The Ellie Chronicles (18 page)

We were on quite a well-defined track. It was fairly open bush, which was not good for us, but had undergrowth a metre high, which wasn’t bad. There was a lot of that thin sticky grass though, the stuff the old people call ‘wait-a-while’, because once you got caught in it you had to wait a while to get free again. That was more bad news. With no particular plan we ran along the track. I was looking for a place where we could either hide or make a stand. Nick was on his own and falling back so fast that after fifty metres he was twenty-five metres behind. So that was hopeless. We had only seconds left. And if we dived off the track looking for a place to hide, we would leave tracks so obvious that we might as well have driven a tractor through.

That’s when I heard a faint buzzing. It was coming from the other side, the opposite direction to the soldiers. For a moment I thought, ‘Sheez, we’re really in trouble now.’ Then I realised it could only be one thing. I called to Nick, ‘Quick, get round this bend.’

It gave him a bit of motivation I guess, to have a target that he could achieve. As we got to the curve I heard the shouts of the soldiers behind us. Hiding was no longer an option. We would have to stand and fight and hope that those buzzing noises were coming in our direction, and that Lee and Gavin were responsible for them. If not, we were all done for. Our lives hung by a line as thin as a single horsehair.

I pushed Nick towards a rock and told him, ‘Stay behind there.’

Homer and I went back a little way towards the bend. He took the right-hand side and I took the left. There were enough rocks for both of us to get some cover, but not much. I cocked one ear for the buzzing noise at the same time as I cocked the rifle. The noise seemed to be going away. I felt sick but I had to block out the fear and do whatever I could do. Whatever I was capable of doing. I lined up one of the first soldiers in my sights but hesitated, trying to get a good target. Again Homer fired first. He missed I think, but it sure had an effect on them. They went to ground. Bodies rolled in all directions and came up firing. I’d been underestimating these guys. They were real soldiers.

I cowered behind the rock. I think they were firing on automatic, because the bullets sprayed everywhere. But it didn’t make any difference: if the air’s full of bullets it’s full of bullets. They flew past me. It was like the twanging of lots of rubber bands, like when we fired letters to each other in class – or when the boys fired pellets. I saw clods of dirt exploding on the track as bullets hit them, chips in the rocks as bullets hit them and whined away. I hoped Nick had his head down.

I got off a few shots but I know I didn’t hit anyone. It was too difficult to take aim when they were keeping up such a barrage. Even worse was that they were advancing under cover of the fire. I listened desperately for the motorbikes. They didn’t seem to be getting closer but the good news was that they didn’t seem to be getting further away. Then suddenly the putt-putt of the engines came clear and undiluted from right behind us. I spun round, full of hope, but prepared to be disappointed. If it wasn’t Lee and Gavin we were dead. But there they were, in the distance, at the next corner. Lee was on the four-wheeler and Gavin on the Yamaha. Lee was on one side of the track and Gavin on the other. Gavin was standing astride the bike, which was really too big for him, and both of them were trying to suss out the situation, poised to turn and take off at a moment’s notice.

It was time for us to beat an orderly retreat, as General Finley would have said, or to get the hell out of there, as I would have said.

‘Ready to go?’ I yelled at Homer.

‘Oh yeah, might as well,’ he answered. ‘Nothing better to do.’

Typical.

We both fired a volley of shots then started wriggling back. When we thought it was safe we got up and ran. There was no danger here from direct shots but there was a danger from ricochets. We had to take that risk. As soon as they realised we were gone they’d be after us like foxes in a chook shed.

At the same time I waved urgently to Lee. He revved up the bike and charged forward. He couldn’t see what was ahead, so he had no idea of what he was getting into. But the only way we could get out of there was to put Nick on the four-wheeler.

We met at Nick’s rock. We were in an elbow of the track, just out of the line of fire, but we wouldn’t be safe for long. Nick picked himself up and Homer helped him out. Lee swung the bike around in a tight little turn that basically only involved the rear wheels. While he was doing that I went out wider, in a low crouch, then lay flat and kept firing down the track, pretty much anywhere, trying to hold them back a bit. Half a dozen times I saw soldiers in the scrub, heading my way, but not so as I could get a shot at them. They kept firing but like me, at random, as they worked towards us, trying for better positions.

Nick, looking pretty damn anxious, got on the bike. It took him three goes. When he was at last sitting behind Lee, Homer and I climbed onto the running boards. Two soldiers appeared, much closer, one on each side of the track. I realised they’d been more organised than I’d thought, those last couple of minutes. They’d been doing one of those military thingies where two of them go a few metres then crouch and call the next two through while they cover them. I yelled at Lee, ‘Get a move on.’ I tried to aim and fire and keep my balance all at the same time, but there was never much hope of that. ‘Zigzag,’ I yelled at Lee, and after that it was all I could do to stay on. Lee was a born zigzagger.

As we took the corner and reached Gavin he was already swinging the Yammy around. He followed us. Around the next bend we did a quick reorganisation. I took the bike off Gavin – although he wasn’t too keen to give it up – and put him on the back of the four-wheeler with Nick and Lee. It was quite a crowd but there was room for them all. I took Homer on the Yamaha and away we went.

IT WAS A long tough ride home. A number of times I made them stop so we could disguise our tracks. I couldn’t afford to have clear motorbike tyre marks leading straight to my place. We did a few different things. Went on some major detours through kilometres of bush that was just scrubby stuff, no good to anyone. Went down a nice wide section of a creek for quite a way and left it again over an area of rocks that wouldn’t show any marks once the tyre tracks had dried out. Mostly though we just got off from time to time and went back and used branches to smooth out the dirt where our marks were too obvious.

It was difficult, because the four-wheeler, with its wide tyres, ploughed up the ground pretty badly. It was also difficult because everyone was so tired. Nick, poor bugger, couldn’t do a thing. I don’t know what he’d been through but it was worse than a birthday party. Lee got progressively more wrecked – this was his second long return trip on the bikes. Homer didn’t have much energy left after the stress of being locked up, thinking he was about to be executed at any moment. Gavin, despite his age, kept going pretty well. But to be honest I had to do most of the work.

The last hour or so we reached new depths of tired-ness. None of us was any good by then. There were moments when the noise from the Yamaha seemed far far away, and more like the rumble of surf than the mumble of a motorbike. At those moments I had to make a huge effort to wake up. I remembered asking my father years ago if you could fall asleep on motorbikes. It seemed an amazing idea to me. It should be impossible, to sleep when you’re sitting on a motorbike that might be going at a hundred k’s an hour, and you’re getting the full blast of air in your face. It was against all the laws of sleep, surely? But my father said, ‘You can fall asleep anywhere,’ and told me a story about how he’d been harvesting day and night and then gone to play cricket for Wirrawee on Saturday and fallen asleep while he was fielding at fine deeper legside, or somewhere like that.

Homer was definitely falling asleep against my back. I gave him the big elbow shove, nearly knocking him off the bike, and said, ‘Come on, wake up, you’re not allowed to go to sleep. You’ve got to keep me awake.’

He retaliated by launching into his full repertoire of the songs that he knew irritated me the most. But there was nothing else for it. If I was going to stay awake I had to join in. There were even occasional bursts from the other bike too.

This is the song that never ends,
It just goes on and on my friends,
Some people started singing it,
Not knowing what it was,
And now they keep on singing it,
Forever just because
This is the song that never ends . . .

A million green bottles,
Sitting on the wall.
And if one green bottle
Should accidentally fall,
There’d be nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine
     hundred and ninety-nine green bottles,
Sitting on the wall.

This was not much good to Gavin. At one stage Lee had to stop and move Gavin to a position between Nick and him, because they were worried he would fall asleep and disappear off the back of the bike. He looked quite comfortable wedged between the two older guys though.

We set off again, with another burst of awful music. The only other song Homer knew required a bit more imagination. You had to make up verses using people’s names.

In the store, in the store:
There was Ellie, Ellie,
getting pretty smelly,
in the Quartermaster’s store.
My eyes are dim, I cannot see,
I have not brought my specs with me,
I have not brought my spectacles with me.

There was Lee, Lee,
he’d gone for a pee,
in the Quartermaster’s store.
My eyes are dim, I cannot see,
I have not brought my specs with me,
I have not brought my spectacles with me.

Oh we were regular karaoke machines that evening. But I’d better not mention what we rhymed Homer with. It wasn’t a true rhyme anyway.

It was really dark by the time we got home. The answering machine was full: mainly with worried messages from Homer’s mum and dad. He was meant to have been home after school and when they couldn’t get any answer at my place they started getting panicky. And there were a couple from Jeremy Finley and from Jess. I was sure one of them was the leader of Liberation and their carefully worded messages didn’t do anything to change my mind.

Homer rang his parents straight away and told them I’d had a cow stuck in the lagoon and it had taken all that time to get her out, which was true enough, just a couple of weeks out of date. Then he rang Jeremy and told him in fairly guarded language what had happened. Nick was keen to get to a phone too, but I persuaded him to have something to eat first. I thought he was going to pass out at any moment and I didn’t want him fainting on the phone. We were all desperately hungry. We sat at the kitchen table hoeing into minestrone that I’d made at the weekend. The only way I’d been able to manage the food side of life was to get in the habit of making a whole lot of stuff at weekends and freezing it. As I took the minestrone out of the microwave I thought ruefully that this weekend’s work hadn’t lasted long. Thanks to Lee’s bad influence, the minestrone was all I’d done.

I asked Nick, ‘Have you been a prisoner since the war ended?’

He did seem a nice guy. He was very tall and serious looking, but why wouldn’t you be serious after what he’d been through?

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just the last seven weeks.’

He didn’t talk much at first but with each spoonful of minestrone he seemed to get strength back. Good advertisement for my soup. I hoped Gavin was paying close attention. He’d never been crazy about my mine-strone. But Gavin looked like he could hardly get the spoon to his mouth. He was a fair bet to fall asleep by the halfway mark.

‘So how’d it happen?’ I asked Nick.

‘I’m a member of Cross-Country.’

‘Oh, OK.’

I could kind of guess the rest, although Nick told me anyway. Cross-Country was an organisation of people who believed that the best hope for the future lay in reconciliation, trying to build bridges between the two countries, trying to understand each other’s cultures, that sort of stuff. They had friends and enemies on both sides of the border. I knew quite a few people who thought they were disloyal, or to put it a bit stronger, traitors. To be honest, I wasn’t too keen on them myself.

Nick’s particular group had gone over there, legally, to give advice on agriculture. Even though the peace settlement meant that ninety per cent of the best country was in enemy hands, they were making a mess of it, because they didn’t know anything about local conditions.

‘I’m an agricultural economist,’ Nick explained, ‘and I was going round the place giving advice on cereal crops. It seemed to go well at first. Then, I don’t know, I felt that they were getting more hostile. There was a different mood. My interpreter disappeared one night, just wasn’t there suddenly, and late the following morning these guys turned up at my hotel and said they were taking me to meet a group of farmers. The atmosphere wasn’t good, I’d have to say, but I didn’t feel I had much choice. Well, as you can imagine, I never got to meet the group of farmers. I got in the car, and no sooner were we out of town than they pulled guns on me and took me to this camp, not the one where you found me. Originally it was down by the river, in quite a nice open area, but then they moved into the bush. We’ve been there ever since.’

‘Why’d they kidnap you anyway?’ Lee asked.

‘They said I’d been preaching Christianity.’

‘And had you?’ I asked.

He looked a bit disconcerted by that. I suppose I did ask it aggressively, but I’ve never been a big fan of the idea that you can go in and superimpose your idea of the true religion on top of other people’s idea of the true religion. After all, your idea of the true religion seems to depend entirely on which family and which country you’re born into.

Robyn was heavily into Christianity but she’d never have done that kind of stuff.

Nick went a bit red and tried to look straight at me.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘If people asked me, I gave out some literature. That was all.’

I wasn’t too sure that I believed him.

‘You want to make those phone calls now?’ I asked him, as Homer came back into the room.

‘Oh yes, thanks very much.’

He was on the phone a long time. It was terrible of me but I couldn’t help thinking ruefully of my telephone bill. Now that I had to pay stuff like that myself, I’d taken a slightly better attitude to wasting money. It still seemed to pour out the door and windows anyway. Even all the fuel we’d used on this raid – the four drums we’d exploded, along with the amount the bikes had used – it was all money, and I didn’t like my chances of Liberation or anyone else offering to reimburse me.

Half an hour later I felt really guilty for thinking that. I was on the way back from putting Gavin to bed and I heard Nick crying on the phone. It made me sympathise a lot more with what he’d been through.

Homer had gone home, borrowing my Yamaha. He was still trying to work out how to explain to his parents the complete loss of his motorbike. Lee was waiting to get to the phone, to check that his brothers and sisters were OK. My energy levels were like my bank statements, in the red. Feeling depressed I went to bed.

I slept for eleven hours. Another missed school bus, another missed school day. I took another hour to get out of bed. I was still so exhausted I could hardly walk in a straight line. I don’t think it was physical tiredness so much as the aftershock of yesterday’s danger and excitement. At least I managed to reach the kitchen OK. I sat waiting for the electric jug to boil, thinking of the cattle and how hungry they’d be, trying to motivate myself to get out and deliver their hay.

A scrunch of gravel outside did wake me up. It was the scrunch of car wheels.

My first reaction was fear. Could this be a reprisal already? Who’d be visiting at this time on a school day? I peeped through the kitchen window, but there was only an old Falcon. A man and a woman were getting out. They were both tall and stringy. I realised then who they were.

I went out, wincing as the cold air hit me. ‘Hi,’ the woman said, holding out her hand and giving me the chance to inspect every tooth in her mouth. ‘You must be Ellie.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Thank you. Thank you. We’re so grateful that you answered God’s call and brought Nick back to us.’

‘So you’re Nick’s parents?’

The man had been busy locking the car but now, as she nodded, he came over too and shook my hand. ‘We owe you a lot,’ he said.

I was deeply embarrassed. This kind of stuff had never happened during the war. In those days it was all survival. There wasn’t time for anything else.

‘Well,’ I said weakly, wondering why he’d locked his car, and still trying to function properly, ‘would you like a coffee? I don’t know whether Nick’s even up yet. We were all pretty flattened when we got back last night.’

But Nick came into the kitchen at a half-run so I guess he’d seen them from his window. I figured this was an absolutely excellent time for me to feed the cattle so I did a quick change and headed out the door.

It was good to get back to the natural rhythms of life. I don’t know what it is about cattle. They’re so different to sheep. The original beasts Dad bought had been in such poor condition and now they were fattening up nicely, putting on some serious kilos.

I’d gotten to know them well. They were a motley crew. There were quite a few escapees among them, two especially. They were both on the small side but they kept pulling off escapes that would have made a World War II prisoner proud. They could have taught Nick a thing or two. It didn’t matter how many times I improved the fences, they kept getting out. Usually leaving their calves on the other side of course, which wasn’t very considerate of them. Sometimes they took one with them. I’d get rid of both cows in the first draft I sold, just as someone had gotten rid of them to us. They were too much trouble.

Then there were the ones with poor forequarters or the ones whose back lines were out, or the ones who rejected their babies or were too aggressive towards Gavin or me. In my mind they all got pink slips. I had to build up some decent bloodlines again, as soon as possible. We used to have a reputation for that. I was a bit embarrassed that these beasts would be sold with our name on them.

Still, for all their faults you always end up feeling affectionate towards them sooner or later. As with any mob there were characters. We’d given nicknames to a lot of them, and some of those were for obvious reasons: Dribbles, Patches, Fatso, Sticky-Beak, Big Tits. Big Tits was Gavin’s choice, needless to say.

Some of them weren’t so obvious. Phar Lap got her name because she could out-gallop the others. If you turned up with hay at a time when they didn’t expect it she was the first one there. Casanova, because even though he was a steer he was always on the back of other steers. Winfield, because he blew great clouds of steam on cold mornings.

OK, they were pretty dumb names, but you’ve got to do something to entertain yourself when you’re out in the paddocks on those same cold mornings.

By the time I got back to the house everyone was up and about. Nick was waiting to say goodbye so I got that over and done with. He said some pretty sickly things, but he couldn’t help that – I’d probably have done the same if I’d been in the hands of guerillas all that time, not knowing whether I was going to live or die.

To tell the truth I was proud of how we’d managed it. I mean, just over twenty-four hours ago I’d been getting ready for another boring week at school. But I was feeling a little inner glow at the fact that I could still do it, that I still had it. Whatever ‘it’ was. I even thought that if the farm failed – and there was every chance it would – I could look at a career in the military. Didn’t know what I’d do about Gavin in that situation.

With Nick and his folks out of the way I could at least sit down in the kitchen, build up the fire, and relax with Lee and Gavin. Lee had negotiated by phone with the people looking after his brothers and sisters, and he was staying another two nights. Gavin was delighted about this. I was happy but wary.