Tomorrow When The War Began (6 page)

‘Of course it’s bad,’ I yelled at her. ‘Do you
think my dad would leave his dogs to die like that? Do you think
I’ll be having a good laugh about that tomorrow?’ I was screaming
and crying at the same time. There was a pause, then suddenly
everyone lost control. Robyn started crying, and yelling ‘I didn’t
mean it that way Ellie, you know I didn’t!’; Corrie was shouting
‘Shut up! Everyone shut up!’; Kevin was rubbing his fingers through
his hair, going ‘Oh God, oh God, what’s going on?’; Fi had her hand
in her mouth and looked like she wanted to eat it. She was so white
I thought she was about to faint. Suddenly Homer, madly, said, ‘Fi,
I’ve heard of biting your nails, but that’s ridiculous’. We all
looked at Fi and a moment later we were all laughing. Hysterical
laughter, but it was laughter. Lee had had tears pouring down his
face, but now he wiped them away and said quickly, ‘Let’s listen to
Robyn. Come on everyone.’

‘I’m sorry Robyn,’ I said. ‘I know you didn’t
mean ...’

‘I’m sorry too,’ she said. ‘It was a bad
choice of words.’ She took a deep breath and clenched her fists.
You could see her calming herself, like she did at netball
sometimes.

At last she continued. ‘Look everyone, I
didn’t want to say much. Just that we’ve got to be careful. If we
go rushing around the countryside, to seven different houses, well,
it mightn’t be such a bright thing to do, that’s all. We should
decide some things, like whether to stick together, or break into
small groups, like Kevin and Corrie want to do. Whether we should
use the vehicles. Whether we should go any further in daylight.
It’s almost dark now. For a start I suggest no one goes on from
here until it is dark, and that when they do go they don’t use
lights.’

‘What do you think’s happened?’ I asked. ‘Do
you think the same as Lee?’

‘Well,’ said Robyn. ‘There’s no sign of anyone
leaving in a hurry, like in an emergency. They left some days ago.
And they expected to come back some days ago. Now, what’s something
that everyone would have gone off to some days ago, expecting to
come back? We all know the answer to that.’

‘Commemoration Day,’ said Corrie. ‘The
Show.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Homer,’ I said, ‘is there some way you can
tell if your parents came back from the Show? I mean, if I’d
thought of it before, I could have looked for a couple of our bulls
that I know Dad was showing, that he wouldn’t have sold for any
price. And he wouldn’t have come back from the Show without them. I
mean, he would have kept those bulls in the bedroom if Mum had let
him.’

Homer thought for a minute.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Mum’s needlepoint. She
enters a new piece every year, then win lose or draw she brings it
back and hangs it on her Honour Wall. She gets a big thrill putting
it up there. Hang on a sec.’

He ran out, and we waited in silence. He was
back a moment later. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s not there.’

‘OK,’ Robyn said. ‘Let’s assume that a lot of
people went to the Show and didn’t come back. And let’s assume that
since Commem Day all power and phones have been cut, all radio
stations are off the air, and there have been a number of fires.
And the people who went to the Show wanted to come back but
couldn’t. Where does that get us?’

‘And there’s the other thing,’ Lee said.

Robyn looked at him. ‘Yes,’ she said.

Lee continued, ‘The night of the Show those
hundreds of aircraft, maybe even more than hundreds, that came in
over the coast, flying low and at high speed.’

‘And without lights,’ I added, realising that
critical point for the first time.

‘Without lights?’ Kevin said. ‘You didn’t tell
us that.’

‘It didn’t strike me,’ I said. ‘You know how
you notice something, but not consciously? That’s what it was
like.’

‘Let’s assume something else,’ Fi said. She
sounded, and looked, angry. ‘Let’s assume that what you’re saying
is absolutely ridiculous.’ She sounded like me, in this same room,
not very many minutes earlier. Hadn’t I said ‘absolutely
ridiculous’? But now I was starting to come round to Lee and
Robyn’s way of thinking. That little point about the lights had
made a difference to me. No legitimate aircraft, no aircraft on a
legitimate mission, would have been flying without lights. I should
have registered it at the time, and I was annoyed at myself that I
hadn’t.

But Fi continued, ‘There are dozens more
likely theories. Dozens! I don’t know why you won’t consider
them.’

‘OK Fi, fire away,’ said Kevin. ‘But fire
quickly.’ The strain was really showing in Kevin’s face.

‘All right,’ said Fi. ‘Number one. They’re
sick. They went to the Show and got food poisoning or something.
They’re in hospital.’

‘Then the neighbours would have been here,
looking after the place,’ Homer said.

‘They got sick too,’ said Fi.

‘That doesn’t explain why all the radio
stations are off the air,’ said Corrie.

‘Everyone’s sick then,’ said Fi. ‘There’s a
national problem, with some illness or disease.’

‘That doesn’t explain the planes,’ Robyn
said.

‘They were just coming back from Commem Day,
like we said.’

‘Without lights? And so many of them? Fi, I
don’t know if we even have that many planes. I don’t know if our
Air Force is that big.’

‘OK,’ said Fi. ‘There is some national
emergency, and everyone’s had to go and help.’

‘And the planes?’

‘It’s the Air Force, going to help. And maybe
other countries’ air forces too, all helping.’

‘Then why would they have no lights?’ Robyn
was shouting now, getting mad, like she did on the netball
court.

‘We don’t know that for sure.’ Fi was shouting
too. Fi shouting? First time for everything, I thought. Fi
continued, ‘Ellie might have been wrong. It was the middle of the
night. She would have been half asleep. I mean she only just
thought to mention it now. She couldn’t be that certain.’

‘I saw them Fi,’ I said. ‘I’m certain. It
didn’t strike me at the time. My eyes were working. It’s just that
my brain wasn’t. Anyway, Robyn saw them, and Lee. Ask them.’

‘We didn’t see them,’ Robyn snapped. ‘We only
heard them.’

‘Everyone calm down,’ Homer interrupted. ‘Stay
calm, or we’ll get nowhere. Come on Fi, what else?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just think
they’ve rushed off somewhere to help. Maybe some whales got
stranded.’

‘So two lots of parents rush off without even
leaving notes?’ Kevin asked.

‘But if you take out the planes,’ said Fi,
‘you haven’t got nearly as much. Just some little local
emergency.’

‘Don’t forget the radio stations,’ Robyn
said.

Lee spoke up. ‘Fi, they’re all valid theories.
And I’m not saying you’re wrong. You’re probably right, and the
planes are just a coincidence, and the radio can be explained away
and so on. But the thing that scares the sweat out of me is there
is one theory that does fit all the facts, and so bloody neatly
it’s perfect. Remember our conversation that morning in Hell? How
Commemoration Day would be the ideal day to do it?’

Fi nodded dumbly, tears rolling down her face.
We were all crying again now, even Lee, who kept talking as he
wept.

‘Maybe all my mother’s stories made me think
of it before you guys. And like Robyn said before, if we’re wrong,’
he was struggling to get the words out, his face twisting like
someone having a stroke, ‘if we’re wrong you can laugh as long and
loud as you want. But for now, for now, let’s say it’s true. Let’s
say we’ve been invaded. I think there might be a war.’

Chapter
Seven

It was terrible waiting for it to get dark. We
kept starting out, saying ‘OK, that’s enough, let’s go’, then
someone would say ‘No, wait, it’s still too light’.

That’s the trouble with summer, it’s daylight
for an awfully long time. But we’d made a decision to play it safe
and we stuck to it.

The moon was thin and late to rise, so when we
did get going it really was quite dark. We had a couple of torches
that Homer had been able to find but we’d agreed not to use them
unless absolutely necessary. We left Millie on a blanket in Homer’s
kitchen. She was too weak to move far. We walked along the road for
about a k and a half, then branched across the last of the Yannos’
paddocks, taking a short cut to the lane that led to Kevin’s. I
walked with Homer but we didn’t talk much, except when I suddenly
remembered I hadn’t asked him about their dogs. ‘We only had two
left,’ he said, ‘and they weren’t there. I’m not sure where they
might have gone. I think Dad said something about taking them to
the vet. They both had eczema badly. I can’t remember if he said
that or if I just imagined it.’

Once we were in the lane Kevin starting
running. There were still about two k’s to go but, without a word
being exchanged, we all started running too, behind him. Kevin’s a
big guy, not built for sprinting, and he lumbered along like a
draft horse, but for once we couldn’t keep up with him. Except
Robyn, who was always fit. After a while I couldn’t see them ahead
of us, but I could hear Kevin’s heavy panting coming out of the
darkness. As we grew closer to the house Lee called, ‘Be careful
when you get there Kev’, but he got no reply.

He beat us there by two or three minutes I’d
say, he and Robyn. But there wasn’t much point. His house was the
same as Homer’s and mine. Three dead working dogs on chains, a dead
cockatoo in a cage on the verandah, two dead poddy lambs by the
verandah steps. But his old pet corgi had been locked in the house,
with a bucket of food and a bucket of water in the laundry. She was
alive but she’d chosen one of the bedrooms for a toilet, so the
house smelt pretty foul. She was delirious with joy to see Kevin;
when we got there she was still leaping at his face, crying
pitifully, doing excited midair stunts and wetting herself with
excitement.

Corrie, grim-faced, went past me with a mop
and a handful of rags. I’d noticed when I’d stayed with Corrie that
if things got too emotional she’d start cleaning up. It was a
useful habit she had.

We had another quick conference. There seemed
to be so many problems and so many choices. Robyn had the bright
idea that bicycles were quick and silent – the perfect transport.
Kevin had two little brothers, so we scored three bikes from their
shed. Homer asked if we knew anyone who wouldn’t have gone to the
Show; he’d realised that finding someone who’d stayed home that day
might be the solution to the whole mystery. Lee said he didn’t
think his parents would have gone: his sisters and brothers usually
went, but not his parents. Kevin said he wanted to bring the corgi,
Flip, along with us. He couldn’t bear to leave her alone again
after what she’d been through.

This was a tough one. We all felt sympathetic
to the dog, who seemed to be attached to Kevin’s heels by a metre
of invisible lead, but we were starting to get more and more
conscious of our own safety. We finally agreed to take her with us
to Corrie’s, and make another decision depending on what we found
there.

‘But Kevin,’ warned Lee, ‘we might have to
make some ugly choices.’

Kevin just nodded. He knew.

Robyn, who’d thought of the bikes, ended up
jogging most of the way to Corrie’s. We could only get two on a
bike, and she said she needed the exercise. Homer dinked Kevin, who
nursed Flip in his arms. The little corgi spent the whole trip
licking his face in an ecstasy of love and gratitude. It would have
been funny, if we’d had any emotional energy left to laugh.

The image I’ll always remember from Corrie’s
place is of Corrie standing alone in the middle of the sitting
room, tears streaming down her face. Then Kevin came in from
checking the bedrooms, saw her, and moving quickly to her took her
in his arms and held her close. They just stood there for quite a
few minutes. I liked Kevin a lot for that.

Under a lot of pressure from Robyn we agreed
to try to eat before doing any more. She had been so logical all
evening, and she was still being logical, even though it was her
house that we would head for next. So she and I and Homer made
sandwiches with stale bread and salami, and lettuce and tomatoes
from Mrs Mackenzie’s famous vegetable garden. We made tea and
coffee too, using long-life milk and a little solid-fuel camping
stove. It was hard to force the food down our dry and choked-up
throats, but we nagged and nagged until everyone had eaten at least
one sandwich, and it did make a difference to our energy and
morale.

We decided as we ate that we would go to
Robyn’s, but we knew that we were heading into a whole new set of
problems. Out here in the country, where most of us lived, where
the air was free and the paddocks wide and empty, we had still been
moving fairly confidently. Danger just didn’t seem real. We knew
that if there was trouble, if there was danger, it would be in
town.

Robyn described, for the ones who hadn’t been
there, the layout of her house, and where it was in relation to
Wirrawee. We figured that it should be safe to go in on Coachman’s
Lane, which was just a dirt track at the back of a few ten acre
blocks, including Robyn’s. From the hill behind Robyn’s we could
get a glimpse of the town, which might tell us something.

It was time to leave. Corrie was waiting for
me at the front door. I’d been using the bathroom. I’d forgotten
that the Mackenzies weren’t on town water, and a pressure pump
needs electricity to operate. So I’d had to go out to the bathtub
in the vegetable garden, fill a bucket with water, and come back in
to fill the cistern and flush the toilet. Corrie was getting
impatient but I held her up a few moments longer. I was coming down
the passageway, past their telephone, when I noticed a message on
their fax. ‘Corrie,’ I called out, ‘do you want to see this?’ I
held it out, adding as she came towards me, ‘It’s probably an old
one but you never know’.

She took it and read it. As she went from line
to line I saw her mouth slowly open. Her face seemed to become
longer and thinner, with shock. She stared at me with big eyes,
then pushed the message into my hands and stood there, shaking, as
I read.

In a rough scrawl I saw these words, written
by Mr Mackenzie:

The last twenty or so words were heavily
underlined, everything from ‘go bush’ onwards.

We looked at each other for a moment, then had
a big hug. We both cried a bit, then ran outside to show the
others.

I think I must have run out of tears after
that day, because I haven’t cried again since.

When we left the Mackenzies’ we moved
cautiously. For the first time we acted like people in a war, like
soldiers, like guerillas. Corrie said to us, ‘I’ve always laughed
at Dad for being so cautious. The way he carries his spirit level
everywhere. But his big motto is “Time spent in reconnaissance is
seldom wasted”. Maybe we’d better go with that for a while.’

We had another bike, Corrie’s, so we worked
out a way of travelling that we thought was a compromise between
speed and safety. We fixed a landmark – the first one was the old
Church of Christ – and the first pair, Robyn and Lee, were to ride
to it and stop. If it was safe they’d go back and drop a tea towel
on the road, two hundred metres before the church. The next pair
would set out five minutes after Robyn and Lee and the last three
five minutes later. We agreed on total silence, and we left Kevin’s
old corgi, Flip, chained up at the Mackenzies’. Our fear was making
us think.

For all that, the trip to Robyn’s was
uneventful. Slow, but uneventful. We found her house in the same
condition as the others, empty, smelling bad, cobwebs already. It
made me wonder how quickly houses would fall apart if people
weren’t there to look after them. They’d always seemed so solid, so
permanent. That poem Mum was always quoting, ‘Look on my works ye
mighty and despair’. That was all I could remember, but it was the
first time I started to understand the truth of it.

It was 1.30 in the morning. We went up to the
hill behind Robyn’s house and looked at Wirrawee. Suddenly I was
very tired. The town was in darkness, no street lights even. There
must have been some power though, because there were quite strong
lights at the Showground – the floodlights they used for the
trotting track – and a couple of buildings in the centre of town
were lit. As we sat there we talked softly about our next move.
There was no question that we had to try to reach Fi’s house, and
Lee’s. Not because we expected to find anyone, but because five of
us had seen our homes, had seen the emptiness, had been given a
chance to understand, and it was only fair that the last two should
get the same right.

A truck drove slowly out of the Showground and
to one of the lit buildings, in

Barker Street

I think. We stopped talking and watched. It
was the first sign of human life, other than our own, that we’d
seen since the planes.

Then Homer made an unpopular suggestion. ‘I
think we should split up.’

There was a whispered howl of protest, if you
can have that. It was different to Kevin and Corrie offering to go
on their own before. They just hadn’t wanted to drag us away from
Homer’s. But now Homer wouldn’t give in.

‘We need to be out of town before dawn. A long
way out of town. And we’re running short of time. It’s not going to
be quick and easy, travelling around these streets. We’re getting
tired, and that alone will slow us down, not to mention the care
that we’ll have to take. Also, two people can move more quietly
than seven. And finally, to tell you the truth, if there are
soldiers here and anyone’s caught ... well, again, two’s better
than seven. I hate to mention the fact, but five people free and
two people locked up is a better equation than no people free and
seven locked up. You all know what a whiz I am at Maths.’

He’d talked us into silence. We knew he was
right, except for the Maths part maybe.

‘So what are you suggesting?’ Kevin asked.

‘I’ll go with Fi. I’ve always wanted to see
inside one of those rich houses on the hill. This is my big
chance.’ Fi aimed a tired kick at him which he allowed to hit his
shin. ‘Maybe if Robyn and Lee go to Lee’s, what do you think? And
you other three take a closer look at the Showground. All those
lights ... maybe that’s their base. Or it could be where they’re
keeping people even.’

We digested all this, then Robyn said, ‘Yes,
it’s the best way. How about anyone not wearing dark clothes come
back to the house and help yourselves to some? And we meet back
here on the hill at, say, three o’clock?’

‘What if someone’s missing?’ Fi asked quietly.
It was a terrible thought. After a silence Fi answered her own
question. ‘How about we wait till 3.30 if anyone’s not back. Then
move out fast, but come back tomorrow night – I mean tonight. And
if you’re the ones missing and you get back late, lie low for the
day.’

‘Yes,’ said Homer. ‘That’s all we can do.’

Kevin and Corrie and I didn’t need any darker
clothing, so we were ready to go. We stood and hugged everyone and
wished them luck. A minute later, when I looked back, I could no
longer see them. We picked our way down the hill towards

Warrigle
Street

, climbed through the Mathers’ front fence and
crept along the side of the road, keeping very close to the
treeline. Kevin was leading. I just hoped he didn’t come across any
creepie-crawlies. It wouldn’t be a good time for him to start
yelling and screaming.

Although the Showground was on the edge of
town, it was the opposite side to the edge we were on, so we had
quite a walk ahead. But we could move fairly quickly, because we
were well away from the main streets. Not that Wirrawee’s got many
main streets. I was glad that we were moving: it was the only thing
keeping me sane. It was so hard concentrating on walking and
watching and keeping quiet at the same time. Sometimes I forgot and
made a noise, then the other two would turn and look angrily at me.
I’d shrug, spread my arms, roll my eyes. I still couldn’t
comprehend that this might be a matter of life and death, that this
was the most serious thing I’d ever been involved in. Of course I
knew it; I just couldn’t keep remembering it every single second.
My mind wasn’t that well disciplined. And besides, Kevin and Corrie
weren’t as quiet as they thought they were.

It was hard being so dark, too. Hard not to
trip over stones, or tread on noisy sticks or, on one occasion,
bump into a garbage can.

We got into

Racecourse
Road

, and felt a little safer, as there are so few
houses along there. Passing Mrs Alexander’s I stopped for a moment
to sniff at the big old roses that grew along her front fence. I
loved her garden. She had a party there every year, a Christmas
party. It had only been a few weeks since I’d been standing under
one of her apple trees, holding a plate of biscuits and telling
Steve I didn’t want to go with him any more. Now it felt like it’d
happened five years ago. It had been a hard thing to do, and Steve
being so nice about it made me feel worse. Maybe that’s why he was
so nice about it. Or was I just being cynical?