Tomorrow When The War Began (3 page)

Things calmed down with Kevin but we still
couldn’t see any way out of the overhang.

‘Well,’ said Robyn cheerfully, ‘looks like we
camp here for a week.’

There was a bit of a silence.

‘Ellie,’ Lee said kindly, ‘I don’t think we’re
going to find a way down. And the further we go, the harder it’s
going to be to get back.’

‘Let’s just try for one more step,’ I asked,
then added, a little wildly, ‘Three’s my lucky number.’

We poked around a bit more, but rather
doubtfully. Finally Corrie said, ‘There might be a chance if we
wriggle through here. We might be able to get around the side
somewhere.’

The gap she’d picked was so narrow we had to
take our packs off to get through it, but I was game, so I took
Corrie’s pack while she wrestled her way into a prickly overgrown
hole. Her head disappeared, then her back, then her legs. I heard
Kevin say, ‘This is crazy’, then Corrie said, ‘OK now my pack’, so
I pushed that through after her. Then, leaving Robyn to look after
my pack, I followed.

I soon realised that Corrie had the right
idea, but it sure was difficult. If I wasn’t such a stubborn
pig-headed idiot I would have surrendered by this point. We ended
up crawling along like myxo’d rabbits, me pushing Corrie’s pack
ahead of me. But I caught glimpses of a wall of rock on my left,
and we were definitely going downhill, so I figured we were
probably getting around the third of Satan’s Steps. Then Corrie
paused, in front of me, forcing me to stop too.

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Can you hear what I
hear?’

There are some questions that really annoy me,
like ‘What do you know?’, ‘Are you working to your full capacity?’
(our Form teacher’s favourite), ‘Guess what I’m thinking?’, and
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing young lady?’ (Dad, when
he’s annoyed). I don’t like any of them. And ‘Can you hear what I
hear?’ is in the same category. Plus I was tired, hot, frustrated.
So I gave a bad-tempered answer. After a minute’s pause Corrie,
showing more patience than me, said, ‘There’s water ahead. Running
water.’

I listened, and then realised I could hear it
too. So I passed the word back to the others. It was only a small
thing, but it kept us going that little bit longer. I crawled on
grimly, listening to the sound get louder and closer. It had to be
quite a busy stream, which at this altitude meant a spring. We
could all do with a fresh cold drink of the water that came from
these mountain springs. We’d need it for the struggle back up to
the top of Hell. And it was time we started that struggle. It was
getting late; time to set up a campsite.

Suddenly I was at the stream and there was
Corrie, standing on a rock grinning at me.

‘Well, we found something,’ I said, grinning
back.

It was a pretty little thing. The sun didn’t
reach it, so it was dark and cool and secret. The water bubbled
over rocks that were green and slippery with moss. I knelt and
soaked my face, then lapped like a dog as the others started to
arrive. There wasn’t much room but Robyn started exploring in one
direction, stepping gingerly from rock to rock, as Lee did the same
in the other direction. I admired their energy.

‘It’s a nice creek,’ said Fi, ‘but Ellie, we’d
better start heading back up the top.’

‘I know. Let’s just have a relax first, for
five minutes. We’ve earned it.’

‘This is worse than the Outward Bound course,’
Homer complained.

‘I wish I’d gone on that now,’ Fi said. ‘You
all went, didn’t you?’

I’d gone on the course, and enjoyed it. I’d
done a lot of camping with my parents but Outward Bound had given
me a taste for something tougher. I’d just started thinking about
it, remembering, when suddenly Robyn reappeared. The look on her
face was almost frightening. In the dense overgrowth I couldn’t
stand, but I straightened up as far as I could, and quickly.

‘What’s happened?’

Robyn said, with the air of someone who is
hearing her own voice but not believing her own words, ‘I just
found a bridge’.

Chapter
Three

The path was covered with leaves and sticks,
and was a bit overgrown in places, but compared to what we’d been
down, it was like a freeway. We stood spread out along it,
marvelling. I felt almost dizzy with relief and astonishment and
gratification.

‘Ellie,’ Homer said solemnly, ‘I’ll never call
you a stupid dumb obstinate slagheap again.’

‘Thanks Homer.’

It was a sweet moment.

‘Tell you what,’ said Kevin, ‘it’s lucky I
wouldn’t let you pikers give up back there, when you all wanted to
wimp out.’

I ignored him.

The bridge was old but had been beautifully
built. It crossed the creek in a large clearing and was about a
metre wide and five metres long. It even had a handrail. Its
surface was made of round logs rather than planks but the logs were
matched and cut with perfect uniformity. Joints cut in each end
married the logs to crossbars and the first and last ones were then
secured to the crossbars by wooden pegs.

‘It’s a lovely job,’ said Kevin. ‘Reminds me
of my own early work.’

Suddenly we had so much energy it was as
though we were on something. We nearly decided to camp in the
clearing, which was cool and shadowy, but the urge to explore was
too strong. We hoisted our packs on our backs again, and chattering
like cockatoos we hustled down the path.

‘It must be true about the hermit! No one else
would have gone to all that trouble.’

‘Wonder how long he was here for.’

‘How do you know it was a he?’

‘The locals always talked about him as a
male.’

‘Most hims are talked about as males.’ That
was Lee, being a smartarse.

‘He must have been here years, to go to all
that trouble with the bridge.’

‘And the track’s so well worn.’

‘If he did live here years he’d have time to
do the bridge and a lot more. Imagine how you’d fill your
time!’

‘Yeah, food’d be the big thing. Once you’d
organised your meals, the rest of the day’d be yours.’

‘I wonder what you’d live on.’

‘Possums, rabbits maybe.’

‘Wouldn’t be many rabbits in this kind of
country. There’s wallabies. Plenty of possums. Feral cats.’

‘Yuk.’

‘You could grow vegetables.’

‘Bush tucker.’

‘Yeah, he probably watched that show on
TV.’

‘Wombats.’

‘Yeah, what would wombats taste like?’

‘They say most people eat too much anyway. If
he just ate when he was really hungry he wouldn’t need much.’

‘You can train yourself to eat a lot
less.’

‘You know Andy Farrar? He found a walking
stick in the bush near Wombegonoo. It’s beautifully made, handmade,
all carved and everything. Everyone said it must be the Hermit’s
but I thought they were joking.’

The track was taking us downhill all the time.
It wound around a bit, looking for the best route, but the trend
was always downhill. It was going to be quite a sweat getting back
up. We’d lost a lot of altitude. It was beautiful though, quiet,
shady, cool and damp. There were no flowers, just more shades of
green and brown than the English language knows about. The ground
was deep in leaf litter there were times when we lost the track
beneath heaps of bark and leaves and twigs, but a search around
under the trees always found it again. Every so often it brought us
back to Satan’s Steps, so that for a few metres we’d be brushing
alongside the great granite walls. Once it cut between two of the
steps and continued down the other side: the gap was only a couple
of metres wide, so it was almost a tunnel through the massive hunks
of rock.

‘This is pretty nice for Hell,’ Fi said to me
as we paused in the cool stone gap.

‘Mmm. Wonder how long since anyone’s been down
here.’

‘More than that,’ Robyn, who was in front of
Fi, said. ‘I wonder how many human beings have ever been down here,
in the history of the Universe. I mean, why would the koories have
bothered? Why would the early explorers, or settlers, have
bothered? And no one we know has. Maybe the Hermit and us are the
only people ever to have seen it. Ever.’

By that stage it was getting obvious that we
were close to the bottom. The ground was levelling out and the last
of the sunlight was filtering through to warm our faces. The
overgrowth and the undergrowth were both sparser, though still
quite dense. The track rejoined the creek and ran alongside it for
a few hundred metres. Then it opened out into our campsite for the
night.

We found ourselves in a clearing about the
size of a hockey field, or a bit bigger. It would have been hard to
play hockey on though, because it wasn’t much of a clearing. It was
studded with trees, three beautiful old eucalypts and quite a few
suckers and saplings. The creek was at the western edge; you could
hear it but not see it. The creek was flatter and wider here and
cold, freezing cold, even on a summer day. In the early mornings it
hurt and stung. But when you were hot it was a wonderful refreshing
shock to splash your face into it.

That’s where I am now of course.

For any little wild things living in the
clearing we must have seemed like visitors from Hell, not visitors
to it. We made a lot of noise. And Kevin – you can never cure Kevin
of his bad habit of breaking branches off trees instead of walking
a few extra metres to pick up dead wood. That’s one reason I was
never too convinced when Corrie talked about how caring and
sensitive he was. But he was good with fires: he had the white
smoke rising about five minutes after we arrived, and flames
burning like fury about two minutes after that.

We decided not to bother with tents – we’d
only brought two and a half anyway – but it was warm and no chance
of rain, so we just strung up a couple of flies for protection
against the dew. Then Lee and I got stuck into the cooking. Fi
wandered over.

‘What are we having?’ she asked.

‘Two-minute noodles for now. We’ll cook some
meat later, but I’m too hungry to wait.’

‘What are two-minute noodles?’ Fi asked.

Lee and I looked at each other and
grinned.

‘It’s an awesome feeling,’ Lee said, ‘to
realise you’re about to change someone’s life forever.’

‘Haven’t you ever had two-minute noodles?’ I
asked Fi.

‘No. My parents are really into health
foods.’

I’d never met anyone who hadn’t had two-minute
noodles before. Sometimes Fi seemed like an exotic butterfly.

I can’t remember any hike or campout I’d been
on where people sat around the fire telling stories or singing. It
just never seemed to happen that way. But that night we did sit up
late, and talk and talk. I think we were excited to be there, in
that strange and beautiful place, where so few humans had ever
been. There aren’t many wild places left on Earth, yet we’d fluked
it into the middle of this little wild kingdom. It was good. I knew
I was really tired but I was too revved up to go to bed until the
others started yawning and standing up and looking towards their
sleeping bags. Five minutes later we were all in bed; five minutes
after that I think I was asleep.

Chapter Four

We didn’t do a lot the next day. No one got up
till ten or eleven o’clock. First thing we found was a biscuit bag
we’d overlooked when packing the food the night before. It was
empty. Thanks to us some grateful animal was now a lot fatter.

Our breakfast merged into lunch and continued
into the afternoon. Basically we just lay around and ate, in one
long pigout. Kevin and Corrie got into a passionate little session
on Kevin’s sleeping bag; Fi and I sat with our feet in the cold
stream, planning our lives after we left school and left Wirrawee.
Lee was reading a book,
All Quiet on the
Western Front.
Robyn had her Walkman on. Homer had a go at
everything: climbed a tree, had a look in the creek for gold, got a
pile of firewood, tried to flush out some snakes. When I got some
energy going I went with him, to see if the path went any further.
But we could find no trace of it. Thick bush met us in every
direction. And strangely, we could see no sign of any hut or cave
or shelter which the old guy must have had if he’d really lived
down here. Finally, sick of trying to tear our way through
unsympathetic scrub, we gave up and went back to the clearing. And
when we got there Homer did find a snake. It was six o’clock and
the ground was starting to cool off. Homer went to his sleeping bag
and took off his boots, then stretched out comfortably with a
packet of corn chips. ‘This is a great place,’ he said. ‘This is
perfect.’ At that moment the snake, which had crawled into his
sleeping bag, must have stirred under him, cos Homer leapt to his
feet and ran about ten metres away. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled.
‘There’s something in there! There’s a snake in my sleeping
bag!’

Even Kevin and Corrie stopped what they were
doing and came racing over. There was a wild debate, first about
whether Homer was imagining things, then, when we all saw the snake
move, about how to get it out with as little loss of life as
possible. Kevin wanted to weigh the sleeping bag down in the creek
with rocks until the snake drowned; Homer wasn’t keen on that. He
liked his sleeping bag. We weren’t too sure that the snake wouldn’t
be able to bite through the bag; as a kid I was told a terrifying
story by a shearer about how his son had been bitten through a
blanket as he lay asleep in his bed. I don’t know if the story was
true but I never forgot it.

We decided to trust all those experts who’d
been telling us since we were kids that snakes are more scared of
people than people are of snakes. We figured if we were at one end
of the sleeping bag and the snake came out of the other end he’d
probably do a big slither in the opposite direction, straight into
the bush. So we got two strong sticks; Robyn held one while Kevin
held the other; they pushed them under the bag and started slowly
lifting. It was a captivating scene; better than watching TV even.
For a minute nothing happened, though we could see the snake
clearly outlined as the material was stretched. He sure was a big
one. Robyn and Kevin were trying to tip the bag so that the snake
would virtually be poured out of the mouth onto the ground. They
were doing it well too; perfect teamwork. The bag was at shin
height, then knee height, and still rising. Then somehow the sticks
got too far apart. Corrie called out; they realised and started to
correct, but Robyn lost her grip for a moment. And a moment was all
it took. The sleeping bag slithered down to the ground as though it
had come to life itself, and one very mad snake came bursting out.
The only rational thought I had at that moment was curiosity, that
Kevin was obviously as nervous of snakes as he was of insects. He
just stood there white in the face and trembling, looking like he
was going to cry. I think he was so paralysed that he would have
waited and let the snake crawl up his leg and bite him. It was
funny, considering how tough he’d been when he had the stick and
was lifting the bag, thinking he was safe. But there wasn’t really
much time or space for rational thoughts at that stage of my life;
my irrational mind was running the show. It told me to panic; I
panicked. It told me to run; I ran. It told me not to give a stuff
about anyone else; I didn’t give a stuff. It was quite a few
moments before I looked around to see if they were OK ... and to
see where the snake was.

Kevin was still standing at the same spot;
Robyn was a few metres in front of me and doing what I was doing,
standing and looking and puffing and trembling; Fi was in the
creek, I’ve got no idea why; Lee was up a tree, about six metres
from the ground and rising fast; Corrie was intelligently at the
fire and using it as protection; Homer was nowhere to be seen.
Neither was the snake.

‘Where is it?’ I yelled.

‘It went that way,’ said Corrie, pointing into
the bush. ‘It chased me, but when I got here I jumped over the fire
and it veered away.’

For someone who’d just been chased by a
frenzied snake she seemed the calmest of us all.

‘Where’s Homer?’ I asked.

‘He went that way,’ said Corrie, pointing in
the opposite direction to the snake. That sounded safe enough, even
for Homer. I slowly stopped panicking and came in to the fire. Lee,
looking a bit sheepish, began descending the tree. Even Homer
appeared eventually, coming cautiously out of a dense patch of
scrub.

‘Why were you standing in the creek?’ I asked
Fi.

‘To get away from the snake of course.’

‘But Fi, snakes can swim.’

‘No they can’t ... can they? Oh my God. Oh my
God. I could have died. Thanks for telling me guys.’

That was the end of our major excitement for
the day, unless you count the Sausage Surprise that Homer and Kevin
produced for tea. It certainly was full of surprises, and like the
snake it was the kind of excitement I could do without. We went to
bed pretty early. It had been one of those days when everyone was
exhausted from doing nothing. I climbed into the sleeping bag at
about 9.30, after first checking carefully that it was empty. By
that stage only Fi and Homer were still up, talking quietly at the
fire.

I sleep pretty soundly, pretty heavily, and
this night was typical. At one point I woke up but I’ve got no idea
what time it was, maybe three or four o’clock. It was a cold night;
I needed to go to the dunny but spent ten minutes trying to put it
off. It just seemed too cruel to have to crawl out of that snug
sleeping bag. I had to give myself a stern lecture: ‘Come on, you
know you have to go, you’ll feel better when you do, stop being
such a wimp, the quicker you do it the quicker you’ll be back in
this warm bag’. Eventually it worked; I struggled grimly out and
staggered about ten metres to a convenient tree.

On my way back, a couple of minutes later, I
paused. I thought I could hear a distant humming. I waited, still
unsure, but it became louder and more distinct. It’s funny how
artificial noises sound so different to natural noises. For a
start, artificial noises are more regular and even, I guess. This
was definitely an artificial noise; I realised it had to be some
kind of aircraft. I waited, looking up at the sky.

One thing that’s different up here is the sky.
This night was like any clear dark night in the mountains: the sky
sprinkled with an impossible number of stars, some strong and
bright, some like tiny weak pinpricks, some flickering, some
surrounded by a hazy glow. Most views I get tired of eventually,
but never the night sky in the mountains, never. I can lose myself
in it.

Suddenly the loud buzzing became a roar. I
couldn’t believe how quickly it changed. It was probably because of
the high walls of rock that surrounded our campsite. And like black
bats screaming out of the sky, blotting out the stars, a V-shaped
line of jets raced overhead, very low overhead. Then another, then
another, till six lines in all had stormed through the sky above
me. Their noise, their speed, their darkness frightened me. I
realised that I was crouching, as though being beaten. I stood up.
It seemed that they were gone. The noise faded quickly, till I
could no longer hear it. But something remained. The air didn’t
seem as clear, as pure. There was a new atmosphere. The sweetness
had gone; the sweet burning coldness had been replaced by a new
humidity. I could smell the jet fuel. We’d thought that we were
among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded
everything, everywhere. They didn’t have to walk into a place to
invade it. Even Hell was not immune.

I got back to the sleeping bag and Fi said
sleepily: ‘What was that noise?’ It seemed that she was the only
one awake, though I could hardly believe it.

‘Planes,’ I said.

‘Mmmm, I thought so,’ she said. ‘Coming back
from Commem Day I suppose.’

‘Of course,’ I thought. ‘That’s what it’ll
be.’

I started to drift into a kind of sleep,
restless and full of wild dreams. It still hadn’t occurred to me
that there was anything strange about dozens of aircraft flying
fast and low at night without lights. It wasn’t till much later
that I even realised they’d had no lights.

In the morning, at breakfast, Robyn said, ‘Did
anyone else hear those planes last night?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was up. I’d been to the
toilet.’

‘They just never stopped,’ Robyn said. ‘Must
have been hundreds.’

‘There were six lots,’ I said. ‘Close together
and really low. But I thought you slept through it. Fi was the only
one who said anything.’

Robyn stared at me. ‘Six lots? There were
dozens and dozens, all night long. And Fi was asleep. I thought you
were too. Lee and I were counting them but everyone else just
snored away.’

‘God,’ I said, starting to realise, ‘I must
have heard a different lot to you.’

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said Kevin, tearing
the wrapper off his second Mars Bar. He claimed that he always had
two Mars Bars for breakfast, and so far on this hike he was right
on schedule.

‘It’s probably the start of World War Three,’
said Lee. ‘We’ve probably been invaded and don’t even know.’

‘Yes,’ said Corrie from her sleeping bag.
‘We’re so cut off here. Anything could happen in the outside world
and we’d never hear about it.’

‘That’s good I reckon,’ said Kevin.

‘Imagine if we came out in a few days and
there’d been a nuclear war and there was nothing left and we were
the only survivors,’ Corrie said. ‘Chuck us a muesli bar someone,
will you please.’

‘Apple, strawberry, apricot?’ Kevin asked.

‘Apple.’

‘If there’d been a nuclear war we wouldn’t
survive,’ Fi said. ‘That fallout’d be dropping softly on us now.
Like the gentle rain from Heaven above. We wouldn’t even know about
it.’

‘Did you do that book last year in English?’
Kevin asked. ‘X or something?’

‘Z?
Z for
Zachariah?’

‘Yeah, that one. That was good I reckon. Only
decent book we’ve ever done.’

‘Seriously,’ said Robyn, ‘what do you think
those planes were doing?’

‘Coming back from Commem Day,’ Fi said, as she
had during the night. ‘You know how they have all those flypasts
and displays and stuff.’

‘If you were going to invade that’d be a good
day to do it,’ Lee said. ‘Everyone’s out celebrating. The Army and
Navy and Air Force are all parading around the cities, showing off.
Who’s running the country?’

‘I’d do it Christmas Day,’ Kevin said. ‘Middle
of the afternoon, when everyone’s asleep.’

It was a pretty typical conversation I guess,
but for some reason it was getting on my nerves. I got up and went
down the creek, where I found Homer. He was sitting on a gravel
spit, combing through the stones with a flat rock.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Looking for gold.’

‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘Nuh.’

‘Found any?’

‘Yeah, heaps. I’m putting it in piles behind
the trees, so the others don’t see it.’

‘That’s pretty selfish.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s the kind of guy I am. You
know that.’

He was right about one thing, I did know him
well He was like a brother. Being neighbours, we’d grown up
together. And although he had a lot of annoying habits he wasn’t
selfish.

‘Hey El?’ he said, after I’d sat there for a
few minutes watching him scrutinising gravel.

‘Yeah?’

‘What do you think of Fi?’

I nearly fell into the creek. When someone
asks you that question, in that tone of voice, it can only mean one
thing. But coming from Homer! The only women Homer admired were the
ones in magazines. Real women he treated like beanbags.

And Fi, of all people!

Still, I wanted to answer his question without
putting him off.

‘I love Fi. You know that. She seems so ...
perfect sometimes.’

‘Yeah, you know, I think you might be
right.’

He got embarrassed at admitting even that
much, and spent a few more minutes scratching for gold.

‘Guess she thinks I’m just a big loudmouth,
huh?’ he said at last.

‘I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue Homer. But
I don’t think she hates you. You were chatting on like old buddies
last night.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ He cleared his throat. ‘That’s
when I first ... when I realised ... Well, it’s the first time I
really took much notice of her. Since I was a little guy anyway. I
always thought she was just a stuck-up snob. But she’s not. She’s
really nice.’

‘I could have told you that.’

‘Yeah, but you know, she lives in that big
house and she talks like Mrs Hamilton, and me and my family, I mean
we’re just Greek peasants to people like her.’

‘Fi’s not like that. You ought to give her a
chance.’

‘Gee I’ll give her a chance. Trouble is I
don’t know if she’ll give me one.’

He stared moodily into the gravel, sighed, and
stood up. Suddenly his face changed. He went red and started
wriggling his head around, like his neck had got uncomfortable
after all these years of connecting his head to his body. I looked
around to see what had set him off. It was Fi, coming down to the
creek to brush her perfect teeth. It was hard not to smile. I’d
seen people struck by the lightning of love before, but I’d never
thought it would happen to Homer. And the fact that it was Fi took
my breath away. I just couldn’t imagine what she’d think or how
she’d react. My best guess was that she’d think it was a big joke,
let him down quickly and gently, then come and have a good giggle
with me about it. Not that she’d laugh to be cruel; it was just
that no one took Homer very seriously. He’d always encouraged
people to believe he had no feelings – he used to say ‘I’ve got a
radium heart, takes five thousand years to melt down’. He’d sit in
the back of the class encouraging the girls to criticise him.
‘Yeah, I’m insensitive, what else? Sexist? Come on, is that all you
can think of? You can do better than this. Oooh Sandra, get stirred
up ...’ They’d get madder and madder and he’d keep leaning back on
his chair, smiling and taunting them. They knew what he was doing
but they couldn’t help themselves.