Darkness Be My Friend (2 page)

It was so embarrassing. The driver started looking at
us like, "What the hell is wrong with these people?" and finally Corporal Ahauru, who was in charge of us back then, took her aside and had a long conversation with her and I knew exactly what she was saying, exactly, down to the commas and full stops. It'd be, "They're the ones who've been in the news, those teenagers who did the attack on Cobbler's Bay, in Aussie, and they've all got major emotional problems, poor things, and I think right now they're seeing this little bit too threatening, a bit more than they can cope with."

Corporal Ahauru is a nurse, did I mention that before?

So we didn't go on the jetboats and the driver probably still thinks of us as cowards and frauds and at that stage not even Colonel Finley would have sent us back into a war zone.

Somewhere along the line, though, we must have got marginally better. I'm not sure how or when it happened, but I suppose after a while there were one or two good days and then, after a bit longer, nearly as many good days as bad ones. I can't speak for the others but for me it never got to be more than three good days in a row, and that only happened once. We made a few friends, and that helped, although I admit I was insanely jealous when the others started mixing with new people. It was all right for me but not for them. I wanted them—Homer and Lee and Kevin and Fi—I wanted them all for myself.

Next thing, someone got the intelligent idea that we'd go to schools and give talks to help raise money for the war effort. We tried three times, then unanimously canned it. It was a disaster: well, three disasters.
I'm going red even now, thinking about it. We were over-confident, that was one problem. We thought it'd be a snack. That was the way we were for quite a while, going from wild over-confidence to total terror, like with the jetboats.

The first talk was at a primary school and it was a Friday afternoon and the kids were rioting even before we got there. They were in the gym, waiting for us. There'd been some mix-up about the time, so we were twenty minutes late. We could hear them yelling as we came in the gate. We thought it must still be lunchtime, judging from the noise. OK, if we'd given brilliant speeches maybe we could have turned it around, but we didn't give brilliant speeches. Lee was so soft no one heard him. Homer had more "urns" than words, Fi spoke for thirty seconds, looking like she was about to start crying the whole time, and Kevin tried to make a joke, which failed dismally and all the kids made sarcastic noises—like fake laughter and stuff—and Kevin lost his temper and told them to shut up. That was extremely embarrassing.

I'm not going to say what happened with my speech.

The second time was a bit better, because at least we prepared for it, and also it was a secondary school, but now we were too nervous to make it work properly. Lee was the best because this time he had a microphone. Homer's sentences went: "And we, urn, we ah, we walked, urn, to this, like, urn, er, silo, I think that's where we went then, is that right, Ellie, or was that before we got Kevin back?"

The third time Kevin refused to do it at all, and Lee knocked over a jug of water when he stood up to speak.
Fi gave a great speech, but the rest of us hadn't improved much.

That's when we dumped it.

But I did meet Adam at the last school, Mt. Burns High School in Wellington, just off Adelaide Road. We were in the Year 12 (Sixth Form they call it) common room after the talks and this guy handed me the Mallowpuffs and started chatting me up. He was a prefect and he was wearing a school blazer that had so many badges I'm surprised he could stand up straight. Seems like he was the local hero. Swimming, rugby, debating, he'd done it all. Lots of boys in New Zealand wear shorts to school. They have a Seventh Form too and even some of the Seventh Formers wear shorts. It looks kind of silly, because they seem too old for it, but it gives you a good chance to perv on their legs. And Adam did have swimmer's legs. Someone told me later that he could swim a fifty-metre pool in sixty-five seconds without using his arms. I was impressed.'

He used his arms on me, though. He invited me to a party that same night, and I went. It was a big mistake. It was so long since I'd been to a party that I'd forgotten how to act. I hadn't bothered to eat before I went, because I figured they'd have food there. And there was food all right: a packet of chips, a bowl of jellybeans and half-a-dozen over-ripe bananas. That's the kind of party it was. Then, to make matters worse, I had three BLS's in the first half-hour. Another big mistake. By eleven o'clock, after a few more BLS's, and more than a few slurps from Adam's beer glass, I was gone. I'd had it.

And he changed really suddenly. One minute we were just joking around like old buddies, the next he had his
tongue in my mouth and was walking me backwards down the corridor to the bedrooms. I was trying to say, "Hey, what happened to beautiful old-fashioned romance? What happened to foreplay even?" but it's hard to talk with a tongue in your mouth. Sure I was kissing him back at first, but it wasn't working at all for me, I was just doing it, I don't know, because I was expected to, I suppose, he expected me to. Sort of automatically. I've never been less turned on in my life.

When we got in the bedroom he fell backwards on the bed, taking me with him. It wasn't very graceful. I felt dizzy and sick. He was tonguing my ear and all I could think was, "God, when was the last time I cleaned the wax out?" but I felt too sick and drunk to stop him, to even try to stop him. Next thing he's undoing my zip. I'm not saying I was too drunk to do anything about it, it wasn't like that, I mean that'd be rape', no, it was just that I couldn't be bothered. Oh, I tried for a minute, tried to pull my jeans back up, but in the end I thought, "Who cares,'what does it matter, just get it over with and then I can go home."

I don't understand what guys get out of sex like that; not very much, I would have thought, but they obviously get something out of it or they wouldn't do it. The only good thing I can say about him was that at least he used a condom. But only because he thought he might catch something from me. I'm sure it wasn't because he wanted to protect me.

All I got out of it was a terrible feeling that I was a disgusting human being. It was so against everything I stood for, everything I believed in. The next day I felt awful. I had a terrible headache anyway, and my stomach felt like it was still doing slow spins, but worse, far worse, was the way I felt such a slut. I felt sick at myself. I couldn't talk to the others about it, couldn't talk to anyone, except about three o'clock I got the bright idea of calling Andrea, the psychologist.

She was good, like always. It took me about an hour to get it out but in the end I told her everything. I started crying as I got to the end of the story, and then I couldn't stop. I felt so ashamed. Not of crying, but of being so cheap. I was bawling into this mustard-coloured cushion in Andrea's biggest armchair and using her tissues like they were five cents a box. And they're not, of course—everything in New Zealand's so expensive. Five cents a tissue'd be more like it.

Andrea didn't say anything for ages. She's the only person I've ever met who lets you have time to think about what you want to say. She never puts pressure on you in that way. She just sits there and watches and waits.

But finally I was sitting up a bit and hiccupping and blowing my nose. She explained how I was still reacting to Robyn's death, using different things as anaesthetics, and that was all really. She had another appointment to go to, so the next thing she'd left. I did actually feel a bit better—it surprised me, but it's true. I'd never thought of any connection between Robyn's death and the way I'd acted.

But I was angry at Adam. I thought, "If I ever see him again he'll get more than wax in his mouth."

I didn't want to write about it here, and I wouldn't have, except I think maybe it's one of the reasons I ended up not putting up so much of a fight about going
back. I just felt awful about how I'd behaved and how I'd let myself down and everything.

Maybe I thought going back would be a way of making up for that.

I was desperate for some self-respect.

It was only a day later that the bushfire started burning stronger. There'd been the rumour about using refugees as guerillas, then the next thing, the five of us were called up for medicals.

We got the full treatment, not just a physical but a mental as well. About three thousand questions, from "What did you eat for breakfast?" to "Do you still want to be a farmer when the war is over?" from "What's your favourite TV show?" to "Which is more important, honesty or loyalty?"

We got weighed, measured, pinched and probed, inspected and injected. My bad knee and my bad vertebrae. My eyesight and hearing and reflexes and blood pressure.

At lunch, munching on Saladas and cheese, breathing on the celery to warm it because it had just come out of the fridge, I said to Homer: "What do you think that was all about?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "It's like they're checking
us out. Seeing if we're in good shape again. Maybe the holiday'll be over soon."

That's the first time I took it a bit more seriously. But only for a minute or two. I'd almost forgotten that rumour, and Lee's comment about the shopping list. I said to Homer, "We're still a bunch of wrecks. They won't want us to do anything for ages vet."

I believed that too. Secretly I thought they'd never ask us to do anything again.

What was next? Another interview with Colonel Finley, I think. That was quite unusual. He was a busy man. But at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon he rang Homer and asked if we could come for a meeting.

You don't say no to Colonel Finley so we cancelled our plans for a wild Saturday night—in other words we turned off the TV—and went to see him. It was quite some meeting. There were six officers, two Australian and four from New Zealand. They weren't even introduced to us, which seemed a bit rude. Everyone was too busy, I suppose. But one of them had so much gold braid on his uniform that he could have melted it down, sold it, and retired on the proceeds.

It was amazing we all fitted into Colonel Finley's little office, with its nice old-fashioned pictures on the walls and the clouds of blue pipe smoke. Maybe it was bigger than it looked. It must have been, because it always looked tiny. Somehow we all found chairs. I perched on the edge of Fi's. We sat there for half an hour getting grilled about a whole lot of stuff. They had maps of the Wirrawee district and Cobbler's Bay and Stratton, but they wanted all kinds of other information, down to
details like the size of the trees in Barker Street and the condition of the four-wheel-drive track going into Baloney Creek.

The questions came thick and fast and everything should have gone fine, but somehow it didn't. We know most of that country pretty well, or we thought we did, but the officers wouldn't have been too impressed. The five of us managed to disagree on every second answer. Homer and I managed to disagree on every answer.

"There's a service station on the corner of Maldon Street and West Street."

"Maldon and West? No, there isn't!"

"Well, what is there then?"

"I can't remember, but it's definitely not a service station. Which service station do you reckons there?"

"You know, that old one, Bob Burchett or whatever his name is."

"Bob Burchett? That's on the corner of Maldon and Honey, and it's Bill Burchett, not Bob."

"Kevin, I'm right, aren't I? It's Maldon and West."

It was like that most of the time and when we got back to our quarters Homer wouldn't even speak to me.

Sunday a guy dropped in after lunch for no reason that any of us could quite work out. His name was Iain Pearce, he was in his mid-twenties, he was obviously something military—you could tell by the way he walked—but he was wearing jeans and a grey Nike T-shirt, and he just sat there chatting away like a new neighbour who'd come in for a cup of coffee. He had one of those honest uncomplicated faces, steady eyes, and a very straight black moustache. Kevin liked him at first sight, so for a while they did most of the talking.
And most of it was guy talk: rugby and cars and computers. It wasn't too interesting but I didn't have the energy to move, so I sat there half-listening, trying not to yawn. Fi was even ruder: she was reading a magazine called
Contact,
a newsletter for refugees like us who'd escaped to New Zealand. So she ignored them completely. Lee joined in a bit, but not Homer. Homer was still sulking, so when he talked it was in mumbles and grunts.

Gradually, though, Iain turned on the charm. I think he must have done a PR course or something, because after he'd talked to Kevin for a while he went to work on the rest of us. I quite enjoyed watching him do it. First he asked Fi about the music she liked and, because Fi loves music, she couldn't resist that. Then he found out that Fi and Lee and I had gone to a new New Zealand movie called
The Crossing,
which he hadn't seen but he knew the guy who did the special effects—maybe I should have worked out from that what kind of work Iain was in—so we told him a bit about the film. And somehow a few minutes later the subject was pig farming and Homer, who's always been mad about pigs, was talking nonstop about how he wanted to build up a herd of Poland Chinas, a breed I'd never heard of.

An hour later Iain had gone and we still didn't have a clue why he'd come in the first place.

The fire was raging now, only we didn't know it.

We knew it the next day, though. Oh boy, did we know it. The Monday. Black Monday. Fi and I had been for a run at about three in the afternoon. We went through the pine trees and along an old track to a hill that I always liked. There wasn't anything much up
there, nothing spectacular, but it was a nice round smooth soft hill where the grass was always wet and green, and the fences were exactly the same as a couple of our older ones at home: dry stone walls with a single strand of barbed wire on top.

It's a hard run up there but easy coming back, except that Fi always cheats, cutting off the corners at every bend. I make it tough for myself by sticking to the track. I can still beat Fi, even when she cheats, but she doesn't really try; she mainly comes to keep me company.