The Third Day, The Frost (17 page)

Chapter
Twenty-one

Late in the afternoon we had a meeting in a
parked car where I’d sat for hours. It was an old white Rover 2000
with leather seats, in quite good condition. I don’t think it had
been in an accident; it probably just died of old age, but I
figured I might as well be comfortable, so that’s why I chose it.
Plus it was one of the few cars that still had its windscreen.
There were a couple of leaks from rust spots in the roof but I sat
far enough away from them and stared out through the scratched and
dirty windscreen at the grey road beyond.

The others had been back in the middle of the
car yard, lounging around doing nothing much. Most of them seemed
asleep when I went to check on them. I rigged up a long cord with a
can of pebbles on the end of it, so that if any soldiers appeared I
could yank on the cord, making a noise which would alert the
others. And at 3.30 I got to use it. A couple of trucks appeared on
the road, going much slower than the other traffic which had sped
past from time to time. I pulled the can over straight away. By now
I knew the look of a patrol when I saw one. Then I slithered out of
the Rover and did a stomach crawl back to the gang. We made a quick
decision – there was no time for any other kind – they would hide
in the pit and I would go up the tree above the pantech and watch
from there.

So I shinned up the wet trunk, trying not to
hug it too tightly, to keep as dry as I could. Then I huddled in
among the dripping leaves and watched the patrol. They turned
straight into the gates of the yard then stopped, and eight
soldiers, six of them women, got out. The encouraging thing was
that there was no sense of purpose about the trucks or the people.
They didn’t look like highly trained commandos launching a search
and destroy mission. They looked like a bunch of part-time soldiers
who’d been dragged out into the rain to do a job that they didn’t
have a lot of enthusiasm for. There was an officer with them, and
she yelled and pointed for a few minutes, and then they split up
into pairs and went off in different directions.

It was all a bit casual. They poked around and
under cars, and looked in most of them. But that was the extent of
it. One of them went to the back door of the house, which he
probably thought was the front door, and broke the pane of glass in
it. I heard the tinkle of it falling. He peered through it, but
came back almost straight away wrinkling his face and saying
something to his partner. I could guess what it was: this place
stinks. It did too; I didn’t blame him.

Within half an hour they were gone. I waited
ten minutes, then went and got the others out of their hole. No one
was too excited. We’d seen it all before. It was another escape,
not a particularly close one, but of course it could easily have
been different. It would only have taken one curious soldier to
notice the galvanised iron over the pit and call the others, and
that would have been the end of us. One day it would happen. One
day we would be caught. Seemed like it wasn’t going to be this
time.

I went back to the Rover to continue my watch,
and it was there that the others came, half an hour before sunset.
Robyn sat in the front seat beside me, with Fi on her lap, and the
boys squashed into the back. It was so crowded that they had to
leave the back doors open to fit themselves in. Kevin sat right
under a leak and got dripped on every few seconds.

The most unexpected thing about our meeting
was that it was Fi who took charge. Everyone else seemed too tired
and depressed. Homer looked terrible, like he’d been to a B & S
and was the last one left at the Recovery. Lee was sunk in his own
private thoughts. Kevin looked so jumpy; he kept blinking all the
time, as though he had dust in his eyes. Robyn was OK, I think, but
quiet, but Fi seemed strong and determined, like she could be
sometimes.

‘Seeing nobody else seems to have any ideas,’
she said in a firm voice, ‘I’m going to say what I think.’

‘Onya, Fi, go for it,’ I said.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think we have to take
care of ourselves for a while. The best thing would be a three-week
holiday on the Barrier Reef, all expenses paid and a thousand
dollars spending money. I don’t think we’re going to get that,
though. But even in World War Two the pilots only had to fly a
certain number of missions, and then they’d be rested. Battle
fatigue I think it was called. Well, we’ve got our own battle
fatigue, and we need to take a rest. If we try and do any more for
a while we’ll just wreck ourselves. The last few weeks we’ve been
going steadily crazy, and part of going crazy is that you don’t
notice you’re going crazy. Whether we do it for our own sakes or
whether we do it because it’ll make us better fighters doesn’t
matter; the fact is we have to look after ourselves.’

‘So do you think we should have a holiday?’
Homer asked.

I was so relieved that Homer was showing some
life again that I could have cried. I think the thing that mattered
most was that Fi was giving us permission to take a break. There
were no adults to say such things to us, and we’d stopped saying
them to ourselves. We’d got ourselves into a state of mind where we
couldn’t think clearly; we were just driving onwards until, like
overworked engines, we broke down. As Fi talked I realised that it
was OK to take a break, that we didn’t have to win the war all by
ourselves.

‘Yes,’ said Fi firmly.

‘I don’t want to go back to Hell,’ Robyn
said.

‘Likewise,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s so long
since I’ve been there.’

‘I was thinking of the Isthmus,’ Fi said.

‘Yeah!’ Lee suddenly said. We got such a shock
at the way he blurted it out that we got the giggles. I could see
Lee in the cracked rear-vision mirror; he looked a bit sheepish,
but he was grinning.

‘You like the idea, huh?’ Homer said to
him.

‘Well, I like the Isthmus,’ Lee said.

The Isthmus is a long neck of land that
connects the town of Ferris with Blue RocksNational Park. It’s
actually called Webster’s Isthmus, but no one ever uses its full
name.

There’s no access to the National Park by car;
you have the choice of foot or boat, because there’s no road across
the Isthmus. That made it ideal for us, of course. The park is
beautiful, but it’s the Isthmus itself that’s extra beautiful. I’d
been there once with Fi’s family, staying at a cabin that some
friends of theirs owned. I didn’t know Lee had been there at
all.

‘When did you go there?’ I asked his
reflection in the mirror.

‘With the scouts,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know you were a scout.’

‘Well I was. For more than a year. There’s a
scout camp about a k from Ferris, and we spent five days there one
Easter. It was great. They made us hike our little butts off, but I
enjoyed it. What a place.’

‘Mmm,’ I agreed, remembering that wild rocky
landscape, and the water exploding against the cliffs. ‘We’d be
safe there for a while. I think the colonists’ll be too busy
colonising to go bushwalking.’

‘It means staying away from Wirrawee quite a
bit longer,’ Robyn said hesitantly. ‘I feel guilty when we’re not
near our families, even if we can’t do anything to help them.’

‘Of course,’ said Fi. ‘We all feel that. But
honestly, what can we do for them? We all know the answer: nothing.
We’ve got to think of this as a holiday. Let’s say we’ll go there
for two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks we’ll go back to
Wirrawee and check out the situation. We’ve got enough food,
easily, with the cans we scored here, but too much to carry. We’ll
have to take the Jackaroo. I think it’s worth the risk. If we go in
the middle of the night, drive slowly, don’t use lights, we should
be safe. Surely they’ll be thinking that we’re out of the district
by now. All the search parties’ll be coming back to Cobbler’s
saying they found nothing, and I guess their bosses’ll never know
what sloppy searching they do.’

‘Hope they never find out,’ Robyn said, with
feeling.

There was no real opposition to Fi’s idea. The
only problem was the timing. No one felt comfortable about leaving
straight away. It was still too soon after the attack. We decided
we would wait four days, and see whether they had stopped combing
the district by then. It would be boring, but boredom was better
than death, any day.

So we fiddled around, doing nothing. I spent
the time sitting and thinking, looking out across the paddocks. I’m
embarrassed to say that I went back to thumb-sucking in a big way,
till the thumb on my left hand looked soft and white and wet. But
at least it was clean.

We looked in the house for books, but only
found two, apart from technical manuals. I thought it was amazing;
a house with just two books. One of them was
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
and the
other was
Gone With The Wind.
No one
wanted the first one but Fi and Robyn argued over
Gone With The Wind.
In the end, they compromised.
Fi’s the faster reader, so she started it, then as she finished
each page, she tore it out and gave it to Robyn. It was a good
system.

Homer and Kevin started mucking round with the
Jackaroo engine, trying different parts that they salvaged from the
wrecked cars. They claimed they were making it faster, quieter,
cleaner, smoother. By the time they finished, I was just grateful
it was running at all.

Lee disappeared for hours on end. I mean many
hours, like eight or ten. I think he just roamed across the
countryside, going wherever his mood took him. He was so restless.
I wondered if he was turning into a wild animal, a lone wolf
maybe.

It was four o’clock on the third day when our
plans changed. I was on the top of the pantech, sucking my thumb,
watching Lee come back across the paddock. He was sticking close to
the treeline, slipping quickly from tree to tree, a shadow among
many shadows. When he was climbing the fence into the wrecker’s
yard, I went down to meet him.

‘Get everyone,’ he said as soon as he saw me.
‘Tell them to meet at the Jackaroo.’

I took one look at his face and ran to find
the others. In just a couple of minutes we were gathered there,
facing Lee. He said one word, and that was enough.

‘Dogs,’ he said.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Fi, but the rest of
us knew.

‘They’ve got a pack of dogs,’ Lee said. ‘Two
alsatians and a couple of beagles. They’ve knocked off for today
but I reckon they’ll be back tomorrow. And they’re not mucking
around. They know what they’re doing.’

‘Tell us the whole story,’ Homer said.

‘There’s not much to tell. About 3 k’s from
here, there’s a church and a hall, and a farmhouse across the road.
I was just coming over the hill behind the church when I heard dogs
barking. I dropped down and crawled forward a bit, and there they
were: searching the church and hall. Four soldiers, each with a
dog. When they finished, they went over to the farmhouse and did
the same thing there. Only took them ten minutes. And I forgot to
mention: there were two others with rifles, just watching. Then
they all got in a truck, and drove along to the next place, looked
like an old primary school. Same thing there, then they had a bit
of a conference, looked at their watches, hopped in the truck and
drove back the way they’d come.’

‘So they look like they’re working their way
along the road?’ I asked.

‘Exactly. And if that’s what they are doing,
they’d be here by tomorrow lunchtime. At the latest.’

We all looked at each other.

‘Well, who’s for the Isthmus?’ Homer asked,
when no one else said anything.

It seemed the most sensible thing to do. We
had to go by car now, because if we tried to walk the dogs would
pick up our scent. We had to move the Jackaroo, because it was such
a fatal piece of evidence against us. Seemed like the time had come
to get way out of this district.

After that it was all action.

We didn’t have any maps but we thought we
could scam it. If we kept to the south of Stratton we should hit
the

Conway Highway

, and that went through Ferris. I figured on a
three-hour drive. Petrol might be our biggest problem. Here we were
surrounded by hundreds of cars and not a drop of petrol to be had.
The Jackaroo was three-quarters full and I could only hope its tank
would be big enough.

We decided to leave at 2.30 am, but in the end
we got so bored and impatient sitting around that we went a few
minutes before two o’clock. Robyn and Fi had been sitting in the
car for an hour already: they said they were doing it to make sure
they got the front seat. The boys grumbled a bit but finally sorted
themselves out in the back; I jumped in the driver’s seat, and a
moment later we were on our way.

The rain was blowing in again and the
temperature was dropping; not a great start to our beach holiday.
But we were in a better mood. Just being on the move again was
good.

We crawled along on the edge of the bitumen,
without lights. A few times when the bush thinned and the road
curved I stopped. We took it in turns to walk up to the corner,
check it out, and wave the car on.

Random patrols seemed to be a thing of the
past, and we felt we would see any convoys before they saw us, even
if they did have their lights dimmed. It struck me that since our
attack on Cobbler’s Bay we’d hardly seen any convoys. I mentioned
that to the others and it cheered them up even more. Maybe we
really had achieved something special with our anfo. Certainly
Lieutenant Colonel Finley’s reaction had been encouraging. He
wouldn’t have come rushing to the radio to speak to us if we’d just
let down someone’s tyres.

We started talking about it all. It seemed a
new compulsion: everyone suddenly gushing about what they’d done
and what they’d seen and how they’d felt. It had been the same
after our other big hits, talking about them over and over until we
didn’t feel the need any more. But we hadn’t really done that with
Cobbler’s Bay. Maybe we’d been too tired, or too depressed. For me,
it was because the whole thing was too big. I couldn’t cope with
the enormity of it. Especially the last bit, shooting those
soldiers. That was way too big. And the biggest thing of all was
that in another way it had hardly affected me. I’d put bullets
through their guts, shot them dead and left them there with their
blood pouring out onto the bright red sand, and I’d hardly noticed
I’d done it. Just another moment in my life, an ‘incident’, like
drenching sheep. I was numb about it.