The Ellie Chronicles (41 page)

Still lodged into the crack, I considered the possibilities. I have to say there weren’t many. I was so close to Gavin that if I stretched out my arm and he stretched out his I reckon there wouldn’t have been a metre between us. But so what? The little mound he was caught on looked about half the size it had been when I started. Maybe that was the erosion caused by his weight, or maybe I’d had a false impression of it from the top, but I knew one thing – it couldn’t support both of us. It wasn’t going to support him much longer. The thin shower of soil continued steadily, sometimes just a few sandy particles, sometimes a serious trickle. It was like putting a plastic liner in a new dam and having a kangaroo puncture it with its feet when it wandered in for a drink. Only a few little holes, but that was a dam which would never hold water. Drip drip drip.

Gavin continued to be . . . to be what? I didn’t know. In shock? Waiting bravely and calmly? Had he broken his back and was lying there wondering about the best model wheelchair for kids living on farms? Probably not. He was conscious and he seemed to see me, but as far as I could tell, he was making no movement. That was good, as long as he wasn’t completely paralysed by his fear. His eyes were still fixed on me, though, and still following me, and I had the feeling that he hadn’t taken them off me the whole time I’d been inching towards him.

I was fairly certain that if I got close enough it’d be just like those stories about people drowning. He’d reach out and grab me and not let go and like the mad drowning people who pull their rescuers under he’d pull me off the cliff and we’d fall together, fall forever, and hit the rocks below still locked onto each other.

Without any plan or a sane idea of what to do I spied out a route along the face that would take me below him. I didn’t want to come in above him because if I fell I’d take him too and in the last few seconds of my life I didn’t want that on my conscience. And I didn’t want to come in beside him, for the reason I just said.

I did talk to him, meaningless babble like the songs you sing when you’re guarding a mob of cattle at night, and of course he didn’t hear any of it. But I thought it might calm him a little when he realised I was chatting away like I was on the school bus and sitting next to Homer and in a good mood. ‘Nice day for it . . . if by some miracle we survive this let’s not do it again, OK . . . just stay right there my little thrill-seeking friend, don’t be going anywhere now . . .’

My brief rest was over. I had a bit of strength back in my arms and legs, which had been the general idea of clinging there for those few moments, but my overall condition was weakening. In other words I was getting too tired. So I did a bit of manoeuvring and, with shaking legs, started going straight down the crack. It struck me suddenly that if and when we fell we would drop into Hell, the northern end of it where I’d never been, and how strange was that, to die in the place called Hell that had saved us so many times, that had been our refuge, but now in a final good joke was turning on us to claim the doomed souls that had never understood it properly. Clever Hell, such a smart trick to give comfort and help and then betray us. Much better than just killing us in the first place. How boring for the king of hell would that have been?

Trying to make like a spider, I inched across. I came in under Gavin like I’d wanted. That was good I suppose, except that it meant I’d committed myself to a plan that I really did have in my brain, in my subconscious anyway, but which seemed so stupid and impossible that I couldn’t take it out and look at it, not even for a moment. But there was nothing else to do. Gavin shifted his head slightly and looked down at me. It was the first real movement I’d seen him make since I started. I was pretty sure that his stillness was more than caution: he was frozen by the knowledge that soon he would drop to an awful death.

I braced myself. I had a toe that felt fairly secure, on the bottom curve of a biggish boulder. Nothing else felt secure. My other toe was trying to worm into hard-packed dirt and my fingers were basically on sheer rock. But I would need those anyway, need my arms, so it didn’t matter much. I spoke to Gavin calmly, knowing again that he couldn’t hear but knowing there was a good chance that he would lip-read me.

‘OK, Gav, just wriggle down here to me. I want you on my back.’

THERE, I’D SAID it. Said the mad thing. Even the words brought me out in a sweat from every microscopic pore in my skin. You know how you squeeze a sponge and a drop of water appears at every point? Simultaneously? That’s what happened to my body. It didn’t worry me except that I knew my hands were suddenly slippery again, which wasn’t good.

Technique. Concentrate on technique. Your balance, your angle to the cliff, the left toe that’s trying to make a hole for itself. Try not to think about Gavin who actually twitched like he understood. At least half of you devoutly hopes he didn’t understand. That way you could get out of this crazy offer.

He still hadn’t moved but there was a different tension in him now. I kept drilling that left toe in. Then I looked up at Gavin again. I stared at him so hard I’m surprised I didn’t bore holes in his face. But I had to know if he understood. And I thought he did. I said to him again, a little impatiently, ‘Come on, get on my shoulders.’

I was scared that he would be too paralysed to do anything. If anything, it was the opposite. He made a sudden movement, as though he thought that all his problems were solved and all he had to do was step down to where I was and do the piggyback thing.

Immediately half the mound of dirt that supported him fell apart and soil showered over me. A bit got in my throat but I tried not to cough. A cough, a spasm, a hiccup, or worst of all a sneeze, any of those would be enough. Action and reaction.

With the mini-avalanche Gavin suddenly had no choice about whether to join me. He was about to fall. The big danger was that he would be so unable to move that he would leave everything to gravity. If he did, then we were both gone. He would knock me from my precarious spot and we would fall to the rocks. I felt my eyes dragging downwards, to look at those rocks, and it took all the strength I had to force them in the opposite direction. I wanted to see death but I mustn’t let myself.

Gavin hovered over me but at the last moment some kind of desperate instinct cut in, and he did move voluntarily, well, a little bit at least. He swung a leg down to near my head, and then, as he started to slip, tried to get some control over the rest of his body. He scrabbled for handholds and footholds, with no real success, but the scrabbling for them meant that he stuck to the face of the cliff for a few seconds, instead of plummeting like a rock.

Those few seconds were just enough for him to reach me. I braced as I felt his swinging left foot touch my hair, then kick the side of my head on the way back.

A terrible silent wrestle followed. He continued to slide down, but now he used my body for his handholds and footholds. Although this was what I wanted, the struggle and the strain and the tension were almost impossible. I had known that he would wreck my balance, changing my centre of gravity, but I hadn’t realised how severe it would be. He was so heavy! And he did cling to me like a drowning person.

For half a minute I fought with him, with the cliff, with death itself. But the main fight was with me, to find new strength, deeper strength, the physical strength to stay upright and to fuse my fingers and toes with the dirt and rock, and the mental strength to keep energy flowing to my body.

Within a second or two I realised that I couldn’t fight Gavin, but that I couldn’t help him either. I had to think of myself as made of wood or stone, a tree or old rock. I had to leave it to him to scramble all over me, dig into me, hang on to me. If he couldn’t, that was his concern. If he failed, he fell. There was nothing I could do about that. I just had to concentrate on being solid, being strong.

We teetered outwards. There was a dreadful second when I lost three of my four points of contact with the cliff and we were about to drop. It was no use shouting at Gavin, but I shouted at him anyway, and I think he actually felt the vibration of air around him, because he did calm down a little and get a better grip on me. He was still half strangling me, but as I recovered my balance, all I could do was wait and hope that he would work out how impossible the position was.

More seconds passed before he began to slowly, agonisingly, adjust himself. He needed to get a move on, because I couldn’t hang on much longer. I simply didn’t have the strength to stay there forever. No-one would. But he got his right arm from across my throat, which gave me a bodyful of fresh pure air again, and he got both legs around me, so that he was in a reasonable piggyback position, except for his left arm, which was around my stomach, and which meant that I was slewed to one side all the time.

But I knew I couldn’t hope for anything better. And I sure as hell knew that I had to start going down, because I couldn’t hang on any longer.

The first movement was painful in one way, because I was still shocked at the weight of him, and how much strength I needed. But it was good in another way, because I think both of us were relieved to be moving at all. That little sideways shuffle, where I managed to get both my hands and both my feet to a new position, thirty centimetres to my left, was like an action that ended a paralysis. I felt that he was slightly calmer, although his grip was still so intense that if we fell we would fall locked together and hit the ground like that. Well, we were pretty locked together in our lives now, and it seemed we would go into the next world the same way.

We began the grimmest journey of our lives. We’d been on some pretty grim ones, but this was the worst. Inch by inch, crevice by hole by tiny indentation, lump of rock by pimple of dirt by protruding root. Down a few inches at this point, but sideways for the next three moves. At one time I had to go back up about a metre, to get out of a dead end route, and I think those were the worst few minutes of all. I could almost feel Gavin’s groan of disappointment and fear when I started climbing again.

He didn’t actually make a sound during the whole time, but his grip never slackened. If anything it got tighter, although I wouldn’t have thought that were possible. I began to wonder if, assuming we got to the ground, I’d ever be able to get him off me.

New muscles started to hurt. The backs of the knees, the arches of my feet, the joints of my shoulders. Sweat streaming down my face made my hair wet and dank. I couldn’t see any more for the sweat that blotted my vision and stung my eyes. I refused to think of this ever ending because I was scared the knowledge would weaken me.

My left foot landed on something unexpected. I bounced my leg a little and realised it was wood; a branch or a root. It felt soft but I needed its help so much that I relaxed onto it. For a wonderful moment it took my weight. Then it broke.

We started sliding. Dust rose around me. Little landslides of gravel came with us. I grabbed madly with open palms and with fingertips. We passed the broken stick and I saw that it was an old root, quite rotten. Grab, grab, grab, there had to be something. My hands must be getting mangled but I didn’t feel anything and didn’t care. Grabbed at a protruding rock, caught onto it for a moment but couldn’t hold it. At least it slowed me down. And a moment later I got my fingers into a split and held on.

I felt like an old snail. Do snails have a three-second memory? I had to forget the terror of the slide and just resume my journey. With the weight on my back. On and on, sobbing now, muscles locking up, slower and slower, can’t go on, can’t do it, it’s too hard, just give up, fall away into freedom.

And then we were there. Even though I had longed for the moment when we would be three or four metres from the bottom and could separate and jump, it didn’t work out that way. Gavin was still clinging so tightly that I couldn’t risk jumping with him wrapped around me, so I had to grit my teeth and force my screaming muscles to move again. Until we were not much more than a metre from something that looked more like dirt than rock. And then I let go and dropped.

We hit the ground fairly hard and rolled a couple of times. There was quite a slope, and it wasn’t until we were rolling that he started to release me. I shook him off and crawled away, then collapsed. I had no thoughts of triumph or success, no thoughts of anything really, only a complete and utter exhaustion, as though I could never move, never do anything again. Gavin crawled over to me and kind of slopped on top of me, and at some stage we both went to sleep, because when I woke up, the shadows had already reached us and it was getting cold.

My body ached like I’d been pounded with baseball bats by a gang of sumo wrestlers, but I knew no helicopter was going to pluck us out of there. If they hadn’t come while we were on the cliff they weren’t going to come now. I woke Gavin and we plodded our weary way back to the top, finding a kangaroo track that must have led to the creek we’d drunk from so often.

The day had started in one direction but gone in another and ended in a place we hadn’t known about. So sore that I could barely put one foot in front of the other, I struggled home, wondering why (since the end of the war) the mountains seemed to be betraying me.

TWO WEEKS LATER we were in the city. It’s one of life’s miracles . . . well actually, there are two miracles and they’re closely connected. One is that you can move so quickly from environment to environment. One minute you’re in the Sahara Desert; twelve hours later, with the help of a few helicopters or planes or something, you can be waist deep in snow in Alaska or strolling down the streets of Paris. Well, I think that’s how it works anyway. Not having travelled further than New Zealand in my young life, I wouldn’t know.

The second miracle is that you can adjust to it, cope with it. You’d think that the shock of the upheaval would be so overwhelming that you’d need to be put in bubble wrap for six months and fed through a tube. But no, the good old human organism is so resilient that it can bounce around from place to place with only a thirty-second adjustment. Most of the time anyway.

Actually, when I think some more about it, as I have done for about three hours since writing the last bit, I realise it’s not that simple. You make the immediate practical adjustment, you don’t wither up and die, you get on with it, but there are slow, long-term shifts needed, adjustments that happen at a much deeper level, and which maybe sometimes never happen. I guess this would be very unhealthy for the average human organism.

Anyway, how we got to the city is that after the dreadful, terrible time on the cliff, after we dragged ourselves home, after we drank a lot of hot sweet tea, after we huddled under a doona watching mindless television, after all that, at about nine o’clock, Gavin started to talk.

And oh boy, once he started, he wouldn’t shut up.

I’ve always liked Gavin’s voice. It’s low and husky, and he pronounces some words, most words, slightly differently. Often he seems to clip off the ends or twist them slightly, which makes them kind of exotic. He talks quite a lot to me, although it took a long long time before we got to that kind of relationship. Like I said before, he only talks to people he trusts, which is probably quite sensible. So people who meet him for the first time, or who don’t know him very well, assume he’s the strong silent type. Strong, yes; silent, depends who he’s with.

For the first time he told me his own stories. I remember writing quite recently about how stories give you an identity. In some ways they give you your life. You think you’re a big lump of skin and bones and blood and organs and cells, and of course you are, but you’re also a big lump of stories. You know those pictures they have in butchers’ shops showing how sheep and cattle are divided into rump and blade and so on? They should have another one, in bedrooms maybe, showing humans divided into the stories of their early childhood, the stories of their primary school days, the stories of their birthdays and Christmases, the stories of their friendships, and so on.

If you know someone’s stories, you know them. If you don’t know their stories, you don’t know them.

I hadn’t really known any of Gavin’s stories. In the early days he’d told us how he’d lived with his mum and his little sister, and that his dad had been killed in an explosion at a factory. I think Gavin was only about three at the time. I always figured that this was why he attached himself so strongly to Homer and Lee, because they were like fathers to him. Bit young for it, but still.

Now he told me story after story, filling out the details of his life, so that I started to know him in a new way. I want to write it down, because like I said at the very beginning of this whole thing, when I sat by the creek in Hell with a pen and a bit of paper, writing stuff down is a way of recording it, but more importantly, making it important, giving it meaning, except most of the time I don’t know what the meaning is. I just know that putting stuff on paper makes it solid somehow.

Gavin talked randomly and he told his stories in no particular order, but I think the general outline goes something like this: his dad was a boilermaker. I had to get him to write that down before I could work out what the word was, and as both of us were stiff and sore and tired and a bit dead mentally and physically it was quite a pain to have to go get pencil and paper, and then another pain to go get the dictionary. The dictionary said a boilermaker was someone who makes boilers. I don’t know how many boilers the world needs, but probably quite a lot.

He worked either for the Army, or in a factory that supplied the Army. Gavin wanted to think that he was in the Army, but Gavin was Army mad, so he was a bit biased. I just couldn’t imagine that the Army would have its own boilermakers, but maybe they do.

Anyway, the explosion killed four people. When Gavin tells a story he doesn’t just tell it, he acts it. Even though he was so wrecked, he couldn’t help himself. I wasn’t very comfortable under the doona with his arms and legs flying in different directions though, so I cut the description a bit short.

He seemed amazed that I hadn’t heard of the accident, but I couldn’t remember anything. It was years ago, it was hundreds of k’s from Wirrawee, and since then we’d had a full-scale war. Of course to Gavin it was the most important event of his life, but I would have been a little kid myself, with no interest in newspaper headlines or the evening news.

I couldn’t quite figure out what sort of work his mum had done. He said she was an entertainer. At first I thought he was saying trainer but when I figured entertainer I immediately thought she might be a singer with five platinum records. But when I asked him what kind of entertaining he changed and said she wasn’t an entertainer, just someone who looked after customers for a business in Marlon. Marlon’s a pretty grotty area if you ask me, but Gavin’s family lived in Mount Savage, which isn’t any better . . . it matches its name.

After his dad died there was one of those epidemics of death that seem to happen to some people, including me, except that I’m talking about non-war stuff, where a whole string of people die in quick succession. For Gavin it was two grandparents and his aunt and his rabbit. He didn’t know what his grandparents died of: ‘They were sick,’ he said and shrugged. But his aunt committed suicide. He was more interested in talking about his rabbit. ‘Did he commit suicide too?’ I asked, which was totally tasteless and unfunny except that he didn’t notice me say it. I rather liked the idea of a rabbit locking itself in the bathroom and taking an overdose. He said he was really upset about his rabbit, and I believe it, but it made me wonder some more about the cat he had massacred. We still hadn’t talked about the cat. It was too big a topic.

The rabbit’s name was Rick. Rick the rabbit. My first reaction to any rabbit is to shoot it, so I’m not into giving them names. If we started giving names to our rabbits we’d have to employ someone to do it. Rick didn’t seem much of a name to me but again Gavin didn’t know how he got it. ‘My sister called it that,’ he said.

Gavin acted out the death of Rick, again with more energy than I could muster. I got the impression that Rick had eaten something wrong and died of stomach problems. It did occur to me, watching Gavin and listening to his stories, that there were gaps in him, and they were the gaps in his family . . . I don’t know what the word is, mythology maybe? Just as each person is a big pile of accumulated stories, each family, and for that matter I suppose each culture, is the same. Maybe that’s one of the problems for Aboriginal people, maybe so many of them were murdered that a lot of stories were lost and now there are too many gaps. Gavin seemed like he didn’t have enough stories. I don’t know how many stories each person should have but if you don’t have enough, if you have blank spots instead of stories for part of your life, then that would be a pretty serious thing I think.

Gavin didn’t know how his grandparents had died, didn’t know what kind of work his mother did, didn’t know how Rick got his name, didn’t know why his aunt committed suicide . . . I asked him how his parents met and he didn’t know that either.

It soon became obvious that another bloke had moved in about a year before the war. His name was Ken. I’d never heard about this guy before. Gavin mentioned him once, accidentally, then again a few moments later, and looked mad at himself each time. Ken had done up a bike for Gavin and Ken had taken them to the beach for a weekend. Who was Ken?

‘Just a man who lived with us.’

‘Where was he from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were he and your mum like, thinking of getting married?’

‘I don’t know. He was stupid.’

‘You didn’t like him?’

‘No.’

Gavin was starting to clam up. I didn’t want that so I got off the subject of Ken. But it seemed like I was too late. Gavin had again turned into the stubborn self-contained little ball of silent grimness that I knew so well. After about ten minutes of saying nothing he got up and padded off down the hall towards his bedroom. I assumed that was it for the evening and he had shut down. Gavin has left the building. But to my surprise he came back a few minutes later, carrying something.

It was quite dark by then. I turned a light on, so he could see my mouth.

I recognised the envelope when I saw it. My mum wrote to the Red Cross after the war when we had been trying to find Gavin’s mum and little sister. She wrote in Gavin’s name, seeing it was his family. The answer, when it came, was pretty blunt. A couple of sentences describing what the Red Cross had been doing and where they’d gone for information, and then came the punchline. It was like a punch all right.

We’re extremely sorry to tell you that our enquiries suggest that your mother, Mrs Fisher, was murdered in the firstfew hours of the war and no trace has been found of your sister, Rosie. Given the child’s age and the chaotic and extremely dangerous situation at the time we are not optimistic about finding her . . .

Now Gavin seemed to think it was very important that I read the letter again. I couldn’t work out why but I got it out of the envelope and opened it. And realised almost straight away that it was a different letter. I glanced at the date. This one had come quite recently, about a month ago. Funny, Gavin had never mentioned it to me.

I read it and my skin got that crawling prickling feeling I’ve had only a few times, for example when I’m looking at a large black automatic weapon that’s pointing straight at me or staring down a cliff and seeing Gavin about to fall to his death. God, what was it about Gavin? Would I ever understand him? Did he have serious mental problems?

We
are delighted to inform you that despite our fears for the safety of your sister and our doubts about finding her, we have been successful in locating her.

As you know, we rely upon people registeringfound children with us, but for various reasons many people do not do this. However, a letter received in this office recently started us on a new search for Rosie, and enquiries have established that she appears to be living at 87 Green Street, Marlon, with a family named Russell.

It appears that Rosie knew this family before the war, and they have been caring for her since they found her in a prison camp in the first few days of the war.

You would probably be aware that many unofficial living situations have developed as a result of the war, and many of these are not yet sanctioned or even recorded. We have referred Rosie’s case to the Department of Child Relocation, but they have a large workload, and it may be some time before they can address her situation.

In the meantime, it was our impression that Rosie was as happy as could be expected, and that the Russells are taking good care of her.

Rosie was delighted to learn that you had survived the war, and she is looking forward to a reunion with you. Privacy legislation prevents us givingyour contact details to the Russells but they have consented to your being informed of their address and telephone number.

I knew that if I let my face show my feelings, I would sit there gazing at Gavin like he was an alien or something out of a freak show so I tried not to frighten him off, but instead to look as though it was the most normal thing in the world for you to be uninterested when your missing sister is found after a year or so. He was watching my face pretty carefully though, and I’m not sure whether he was fooled.

So I said to him, ‘Do you want to go see her?’ When he hesitated I decided I needed to be more positive, and hopefully that might transmit a little energy to him, so I changed it to, This is fantastic. Let’s go see her this weekend.’

Well, he didn’t say no. That’s about all you can say for him. And that’s why we were in the city, staying at Lee’s and set for a reunion that I figured probably wasn’t going to be as emotional as the ones on TV or in magazines. I even thought of going to the place myself first, to suss out what was happening, to set it up, but then thought that would be too sneaky, and not fair on Gavin.

Life at Lee’s was pretty chaotic. What am I talking about, pretty? It was chaotic, and it wasn’t pretty. I don’t know how he put up with it, considering how precise and controlled he is about everything. I mean, the guy’s a piano player, not a guitarist. He’d rather do chemistry than drama, rather play chess than Bullshit or Spoons, rather swim laps than run around the edge of the pool chucking people in and doing bombs. And here he is living in the middle of
Lord of the Flies.

He was embarrassed about it, and kept giving me guilty little looks, as if to say sorry, and a couple of times he did actually say, ‘Sorry about the mess,’ ‘Sorry about the noise,’ ‘Sorry about the way they’re carrying on.’ But he didn’t seem very good at looking after the kids. Besides Pang there was Phillip, who was nine, Paul, who was seven, and Intira, who was four. Between them they could put together quite a party. Lee’s method was to ignore them, then suddenly chuck a tantrum and rant and rave at them and hand out rules and punishments, which shut them up for a short time before the whole thing started again. I could see that he was going crazy with the strain of it, and I didn’t blame him.