Darkness Be My Friend (16 page)

I suppose it was also the smell, although I didn't realise that at the time. Everyone does have their own smell. They say blind people can recognise who's been in a room by the smell they leave behind. I know I could recognise when my father had been in the bathroom by the smell he left behind. Talk about toxic. If we'd bottled that and released it as nerve gas we'd have won this war in the first week.

Of course, with my infallible judgement I'd found the only room in the school that wasn't silent. It didn't help when I was so desperate to get some sleep. It was the sick bay, where they had two beds. I had one and Kevin
the other. But there must have been a slight gap between the window and its frame, and the wind whistled and howled through the hole with a note that changed all the time. It was the eeriest noise. It sounded like wild lost creatures crying in the night, their haunting voices begging for someone to save them. Except it was like they were already dead, and they were crying from the grave. Then it would stop for a minute and I'd think, "Oh good, at last I can get some sleep," and sure enough at that moment it'd start up again. Things weren't helped, either, by the fact that the black smoke from the fire was drifting past and, although there seemed to be less of it now, it did make the whole place feel and sound like a scene out of Hell.

So I didn't get much sleep. But I guess the real reason for that was my fear. It felt so dangerous to be here in Wirrawee in broad daylight, trying to sleep. Sure I could give myself a hundred rational reasons why we'd be OK. No one had been here for ages, they'd all be busy fighting the fire, they'd think we would have gone bush...

OK, three rational reasons why we'd be OK. They were good reasons, too. But they weren't enough. I was still all tensed up, staring through the window at the hot black smoke.

I began to realise that there was one more reason I couldn't sleep. The ride with the horses through the bush, running down those soldiers, coming so close to death myself: it had only happened twelve hours before. It was like everything else in this war: there was no time to react, no chance to think about stuff, to find meaning to it, or put it in a picture that made sense.

If you don't know what something means you're in trouble.

Of course I knew what last night meant in one way: I knew I'd done those things because I wanted to stay alive. No prizes for getting that right. But I wanted an answer that told me something more. If I was going to say that my life mattered above someone else's, that it was OK for someone else to die so I could survive, I had to know that was OK. Sure it's human nature to preserve your own life at all costs. Not just human nature either. Nature full stop. I've seen what a trapped kangaroo does to dogs that get too close. But if God gave me a mind and a conscience, and an imagination that can put me inside the head of someone else, then he must want me to use those things. Not just do stuff with no thought about what it meant. I'm not a kangaroo.

So I thought—and I still think—about whether it was OK.

Another thing God gave me was a sense of responsibility. I wish he hadn't, sometimes. Thanks for nothing, God. Because having got it means I'm stuck with it, and when I do something powerful, that I think might be wrong, I can't just shrug it off. I knew that I'd killed another person, maybe more than one; it's something I did, it was mine and I owned it.

So I had to cop it. Those soldiers had died last night. And the horse. I'd again made the decision that my life was worth more than theirs. And I didn't even know these people. They were strangers to me.

Was there some plan to all this? Did I deserve to live, and did those strangers deserve to die? Was this a test I had to pass? Was I going to go on and find a cure for
cancer or something? Suppose one of the soldiers was going to leave the army in ten years and find a cure for cancer, but now it would never happen because I'd killed him?

That's what I was trying to say about finding a meaning to the madness happening around me.

And instead of a meaning, all I got was the weird scream of the wind, and the choking smoke and the heat of a fire I'd started myself.

By late afternoon the fire at last seemed under control. There were ashes as far as the eye could see and the playground was sprinkled with black, like castor sugar on a sponge cake, only the wrong colour.

The smell of burning, that unmistakable charred smell, filtered into every corner, every nook and cranny. It clung to our clothes and gradually blocked out everything else: the musty smell of the school, the sweaty smell of Homer and Kevin and even Fi and me, and the sickly smell of the dead possum that had fallen through the ceiling tiles in Room A23.

As dark slowly surrounded the school we started to feel a little safer. We thought it was unlikely they'd come looking for us at night. They'd have too many problems of their own, with the damage from the fire. And you can't do much of a search in darkness anyway. They might even be scared of us, too. After all, we'd shown ourselves to be pretty desperate. I got scared of myself often enough these days, so I wouldn't blame them for being scared of me. No, I didn't think they'd come looking for us after dark.

I did my turn at sentry then went to talk to Fi. She was hard to find. It felt strange to be walking the long
empty school corridors. Of course, I'd never seen it like this before, but then I guess not many people had. We were in A wing. My footsteps echoed through the building. I went past the office, the Graphics room, the dunnies, the computer room, then on past the regular classrooms. The whole world could have gone missing and I wouldn't have known. That's how empty it was. It was maybe the most alone I've ever been, because this was a building made for hundreds of students and teachers, and so it felt even more alone than the Hermit's hut.

Right down the very end I found Fi. Or rather, she found me. She was in A22. She called out as I came to the end of the corridor, otherwise I would never have known she was there. I think she was actually really depressed, the way I was close to being myself, but this time we didn't depress each other like you'd expect.

"This was my favourite room," she said.

"Why?"

It didn't look too interesting. Because the invasion had come during the school holidays the rooms were even more boring than usual. No essays or pictures on the walls, no writing on the whiteboards, no books lying around. There was an emergency evacuation plan on the bulletin board, next to the light switch, and opposite that a poster of an Emily Dickinson poem. But the poster was ripped in one corner, and someone had scribbled across the bottom with a texta. From the overhead fan a pathetic bit of pink Christmas streamer still dangled. When they celebrated Christmas in here less than a year ago, little did they know how everything was about to change.

"It was my English room," Fi explained.

"Who'd you have for English?"

"Mr. Rudd."

"Oh yeah, I never had him."

"He was so good! I hope he's OK now."

"I wish I'd had him for something. Everyone was always raving about his lessons. He was American, wasn't he?"

"No, Irish."

Fi, who had been lying on the floor, suddenly came to life. She jumped up and launched into an impersonation of Mr. Rudd.

"Fiona, I'm sorry we had to start without you. It occurs to me that you're always late for my classes, and I'm wondering if we can make English a little more attractive for you. Would you like to sit yourself over here? This is our corporate box. Can I take your coat? Can I get you a drink? Would you like a more comfortable chair? Here, have mine. No no, really, please don't distress yourself, it's no trouble at all."

Fi was always hopeless at doing impersonations but I laughed anyway.

"He sounds sarcastic," I complained.

"Mm, not really. I mean, I suppose he could be, but it was never nasty like it is with some teachers."

"I did have Social Studies in tins room in Year 8," I said. "With Mrs. Barlow. It wasn't bad. We had that Japanese Day, where we all cooked Japanese food and did origami and stuff. That was good."

"Oh yes, I remember. And on Bastille Day we cooked French food. Mrs. Barlow was good like that. Baa-baa we called her. It was such a stupid nickname."

"Remember when we had that class barbeque in Year 9, I think it was? And the boys served the sausages all raw? I nearly turned vegetarian on the spot. And there was that food fight."

"I remember that. My mother complained to the school. I had grease and tomato sauce all over my uniform. Mr. Muir got in trouble because he couldn't control us properly."

"He was hopeless, wasn't he? Were you in that class where he started crying?"

"No, but I heard about it."

"It was terrible. I didn't know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. It was Homer's fault too, you know. He gave him such a hard time. He never let up. All those jokes about his weight. He called him 'two-tonne' to his face a couple of times, then pretended he was talking to Davo. The day he started crying, Homer had asked him, 'Mr. Muir, do you eat to live or do you live to eat?'"

Fi looked upset. She was so gentle and nice that she couldn't bear to hear about even a teacher being given a hard time. I wished I had some of her sweetness. Half would have been enough.

It was dark in the room now but we kept talking, remembering the good and bad times that we'd had in this building, in this school.

"Do you realise we've spent more than two-thirds of our lives at school?" I said to Fi.

"Have we? Gosh. Well I would have spent two-thirds of that time wishing I was somewhere else. And now I'd give anything to be back here, playing Theatre Sports in English."

"Did you play Theatre Sports? No wonder you liked it. We never did anything that much fun. Just boring old spelling tests and language. The only good stuff was when we had to give talks. And Bryony told us about her sister thinking sheep droppings were sultanas and how she'd tried to eat them. And one day we had to bring in our favourite pictures and talk about why we liked them. And it was amazing because Homer brought in this painting of waterlilies and he talked about how when he felt stressed he'd go and sit in front of this painting and stare at it for half an hour and it calmed him down. Everyone was in total shock. It was the only time I saw Homer take a break from the tough-guy role at school. No one else brought in a painting at all; they just had photos of their footy teams and stuff."

"That's what I thought you meant when you said 'favourite pictures,'" Fi said.

"Mmm, I just brought in a boring old photo of me showing Mirrimbah Buckley Park."

"What's Mirrimbah Buckley Park?" Fi asked.

"In the old days we had a merino stud," I explained. "My grandparents started it and Dad took it over. But in the end Dad thought it was too much. It was so much work and the competition was unbelievable. People were doing the most amazing things to get publicity. Putting on big sales and flying clients in for them. Dad couldn't be bothered with that scene. We couldn't afford it, anyway. Plus Dad wanted to diversify more. He sold the stud to the Lucases. But while we still had it I used to show the sheep sometimes, and Mirrimbah Buckley Park was our best ram ever. He got first at the Stratton Merino Show, Open Rams, and third at the
National Merino titles. We got a fortune for him. Grandma was so mad at Dad for selling him but Dad had already decided to sell the stud, only he hadn't told Grandma. When he did tell her it was like global warming. Grandma wouldn't talk to Dad for months. I could see her point. They worked so hard to develop the stud and then Dad takes over and breaks it up.

"The funny thing is that we've still had to get into the publicity circus with the Charolais, so you never win."

I realised Fi wasn't listening. She was staring out the window.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I saw something move out there," she said.

We hit the floor at the same time. I lay with my face in the dust of the carpet. My heart was thumping so strongly it almost lifted me off the ground. I didn't spend long thinking about that, though. Fi was already wriggling across the room towards the door, and I followed. We got out into the corridor, then, bent double so we'd be below the windows, we ran swiftly and silently back towards the sick bay. I knew Homer was on sentry and I thought Kevin would be on one of the beds, having a snooze.

I had time to feel annoyed at Homer. I thought he should have seen whoever was out there. The arrangement we'd made for the sentry was that he or she would
stay in the reception area where you could get a good view of three sides of the school grounds. But you had to keep peeping out around the partition to see the fourth side. I couldn't help wondering if Homer had been a bit slack on the job.

It turned out I'd underestimated him. As we ran up the corridor we met the two boys coming to find us, bent as low as we were.

"What did you see?" Homer whispered urgently, as we met.

"Just one person, I think," Fi said. "I'm not even sure it was a person."

"I only saw one," Homer said. "But it was a person all right. Sneaking around the canteen."

We were crouched on the floor of the corridor. You could feel the fear in all of us. Because we were in a group, a circle, the fear seemed to concentrate in the middle of the group. It was like a solid thing that you could reach out and touch.

"We'd better go down the other end," Kevin said. "See if anyone's there."

"But even if there is," Homer said, "wc can't get out without making a noise. We boarded that window up, remember, and they've all got security locks on them."

Suddenly I realised what a trap we'd made for ourselves. I prickled all over.

"Let's go up there anyway," I whispered. "If we think no one's around that end we might just have to knock a window out and make a run for it."

I felt it was better for us to be doing something than crouching there in terror.

Still bent over, we hurried to the other end of the
building. It was completely dark outside now. That was our only advantage. But if they had the place surrounded, it wasn't much of an advantage.