The Dead of Night (11 page)

"I had it in my hand Ellie. I'm not that slow. I was ready."

"And suppose a patrol had jumped us? Suppose we'd been caught with sawn-off shotguns? We'd have been put against a tree and shot and you'd have five people's blood on your hands."

"But that didn't happen, did it? That proves I was right."

"That doesn't prove anything! That was a fluke!"

"No, because the fact that it didn't happen proves that we'd covered ourselves properly. There's no such thing as a fluke. It's like that golfer said, good players always have the luck. As long as we keep being careful, and smart, we'll keep being lucky. I don't believe in flukes. I figured all this out before I decided to take the guns."

"Homer! You're crazy! Anything could have happened out there! Don't believe in flukes? You don't understand life. It's all flukes. You're acting like you can control everything. You think you're God! Jeez, even in golf, the ball can hit a tree and bounce off into the hole. How do you explain that? Anyway, that's not the point," I said quickly, in case he could explain it. "The point is that you've got to go along with group decisions. You can't ignore us and do what you want. We're all in this together. Don't go calling me a one-man
band. You're not only the band, you're the roadies as well."

"Break it up, guys," Chris said. The others had been reacting to us in their different ways. Robyn had been standing leaning on a mattock, watching and listening with great interest. Fi, who hated conflict, had gone off to our current dunny, fifty metres away in the bush. Lee was reading a book called
Red Shift
and had not even looked up. Chris had been whittling a piece of wood into the shape of a dragon. He'd been doing a lot of stuff like that lately, and was getting really good at it. But he looked upset and angry at the way we were fighting, and a few minutes after he interrupted us he went off to the creek, while the rest of us started getting organised for the expedition.

I was packing in a bit of a rage, throwing things around, growling at everyone. It wasn't till Fi came back from the dunny that I calmed down a bit. Well, to be more accurate, she calmed me down. She picked up a stick that I'd knocked over, one that we used for drying clothes, and tried to put it back in its position. One end of it sat in the fork of a tree and she couldn't quite reach it, so I went to give her a quick lift. To my horror she flinched slightly as I grabbed at her. It was only the slightest movement, but for that second she looked like she thought I was going to hit her.

"Oh Fi!" I said. I was really upset.

"Oh, I'm sorry Ellie," she said. "You just took me by surprise, that's all."

I sat down on the ground beside the tent and crossed my legs. "Fi, have I turned into a monster?"

"No Ellie, of course you haven't. There's just so much happening, it's hard to get used to it all."

"Have I changed a lot?"

"No, no. Ellie, you're a strong person and whenever you have strong people around, you have fireworks. I mean, Homer's strong and Robyn's strong and Lee's much stronger than people realise. So there's bound to be clashes."

"Everyone's strong in different ways. I didn't think Kevin was strong until he drove off with Corrie to the Hospital. You were so tough when we blew up the bridge."

"I'm not strong with people though."

"Do you still hate me for what I wrote about you and Homer?"

"No! Of course not! It was just a shock when I read it, that's all. Your trouble is you're too honest, and that was the shock. You wrote down the things that most people think but never say. Or else, people write them in their diaries and never show anyone."

"But you and Homer still haven't got it back together."

"No, but I don't know if that was because of what you wrote. He's so difficult. Some days he's so loving and beautiful and other days he treats me like I don't exist. It's very frustrating."

Seemed like I had a lot of significant conversations that day. Maybe it was the fact that we were on the move that got everyone talking suddenly. The last one was with Chris and that was even tougher than the one with Homer. I went down to the creek deliberately to
find him, because I felt guilty about neglecting him lately. The more morose he became the more I avoided him. Everyone did. And I suppose that just made him worse. So Saint Ellie decided to fix things, and away she went, determined to do something good for once.

I found him sitting on a rock looking at his left foot, which was bare. For a moment I couldn't see what he was looking at but then I saw this nasty black bulge on his skin, like a long ugly blood-blister. I looked at it, shuddered, looked again, and realised it was a leech. Chris was sitting there calmly, watching it grow fat on his blood.

"Er, yuk," I said. "What are you doing that for?"

He shrugged. "Passes the time." He didn't even look up.

"No, seriously, why?"

This time he didn't answer at all. For the whole time we were talking the leech stayed there, getting bigger and blacker. It made it hard to have a conversation. I couldn't take my eyes off it. But I tried.

"Can you make sure you check for eggs behind that flat rock? Blossom's been laying there occasionally."

Blossom was a rather depressed looking red hen who wasn't popular with the other chooks.

"Sure."

"So how are you going to spend the time while we're away?"

"I dunno. I'll find things."

"Chris, are you OK? Like, you seem so cut off these days. Do you hate us all or something? Is anything getting you down?"

"No, no. I'm fine."

"But we used to talk, we used to have these great conversations. How come we don't do that any more?"

"I dunno. Nothing to talk about."

"So much is happening. We're in the middle of the biggest thing that we'll ever see in our whole lives. So much is happening."

He shrugged again, not lifting his eyes from the foul slug on his leg.

"I'd love to see some more of your writing, your poetry."

He gazed at the leech for a long time, but without answering. Finally he said, "Yeah, I liked what you said about the other ones." Then, as if he were talking to himself, he added, "Maybe I should. Maybe yes, maybe no."

He turned and stretched out past me to get something from his jacket, which was lying on a rock. Mechanically I picked it up and handed it to him. As I did so I smelt again the stale sweet smell of alcohol on his breath. So he still did have a secret collection of grog somewhere. He pulled out a box of matches. He seemed to be ignoring me. I felt flat and dispirited. I'd been in a better mood after talking to Fi but that was lost again. I could hear Robyn veiling for me; our expedition was ready to move out.

"Well, see you," I said to Chris, "in a couple of hours or a couple of days."

He didn't even answer. I slouched off up the hill, grabbed my pack and headed for the point where the creek slid under the thick growth of bush, the route to the Hermit's cabin and beyond. Fi and Homer and Lee
were already there; only Robyn had waited for me. I took off my boots and socks. We'd agreed on a compromise—to' wear boots and keep our socks dry—so I put the boots back on and followed the others into the cold water. Was this trip a good idea? I couldn't decide but I didn't care all that much. It was something to do, and if we were careful we couldn't come to much harm. Except for frostbite, I thought, as I felt the water trickle in around my toes. And leeches. I kept glancing down nervously to make sure they weren't making sneak attacks on me.

We passed the little old cabin and kept going. We were in new territory now. It didn't take long to get quite uncomfortable. Bent over, slipping on rocks, getting pain up my legs from my freezing feet, I grunted and grumbled my way along. I kept trying to move the pack on my back into new positions, feeling more like a tortoise with every passing minute.

"This is a tough way to earn a living," I said to Robyn's bum. She laughed. I think that's what she did, anyway.

Turning her head a little she said back to me, "Hey El, do yabbies bite?"

"Yeah, count your toes every time we stop. They're hungry little critters."

"And dragonflies?"

"Them too."

"Bunyips?"

"They're the worst of the lot."

We had to duck even lower then as undergrowth pulled at our hair. It was the end of conversation for a while.

We went on like that for a long time. Once I got into a routine it wasn't so bad. There's those first few minutes when you're sweating and in pain, then it becomes a kind of rhythm and you go with the flow. It's happening inside you and outside you, but the first intensity wears off," luckily. So I plodded along, following Robyn who was following Lee who was following Fi who was following Homer. Sometimes the creek widened and rippled over gravel, which was nice and easy; sometimes I slipped on smooth rocks or felt the pressure of sharp ones; sometimes we had to clamber around deep pools. In one place the creek flowed straight and dark for about eighty metres, with a sandy bottom, and we were able to walk along it with our heads up as though we were on a highway.

I'd always thought of Hell as being a basin, a bowl, but I had no real evidence of that. From Tailor's Stitch the far side of Hell looked to be a ridge of rock and trees, a lot lower than Tailor's. It certainly gave the impression of forming one side of a basin, with Mt Turner the only really high point. But beyond that was the Holloway Valley/and the creek had to reach there somehow.

We slogged away for two hours, losing height most of the time. I was wondering if I'd be able to stand straight again or if I'd be locked into this position forever, a hunchbacked monster from the bush. Suddenly I realised that Robyn's bum had swung around and was going away from me; in fact it was rising, leaving the creek. I glanced up from under my pack. Robyn was clambering out of the water to join the others, who were sprawled along the bank pulling off their boots,
groaning as they tried to rub their legs back into life. We were in a clear length of bush for the first time since leaving our campsite. There were only a few metres of flat, but it was enough. There was even some warm sunlight to lie in; the thick canopy of trees was broken and we could see a clear pale blue sky.

"Mmm, this is nice," Robyn said.

"Thank God it was here," I said. "I couldn't have gone much further. That was one mother of a paddle. Whose idea was this anyway?"

"Yours," came the four voices, on cue.

I pulled off my saturated boots and looked around as I rubbed my feet and legs. The creek flowed on without us but it changed its tune a little further down. I could hear a wilder, louder, lonelier sound. And through the trees was more sunlight, a light blue background instead of a thick green and brown one. Walking like a hospital patient on her first day out of bed I hobbled along to the end of the clearing, followed by Homer. We went a few metres into the belt of trees, and stood, looking. There was the Holloway Valley.

To a lot of people I suppose it wouldn't have been beautiful. It had been a dry summer and although the river flats were a soft green, the paddocks beyond Risdon had burnt off into the ochre sameness that seemed part of my life, part of me. The lush green of our springs and early summers never lasted long. I was more used to that dry monotonous yellow; so used to it that at some stage it had soaked into me, till I wasn't sure if there were boundaries between me and the landscape any more. I remember Mr Kassar at school saying that he'd come home after living a year in England and
his heart had ached with love when he saw the sunburnt plains again. I knew what he meant; boy did I know what he meant.

Even the yellow wasn't all yellow of course. There were dark green dots of trees and lines of windbreaks, the flashing of galvanised-iron roofs like little square pools of water, the tanks and sheds and stockyards and dams, the endless boring fences. It was my country, even more than the bush and the mountains, and definitely more than the cities and towns. I felt at home in those hot, rustling paddocks.

But between us and the valley were a line of cliffs and a lot of bush. We'd skirted around Mt Turner without even realising it, and it was now quite a way over to my left. Homer and I were standing at the brink of one of the lowest cliffs, where the creek trickled over the edge in a long thin stream, falling to rocks fifty metres below and then gurgling away into undergrowth again. The bush down there looked as thick as the stuff we had come through in Hell.

"Lucky Kevin isn't here," Homer said, gazing down at it.

"Eh? How do you work that out?"

"Didn't you know? He's terrified of heights."

"God! Is there anything that guy isn't afraid of? And he always acted so tough."

"Mmm. Guess he came through in the end, but."

"Guess he did."

We went back to the others and told them what we'd seen. We left our packs and went for a walk along the cliffs, looking for a way down.

"Short of bungy jumping..." Lee said, after ten minutes.

"We've got to be able to get back up again," said Robyn, alwavs practical.

The cliffs were fast becoming impassable in this direction, crowded by trees, breaking away in a few-places, and with some dangerously slippery sheets of rock. We gave up and tried the other way, passing the creek again and striking out across some more bare patches of shale. We found only one possibility: a tree which had fallen head-first down the cliff and died there. Its bare white skeleton now leaned against the wall of rock; branches like bones stuck out on all sides, a kind of natural stepladder.

"Golly," said Fi in her grandmotherly voice as we stood there and gazed down at it.

"No way," said Lee.

"I don't see why not," Robyn said.

"I don't have medical insurance," Lee said.

"We should have brought some rope," Homer said.

"We should have brought an escalator."

"I think it's possible," I said. "If someone does it without their pack first, and if that works we can think about getting the packs down."

They all looked at me as I said that, and they kept looking at me after I'd finished. I started to feel uncomfortable. "Whose idea was it we come on this trip?" Homer asked again. They kept looking at me. I sighed, and began to take my pack off. Was it my imagination, or did they press closely around me as they escorted me to the edge of the cliff? Seemed like I had the proverbial
two chances of getting out of this: Buckley's and none. I got down on all fours and began sliding backwards over the edge.