by John Marsden
He didn’t have to say it for long. After the second group of ‘Lomus’ his ear was nearly bitten off by the reply. It was a woman speaking, not a voice we recognised but she had the right response, which was ‘Zinzan’. They were football names, I think.
Her first question was: ‘The Colonel wants to know if you’ve been active?’
Lee fired back: ‘Yes, very. Over.’
‘We thought so. We’ve had some interesting reports. Have you reunited with the Keas? Over.’
I had to think for a moment. Then I remembered. Keas were the codename for Iain and Ursula and their group. But Lee was already answering. ‘No, we’re still alone. We have no news of them, unfortunately.’
‘But you’ve attacked their target? Over.’
‘Yes, correct.’
‘Do you know how many units were destroyed? Over.’
‘Not exactly. We guess a minimum of thirty. Maximum could be anything, fifty or more. We might have got the whole lot.’
‘That’s what we’re thinking. But some buildings are still standing, and we need to know what’s in them. Can you help us there? Over.’
‘We only know about the ones in the north-west corner.’
‘Yes, go ahead, that would be very helpful. Over.’
‘OK, the new galvanised iron hangar, about a hundred metres by fifty, next to a power line, is empty except for a few trucks. Across from that is an L-shaped wooden building, and that’s the soldiers’ barracks. To the south of the hangar is a store shed with aircraft parts, stuff like that. That’s all we know about. Over.’
There was a pause, then the voice came back. ‘Thank you. That’s excellent. It was the first building we were worried about. What credibility rating would you put on your own assessment? Over.’
‘Huh?’ Lee looked at me.
‘I think she means, how sure are we that the hangar’s empty,’ I said swiftly.
‘Oh, OK,’ Lee said. Then, into the radio, he said: ‘We’re one hundred per cent sure. It was our home away from home.’
There was another pause, then the woman asked: ‘Did you sustain any casualties? Over.’
‘Now she asks,’ Homer said behind me.
‘No, none.’ Lee said.
‘Do you have anything else? Over.’
‘No. Over.’
I began to feel kind of empty. I wanted a whole lot of praise and gushing. All we ever seemed to get from them was this cool calm stuff, like a recorded voice on a phone.
‘Cut it off,’ I said to Lee. We’d been on the air long enough.
But the woman was speaking again. ‘Can you call this time tomorrow night? The Colonel wants to talk to you himself. Over.’
This was something, at least. Apparently we were still important enough for Colonel Finley to grant us a few moments of his precious time.
We trudged back to our little fire and got it going again. We were all dry enough now, so we didn’t really need it. But it was comforting. I felt suddenly terribly weary. The radio call left me in the flattest of moods. Despite that, I heard myself volunteering to do the first sentry. It was incredibly generous of me. Everyone else seemed to be grateful, and so they should. They crawled off to their little hidey-holes, to try to sleep. I didn’t know how successful they’d be. I certainly didn’t know how successful I’d be in staying awake. I felt extremely aggrieved because we couldn’t trust Kevin in his depressed state to do sentry, so even though we said we’d wake him, we had made a private agreement to leave him out of it.
Maybe a full night’s sleep would help get him back to normal.
The night was a bit of a blank for me. Kevin didn’t seem to care about being passed over for sentry duty – I don’t know if he even noticed; he certainly didn’t say anything – and I don’t know if anyone got much sleep. I felt like I didn’t get any. We were so hungry in the morning that the roar of rumbling stomachs was almost funny. I’m surprised it didn’t attract hordes of enemy soldiers. But we had to get moving. The search for us wouldn’t be scaled down for a long time yet. In fact they’d probably increase it. They simply had to find us, for their own sake. It was way, way too expensive to have us out in the bush getting ready for our next attack. If the last one cost fifty or a hundred million bucks, what would the next one cost? They’d be prepared to spend a few weeks on a search. That’s how they’d think.
Before dawn we were stumbling through the bush, trying not to trip over, trying to be quiet, trying to stay awake and watchful.
We saw our first helicopter that morning, but it flew past to the west, very low, and going away from us, so I don’t know if it was part of a search.
By then we were back in the river. It wasn’t fun any more but it was an effective way to travel: silent and quick and reasonably secretive. I fretted that all the time we were going further from Hell, where the rest of our stuff was, and where I felt comparatively safe. But that was too bad. Like the song says: ‘If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets in the sea.’ Or, as my Stratton grandmother used to say: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
I had the idea that drinking lots of water would fill my tummy and relieve the hunger, but it didn’t work; just made me feel bloated inside as well as out. In a book I guess the hero would do something outdoorsy and boy-scouty, like make a snare for rabbits out of a young tree branch, or dig up roots using ancient Aboriginal knowledge, or tickle the tummies of a few trout. I wasn’t that outdoorsy, although when I was younger I’d tried a few times to make snares for rabbits. They never worked. Anyway we didn’t have time to sit around for a day or two waiting for an unusually stupid rabbit to blunder into a trap, after he’d had a few drinks with his mates. That was the only way we were ever going to catch one. A drunk rabbit would be quite handy, because it’d have marinated itself already. Save a lot of trouble.
An old bloke named Alf, who’d worked on our place, caught a dozen trout one afternoon by tickling their tummies. I had trouble believing it but he and Dad finally convinced me. The circumstances were a bit unusual though. It was a dry year and one of the tributary creeks on our property – a creek so insignificant it didn’t even have a name – stopped flowing and was down to a series of little pools. Alf noticed that quite a few pools had trout in them, hiding under the bank as far as they could get, to be in the shade. So he stuck his hand in, gave them the old tickle, and flicked them out, one by one.
I’m not sure what the tickling did, hypnotised them I guess. At the Wirrawee Show there’d been a Tassie bloke giving a demonstration with snakes and lizards. He had one type of lizard where you just stroked its belly half-a-dozen times and it went into instant deep sleep. Totally relaxed. He put it on the ground and it lay there like an old drunk for nearly the whole demonstration. One time it woke up and started scuttling around so he picked it up, gave it another stroke, and exactly the same thing happened – instant coma.
I’ve hypnotised a few chooks over the years of course – I reckon every kid who’s got chooks has a go at that. It is funny to watch. You put them on the ground, hold their heads down and draw a line out from their beaks, and straight away they’re gone. You can have them lined up across the chook yard doing Elvis impersonations, pretending they’re stripping their feathers off, or acting like they’re madly in love with the rooster. No worries.
Years ago my Stratton grandmother had a dog you could hypnotise. You did it the same way as the chooks. He walked in circles, his head sticking out in front and his tail sticking out the back, completely straight. And all in slow motion. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. We’d be on the ground in hysterics, but if you laughed out loud or made a noise it’d break the spell. The kitchen door slamming or a vehicle starting would be enough to wake him up. The dog – his name was Cob – would suddenly snap out of it. Life came back to his eyes, he’d shake himself vigorously, then sit down and have a good scratch, all the time looking a bit foolish, like he knew he had let down the doggy species by not acting with enough dignit
y.
In the end Dad stopped us doing it, because he said it wasn’t good for the dog. He found Cob one day in a hypnotic trance on his own, just walking round the yard in a circle, in slow motion. So he said we’d better stop. Cob was becoming a junkie, couldn’t do without his hypnosis fix.
Very strange.
These were the kind of dumb things I thought about as we cruised down the river. I passed a few hours like that, thinking and dreaming about the old times, BTW. It was a colder day and it felt warmer in the water this time. I found myself resenting the times I had to stand up and wade in the shallow stretches. The wind was so cold on my wet skin.
I was keeping half an eye out for soldiers, of course, but only half an eye. Around lunchtime – or what would have been lunchtime if we’d had any lunch – things changed.
But it wasn’t soldiers exactly who changed them.
Chapter Thirteen
‘This is worse than the forty-hour famine,’ Fi complained.
‘Mmmm,’ I agreed. I couldn’t be bothered talking. I’d been thinking about food a lot though, and in particular the smell of barbecues. I’d decided that right now I’d take that smell above any other in the world. I was dreaming of slightly charred sausages, fried onions and lots of potato salad.
The next moment though I was wide awake and talking, even if it was in a whisper.
‘Go back,’ I hissed at her.
But it was too late. We were already too far around the bend and in a narrow deep part of the river where the water was moving quickly. Ahead of me I could see Lee surfacing by the right bank. He had seen the danger and swum to the bank underwater. He obviously planned to sneak out there, so I nudged Fi and we followed suit. I cursed myself for not paying better attention. We had nearly been caught. I should treat my life as worth more than that.
The problem was that we’d at last reached the outskirts of Stratton. It had been a long time coming, and although I hadn’t wanted to get there it was a relief to break the monotony of the long swim. Ahead was a major bridge, built of concrete and steel, four lanes wide. I knew that bridge well, although I’d never seen it from this angle before. Beyond that was a series of rich houses all going down to the river. I figured the enemy officers had probably taken those over by now. In Wirrawee they’d helped themselves to the best houses.
On this side of the bridge was a factory that made ball bearings. Before the war anyway. I didn’t know what it did now. It was the kind of target the Kiwis would love to bomb to bits, but nothing had touched it yet. Someone was using it, because I could see a couple of people standing talking on a brick wall out the front. And just before I dived I saw a truck backing down beside the building.
I got to the bank in one breath, which was pretty good, although I wouldn’t like to do it too often. I came up just in front of Fi. I could see Homer and Kevin scrabbling up the bank already, so it seemed everyone was safe. I dragged myself out of the water and followed them, feeling as waterlogged as a walrus. Water poured off me. I think the river level dropped by half a metre when I got out.
We lay together in the bushes, gasping for breath. We were so tired and hungry that we didn’t have the energy for these sudden shocks, these huge bursts of effort. It was cruel.
But it seemed our journey along the river had come to an end, for the time being anyway. We had no choice. We were in Stratton whether we liked it or not. Our second visit during the war, and I hoped it’d go a bit better than our first one, when I came so close to death, and Robyn crossed the line.
We had no idea what to do. We talked in low voices as we lay there shivering with cold. Trust our luck to draw the first cold day for ages. In the long run we all wanted to get back to Hell – the only safe place we knew – but it was obvious there was no chance of that at the moment.
I assumed we’d wait for night and keep going down the river, but the others, Lee and Fi especially, weren’t very keen. Fi hadn’t wanted us to go to Stratton in the first place but now she changed her mind completely. Maybe she felt safer in towns. It did seem a bit mindless to keep drifting down the river, with no goal or plan.
At one stage I mentioned my grandmother and Lee interrupted me. ‘Why don’t we go there?’
‘I guess we could. But I don’t know that there’s much point in that either.’
‘No, there probably isn’t. But at least you know the area. All the short cuts and hidey-holes. We could move around there with a bit more confidence. Your grandmother’s sounds better than nothing.’
‘How far is it?’ Fi asked.
‘I guess maybe five kilometres. But it’s a nice house, so it might have been taken over.’
‘It’s out in the suburbs though, isn’t it?’ Fi said. ‘It’s probably too far away for them.’
No-one else said anything and no-one else seemed to have any ideas, until Homer clinched it. ‘I think we’d be safe in Stratton,’ he said. ‘They can hardly search the whole city for us, even if they think we’re here.’
It seemed like my grandmother was in for a visit from her granddaughter, and her granddaughter’s rowdy teenage mates. Before the war Grandma, who was very formal, would have regarded that as a bit of a nightmare. Now, wherever she was, and if she was still alive, I don’t think she’d have minded.
I doubted that she was still alive. She’d been about seventy-five when the war started, but she looked so frail. She was my bony grandmother. When you hugged her you felt the sharp bones. She was nice and kind of course – I think all grandmothers are, I think there’s a law that says they have to be – but she hated any fuss, so if she slipped me fifty bucks for a new shirt I wasn’t allowed to say anything except ‘Thank you, Grandma’.
I was the one who did the hugging. She put up with it, but it wasn’t her style.
No-one told me exactly what happened to the Stratton people when the war began. In some cities people were gradually allowed to return to their homes, where they were strictly supervised, but because Stratton was such an important industrial area, all the civilians had been removed. I tried to imagine my grandmother in a prison camp, but I think she would have lain down and died in a place like that. Her pride would be hurt too deeply. Not just hurt: taken out, bashed, jumped on with hob-nailed boots, kicked to pieces.
They might have put her on one of the farms – like Homers’ parents – but they would have thought she was too old for that. Maybe they were right. But with her spirit you’d never know.
We didn’t start out right away. Instead we got onto the subject of food. How could we get some? It wasn’t a long conversation, as no-one had a clue. People sat around saying what they hoped, instead of practical ideas. ‘Maybe we’ll find some shops we can break into.’ ‘Maybe there’s a few houses that haven’t been looted.’ ‘Maybe we can get in touch with a work group of prisoners.’
I got sick of that pretty quickly.
‘Oh, come on, this is a waste of time,’ I said, after the twentieth vague suggestion.
The journey to Grandma’s place was dull for the first half. One of the many times during this war that had me grinding my teeth with boredom. Lee passed out some chewing gum from his waterproof pack, but that was all he had. I found myself cursing him because he hadn’t carried more food, which was hardly fair, seeing I didn’t have any.
The chewing gum only made me more hungry. Fi claimed that chewy always does that; she said it’s because your stomach’s getting messages from your mouth that food is on the way, but the food never arrives, so your tummy gets more and more frustrated. It’s quite possible. Anyway it was a good theory.
Even though Grandma’s was only five kilometres we took a route that would have been ten k’s, easily. I didn’t know the way too well, so I took decisions based on which was the quieter way to go. We ended up doing a tour of the outskirts of Stratton.
And that turned out to be pretty smart. We were about halfway there when we stopped for a rest in the corner of a large empty park. We were talking about the ai
rfield raid again. Fi was wondering aloud whether our attack would make much difference. Then, as though Colonel Finley timed it just to impress us and to answer Fi, we got dramatic evidence that it had. There was a low rumbling away to the east. For a minute we couldn’t work out what it was, then Lee said: ‘It’s planes.’
We jumped to our feet, poking our noses cautiously out of the shrubbery. We were in a good position, high above most of Stratton, with a view of the CBD. And before we’d even seen the first plane there was a series of explosions on the eastern edge of the suburbs. Flashes of red, like a giant camera going off, then the familiar mushroom clouds of dirty loam-coloured smoke. A moment later we heard ‘crump, crump, crump,’ and the droning of an aircraft as it gained height. Lee pointed up into the sun. ‘There they are,’ he said.
Some people said the Kiwis loved dropping bombs on us. They’d been wanting to do it for years, ever since we first won the Bledisloe Cup. Well, they sure went for it now. I don’t know how many tonnes they dropped on Stratton but they let rip. It went for nearly ten minutes. They did it in waves: two planes at a time, beating across the sky like march flies, dropping their load, and droning away into the distance. We actually saw the bombs dropping; not great big round things with propellers on the ends, like in the cartoons, but more like black sticks, and lots of them. As each pair of planes disappeared, the bombs hit, there was another huge blast, the ground rocked and another red fireball erupted, followed by its shadow of smoke.
I actually saw one building fall in on itself. It was a big place that looked like a factory, and the walls suddenly folded in and slid down, collapsing like someone fainting. It was scary and exciting at the same time.
Considering the New Zealanders had just about given up aerial bombing, this raid was proof that we’d opened up the skies for them again. We grinned at each other in amazement. Homer’s eyes were alight with pride. To think we had contributed to this! Our radio call had made it happen. Dial-a-bomb. Dial-a-plane. Dial-an-air raid. It was a bit too big to take in. I found myself almost hoping for the planes to go, so I wouldn’t have to think about it any more.
