Circle of fight

CHAPTER 9

Stepping out onto the streets of Havelock was not the scariest thing I’d ever done, but it made it through the home and away series and into the finals. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d ever done either, but it was definitely a contender for the flag. The only other country I’d been in was New Zealand, and sure, it’s another country, but everything there looks so similar. The people certainly do, and they speak more or less the same language, even if they have trouble with a few vowels and the boys have their teeth soldered together.

Going to Havelock was going to the City of Weird for a few reasons, one being that I was in another country, even though I still thought of it as my country, and even though the landscape was the same. The cityscape was changing, had changed quite a lot, but the landscape was still those smoky blue mountains and green-grey gum leaves and strong hot sky that was the background to my life.

At least I’d had that experience a few times now, from crossing the border, so I was getting more used to it.

The cityscape did come as a shock. I’d never been to Havelock before, so I’m making assumptions, but I don’t think any of our cities or towns had looked like this before the war. Of course the capital cities had their ethnic areas, where you could almost pretend you were in another country, and I loved going there, enjoying the food and the shops and the energy. But when a whole city is different, when you know that block after block, suburb after suburb, will be like this, then you’re in a different headspace. You know that you’re the alien, you’re the outsider, you’re the ethnic. You’re locked into a lot of things in life, but with most of them, like your personality and your feelings and your coolness or lack of coolness, you kid yourself that you can change them at any moment. Even your weight. But you can’t kid yourself about your skin colour or the way your eyes and nose and mouth are shaped and arranged. You’re locked into your body for life. There was some white journalist in America, back in the fifties or whenever, who took chemicals to make his skin go black for a while, and then wrote a book about being a dark-skinned person in a white society. It sold squillions but someone told me the guy died young from the toxic effects of the chemicals. It did strike me as interesting that white people had to have a white guy explain to them what it was like to be black. They couldn’t hear it from a black person.

When I was in Year 9 I got the gig to go to Stratton and sit on a stage with half-a-dozen students from other schools at a conference for school librarians. We were like a panel, and the audience could ask us questions about what we liked in school libraries and what we didn’t like, and what made us go into the library and what drove us away, and our opinions about reading, all that sort of stuff. Well, it went like a bushfire. In fact the session ran twenty minutes overtime and most of the teachers missed their afternoon tea. But all the time, while I was on the stage taking my turn at answering questions, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Why don’t they ask the kids at their own schools? They could have got the answers to these questions a million years ago. How come they have to put us on a stage before they take us seriously or listen to us?’

People get locked into roles and attitudes. On a normal day at school we are just the sheep, teenagers who get herded around in flocks. But once they put us on that stage we became experts. We were authorities on teenagers and reading. People listened. They wrote down what we said. They applauded as we left.

You’re assigned roles all the time. Baby, girl, rural, child, daughter of the Lintons, teenager, war hero, person who looks after Gavin. White. Or black. Or Asian or Hispanic or Polynesian. When it comes to being assigned roles in life, skin colour’s a biggie. And for me, I was officially white. It’s not even an accurate name, just like black isn’t accurate when you think about it. I mean there are major colour differences between Australian Aborigines and Sudanese and African-Americans and West Indians. Me, on the tanned bits, which are my face, and my arms, because I wear short-sleeved shirts most of the time, I’m a sort of brown-pink, and on the rest, a very light rose pink which does become almost white when you look at it. But then all the veins give a blue-grey background and there’s such a network of them that they make quite a difference too.

I read this book called Hawaii by James Michener. It’s a really seriously very very very long book. More than eleven hundred pages. Now that’s long. Obviously I liked it or I wouldn’t have bothered. Anyway, towards the end he wrote about this idea called ‘The Golden Man’. He wrote this ages ago, so I thought he was being quite prophetic. Hawaii was like a melting pot, and he said a new type of human was emerging there, who was not golden in terms of skin colour, by blending black and white and Asian and Polynesian and whatever else. He said it was entirely to do with the mind, the way you think, so you can be a golden man, or a golden woman, or a golden kid for that matter, even though you’re racially Portuguese or Chinese or Caucasian or Hawaiian. Michener said that the secret is that these people understood the flow of movements around them. They were open to the world, I suppose. And that gave them the ability to be aware of the future, but most importantly it gave them the ability to stand at the place where all the rivers meet. It wasn’t James Michener’s idea really, it came from some university professors after World War II, not that it matters.

So my ambition in life is to be a golden woman. And looking around my friends, I can see that some of them, in fact most of them, are heading that way already. Maybe that’s why they are my friends. I mean who wouldn’t be attracted to people like Bronte and Jeremy and Lee and Fi? Not that Jeremy or Lee are in the running to become golden women. Golden men, definitely. Homer? Yes, and I’m not just saying that because he might read this one day. Even though he’s so sexist and blunt and anti-greenie and all the rest of it, he is very aware of the world. And deep down he’s not prejudiced or anti-conservation. He knows those things are right, it’s just that he would prefer it if they weren’t. They don’t suit his personal convenience. He would love a world where he was serviced by beautiful slave girls all day long, who fed him and massaged him and pampered him — actually, I wouldn’t mind a world like that myself, with slave boys preferably — but he knows it ain’t possible. Homer would love to flatten all the paddocks on their place and just sit on the tractor and go up and down without having to do fancy manoeuvres around clumps of trees. He’d love to leave the TV on all day and take twenty minute showers and drive a Porsche. But he’s smart enough to know that it’d be plain wrong if he did live like that. Occasionally people — new teachers for example — made the mistake of thinking he was just another redneck and they treated him accordingly. He always played right up to it as soon as they started patronising him. Sometimes it took them a long time to realise, and they were always so shocked and off balance when they did.

Anyway, there I was, in the great metropolis of Havelock, feeling shocked and off balance myself, that for the first time in my life I looked completely out of place. Nothing I could do, short of taking chemicals or getting extreme plastic surgery, would make my skin and facial features the same as everybody else’s. My appearance didn’t matter when we were doing raids across the border, because that was hit-and-run stuff, trying to damage them then get out as fast as possible. But now I was part of their society, trying to fit in, and that made all the difference.

The funny thing was that when I looked in the mirror I seemed an alien to myself. I’d had the makeover. Not like in the magazines, to make me into a glamorous supermodel. They would have needed a lot more time to do that. Like, years. But Bronte had suggested I change my appearance as much as I could, to reduce the chances of being recognised. I had to do it quickly so they could take photos of me with my ‘new’ face, to go in the identity papers.

Liberation had done something else as well as Paulaise me. Before I left, Jeremy had pulled a wad of money out of his computer bag and chucked it on the kitchen table. It was like we were doing a drug deal or in a gangster movie or something.

‘What’s this?’ I picked it up. Unlike our currency it was all the same colour. Someone had neatly sorted it into piles of ten notes, with the tenth one folded around the others. There were ten piles. ‘Is this worth anything or is it just Monopoly money?’

‘It’s about two thousand bucks in our money. It’s very popular over there.’

‘Wow. Can I get some DVDs?’

‘I think that if you don’t spend it, they’d like it back. It’s for bribes, basically. And anything else you might need money for.’

I looked at it more closely and realised it was American. Ten dollar bills. ‘Jeremy, are all Liberation groups seriously well organised? Or is it just the one that you guys belong to? Cos they seem to think of everything. And the way they can just cough up a thousand bucks American…’

‘Put it down to leadership,’ Jeremy said.

‘The Scarlet Pimple?’

‘You got it.’ Jeremy’s eyes were suddenly alight. ‘You’ve got no idea, Ellie. The Scarlet Pimple’s amazing. Talk about smart. And like you say, organised. We’re the best Liberation group for hundreds of miles. Everyone knows it, even the Army. But it’s all because of one person.’

I was suddenly jealous of the guy who could inspire that kind of admiration in Jeremy. Jeremy wasn’t easy to impress. And it seemed like either he wasn’t the Scarlet Pimple or else he had a very big head. Enormous.

‘Maybe I should join after this is over,’ I said. ‘I would like to work with someone like that.’

‘Well, you know they’d have you in a moment,’ Jeremy said. ‘You’d be the star signing. The hot new recruit.’

Lee had rushed back to Stratton because Pang had suspected appendicitis, but Bronte turned up a few minutes later. Seemed like she was always there to see me off. Good old Bronte. She was no action-woman but she was calm and reliable. I wondered how she’d handle real pressure. Jess and Jeremy had both come through OK in their first raids over the border, so she probably would too, especially as she was mentally stronger than Jess, I thought. But I couldn’t picture Bronte doing stuff like that. It wasn’t her scene. She was like the CWA ladies who make tea and sandwiches at bushfires, the steady workers who make the foundations strong.

She was going to camp at my place in case there were more phone calls from the kidnappers. It was the kind of thing Bronte was made for. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather leave at home to do a job like that.

I’d taken about six hours to get to Havelock. Liberation were confident that I could get away with being on the city streets, but they were equally confident that I’d have no hope if I were seen anywhere else. So they had to get me there without anyone spotting me. Even the first part wasn’t as easy as it used to be. I rode with Homer to the border, but now there was a big wire fence across it, and signs saying No Access in English and more signs in the distance, not in English but somehow they still managed to say No Access.

Despite their famous efficiency Liberation hadn’t given us any warning about a fence. We looked at each other. ‘Now what?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got pliers. I guess we can cut through.’

‘What if it’s wired up to ten thousand volts?’

‘I was just thinking the same thing.’

He pulled out his Leatherman and unfolded the pliers and passed it to me. ‘There you go.’

‘No, no, really, I’m only a girl. This needs a big strong man.’

‘I might wreck my nails. I think you should do it.’

‘Rock paper scissors?’

‘OK.’

We both went rock, then I went scissors and he went rock again. Damn. I took the Leatherman and went over to the fence. While I got some leverage on the pliers he did the stalk of grass thing, testing for an electric current. The grass didn’t cry, didn’t scream. It made sense. If it was alive, I would have expected warning signs. What did worry me was that it might be hooked up to some electronic gadget that would warn the authorities we were trying to break through.

Cutting was hard work, because they weren’t proper pliers of course, and I soon had red, sore hands from the pressure I had to apply. Homer took over after a while. Between us we made a hole big enough for the bike. Lucky we’d brought the two-wheeler, not the fourwheeler, or we’d still be there.

We got through and went on our way, much more cautious now. If they’d built a fence, what else might they have done? But we got to the rendezvous OK, about half an hour early in fact. A windmill was the landmark. It was a hundred metres down from an intersection, under the shade of a clump of wattles. ‘You’d better go back as fast as you can,’ I said to Homer. ‘In case anyone’s on their way to check the fence.’

‘Yeah, righto,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking the same thing. Good luck then. Hooroo.’ He started the bike and got on, put it in gear, turned it around, and started off with a quick wave. I watched him go, feeling a bit dismal. If one of us got killed in the near future — and that’d probably be me — those would have been our last words to each other.

I sat staring into a nearby paddock. What hope did I have of finding Gavin? This whole thing was so vague and unplanned. The only reason Liberation and the Scarlet Pimple thought it was worth a chance was — well, there were two reasons really. One was that we had no other avenues, no other hopes. This was Plan A, but

there was no Plan B.

And the other reason was that they thought I could get good intelligence once I was ‘on the ground’. ‘On the ground’ meant, once I was in the heart of Havelock. The message from the Pimple was: ‘These people only trust face to face. They won’t tell us much by phone and they won’t put anything in writing. The group who’s got Gavin seem to be renegades, out-of-control, with no friends. Everyone’s scared of them. But if someone’s there, on the ground, we think people will give you serious information.’

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. Flambe, that’d be me. Still, better to flambe 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.