Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (11 page)

‘But,’ Kevin said helpfully, ‘there’s a place on your temple, on the corner here I think, and if you hit that it’ll kill you stone cold dead straightaway. You don’t have to hit it hard at all.’

‘He had a helmet on,’ I said, not liking this kind of gory detail. ‘OK, geniuses, if we’re not going to spread oil again what can we do?’

It was actually Kevin who came up with our next idea. It was his fault that three-quarters of an hour later I found myself lying in wait on

McManus Street

. I was behind a tree on the west side of the
street,
Homer was behind a telephone box on the other side. Kevin was lurking somewhere further along, doing nothing in particular, just being a back-up.

Two patrols had passed already but we had to let them go. I was getting bored and, although I’d said to Homer earlier that none of us would sleep tonight, I was tired now. I wandered across the street to talk to Homer. ‘Let’s wait for one more,’ he said. ‘If it’s no good we’ll go back to the house.’

I heard yet again the buzzing noise of a patrol. Like a big slow wasp. In this street, more open than

Morris Street

, you could hear them coming. These guys were still a distance away but they moved so fast sometimes, and I was on the wrong side of the road. I ended my conversation with Homer in mid-sentence and ran back to the flowering gum. I picked up my end of the wire.

A minute later they came into

McManus Street

. The throbbing of the engines reached me loud and clear, no longer muffled by houses or trees. But unless my ears were lying there was something different this time. They did sound more spread out. Maybe our chance had come. The first two were already halfway along the street, almost level with me. The other four were quite a way behind. I tensed even further, if that was possible. The first two passed quickly. I saw their bright red brake lights come on for the corner, before the others had even reached me. Three more came past. I knew this was it now. There was one still coming, and he was the one we wanted. He was fifty metres behind, but as the others got to the corner he accelerated, to catch up with them.
Big mistake.
Huge mistake.
If he’d been going slowly he would have fallen more gently and probably not have done himself much damage. But a few metres before he got to us he went for it.

With a roar from the engine he powered into a
wheelstand
. I couldn’t believe our luck. As his rear wheel reached our wire I was already grabbing my end and pulling as hard as I could. Homer was doing the same. I’d been thinking of wrapping the wire around my wrist so I’d get a good grip on it. Lucky I didn’t. I think I would have lost my hand. The wire whipped out of my grasp like it had been electrified. But it did the job. The guy flew through the air, almost in slow motion. The motorbike banged and slid its way towards Homer. It definitely wasn’t going in slow motion. The man hit a tree with a dull thud, the same sort of sound you’d make if you hit the trunk with the back of an axe. The tree shook and leaves fell. The man dropped to the footpath and lay there sprawled out, completely lifeless. I’m not saying he was dead, I’m just saying he was totally unconscious, and he may have been dead. I don’t know.

While I’d been watching this frightening sight Homer was already out of his hiding place and gathering the wire. He wasn’t even looking at the rider. I was annoyed with myself that Homer was doing the work while I was being a tourist. Lucky I didn’t have a camera; I’d probably have been taking photos.

So I ran to help. We had to get the wire out of the way so they would find no reason for the crash. We wanted it to be a mysterious, inexplicable accident.

The wire was in two parts. The impact had snapped it. Already I could hear the other bikes coming back. All of this had taken only five or ten seconds. The previous three bikes had just got around the bend when we tripped the last guy, so it was taking them no time to return.

‘Come on,’ I said to Homer. I was badly scared. We had almost a hundred metres to get into safe cover. We wanted to be down a driveway and into the next block before anyone started looking.

Homer took off and I followed, trailing about ten metres of cable and trying to roll it up as I went. It caught in something behind me and nearly ripped my hand off again. I pulled fiercely, determined to make it come free, determined that the sheer strength of my willpower would get it free. No way in the world was I going to go back and get it.

Unfortunately my willpower wasn’t enough. The bloody thing wouldn’t move.

Like it or not, I had to do something. I started charging towards it, then saw, even in the darkness, that it had caught around a tap. I yanked it from a different direction and felt it come loose at last.

I turned and followed Homer again, reeling the wire in as I ran. He was as good as out of sight, down the end of the driveway, getting ready to climb the fence. He didn’t seem worried about me. Maybe he thought I was right behind him. Maybe he didn’t think about me at all. I went at that fence as though I was at the school sports day and running the last leg in the relay. A beam of light came down the driveway, lighting my legs. I understood that it was one of the headlights, either searching the driveway or a bike turning round and accidentally lighting the place up. Whichever, I felt totally exposed. I didn’t know whether to stop, so that my movement didn’t attract their attention, or to keep going, to outrun their bullets. I kept going. I figured they’d already had heaps of time to see me.

The fence seemed an awful long way off. Homer was lying along the top of it like an old-fashioned high jumper rolling over the bar. He seemed to have realised at last that I wasn’t breathing down his neck. I leapt at his outstretched arm and grabbed it, chucking the wire over into the darkness,
then
using my left hand to scrabble my way up the fence. I gripped the crossbar and hauled myself to the top, Homer rolling over just before me, so that I landed on top of him, in someone’s garden.

‘Do you think they saw you?’ he panted from underneath.

‘How should I know?’ I said crossly.

I could feel him trembling. We couldn’t take much more of this, I thought. Even simple little operations were riddled with danger now, like old timber rotten with borer.

‘Where’s Kevin?’ Homer asked.

‘Will you stop asking silly questions?’

That was probably a silly question. Anyway, Homer didn’t answer it. At the same moment a slight rustling told us Kevin was coming from the next-door garden. He crouched down beside me.

‘Do you two want to be left alone?’ he asked.

I’d been in a bad enough mood already and he’d just made it worse.

‘What happened?’ I asked coldly. I disentangled myself from Homer.

Kevin must have got the message because he didn’t try any more jokes.

‘I think we’re OK,’ he said. ‘The guy’s badly hurt.
Might even be dead.
They didn’t see anything. And the bloke himself, if he does survive, won’t remember a lot.’

‘Fair enough,’ Homer said, then, to Kevin, ‘do you want to go back and have another look?’

He meant
,
to go back and get their thrills by perving on the body of the motorbike rider.

‘I’m going,’ I said, standing up and looking for the wire. I was disgusted with both of them.

Chapter Six

 

 

After that ugly moment I can hardly believe what I did next. But then again, who said humans are meant to be smart?

I think I’ll take the gutless way out and blame hormones. You can’t control your feelings, just your behaviour. And sometimes you can’t control your behaviour.

OK, here goes. I went to bed when we got back from the second raid on the motorbikes. It was close to three o’clock in the morning. Like I’d predicted, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t have forced my eyes shut with a pair of pliers. I was lying there thinking about my great-grandmother Tommy, then about Ryan, then about the huge unexploded bomb we’d seen cordoned off in a street on the way back to the house, then about the soldier thumping into the tree, then about the wild and sickening race down the driveway to the fence.

Each thought was so
vague,
they were just wisps of smoke through my brain, no beginnings and no ends, one wisping into another.

I heard Lee’s voice next door, saying goodnight to Homer. Their voices rumbled away for a while but I couldn’t hear the words. I think I did then drift off into a little half-sleep, my daydreams mixing in with my sleep-dreams. I had a woollen blanket over me and it was prickling my skin, but I quite liked it. I started to feel warm inside and out, then hot and restless. I knew what I wanted, and for once I couldn’t be bothered analysing it or thinking about the negatives. My skin was so sensitive I could feel every little point of contact between my body and the blanket. I felt like my body was swollen, like everything was a little bigger than usual, though some parts more than others. I felt I was sailing in some sort of strange hot sea.

I knew Homer had gone when I heard him stomping downstairs, mumbling to himself, sounding like a tractor down a gully. I waited ten minutes or so, then got up, wrapped Grandma’s biggest towel around me, and padded down to Lee’s room. I slid the door open quietly. The room was quite dark: the only light came from the moon through the window. I liked the dim light. It laid a kind of golden touch on the carpet. Lee was sprawled across the double bed on his back and his skin looked kind of golden too. I smiled at the pyramid he’d erected under the old cotton sheet.
Seemed like this wasn’t going to be too difficult.
I let the towel slide off me, and even the sensation of that – the fabric touching me – gave me goose pimples.

I slipped in under the sheet. I had a feeling Lee was awake and when I felt the tension of his body I knew it. I rubbed his chest.

‘How would you like to find a gorgeous naked babe in your bed?’ I asked.

Without opening his eyes he said: ‘Well, I’ll settle for you in the meantime.’

I bit him sharply on the shoulder and he opened his eyes then. We wrestled like animals, twisting and turning and biting and growling, like kittens or puppies. Then there was a bit of a pause while I got the condom onto Lee. He said in surprise: ‘Where did you get that?’

‘Newsagent,’ I answered.

After a few minutes I got my legs around his hips and pretended I was squeezing him, but I knew I was just giving him his chance, letting him in. He was quick too. He had me pinned in a moment. I cried out so loudly I gave him a shock, but then he realised it wasn’t a cry of pain. It seemed like only seconds before we were both totally out of control, in convulsions.

Then, almost straightaway, we did it again, more slowly. It was nice. I heard myself whimpering as the moment approached, and although the convulsions were slower to start they seemed to go deeper.
Like the foundations of my being were stirring and shifting and rumbling.
Lee sounded kind of happy too. He kissed me so fervently afterwards that I was astonished. But pleased. It was like I’d been doing him a favour, when I was really doing myself a favour. I suppose we’d done each other a favour.

I let him slip out of me, then I snuggled into him and had a proper sleep, a comfortable sleep, about the best sleep I’d had since the war started. About 7 am I snuck back to my room, just to avoid the embarrassment of being busted by the others.

A couple of hours later, as
Fi
and I changed sentry shifts, Homer gave us a big spiel about how if we got another ‘Pineapples’ message at lunchtime he’d organise the next motorbike attack. He was absolutely determined to try this scheme where he’d run a live electrical wire into a puddle, so a soldier who stood in it would be electrocuted. Then he’d pull the wire out, run off with it, and they’d never know how the guy died. They’d think it was another accident.

There were at least two problems with this brilliant idea. One was that a doctor would be able to tell with one glance that he’d been electrocuted, which might strike them as a bit strange. If we were stuck in Stratton for weeks, and they realised
guerillas
were in town, things might get a bit hot.

The second problem was that even Homer couldn’t think of a way to make the rider get off his bike in the middle of a puddle. He didn’t have to get off his bike, just put his foot on the ground, so he was no longer protected by his rubber tyres. Sure we could easily drag stuff onto the road to make a roadblock, and that would stop them, but it would obviously be an act of sabotage. You could try to make a roadblock seem natural, but how? Saw-marks on a tree or a telegraph pole would be a bit of a giveaway, not to mention the noise we’d make cutting it down.

So it was probably lucky that we didn’t get the chance to try Homer’s idea.

Instead the time came for our last big adventure together.

When we called at lunchtime, instead of a coded message we got a straightforward statement: ‘Call back at twenty-one hundred.’

It sounded ominous – or promising, depending on which way you looked at it.

The codeword to trigger us back into action was ‘Oodnadatta’, deliberately chosen because it didn’t suggest anything too dramatic. Homer had wanted ‘Blast-off’, but as Ryan pointed out, if anyone was listening in and heard that, they’d know something big was about to break. Even a detail like that could be important.

At 8.59 Kevin and I attempted the radio check. Reception was poor and we didn’t make any contact on the first try. The standard procedure was to try again an hour later, but at ten o’clock, although we made contact, we got so much static we couldn’t be sure what they were saying. That was really annoying, because it meant we had to go all the way out into the country for the third one, at eleven o’clock. There was no other way we could be sure of getting a good signal.

It also meant that if we did make contact we’d be doing it at the normal time anyway, which made the idea of the twenty-one hundred gig a bit of a joke.