The Thompson Gunner (29 page)

But it was probably spring when we went into Belfast that day, and I know it was June when we left, and not much happened in between.

Books arrived and told me about Australia and how different it was, and I had to adjust to the idea of leaving everything I knew behind. ‘It's very sunny in Australia,' my father said one drizzly Sunday, while we waited for the weather to clear for our walk in the woods. ‘Sometimes people don't even wear shoes.' I didn't know how those two things were related, or why the second was good, but he seemed very positive about the prospect.

Perhaps it was a matter of a few weeks between the bomb
in Belfast and us leaving. I think I can remember a ninth birthday party with a magician when my hand was still bandaged. It was inside at someone's house on another cloudy afternoon. And there was also a day when the sun shone and we did walk in the woods and I collected flowers for keeping in a flower press, so that I'd have something to take with me from the only place I knew. No one explained quarantine laws to me, and the flower press made it through customs unnoticed. I still have it, with its layers of spring flowers and leaves, brown and flat. I can still remember putting some of them in there when they had some bulk, then refitting the top and tightening the wing nuts at the corners.

There was another roadblock too, the same people standing there with a few rifles and a handgun, waving the traffic to a stop, making a show of looking in the boots of people's cars.

And a trip to Belfast, another trip to Belfast in the van. This time, at night. My mother did my hair in Heidi plaits before I left for the Macleishes'. It was a style that she quite liked, though my thick unruly hair didn't make it easy. I was sleeping over, which was something we did quite often at each other's houses. But this time, in the middle of the night, I remember someone waking me and soon we were in the van and on our way to Belfast. Paul was driving, and his friend Danny was in the front with him, talking tough, which is what he did. The rest of us were in the back, with the bags.

But that was before the other trip in the van to Belfast, not after. It was before.

I
T WAS BEFORE
, that's the thing. It was a time when there seemed to be people killed every few days in shootings and bombings, and a lot of it was put down to retribution for previous attacks. Tit-for-tat killings, they were called. They were always on the news, and one would lead to more and they didn't stop. And the night trip to Belfast was somewhere in the middle of that, and before the trip with the bomb and the Thompson gunner.

The sky is clear as we come over the fields and into Melbourne. I'm not awake and not asleep either. In the Qantas Club I make coffee, I press the wrong button and get a long black, I eat a plate of fruit. I sit with my back to the wall and people come and go, most of them travelling with work. I listen to them talk, lining up their days, making calls. There are newspapers, but I can't read them.

I can remember the smell of the van, farm smells, and the way everything jolted and clattered around when we hit a bump in the road, and how there was nothing to hold onto in the back.

It's almost as if the smell is in the plane on the way to Brisbane, it's so real to me. They serve us breakfast, but I've had my fruit. They show us the early news, housing approvals for the last quarter, Tiger Woods putting to win a golf tournament.

I have a window seat, which leaves me feeling stuck, but I can look out at the world down below, at the mountains and the brown, drought-stricken fields.

We lived in a peaceful farming area. My parents always said that, and it was true. Much of the province was relatively unaffected by conflict, or seemed like it, and life went on in a lot of respects as it had before. There were real seasons, and they had a bearing on our lives. I have sycamore seeds in my flower press, collected before that final spring, I think. They were too fat for the flower press really, the seed parts of them anyway, but they had the most interesting shape so I had to have them.

I call Janis's rooms as soon as I'm off the plane. My plan is to say that something's come up, but I can feel my voice going, or my breath going wrong, as if I've breathed in too much before calling. My lungs feel stuck full with air and I can't move it in or out.

‘Do you want to come in today?' a voice says, when I'm stranded with my request half-made. ‘Do you want to make an appointment? We have a cancellation mid-morning, if you'd like that. If you can get in here in about forty minutes.'

I go into the toilets and I sit in a cubicle until I can fix my breathing. I read every word of the tampon ad on the
back of the door. I count, and breathe slowly in and out, and I remember Elli reading the condom ad in a cubicle at this same airport.

There's still a crowd around the baggage carousel when I get there, and my suitcase is out and doing laps.

Outside the terminal, the air is warm and thick and humid, carrying the usual smell of spent fuel and the nearby wetlands. I queue for a cab and give the cabbie Janis's Wickham Terrace address as we pull away from the kerb. He's not a talker, and I'm grateful. We glide down the airport road, swinging in and out of the curves on the lazy suspension. There has been rain while I've been gone. The grass is now lush by the roadside and it was brown when I left. The early summer storms have come.

A plane takes off beside us, the road curves and then curves again, the cabbie fiddles with a knob, trying to tune in properly to the radio station that's crackling away playing Steely Dan.

‘Bloody thing,' he says. ‘It's not my car.'

We loop past industrial buildings and the wharves to Kingsford-Smith Drive and the Inner City Bypass. There is hardly a cloud above the city today, and little traffic now that peak hour has passed. I'm home, but it's not enough like home. I know it all well – the steel and glass of the city centre, the timber and tin of the old houses, the tall trees in Newstead Park – but the light is harsh today and nothing looks entirely like itself, and I feel sad.

Janis is still with her previous client when I arrive.

‘You've hurt your hand,' the receptionist says, and I tell her that's what celebrity canoeing does to you, if you're partnered with some dweebie guy who's known for the best mosaics on TV, and some idiot goes and puts a paddle in his hand.

I
wish I could remember her name, but I can't. She's not always here, but I know we've met before. I push my suitcase into the corner and she gets me a glass of water and says I should sit. I tell her that I've been sitting on planes, sitting for hours, and I'd rather stand, if that's okay. She nods and gets me more water. There's a plant in the corner and I ask her what it is and she says she doesn't know. I tell her I like the look of it and she says it's probably artificial. She doesn't know for sure, but she never goes near it so she hopes they're not expecting her to water it. She laughs.

I'm feeling slimy and unclean and tired from the flight and I realise I must look far from my best, so I explain that I've just flown overnight from Perth via Melbourne and that it feels wrong and unfair to have jet lag without having left your own country.

And she says ‘Oh, jet lag' as though it might account for a lot at times like these.

I ask if there's a bathroom, and I go and wash my face. I take my time, and Janis is waiting when I get back.

‘Hi,' she says with a smile. ‘Come on in.'

And I say Hi to her and ask her how she's been, and it's not so bad. It's familiar. I walk into her room and she shuts the door behind us.

There's a picture of a boat on the opposite wall and all of a sudden it seems to shudder and she says, ‘Take a seat, take a seat.' She gives me the calm smile therapists give you before you tip your life all over them, and she says, ‘So, how have things been for you? You've been away for a few weeks, haven't you? There have probably been a few times during that that haven't been easy.'

And
I say ‘Yeah' and I start to tell her my tooth story, and I'm racing through it but she's onto me, giving a polite half-laugh and saying that as long as I found a good dentist the worst of that episode is hopefully behind me.

So I tell her, ‘I met this guy in Canada, and it's so complicated, but he has a wife and three kids in Thunder Bay, Ontario, so not that complicated in the end. And of course, I wasn't looking for anything like that, not that it amounted to much, but Murray and I had reached our conclusion by then.' She's nodding, nodding and waiting for this to go somewhere. I'm talking too fast, and the timing of my breathing is all confused. ‘It was just an incident, hardly life-changing. Anyway, anyway, okay, there's one or two other things, I have to admit that. I hit a guy in the face with a paintball gun and it
was
deliberate.'

‘Could I just stop you for a second,' she says in a voice that sounds half-speed, so slow it's hard for me to stick with it. ‘Could I ask what happened to the wrist that you've got the bandage on?'

‘Well, sure, that's part of it. Not part of it directly, but it got hit by a canoe paddle, and I'm getting there. I'm getting to that bit.' I have things I want to say and she shouldn't interrupt me. It's hard to get them right. ‘Remember those times, remember those times when Murray told us that stupid story about the cart and the bent axle? Did he tell us that one in here? Do you remember it? And how I didn't tell the same sort of thing, the same sort of story? And that was a difference. Which was the bit I said, just that it was a difference . . .'

And
she says, ‘Slower. You're losing me. Just take your time and tell me what you need to tell me.'

‘Yes, it's from a long time ago. And it's a secret, a sworn secret, you have to understand that. Lives depended on it once. Or there was a chance they might have. I don't know.'

She has a jug on the desk, and she refills my water glass, which I'm still holding tightly in both hands. She pushes the box of tissues over. She nods, but doesn't speak.

‘All right. It's a complicated story. There was glass in this hand, there still might be more, but I don't think so . . .'

And I'm afraid telling her, afraid telling her one word of these things that I'd promised I'd keep to myself. Everything would be okay if I kept the secrets, that's what I knew. And it was okay, or next to okay, ever since. Though it was a terrible effort sometimes, and very tiring. Dreams came along and got mixed in, and things can lose their certainty, but stay just as vivid when they come back at you. And you call it a dream, a bad dream, a recurring nightmare, but you can hear it, smell it, taste it because you did it. Because you were there. And it never figures in other people's stories of that time – your parents' stories, told with authority – because they weren't there, not that day, not that night.

And you never tell them because you said you never would, and because you flew away with them to start a new life, without them knowing what you'd done. Time passes,
and why would you change that? Why would you bring anguish upon them, and guilt they don't need to feel? They can't be faulted, and you can't let them down.

My mother said it was bad dreams, then and later, when I'd wake up shouting in the middle of the night. And it
was
bad dreams, but here's where they came from.

I tell her. I tell Janis about the Macleishes and the arsenal under their barn. I tell her how it felt the first time I fired the Webley at targets in the field. I tell her I'd got the story wrong in parts, remembered the wrong worst bit. The wrong trip to Belfast.

W
E'RE IN THE VAN
and it's dark and bumpy, but I've got a torch in my pocket – just a little one my mother gave me for any bathroom visits in the middle of the night. Not that it's a room that's hard to find at the Macleishes' house. It's two doors down on the right from the one I get to sleep in.

The torch is like a pen and it has a clip on it. It's in my pocket and I take it out and turn it on and Paul says, ‘What are you doing back there?' but not in a bad way. He's just asking.

The light shines on my hand in a circle, with fuzzy edges. I can see other people's faces, just. I turn it off and put it away.

There's the smell of a cigarette from the front, from Danny not Paul, and in the back the smell of dogs and earth. I'm on a sack and the floor's hard. The sack's empty and it slips and slides. It's a potato sack, probably. There's a bag poking into my side.

We ate a bird for dinner, and it looked more like a bird than chickens do. I know chickens are birds just as much, but you buy them half-ready. This one wasn't a chicken, it came from the woods, it had a pellet in its neck from the shotgun. There were some other pellets too but Mrs Macleish had got them out by then. Mark found the one in its neck and she told him, ‘Don't be such a fool with all your noise about lead poisoning, just eat what's in front of you.'

I
got my hair done in plaits before going to the Macleishes'. I don't like it that way much, but some people do. Actually, I quite like it sometimes, but mainly it's good for keeping your hair off your face, which is good if you mean business.

So, Paul has this plan, and we've been practising for it. And we've put ideas in too, Mark and me, and they've made the plan better, so now it's ours as well. I don't know who the other people are, the people in Belfast, but Paul does and you can't know everything. You know what you need to know and you follow orders. And when it came to the plan, he listened to Mark and me because we know strategy. Cover the exits, work out your escape routes, set it up as a trap, things like that. And it wouldn't have worked with just him and Danny, but it would work with us.

He said it was boring, driving guns around hidden in the back of the van. He said it was good the first time, since you didn't know what would happen. But nothing happened and, if you knew the right roads, nothing would. He said, ‘I'm good for more than that, and I'm going to show them. We're going to show them we can do anything. I'm sick of being their donkey, just carrying things around.'