Tomorrow When The War Began (4 page)

So after a while we started believing him when
he said he was too tough to have emotions. It seemed funny that Fi,
the most delicately built girl in our year, looked like being the
one to bring him undone, if that’s the right way to put it.

I went for a walk back up the track, to the
last of Satan’s Steps. The sun had already warmed the great granite
wall and I leaned against it with my eyes half shut, thinking about
our hike, and the path and the man who’d built it, and this place
called Hell. ‘Why did people call it Hell?’ I wondered. All those
cliffs and rocks, and that vegetation, it did look wild. But wild
wasn’t Hell. Wild was fascinating, difficult, wonderful. No place
was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell,
that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names
on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more.
Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first
thing they saw was a huge big sign saying ‘Housing Commission’ or
‘private school’ or ‘church’ or ‘mosque’ or ‘synagogue’. They
stopped looking once they saw those signs.

It was the same with Homer, the way for all
those years he’d been hanging a big sign around his neck, and like
a fool I’d kept reading it. Animals were smarter. They couldn’t
read. Dogs, horses, cats, they didn’t bother reading any signs.
They used their own brains, their own judgement.

No, Hell wasn’t anything to do with places,
Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.

Chapter Five

We got fat and lazy, camping in the clearing.
Every day someone would say ‘OK, today we’re definitely going up
the top and doing a good long walk’, and every day we’d all say
‘Yeah, I’ll come’, ‘Yeah, we’re getting too slack’, ‘Yeah, good
idea’.

Somehow though we never got round to it.
Lunch-time would creep up on us, then there’d be a bit of serious
sleeping to do, a bit of reading or paddling in the creek, then
it’d be mid-afternoon getting on to late afternoon. Corrie and I
were probably the most energetic. We took a few walks, back to the
bridge, or to different cliffs, so we could have long private
conversations. We talked about boys and friends and school and
parents, all the usual stuff. We decided that when we left school
we’d earn some money for six months and then go overseas together.
We got really excited about it.

‘I want to stay away for years and years,’
Corrie said dreamily.

‘Corrie! You got homesick on the Year 8 camp,
and that was only four days!’

‘That wasn’t real homesickness. That was
because Ian and them were giving me such a hard time.’

‘Weren’t they such mongrels? I hated
them.’

‘Remember when they got caught bombing us with
firelighters? They were crazy. At least they’ve improved since
then.’

‘Ian’s still a dork.’

‘I don’t mind him now. He’s all right.’

Corrie was much more forgiving than me. More
tolerant.

‘So will your parents let you go overseas?’ I
asked.

‘I don’t know. They might, if I work on them
long enough. They let me apply for that exchange thing,
remember.’

‘Your parents are so easy to get on with.’

‘So are yours.’

‘Oh, most of the time I guess they are. It’s
only when Dad’s in one of his moods. And he is awfully sexist. All
the stuff I had to go through just to come on this trip. If I was a
boy it’d be no problem.’

‘Mmm. My dad’s not bad. I’ve been educating
him.’

I smiled. A lot of people underestimated
Corrie. She just quietly worked away on people till she got what
she wanted.

We figured out our itinerary. Indonesia,
Thailand, China, India, then up to Egypt. Corrie wanted to go from
there into Africa, but I wanted to go on to Europe. Corrie had this
idea that she’d have a look at everything, come home, do nursing,
then go back and work in the country that needed nurses most. I
admired her for that. I was more interested in making money.

So the time drifted by. Even on our last full
day, when food was getting short, no one could be bothered going
all the way back to the Landrover to get more. Instead we
improvised, and put together snacks that at any other time we would
have chucked at the nearest rubbish tin. We ate meals that I
wouldn’t have fed to our chooks. There was no butter left, no
powdered milk, no condensed milk because we’d sucked the tubes dry
on our first day. No fruit, no tea, no cheese. No chocolate – that
was serious. But not serious enough to motivate us to get off our
butts. ‘It’s catch twenty-something,’ Kevin explained. ‘If we had
chocolate it’d give me the energy to get up to the Landie to get
some more. But without it I don’t think I could make it to the
first step.’

It was hot, that was our main excuse.

Homer was still rapt in Fi, always wanting to
talk to me about her, trying to accidentally put himself wherever
she happened to be going, turning red every time she spoke to him.
But Fi was being very frustrating. She wouldn’t discuss it with me
at all, just pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about,
when it must have been obvious to anyone short of a coma.

The seven of us had got through five days
without a serious argument, which was good going. Quite a few
little arguments, I admit. There was the time Kevin had blown up at
Fi for not doing any cooking or washing up. It was after the Great
Snake Shemozzle; I think Kevin was embarrassed that he hadn’t come
out of that with much credit. Then his Sausage Surprise got such a
poor response, so he probably was feeling a bit sensitive. Still,
Fi was getting a reputation for disappearing when work appeared, so
Kevin wasn’t too far wrong.

There was Corrie’s frequent cry of ‘That’s not
funny Homer’, heard when he tipped cold water on her in her
sleeping bag, when he did cruel and disgusting things to a black
beetle, when he dropped a spider down her shirt, when he tore out
the last page of her book and hid it so she didn’t know whether the
lovers made up or not. Corrie was one of Homer’s favourite victims:
he only had to give her a glimpse of the red cape and she charged
straight at it every time. He was lucky she didn’t hold
grudges.

If I’m going to be honest I’d better admit
that I managed to annoy one or two people once or twice. Kevin told
me I was a know-all when I made a few suggestions about rearranging
the fire. In fact the fire got me in trouble a few times. I guess I
liked fiddling with it a bit too much. Whenever it died down a
little, or the smoke started coming in the wrong direction, or the
billy wasn’t over the best coals, I’d be in there with a stick,
‘fixing’ it. Well, that’s what I called it. The others called it
‘being a bloody nuisance’.

My worst fight was really stupid. I don’t
know, maybe all fights are really stupid. We started talking about
the colours of cars, which ones are the most conspicuous and which
ones the least. Kevin said white was the most conspicuous and black
the least; Lee said yellow and green; I said red and khaki; I
forget what the others said. Suddenly it got quite heated. ‘Why do
you think they paint ambulances and police cars white?’ Kevin
yelled. ‘Why do you think they paint fire engines red?’ I yelled
back. ‘Why do you think they have so many yellow taxis?’ Lee yelled
a bit, although I don’t think his heart was in it. It went on and
on. I thought I was on safe ground with khaki for inconspicuous,
because that’s what the Army uses, but Kevin told some long story
about how he nearly had a head-on with a black car a week after he
got his P’s. ‘That doesn’t prove black’s hard to see,’ I said, ‘it
just proves you shouldn’t be allowed on the roads.’ I can’t even
remember how it ended, which goes to show how stupid it was.

But on our last night, sitting around the fire
playing True Confessions, Robyn unexpectedly said, ‘I don’t want to
go back. This is the best place and this has been the best
week.’

‘Yeah,’ Lee said. ‘It’s been great.’

‘I’m looking forward to a hot shower though,’
Fi said. ‘And decent food.’

‘Let’s do this again,’ Corrie said. ‘Back here
in the same place with the same people.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ Homer said, obviously thinking of
another five days to spend adoring Fi.

‘Let’s keep this place a secret,’ Robyn said.
‘Otherwise everyone’ll start using it and it’ll be wrecked in no
time.’

‘It is a good campsite,’ I said. ‘Next time we
should have a proper search for where the hermit lived.’

‘He might have just had a shelter here and
it’s fallen down,’ Lee said.

‘But he built that bridge so well. You’d think
he’d build his shelter even better.’

‘Well maybe he just lived in a cave or
something.’

True Confessions resumed, but I went to bed
before they could make me confess to all the things I’d done with
Steve. I figured I’d told enough already, so I got out while the
going was good. But I still didn’t sleep well. Like I said,
normally I was a heavy sleeper, but the last few nights I just
couldn’t settle down to it. To my own surprise I realised I was
quite anxious to get home, to see how things were, to make sure it
was all OK. I did feel some kind of strange anxiety.

In the morning everyone got moving early, but
it’s a funny thing, you can have ninety per cent of the work done
in the first hour, but the other ten per cent takes at least two
hours. That’s Ellie’s Law. So it was nearly eleven o’clock and
starting to warm up before we were ready to go. A last check of the
fire, a regretful farewell to our secret clearing, and we hit the
track.

It was a steep climb, and we soon began to
realise why we hadn’t been too keen to do day trips back up onto
Tailor’s Stitch. Our biggest motivation, apart from Fi’s enthusiasm
for showers and food, was to see where the track started at the
top. We couldn’t figure out how we – and all those other people
over the years – had missed it. So we kept plugging along, sweating
and grunting up the hardest bits, sometimes pushing the person in
front through a narrow gap in Satan’s Steps. I noticed Homer stayed
close to Fi, giving her helpful pushes whenever he got the chance,
and she’d smile at him and he’d go red. Could she possibly like
him, maybe? I wondered. Or was she enjoying stringing him along?
It’d serve Homer right if a girl did that to him. One girl could
get revenge for all of us.

Our packs were lighter, thanks to all the food
we’d eaten, though after a short time they felt as heavy as ever.
But soon enough we were close to the top, and looking ahead to see
where we’d come out. The answer, when we got close enough to tell,
was surprising. The track suddenly veered right away from Satan’s
Steps and struck out across a landslide of loose gravel and rocks.
This was the first time we’d been out in the open since leaving the
campsite. It took a few minutes to find it again on the other side,
because it was much fainter and thinner. It was like going from a
road onto a four-wheel-drive track. It was in public view, but it
still would have been invisible to anyone standing on the arete.
And anyone stumbling across it would have thought it was just an
animal track.

It continued to wind upwards then, finishing
at a big old gum tree near Wombegonoo. The last hundred metres were
through scrub so thick that we had to bend double to get along the
path. It was almost like a tunnel, but it was very clever because
people looking down from Wombegonoo would see only impenetrable
bush. The gum tree was at the base of a sheet of rock that
stretched up to Wombegonoo’s summit. It was an unusual tree,
because it had multiple trunks, which must have parted from each
other in its early days, so that now they grew out like petals on a
poppy. The track actually started in the bowl in the middle of the
tree: it brought us cunningly into the bowl by leading us under one
of the trunks. The bowl was so big that the seven of us could
squash into it. Either side of the tree and below it was the jungly
scrub of Hell; above was the sheet of rock which, as Robyn said,
would leave no tracks. It was a perfect setup.

We took a break on Wombegonoo, not for long
because we had virtually no food left and we’d all been too lazy to
carry any water up from the creek. It was about a forty minute walk
to the faithful Landrover, which we found where we’d left it,
backed in under the shady trees, patiently waiting. We fell upon it
with cries of delight, getting into the water first, then pigging
out on the food, even the healthy stuff that we’d rejected five
days earlier. It’s amazing how quickly your attitudes can change. I
remember hearing on the radio someone saying how prisoners of war
had been so grateful for any little scrap of food when they were
liberated at the end of World War Two, then two days later they
were complaining because they got chicken noodle soup instead of
tomato. That was just like us – and still is. That day at the
Landie I was dreaming of an ice cream I’d chucked out from the
fridge at home a week earlier, because it had too many little ice
crystals sticking to it. I’d have given anything to have had it
back in my hand. I couldn’t believe how casually I’d thrown it
away. But after an hour or two at home I guess I would have thrown
it away again.

Once we got to the Landrover it seemed like
the others lost any sense of urgency to get home. It was a hot day,
humid, with quite a lot of low cloud drifting past. You couldn’t
see the coast at all. It was the kind of weather that sapped your
energy. That wasn’t really true for me though. I was still a bit
uneasy, keen to get back, wanting to check that everything was OK.
But I couldn’t force the others to go at my pace. I was affected by
Robyn telling me just that morning that I was bossy. I was a bit
hurt by that, especially coming from Robyn, who didn’t normally say
unkind things. So I kept quiet while everyone lay around in the
patchy sunlight, sleeping off the effects of all the food we’d just
eaten.

After a while Kevin and Corrie disappeared
down the road a way. Homer was lying as close as he dared get to
Fi, but she didn’t seem to be taking any notice of him. I talked to
Lee a bit, about life in the restaurant. It was interesting. I
didn’t realise how hard it was. He said his parents wouldn’t use
microwaves or any modern inventions – they still did things in the
traditional way – so that meant a lot more work. His father went
down to the markets twice a week, leaving at 3.30 in the morning. I
didn’t think running a restaurant would suit me, once I heard
that.

Eventually, around midafternoon, we got going,
picking up Kevin and Corrie down the road a kilometre or so. We
lurched our way down at about the same speed as we’d lurched our
way up. As we got a better view of the plains we were surprised to
see six different fires in the distance, scattered across the
countryside. Two looked quite big. It was really too early in the
year for major bushfires, but too late for burning off. But that
was the only unusual thing we noticed, and none of the fires was
remotely close to our places.

At the river there was a majority vote for a
swim, so we stopped again for a long time, more than an hour. I was
getting quite edgy, but there was nothing I could do to hurry them
up. I only swam for five minutes, and Lee didn’t go in at all, so
when I came out of the water I sat and talked to him again. After a
while I said, ‘I wish they’d get a move on. I’m really keen to get
home.’