Authors: John Marsden
And chances are you’re just searching for a body anyway.
W
E KNEW WE
were a target. We found out in a way that caused me a lot of internal chaos. First, Lee and Homer and Jeremy and Jess had crossed the border on a mission that ended up creating some chaos over there. The idea was that they would stop a group who were going to attack a target on our side of the border. Get them before they get you, the best defence is attack, strike while the iron’s hot, all that kind of stuff. I had no problems with that in principle, especially after what had happened to my parents and Mrs Mackenzie, and to Shannon Young and her family. Not to mention hundreds of other people who’d been wounded, or worse, by visits from an enemy who we weren’t supposed to be fighting any more.
This particular mission had gone wrong, although we got out of it OK in the end. I hadn’t intended to go but I got sucked into it by Gavin, and found myself with the others in a very intense situation. For a while it looked like we’d be getting out of it in body bags.
It was quite a few weeks before we were off on another mission. It was meant to be sooner but they kept putting it off. But this time I volunteered to go, for two opposite reasons: partly because it was meant to be just a little mission without a lot of danger, but partly because I wanted to feel danger again. One of the effects war had on me was that I got bored really easily these days. It was hard to settle down to routine. Brushing your teeth, feeding the dog, studying for a test, these things did not have the gut-grabbing excitement of towing a steel dumpbin through a rain of bullets while you hoped your friends, who were hiding in the dumpbin at the time, didn’t get killed. I didn’t want to be addicted to this kind of stuff, I knew it was unhealthy, but like all addictions it had its hands around my throat before I knew it was there.
Liberation, the organisation that I didn’t even belong to, the organisation that was so secret I knew only a couple of its members, had offered me a new quad bike to replace the one I’d lost when we’d had our deadly rendezvous over the border, but the bike came with a string attached. They made it clear that I was expected to use the bike on a new trip. Pretty long string. But this time I gave in without a fight, for the reasons I said. I tied Gavin to Mrs Yannos with some of the leftover string, not quite literally but almost, and went with Lee and Homer, just the three of us, out into the sweet night air.
‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it . . .’ The boys told me the night before where we were going and what we’d be doing. It was what you call a sensitive mission. I swore oaths of secrecy and even now can’t say much about it, but it involved meeting someone deep in enemy territory and giving them a parcel. It was a very well-wrapped parcel – seemed like a strong cardboard box with about a hundred metres of tape around it – and none of us had a clue what was in it, but when we met the man he said, ‘Thanks, this will keep quite a few people happy,’ I wondered if it might be drugs. Had Liberation turned me into a drug runner? Maybe I should have thought this through a bit more, and not trusted so much in people I didn’t know. Then the guy smiled at us and said, ‘You seem very young. Do you know how much is in here?’
He seemed so relaxed and his English was almost perfect. I shook my head. He shrugged and said, ‘Well, enough for a luxury car. They must trust you a lot.’
I realised then that it was money, and felt guilty for not trusting the Liberation people. I admit I also thought, ‘Gee, I could have paid off a lot of the farm debts if I’d known that earlier.’
The man gave Homer a packet of papers, a big envelope stuffed with bits and pieces in a pretty messy way, like they’d just been shoved in there. Back we went, as dawn greyed the sky. It was such an easy trip that I wondered if security was getting a bit slacker now. It was difficult at times to remember that if we were caught we would face death. It wasn’t until we were back on our side of the border, the safe side, that I realised we’d been turned, not into drug runners, but into spies. The papers might have looked like a big mess, but I’d say they were pretty hot. The guy we’d met was probably being paid for spying and now we were in the same category as him, even if we were amateurs. Everyone knows the penalty for spying, in pretty much any country. The Americans electrocuted that Jewish couple, the Rosenbergs I think their name was, in the 1950s, because they claimed they were spies for Russia. When it comes to spying, people don’t muck around.
Back home I fed the boys omelettes for breakfast. Homer went off with the envelope full of papers, Lee went to bed, and I went to school. Partly I went because I’d promised Gavin I’d be on the bus, but partly because it amused me to go. I wanted to be able to sit through each class, have recess and lunch like normal, hang out with the usual people, knowing all the time that while they’d spent the night doing homework and watching TV and then going to bed, I’d spent it spearing through the night on the quaddie, in enemy territory, carrying a huge amount of money, meeting a spy, collecting secret documents, risking death. How weird life was. How amazing that an average human like me could be so adaptable. I did fall asleep a couple of times in lessons but the rest of the time I spent wondering how I had ended up in this strange existence.
In the next few days, though, I found myself feeling bugged about the trip. I had the feeling Homer knew something that I didn’t, and apart from Poland China pigs and taking diesel engines apart, that doesn’t happen a lot. If you could see Homer’s school grades you’d have to agree. I like feeling superior to Homer whenever I can, I don’t mind admitting that, because he’s so good at making other people feel inferior, so it was doubly or even triply annoying to think that he was sitting smugly on some secret knowledge. It was my fault because I’d refused to join Liberation, the group which organised these parties. I didn’t even know who was in charge of our local branch, only that it was someone Homer and the others nicknamed the Scarlet Pimple. It could have been Homer himself, or Jeremy, or anyone else for that matter. Could have been any one of half-a-dozen macho young guys in the district. Could have been a girl. Could have been Gavin or Mrs Yannos or Mr Rodd. Chances were that it wasn’t though.
But when I saw the big Greek wombat a couple of times the next day, and the day after that, I had the feeling that more than usual was being kept from me. Like there was a big rock in the middle of our conversations and he kept sailing around it.
I wanted to know about that big rock.
Well, I found out about it, and was sorry I had. No, that’s not true. Knowledge has got to be better than ignorance any day of the week, that’s what I believe anyway. I just wish I could have made better use of the knowledge.
On Thursday afternoon Homer wanted to get off the bus at our place and come home with Gavin and me. His idea was that I’d feed him and then take him home. He’d probably have another meal at home, but that’s Homer for you. Never stand between him and a steak. But it was fine by me and we got off together and opened up the twin-cab, which was parked by a young sugar gum and nice and warm in the spring sun. Apart from anything else, it was good to have Homer to myself for a bit. Well, as much as Gavin would share him. We hadn’t had a decent conversation for ages, just a few words as we rushed past each other in school, or grunts as we fed cattle or serviced machinery together.
‘Place is looking all right,’ he said as we cruised up the driveway.
‘I don’t think Dad would have agreed with you.’
‘Nah, but it’s not bad. Mr Young’s cattle are getting some condition. I had a look at your lot the other day too, and some of them are coming on well.’
‘And some of them aren’t.’
‘Yeah well Miss Queen of Positivity, I’m trying to look on the bright side. If you buy a bunch of skeletons, at the end of the day you might have skeletons with meat but they’ll still be skeletons.’
‘The walking dead.’
‘Yeah exactly.’
‘They weren’t that bad.’
‘Nah, those Poll Herefords aren’t too bad.’
‘They’d want to be for the price I paid for them. Eleven hundred and forty bucks a head.’
‘The way prices are going you could get a grand a head for steers that died of starvation.’
‘That died three weeks ago.’
‘Only three weeks? Sheez, you’d get fifteen hundred if they’d only been dead three weeks. Hey, how about you turn right up there and go across the ford?’
‘Hey, this thing doesn’t have four-wheel-drive.’
‘It’s got four wheels hasn’t it? And they all go round at the same time? I’d call that four-wheel-drive.’
‘Why do you want me to go across the ford?’ But I could tell he was serious so I went right and eased the ute down into the gully, trying not to tear the sump out on the rocks. From the back seat Gavin started squawking in protest. When we didn’t pay him any attention he tried to climb through into the front, to find out what was going on. We shooed him back.
We bumped up the other side. I could almost feel the relief of the suspension as the track flattened out and we accelerated to a dazzling fifteen k’s an hour. We drove along the side of the gully, the nastiest bit of erosion left on the property.
‘You wanna stop here somewhere?’ Homer asked.
Obediently, I stopped. Obedience is not my usual attitude with Homer, but sometimes you have to play along to work out what he’s getting at. We sat looking at the view. We could see the house from here, quiet and comfortable in the afternoon sun. A magpie made a clumsy landing on the front lawn and taxied to a halt near a hydrangea bush. Gavin stirred restlessly in the back seat and poked his head between us.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Why are we here?’
I turned a bit so he could see my mouth. ‘Ask Homer,’ I said.
He asked Homer but he didn’t get much joy there. He got more restless and then gave up, opened the back door and got out, announcing, ‘I’m walking home.’
‘Watch out for snakes,’ I said.
Off he went, sliding into the gully, eroding a few more clods along the way. His head disappeared. Homer and I sat there a bit longer. Eventually Gavin reappeared on the far side, climbing busily.
‘There’s a lot of different ways to get to your house,’ Homer said at last.
‘Yeah.’
‘Like, if you go along here a k there’s another ford.’
‘That’s the truth.’
‘It’d be good to take the scenic route more often.’
‘Homer, what the hell is this about?’
‘If you took different routes all the time, it’d be harder for anyone to ambush you.’
He said it so casually that it took me a while to realise how sinister his message was.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
When he didn’t answer I slowly understood that life was not the way I’d thought, that my life had a different shape to the one I’d imagined. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time I’d seen it so clearly. It’s hard for my brain at moments like that. The only way I can describe it is that I had a picture of my life as, say, a farmhouse with a veranda and a large chimney, and then suddenly it metamorphosed into, I don’t know, a stainless steel triangular prism sitting on top of a mountain.
Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Then, so quietly that I surprised myself, I said, ‘Why?’
He glanced at me, then looked away again, through the windscreen. ‘That raid we went on. To the –’ I’m not allowed to say the name of the place in case anyone finds this.
‘Yeah?’
‘That envelope of papers he gave me.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘I tipped them out on the floor to sort them out a bit, just, you know, to pack them better, neater.’
‘Cos you’re such a neatness freak.’
‘Well I wanted them in a bigger envelope where they wouldn’t be –’
‘Yeah yeah I know, I’m just kidding, go on.’
‘OK, well, first thing I see, well not the first thing, but in the middle of them is a map of your place.’
‘My place?’
‘A map of the district, with your place outlined, and the house marked, and a line drawn along the route we take over the border, more or less.’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t have the boundaries of the property even halfway right, but you could see they were picking out your place, the map was to show someone where you live.’
My body prickled like a thousand funnel webs were walking all over me. I felt as though I were rising in my seat even though I was still sitting behind the wheel.
Homer didn’t say anything else, just waited for me to do the figuring-out by myself. It didn’t take me long. My place was being singled out, I was being singled out. I felt a spasm in my stomach, like a violent sickness, but I didn’t do anything as dramatic as vomit, like in novels, where everyone seems to vomit or faint when they hear bad news or cut their little finger.
So they hadn’t finished with us yet. Before I thought to ask Homer the most important question, he gave me the answer anyway. He said quietly, ‘It was dated two weeks ago.’
‘You could read the date?’
I didn’t know what they did about dates in their language, those aliens, those monsters, those horrible people who I suddenly hated with so much passion it scrunched me up inside.
‘It was a computer thing, you know, downloaded from one of those websites where you can get maps of your back yard.’
I sat there, continuing to figure. It was like a sudoku. Mrs Barlow, my English teacher, had been saying the other day how when you write a story you should think sudoku. Give the reader a few bits and they’ll figure the rest out, no problem. She used me as an example. ‘If I say “Ellie got on the tractor” then you can figure Ellie’s on a farm, you don’t need to tell the reader that, they can work it out for themselves.’
‘She could be at a field day,’ Sam Young called out.
I put him and Mrs Barlow out of my mind and tried to concentrate on my own sudoku. ‘So you think they’re coming back here,’ I said. ‘They’ve got unfinished business. How come you didn’t tell me this straightaway? They could have come last night. Or the night before. Gavin and I could have been murdered by now.’