Darkness Be My Friend (29 page)

That was Homer being funny again. He hated football; in fact, he hated nearly all sports, and he often tried to pretend he didn't know anything about them.

"They'd call it committing suicide, I think," I said. "So what happened? You got away OK?"

"No, the next bullet went straight through my heart and I was killed. Chuck us the rest of those Twisties, will you? Thanks. Seeing you've been so generous with them I'll admit I was lying about being killed. No, we just kept running. We took a roundabout route to the racecourse, and got there at the same time as you guys. And then another roundabout route to here. Lucky you're such a bully, Ellie, because we were stuffed. If we'd tried to come the direct way, like we would have if you hadn't driven us along, we might have walked into those soldiers. They were smart. I reckon they'd have been sniffing around a lot longer than some of the idiots we've seen in action in the past. But last night I wasn't thinking of that. I was just cursing you for nipping at our heels all the way here."

Homer said all this while casually tipping Twisties into his mouth but I sat there burning with pleasure. Homer simply didn't pay people compliments. If God appeared in front of us Homer would say, "Listen mate,
you've done a lousy job on my belly button. And what'd you give us toenails for? I mean what's the good of them? They're a bloody nuisance."

So although I didn't give him the slightest clue that I was pleased, I sure was.

"Well," I said casually, "in my last life I guess I must have been a blue heeler."

We stayed there four days. We had only one real moment of fear, and that was when a couple of soldiers came to pack the man's stuff. It was at eight o'clock on our last night, Sunday. Fi was on sentry and the rest of us were up the tree, waiting impatiently for the time when it'd be safe to re-enter the house. Ten o'clock was usually the earliest we went inside.

Fi saw them coming and did what we'd agreed. She ran through to the back door and out of the house. As she crossed the backyard she pulled on a string which we'd hung from the tree house. This was the warning to us. Then she hid in the passionfruit vines that formed a huge mass of leaves and flowers on the back fence.

The men were only there for half an hour. I guess they wouldn't have enjoyed the job. After the sounds from the house had finished, and the lights had gone out, we waited a full three hours, till nearly midnight,
before going to the back door. Then we found they'd locked the house.

We weren't too keen on breaking a window We could've done it without much noise, but anyone visiting the next day would have known something was wrong. We looked at each other, trying to decide our next move.

"It's time we were out of here, anyway," Homer said. "It should be safe enough by now. There's no real point in even going inside. We ate nearly all his food and these guys probably took the rest. I vote we go back to Hell, call up Colonel Finley, and get ourselves a ticket to New Zealand, business class."

We agreed quickly, and with relief. We were all ready to go. We felt there was nothing we could achieve in Wirrawee for the time being. Maybe Colonel Finley would suggest something when we reported to him again, but the airfield seemed beyond anything we could manage, and the fate of the Kiwi soldiers was a complete mystery. I couldn't speak for the others but for myself I had such a longing to get to safe New Zealand that I thought I might faint when Homer mentioned the word. I'd changed my views again since we'd first come back.

And so we started on that familiar journey. Again we became shadows in the night, dark dingoes slinking home to our lair. We didn't flinch when we heard the strange cackling noise that foxes make when they feed together, nor when we heard the
oooooom
of the tawny frogmouths or the clatter of bark falling from a gum or the sharp ripping and crack of a branch suddenly
breaking. We slipped silently through the dry scrub when we could and at other times moved quickly and quietly across the bare paddocks. Cattle followed us curiously, sheep baaed and bolted when we startled them with our approach.

Occasionally a bird, as startled as the sheep, would fly away with a wild shocked whirr of wings. We ignored them all and hurried on.

The sun was well up and the land and air getting rapidly hotter when we climbed to the top of Tailor's Stitch. As was usual for us nowadays we had made a big detour around my own house. I didn't know who lived there now and I didn't want to know I felt more comfortable in Hell than around home.

We did the same as we bad such a short time ago with the Kiwis: waited off the side of Tailor's Stitch until dark. Another of those delays that at times I thought would make me scream with boredom, but which at other times I spent quite happily, talking or thinking or daydreaming.

This day passed at the pace of a day on a tractor, when you know at the end of it you'll still have three paddocks to go and each one will feel the same as the one you're in.

I think it seemed all the longer because for once there was something to look forward to. If we could contact Colonel Finley from the top of Wombegonoo that night, we could maybe be out of there within three or four days. It was nearly a week —five days to be exact—since we were meant to have called him, so I figured he'd be keen to hear from us. And although we had no good news for him it would be a relief to hear
his voice. It would make me feel I was back in New Zealand already. I longed for the moment when we could make the call, and hungrily counted the hours, the minutes, before we switched on the little transmitter.

At nine o'clock we eagerly trekked to the highest point of Wombegonoo, to the spot where we could be sure of getting the best conditions for our broadcast.

I wouldn't say I'd ever trusted Colonel Finley. I quite liked him in some ways. He was so English, like an actor out of those old black-and-white British movies. He had a moustache, smoked a pipe, and worked in a study with tonnes of books in oak bookcases and nice pictures of things like horses and farmlands and oceans.

Maybe it was all a bit too good to be true, a bit too much like an English gentleman in a film.

I don't know. Fi and I argue about this. She says I'm too hard on him. She may be right. I still feel he's doublecrossed us though. Sure, I know times are hard, there's a war on, the New Zealanders can't afford to waste their resources, but I do think he should have sent the helicopter. I feel we've done enough to be given a bit of consideration. OK, maybe not on this trip, where we failed at just about everything. But we did quite a bit in the past, especially at Cobbler's Bay.

They might come for us yet, of course. He didn't say they were dumping us here forever. He's not that
ruthless. It was just the shock, I suppose. Or the disappointment. Being so keyed up to make our escape. Being so happy at the thought that we could be sale again, live normally again, eat and sleep and talk openly to people. Hot food and hot showers and clean sheets. That was all I wanted, all I looked forward to. It doesn't seem much to hope for, does it? Not much compared to what we once had, and what we took for granted.

So I can't make up my mind about the Colonel. Is he a good man, trying to make the best of a bad situation? Allocating his resources without fear or favour? Sticking to his principle of "cost-effectiveness," no matter what? Or is he a cynical cold-blooded cold-hearted mongrel who used us and then dumped us?

Maybe time will give me the answers to those questions and maybe it won't.

I guess our fate is up to us now. And we've been there before, of course. There's something quite comforting about it in a strange way. We've learnt a few things. We know We've got a few things going for us. A bit of imagination, a bit of guts sometimes, a bit of spark. I remember our old dog, Millie, getting run over by a tractor then struggling up again and trying to keep mustering. That's us, I reckon. Some of the things that have happened to us were like being run over by a convoy of tanks.

But we're still here, we're still alive, we're not giving up yet.

It's like Homer said this morning when I was talking to him about our next call to Colonel Finley, on Tuesday, "Well, tell him, stuff him, we'll do it on our own."

From the first day of the invasion I knew that if we were going to live with ourselves on the terms that we wanted, we'd have to pay a price. Like the man in the poem. And we've paid a price every day since. It's expensive. The man in the poem found that out. But I don't want to live cheap, or live for nothing. I never have wanted that and I've never liked it. That's one lesson my parents taught me. That's why I don't like what I did with the boy in New Zealand. That's why I do like my friendship with Fi and Lee and Homer and Kevin. It's why I love and respect the memory of Corrie and Robyn. It's why I feel sad that Chris never learned that lesson.

When I think about it, I realise it was the same before the war. I was never so aware of it then though. Pity I needed a war to learn it properly. Believe me, I'd do a few things differently if we had those days back again. Even in peacetime it's expensive to be the kind of person you want, to live the kind of life you know is right.

Well, I've learnt this much: it doesn't matter what it costs, it's worth paying the price. You can't live cheap and you can't live for nothing. Pay the price and be proud you've paid it, that's what I reckon.

Page 228, "The Refined Man," by Rudyard Kipling, from A
Choice of Kipling's Verse,
TS. Eliot ed., Faber and Faber, London, 1963.

Pages 2 and 227, "Here Dead We Lie," by A.E. Housman, from
Up the Line to Death,
Brian Gardner ed., Methuen and Co., London, 1976.

Page 100, "Smoke curls up around the old gum tree trunk," Australian traditional.

Page 45, "The Man from Snowy River," by Banjo Paterson.