Circle of Flight

John Marsden’s life recently took a new turn when he established a small alternative school just outside Melbourne.

Candlebark School, with 75 students, embodies John’s commitment to education that is imaginative, lively, spirited and invigorating. He has applied the same principles to his writing, which is now read avidly around the world, but never more eagerly than in Australia, where his sales have passed two million.

Recently John became only the fifth author to receive the prestigious Lloyd O’Neil Award. He joins Ruth Park, Tom Keneally, Morris West and Peter Carey to be honoured for lifelong services to the Australian book industry.

circle of flight

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 the 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

JOHN MARSDEN

John Marsden’s website can be visited at:
www.macmillan.com.au/johnmarsden
or
johnmarsden.com

First published 2006 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Jomden Pty Ltd 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations) in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Marsden, John, 1950– .
Circle of flight.

For young adults.
ISBN-13: 978 1 4050 3767 9.
ISBN-10: 1 4050 3767 9.

I. Title (Series: Marsden, John, 1950– The Ellie chronicles).

A823.3

The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cover design by Liz Seymour, Seymour Designs
Set in 12/14.5 pt Legacy Serif by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, Adelaide

Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

These electronic editions published in 2010 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

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.

Circle of Flight: The Ellie Chronicles

John Marsden

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This book is dedicated to you, because you are the pioneers . . . Jake Rushford, Piper Kelly, Mitchell Gandolfo, Grace Hannan, Sarah Wilkinson, Jesse Fitzmaurice, Alessandro D’angelo, Luke Walker, Kiara Cimino, Luke Mitchell, Robert Nowland, Mercedes Lewis, Jamieson Fay, Katie Nowland, Emily Eliades, Jemma Reeves-Singles, Catherine Abourizk, Nick Lindsay, Brock Cowburn, Jesse Colcott, Jordan Tzovlas, Amy Marks, Zach Colcott, Chris Tzovlas, Michael Mortimer, Jake Reeves-Singles, Kim Nieuwenhuizen, Hannah Stewart Smith, Alex Kibble, Sabrina Lewis, Matilda Fay, Laura Bright, Zoe Hawke, Olivia Bland, James Allbon-Wellm, Beck Russack Riches, Bianca Cimino, Kevin Singh, Monika Crljen, Laila de Silva, Sarah Eliades, Oliver Leverton, Declan Cutler, Nick Stocky, Owen Kelly, Rory O’Connor and Issabella Cimino.

I thank, for stories, ideas or answers to sometimes esoteric questions, in no particular order, Matthew Townsend, Cameron Smith, Warwick Kirk, William Siu, Michelle Mitchell,
Bellbirds and Blowflies
by Molly Keys,
Mount Hesse
by Peter and Phyllis Kininmonth,
Australian Criminal Law
by Colin Howard, Hanna Pirie, Bob Mitchell and, for enhancing and changing my understanding of the world, as well as telling me the Himmler story, Keith Johnstone.

Y
OU COME UP
the driveway. You’re late, but you knew you were going to be. That’s why you took the ute to school this morning. And told Gavin to catch the bus. He’ll have been back for two hours now. On his own. But you’re not stupid. And he’s not stupid. You both know what to do. He’s been good about it. He takes the precautions. When he gets off the bus he doesn’t just jump on the new fourwheeler and herb straight on up to the homestead.

He knows. And so do you. You detour into the bush, find a spot where you’ve got a good view of the house. You take a look. You watch for hostile visitors, enemy soldiers, an ambush. Even if the house looks OK, you still take care. You approach from a different direction each time. You use your eyes. If it’s Gavin, you can’t use your ears. But you use something else, better still. Your instinct. Your sixth sense.

Gavin knows. He knows that if there’s any sign of trouble, there’s a bolthole the two of you have organised, down near the lagoon.

He knows that if you’re there on your own you go out to feed the chooks and dogs, and check the stock, but you’re careful about it. Change your pattern all the time. Never leave by the same door twice running. Lock the house behind you. Take the rifle.

And you do the same things yourself. Today for example, you don’t go in the main gate. You use the bush gate into the Parklands paddock. You stop behind a couple of trees, get out and take a good look at the house from across the creek. You notice that everything looks fine. Washing on the line, Polaris in the machinery shed, axe stuck in the chopping block where you were splitting wood last night.

Marmie’s still in her run. That’s a bit unusual. Normally Gavin’d let her out. He loves that little dog.

Then you see it. One little thing is wrong. The front door’s wide open. Your heart starts hammering. You get back in the ute. You take off with a clumsy foot dance involving the clutch and the accelerator. You come at the bridge at a bad angle. The bridge is just a couple of logs with planks laid across them, and no railing. You think for a moment that you’re going to roll off it, onto the rocks, into the water. Now your stomach is lurching. But you make it across the bridge.

You forget about security. That bloody Gavin. If he’s just been careless . . . but what are you thinking? You want him to have been careless. Careless leaves the other option a trillion k’s behind. Oh Gavin, please be careless. You can have both the Kit-Kats after tea tonight if you’ve been careless.

You jam on the brakes and stop the ute right in front of the house. You throw open the car door and jump out. Not for the first time you run into a building that could be full of guns, with death waiting for you. You don’t even think of that until you’re crossing the threshold. It seems like an abstract thought, interesting to a scientist perhaps.

A few metres down the corridor you tread on something. In fact you nearly wrench your ankle. You look down. It’s a spare magazine for a rifle. It looks to be full, loaded with bullets
.

Now it’s too late to do anything else, so you go on.

You already know what you’re going to find. Underneath the fear and horror and panic there’s a cold realisation, that Gavin’s body will be somewhere in the house. You can picture what those bullets will have done to his little body. You’ve seen their effect on adult bodies, the men in the barracks, your mother in the kitchen. You go first to his bedroom. His school uniform is there. God, for once he actually changed out of his uniform when he got home. It’s still on the floor, and the shirt’s all scrunched up, but for Gavin that’s what you expect. The rule is that he changes every afternoon, as soon as he gets home. He actually does it about once a week. His Redbacks aren’t there, but he could have left them on the veranda, like he’s meant to do but never does. There’s no sign of a struggle, but most importantly, there’s no sign of the horror that you know awaits you somewhere. The open front door and the magazine full of bullets have told you everything. You run back to the kitchen. Nothing there either, except memories, terrible vivid images.

You go to the TV room. And you see everything, as though you were there when it happened. The chair on its back. Gavin’s favourite chair. The cushions scattered. The television with a hole smashed through it. Sharp glass fragments, milky white, everywhere. It’ll take hours to vacuum every last piece. No Redbacks, but one of his ug boots, the short ones that come up just past the ankle, lying on the floor, between the sofa and the door.

He always wears those after he’s done his jobs.

You run back out through the house. You’re crying, but not much, and there are no tears. You’re saying his name over and over in a kind of weeping way, but there’s no point to that, because he couldn’t hear you anyway.

You stand in the middle of the front drive. You’d make a good target for anyone with a high-powered rifle, for anyone with no conscience, for anyone who takes life because they like it, for anyone who has a particular reason to hate you for what you did during the war.

You see something that you missed before, when you were racing up the driveway in the ute. His other ug boot, about thirty metres away. Your brain clicks a few times as it processes this information. And something deep inside your mind tells you that there’s still hope. Not much, but just a chance that he might be out there somewhere, and alive. But you’re not a blacktracker. Sure, you’ve picked up a few things over the years. Sometimes you’ve been able to follow a cow who’s about to calve, and you’ve found the hidey-hole she’s made. You’ve followed the trail of the motorbike, to find your dad when he was working somewhere in a paddock and you had a message for him from your mum. Sometimes that was ridiculously easy, especially when he was riding through long grass, or a crop.

Not long ago you did follow some of Gavin’s tracks when he nicked off on a motorbike to follow his heroes, Homer and Lee. But with the rain there are so many tracks around the homestead at the moment that maybe even one of the legendary blacktrackers, the Aborigines who can follow a lost child across rocks and sand, would be struggling here.

And now you have a lost child, and he could be one kilometre away, or a hundred, and he could be to the north or the south or the east or the west. And he could be going further away with every minute. This is a big country. You don’t know where to even start your search.