by John Marsden
The conditions there were very different to West Stratton. It was back to the tension of the previous day. That was good news and bad news. The good news was that I didn’t feel the constant tingling in my back that I got around Grandma’s: the feeling of being watched or followed. Here the dangers were obvious, out in the open. The bad news was that this area was definitely occupied. Seems like these spectacular new homes proved irresistible to the invaders. It all reminded me of the new-look Wirrawee, with families living in the houses again. Not ‘our’ families, but if you didn’t know that you wouldn’t have guessed it. The same washing hung from the lines, the same cars were parked in the streets, the same flowers grew in the same carefully manicured gardens. I felt like we’d stepped out of the lightless world of West Stratton and into an American TV show.
Homer and I looked at each other from our hiding place in a creek bed. We were in a small park at the bottom of the hill.
‘No point going up into that,’ Homer said flatly.
‘I agree.’
‘Oh thank goodness,’ Fi said. ‘The way you two carry on I thought you’d want us to charge in and take them all hostage.’
‘Hmm, now that’s not a bad idea,’ Homer said.
We withdrew as delicately as we could into West Stratton. It had once been an unfashionable nice old suburb. But it didn’t feel all that nice any more. Again I found myself looking around all the time. My neck could have twisted like a coil spring on a car.
‘Do you get the feeling something’s wrong around here?’ I muttered to Fi, as we crouched behind a garden shed in someone’s backyard.
It seemed, even to me, like a stupid question to ask in a war zone when your country’s been invaded. Fi looked at me so strangely that I thought that’s what she was about to say. But to my relief she said: ‘Yes, it’s creepy. I feel like I’ve been drinking tonic water.’
I’ve never drunk tonic water, but it seemed like at least we agreed there was a problem.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Homer grumbled. ‘I don’t feel anything. Except hungry.’
Fi and I grinned at each other.
From the backyard with the shed we took a short cut to a lane that would get us within a block of Grandma’s. We reached the entrance of the lane. Going into it I felt the strongest sense of danger I’d had since the war started. I don’t know why I didn’t stop right there. Well, I do know; it’s because Homer and Fi were already twenty metres in and it was too late. I could have called out but it would have been noisy. I could have stopped where I was but I didn’t want to be separated from them. I could have ... oh I don’t know. The point is I didn’t do anything except follow along tamely. And I suspect the real reason is I didn’t trust my instincts enough and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of Homer.
It did look safe. It was one of those narrow lanes that in the old days was used by the night cart for its pick-ups. A modern car would have trouble getting down there. The lane was only short but was lined all the way by high fences. The fences made us feel secure from a side attack but at the same time caused all my tension to be concentrated in a small area.
Whatever, halfway down, I’d had enough. I called softly to the other two: ‘Hurry up,’ and started running. Fi started too, before the first word was out of my mouth, so I knew she felt the danger. But as soon as we started, the lane erupted. It was the most frightening thing. Like lifting the dags on a sheep and finding it swarming with maggots. Like being bombed by a magpie you didn’t even know was there. Like picking up a log and finding, not one snake underneath but a whole nest, mother and babies, writhing and rearing.
They came over the fences. I suppose we knew, subconsciously at least, that fully armed enemy soldiers in their combat uniforms couldn’t come swarming over high fences like gymnasts springing off trampolines. That’s the only excuse I can give for going down the stupid lane in the first place. But we didn’t know how much things had changed in Stratton, in our own country. Because these weren’t fully armed enemy soldiers in uniforms. These were kids.
They were a mixture of ages. The youngest might have been six or seven, but they were so skinny and undernourished that I couldn’t tell. The oldest were probably twelve or thirteen. There were six that came over the fences and another two at the end of the alley, in front of us. When I looked around I wasn’t surprised to find another one blocking the light behind us.
They were all armed. One even had a bow and arrow. Two had rifles, which they cocked as soon as they landed and aimed straight at us. The rest had knives. I thought they were going to shoot us on the spot, that’s how frightening they were. They looked half mad.
I couldn’t believe it was happening. These weren’t the enemy. These were our people, the kind of kids you’d share the school bus with, the kids you’d muck round with at the Wirrawee pool. And they were attacking us. It was all wrong, horribly disgustingly wrong. I looked at them frantically. Stared at them. I was trying to find something I could recognise. I wanted to find one friendly pair of eyes, and then I would have said to them: ‘Hi! It’s us! Let’s talk. We’ve all been through the same stuff. We can help each other.’
I found no face like that. Just glaring, wild, scary eyes. In some of them, yes, I thought I saw expressions more scared than scary, but that was probably me being over-imaginative. There wasn’t time to think about it anyway.
They were shouting and screaming at us to get down on the cobblestones. Homer and Fi were already down. A boy was pointing a rifle at me so aggressively, so viciously, thrusting it forwards with such violently shaking arms that I thought he was about to pull the trigger. His finger was already squeezing the trigger far too hard, and I dropped fast. ‘Oh God,’ I thought dumbly, ‘is this how it’s going to end? Shot dead in a lane with no name, by the very people we thought we were helping?’
I lay on the cobblestones. I’ve never felt anything more uncomfortable. A rifle got pushed into the back of my head so hard that I thought it had broken the skin. Hands started wriggling into my pockets. They felt like little claws. I simmered, furious at my helplessness. ‘Turn over,’ a girl’s voice said, and I did. She went through my shirt pockets.
I was trying to think, to come up with some way to calm the situation. It wasn’t easy. I heard Fi say: ‘Stop it, you little moron,’ and Homer say: ‘Give up.’ It was weird. These were the words we’d have used to kids on the school bus if they started chucking their lunches at each other, or mooned someone through the back window. They weren’t the words to use to violent thugs.
I focused on one of the older girls. She could have been any age between ten and twelve. I chose her not because she looked kinder but because she was a girl, so I assumed she might be more reasonable. ‘What are you doing this for?’ I asked. ‘We’re on your side, you know.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said, looking away.
‘Haven’t you got any food?’ a boy asked me. It was the first time any of them had spoken in a voice halfway normal. He looked very young, and his voice was so helpless and unhappy that I did feel a bit sorry for him.
Still lying on the cobblestones, I shook my head.
‘We just got here,’ I said. ‘We’ve been living out in the bush. We don’t know where anything is.’
I thought that if we could get them talking there might be some hope; we might get a calmer atmosphere.
‘You must have food somewhere,’ a girl said. I couldn’t see what she looked like. She was standing behind my head, quite a way back.
‘Nothing, I swear,’ I said.
‘We haven’t eaten for three days,’ Homer lied.
‘You’re breaking my heart,’ the same girl sneered.
‘Want a tissue, cry-baby?’ another voice asked.
I was sure this was how they talked to each other. It’d stop the little kids from crying or showing weakness. After all, they’d survived, how long? I was losing track of time, but it was probably about ten months, probabl
y without adults. Weakness wouldn’t have got them far.
I asked: ‘Have you been on your own the whole time? Have you ever had adults with you?’
A boy started to answer, saying: ‘We had a couple of ...’ but a girl interrupted him. She barked a word that sounded like ‘Exit’, but could have been anything, and suddenly they were gone. They might have been undernourished but they were as quick as rats. One moment there, the next a patter of feet, the next an empty alley and silence.
We picked ourselves up. Fi wiped a tear out of her eye and sniffed. Homer looked furious. ‘Those little mongrels,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken everything.’
We did a stocktake, continuing it as we left the lane and found a hiding place in the backyard of a looted milk bar. They’d taken Homer’s precious Swiss Army knife, as well as good knives from Fi and me. But the way Homer carried on you’d think he was the only one who lost anything.
They got everything I’d had in my pockets: a biro, a couple of Panadol in foil, my last tampon, a New Zealand compass, a photo of my parents, the ring Robyn gave me for my twelfth birthday and which I kept in my pocket, because I thought it was safer. Even my hankie. Worst of all, my watch, that had been a Christmas present from Grandma.
We’d been well and truly mugged, by a bunch of ten year olds.
To be on the safe side we took a really roundabout route back to Grandma’s. We didn’t know if the kids were still watching. We didn’t want them to know where we were hiding, although I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d known our names, dates of birth, blood types and school grades. They’d been frighteningly efficient. I wondered if they’d been the ones squatting at Grandma’s, but I thought there were too many of them for that.
When we got there and told Lee what had happened he was at first incredulous and then depressed. ‘Unbelievable,’ he kept saying. ‘After what we’ve been through. Unbelievable. God, what’s going to happen to us? Even if we end up winning this war, the whole country’s going to be a psychiatric hospital.’
We sat glumly around the dining room table, where we had a view into the street. No-one had the heart to disagree with Lee.
‘Well, what’s next?’ Fi asked eventually. ‘We have to make plans. We can’t just sit here for the next six months. We’ve got a lot of stuff to work out.’
She looked straight at me as she said it. All I could think was how much we’d changed, and in such subtle ways. BTW, before the war, Fi would never have taken the lead like this. Especially not in front of Homer and Lee. She would have waited until we two were alone and then we would have talked it through between us. It was only a little thing and there was a time when I mightn’t even have noticed it, but I noticed it then, and I felt a bit sad. So many things had changed that I clung even harder to the few things that hadn’t.
‘Well, we should try to stay here for a few days,’ I said. ‘Obviously we all want to get back to Hell but until the search dies down we daren’t go back into that area.’
‘Food’ll be a big problem here,’ Lee said.
‘Yes, and security.’
‘Yeah, not just from the enemy, and the squatters, but from those bloody little sewer rats too.’
‘On the other hand ...’ said Homer.
He didn’t finish the sentence and we were all puzzled for a moment until I suddenly realised and said: ‘Oh, your parents.’
‘Yep. I know it’s a one in a million chance ...’
He was right about that.
‘We don’t have to make a decision now,’ I said. ‘We should try to call Colonel Finley again tonight. He might have some suggestions.’
‘Yeah, so might Santa Claus,’ Lee said.
‘Well he might.’
I meant Colonel Finley, but it came out wrongly.
‘It’d be a long hike to Hell from here,’ Fi said.
‘At least we’ve still got food there.’
‘We hope.’
‘How can we get food in Stratton?’ Homer asked.
‘There’s enough in the vegetable garden to last a week maybe. It’s not exactly a gourmet diet, but at least we won’t starve. And the longer the summer goes, the more new growth’ll come up.’
‘Great,’ said Homer.
Homer wasn’t designed to be a vegetarian.
‘Those kids probably don’t have a clue that vegetables grow in gardens,’ Fi said. ‘They probably think they’re manufactured out the back of the supermarket. There’s probably lots of gardens around here where we’d find stuff.’
That was a good idea, although there was something in Fi’s voice that made me suspect she wanted to sit the kids down at a long table and feed them greens. It was a frightening thought.
‘It’s not like we’re trapped in the middle of New York,’ I said. ‘If we follow that creek I reckon we’d be in the bush in an hour.’
‘Yeah,’ Homer said. ‘That’s true. If we did use this as a base for a while we could butcher some meat and bring it in. I don’t mind vegetarian for a few days if I know there’s half-a-dozen lamb chops waiting at the end of it.’
‘Half a dozen!’ Fi said, looking faint.
‘We need a safer way to cook though,’ I said. ‘I think it’s really dangerous having the smell of a fire wafting through the neighbourhood.’
‘Especially with those kids around,’ Fi said.
‘Yeah, they’re scary. We’re going to have to do something about them.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Kevin said.
I nearly swallowed my tongue.
‘Yeah?’ we all said eagerly. Too eagerly. For a moment I thought he was going to back off again. But finally he forced a few more words out.
‘Boucher’s. The trout farm.’
‘Yeah, what is that place?’ I asked. I’d been past the turn-off often enough but had never been down there. It was about eight kilometres from Stratton.
‘I’ve been there,’ Fi said. I wish she hadn’t said anything, because for Kevin to start talking again was such a big deal that I wanted to encourage him to keep going. But she took over.
‘It’s great. They have this big dam filled with trout and they give you fishing rods and everything, and you catch as many as you want, then you clean them in a little shed and take them home and cook them. The cleaning’s yucky, but I just smiled nicely at Mr Boucher and he did it for me.’
‘You’re a disgrace, Fi,’ I said.
‘Typical woman,’ Lee said. ‘You all pretend to be feminists until you want a guy to do something for you, then you go all gooey and girly and wear a short skirt.’
This was such a boringly predictable comment from Lee that neither of us bothered to answer.
‘Anyway it was a good idea, Kevin,’ I said. ‘If we could score a few trout it’d make all the difference.’
‘Ellie, do you do that deliberately?’ Lee asked. ‘Cos it sounds so sterile.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Oh you know, that primary-school-teacher voice. “That was a lovely idea, Kevin. You are a clever boy.”’
Kevin got such a smug smile on his face that I could have hit him.
We hadn’t had a good argument for a long time – we’d been too busy – but we sure made up for it then. Sometimes it seemed like Lee was just spoiling for a fight.
I went upstairs. I wasn’t planning on having a sleep, but I lay down on a bed and went out like I’d had a general anaesthetic.
Chapter Fifteen
It took me a few days to get over the argument. Normally I don’t think I hold grudges for long. But I felt especially betrayed by Lee. I felt he owed me a favour or two. To be totally honest, I sort of thought that the fact we’d slept together might have made a difference. OK, I know it means less to boys than it does to girls – well, that’s what my friends all say – but I still thought it would have made a difference.
And Fi hadn’t stuck up for me, either. That hurt. With only two of us against three guys I thought we needed to take care of each o
ther. I’d have taken her side if Lee or Homer or Kevin had a go at her.
So I sulked for a while. I spent most of the time doing something that was very important to me. I hadn’t said much to the others about my reasons for wanting to stay at Grandma’s. Of course it made sense to hide there and not try to reach Hell just yet. But my main reason was a great desire to take care of Grandma’s things, to tidy up her house, to restore it to a decent state. That meant collecting all her letters and papers, which were scattered around the house, and burying them in a small Esky in the garden. It meant wrapping her best clothes in any plastic I could find – the shower curtains were a big help – and hiding them in a dark corner under the house. It meant picking up the remnants of her jewellery and ornaments, and storing them in among the pink batts in the ceiling.
I couldn’t help feeling bitter as I looked at the pathetic little pile of jewellery. I could hold it all in one hand. Grandma had owned many valuable and beautiful things, which would have come to me one day. Many times when I was little she had got them out, put them on me, told me their stories. There was a silver and emerald necklace, a pearl necklace, a white jade brooch, a heavy gold bracelet, at least a dozen rings. One of the rings had a ruby the size of a peach stone.
Now those treasures were reduced to a few broken earrings, four bangles, a Wedgwood brooch and an empty locket.
The dusting and sweeping and tidying took a lot of time and energy. There was so much to do that it wasn’t hard to keep myself busy, and in fact I hardly saw the others. When I did they seemed much the same as me anyway: kind of switched off. Kevin really did do some good stuff in the garden, clearing and watering and fertilising. Fi became the main cooking person and Homer was surprisingly good at helping her. But all of us seemed to spend time sitting staring at nothing, in different parts of the house. Quite unexpectedly I’d come across Homer or Fi, for example, slumped in an armchair looking like they’d been hit over the head with a pile-driver. They’d stay like that for hours. I was the same. I’d curl up in the big old brown leather armchair at the roll-top desk and suck my thumb, while I gazed at the wallpaper. After some time I’d find that three hours had passed, but I don’t know where they went. Maybe into the limbo where lost hours are stored, where thoughts and feelings that can’t be put in categories are sent for safekeeping.
