‘You guys must be wrecked,’ Coco said, resting against the wall, the torch dangling in her hand. ‘It’s just me and the torch and I’m rooted. I can’t believe you’re still going and carrying Jesus at the same time.’
‘It’s not too bad,’ Enron said. ‘You okay with Him?’ he asked me.
I nodded, though now that he mentioned it I wasn’t sure I could carry Him much longer. My arms felt heavy, like when I was in grade five and we’d go into the school library and stand in the doorway and press against the frame with our hands – crucifix-like, incidentally – and when we couldn’t push any more, when our muscles killed, we’d step away and our arms would float up towards the ceiling as if the laws of gravity didn’t apply. As if they’d been untethered from this earth and the only thing preventing them from floating away like helium balloons was the body they were attached to.
‘So you don’t know what’s happened to Mum and Dad?’ Coco asked Enron as we stood in silence.
Enron shook his head.
‘But a few things make sense to me now,’ he said. ‘I wanted to go to Brighton Sec, but Mum said I had to go to Elwood. There was never a question I’d go anywhere else, even though my best mate was going to Brighton and I wanted to go with him. I presume it’s because you guys were there. And even though Mum knew we weren’t friends …’
Embarrassing to have it said out loud like that.
‘… she’d sometimes ask questions about you, say someone had told her this or that about you, that you’d gotten a good role in the school play, whatever.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
My parents had never mentioned Enron. But they knew him. They’d been keeping an eye on him. They trusted me and Coco with him.
Enron took the map out of his pocket and looked at it again. He pointed at a spot that sat somewhere between ‘this exit not safe’ and ‘massive steps’.
‘I think we’re about here,’ he said, then folded up the map and put it back in his pocket. ‘A bit more than halfway.’
And sure enough, a bit further on we got to the ‘massive steps’.
Whoever wrote the map hadn’t been kidding. They were massive. Not suitable for the standard-size human beings that Coco and I were. Each step had a rung beside it on the side wall so you could hold on as you took each giant step. And with each downward step I tried not to think about the tons of dirt above my head pressing down, stealing my oxygen, creaking and shifting as we climbed lower.
It was important not to freak out.
Enron got the map out again, checking where to from here.
‘So there’s another drain coming up,’ he said, ‘which looks like it might be a bit smaller than this one.’
I could smell a freshness in the air. Our drain formed a V with the other one and Enron was right; the space we were in had shrunk to such a degree that Enron had to hunch over so he didn’t crack his head on the roof and even Coco and I had to bow our heads slightly. Enron walked in front of me, not beside as he had till then, and we had to carry the sling between us like a hospital stretcher.
‘How long does this go for, do you reckon?’ I asked Enron.
He shook his head.
‘Not sure. Not too far, I don’t think.’
The water was deeper in this drain, and seemed to be running a bit faster than in the drain we’d just come from.
I don’t like enclosed spaces.
I don’t like heights.
I don’t like the dark.
And I don’t like walking in water that’s pooling and swelling as you walk in it; and don’t like being underground and worried that the upstairs world had clouds that were dumping torrents of water right this moment.
The water was getting deeper. Halfway up my foot, making it difficult to walk without sliding.
Starting to.
Freak.
Out.
Water coming up to my shoelaces.
Starting.
To.
Seriously.
Freak.
And that’s when we saw it. Up ahead. A torch light at the end of the drain, pointing at us, shining in our eyes. ‘Dodie,’ someone called out. A voice I didn’t recognise.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘Is one of you Dodie?’
‘Yeah. Me.’
And then the voice snapped at us. ‘It’s pissing down outside. We gotta get outta here. Right now.’
Firstly, it’s completely illegal to go into the drains. Do not try this at home.
Secondly, there’s a saying: ‘When it rains, no drains.’ Take notice. It’s seriously stupid to go into them if it’s raining, or looks like rain.
As we followed the guys through the tunnel back the way they’d come, our feet started to get wetter with the swelling water, my fear rising in sync. The thing that was alarming (aside from being in a drain under the ground following guys we didn’t know and under threat of drowning with the Messiah in a sling between us – aside from all that) was that the water wasn’t rising steadily like someone had turned on a tap. Instead it was rising unpredictably, as if someone had a huge bucket above our heads and was tipping it in at random moments, the water running faster and more treacherously with each slosh. It had risen to my calves and there was every chance it was going to be at my knees before I knew it.
The good news? I didn’t panic. I was scared as shit, but I didn’t panic.
A couple of weeks earlier I couldn’t find my essay on Hamlet and I was carrying on because it was ‘due today and I wish you wouldn’t touch my things; you’re always cleaning up,’ this at my mum, ‘and I can’t print it off again because I’m late already, why can’t you just leave my stuff alone?’, my voice raised and hysterical. And then I had found it. In my schoolbag, wedged between my maths book and The Secret River. And because my mum has never been one to miss an opportunity for a ‘life lesson’, she said to me in her calm, quiet, make-a-point voice, ‘You want to try and tone it down, because otherwise, you’ve got nowhere to go – you’re already at the peak of panic, and it’s just an essay. What if something really bad was happening?’
So the good news, Mum – I didn’t panic. I knew there was a chance that the drain was going to be filled with water in the next couple of minutes and the seven of us, counting Jesus, were going to be under it, stuck, but I didn’t panic. I kept sloshing as fast as I could behind Enron and the other three guys, checking over my shoulder occasionally that Coco was still there and hadn’t fallen over. The water had risen to my knees.
But I still didn’t panic.
We got to a set of staggered rungs exactly like the ones we’d come down in the first place. One of the guys climbed up and flipped the manhole cover, then turned back and clicked his fingers at us.
‘Okay, let’s go,’ he said, click click. ‘Quick.’
We got out. Quick.
First Coco, then me, hesitating at the top only because I wasn’t sure how to haul myself out, so the guy pulled me by the arms out to open, fresh, lovely, beautiful, wet, rainy air. Enron came up with Jesus in fireman hold, followed by the two other guys we didn’t know.
They were right. It was pissing down.
One of them pushed the manhole cover back over with his foot, and then the three of them started running away from us fast, yelling, ‘Come on!’, collars of shirts lifted up over heads to protect from the rain; Coco, Enron-with-Jesus and me running behind them.
Funny what a sheep I am. I didn’t even think that maybe these guys were the ones who had something to do with my mum and dad missing. Didn’t consider for a minute that maybe we shouldn’t be following them. Just followed them, baa-ing like a little lamb.
Dodie was a little lamb.
Her fleece was a bit wet from all this rain.
It wasn’t until we were away from the drain and came to an awning that jutted out the front of a strip of shops that we were able to check each other out properly for the first time.
There were three of them. One wearing a Colling
wood cap and Adidas trackpants, one wearing a Bliss n Eso T-shirt and trackpants, and the other guy wearing a flannelette shirt and low-slung jeans.
They all looked about our age.
The boy in the flannelette shirt – I couldn’t help noticing – was the handsomest of the three, his dark messy hair flicky with rain and his blue eyes framed by those dark long lashes that some guys have and no girl ever has but tries to emulate with mascara and feathers.
‘I’m Taxi, anyway,’ the Collingwood supporter said, reaching forwards and shaking everyone’s hand in turn.
‘Ron,’ Enron said.
‘I’m Dodie,’ I said.
‘Coco.’
‘I’m Jones,’ said Handsome, nodding at us.
‘I’m Apex,’ said the third one.
‘So … the big question,’ Jones said, pulling out a pack of tobacco and rolling himself a fag. ‘What the fuck was that all about? And who’s this guy?’ He lifted his chin in the direction of Jesus, prone on Enron’s shoulder.
Coco, Enron and I looked at him. Oh, this guy here? This is Jesus. Yeah. You might have heard of Him. Gospel. Bible. He features pretty heavily. Kind of the main character, as a matter of fact.
I was unsure exactly how to phrase it.
‘You never heard the saying “When it rains, no drains”?’ Taxi said, as though we spent our lives hanging around underground pipes and sewerage systems, just waiting to jump in. ‘We tried to text you after your message came through, but you didn’t reply so we knew you must have gone down already.’
‘So,’ Jones licked the length of the rollie then tamped it sealed, ‘who’s the dude?’
Mm mm. He was really very handsome. And he had a nice voice, too. Deep and a bit gravelly. And when he said ‘dude’, he didn’t sound try-hard, he just sounded like that’s the way he talks.
Enron hesitated a moment, then hoisted Jesus off his shoulder and cradled Him for Jones, Taxi and Apex to have a look.
The three of them said zip for a minute.
Until finally Apex said, ‘Holy shit. No fucking way.’
As we stood discussing what to do, two empty taxis came down this quiet side street, one after the other, as if hailed by divine intervention.
Enron, Jesus, Jones and Apex got in the first one, explaining to the cabbie that Jesus was drunk – not sure that you’re supposed to say that kind of thing about the Messiah, but presumably in this type of situation you’re absolved – while Taxi, Coco and I got in the second one and followed the lead taxi down the darkened streets onto the main roads that took us the easy, dry, not-through-the-drains way to the Mover’s house in Port Melbourne.
The taxis dropped us at a beaten-up weatherboard house in a quiet street. There were no other cars around.
‘This is where you’d have come out if you’d kept going through the drains,’ Taxi said, tapping at an iron manhole cover with his foot. ‘Except you wouldn’t have, because you’d be drowned by now. Then you’d have walked in here.’ He opened the knee-high gate. ‘And gone down here.’ He walked down the side path past the house with the TV that could be seen through the netted curtains in the lounge room, down to the back fence. ‘Then through here.’ And he turned the handle on a gate that opened onto a rambly, fruit-tree-filled, dark backyard. ‘Voila. Casa le Mover.’
The Mover’s house.
It was an old beaten-up weatherboard with peeling paint pretty much like the one we’d just walked through. The back porch looked like it had a pretty good chance of collapsing in a high wind. All the blinds were pulled down and the television could be heard, turned up loud enough for whichever deaf person was inside watching.
I grabbed hold of Coco’s hand, maybe to reassure her, or maybe to reassure myself.
‘And then we go in here.’ Instead of taking us inside the house to where the television was on and blaring, Taxi led us over to the double garage and pushed open the side door.
The problem with the Mover was, he couldn’t.
Couldn’t move, had trouble swallowing, and his eyesight wasn’t crash hot either. Multiple sclerosis does that to a person, apparently. Shuts down their faculties, one by one.
‘MS – the gift that keeps on giving,’ the Mover told us gruffly, as he struggled to keep his bandaged hand from flopping off the arm of his wheelchair.
We were sitting in fold-up chairs in the garage: me, Coco, Enron, Taxi, Jones, Apex, Jesus, and this old guy called the Mover, who was sitting in a wheelchair (wheelchairs fold up when you put them in the boot or whatever, so technically they’re still fold-up chairs). Both his legs were bandaged to the knee. His fingers were bandaged, too.
The only light came from a candle on the floor throwing out a one-watt glow. Jones sat leaning over the candle, a big scary-looking knife in his hand, whittling away at a chock of wood.
‘There’s been a change of plan,’ the Mover whispered in the gloom, ‘which means you’ll have to take Him from here.’
Excuse me?
‘Transport’s changed as well,’ he went on, not bothering to check if Coco, Enron and I knew what the hell he was talking about. ‘You’ll have to take the Ford instead.’ He motioned with his head towards the old bomb sharing the garage with us. ‘It’s a shit-heap now, and it was a shit-heap then, but it was blessed last time we moved Him, and it’s the best option we’ve got available to us at this point in time.’
I frowned at him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, leaning forwards as if I was hard of hearing, ‘I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to say.’
‘You know how to drive,’ the Mover said.
‘Drive?’
‘You know.’ He lifted his bandaged hands in front of him as if he was holding a steering wheel. ‘Brrm brrm.’
I blinked at him.
‘I haven’t got my licence,’ I told him.
‘It goes without saying you are officially incommunicado from here on in,’ the Mover continued, as if my lack of a driver’s licence wasn’t even a consideration. ‘No phone, no Facebook, no Twitter, website, blog, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Zoned Out, or whatever it is you kids are into. You can leave your phones here until it’s finished, otherwise there’s the whole issue with triangulation. If you need to use a phone …’
‘Triangulation?’ I said.
‘Correct. If you absolutely have to make a call, you can use Taxi’s phone, because his won’t be traceable …’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But … triangulation?’
‘Tri-ang-gu-lation,’ he said, speaking slowly as if I was a moron. ‘If your phone is turned on, it sends signals to different cell towers, giving an approximation of where you are at any time. If you use your phone, the police can track you. So can the people who have taken your parents. So you can’t use them. Can’t have them turned on. Best not to take them. And now, if you’re right to move on …’
I frowned at him.
‘… Jones’ll go with you, so he can fix the car if anything goes wrong.’ The Mover flicked his eyes over at Jones, as if the whole phone issue was finalised, as if we were all cool with ‘tri-ang-gu-lation’. ‘Coco, Ron and Taxi make five. Jesus, six. You should all fit. Apex needs to help me with some stuff here.
‘The most dangerous time will be when you drive out of here. They’re watching the house, and they’ll take the earliest opportunity to either run you off the road, or follow some distance behind till you’re on a more secluded road and then try to take Him. So you’ll have to be careful and think quick when that happens. Which it will. Guaranteed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, even though I wasn’t. ‘I’m not leaving my phone here. I don’t even know you. And you don’t seem to have understood what I was saying just before.’ Matching his condescending tone with my own. ‘I can’t even drive out of this garage without a supervising driver.’ I folded my arms across my chest to back up my argument. ‘Much less out on the roads to wherever it is you expect me to take Him.’
‘Lavender Bay,’ the Mover said.
> ‘Lavender Bay? I don’t even know where that is.’
‘Sydney.’
‘Sydney?’
He nodded.
‘Sydney, as in New South Wales?’ I checked.
He nodded again.
I laughed.
‘Yep. Right.’ Sarcasm making my words sticky. ‘Sydney. We’ll just pop up there, shall we? No worries at all. I don’t think so. Get one of these guys to drive. Jones. You said he’s good with cars. He can drive.’
‘Haven’t exactly got my hours up,’ Jones said.
‘Well, I haven’t exactly got my licence,’ I shot back at him.
‘As in, I’ve got no hours up,’ Jones said.
‘As in, I’ve got NO licence.’ I looked around the room at all of them. ‘I’ve got exams in two weeks, my parents are missing, and even if I did have my licence I’d only be allowed to take one passenger with me for the first year of my Ps. I can’t drive to Sydney.’ I shook my head at the joke of it all. ‘I mean, there’s no way.’
The Mover didn’t say anything for a moment, and then he reeled a list off his bandaged fingers.
‘Sailing, karate, cooking, Girl Guides, driving since you were sixteen years old. You’ve got 162 hours of driving up your sleeve, and were planning to sit for your licence next week on the day of your birthday. Am I right?’
I stared at him. He was right.
‘Your parents have always known this was a possibility. They’ve been preparing you for this all your life. Both of you,’ he said, nodding towards Coco. ‘Just don’t put a P-plate on the windscreen, and the cops will assume you’ve got your full licence. No licence is not the problem here.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said, panic raising the pitch of my voice. ‘What do you mean, the plans have changed? You knew you had to move Him. You call yourself “The Mover”.’ I put my fingers up and inverted comma-ed the word. ‘And now you say, “Sorry, I’m afraid I’m not available to move Him, and I haven’t organised anyone else, so you’ll have to do it. And risk going to jail for driving unlicensed. Maybe have a car accident and kill all your passengers. And your sister. And probably get lost on the way. And not have time to study for exams. And fail all of them.” And by the way, you don’t seem to have heard me when I said my parents are missing. Which is clearly no biggie so far as you’re concerned, but it’s a pretty big deal for me. And Coco. Our parents are missing. Do you get that?’
Reluctant Hallelujah Page 6
