Darkness Be My Friend (20 page)

Corrie, who made herself sick worrying about tests. Corrie, who spent a whole lesson typing groups of As—just the letter A—into a computer, then blocked it, copied and pasted it, and did that over and over until she'd created a file eight megabytes long. Then we did a word count. It took twelve and a half minutes.

Corrie, who broke her collarbone when she fell off the back of the trailer as we picked up the posts from the old fenceline. Corrie, who talked me into following her on a crawl through the little gaps between the bales in their hayshed, then suddenly panicked and thought she wouldn't be able to get out and got total claustrophobia. Corrie, who fell so madly in love with Kevin, and so suddenly, that I was jealous and had to make myself like him. At first I'd even tried to talk her out of going with him but for once she was not going to be talked out of something: she had her heart set on him,
and she got him, and in the end I had to resign myself to the fact that our relationship had changed forever.

We would have to bring Kevin here too, to the cemetery, because he had as much right as I did, maybe more after the sacrifices he'd made to get Corrie to hospital.

But no, I thought, I had a right to be here too. Come and I were mates. We were mates for life.

And now my best mate was under the earth, under six feet of cold heavy soil, separated from me by six feet and by eternity. How could it be possible? All those futures we discussed, all those plans to share a flat and go to uni, to travel the world together, to get jobs as pilots or jillaroos or teachers or doctors or governesses: in none of those plans did we ever consider for a moment that it might end like this. Death wasn't on our agenda. We never mentioned the word. We thought we were indestructible. And what would happen to me now? Our plans had always been for two, but Come had left me and I was on my own. I felt like a Siamese twin who'd been amputated from her other half. Sure I had Fi, and sure I loved her dearly, but I hadn't grown up with her the way I had with Come.

The last time I'd seen Corrie was at the hospital and I thought I'd said goodbye to her then and I'd sort of known I wouldn't see her again, but now I realised I hadn't accepted that at all. There were so many more things I should have said, wanted to say, had forgotten to say. Now, how would I say them? If I lived for a hundred years I would never get the chance to say them.

"How did you know she was here?" I asked Lee.

He shrugged and put his arm around me.

I welcomed that, I wanted it, and I snuggled into him.

"I didn't know. I was just browsing. It got so boring hanging round here. I saw the new graves and thought they might be people who'd died since the invasion."

"Where are your parents?"

"They're buried at the Showground."

I sat up a little, and drew away from him and looked at him. "The Showground? Why? Why not here?"

"Anyone who's been executed—that's what they call it when they murder someone—gets buried at the Showground. I don't know why. I guess they figure they're too naughty to get a proper grave."

"How'd you find that out?"

"Dr. Krishnananthan told me."

"So that's how you found out they'd died? You haven't seen their graves?"

"That's right."

"Oh, Lee. It's all so sad."

We hugged for, I don't know, an hour or so, trying to comfort each other.

Finally I said, "We'd better go back."

"I don't want to."

"Yeah, I know."

And I knew why. When we went back we would have to break the news to the other three.

In a way I would rather have faced the enemy again than face that.

Sometimes friendship has quite a price. I loved Fi and I liked her parents, but when Fi asked me to hide with her in the park while she waited to meet them I agreed, then realised later I didn't really want to do it.

Why? I'm not sure. I think it was too much to cope with. One night I find that three people who were so very important in our lives are dead, I go through more grief than I knew I could feel (I'd been thinking I could never feel anything again), and I realise that I'm still fairly rapt in Lee. And that was all just after Fi asked me if I would go to the park with her.

Fi reacted kind of strangely to the deaths of Lee's parents and Come. It didn't seem to sink in somehow. She didn't react with grief, like Homer did, or rage and despair, like Kevin. Maybe she was numb to it all. The shock of finding out about her parents seemed to leave her like a robot. It was like she had shut down.

I'd done the same thing myself a few times, that's how come I recognised it in her.

But I went to the park at four-thirty in the morning, with her and Lee, and Lee showed us where to hide in the middle of the tree ferns. It was cool and damp there. Unlike the ferns at the high school, they had survived the neglect while the invasion was happening. Someone was looking after them now because their fronds were a fresh green and their trunks a strong brown.

Not that we could see that until the sun came up. We moved the garden seat, which was the signal to Fi's parents that Dr. Krishnananthan suggested, then,
after Lee left, I spent all my time trying to find a comfortable spot. It was so damp that I soon had a wet bottom. It was pretty cold in among the ferns. The next thing I gave a series of sneezes, about seven I think. That startled Fi out of her coma. She peeped out of the ferns nervously in case hundreds of soldiers were running towards us with boxes of tissues. Or something else.

I was hanging out for dawn, so it would warm up, but even long after the sun rose no heat reached the fernery. It was designed that way, of course. I felt that I would die of hypothermia soon. When my teeth started chattering uncontrollably, and no amount of rubbing would warm my arms and legs, I said to Fi, "I'll have to go out in the sun for a minute, or it'll be the end of me."

She was too nervous to do the same but she kept lookout while I did a quick two minutes in the early heat of the morning.

The day dragged on. Fi and I didn't talk for a long time. There was so much to say that we couldn't even start. I took to looking at my watch every few minutes: 7.50, 8.05, 8.15, 8.35. We'd hoped to see them arriving for work, but we didn't. They probably came by car or truck from the Showground, and the carpark was on the other side of the building.

Gradually I got into the spirit of things. At last I was getting excited on Fi's behalf. The only problem was that once I started sneezing, I couldn't stop. Every time I sneezed Fi jumped a metre, then looked out fearfully to see if anyone was coming. I tried to bottle up the sneezes but I couldn't stop them all. I've always had a
theory that it's bad for you to suffocate your sneezes and, sure enough, I soon found myself getting a headache, so that proved my theory.

10.35, 11.00, 11.15, 11.45. The hands of my watch moved so slowly I kept putting it to my ear to make sure it still worked. We didn't know what time Fi's parents would come out, but any time after noon seemed possible. Neither of us could stand still. Fi was almost spinning, she was so excited. She was talking now. She kept fingering her scar, and starting sentences, then changing to new ones and forgetting what she'd been talking about.

"Do you think this bracken is ... it reminds me of the botanical gardens at Stratton ... I wonder if they got bombed ... do you remember the church there? They sure ... oh look, there's a pigeon on the hand of the statue ... did you ever see Mr. Morrison's parrots, the way they used to..."

All of this would be in bits and pieces, like she wasn't really listening herself, stuttering and stammering and switching topics, and taking five minutes to get a few words out.

I didn't blame her, though. If all went well she was about to have one of the most powerful moments of her life, the moment that we'd all dreamed about and longed for, and that for at least one of us could now never happen. I kept wondering how it felt for Lee to break the news to Fi that she could see her parents. No one would ever break that news to him now. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

But side by side with my grief for Lee was my happiness for Fi. I just wished there was more room in my
little body to accommodate all these violent wild feelings that kept screaming around inside me. I already had so much stuff squashed in there—liver and appendix and intestines and heart and all that junk. There was absolutely no room for feelings. But they still managed to squeeze in somewhere. Most of them lived in my stomach—a whole huge mess of them in there—but some kept crawling over my hands, and some stuck in my throat like I'd swallowed a doorknob.

While I thought about all that, half an hour more sneaked past. And suddenly Fi grabbed my left wrist so hard she nearly broke the bone. Just like she'd held Lee's hand back at the school. I had no idea she could be so strong. I looked up at the tech building. There they were, sauntering across the grass, trying to look casual. They did look pretty good, too. They were both very thin, although they always had been, but before the war they were slim and now they were skinny. They both wore jeans and T-shirts, which was funny, because their style used to be corduroy and tweed. Mr. Maxwell looked naked without a tie.

Fi gave a little sob. If I hadn't pulled her back by the shirt I think she would have run straight out there. But I wasn't much better because I sneezed, three times, very loudly. Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell looked over towards us like they'd heard gun-shots. Then they both glanced around guiltily. They were walking about five metres apart but it was as though a string connected them, because their movements were so co-ordinated.

I hoped desperately that no one was watching. I scanned the park, searching for any sign of movement.

Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell went past the ferns, one on
each side, then Mr. Maxwell pretended to see something in there worth looking at. He called to his wife and pointed to it and they both came walking in, as though they were botanists in the jungle.

I grinned at them and Mr. Maxwell gave me a nervous smile and patted my arm but, of course, they only had eyes for one person.

"Oh my poor darling, look at your face," I heard Mrs. Maxwell say, as she put an arm around Fi and sort of folded Fi into her.

I left them to it and eased my way to the edge of the fernery. The pretend reason was to look out for soldiers, but if any appeared I wouldn't be able to do much. We could run away but Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell couldn't, because Fi's little sister was at the Showground as a hostage. And if we ran away and the soldiers saw us they would know we were the ones they'd been searching for in the bush, the ones who lit the fire. So Fi's parents and her sister would be in deep sewage if that happened.

On the other hand we couldn't just stay there and let ourselves be caught. In all the time I'd spent with Fi since early morning we never got around to discussing what we'd do if we were seen. I supposed we would run—we would have to run—but the consequences would be so awful that I couldn't even imagine how we'd live with them afterwards.

For the first time I began to realise just how terribly dangerous this situation was. We should have thought it through much more. We were losing the old habits of caution that we'd had before we went to New Zealand. We were getting too casual.

I felt guilty thinking it, but I couldn't help hoping Fi wouldn't spend too much time with her parents.

Of course, the real reason I stayed away from their meeting was that I wanted Fi to have her parents to herself. It was precious time she was getting—it might be months, or even a year or two, before it happened again—and despite all the dangers I was anxious not to interrupt it.

I suppose there was another reason I kept away. And it was simple enough. It was just too painful for me to get involved in all this. It hurt too much. That's all.

So I crouched at the edge of the damp greenness and sneezed as quietly as I could and wiped my nose and sneezed some more.

From the fernery I could hear Fi's voice rising and falling. She sounded surprisingly calm, and she was doing nearly all the talking. I guess she had plenty to talk about. I heard my own name mentioned a few times, but for once in my life I was trying not to eavesdrop. I heard Mr. Maxwell's deep bass rumble as he said something about Fi's sister, Charlotte, and I nearly got the giggles suddenly as I remembered a corny magazine article I'd read in an old
New Idea
magazine back in New Zealand. It was about relationships between fathers and children and it said it didn't matter if the father was away a lot as long as when he was with his children it was "quality time."

I wondered if the editors of
New Idea
would call this quality time, and if they'd think it didn't matter that Fi hadn't seen her father for over nine months.

I checked my watch. We knew that Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell had only half an hour for lunch. The one thing
Dr. K. had been adamant about was that they got back on time. Otherwise the supervisor came looking for them and there were big punishments because the supervisor's job depended on everybody being where they were meant to be and doing what they were meant to do. The punishments didn't necessarily matter much but the supervisor coming out looking for people mattered a lot.

It was twenty-four minutes already by my calculations and I thought I'd better say something. I called out, "I think you're meant to go back in a couple of minutes."

Before the war I'd never have dared to speak to people like the Maxwells in that way, but now I did it with no real hesitation.

Mr. Maxwell answered. "Yes, thanks, Ellie, we're coming now."

I stepped back into the ferns as I heard them saying goodbye to Fi. I turned to face them. Mrs. Maxwell had obviously been crying and Mr. Maxwell's eyes were red too. They both hugged me and said nice things, so I guess Fi gave me a good report. "Give heaps and heaps of love to my parents if you see them," I said. "Tell them I've been good. Tell them I miss them and think about them every day, and I can't wait to see them again. Tell them the Landie's still hidden up on Tailor's Stitch."