Darkness Be My Friend (7 page)

"Hi," she said, "how did you sleep?"

"Terrible. I got up before dawn. How about you?"

"Fine. Like a baby."

"I don't know why people say that. Most babies are shocking sleepers, aren't they?"

She laughed. "So they say. I keep as far away from babies as I can."

"I can't say I've had a lot of experience myself."

She sat on the next rock, a couple of metres to my left, and threw a dead leaf into the creek.

"It's nice here," she said, after a few moments.

"I know I'm glad I'm back now."

"And it's so well hidden. Looking down from the top I just couldn't believe we'd get in. You were so clever to find it."

"It was a total accident."

"Yes, Fiona told me."

"When do you have to, you know, start doing stuff?"

"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. We'd like to go into Wirrawee tonight. And if you feel up to it, we'd like you to be one of our guides."

I tried to act like I hadn't already heard.

"Who else would you take?"

"Well, please don't say anything till we've talked to the others, but we were thinking Lee might be a good choice."

"Yeah, he would be good..." I was torn between two loyalties. "But I think you should take Homer too."

"We thought it was important to have him in charge back here."

"Ooh," I thought, "that's neat. That's very clever, but I don't think it'll be enough to satisfy Homer. I think he'll see through that."

And that's what happened. As I came back from the creek with Ursula, about ten minutes later, the first thing I saw was Homer storming off towards the track, looking like he was going to walk straight to Wirrawee
and blow the whole place up by himself. He stayed away for the rest of the day. When we left that afternoon he was still sulking; in fact he seemed to be taking it out on the poor old bush. I could hear him smashing down timber which, according to Kevin, he was going to use for a store shed.

Somehow I didn't think that store shed was ever going to get built.

It was a long walk. One night we'd been at a party in Wirrawee, at Josh and Susie's place, and Homer had been hitting the grog in a big way, and everyone was giving him a hard time, and he kept saying he was cold sober, and finally, at 3 a.m., he announced that to prove he was sober he'd walk home. A minute later he was heading off down the drive, with us all waving him goodbye as we fell about laughing. I was staying overnight so I had no way of knowing if he'd got home or not, but at eight in the morning the phone rang and, when Josh finally staggered out to the kitchen to answer it, it was Homer. He was so pleased with himself that I could hear his voice from Susie's room where I was in the bed.

But that's the only time I'd heard of anyone walking from our properties into Wirrawee, or vice versa.

No, wait, that's not true. My grandfather had a worker
named Casey I think his name was, and he was famous for his walking. "Spring-heel Bob" they called him because he had an unusual way of bouncing on his heels. Apparently he used to walk everywhere, even to Wirrawee if he had to. I remember my grandmother saying he'd walked to Stratton once to see his girlfriend. In those days the mail was only delivered as far as the Mackenzies' place, and he walked there twice a week to get the letters.

My grandfather was too stingy to let him have a horse.

I was full of ideas for shortcuts for us to get into Wirrawee that night, but Iain wouldn't listen to any of them. He put safety above everything, which was fair enough, of course, but I thought he took it a bit far. Not only did we have to walk, we had to make all these detours to avoid houses and roads. It made Homer's famous walk look like a little after-dinner stroll. It tested my fitness, too. I'd thought I was still pretty fit when they asked me to slow down on our way up to Tailor's Stitch, but I soon realised my stamina wasn't anywhere near the soldiers'. They could have gone for a week at the same pace. No wonder their horses kept coming over and winning the Melbourne Cup. These guys could have won the Melbourne Cup on their own. They didn't need horses.

It took us all night. We weren't allowed to speak which meant my muscles could talk to me uninterrupted. They sure had plenty to say: nothing but complaints. Whinge, whinge, whinge. I don't blame them, though. They were hurting. I wished I'd done more running, back in New Zealand.

When we got close to Wirrawee we stopped for a consultation with Iain and Ursula. There would have been time to go into town for a quick look around before dawn, but they felt it wasn't worth the risk. So we scrambled into some scrubby country, not far from the ruins of the Mackenzie house, and holed up for the day.

This time there was no hope of my wandering away for another walk. Iain was adamant. I could see his point and I didn't make any fuss. I was starting to like my own company more and more, but on this trip I wasn't likely to get much of it. It was a hot day and I was pleased to be able to get my breath back and give my legs a rest. It seemed that since we'd returned we'd been going nonstop: apart from the morning in Hell, my feet had hardly touched ground.

I had another good long sleep that lasted about as long as the one two days before. Seemed like suddenly I could only sleep in daytime. I wasn't too comfortable when I woke up though! A rock had dug its way into my back and the sun was burning my face.

I struggled up and made my way over to Lee and the others. They'd started a game of miniature cricket using a pebble as a ball and a twig as a bat. I watched sourly. I was all hot and sticky and sore and uncomfortable, my legs were aching, and I wasn't in the mood for games. But gradually I got sucked in: when the pebble came my way a few times I fielded it. Eventually I took a catch and got to bat. It was quite fun. It made me sad in a way, though. This was the life we should have had. Playing silly games, mucking around, enjoying being kids for as long as we could. That was how we'd spent half our time at school. When Eric Choo broke his leg we'd
turned his crutch into a bat and invented another variety of cricket: when you hit the ball you had to run around the rubbish bin and back to the wicket, using the crutch to travel. From then on when anyone came to school with a broken anything that needed a crutch we'd all cheer and start the game up again.

That's what I mean. Just silly stuff like that. We had enough years in front of us to be serious and grown-up and respectable. Why rush it?

But on the other hand we always complained when teachers and other adults treated us as kids. In fact there was nothing that annoyed me more. So it was a frustrating situation. What we needed was a two-sided badge that said "Mature" on one side and "Childish" on the other. Then at any moment we could turn it to whatever side we felt like being and the adults could treat us accordingly.

One thing did make me think, though. It wasn't exactly all these people telling me about kids in other countries being in the army when they were ten. I mean, if you listened to that stuff you'd think that babies in nappies were parachuting out of aircraft with M 16's in their little paws. No, what I did wonder about was those photos of Aboriginal kids being initiated as full adults, full members of the tribe. Because in every photo they looked to be about ten or eleven years old. And I'd always wondered about that. If they were fit to be full adults when they were ten, what was wrong with us that we weren't ready till we were twenty or twenty-one? Or in some cases even older I knew twenty-four-year-olds who were still treated like little kids. Randall McPhail, for instance. Sometimes I didn't think he was
ever going to grow up. He was twenty-eight and still living with his parents, still burning around the district in his hotted-up Holden ute with stickers on the back saying things like "No ute, no circle work" or "I survived the Stratton B&S."

Every time I saw him I was like, "Grow up, Randall."

Well, that's the way he was before the war. Maybe the war had made him grow up. But it shouldn't need a war to do that.

Everything you said now had to be dated as either before the war, or after the war started. It wasn't BC or AD any more; it was BW and AW

The thing is, I wanted a Holden ute too, and I loved B&S's, but I sort of assumed that by the time I was twenty-eight I'd have moved on to something else. I hoped I would have.

That still didn't solve my puzzle about the Aboriginal kids. Maybe it was because they had a shorter life expectancy in those days, so you had to grow up faster. Maybe now, with modern medicine and stuff, you could take longer with childhood; there wasn't such a rush to move on to the next stage. After all, that's what had happened with us. Our life expectancy had been reduced because of the war. And we'd sure grown up fast.

Eventually the soldiers and Lee got tired of cricket. They wandered off and sprawled out under trees and bushes. Iain had four people on sentry duty this time, so that soaked up a lot of the troops. I actually volunteered to do some but he thanked me politely and explained that he wanted me fresh for the walk through Wirrawee that night.

"Typical Iain," I thought cynically, "always sugarcoating everything." If he wanted you to do the washing up he'd tell you it was hand aerobics and you needed the exercise. If he didn't want you to do it, he'd tell you he wanted your hands kept dirty so they didn't shine at night. OK, slight exaggeration maybe, but I was still sure that somewhere sometime he'd done courses on how to get people to do what he wanted. It never felt quite sincere.

I saw Lee on the other side of the hill. He was sitting under a thin black wattle, an oddly shaped tree that seemed to have gone into contortions and tied itself into a knot. I had a sudden urge to be with him so I walked up there. He was scratching in the ground with a stick. He didn't look up when I got there so I just stood and watched for a while. I realised he was writing his name, then rubbing it out, then writing it again. Sometimes he'd write it plainly and sometimes ornately. Then he wrote my name. I laughed and he rubbed it out. Then he threw the stick away. I felt a bit guilty that I'd laughed, though I don't know why. I sat down beside him. Neither of us said anything for a while, then he said, "Remember that exercise we did in English once, where we had to say what we'd save?"

"Nuh."

"Oh maybe it was a different class. I think it was Mrs. Savvas in Year 8. We had to say which things we'd save if our house was burning down."

"So what did you say?"

"I can't remember them all. We had to name five things, I think. I know everyone said their photos, their photo albums. I probably said my violin. Belinda Norris
said her Barbies, I remember that. We paid her out for months afterwards."

"Trust Belinda."

"Yeah. But what I was thinking about was, it's happened to us, hasn't it? Like, our houses have burnt down and we haven't saved much."

I didn't say anything. I wasn't sure where this was heading.

Lee said carefully: "Suppose when we finish showing them what they want to see in Wirrawee, I get away for an hour, and go back to my place and pick up a few things."

"Like what?"

Lee started scraping another name into the dirt, with his finger this time. I couldn't see what the name was.

"My grandfather," he said slowly. "When he was alive, there was this scroll..."

And suddenly Lee was crying. It took me a minute to realise, because he did it so quietly. He hadn't changed his position: he was still sitting there but his body was shaking. It was like—this sounds terrible but it's the only way I can describe it—it was like someone was running a low-voltage electric current through him. I couldn't see his face, but I could picture it. His teeth would be clenched and his eyes closed tight. I put my hand over his and held it; no, not just held it but kneaded it with my fingers, over and over again. But there was nothing I could really do. The tears flowed and flowed. And the strange thing was that he didn't make a single sound. Silent crying. There's something awful about that. I don't know why it seems so terrible, maybe just the feeling that he was crying without letting himself
cry. And it went on and on. I thought he'd never stop. I wasn't exactly timing it, but it could have been half an hour.

When he at last seemed to have stopped I moved up a little higher so I was beside him, and I put my arm around him. We stayed together like that for a long time. I was starting to realise that my relationship with Lee might not be completely over. I still had very strong feelings where he was concerned. I just wasn't sure what those feelings were. In the past when I'd ended a relationship, that was it: I never had a thought of reviving it. It was definitely like that with Steve. But maybe being in so many isolated situations with Lee meant that different rules applied now.

The rules for everything else had changed. Why not for relationships?

Wirrawee had certainly changed, almost beyond belief. There'd been hints of it as we walked in there, but we'd kept away from the road as much as possible, so we had no real warning. From time to time I'd seen glimpses of cars and trucks, and most of them were travelling at good speeds, with headlights on full. It seemed that since the bombing raids had been reduced they felt a lot more confident.

They felt pretty confident in Wirrawee itself. I soon
found that out. It was 1130 p.m. when we started our cautious approach to the town. Ursula and Lee and I were leading: we came over the little hill on Coachman's Lane that was always such a bugger on the fun run—it came just near the end, when you had no energy left—and to our surprise there were lights everywhere. It was party time in Wirrawee. Even New Zealand hadn't been like this, because they had electricity restrictions there, brownouts and even blackouts. Some of that was because they were getting short of electricity, some because they were scared of being bombed. They didn't want to give bombers a nice bright easy target. Their best defence against being attacked was world opinion, which was mainly on our side. But I suppose the brownouts were fair enough. Playing it safe.