Burning for Revenge (2 page)

When we talked to the others I found things were a bit more complicated than I'd expected. Homer and Fi reacted like I thought they would—pretty much the same as me. But Kevin ... well. I hadn't let myself think that any of us might go off like he did.

How could I? If I did, I might have to think about my own fears. Those fears had sent me into panic when Colonel Finley said he wanted us to come back from New Zealand. Those fears had taken control of me completely when the enemy soldier walked towards me in the streets of Wirrawee. Those fears caused a scream to come ripping out of my throat, when silence was the only option. For all I knew, my scream might have caused the capture or death of the twelve New Zealand guerillas.

So I couldn't think about Kevin not being as brave as me. I couldn't condemn him for lacking a bit of guts sometimes.

It happened while we were at the fireplace, eating a lunch that was mainly rice, like a lot of our meals these days. Lee started making his big announcement, but he'd hardly finished his first sentence before Homer burst out: "We might as well go and do something. This is hopeless, sitting around here. Even if we do some tiny little thing, it'd be better than this."

"Danger's a drug," I thought, as I sat there watching him. "And you're hooked on it, Homer."

"I don't mind doing little things," Fi said. "I just hope you guys can stop at little things. But you never seem satisfied with that. You always want to go for the big blast."

Kevin said nothing for a minute. Then, with voice shaking, he said: "I don't think we should do any more. The way Finley's dumped us here ... it sucks. Why should we do anything for him? He's sold us right down the creek."

No one seemed to know how to answer that. I mean, I think we did know; it's just that no one wanted to be the one to do it. We weren't too keen on flowery patriotic speeches.

For some stupid reason I opened my mouth though. I had no right to, but I did.

"Kevin, this isn't anything to do with Colonel Finley. We've all said about a thousand times what we think of him not sending the chopper. That's not the issue. The main thing is that we're in a position to do something to help and no one else can. I don't think we've got much choice."

Then I said the stupid thing, the unforgivable thing. "I know we're all scared Kevin, but we've just got to go out there and do it."

There were some things we never said to each other and the word "scared" was one of them. Oh, maybe at night in our sleeping bags when we were being honest and we couldn't see each other's faces, but this wasn't one of those times.

Kevin went red and even Fi, sitting beside me, drew away a little.

"At least I don't scream when I see a soldier," Kevin said.

He got up and walked off. I sat there burning with shame and fury. I knew why he'd said if. even in my rage I knew why he'd said it, but I didn't know if I could ever forgive him. I had enough trouble forgiving myself.

Homer said, "That wasn't very smart Ellie."

"Oh leave her alone," Fi said.

Lee didn't say anything. That hurt too. I thought he would have stuck up for me, especially against Kevin, who he didn't like much.

So that was why I was lying in my tent listening to the summer storm smashing into the bush, watching the thrashing and threshing of the tent, crying out in fear as a small branch landed on the nylon fly. The thunder boomed and blasted, the rain had never fallen more heavily, and I never felt more alone in my life.

We were all paralysed by the tension between Kevin and me. I thought it would blow over in an hour or two, like most of our arguments, like the summer storms. But Kevin wouldn't talk to me and no matter how keen the others were to get out of Hell they didn't seem able to make a move while this coldness went on. I tried to apologise to Kevin, but he wouldn't listen. That made me feel I was definitely in the right now, which didn't help settle things, as it made me less interested in trying again.

On the third day though Lee settled it, in a kind of way, by saying suddenly and aggressively: "Look, I said to Ellie the other day that I was going, whether anyone else came or not. I should have gone then, when I said I was. So the hell with the lot of you, I'm going now."

"I'll come," Homer said, straight away.

"So will I," Fi said.

"I will if you want me," I said.

"Of course I bloody want you," Lee said, looking irritated.

No one looked at Kevin, who was trying to clean a fry-pan that had some burnt rice stuck to it. I don't know what recipe he'd used for his fried rice, but it hadn't worked too well. His face was red, but probably not from the sweat he put into his scrubbing. He didn't say anything for so long that we gave up and assumed he wasn't going to speak at all. Instead we started talking about what we needed to take with us. Suddenly Kevin interrupted. "You could at least include me in this," he grumbled.

We looked at each other. This time I wasn't going to be the one to say something. No one else seemed in a hurry either. Finally Fi, the peacemaker, said: "Well, we weren't sure if you wanted to come."

"Of course I'm coming," Kevin snapped. "What, did you think I was going to stay here on my own? I'm not that stupid. You saw what happened to Chris."

There was another pause, then we kept going with our plans, with Kevin making the occasional comment, usually negative. For once though we didn't have many plans. I didn't like that. Normally we gave a lot of thought to what we were doing. The longer the war lasted, the more we seemed to make things up as we went along. It made me feel insecure.

There was only one thing I wanted, and that was to go in the direction of Holloway, to look for my mother. The others had no particular objection to that. Homer's parents were thought to be somewhere near Stratton, and we didn't want to go that way. The country there was too built up, too closely settled. It seemed too dangerous for us. We didn't have much clue where Kevin's family was—somewhere to the north apparently. All we knew was that his mother was in the Showground, like my father. We had no hope of getting into the Showground. Anyway, we weren't keen on going towards Wirrawee or Cobbler's Bay for a while. We'd made things a bit hot for ourselves in these places. If we went the long way towards Holloway—via the Wirrawee-Holloway road instead of taking the shortcut through the mountains—we would then have a choice of going to Goonardoo or Holloway. Goonardoo was on the main north-south railway line, so we might be able to do a bit of damage there, and they were both big towns.

That was as far as our actual plans went. The rest of the time we just threw ideas at each other. Lots of sentences beginning with "Maybe we could..." or "What about if we...." It was like playing "if only" with the future, instead of the past.

Fi wanted to call Colonel Finley, to tell him we were leaving Hell. There was no particular objection to that either. That was the trouble. No one particularly objected to anything, except Kevin, who objected to everything. All we had was this strong feeling that we should get back out there and be useful.

I don't know about the others but I'd started blocking out fears about danger and death. Seeing so many people die, including some of my own friends, had made me feel weird about my own life. I'd moved gradually into a different state of thinking, where I didn't dream much about the future. Maybe that had happened to all of us and that's why we didn't do a lot of planning.

I think I'd started to believe I wouldn't survive the war. One of the slogans people chucked around a lot in peacetime was "Live for the day." It's like in sport, "Take it one match at a time." Unconsciously we'd started doing that now. I'd never lived that way before the war; I hadn't liked the idea at all. It wasn't a good way to farm. "Live as though you'll die tomorrow, but farm as though you'll live forever." Everything you planted, everything you built, had to be for the long term. No good sticking up a fence that would fall down in a year or two. We'd dig a hole a metre deep for a corner post but that wouldn't suit Dad. "Better go down another foot. Be on the safe side."

"You mean thirty centimetres," I'd tease him.

We'd never hold back from planting an oak tree just because it wouldn't come to maturity for fifty years. "I won't live to see this full-grown," Dad would say.
Then he'd plant it anyway. He grumbled at the way the nurseries advertised everything as "rapid growth," "quick growing," "instant." He thought that was a bad approach to life.

Now I had to face the possibility that I wouldn't live to see those oak trees full-grown either. I was living the way we never had, the way I'd been taught from the cradle not to live, the way every instinct in my body told me not to live. But it was hard to stick to my parents' ideas in the face of the deaths of Robyn and Come and Chris. Their deaths, the deaths of all the other people I'd seen or heard about, and the disappearance of the twelve New Zealand soldiers had been working on me slowly and steadily. Eating away like a creek at a gully. Like footrot in sheep. Like cancer.

So I left Hell with the others, feeling pessimistic, wondering if Id ever see it again. And with no real plans. If I could find Mum, I'd be happy. I didn't think beyond that. I didn't know if I'd live beyond that. But at the same time I knew we had to keep fighting. We were well past the point where we sat around debating if it was morally OK to fight and kill. We'd gone so far down that road, there was no turning back. We had to go on to the end, no matter what it might be, trusting it would work out OK. Some of our earlier talks about fighting seemed naive to me now.

On and up we climbed. The storm had come through here with a vengeance. Fallen trees cut the track in three separate places. I had this little game with myself, that the three trees represented Robyn and Come and Chris, and that if we found any more it would mean some of us would die.

Well, we didn't cross any more on the track out of Hell, but on the way up to Wombegonoo we came to two others. As I climbed over the splintered limbs, the broken branches and the crushed leaves—the trees were very close to each other—I couldn't help wondering if they meant anything. Were they symbolic, or was I just being stupid? In English we'd done so much stuff on symbols. We'd given Ms. Jenkins such a tough time about them. "Oh come on Miss," we'd say, "don't tell us the author meant it that way! I bet if he were here he'd say, 'I don't know what you're talking about. I was just writing a story.'"

There was a bit in
To Kill a Mockingbird
where Jem stops Scout from killing a roly-poly, whatever that is, and Ms. Jenkins said the roly-poly was a symbol of Tom Robinson, but I don't know; it seemed a bit far-fetched to me.

On the top of Wombegonoo a strong fresh wind was blowing. It had chased away the clouds, and left a sky that glowed. The temperature was cool but not cold. We'd had a lot of rain lately, quite a few storms. They leave the air so clean and clear. They wash the dust away and let the stars shine. But I don't think I've ever seen it as bright as it was that night.

If I were looking for symbols, maybe that was another one. The stars were so many different colours. Mostly shades of white of course, but some tinged with blue, some with red, some with yellow or gold. And others, a few, burning a strong red. When the Slaters had their Japanese friend visit a few years back she told me they were lucky to see a dozen stars at night in Tokyo. Well, I don't know how many we saw that evening. In places they were so bright they became one shining stream of light.

Radio reception was good at first too. Colonel Finley sounded more relaxed. I guess the war must have been going a bit better. I don't know, maybe he'd just had a second helping of dessert. Maybe he'd been promoted. Maybe he was happy to hear our friendly voices. He'd probably been sitting around the office saying "Gee, can't wait to hear from my little buddies again. I miss them, you know. Might send a helicopter to pick them up."

We had to be careful what we said of course. When we were back in New Zealand Colonel Finley told us to assume the enemy was listening whenever we used the radio. He told us to be "brief and circumspect." Col and Ursula said the same thing. I've never figured out exactly what circumspect means but it wasn't hard to guess.

Homer did the talking. He just said we were going out into enemy territory, but not specifically to look for the "Dirty Dozen"—which is what we'd nicknamed the missing New Zealand soldiers. We had no real hope of seeing them again, unless it was by luck. If they were still alive we were sure they wouldn't be in this area. Stratton maybe, but not around Wirrawee or Holloway. The best we could hope for was that they were prisoners, and of course they'd be in a maximum security prison, not Wirrawee Showground.

The nearest maximum security prison was Stratton, as we well knew, and it mightn't be open for business any more. It took a hell of a pounding during at least one Kiwi air raid that we'd experienced. The air raids might have meant the end of Stratton as a place to lock up dangerous criminals, like us, or the Kiwi soldiers.

So we told the Colonel we were heading in a different direction, to do whatever damage we could. He didn't sound quite so relaxed when we told him that. In his usual dry formal way he said: "Anything you do will be appreciated. If they have to move one soldier to your district in response to your activities, then that's one soldier less to fight in the critical areas. Is there anything we can do for you?"

It was a pretty illogical question, as there wasn't much he could do from way back in Wellington. But Homer grabbed the chance. "A lift out of here would be nice."

Colonel Finley actually sounded a bit guilty when he answered. "Don't get the wrong idea. We haven't abandoned you. We will get you out, but we just can't do it right at this moment. Don't give up on us though."

I think we all cheered up a bit when we heard that. But a moment later the reception went crazy: static and whistles and chainsaw noises. Homer started trying to call the Colonel back but I stopped him. The sudden loss of the signal and the weird noises on such a clear night scared me. It made me think that maybe one of our fears was justified: maybe they were monitoring us. I got him to turn the radio off. There wasn't any point anyway. It was good to hear a friendly adult voice—nice and comfortable—but there was nothing else we could say to him. Not much else he could say to us, either.