Tomorrow When The War Began (15 page)

‘I agree,’ Robyn said.

‘All day and all night,’ said Lee, ‘I pray for
my leg to get better so I can go and find my family.’

‘I’m with the majority,’ Kevin said.

We looked at Homer. ‘I never thought I’d have
to hurt other people just so I could live my own life,’ he said.
‘But my grandfather did it, in the Civil War. If I have to do it, I
hope I’ll have the strength, like Ellie did. Whatever we do, I hope
we can do it without hurting anyone. But if it happens ... well, it
happens.’

‘You’re getting soft,’ Kevin said.

Homer ignored him. He continued, briskly. ‘I
keep thinking of that quote Corrie mentioned the other day, “Time
spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted”,’ he said. ‘The stupidest
thing for us to do would be to charge in like Rambos with our
little .22’s popping away. Fi’s right, our families don’t want us
stretched out cold on a slab in the morgue. If we take a few extra
days, well, that’s the way it has to be. The only reason we should
take big risks is if we found that something terrible was about to
happen to them. Of course it could have already happened, and if it
has, well, we can’t do anything about it.

‘So, what I’m thinking is, we need some kind
of observation place, somewhere hidden and safe, where we can watch
the Showground. The more we know, the better our decisions will be
and the more effective we can be. Judging from the radio, the whole
country hasn’t been a pushover, and there’s a lot of action still
going on. We ought to talk to anyone we can find in town, like Mr
Clement, and even try to link up with the Army, or whoever’s still
fighting in other districts. We should set ourselves up as a real
guerilla outfit, living off the land as much as possible, mobile
and fast and tough. We might have to survive like this for months,
years even.

‘For example – you mightn’t like this, so say
so if you don’t – suppose we sent two or three people into Wirrawee
for forty-eight hours. Their job would be to get information,
nothing more. If they’re really careful they honestly shouldn’t get
seen. They’ve just got to become totally nocturnal and triple-check
every move they make. The rest of us can start organising things
more efficiently here. We’ll never get a better base camp, but we
should get more supplies in and make it a proper headquarters. It’s
frightening how quickly we’re going through the food. We should
start organising rations. And I’d like to set up other little
hideaways through the mountains. Stock them with food and stuff, in
case we get cut off from this place. Like I said, we’ve got to get
more mobile.

‘And living off the land, we’ve got to get
serious about that. So the people back here should figure out some
possibilities. Where are all the springs in these mountains? Can we
trap rabbits or roos, or even possums? Ellie and I, our families
have always killed our own meat, so we can do a bit of rough
butchering.’

‘Same for me,’ Kevin said.

‘I can do a nice sweet and sour possum,’ Lee
said. ‘Or catch me a feral cat and I’ll make dim sims.’

There was a groan of disgust. Lee leaned back
and grinned at me.

‘We could bring animals in here,’ Corrie said.
‘Chooks, a few lambs maybe. Goats.’

‘Good,’ said Homer. ‘That’s the kind of thing
we need to look at, and think about.’

Kevin looked gloomy at the mention of goats. I
knew what he was thinking. We’d been brought up as sheep cockies,
and the first thing we learned was to despise goats. Sheep good,
goats bad. It didn’t mean anything, just went with the territory.
But we’d have to unlearn a lot of the old ways.

‘You’re thinking in the long term,’ I said to
Homer.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The really long term.’

We talked on for a couple of hours. Corrie’s
radio had had the last laugh. It spurred us out of our shock, our
misery. By the time we stopped, exhausted, we’d come to a few
decisions. Two pairs would go into town the next evening, Robyn and
Chris, and Kevin and Corrie. They would operate independently, but
stay in close contact. They’d stay there the next full night, most
of the night after, and return by dawn the following day. So they’d
be away about sixty hours. Kevin and Corrie would concentrate on
the Showground. Robyn and Chris would cruise around town, looking
for people in hiding, for useful information, for equipment even.
‘We’ll start to reclaim Wirrawee,’ as Robyn put it. We worked out a
lot of complicated details, like where they’d have their base
(Robyn’s music teacher’s house), where they’d leave notes for each
other (under the dog kennel), how long they’d wait on Wednesday
morning if the other pair was missing (no time), and their cover
story to protect us and Hell if they got caught (‘Since the
invasion we’ve been hiding under the Masonic Lodge and only coming
out at nights’). We figured that was a place that wouldn’t
incriminate anyone else, and a place that the patrols wouldn’t have
checked. Robyn and Chris agreed to set up a fake camp in there, to
give the cover story credibility.

The rest of us, back in Hell, would do pretty
much what Homer had suggested – smuggle in more supplies, establish
Hell as a proper base, organise food rationing, and suss out new
hiding places.

Strangely enough I was quite elated at the
thought of the next couple of days. It was partly that I was scared
of going back into town, so it was a relief to get a reprieve from
that. It was partly too that Kevin would be away for a few days, as
he was getting on my nerves a bit. But mainly it was the
interesting combinations that were possible among the people who
were left. There were Homer and Lee, both of whom I had strong and
strange feelings for, but made more complicated by Homer’s obvious
attraction to Fi. It was an attraction he still seemed too shy to
do much about, although he was more confident with her now. There
was Fi, who lately had lost her cool and become nervous and
tongue-tied when she was near Homer, despite the fact that it was
still hard to believe she could like him – well, like him in that
kind of way. There was Lee, who kept looking at me with his possum
eyes, as though his wounded leg was the only thing stopping him
from leaping up and grabbing me. I was a little afraid of the depth
of feeling in those beautiful eyes.

I felt guilty even thinking about love while
our world was in such chaos, and especially when my parents were
going through this terrible thing. It was the steers at the
abattoirs all over again. But my heart was making its own rules and
refusing to be controlled by my conscience. I let it run wild,
thinking of all the fascinating possibilities.

Chapter
Fourteen

Monday morning a dark river of aircraft flowed
overhead for an hour or more. Not ours unfortunately. I’d never
seen so many aircraft. They looked like big fat transport planes
and they weren’t being molested by anyone, though a half-hour later
six of our Air Force jets whistled past on the same route. We waved
to them, optimistically.

We’d been back to my place, very early, and
brought up another load: more food, tools, clothing, toiletries,
bedding, and a few odds and ends that we’d forgotten before, like
barbecue tools, Tupperware, a clock and, I’m embarrassed to say,
hot-water bottles. Robyn had asked for a Bible. I knew we had one
somewhere and I found it eventually, dusted it off and added it to
the collection.

It was tricky, because we couldn’t take so
much stuff that it would be obvious to patrols that someone was on
the loose. So we went on to the Grubers, about a k away, and helped
ourselves to a lot more food. I also picked up a collection of
seeds and seedlings from Mr Gruber’s potting shed. I was starting
to think like Homer and plan for the long term.

The last things we got were half a dozen
chooks – our best layers – some pellets, fencing wire and star
pickets. As dawn broke we rattled on up the track, the chooks
murmuring curiously to each other in the back. I’d let Homer drive
this time, figuring he needed the practice. To amuse Fi I closed my
eyes, picked up the Bible, opened it at random, pointed to a spot,
opened my eyes and read the verse, saying at the same time,
‘Through my psychic finger I will find a sentence that applies to
us’. The one I’d picked was this: ‘I hate them with perfect hatred;
I count them my enemies.’

‘Golly,’ said Fi. ‘I thought the Bible was
meant to be full of love and forgiveness and all that stuff.’

I kept reading. ‘“Deliver me, O Lord, from
evil men; preserve me from violent men, who plan evil things in
their heart, and stir up wars continually”.’

The others were really impressed. So was I,
but I wasn’t going to let on to them. ‘See, I told you,’ I said. ‘I
do have a psychic finger.’

‘Try another one,’ Homer said. But I wasn’t
going to throw my reputation away that easily.

‘No, you’ve heard the words of wisdom,’ I
said. ‘That’s all for today.’

Fi grabbed the Bible and tried the same
ritual. The first time she got a blank section of page at the end
of one of the chapters. The second time she read, ‘“Then the king
promoted Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the province of
Babylon”.’

‘It’s no good,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to have
the psychic finger.’

‘Maybe the one you read would make Robyn feel
better about gunning soldiers down,’ Homer said to me.

‘Mmm, I’ve marked the page. I’ll show her when
they get back.’ No one mentioned the possibility that they might
not get back. That’s the way people always are I think. They figure
if they say something bad they might magically make it happen. I
don’t think words are that powerful.

We reached the top, hid the Landie, and took
the chooks and whatever else we could carry into Hell. We’d have to
wait until dark to get the other stuff. It was too dangerous being
up on Tailor’s Stitch with daylight coming on, and so many aircraft
around. And it was shaping up to be a scorcher. Even down in Hell,
where it was normally cool, the air was getting furnace hot. But to
my surprise we found Lee leaning against a tree at the opposite end
of the clearing to where we’d left him. ‘Hooley dooley!’ I said.
‘You’ve risen from the dead.’

‘I should have chosen a cooler morning,’ he
said, grinning. ‘But I got sick of sitting there. Thought it was
time for some exercise, now that I’ve recovered from that truck
ride.’ He was grinning, very pleased with himself, but sweating. I
rinsed a towel in the creek and wiped his face.

‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’ I
asked.

He shrugged. ‘It felt right.’

I remembered how quite often when our animals
got sick or injured they’d get themselves into a hole somewhere –
under the shearing shed was a popular place for the dogs – and
they’d stay there for days and days, until they either died or came
out fresh and cured and wagging their tails. Maybe Lee was the
same. He’d kept pretty still since he’d been shot, lying among the
rocks, thinking his quiet thoughts. He wasn’t yet wagging his tail,
but the energy was returning to his face.

‘The day you can sprint from one end of this
clearing to the other,’ I said, ‘we’ll chop off a chook’s head and
have a chicken dinner.’

‘Robyn can cut the stitches out when she gets
back from Wirrawee,’ he said. ‘They’ve been in long enough.’ I
helped him to a shady place near the creek, where we could sit
together in a damp dark basin of rock, probably the coolest spot in
Hell that day.

‘Ellie,’ he said. He cleared his throat
nervously. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. That
day back at your place, in the haystack, when you came over to
where I was lying, and you laid down and we ...’

‘All right, all right,’ I interrupted. ‘I know
what we did.’

‘I thought you might have forgotten.’

‘What, do you think I do that kind of stuff so
often I can’t remember? It wasn’t exactly an everyday event for me
you know.’

‘Well you haven’t looked at me once since
then. You’ve hardly even spoken to me.’

‘I was pretty out of it for a few days. I just
slept and slept.’

‘Yes, but since then.’

‘Since then?’ I sighed. ‘Since then I’ve been
confused. I don’t know what I think.’

‘Will you ever know what you think?’

‘If I could answer that I’d probably know
everything.’

‘Have I said something to upset you? Or done
something?’

‘No, no. It’s just me. I don’t know what I’m
doing half the time, so I do things and I don’t always mean what I
think I mean. Do you know what I mean?’ I asked, hopefully, because
I wasn’t sure myself.

‘So you’re saying it didn’t mean
anything?’

‘I don’t know. It meant something, at the
time, and it means something now, but I don’t know if it means what
you seem to want it to mean. Why don’t we just say I was being a
slut, and leave it at that.’

He looked really hurt and I was sorry I’d said
that. I hadn’t even meant it.

‘It’s a bit difficult sitting down here,’ he
said. ‘If you want to get rid of me, you’re the one who’ll have to
go.’

‘Oh Lee, I don’t want to get rid of you. I
don’t want to get rid of anyone. We all have to get on, living in
this place the way we are, for God knows how long.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This place, Hell. It seems
like Hell sometimes. Now for instance.’

I don’t know why I was talking the way I was.
It was all happening too unexpectedly. It was a conversation I
wasn’t ready for. I guess I like to be in control of things, and
Lee had forced this on me at a time and a place that he’d chosen. I
wished Corrie were there, so I could go and talk to her about it.
Lee was so intense he scared me, but at the same time I felt
something strong when he was around – I just didn’t know what it
was. I was always very conscious when I was near him. My skin felt
hotter, I’d be watching him out of the corner of my eye, directing
my comments at him, noticing his reactions, listening more for his
words than for anyone else’s. If he expressed an opinion I’d think
about it more carefully, give it more weight than I would, say,
Kevin’s or Chris’s. I used to think about him a lot in my sleeping
bag at nights, and because I’d be thinking about him as I drifted
into sleep I tended to dream about him. It got so that – this
sounds stupid but it’s true – I associated him with my sleeping
bag. When I looked at one I’d think of the other. That doesn’t
necessarily mean I wanted him in my sleeping bag, but they had
started to go together in my mind. I nearly smiled as I sat there,
thinking about that, and wondering how he’d look if he could
suddenly read my thoughts.

‘Do you still think about Steve a lot?’ he
asked.

‘No, not Steve. Oh I mean I think about him in
the same way I think about a lot of people, wondering if they’re
all right and hoping they are, but I don’t think about him in the
way you mean.’

‘Well if I haven’t offended you and you’re not
with Steve any more, then where does that leave me?’ he asked,
getting exasperated. ‘Do you just dislike me as a person?’

‘No,’ I said, horrified at that idea but
getting a bit annoyed too, at the way he was trying to bully me
into a relationship. Guys do that all the time. They want definite
answers – as long as they’re the right answers – and they think if
they keep at you long enough they’ll get them.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘sorry I can’t give you a list
of my feelings about you, in point form and alphabetical order. But
I just can’t. I’m all confused. That day in the haystack was no
accident. It meant something. I’m still trying to figure out
what.’

‘You say you don’t dislike me,’ he said
slowly, like he was trying to figure it out. He was looking away
from me and he was very nervous, but he was obviously leading up to
an important question. ‘So that does mean you like me?’

‘Yes Lee, I like you very much. But right now
you’re driving me crazy.’ It was funny how often I’d thought of us
having this conversation, but now that we were having it I didn’t
know if I was saying what I wanted to say.

‘I’ve noticed you looking at Homer kind of ...
special since we’ve been up here. Have you got a thing for
him?’

‘It’d be my business if I did.’

‘Cos I don’t think he’s right for you.’

‘Oh Lee, you’re so annoying today! Maybe you
shouldn’t have tried walking on that leg. I honestly think it’s
weakened your brain. Let’s blame it on that, or the weather or
something, because you don’t own me and you don’t have any right to
decide who’s right or wrong for me, and don’t you forget it.’ I
stormed off in a hot passion to the other side of the clearing
where Fi and Homer had been making a yard for the chooks. The
chooks were in it, looking shocked, maybe because they’d heard me
chucking my tantrum; more likely because they were wondering what
the hell they were doing there.

Oh. ‘What the hell.’ I just made a joke.

I watched the chooks for a while, then cut
across the clearing again to where the creek wandered back into
thick bush and lost itself in a dark tunnel of undergrowth. I’d
been thinking for a few days I might try to explore down there a
bit, impossible and impassable though it seemed. This might be the
time to do it. I could work off some anger and get my mind onto
something else. Besides, it looked cool in there. I took my boots
and socks off, stuffed the socks in the boots, and tied the boots
round my neck. Then I bent over and tried to pretend I was a
wombat, a water wombat. I’m the right shape for that, and it was
the only way to get under all the vegetation. I was using the creek
as a path, but there was a definite sensation of going along a
tunnel. The greenery arched so low that it scraped my back even
when I was almost kissing the water. It was cool – I doubt if the
sun had penetrated the creepers for years – and I hoped I wouldn’t
meet too many snakes.

The creek was narrower through here than it
was in our clearing, about a metre and a half wide and as much as
sixty centimetres deep. The bottom was all stones, but smooth and
old ones, not too many with cutting edges, and anyway my feet were
getting tough these days. There were quite a few dark still pools
that looked very deep, so I avoided them. The creek just chattered
on, minding its own business, not disturbed by my creeping
progress. It had been flowing here for a long time.

I followed it for about a hundred metres,
through many twists and turns. The beginning of the journey had
been sweet, like most new journeys I suppose, and there was the
hope that the ending might be sweet also, but the middle part was
getting tedious. My back was aching and I’d been scratched quite
sharply on the arms. I was starting to feel hot again. But the
canopy of undergrowth seemed to be getting higher, and lighter –
here and there glints of sunlight bounced off the water, and the
secret coolness of the tunnel was giving way to the more ordinary
dry heat that we’d had back in the clearing. I straightened up a
little. There was a place well ahead where the creek seemed to
widen for ten metres before it turned to the right and disappeared
into undergrowth again. It spread out into a wider channel, because
the banks were no longer vertical there. They angled gently back,
and I could see black soil, red rocks, and patches of moss, in a
little shadowy space not much bigger than our sitting room at home.
I kept wading towards it, still bent-backed. There were little blue
wildflowers scattered along the bank. As I got closer I could see a
mass of pink wildflowers deeper in the bush, back from the creek. I
looked again and realised that they were roses. My heart suddenly
beat wildly. Roses! Here, in the middle of Hell! Impossible!

I splashed along the last few metres to the
point where the banks began to open out, and sploshed out of the
creek onto the mossy rock. Peering into the wild of the vegetation
I struggled to distinguish between the shadows and the solid. The
only certainty was the rosebush, its flowers catching enough
sunlight through the brambles to glow like pieces of soft
jewellery. But gradually I started to make sense of what I was
seeing. Across there was a long horizontal of rotting black wood,
here a pole serving as an upright, that dark space a doorway. I was
looking at the overgrown shell of a hut.

I went forward slowly, on tiptoe. It was a
quiet place and I had some sort of reverential feeling, like I did
in my Stratton grandmother’s drawing room, with its heavy old
furniture and curtains always closed. The two places couldn’t have
been more different, the derelict bush hut and the solemn old
sandstone house, but they both seemed a long way removed from
living, from life. My grandmother wouldn’t have liked being
compared to a murderer, but she and the man who lived here had both
withdrawn from the world, had created islands for themselves. It
was as though they’d gone beyond the grave, even while they were
still on Earth.