‘There’s a lot of different ways to get to your house,’ Homer said at last.
‘Yeah.’
‘Like, if you go along here a k there’s another ford.’
‘That’s the truth.’
‘It’d be good to take the scenic route more often.’
‘Homer, what the hell is this about?’
‘If you took different routes all the time, it’d be harder for anyone to ambush you.’
He said it so casually that it took me a while to realise how sinister his message was.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
When he didn’t answer I slowly understood that life was not the way I’d thought, that my life had a different shape to the one I’d imagined. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time I’d seen it so clearly. It’s hard for my brain at moments like that. The only way I can describe it is that I had a picture of my life as, say, a farmhouse with a veranda and a large chimney, and then suddenly it metamorphosed into, I don’t know, a stainless steel triangular prism sitting on top of a mountain.
Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Then, so quietly that I surprised myself, I said, ‘Why?’
He glanced at me, then looked away again, through the windscreen. ‘That raid we went on. To the — ’ I’m not allowed to say the name of the place in case anyone finds this.
‘Yeah?’
‘That envelope of papers he gave me.’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘I tipped them out on the floor to sort them out a bit, just, you know, to pack them better, neater.’
‘Cos you’re such a neatness freak.’
‘Well I wanted them in a bigger envelope where they wouldn’t be — ’
‘Yeah yeah I know, I’m just kidding, go on.’
‘OK, well, first thing I see, well not the first thing, but in the middle of them is a map of your place.’
‘My place?’
‘A map of the district, with your place outlined, and the house marked, and a line drawn along the route we take over the border, more or less.’
‘What?’
‘They didn’t have the boundaries of the property even halfway right, but you could see they were picking out your place, the map was to show someone where you live.’
My body prickled like a thousand funnel webs were walking all over me. I felt as though I were rising in my seat even though I was still sitting behind the wheel.
Homer didn’t say anything else, just waited for me to do the figuring-out by myself. It didn’t take me long. My place was being singled out, I was being singled out. I felt a spasm in my stomach, like a violent sickness, but I didn’t do anything as dramatic as vomit, like in novels, where everyone seems to vomit or faint when they hear bad news or cut their little finger.
So they hadn’t finished with us yet. Before I thought to ask Homer the most important question, he gave me the answer anyway. He said quietly, ‘It was dated two weeks ago.’
‘You could read the date?’
I didn’t know what they did about dates in their language, those aliens, those monsters, those horrible people who I suddenly hated with so much passion it scrunched me up inside.
‘It was a computer thing, you know, downloaded from one of those websites where you can get maps of your back yard.’
I sat there, continuing to figure. It was like a sudoku. Mrs Barlow, my English teacher, had been saying the other day how when you write a story you should think sudoku. Give the reader a few bits and they’ll figure the rest out, no problem. She used me as an example. ‘If I say “Ellie got on the tractor” then you can figure Ellie’s on a farm, you don’t need to tell the reader that, they can work it out for themselves.’
‘She could be at a field day,’ Sam Young called out.
I put him and Mrs Barlow out of my mind and tried to concentrate on my own sudoku. ‘So you think they’re coming back here,’ I said. ‘They’ve got unfinished business. How come you didn’t tell me this straightaway? They could have come last night. Or the night before. Gavin and I could have been murdered by now.’
‘We thought we’d wait till the right moment. And Dad and George and I have been hanging round here for a few nights.’
‘What?’
‘You know… with rifles. These raiding parties are always small. We thought we could take care of them. Dad was right into it. Never knew he was so bloodthirsty. Guess that civil war got into his blood.’
I was dumbstruck. My first instinct was to say, ‘I don’t need looking after! How dare you do that without telling me? I don’t like people making decisions on my behalf.’
But I had to recognise the generosity of my neighbours who would put themselves in danger and go without sleep to protect me. I had to recognise the kindness of it. ‘The highest wisdom is kindness.’ Where had I read that?
‘Thanks,’ I said, trying not to choke on the word. ‘Civil war?’
‘Greek Civil War.’
‘Oh. Was there a Greek Civil War?’
‘Ask him, he’ll tell you. For weeks. Anyway, the Scarlet Pimple did a bit of checking around with the experts from the Army and so forth, and they didn’t have any reports of anyone about to launch an attack. So we thought that you’d probably be OK in the short-term. And face it, if you can’t trust an expert, who can you trust?’
‘Exactly.’
My mind was churning now, fit to match my stomach. I was just one big churn. You could have made butter in me, easy.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘The short-term. That’s all there is now, isn’t there? The bloody short-term. In the medium- term they’ll come in here and kill Gavin and me and burn the place down. And in the long-term we’ll be rotting in our graves. Well bury me with my parents, that’s all I ask. And Gavin too thanks.’
Homer didn’t say anything. We sat there looking through the windscreen of the ute at the eroded gully, the ugly evidence of a landscape wrecked by humans.
CHAPTER 3
Before the raid and the conversation with Homer things had actually been going rather well. Maybe the problem is that I don’t touch wood enough. Maybe the problem is that God likes to play with us. Teasing us the way a kid does with a spider, when he harasses it for a while then lets it crawl away into a hidey-hole, and after a few minutes the spider thinks he’s safe and comes out again and there’s the kid, waiting, ready for the next round. And so on and so on until the kid decides that he’s had enough fun now, he’s bored, and he squishes the spider.
We’d been through a terrible experience in Stratton, Gavin and I, which was about as terrible as experiences get. Gavin’s my adopted brother more or less, and when we went looking for his little sister, we found her, but unfortunately the man who had been their stepfather found us first. No-one but Gavin knew the truth about him, that he had murdered Gavin’s mother. And when you’re the only person in the world who knows about a murder, you’re not in a very comfortable position. We found ourselves in a very uncomfortable position, getting wet and bloody, in a fountain in a park, trying to defend ourselves against a knife attack, and not making a very good job of it for a while. We both had the scars to prove that.
What it did lead to was a new experience for both of us, going to court for a criminal trial. It was one of those things where you feel kind of excited, but guilty for feeling excited. Nervous as well of course, definitely nervous. OK, I’ll be honest, scared, but you can’t help having the other feelings as well. The trial was in Stratton. One thing that was good these days was that the legal system had been streamlined under the new constitution so things got dealt with faster. A law student I was talking to at the court said that in the old days it might have been a year before this case got heard.
