The Ellie Chronicles (55 page)

It wasn’t much but it was all I had, and in search of Gavin I would be like those bloodhounds that follow a trail until they die. Literally. They were my role models now. I had such a hunger, such a need to have him back that I didn’t care what the cost might be. I guess a psychologist would say it was because of losing my parents, which is fair enough. I didn’t really care what the reasons were, but this seemed like a different feeling to the one I had about my parents. Feeling? What am I talking about? How can I leave the s off the end when my sadness about my parents included the guilt I felt when I saw people in Pakistan grieving for whole families washed away in a flood, the sense of loss that I had never collected the recipes from my mother because I’d just assumed I would accumulate them as a matter of course, the gratitude for the love and support I got from people like Homer’s parents, the confusion that came from wondering all the time how I could possibly go on, the strength that memories of my parents’ steadiness gave me . . . The war had hit my mother hard but she slowly put her life together again, put the calcium back in her bones, and she went through a lot of pain doing it, but she was successful, and the days finally came when she could dance to ‘Yellow Submarine’ while she was making the coleslaw and kiss my father with passion and buy bright new clothes and have coffee with old friends in Wirrawee and read difficult books by people who’d won Nobel Prizes, then not long after that, a gang of strangers came into the house and killed her. So yeah, I had strong feelings about the loss of my parents and they were different to the feelings I had now about Gavin, but perhaps it does all amount to the same thing. If you add up 2 and 2 you get 4, but if you add up 3 and 1 you still get 4, so maybe that’s how it was. I was getting the same total.

Dark shapes in the distance moved slowly back and forth. They looked like cattle and I hoped they were and I hoped they hadn’t been trained in surveillance of enemies from over the border. Occasional trucks rumbled past. I didn’t know whether I was expecting a truck or some other vehicle. I could have been waiting for a camel train for all I knew. I didn’t see a single car but there was a motorbike, with two young people, probably men. They didn’t have helmets but they were going fast and they didn’t slow down for me.

I was well hidden, behind a clump of young wattles, safe unless someone came looking for me or unless I was wildly unlucky. But the rendezvous time came and went. I realised a bit too late that I should have made arrangements with Homer for a way to get back if no-one turned up. Maybe we’d both pinned too much faith on the Scarlet Pimple and Liberation. Ten minutes late didn’t bother me, twenty made me a bit uneasy, half an hour was stressful. It was actually an hour and five minutes before an old Acco rumbled to a halt fifty metres before the windmill, and the driver cut the engine. In the silence all I could hear was the squeaking of the old mill. I was dry-throated and straining with all my senses to see and hear what was happening. A minute earlier I’d been thinking about how to get home again. I’d decided I had to wait for a full two hours before I gave up. Too much was at stake. If the guy’d had a flat tyre or something I couldn’t walk away. But I didn’t like the idea of waiting two hours, didn’t like it at all.

When a loud noise stops, the silence gets pretty oppressive. I’d heard the Acco coming for quite a while and the sound had gradually taken over the paddocks. Now there was nothing but a whingeing windmill slowly rotating. Then I heard footsteps from the direction of the truck and a voice calling softly, ‘Hey girl. Hey! You there?’

There wasn’t time for long games of Spotlight. I stepped out onto the road. ‘Here,’ I called. The man immediately turned back to the truck. All the lights were off so I couldn’t see him very well. ‘Quick,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Very late.’

Well, he didn’t need to tell me that. I jogged down the road after him. I’d only brought a light backpack so it was easy to handle. But when we got to the truck it turned out that I had some hard lifting to do. The truck was stacked with hay bales, the small ones. The guy started unloading. I realised what was going to happen. I’d be hidden in the middle of this mobile haystack. Lucky I’ve never been a hay fever person.

I swung up on the top and started throwing bales off. He stopped and stared at me. I could see his wide eyes. He was middle-aged, with a round face and grey hair cut short. ‘You very strong,’ he said in surprise. I grinned and kept dropping the bales onto the road. There would be strands of it everywhere for a while, if people were looking for evidence of where I’d been. I had to hope a strong wind would take care of them.

I heard a high-pitched grunt to my left and looked across to the paddock. Attracted by the sweet scent of hay the cattle had started lining up along the fence. I nearly got the giggles. If another vehicle came past we were in serious trouble. But now the man seemed satisfied that he’d made a deep enough compartment for me. In I went, with my bag, and he swung the first bale back into place. For a lightly built guy he was pretty strong too. It’s a lot harder throwing bales back up onto the truck than it is dropping them off. Ten times harder.

Quickly the bales piled up and then he pushed a length of poly pipe down to me. I realised it was going to give me air, but I didn’t like the idea much. The man cupped his left hand and showed me how I could breathe through it. ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ I called up to him and he said, ‘Yeah yeah no problems.’ It wasn’t much reassurance. Before I could ask any more questions he disappeared and a few moments later another bale was thrown across the top, and then another and another until I could see nothing, just hear the thump thump thump of each new brick in my wall. Then silence. Complete silence. Silence like I’ve never experienced before. Silence and darkness. I felt the truck jolt slightly as he got in, then the engine started and a shudder ran through it, ran through me. The vibration was quietly comforting. That was lucky because not much else was comforting. OK I wasn’t allergic to hay but I could have been claustrophobic. There had been a time, oh how long ago, when Corrie and I were children and the world was a different place, and we’d been crawling through gaps in her haystack. We got deep inside there, acting like we were explorers, giggling a lot, with me calling ‘Go right!’ ‘Go left!’ and suddenly Corrie had a panic attack and decided we wouldn’t be able to get out. Deep in the middle of the hay piled inside their huge barn was a bad place to have a panic attack, but she unnerved me too, and I started backing out as fast as I could but it wasn’t fast enough for either of us, and in front of me Corrie was going off her head. She kicked me about eight times as we backed up. By the time she got out she was a complete mess. I was all right, just freaked by her going so quickly from sanity to madness, so we left the barn and went back to the house and watched TV while she calmed down.

Of course I would have to remember that now, when I was inside another haystack, and this time really trapped. No way could I get out of here unless the driver or someone else decided to let me out. It might be possible to use the poly pipe like a didgeridoo and make enough noise to be heard, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in it as a life-saving device. Suppose some sparks flew onto the haystack and it caught fire? No-one would be able to get close enough to hear my didgeridoo. I’d cook. Not just slow roast either. Flambé, that’d be me. Still, better to flambé than to roast. I read somewhere how a Canadian guy proved that lobsters boiled to death don’t feel any pain. Well, hey, who am I to contradict some scientific genius, but I have trouble believing that anything boiled alive isn’t going to suffer.

What if the man forgot I was there or died or something and they left the truck parked in a barn or a garage for a few months before they bothered to unload it? I did an experimental push upwards, using one shoulder then both, and got the result I expected. Nothing. Not a quiver of movement. That pig who built the house out of straw wasn’t so stupid. I would break my shoulders before I could move these bales.

I was getting quite panicky myself, but at the same time I knew I was talking myself into this. It wasn’t serious hysteria like Corrie, just a quiver or two, but it was enough. I decided I’d better get some control of my mind or I could go seriously crazy. I started singing, mumbling really, forcing myself to remember the lyrics of the school musical that Fi had been in two years before.

‘Once again you find me,

The place you always find me,

The very very coolest place in town.

You see the blah blah blah blah blah . . .’

And then a bit later there was something like:

‘You see the bright lights burning,

A thousand heads are turning . . .’

But the rest was mostly blahs. I didn’t do very well on that one and I definitely wasn’t in the coolest place in town. Still, it worked as far as distracting me went. I started in on ‘Time of Your Life’, which I knew a lot better, and had the right kind of mood for where I was and what I was doing.

I had to do something. The darkness was so total that I didn’t bother holding my hand up in front of my face. I knew I could stick a finger in my eye socket and I wouldn’t see it. All I had was my mind and I had to keep that busy. I tried naming all the countries in the world. That got too complicated, so I did them in alphabetical order, and got to forty-three, then decided I had to reach fifty. Portugal. Forty-four. Oh, of course, those Pacific islands. Tonga, Fiji, Samoa. Forty-seven. Was New Caledonia a separate country or part of France? I wasn’t sure, so it got disqualified. Malaysia, of course, stoopid me. Forty-eight. Iceland, forty-nine. It took another, I don’t know, six or eight minutes to get to fifty. Time loses meaning when you’re in total darkness with your senses getting almost no input except the vibration of the truck and the sweet smell and prickly feeling of hay. Aaaggghhh Switzerland! I hugged myself with a feeling of triumph. How could I forget Switzerland? Maybe it was because they’d never been in a war. If the history of the world is one long series of wars interrupted by little moments of peace, then that could explain why I’d overlooked Switzerland. Still, a long moment of peace would suit me pretty well right now.

I started working out long complicated maths problems in my head. 316 × 8. It’s not so hard. The way I do it is just eight 300s, 2400; eight 10s 80, add them, 2480; eight 6s, 48, add that as well: 2528.

Then I fell asleep.

WHEN I WOKE the truck had stopped. I didn’t know how long it had been stopped for. Nor why it had stopped. I kept thinking of the
Scarlet Pimpernel
, the actual book, about as ancient as the Bible. They’d smuggled people out of Paris in carts during the French Revolution, and the soldiers would stop the carts and search them . . . Was that happening right now?

I was hot and very thirsty, and could smell my own sweat. I longed to stretch out my legs before they cramped. The poly pipe wasn’t much use as a periscope because I couldn’t twist it to get a view. All I saw was the sky. It was still dark outside though. I rubbed the backs of my legs, trying to get some circulation happening. The more I thought about it the worse it got, like with everything. Then I felt the truck shake, as though someone had just got on it.

I could feel the bales being thrown off. It was scary. I didn’t know what I’d see, or who would be there. It was a bit like being born, I guess. I’d been in this little womb a long time and I’d had enough, I wanted to get out, but I had no idea who would be waiting and what the world would be like. Would they hold me upside down and spank me on the bum? Or worse? Anyway, this was a caesarean, not a natural birth. I didn’t have to do anything, just lie there curled up and wait till the doctor opened up a gap.

Cold crept in when the bale above me lifted off, but more like a sweet coolness, a refreshing wave of beautiful air touching me everywhere. It wafted around me, tickling and comforting. God I needed it. I looked up. Just the night sky and a couple of stars. Another bale went. The man was taking them off one by one, completely ignoring me. I climbed out and off the truck but didn’t try to help him this time. Sometimes doing nothing can be exhausting. I’d done nothing for a long time and I was totally stuffed.

We were in some sort of barn and the man was stacking the bales, starting a new pile beside the ones he already had. Probably a thousand bales in the barn altogether and nice stuff too, first-cut lucerne maybe, but you could see plenty of clover in it. He continued to ignore me and I continued to ignore him. I walked around trying to get my legs working, and more importantly trying to get my brain working. It was strange being in a place and having no idea where I was – literally no idea. Farm or city, mountain or desert, coast or inland, heaven or hell, take your pick. We were probably on a farm, obviously, and I don’t think we’d gone up or down a lot of hills, but we might just be in a grain storage place or a feed merchant’s. I drifted towards the door, thinking I’d have a peep outside, but also curious to know whether the man would acknowledge that I existed if I did something a bit more extreme. Sure enough, as soon as I got close to the door he hissed at me like a goose, and gestured for me to get back. I veered away, smiling to myself. It was reassuring to know that I existed, that I had substance, that I could be seen by others. If someone else acknowledges me then I must be real. I am seen, therefore I am.

Someone else existed too apparently – we were not alone in the world – because at that moment I heard a motorbike whirring towards us. It sounded, I don’t know, like a cicada having an orgasm. OK, yes, I’ve never heard a cicada having . . . but anyway, it was a motorbike that badly needed tuning. I looked at the man, expecting to see him waving wildly at me to take cover, but he carried on throwing bales off the truck. Now that his stack had grown he was trying to land them directly on top of the pile from the tray of the Acco. Obviously the motorbike didn’t represent danger.

It made me nervous though and I stood out of sight behind what looked like a very old threshing machine. The motorbike engine stopped and there was a pause before the door was suddenly thrown open. I could see the grey of first daylight behind the man who came in. He was a big guy, young, and as he took off his helmet I saw a huge row of perfect white teeth and heard a loud laugh. He spoke in another language to the man, but I was willing to bet he said, ‘Where is she?’

The man wasn’t sure himself now and he peered around looking for me. I came out from behind the thresher. The young guy heard me, turned, looked me over, and said in almost perfect English, just a trace of an accent: ‘Oh, nice, we got a good-looking one. About time.’

The older man didn’t react. I gave a weak kind of smile. The motorcyclist said, ‘You should have seen the last female we helped. We nearly turned her over to the police for being so ugly.’

I couldn’t help but give a bigger smile. I’d expected an atmosphere of secrecy and terror and here was another version of Homer, larger than life, outrageous and, to be honest, better looking. And here was the kind of humour I’d grown up with, the humour I was used to, the jokes that, for better or for worse, I’d been hearing all my life. For worse, actually, but that’s another story.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Toddy.’

‘Hi. I’m Ellie.’

‘Well, we got no time to waste. Here, we cover your beautiful face with this.’ He handed me a wig of black hair and a white mask, adding, ‘Don’t mind me, you get used to me, everyone does, sooner or later.’

I put the wig on carefully, tucking away any loose strands of my own hair. It came down below my shoulders, quite a long way, about fifteen or twenty centimetres. It felt weird. I’ve never had long hair. But I love black hair and was quite happy to get some suddenly. The mask was one of the ones you see people on TV wearing when there’s a plague, or nurses if they’re in an infectious area. Just a tissue-paper thing with a string. It was a clever disguise. Two items, both so easy to find, and my whole appearance was changed.

Or I assumed it was. I didn’t have a mirror, and although I went around the barn looking for a reflective surface, I didn’t find anything much. It was a pretty dusty old barn, and most of the metal surfaces were blotched and worn. Dust and rust, that was the story of that place.

‘Come on,’ said Toddy, ‘we don’t have time for you to go staring at yourself. You women, all the same, it doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s the personality guys go for, don’t you understand?’

I laughed. It was hard not to, even in such an unfamiliar and dangerous situation. I picked up my bag and followed him outside, calling out ‘Thank you’ to the older man, and waving. As before he said nothing, didn’t look at me, showed nothing. He was probably keen to wipe me from his memory, as fast as possible. I guess that reminded me just how dangerous everything was, the risks that he and this Toddy guy ran.

It was a cool day, pretty smoggy. We were in a scrapyard of some kind, with a pile of roofing iron on my left and a mountain of bolts and nuts and stuff to my right. Some of them were pretty big. Toddy led me to his bike, which was a Ducati, polished to within an inch of its life. You know, there’s this word, salubrious, and it means attractive or something, but there’s no way it should. Salubrious? Excuse me! Does that sound enchanting and fragrant? It’s gotta mean grey and depressing and gloomy. So as far as I’m concerned, this scrapyard was salubrious, and in that salubrious place the Ducati shone like a butterfly in a butcher’s shop. Pity it sounded so bad. He started it up – after three goes – and I felt like sticking my fingers in my ears and begging him to turn it off.

But instead of doing that I took a peep at myself in the rear-vision mirror. Firstly, without the mask on. It was dramatic. The change was amazing. I looked older and, to be honest, better, I thought. More, I don’t know, sophisticated or something. More like a city girl. Well, that was good. I might have to be a city girl for a while. I slipped on the mask. Unrecognisable. I was lost, gone, my identity removed simply by adding hair and covering my face. But there was still the problem of my eyes. Before I could say anything Toddy handed me a pair of sunglasses. ‘There you go, princess,’ he said. Princess? God, he was worse than Homer. But he’d thought this through. Maybe he did it every day, took girls from our side of the border into these dangerous situations. It’d make for an unusual job.

We rode down a dirt track which was the driveway into the place and turned left. OK, now I had some sense of where I was. City, probably, but on the outskirts. Could well be Havelock. I sure hoped it was. This was the poor side of town though, boring buildings, dull factories, nothing beautiful, no style. I called into Toddy’s ear, ‘Are we in Havelock?’ and he called back, ‘Well it’s not New York.’ Then he added, ‘No more talking.’

I saw the sense in that. You never knew how far your voice might carry, and I didn’t want people to hear voices speaking English as we rode past.

It was cold on the bike and I used Toddy as a windbreak. I had a million questions. Where was he taking me? Did he know anything about Gavin? How were we going to find Gavin? How had all this been arranged? Who was Toddy anyway? Could I trust him? How did I know that? He could be taking me straight to the nearest police station.

Soon, though, I stopped concentrating on those questions as there was just too much else to look at. The traffic was getting heavier and with every block we seemed to be moving towards the centre of town. Seemed like people got to work pretty early around here. There were a lot of motorbikes but I felt quite conspicuous, more and more vulnerable. We stopped at a red light and a moment later another motorbike pulled up beside us. A girl was riding it. She was about one metre away, jammed between two lines of traffic. We could almost have rubbed noses. She stared straight at me. I stared back. Wig, sunglasses, paper mask . . . that was all I had. Underneath was all Ellie. The light seemed to stay red forever. She never took her eyes off me. With a jerk Toddy’s Ducati moved forwards again. She followed a second after us. For three blocks I knew she was right behind. I didn’t dare look around. Nothing spells guilt louder than looking around. But under the highpitched quivering of the Ducati I could hear her bike. It was a deep and powerful throbbing. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth block it disappeared. Now I looked around. There was no sign of her. I hoped she hadn’t gone straight to the nearest authorities to report the suspicious-looking girl on the shining motorbike.

Travelling openly through a foreign city – because that’s what it was now – felt strange and exciting. I wished I could just be a tourist and walk these streets even more openly. I wished I could travel overseas and go to places with exotic names like Beijing and Uttar Pradesh and Ulan Bator. Oh yeah, Mongolia, that was another country I’d forgotten when I was stuck in the hay bales. That made fifty-one.

If only my mind wasn’t tortured by thoughts of Gavin lying desperate in a cell somewhere. If only I could be sure he wasn’t dead or injured. If only my life wasn’t in constant jeopardy every second I was on this side of the border. Well, if wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets in the sea. Or, as my Stratton grandmother once said, ‘If wishes were dishes we’d all have cupboards full of Royal Doulton.’

‘But you do, Grandma,’ I’d replied, which for possibly the only time ever stopped her in her tracks.

If it wasn’t for my fears for Gavin – and for myself – I could have enjoyed the motorbikes loaded with boxes of electric kettles and cages of chooks and big bottles of water for office workers. The shops bulging with fruit or car parts or shoes or baby clothes. The mess of traffic at every second intersection, the constant honking of car horns, the little stands along the footpaths with people selling food, the kids so neat and pretty on their way to school. But every time I started to relax a little I saw something else, something sinister. Soldiers. Everywhere. Half-a-dozen marching loosely along a footpath, a group standing smoking and talking at an intersection, a truckload in the traffic in front of us. At no stage did we pass a whole army, but by the time we got to Toddy’s place we’d seen a fair part of an army, scattered around a city where there was no escaping them, almost no street or park where they were not in evidence, soldiers, soldiers, soldiers.

And I could see myself in a different city almost, not the open visible one with shops and schools and grandparents and kids and people going about their business, but another city, darker, where criminals crept from place to place and soldiers hunted them, a city which gave no access to help or friendship, but offered only pursuit and vengeance and execution. Like spiderwebs over a garden, almost invisible in the bright light, the people of this other city were connected, but the connections could not survive the attack of a determined and relentless enemy. Soldiers armed with rifles and knives and righteousness could slash through cobwebs. I had a visa into this dark city but the other one would be forever closed to me. The things I had done, the life I’d led, meant that no matter how long I lived I could never be invited into the bright and open city where normal people went about their normal lives.

We reached a different part of Havelock, more open, bigger shops, a couple of parks. A massive church that was probably a cathedral back in the old days. The good old days. I hadn’t left high school and I was already talking about the good old days. For the first time I saw foreigners, people like me. A Saab ahead of us at the lights had a blonde girl in the back seat. Across the road I saw two boys, about thirteen years old, one with red hair and fair skin. To my amazement he was wearing a Fremantle Dockers top. The other one had a Brazilian soccer shirt. The kid with the Brazilian shirt looked like he might be from a meeting of a couple of continents, South America and Asia maybe. They were coming out of a cafe and they just walked on down the street like they were in their hometown. That gave me some confidence. No-one jumped out at them asking for identity papers and wanting to know their mothers’ maiden names. The soldiers ignored them.

There were more street signs in English around this district too, so I figured we were in the part of town where more foreigners hung out, the part Lee had described, where the United Nations had people working.