkness, occasionally dappled by the dim light from the few street lamps that worked. Walking a little more quickly than normal, my instincts and my body wanting to go faster but my mind keeping on the brakes.
I wanted to get there, I always wanted to get there. And there was always a Toddy in the background, reining me in, and all around me the invisible watchers, saying ‘Hello, who’s she, looks like trouble, stop her, get in her way.’
I turned left, following instructions, and a block later was crossing the main road again. It was still busy. This part was very bright, very commercial. The neon signs were orange, red, blue, yellow, pink. I couldn’t read most of them but some were in English as well as their own language. Best Chinese Food. Handy Supermart. American hamburgers. National Security Bank. Top Indian Food.
It was strange crossing this river of light and cars and colour and people. It seemed a long way from a paddock filled with cattle. A group of four middle-aged women hurried past, no-one talking. They looked like they were too tired to talk. They looked sad. I wondered if one or two of them might be the mothers of the men Lee and I had driven to their deaths at the hands of the bull. At the hooves and horns of the bull. Getting from one side of the street to the other was pretty wild. Traffic rules didn’t seem to matter much. A funny little white taxi zipped around another car, happily going over the double lines to do it. Further up the street a man stood in the middle of a pedestrian crossing waiting for someone to stop or maybe even slow down a little so he could continue his brave journey. The way things looked, he might be there most of the night.
I did me some slipping and some sliding between cars, letting this one go, taking a chance on that one, ducking between those two, and making it onto the footpath with a feeling that wasn’t much different to the feelings I’d had after some of my near-death experiences during the war. I was past the halfway point, with only two blocks and a half to go. No-one seemed to have paid me too much attention in the busy road. Now I plunged back into the quiet semi-darkness of the side street. There was a different smell along here, sweet but not pleasant. The kind of sweetness that makes you feel slightly nauseous. Something fermenting, something on the verge of being rotten. A woman squawked on my left and startled me. The sound had come from one of the houses. She was angry at someone. She rattled off a string of abuse that could have been about the way her husband drank or the way her teenage daughter answered back or the way no-one would take out the garbage and she had to do all the work around here. I hurried on. I passed a church that was closed and dark. A block of flats where a man was pressing numbers into the security pad. A place that sold huge pottery vases, all crammed in together, standing like dull people waiting to be told what to do.
And at last the fire hydrant. I slipped into the shadows, using an overhanging tree for cover. A few minutes later Toddy’s footsteps approached. In real life footsteps are never the way they’re described in books, unless someone’s on a wooden floor maybe. You hear more than the actual feet. You get the sense of a physical presence, with the noises that come from the feet, sure, but the clothing and I suppose the arms as well. There’s an array of sounds coming towards you. Toddy made light sounds considering he was a big guy, and he sounded nervous, but then I’d expect that anyway, given the dangerous place I was in. This was totally a ‘Trust Toddy’ exercise. Trust a complete stranger, someone you met for the first time that very morning. If he was betraying his own country for money, it figured that he’d betray me right back to them for even more money.
He went on by, a dark shape, not looking to right or left. I leant against the wall, waiting for him to come back. I heard a sound above my head and, looking up, saw the shape of a possum outlined against the light from a small block of flats across the road. It was stretching from one branch to another, but the distance was a little too far. ‘Great heavy thing, possum,’ I thought. I’d never seen a squirrel but I imagined they were much more nimble. The possum was in silhouette, but as I watched, it connected with the other branch and hauled itself across. ‘Good job,’ I told it.
I turned my attention back to the street. Someone was approaching from the left, the direction Toddy had gone. I hoped it was him. But the sounds were heavier. An older man walked past slowly, out for his evening walk perhaps. I stayed still, hoping he wouldn’t notice me, but he glanced at me as he went past and I thought I saw a little change in his expression, like he was startled. It was really too dark to tell and I hoped I’d been wrong. It was a bugger that he’d seen me. I must have looked awfully suspicious. Another three or four minutes passed. Where was Toddy? God he was taking his time. Then with a quick light rush of movement he was there.
‘Come on, anyone see you?’
‘Yes, an old man out for a walk. He looked a bit surprised.’
‘Oh damn, couldn’t you stop him?’
I was starting to get irritated by Toddy, the way everything was always my fault. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Blind him? Kill him? Hypnotise him? “You’re not seeing a girl, you’re seeing a chicken”?’
We were hurrying along the street. Toddy didn’t answer. We reached a block of flats and turned left down a side alley, then hung a sharp right into a foyer. There was a lift but we didn’t take it. We went up a grimy staircase, three levels. I was struggling. Toddy moved fast.
He gave a soft knock on a door mar
ked 31, opened it and went straight in. I just kept following, past a couple of bedrooms, past a tiny kitchen, and into a sitting room.
Three men were sitting there playing cards. They all looked to be in their early twenties. The cards looked a lot older. They were grease-stained and dog-eared. The curtains were drawn and the lighting was dim. Everyone seemed to be smoking and the place stunk of dead cigarettes.
It occurred to me that the people who had kidnapped Gavin wanted me and the Scarlet Pimple in exchange for him and now they had me, possibly. If Toddy had made a mistake here, or worse, if Liberation had been wrong about Toddy, then I was now a prisoner. Very handy for them. They hadn’t lifted a finger. I’d just arrived and handed myself over.
Toddy said a whole lot of stuff to them but they didn’t look particularly interested, just kept playing cards. Occasionally one of them would grunt a comment or an answer. They held the whip hand, that was obvious. Toddy seemed even more nervous. I wondered when my turn would come and whether I would be expected to speak.
Then Toddy turned to me. He cleared his throat. ‘These men know a bit about the group who are holding your brother. They don’t get on with them at the moment. There’s a – I think in New York they would say a “turf war”. These men don’t know who you are or who your brother is but they know there’s a little boy being held as a hostage. But they don’t trust me very much. They think I’m running an operation of my own. I brought you here as proof that I’m not involved in some double-cross or even triple-cross.’
I felt like I was in Sleazeville. The idea of a bribe seemed to have floated in through the door. I didn’t know if this was the right time to do it so I asked Toddy, ‘Should I offer them money?’
‘You have some?’ he asked quickly. He was sure onto that fast.
‘A little,’ I said.
‘No, don’t talk about that yet. Tell them a bit about yourself and why you’re here.’
It was a weird situation. I had to make a speech in a language these guys didn’t know and the life of a child might depend on it. I wasn’t feeling too inspiring in this grotty smoke-filled room with a bunch of guys who were apparently gang members of some kind. But I had to be inspiring. I just started off slow, feeling my way, trying to put some words together. Pausing at the end of each sentence for Toddy to translate was good in one way, bad in another. The good part was that it gave me time to think about what I wanted to say next. The bad part was that I couldn’t get a flow going. It soon became obvious that I wasn’t going to have them swaying in the aisles shouting ‘Halleluiah’ while I inspired them with a sermon about giving their life to the Lord Jesus.
So I told them about Gavin mostly, how Gavin’s stepfather had murdered Gavin’s mother in the last few minutes of the peace or the first few minutes of the war, how Gavin had run off and lived as a street kid in Stratton, seeing other kids coming and going around him, seeing them dying sometimes, of neglect and injuries and in one case at least from being lost in the bush, how I’d found him and kept him with me, and how Gavin’s stepfather had only recently tried to kill the poor kid. I didn’t say much about me because I didn’t want them to guess who I was – assuming they’d heard of me in the first place – but I did say I had no family left and Gavin was now my brother and the only person I had in the whole wide world.
At the end there was a short silence and I said to Toddy, ‘I’ve got a few hundred dollars American, if they want money to tell me where he is.’
‘Just wait,’ he said.
But one of the men had heard the magic word and he looked at me directly for the first time. ‘One thousand dollars,’ he said.
‘I haven’t got that much,’ I lied.
Suddenly they all forgot their card game and everyone was talking at each other. I couldn’t work out what was going on but they were pretty agitated. I looked at Toddy and he gave a little shake of the head. When they kept going hammer and tongs at each other he said quietly to me, ‘They’re arguing about the money. The others don’t like him asking for it.’
The man nearest to me turned around in his chair and looked at me. I hadn’t seen anything much of him before, just the back of his head. Now I realised he was the youngest of them, only about nineteen, and quite goodlooking. He put his cards down on the table where they could all see them. Obviously he wasn’t going to win that hand. ‘We’ll tell you where he is,’ he said. He didn’t speak in English, and to my left Toddy was translating, but I didn’t need the translation. Somehow I knew exactly what the guy was saying. ‘We’ll tell you where he is, but that’s all we’ll do. You’re on your own after that. If you’re going to get him out of there it’s up to you.’
I nodded to thank him. The other men had all gone silent and they’d chucked their cards on the table too. They just watched the young guy like they no longer had anything to do with this. The man glanced at his watch, turned to Toddy, and started talking to him in their own language, pretty fast, Toddy nodding at the end of every sentence. Then it was over. They picked up their cards, the young guy turning back to the table, and Toddy signalled to me that it was time to leave.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said awkwardly to the young guy’s neck. He didn’t respond. I followed Toddy down the corridor, past the bedrooms and through the front door. We continued downstairs without saying a word. Out into the street, towards the bright lights again, walking very fast, this time Toddy right beside me, kind of pulling me along. A hundred metres from the main street he stopped abruptly and dragged me to the right into the grounds of the church.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘listen good. They told me the place and I take you there now. I leave you there and what you do, it’s up to you.’ His English started to collapse under pressure. ‘You live, die, I don’t know, I only Toddy, I no fight. You want little, you take little, I do nothing.’
I realised he meant ‘little boy’, but I didn’t say anything. ‘You get him, you don’t come to my house, you go to place I tell you, if I can find you I help you, OK? You don’t never come to my place, you understand? You never come my place.’
‘All right,’ I said. I resented this, but I could see it from his point of view too. It wasn’t his war. He had to survive. He didn’t want to lose his life for a couple of strangers.
‘All right,’ he echoed me. ‘All right. You stay here. I get motorbike. I bring your stuff. Then you never need my place.’
‘So you’re going to take me to Gavin right now?’
I nearly gagged with the fear of what I was about to do, the situation I was about to enter. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘These people, they move all the time. We go fast, before they move again. They move, we never find them.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘You go get the bike. I’ll wait here.’
CHAPTER 12
ALTHOUGH MY FEELINGS about Toddy were now pretty mixed I clung to him as I rode on the back of his motorbike. He might be the last human I ever clung to. The only comment he made when he came back with the bike was, ‘You shouldn’t have said about the money,’ but I didn’t care. Maybe it was a mistake but it had changed the atmosphere in that room and somehow it had made things happen. I think Toddy just liked being in control of the situation, didn’t like that I’d ignored his instructions. Now I didn’t compare him much to Homer at all. Homer had more, I don’t know, well, not more, less . . . Less vanity, less fear, less ‘I’m in charge here.’
We rode through the sweet cool night air, which made it hard to understand why sweat kept dripping down the back of my neck. Why my face felt so hot. On the edge of town Toddy stopped to show me a hiding place where he said he’d look for me the next day. Me and Gavin, I reminded him, and he was, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, of course,’ and I realised he was sure he’d never see me again, let alone have the pleasure of meeting Gavin. It made me determined to succeed, if only for the completely stupid reason that I wanted to prove to Toddy that I wasn’t helpless and hopeless.
The hiding place was on the edge of an ol
d cemetery, which seemed appropriate. One way or another it seemed likely I’d end up in a cemetery by the next day. I took a quick look around and then got back on the bike. Away we went, towards an unknown and probably impossible destination. To my surprise we headed back into town. I’d always had a picture of these guys holed up in the countryside somewhere, a remote place where I’d have to sneak across paddocks and in and out of trees to reach them. That was the way we’d operated a lot of the time in the war. But now we rode right towards the CBD, Toddy occasionally pointing out something that would help me navigate back to the cemetery.
Twenty minutes later we were in what must have been one of the oldest parts of Havelock. It was the kind of respectable suburb where prices are high, where dentists and architects live. We rode slowly down a wide street that had a lot of speed bumps and was closed at the far end so nasty noisy old trucks and buses couldn’t disturb the sleep of the dentists. Toddy kept peering at the numbers. Three blocks from the far end he stopped and turned off the motor. ‘Down there,’ he whispered.
‘OK.’
‘Number 503.’
‘OK.’
‘Good luck.’
I didn’t bother answering, just got off the bike. I think he was feeling a bit embarrassed at dumping me like this. Or maybe he’d always planned to do this. Whatever, he reached into the pannier of the bike and pulled out a leather pouch, unwrapped it and showed me a handgun. Like everything about Toddy it was a little larger than life, with a silver handle and a long barrel.
