down it, wondering how far I should go. If I’d got the wrong one this could be an expensive side trip. I suddenly remembered too that you’re not meant to ride four-wheelers on made roads. Well, not my four-wheeler anyway. It was something to do with the tyres. They ploughed up the paddocks any time I went off the tracks. Around the front of the machinery shed where I rode in and out, you could see nothing but muddy tracks. The grass was worn away in no time flat. They were heavy-tread tyres and I don’t know why they couldn’t tolerate bitumen but apparently they couldn’t.
Well, tough luck. For tonight they had no choice.
I’d gone about a k and a half when I saw one of those green and white direction signs ahead. Thank goodness. I’d been lucky no more cars had come. If I was really lucky the sign would tell me I was on Rawson Road. If I was really really lucky Homer and Lee and the others would be waiting there with Gavin to say, ‘Hi Ellie, the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm and we can all go home.’
I wasn’t too lucky. The sign was not in English but the numbers were the same as ours, and it looked like they’d kept the road numbering system we’d used. I didn’t know what number Rawson Road was meant to be but I knew it wasn’t Highway 3 and apparently I was on Highway 3.
Swear swear swear. Swearwords can be satisfying sometimes. I wheeled the bike around then had to go straight off the road because there was a car coming. In fact it was a truck with a string of cars behind it so I had to lie low for about four minutes while they all trundled past. As soon as there was a break I revved the bike back to the intersection. I didn’t have to worry about noise now, not out here on the highway.
I turned left and headed off on the dirt again. The landscape looked exactly the same. Sometimes it gets so boring, the way it just goes on and on. Sometimes it’s depressing. On TV ages ago they were talking about the Germans invading Russia during World War II, and how the landscape of Russia sent some of the soldiers crazy. It was to do with the way they woke up each morning and set out again and marched all day but nothing changed. Nothing ever changed! For day after day, month after month, they kept moving through a world where they felt like they weren’t moving at all. Walking and walking and walking and the horizon never moved and it all stayed the same.
No, I remembered, I didn’t see it on TV, I heard it on the car radio, and Mum was driving, because I remember her looking out at the bush and saying, ‘Yes, God, yes!’ when she heard this.
I didn’t agree with her — our landscape never had that effect on me — and I was worried by her saying it. For one thing I thought she was being disloyal. But still, I understood what she meant. At the same time if you knew the bit of bush you were in, or if you stopped and spent some time there, or if you opened your eyes and had a decent look around, you couldn’t see it as monotonous. It was only when we were driving that the endless miles got slightly depressing sometimes.
I sort of knew Rawson Road when I came to it. I’m not sure what it was, but something gave me the vibe of ‘Yes, I think this is it.’ It must have been three years since I’d come along here, and that was in the car, with my parents.
I turned left and rode fast on the gravel at the side, looking for another green and white sign. There wasn’t one, but after a couple of k’s I passed the entrance to a farm, and in paint on the front gate was the address, unaltered since before the war, 1274 Rawson Road.
What a relief. I pressed on. My next problem was to find out whether I was going in the right direction. I figured I was now on the hypotenuse of the triangle. The other two sides were from my place to the start of Sutherland’s, and Sutherland’s itself. The hypotenuse didn’t really lead back to my place, but it came out about eight k’s away. Close enough.
I knew that the square of the hypotenuse would be equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Thank you Wirrawee High for that piece of knowledge. But it didn’t seem much help right now. I needed something else. I needed the intuition and awareness of a fox. I remembered how foxes do this thing where they get a rooster to stick his head through the wire of the pen so the fox can bite it off. I didn’t know how they did it but I’d seen it a couple of times myself and the Yannoses had it happen to their chooks too. I don’t mean I actually saw it, but I saw the results. You go down to the chook pen in the morning and there’s a decapitated rooster lying inside the wire. How is it possible? We have quite a big pen and yet somehow the fox was able to get the rooster to come all the way to the wire and obligingly stick his head through so the fox could have it for supper.
I needed to find the trick, to know how to do it. I suppose it’s like using the energy in the ball and deflecting it to win a point. I vaguely remembered Robyn explaining something like this to me once when we were playing tennis. She understood sport in a way I never could. She said you don’t try to hit the ball hard. You let the other player do that, and you just put your racquet in the way and let the ball go back with the speed the other player has already put on it.
If a fox can make the rooster come to the wire and put its head out to be bitten off, the fox doesn’t have to do much work. I didn’t want to start a war here; all I wanted was to bounce Gavin back to the other side of the border.
I kept going but I could see I was heading into a serious problem. Rawson Road was quickly turning into a suburb. There were houses ahead, and they were close together. Being in a rural environment had been fine by me, but there was no way I could ride through settled areas on a four-wheeler. It was one of those mid-moon nights, where you could see well enough, not like a full moon, as good as daylight, but light enough to put me in a dangerous situation.
I snuck past the first group of houses, took the curve, saw another even longer row of houses and slipped past them too, but I was running out of nerves and I knew I’d soon be running out of luck. I didn’t want to wait until my last bit of luck actually fizzled out like foam on the sand. I pulled over onto a bit of broken ground and sat there trying desperately to think. I hated being in this position, where I had to make life and death decisions in a matter of seconds, with practically no information to go on. I like being in control. I was biting my bottom lip one minute and chewing on my knuckle the next. What to do? What to do? My mind threatened to break out and stampede, to knock down the fences and run wild, to go in a dozen directions at once.
‘All right,’ I told myself, ‘at least work out what you want most of all. What are you doing here?’ I knew the answer straight away. I was here with a mission and that was to find Gavin and keep him safe and get him home alive. It would be nice to help Homer and Lee and Jeremy and Jessica, and save innocent people from being attacked by a bunch of terrorists, and preferably to keep myself alive too, but this was a Gavin mission and it was as simple as that.
OK, so how was I going to do it?
No easy answer, just keep going and look everywhere and hope like hell or heaven I could find him.
I had to leave the bike though. I rolled it behind a tree. It wouldn’t be safe for long but if this was the beginning of the suburbs I couldn’t ride any further. I slung the rifle onto my back and trotted down the side of the road, keeping to the shadows, looking for something, anything, a clue, a prop, a guide.
Sometimes in life you do get what you want. In this case, though, I was quite a way past the sign before I recognised it.
It was another road sign, this one from pre-war days, a sort of mustard colour with a green logo. A tourist sign I think. There was no name on it, just a picture of a palm tree and 800 metres.
I was so busy looking for a car to steal, some sort of transport, that I got a hundred metres past the sign before I started thinking about palm trees. By now I was well and truly in the land of the flats and the low-cost houses and the tar and cement. A set of traffic lights was ahead. I was getting really wary. Things were quiet, but there were cars occasionally and I saw a kid on a skateboard and a couple of people going in and out of their homes. It was weird. This didn’t look like a war zone. I felt like I was the terrorist. I was the one with the rifle.
Palm tree. Wait a minute. Palm tree. Jeremy’s voice. Ambush. ‘Under the coconut tree,’ that’s what he’d said. What did he mean? An ambush under the coconut tree?
I started jogging. I had to take a long detour to get around the intersection. Luckily half the lights weren’t working, so it wasn’t as well lit as it would have been in the old days. The whole atmosphere was like that though, everything run-down, shabby. Potholes in the road, a drain blocked and water banked up in a big pond, a bus shelter with the roof missing. I ignored all that and hurried on. I covered maybe half a k and then saw the coconut tree. It was hard to work out what it was. On my left was an old house, like a historic place that was probably open to the public or something before the war, but on the right was a shopping centre. Out the front was a row of palm trees, all looking a bit old and trashed, and in the middle of the main entrance was a big neon palm with three-quarters of its lights out. Why on earth would anyone choose this as a place for an ambush? I could see an arcade or mall in
