by John Marsden
Red had the scores. Harriet had made 11, I’d made 129, but everyone knew who the hero was. Harriet was surrounded all morning. My parents told me I had to come home at lunchtime, because of my arm, so I hardly got to see her. But she popped up just as I was getting into the car. ‘Hey, thanks for the advice yesterday,’ she said.
‘What advice?’ I asked.
‘To dance. Best cricket advice I’ve ever had. I never really got what Mr Surrey meant when he said “use your feet”. But “dance”, yeah, I got that.’
‘No worries. Hey, good shot by the way.’
‘Yeah, wasn’t bad, was it? Probably never do anything like it again but. Speaking of dancing, you want to come to my brother’s birthday party?’
‘You’ve got a brother?’
‘Yeah. He lives with my mum though. Won’t have anything to do with my dad. It’s his eighteenth on Saturday, and I’m allowed to have one friend my own age. What are you like at dancing? Can you do it with a broken arm?’
‘I’ve never tried. But I’ll give it a go.’
She grinned at me, and I grinned back and got in the car. ‘Who was that?’ my mother asked.
‘My first date, I think,’ I replied.
We drove home. Mum put me on the couch with a blanket and the remote control. ‘When are you going to tell me about the other night, and Woody and that?’ I asked.
‘When Dad gets home,’ she said.
He came back early, to my surprise, just after four o’clock.
‘How’s it going, champ?’ he asked.
‘What are you doing home?’ I asked. ‘I’m going good.’
‘I wanted to see how you were. That was a nasty break.’
‘It was a pretty wild 48 hours,’ I said, then did a bit of quick maths in my head. ‘Well, 36 hours more like.’
‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it? I guess you’d like to know what it was all about.’
I turned off the TV, and waited.
‘When your grandpa offered us this house,’ he said, ‘he warned us that we’d have to go through a security check. Of course we wanted to know why. It turns out that a couple of years ago the police looked at the house next door as a possible safe house. Before they signed the contract, they did a security check on Grandpa, and no doubt on the neighbours on the other side as well. Obviously everyone tested out OK, because they went ahead and bought the place.’
‘What’s a safe house?’ I asked. I thought I knew the answer, but I just wanted to make sure.
‘It’s a house the police use for hiding people. Sometimes they’re vital witnesses in big court cases, who have to be protected. Sometimes they’re people who’ve been targeted by criminals. Maybe a couple of attempts have already been made to hurt them, and the police are worried that the criminals will try again.
‘Anyway, the government paid Grandpa a small retainer, that’s like an allowance, every month, on condition that he kept them informed about who was living here, and that he agreed not to rent the house to anyone who’d couldn’t pass a security check.’
Mum had come into the room by this stage, and she joined in. ‘Your dad and I talked about whether this was going to be a safe house for us, never mind the safe house next door, but we had a chat with Lenny and Luke on the other side, and they reassured us. They said it was hardly ever used, and there’d never been a problem.
‘They also explained that police only keep safe houses for a couple of years, and then sell them again, so this one was probably nearing the end of its life.’
‘So,’ I asked, ‘did they choose it for a safe house because there were two policemen on the other side of us?’
‘Apparently not. Lenny said he thought that probably made it more attractive to them, but it wasn’t a major factor. Anyway, as you know, some people were brought here a few weeks ago. We don’t know anything about them except that there were three: a mother, and her mother, and the boy you were told was named Woody.’
‘He said that wasn’t his name,’ I remembered.
‘True, it wasn’t, not even his nickname. It seems that one of the police officers made it up on the spur of the moment, when they realised he needed a name if he was going to play with you and Callan.’
‘So, was he a witness in a court case?’
‘No, no, not the boy. Either his mother or his grandmother, we don’t know which.’
‘We’ll have to keep an eye on the newspapers,’ Mum said. ‘No doubt it’ll be in there sooner or later.’
‘So what’s Woody’s real name?’
‘We don’t know that either. You can understand, the lives of these people depend on no-one knowing anything about them. Although someone found out where this family was, hence the attack on them.’
‘Was anyone hurt? Was anyone shot? How’s Woody?’
‘Woody’s fine; like we thought, his main problem was shock. He’s out of hospital and back with his mum and grandma. They’ve been moved to another house, not surprisingly. But one of the policemen was wounded and one of the gunmen was killed.’
‘He was killed? How many gunmen were there? Is the policeman going to be OK?’
‘There were two gunmen and, yes, the policeman was shot through the shoulder, and is no doubt in a lot more pain than you are today, but he’ll be OK in the long run.’
‘Did they arrest the other man?’
‘Yes, they got him.’
‘Why did the cops want Woody to play with Callan and me?’
‘They checked it with us first, of course. The poor kid was going mad stuck in that house all day and night. He wasn’t allowed to go to the shops, wasn’t allowed to go for walks, wasn’t allowed to go to the playground. He had no other kids to play with, no-one his own age he could even talk to. You really made a difference to him, and the police are very grateful to you – you and Callan.’
‘Probably had vitamin D deficiency, poor kid,’ my mother said. ‘Being in that house all the time. He looked pale enough.’
I couldn’t think of any more questions. It seemed hard to believe that here in this boring street in boring Tarrawagga we’d had the most amazing and exciting and scary experience of my life.
Then I thought of one more question. ‘Are we going to keep living here?’
‘Yes. They won’t be using the place next door as a safe house any more, for obvious reasons. It’ll go on the market in a week or so. And we still can’t afford to move.’
‘What do you think about that, honey?’ asked my mum. ‘I know you don’t like the school very much.’
I shrugged. ‘The school’s all right. Tarrawagga’s a hole. But I can live with it.’
‘So you’ve got to know a few people, huh?’ Mum asked, in a kind of teasing voice. ‘One person in particular maybe?’
I ignored her. Picking up the remote control I turned the TV back on. I wondered when Harriet would get back from staying with her mum. I should have asked for her phone number.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Alex, Charlie, Harry, Wilson, Oliver and Fletcher. As long as you guys are around, I’ll never run out of stories.
About John Marsden
John Marsden grew up in three states of Australia, but not all at the same time. (He’s big, but not that big.) He now lives in Victoria, where he continues to age with each passing minute. One day, barring miracles, he will be dead.
John loved school so much that he started his own. Or, to put it another way, he hated school so much that he started his own so that other kids wouldn’t have to go through the suffering he experienced. The school, called Candlebark, is in a beautiful forest near Hanging Rock. It is pretty much compulsory for Candlebark kids to climb trees, roll down hills, play with sticks and wallow in mud.
Candlebark, which began in 2006, is John’s proudest achievement.
John has also published more th
an forty books, including Tomorrow, When the War Began, which was made into a highly successful movie. Among his other hits are Looking for Trouble, Staying Alive in Year Five, Creep Street and Cool School. John is one of Australia’s biggest selling and most awarded authors.
Also by John Marsden
So Much to Tell You
The Journey
The Great Gatenby
Staying Alive in Year 5
Out of Time
Letters from the Inside
Take My Word for It
Looking For Trouble
Tomorrow . . . (Ed.)
Cool School
Creep Street
Checkers
For Weddings and a Funeral (Ed.)
This I Believe (Ed.)
Dear Miffy
Prayer for the 21st Century
Everything I Know About Writing
Secret Men’s Business
The Tomorrow Series 1999 Diary
The Rabbits
Norton’s Hut
Marsden on Marsden
Winter
The Head Book
The Boy You Brought Home
The Magic Rainforest
Millie
A Roomful of Magic
the tomorrow series
Tomorrow, When the War Began
The Dead of Night
The Third Day, the Frost
Darkness, Be My Friend
Burning for Revenge
The Night is for Hunting
The Other Side of Dawn
the ellie chronicles
While I Live
Incurable
Circle of Flight
First published 2013 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000.
Copyright © Jomden Pty Ltd 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781743514443
Typeset by Post Pre-press, Queensland
Cover design by Seymour Designs
Cover images: Getty Images
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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