Blacky Blasts Back (7 page)

‘Fifteen!' he yelled. ‘Ya barkin' wee minkers. Ya bahmpots. Ya choobs. Awa' and boil yir heids.'

Phil stepped in.

‘Jimmy's right, guys,' he said. No one argued with this, for the very good reason we had no idea what Jimmy had just said. ‘When we say fifteen minutes, we mean fifteen. Not twenty. Not thirty. Fifteen. Got it? Okay.'

He put his hands behind his back. ‘Here's the plan for today. We are going to start with a simple team-building exercise. After lunch, we'll take a small hike into the bush. No more than two kilometres. This will be preparation for a longer hike we'll take the day after tomorrow. When we return, depending on time, we might take the kayaks out onto the river.'

I put my hand up. Phil nodded at me.

‘Won't it be cold in the water?' I asked. The temperature had dropped even further. A penguin would have been on the lookout for a fleecy jumper and a hot-water bottle.

‘And?' said Phil.

‘I was wondering if there was heating in the kayaks?'

Phil laughed, but Jimmy appeared to get even redder. I worried the top of his head might explode. He took a couple of paces forward, elbowing Phil out of the way. He turned the twin bores of his nostrils towards me.

‘Heat, is it?' he yelled. ‘I'll give ya heat, lad. Do ye know why yir kayak wud freeze the wee bits oaf a brass monkey?'

At least I understood most of this. It seemed like progress.

‘No,' I said.

‘Because ye cannae huv yir kayak an' heat it,' he said. Then he burst out laughing. ‘Geddit?' he spluttered. ‘Yir kayak an' heat it. Tha's a wee cracker, so it is.'

Phil stepped in once again.

‘After that,' he said, ignoring his colleague, who appeared to be on the verge of suffocating on his own laughter, ‘you'll be preparing the evening meal – a barbecue – and cleaning up afterwards. Bed will be at eight-thirty, ready for a six o'clock warm-up run in the morning. Any questions?'

This time he did pause, but no one said anything. I think we were too stunned. I'd been hoping for an opportunity to read a book, maybe catch a quick afternoon nap. Possibly a swim in the resort pool, some television in the games room, a leisurely buffet dinner before settling down in front of a new-release
DVD
on a forty-two-inch plasma screen. That's my idea of doing it tough. Unfortunately, we appeared to be lacking a few of the essentials. Like a pool, a games room and a television.

We trailed after our guides as they led us down to the banks of a slow-moving river. It wasn't a big river, maybe twelve metres across, but it looked cold. I half expected to see the odd iceberg floating past. Or even a normal iceberg.

Jimmy still hadn't recovered from his own wit, so Phil gave us instructions.

‘Your task is to construct a way of getting across this river. Three rules. One, the members of your team must all travel together. You can't go one by one. Two, the only tools you have are a length of rope and a small machete. Three, you cannot cut anything down from the forest. Anything you use must already be lying around. Two teams. Start when you're ready.'

Dyl and I were on the same team. Unfortunately, the other two members were John and Kyle. Kyle had a face like roadkill, a home-pierced eyebrow and the attention span of a goldfish. He didn't fill me with confidence. We got into a huddle, which was a good idea since we exchanged heat. I was starting to lose feeling in my extremities. Unfortunately, we were also exchanging body odours. Kyle was part fish. Fish that had been left out in the sun for a couple of days. I broke away.

‘Any ideas?' I asked.

The signs weren't good. Kyle shuffled songs on his iPod and Dyl drained his fifth cola of the day. At this rate he'd run out by the weekend. John, meanwhile, did a stunning impersonation of a tree. Time for Marcus to take charge.

I had two ideas. The first was to spread John across the river and use him as a bridge. I didn't suggest it. The second involved building a raft.

‘C'mon guys,' I said. ‘We need to work together here. There's no I in team.'

‘No Z either,' said John. ‘What's your point?'

‘There
is
a B in banana, though,' chipped in Kyle. ‘Isn't there?'

‘And plenty of
A
s,' said Dyl. ‘Why? Has anyone got a banana? I'm starving.'

I sighed.

‘Forget the bananas,' I said. ‘We need to build a raft.'

‘Hate fruit,' said John. ‘Not a monkey. Need Mars bar.'

It took some time to get the subject away from food, but eventually we fanned out along the bank of the river and collected logs and fallen branches. I kept a firm hold on the machete. I didn't trust John.

The other team were also collecting wood, but I got the impression they were just copying us. We dragged the bigger branches down to the riverbank. The key, I reckoned, was speed. We didn't need to build a catamaran with carved figurehead, sundeck and tennis court. Just a bog-standard raft, big enough to take the weight of three boys and a human giraffe.

I selected eight branches and lopped off unnecessary foliage. Dyl and John took each branch as I finished it and lashed them together with rope. Kyle scrolled through his iPod.

John surprised me. He knew what he was doing with the rope, first of all dunking it into the river and then weaving it through the individual branches. Finally, he tightened the whole structure with a slipknot.

‘Rope wet,' he said. ‘Tightens when dry.'

‘Cool, John,' I said. I felt brown-nosing wouldn't hurt. ‘Were you in the Cub Scouts?'

John snorted.

‘Nah, Mucus,' he replied. ‘Executioner. Career aim. Read a book once.' I tried to keep the surprise out of my face. I'd have put money on John being incapable of colouring in a book, let alone reading one. ‘Knots. Need knots to hang people.'

It wasn't the right time to point out that we don't have capital punishment in Australia anymore. It's not a good idea to upset a potential homicidal maniac.

Both groups finished their rafts at the same time. It wasn't fair. The other group had just imitated us, move for move. But I had a secret weapon. True, I was banking on the other kids being idiots, but nothing I'd seen so far suggested I might be mistaken. As soon as our misshapen raft was finished, I jumped about like a frog on a sugar rush.

‘Hurry, guys,' I yelled. ‘Get this in the water. We can't let them win.'

It was a simple plan, but it worked. The other group grabbed their raft, flung it onto the slow-moving waters of the river and leaped on board. The whole contraption rocked violently, threatening to send the boys into the water. Then it settled. I had my hand on the edge of our raft, stopping it from being launched. I wanted to see if I was right.

I was. The other group panicked for a moment, shuffled to get their balance. Then, when they saw they were safely floating and we weren't even on the water, their expressions turned to glee.

‘Ha! Losers.'

‘Eat my shorts!'

One of the boys dropped his dacks to moon us, but the movement caused the raft to wobble alarmingly. The rest of his group grabbed and steadied him.

‘C'mon, Marc,' said Dyl. ‘They're going to beat us.'

‘No, they're not,' I said. ‘Watch.'

I loved the way the expressions of the boys on the raft changed from triumph to despair. They had forgotten one thing. Adrift on the river, they had no way of steering. The current caught their raft and took it gently downriver. The other bank was only ten metres away, but it might as well have been ten kilometres. They drifted off into the distance.

I held up the long poles I had been saving as a way of pushing us across the river. We could have used John for the same purpose, but I figured he might resent it.

‘Wave goodbye, guys,' I said.

The four of us waved at the dwindling raft in the centre of the river. One of the other group even waved back. ‘Bon voyage,' I yelled. ‘Send us a postcard.'

After that, it was simple. We stepped carefully onto our raft, making sure it wasn't going to capsize. I handed one pole to John and kept the other. Then we carefully punted our way across. When we landed on the opposite bank we'd only moved a few metres downriver. One by one, we stepped onto land.

‘Yay! We won.'

There was jubilation. We punched the air. We gave each other high-fives. We slapped each other on the back. I gave John Oakman a playful thump between the shoulder–blades.

We were tight. We were pals. We'd bonded as a group.

Unfortunately, as my hand made contact with John's back, he stood on a slippery stone. His foot slid. And then it was like one of those old films I'd seen of tall trees being felled. I was tempted to yell T
IMBERRRR!
I didn't.

I watched as he fell into the icy cold water.

I watched as he got to his feet, dripping wet and starting to shiver.

I watched as he turned to glare at me.

We were loose. We were un-pals. We'd come unstuck.

Oops.

It was evening and colder than a polar bear's armpit.

We hadn't got the kayaks out, though we
had
gone on a two-kilometre hike into the bush. There hadn't been time for everything. Firstly, the other group had to be rescued. Jimmy and Phil threw them a rope and towed them to shore. Pity in a way. I'd kinda been hoping for a waterfall. Then we defrosted John. He looked like an icy pole. I reckon it was the only thing that saved me. He'd have killed me if he hadn't been frozen to the ground. I thought it was good odds we'd have to take a blowtorch to him. We didn't. Instead, our guides built a small fire, then wrapped him in blankets and stuck him in front of it. I was going to suggest putting up a couple of split sticks over the fire and turn him on it like a spit, but kept the idea to myself.

Now we were all wrapped in our warmest clothes and huddled around a huge open fire. Overhead, the sky was packed tight with hard, bright stars.

‘Reet, ye big jessies, ya wee girls' blouses,' yelled Jimmy. He appeared to have got his volume control stuck. Whatever he said – and none of us could understand much anyway – was said at maximum decibel count. ‘Nae carry-oot here. Ye want tae eat, ye cook yersen.'

‘Time to get the barbecue going,' added Phil. I think he realised he was also translator.

‘Phil?' I said, as we put kindling under the barbecue grill and Jimmy lugged out a big esky with meat in it.

‘Yeah, mate?'

‘Where is Jimmy from?'

Phil smiled and tugged at his earring.

‘Having trouble with the accent? Scotland, mate. Glasgow, originally.'

‘So he's only just come to Australia?'

‘Been here thirty years.'

I was amazed.

‘Then why hasn't he learned the language?'

Phil laughed.

‘They speak English in Scotland, mate,' he said. ‘Just not as we know it. If you think this is bad, you should have heard him thirty years ago. Compared to that, he's positively ocker now.'