The Thompson Gunner (24 page)

But we don't choose the Tippmann. We choose the Automag Semi. It can fire eight shots a second, and that's more like what Elliott had in mind. Trent takes us to the firing range for some practice shots, and he says, ‘This is also where we execute people who shoot referees.'

He gives us each a large bulbous black paintball hopper which fits on top of the marker and feeds paintballs down into it for firing. Once that's attached it doesn't look like a gun at all. Elliott blasts from the hip and a couple of others do too. Paintballs spray around, bursting in the dirt and against trees and sometimes on the targets. The targets are black silhouettes of people.

I
get the feel of the trigger and I lift my gun and look along the barrel under the hopper. There's a row of eight targets, standing still and waiting for it, black silhouettes against a white background. There are paintballs buzzing in the air around me and splattering against everything in front of us. I take aim at a gum tree over to the right, and fire a single-shot. There's almost no recoil, and the paintball seems to dip a little and goes slightly to the left of where I'd expected. I take another shot, and it's almost corrected, a couple more and I have the feel of it.

Trent leads us to the first course, and we divide into teams of six. We're fighting for a village, he tells us, but it turns out to be more an arrangement of high corrugated-iron fences, with gaps and some holes cut for windows and doors. There's no time to get a sense of the layout, so no real chance to plan how to handle it. Elliott takes his team down one end and I'm with the others.

Someone says ‘What do you reckon we should do?' and I tell them I'm pretty sure Elliott's going to go mad. We should fan out in good defensive positions and let them attack.

I check my equipment. I take a slow breath in and out. My heart rate's up already.

The whistle blows, the game starts. There's whooping from the
far side of the village as Elliott and his team charge into action. They appear in the distance around a wall, in a clump and running bent over. We should hold our fire, but of course we don't. The shooting starts, and they don't scatter quickly enough. They return fire, and keep running our way. I'm crouched on one knee at the edge of a sheet of corrugated iron, and paintballs start clanging everywhere.

I fire a burst of a couple of shots and they go wide to the left. Another couple of shots and I'm closer, and the next burst collects someone in the chest. I aim to the right as he falls, and I fire again. Dye splatters from the next guy's visor.

I roll back fully into cover as two of the others start shooting at me. There's a crack in the sheeting further along, and I lie down and fire through it. Three of them make cover, and the shooting stops.

It's quiet for a moment, then I can hear them running in the dry grass behind the fencing. They're coming to our right. I signal to the others, pointing that way. They're circling us. I signal to listen, and to move quietly.

They burst out of a doorway firing, most of their shots slapping into metal, and the first of them is hit so many times he recoils against the wall and red dye splatters all across his front and he drops to the ground shouting out, ‘You've got me already.'

We take out the other two at the same time, and lose only one of our own. The whistle blows to end the game, but my heart's still racing. We've got them, all six of them, I counted as they were hit, it's over. I wipe my palms on my overalls.
The others are laughing, pushing back their masks. Terri reaches a hand down to the sports reporter, who is still on the ground. He pulls himself up in a B-movie wounded-soldier way and leans back against the wall.

‘That really hurts, you know,' he says. ‘When you get hit by about twenty of them at once. How did I get to be the one coming out of the doorway first?'

A gust of wind blows through the village and rustles the grass. Trent hands around a bottle of water. Elliott tries to brush dye from his overalls with his hand, but only spreads it around. The band from his mask has pressed his dark wavy hair flat, and there's sweat running down his neck.

‘New teams,' he says indignantly, looking mainly at me. ‘You used a strategy.'

I remind him that it's a living chess game, not a day out for rampaging maniacs, and that draws a third ‘ooooh' from some of the others.

He takes me aside on the way to the next course and says, emphatically, ‘I love what you're doing. Love it.'

The second game is ‘Woodland Sniper', and it sends one person alone into the trees to evade capture for twenty minutes, while sniping at pursuers. The first two times we do it, it lasts about five minutes. The sniper claims a couple, then starts shooting crazily as they're encircled and brought down.

I'm sent out third, and I go far into the bush and up a small rise. I have good cover, and can only be attacked from the front and one side. At first I've still got the chess-game analogy in my mind, but then I see them advancing in a line, moving from tree to tree, eleven people unrecognisable in their camouflage and masks. There's no shooting, just the sound of them brushing past bushes and low branches, moving in and out of shadows. They're not even talking. I'm their target, and they're coming my way.

Like the first two snipers, I suppose, my nerves start to fray.

I want to run, to see if there is better cover further back. But they'd see me, they'd get me. They're crouching, running between trees, closing in, and I can never see them all at once. I try to get lower, but they'll find me anyway. I can't be small enough, I can't hide.

Their line breaks up as they get closer. They're almost upon me. I have no choice but to shoot now.

I take out one, two, and the others go to ground. But I keep shooting, hitting trees, and they're onto me, returning fire. Firing through the bushes all around me and moving again, coming forwards. I'm firing almost blind, staying low and firing. I hit another one, but it won't be enough. I'm feeling sick, and hot.

I manage to get six of them, or seven, before they storm my position.

‘Eighteen minutes,' Trent says. ‘That's as close as we'll get, I reckon.'

He gives us sandwiches and bottles of soft drink, and we sit around in the patchy shade at the edge of the course. I wipe my visor against my overalls to get the dye off. I drink, but I'm not hungry. I'd be happy to go back to the city now. I'd prefer that.

For the third game we're on the same course, with two teams each fighting to claim the enemy's flag. Our tactics quickly go wrong, and I get separated from the others. I'm down on the ground behind a log when two of the enemy come past. I can see their boots but nothing more. They're talking, whispering to each other. I can't hear what they're saying. Until they're gone I don't even breathe.

Shots are fired, one or two hit a tree, more than that I don't know. I get up on my knees and then run to the next piece of cover when it's all clear. There's a long burst of fire in the distance, another in reply.

My heart rate is up again, I can feel it.

I run to another tree. To the left, in the distance, the two who passed me before are searching. I don't know who they are with their masks on. They're going from tree to tree, holding their guns waist-high and ready, sweeping their guns in front of them, ready to fire.

It's not like the first game, not any more. In the first game they just charged at us, shooting for the sake of it.

I run harder but there are more of them than just those two, and they could be anywhere. The treetops bend in the wind and the light comes through and the shadows move. They're closing in on me again, I know they are. And I could be the last. I could be the last of my team, and maybe they're all after me now, sweeping through the trees.

I go faster, but it's getting hard to breathe in this vest. It's constricting me, I'm getting dizzy. There could be one of them behind any tree, behind anything. I'm making too much noise. I know I'm going to be caught, and they're
going to shoot me. I keep running, dodging around bushes, pointing my gun at shadows. There's something red on the ground in front of me. I see its eyes and its teeth and I jump over it, trip and fall. I look back and it's a tree root, bulging up out of the ground. I thought it was a fox, just for a second there, but dead already.

I pick up my gun and I run again. I want to be out of here, out of the trees. I can do better if I'm out of the trees.

I jump over a branch and between two bushes to a patch of clear ground, and someone in camouflage turns and brings their gun up to fire but I fire first. But my gun's jammed. I'm upon them already, our guns clatter together, their shot goes wide. I kick, stomach high. Breath grunts out of him – it's a man – and he falls to his knees and drops the flag. I swing my gun at him like an axe at a tree, two-handed, and his head snaps back when it hits, his visor split down into his face, into his right cheek. He flops to the ground and lies on his back looking up at me. It's Elliott, Elliott King.

His eye blinks and blinks as blood inks it in darkly. There's noise all around us. I'm standing over him, my gun in my hand. I'm stuck. I can't read his expression at all, but that's the blood. It should be fear with him in that position, he should be unable to feel anything but fear, but that's not why we came here today. I want this to stop.

Paintballs hit my back like fists.

I settle for some more laps later, since I'll go crazy if I stay in my room until the show, and I don't feel like drinking.
I swim freestyle, up and down, ten long strokes a lap, ten long hard-working strokes till my muscles burn and can pull me no further.

Elliott was taken to the nearest medical centre at high speed, a tea towel and a wad of bandage clamped to his face by Trent's gloved hand, a sheaf of incident report forms in a folder beside them. The rest of us drove back into Perth on the bus.

And the bush gave way to suburbs and then the city, and I reminded myself that I have a job to do tonight, an audience ahead of me with expectations. There's plenty to think about, to focus on. It was hard, though, to put that blinking blood-filled eye out of my head, and the sharp cracking sound that came when I hit him, when he was on his knees.

Elliott explained that he had tripped while running with the flag, and had struck his head when he fell. He wanted to walk back to the carpark but his knees went wobbly on the way and he had to be helped.

I have no idea how I'm going to describe this to Emma when the time comes. He should have picked golf. Not that I play, but I would happily have caddied. I wouldn't have beaten anyone up if we'd played golf. Or mini-golf. I'm always up for that, and happy to play whether I win or lose.

When I'm out of the pool, I call Elliott and get his voice-mail. I apologise, again, and I tell him I'd like to buy him breakfast in the morning, if he'll let me.

Back in my room, there are messages from Claire and Felicity, checking how I am today and saying I should call if I want to. ‘Everything's under control,' Felicity says. ‘I hope you managed to shoot a few of those TV people.'

When we next talk, Emma will ask how paintball went and I'll say ‘I whacked Elliott in the face with a gun' and she'll say ‘I'm sure it was an accident' and I'll have to say No.

I whacked him in the face because the moment called for it, inexplicably, and that's just how it was. My gun jammed. Elliott had the flag. Something like that.

Tomorrow night I'll be on a plane home. There's one more show to get through, and the canoe race, and a dinner. Murray will be in Brisbane now, I suppose, ordering takeaway and hoping for good sleep before his day with Elli tomorrow. A good sleep in an otherwise empty bed.

I
N VANCOUVER
I ate raspberries from the Granville Island markets. I bought a punnet for four dollars and I hadn't eaten such fresh raspberries since I'd left Northern Ireland, not that I could recall. And the people I worked with were as nice as they'd been on my previous visit, but they said I looked tired and they'd heard we'd had a big week in Calgary and Banff.

I could have done without the Rob Castle posters as I walked around the island. He'd been there in August, and August was long ago.

They were right – I was tired and I was losing the capacity to hide it. The hotel gym was an exercise bike almost rusted through in some places and a stepper gone lame on one side, so I caught the ferry and ran around Stanley Park, breathing in the cool, wet, temperate air among the big trees. And the temperature fell quickly as the light went, but the run didn't shake the listlessness, and I faked it for my show as best I could and the next day I left Canada for New Zealand.

Christchurch brought me closer to home, and to realising properly that home, when I arrived, would not be the place I had left.

On
the last of my three nights there, I went to a fan's house for dinner. Her name was Jill and she had seen my short-lived TV show when it screened in New Zealand, as well as some of my regular guest appearances before then on cable. ‘I got $2.42 for that,' I told her when I replied to her first email a year ago, ‘so I'm glad someone was watching.'

That email had invited me to her husband David's birthday, since it was his fortieth and she wanted to line up some kind of surprise. It couldn't be me that weekend, but I'd made it now, weeks before his forty-first, and David had a roast under way and he put a glass of wine in my hand as soon as I walked in.

The house was built for a colder country than home, with somewhere to put your boots just inside the door and fireplaces everywhere. They had two children, a girl aged eight and a boy aged six, and the house was warm and full of Lego, colouring-in pencils and story books. They had a roster magneted to the fridge – soccer, ballet, piano – and two very fluffy cats with a birthday the day after mine. I don't know if the house always felt the way it did then, but that night it felt perfect. I wanted to tell the kids how lucky they were, but there's never any point in that, so I read them a story instead when the time came for them to go to bed.