by John Marsden
The smell of burning, that unmistakable charred smell, filtered into every corner, every nook and cranny. It clung to our clothes and gradually blocked out everything else: the musty smell of the school, the sweaty smell of Homer and Kevin and even Fi and me, and the sickly smell of the dead possum that had fallen through the ceiling tiles in Room A23.
As dark slowly surrounded the school we started to feel a little safer. We thought it was unlikely they’d come looking for us at night. They’d have too many problems of their own, with the damage from the fire. And you can’t do much of a search in darkness anyway. They might even be scared of us, too. After all, we’d shown ourselves to be pretty desperate. I got scared of myself often enough these days, so I wouldn’t blame them for being scared of me. No, I didn’t think they’d come looking for us after dark.
I did my turn at sentry then went to talk to Fi. She was hard to find. It felt strange to be walking the long empty school corridors. Of course, I’d never seen it like this before, but then I guess not many people had. We were in A wing. My footsteps echoed through the building. I went past the office, the Graphics room, the dunnies, the computer room, then on past the regular classrooms. The whole world could have gone missing and I wouldn’t have known. That’s how empty it was. It was maybe the most alone I’ve ever been, because this was a building made for hundreds of students and teachers, and so it felt even more alone than the Hermit’s hut.
Right down the very end I found Fi. Or rather, she found me. She was in A22. She called out as I came to the end of the corridor, otherwise I would never have known she was there. I think she was actually really depressed, the way I was close to being myself, but this time we didn’t depress each other like you’d expect.
‘This was my favourite room,’ she said.
‘Why?’
It didn’t look too interesting. Because the invasion had come during the school holidays the rooms were even more boring than usual. No essays or pictures on the walls, no writing on the whiteboards, no books lying around. There was an emergency evacuation plan on the bulletin board, next to the light switch, and opposite that a poster of an Emily Dickinson poem. But the poster was ripped in one corner, and someone had scribbled across the bottom with a texta. From the overhead fan a pathetic bit of pink Christmas streamer still dangled. When they celebrated Christmas in here less than a year ago, little did they know how everything was about to change.
‘It was my English room,’ Fi explained.
‘Who’d you have for English?’
‘Mr Rudd.’
‘Oh yeah, I never had him.’
‘He was so good! I hope he’s OK now.’
‘I wish I’d had him for something. Everyone was always raving about his lessons. He was American, wasn’t he?’
‘No, Irish.’
Fi, who had been lying on the floor, suddenly came to life. She jumped up and launched into an impersonation of Mr Rudd.
‘Fiona, I’m sorry we had to start without you. It occurs to me that you’re always late for my classes, and I’m wondering if we can make English a little more attractive for you. Would you like to sit yourself over here? This is our corporate box. Can I take your coat? Can I get you a drink? Would you like a more comfortable chair? Here, have mine. No no, really, please don’t distress yourself, it’s no trouble at all.’
Fi was always hopeless at doing impersonations but I laughed anyway.
‘He sounds sarcastic,’ I complained.
‘Mm, not really. I mean, I suppose he could be, but it was never nasty like it is with some teachers.’
‘I did have Social Studies in this room in Year 8,’ I said. ‘With Mrs Barlow. It wasn’t bad. We had that Japanese Day, where we all cooked Japanese food and did origami and stuff. That was good.’
‘Oh yes, I remember. And on Bastille Day we cooked French food. Mrs Barlow was good like that. Baa-baa we called her. It was such a stupid nickname.’
‘Remember when we had that class barbeque in Year 9, I think it was? And the boys served the sausages all raw? I nearly turned vegetarian on the spot. And there was that food fight.’
‘I remember that. My mother complained to the school. I had grease and tomato sauce all over my uniform. Mr Muir got in trouble because he couldn’t control us properly.’
‘He was hopeless, wasn’t he? Were you in that class where he started crying?’
‘No, but I heard about it.’
‘It was terrible. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. It was Homer’s fault too, you know. He gave him such a hard time. He never let up. All those jokes about his weight. He called him “two-tonne” to his face a couple of times, then pretended he was talking to Davo. The day he started crying, Homer had asked him, “Mr Muir, do you eat to live or do you live to eat?”’
Fi looked upset. She was so gentle and nice that she couldn’t bear to hear about even a teacher being given a hard time. I wished I had some of her sweetness. Half would have been enough.
It was dark in the room now but we kept talking, remembering the good and bad times that we’d had in this building, in this school.
‘Do you realise we’ve spent more than two-thirds of our lives at school?’ I said to Fi.
‘Have we? Gosh. Well I would have spent two-thirds of that time wishing I was somewhere else. And now I’d give anything to be back here, playing Theatre Sports in English.’
‘Did you play Theatre Sports? No wonder you liked it. We never did anything that much fun. Just boring old spelling tests and language. The only good stuff was when we had to give talks. And Bryony told us about her sister thinking sheep droppings were sultanas and how she’d tried to eat them. And one day we had to bring in our favourite pictures and talk about why we liked them. And it was amazing because Homer brought in this painting of waterlilies and he talked about how when he felt stressed he’d go and sit in front of this painting and stare at it for half an hour and it calmed him down. Everyone was in total shock. It was the only time I saw Homer take a break from the tough-guy role at school. No one else brought in a painting at all; they just had photos of their footy teams and stuff.’
‘That’s what I thought you meant when you said “favourite pictures”’ Fi said.
‘Mmm, I just brought in a boring old photo of me showing Mirrimbah Buckley Park.’
‘What’s Mirrimbah Buckley Park?’ Fi asked.
‘In the old days we had a merino stud,’ I explained. ‘My grandparents started it and Dad took it over. But in the end Dad thought it was too much. It was so much work and the competition was unbelievable. People were doing the most amazing things to get publicity. Putting on big sales and flying clients in for them. Dad couldn’t be bothered with that scene. We couldn’t afford it, anyway. Plus Dad wanted to diversify more. He sold the stud to the Lucases. But while we still had it I used to show the sheep sometimes, and Mirrimbah Buckley Park was our best ram ever. He got first at the Stratton Merino Show, Open Rams, and third at the National Merino titles. We got a fortune for him. Grandma was so mad at Dad for selling him but Dad had already decided to sell the stud, only he hadn’t told Grandma. When he did tell her it was like global warming. Grandma wouldn’t talk to Dad for months. I could see her point. They worked so hard to develop the stud and then Dad takes over and breaks it up.
‘The funny thing is that we’ve still had to get into the publicity circus with the Charolais, so you never win.’
I realised Fi wasn’t listening. She was staring out the window.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘I saw something move out there,’ she said.
Chapter Fourteen
We hit the floor at the same time. I lay with my face in the dust of the carpet. My heart was thumping so strongly it almost lifted me off the ground. I didn’t spend long thinking about that, though. Fi was already wriggling across the room towards the door, and I followed. We got out into the corridor, then, bent double so we’d be below the windows, we ran swiftly and silently
back towards the sick bay. I knew Homer was on sentry and I thought Kevin would be on one of the beds, having a snooze.
I had time to feel annoyed at Homer. I thought he should have seen whoever was out there. The arrangement we’d made for the sentry was that he or she would stay in the reception area where you could get a good view of three sides of the school grounds. But you had to keep peeping out around the partition to see the fourth side. I couldn’t help wondering if Homer had been a bit slack on the job.
It turned out I’d underestimated him. As we ran up the corridor we met the two boys coming to find us, bent as low as we were.
‘What did you see?’ Homer whispered urgently, as we met.
‘Just one person, I think,’ Fi said. ‘I’m not even sure it was a person.’
‘I only saw one,’ Homer said. ‘But it was a person all right. Sneaking around the canteen.’
We were crouched on the floor of the corridor. You could feel the fear in all of us. Because we were in a group, a circle, the fear seemed to concentrate in the middle of the group. It was like a solid thing that you could reach out and touch.
‘We’d better go down the other end,’ Kevin said. ‘See if anyone’s there.’
‘But even if there is,’ Homer said, ‘we can’t get out without making a noise. We boarded that window up, remember, and they’ve all got security locks on them.’
Suddenly I realised what a trap we’d made for ourselves. I prickled all over.
‘Let’s go up there anyway,’ I whispered. ‘If we think no one’s around that end we might just have to knock a window out and make a run for it.’
I felt it was better for us to be doing something than crouching there in terror.
Still bent over, we hurried to the other end of the building. It was completely dark outside now. That was our only advantage. But if they had the place surrounded, it wasn’t much of an advantage.
To get to the end we had to go into the staff room. It felt funny doing that. It still seemed like forbidden territory. There were two swinging doors that we pushed open carefully, then we scuttled around the table tennis tables to the windows. There seemed to be no moon now, and it was so black outside that we couldn’t see much at all.
‘What do you think?’ Homer muttered to me.
‘I don’t know. We’ve got to have a go though, not just stay here and wait for them.’
‘But they mightn’t even know we’re here. We might draw attention to ourselves if we try to break out.’
‘Yeah, I guess. But it seems weird that they’d come here.’ I was tired, and struggling to find the words to say what I meant. To my right Kevin was making scraping noises with something that sounded dangerously loud, but I didn’t want to stop him because I assumed he was working on getting a window open. We had to take some risks. I tried to concentrate on what I wanted to say to Homer. ‘Unless they’ve got a million soldiers, they wouldn’t be searching every building in town. Plus they’d have to search the bush. They wouldn’t come here especially, unless they knew we were here.’
Homer didn’t say anything.
‘It might just be a kid playing around,’ I said hopefully.
Homer shook his head. ‘I only saw his shadow, but he was too tall for a kid.’
There was a crunching noise from Kevin’s window. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Shut up,’ I hissed savagely.
Kevin wriggled over to where we were whispering. He ignored my comment. ‘I’ve opened it,’ he said. ‘I’ll go out if you want.’
Every so often Kevin amazed me with these acts of courage. I had to keep reminding myself not to sell him short. Just when I thought he was a bit of a wanker he’d do something like this.
Perhaps I should have volunteered to go out there instead of Kevin. But I didn’t. The truth is, I got sick of having to do so much. Cobbler’s Bay, that nearly killed me. I think it affected me in ways I hadn’t even realised yet. Like, it changed me deep inside. And that’s why I was struggling with so much stuff now. I know the prison was the worst thing, and affected me the most, and the deaths of Robyn and Chris, and what happened to Corrie, and the invasion itself ... oh, I’ll go on forever if I start. But staying in that container, then thinking I was going to be killed after the explosion, then seeing the soldiers at Baloney Creek with my friends, and what I had to do to them: somehow that seemed to get me in a terrible horrible way that had a bad bad impact on me.
So when Kevin volunteered, no, I didn’t say a word.
We went over to the window he’d opened. It didn’t seem quite so dark outside after all.
‘I can’t see anyone,’ Fi whispered.
The window still wasn’t open enough. It would have been a tight fit for Fi, and Kevin had no hope. I touched the frame. The timber was pretty rotten. I could see and feel where he had splintered the wood in levering it open. Gingerly I pushed it up another thirty or forty centimetres. I was doing it from underneath, and it creaked and squeaked as it went.
‘Careful, can’t you,’ Kevin muttered, echoing the way I’d told him to shut up a couple of minutes earlier.
Still, once I’d got it up enough, he didn’t hesitate. Right away he started crawling over the sill, then at the finish he took a quick dive and disappeared under the window. For one horrible moment I thought he might have been shot, he went so quickly, but there’d been no sound of a gun, so I guessed he was OK. Sure enough, a few seconds later I saw him running swiftly into the darkness, crouched over and zigzagging.
It was a brave thing he did there, a really brave thing.
Then followed six or eight minutes of silence. We were straining every nerve, watching, listening, sniffing the air, trying for any clue that would help us work out what was happening.
Finally Homer whispered: ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going after him.’
Fi and I spoke at the same time. ‘No, Homer, please don’t.’
‘Wait a while,’ I added. ‘If something’s happened to him, it’ll happen to you, too.’
They knew what I meant.
So we waited. Another five minutes I’d say. Then I heard the sound I least expected to hear; a sound so unlikely that I thought I had finally flipped my lid. Or if I hadn’t, Kevin definitely had. Because either I was imagining things, or else Kevin, somewhere out there in the darkness, had just laughed.
I gazed at Homer in astonishment. Kevin had one of those laughs that once heard you never forget. If you crossed a donkey with a machine-gun you’d get close to it. It’s not the kind of laugh you can easily imitate. It was definitely laughter that I’d heard, and it was definitely Kevin’s.
I risked standing a little higher, so I could get a wider view of the school grounds. It was so frustrating not being able to see. But only a moment later I saw two people coming towards the building from the black gloom of the trees. One of them was Kevin.
And the other was Lee.
Forgetting everything we’d ever told ourselves about security I wriggled through the window and ran towards him. I wanted to have one of those great reunion hugs, like you see in the movies and like I’d once had with Kevin, but as I ran up to him I realised he was in poor shape. He smiled at me, but it was more a contortion of his face muscles than a smile. His chin was trembling and his head hung low. He was walking very slowly. Kevin on the other hand was grinning like a kid who’s won pass-the-parcel at three birthday parties in a row. I guess having risked his life by going out into the night he couldn’t believe how lucky he’d been, how well it had ended up.
‘Are you OK?’ I said to Lee, in one of those dumb questions you ask when you can’t think of anything better.
‘I could use a good meal,’ he said.
We arrived at the window. Homer was hanging out of it beaming at Lee, but I said to him, ‘Get some food.’
His smile disappeared quickly, and so did he. A moment later I heard the swing doors of the staff room open and shut.
Fi and I helped Lee through the window. H
e was very weak. When we got him inside he sat on a stool, then changed his mind and lay on the floor. I ran down the corridor to find Homer. He was still pulling stuff out of his pack. We had New Zealand army food these days, freeze-dried stuff mostly, that was in little foil packets. It was incredibly light and actually cooked up into a decent meal. Savoury Rice was my favourite. But you had to soak it then cook it, and I didn’t know if we could cook it here. I didn’t even know if the power was on. So instead of waiting to find all that out I grabbed some muesli from Homer, got the last of Kevin’s orange juice powder from his pack, and took it to the sink in the staff room. The water was still running so it was easy to mix some OJ to pour on the muesli.
I’d heard somewhere, vaguely, that it’s not good to eat heaps if you haven’t eaten for ages. Actually I’ve just remembered where I heard that. It was one of those World War Two stories about prisoners on the Burma-Thai railway. Apparently when the war ended and the Americans arrived to save them, some of the prisoners died from overeating.
I mean, how unfair can life get?
Well, I didn’t remember that story at the time but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be a good idea to give Lee heaps of food. So I shovelled a few spoonfuls into him, then told him he’d have to wait an hour for some more. He wasn’t too amused but I stuck to my guns, and Homer and Fi backed me up.
While I was feeding Lee, Kevin shut the window and locked it again. But he didn’t use the security lock. It made me feel a little safer to know we at least had an escape route now. Then at last we could ask Lee the questions we’d been sweating to ask.
‘What happened, Lee?’ Homer asked, crouching beside him. ‘Where are Iain and Ursula and the others?’
Lee shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He spoke very slowly, like talking was a big effort. ‘I haven’t got the foggiest. After they’d finished their recce they got me to hide in the bush outside town, past the church, you know, Church of Christ. They told me they’d pick me up after the attack and we’d go back to Hell flat out. So I waited and waited and they just never came.’
