Burning for Revenge (4 page)

Lee's statement shocked us into silence. He put in words what I'd felt for some time, but I hadn't faced up to it quite so directly. We rolled up our mats and put the remnants of breakfast back in our packs. Then we walked on, still with no one saying anything. It had seemed a nice morning half an hour before, but now it didn't look quite as attractive.

Kevin still trailed along. If he had ideas of going back to Hell alone he didn't have the guts to put them into practice. I remembered something my hockey coach, Ms. Sanderson, said, that it's the timid players who get injured. I wondered if that was a bad omen for Kevin. Mind you, I'm not sure Ms. Sanderson was entirely right, because Robyn was the one who got the most injuries on our team, and she was definitely our most aggressive player.

We came out to the Wirrawee-Holloway road and turned right. This part of the road had thick bush on both sides, so we were in a good position to avoid vehicles, by diving behind trees as soon as we heard them. We trudged along silently, lost in our own thoughts. I'd started this trip with a sense of excitement, but I wasn't feeling too good now. I think I'd had a vague idea that we'd come out here and find my mother and everyone would be ecstatic and we'd all live happily ever after. I hadn't thought it through much.

I walked with head down, watching the dust slide over the toes of my boots with each step. Good faithful old boots. The guards took the laces out of them when I was in Stratton Prison, but when I got out I still had the boots. Now, months later, they didn't have a lot of life left, maybe just a few more miles. They looked unloved, which wasn't true, and uncared-for, which was. They had once been an olive-green, very dark. You felt you could almost see black in their depths, if you peered hard enough. Now they were a lighter drier green. The colour had been bleached out by the hard life they'd led. They were scuffed and worn and dull, especially round the toes. I could have used a whole tin of dubbin on the toes alone.

The boots were a bugger to get on in the mornings, like most boots, but once on they were the most comfortable pair I'd ever owned. Not glamorous, but strong and very supportive. I didn't want to ever give them up. They were one of the few links I still had with home.

Ahead of me, Homer, who was leading, came to a halt. I nearly cannoned into him, then realised why he'd stopped. We'd reached the edge of the bush and it was opening into farmland. I'd just walked four k's without noticing anything except my boots. Life's funny like that. Sometimes, before the war, we'd drive from Wirrawee to Stratton and I'd notice nothing on the whole trip. We'd arrive in Stratton and I'd have no idea how we got there, no memory of the road. Now I'd just done the same thing on foot.

I figured that we were about three k's from Holloway West, which was a dot on the map about five or six k's from Holloway itself. I searched my mind to think what was there. A service station and a general store, a school that had been closed by the Government just before the war, a couple of churches, and maybe forty houses. At least that was my memory of it, and when we slipped into the trees and took our packs off for a break, it seemed like no one else could remember much more.

There was a fairly easy route for us though. The old road, just a bush track now, was a few hundred metres back in the scrub, running parallel to the new road. I knew it went to the tip and after that I thought it kept going somewhere out Micklemore way, to the old Soldier Settlement blocks. There wasn't much to interest us in that country, except some good places to hide, and perhaps the chance of finding a few shacks unlooted. Some funny people had lived out there: old-timers, hippies, and people from the city who didn't want to mix with other humans.

So we cut across to the old track. It wound around trees and over a creek or two. It was a friendly road, corrugated and dusty, and it made me feel friendly towards the people who'd carved it from this dry scrub so many years ago. The bush is meant to be beautiful, and it often is of course, but this part wasn't. Just lots of small and medium gum trees, hardly any undergrowth, and shades of dull green and dull brown with no bright colours. I couldn't even see any birds.

Still, I felt at home in it, and it was safe. We walked along slowly, mainly because we were tired, but also I think because we didn't have any special goal. At night we planned to spy on the farms until we could find some prisoners to talk to. We hoped they could give us information about my parents, as well as anything else that would give us an idea of where to go and what to do. Until then we were stuck for suggestions.

We came to the intersection, where a dirt road from the main road met the track we were on. The dirt road led to the tip. It was quite a big tip this one—well, not big by city standards—but it served both Wirrawee and Holloway. Even before the council amalgamations the shires shared the tip.

We cockies didn't use it much because, like all farmers, we had our own tip on the property. There was a gully in Nellie's that we'd been dumping stuff into since my grandfather bought the place. You could stand on the edge of the gully and see the history of our whole farm in a big pile below your feet. Some day maybe an archaeologist would dig the lot up and write a book about our family. Mum and Dad's first car, a cream Valiant ute, was still rusting away, for example, along with a smashed Laminex kitchen table that a drunken shearer had fallen on in the shearing shed. There were sheets of roofing iron torn off by the willy-willy of 1994, tanks with holes in them, a few other cars and tractors, and bits of machinery. There were the remains of my disastrous attempts to make ginger beer—dozens of exploded bottles—and the pump that burnt out when the body of a drowned sheep got caught under the foot valve and lifted it from the water. The sheep went in the gully too, on top of the old computer that we'd tried for eighteen months to sell. Dad had finally lost his patience with it and hoicked it in there, in a fit of temper.

One Christmas holiday I tried to do a jigsaw of the ocean. After three weeks I'd had enough. I scooped up the thousand pieces, marched down to the gully and ceremoniously dumped the lot.

It was a kind of agricultural museum I suppose. Dad reckoned there was a story about every object we chucked in the gully.

The only time we came to the Wirrawee-Holloway tip was when we had toxic stuff to dump, like chemicals. They had a special container for that. And if Dad had to go to Holloway for something else he'd sometimes put a load for the tip on the back of the ute. "All the rates we pay, might as well get something for it," he'd say.

I'd been here with him just about every time and I quite enjoyed our trips. It was better in the old days though, before they cleaned it up. Back then, the tip was open twenty-four hours a day and there was stuff everywhere; you never knew what you'd find. Then there was trouble with the Environment Commission or someone, and the council had to hire a bloke to be there and keep it tidy. It got a bit boring after that. It was only open five days a fortnight, because we shared Darryl, the bloke who worked there, with Risdon. He did five days at their tip and five at ours. He did a good job too, there was no doubt about that. A month after he started he had the bottles in one area, the papers in another, and the cars all in a huge pile at the southern end. Inside the gate he built a galvanised-iron shed where he put anything that might have value, like old fridges and car seats and bits of timber. He was so organised.

One time Dad had to go to Holloway, so he thought he'd call in at the tip. He wanted to dump some sheep dip that was way past its use-by date. And seeing he was going anyway he decided to take the old Aga. It took an hour of struggling and sweating and swearing to load it onto the ute. He had to use the gantry in the end, and with its help and my help he got it on. Then he chucked in the drums of dip, and we drove out there. We dumped everything OK, and as we were leaving Dad asked Darryl if he had any old carpet. Mum wanted it to put on the garden to suffocate the weeds.

"Drop in on your way back from Holloway. I'll have some pulled out for you by then."

"OK," said Dad, "thanks a lot."

Two hours later we were back and we headed up to the northern end to collect the carpet. When we got to the bulldozer there was a bloke with a one-tonner. "Oh mate," he said to Dad, "you couldn't give us a hand for a minute could you?"

"Sure," said Dad, "what can I do for you?

"Well mate, have a look at what someone's chucked out over here. You wouldn't believe what people throw out. Some people sure are idiots, hey?" And of course he led Dad straight to the Aga.

Dad looked at me with eyes that burned, and there was no mistaking the message. It was like, "You say one word young lady and you'll be chipping burrs for the next three years."

So I stood there trying not to laugh as Dad and the man struggled and sweated and swore and finally loaded it onto the one-tonner. I must admit I even helped a bit. The bloke was so grateful to Dad. He kept talking about what a great score it was, and how the bloke who'd dumped it must be so stupid. When they'd tied it down and Dad closed his tailgate for him and the bloke drove away, Dad turned to me and said: "Don't you dare tell your mother about that, ever."

"OK, Dad," I said, "trust me."

"On this?" he said. "I don't think so."

He could never laugh about that one, and when I tried a few weeks later to make a joke about it, he cut me off before the first sentence was out of my mouth.

So here we were, back at the tip, twelve months on, and what I wouldn't give to see Darryl at the gate and the same bloke rabbiting on about his lucky find, and Dad sizzling as he loaded the Aga on the one-tonner.

It was nearly lunchtime. The thought of going into the tip made me a bit nauseous. I had an image in my head of the rotting piles of food that were always scattered around the place, and the clouds of flies. But I couldn't let my imagination take control of me: I had to be careful about that these days. Imagination and memory had become enemies. Before the war they had been my friends. Now, in all kinds of ways, I had to control them both. If I didn't I'd never have another peaceful night again, let alone a peaceful day.

The tip was the same as ever. Magpies and crows strutting around like they were in charge. Huge mounds of dirt heaped up by the bulldozer BTW—before the war. In among the papers and plastic and rotten food, those weird-looking piles that you could never identify. Grey and white and brown: piles of mouldy-looking stuff that was like nothing you'd ever seen before, and nothing you ever saw anywhere else.

So we just sort of wandered in, the way we'd been wandering all morning, not sure of what to do or whether we were looking for anything in particular. As we did I wondered why we were bothering. I mean, what was the point? We sort of drifted along aimlessly, I don't know, hoping to find something maybe. After all, scavenging was a way of life for us now. In times to come we might be grateful for the chance to sleep in a cardboard box at the tip. "You had a cardboard box? Luxury!"

Despite that we spent a fun hour in there. It wasn't exactly Disneyland but it had some good stuff. Even Kevin brightened up again, for a little while, although he didn't want to give us the satisfaction of seeing it. Fi found a cane basket full of wrecked soft toys—teddies and Humphreys and monkeys and tigers, all of them multiple amputees—and she and Homer started chucking them at each other. I had a good time reading some old newspapers. They were yellow and dirty on top but once you got down into the pile a few centimetres they improved. It was a bit depressing and it made me homesick again, but it was also weird. The things we got upset about back then! One of the sports articles started, "A tragic knee injury to Barry McManus has cost the Norths fullback any chance of playing in this year's finals."

"Tragic!" I thought. "I'll show you tragic. Tragic is Lee losing his parents. Tragic is Robyn and Corrie and Chris being cheated out of fifty or sixty years of life. Tragic is one country invading and looting and overrunning another. That's tragic."

I gave up on the papers and wandered through the tip, kicking stuff aside with my feet, occasionally stopping to look at something more closely. Fi and Homer had gotten tired of their game and wanted to go. They were already at Darryl's hut at the entrance, calling to the rest of us. Kevin was nearly there and Lee was leaving whatever little playground he had found and heading in that direction too.' With a sigh, I turned my back on a bunch of old photos scattered across the ground and went to join them.

I was the last to get to the hut, and I nearly didn't make it. The thick scrub surrounding the place was a good screen, muffling any noise from the road. I was walking towards the others with a big smile, wanting to tell them about a Far Side cartoon in one of the newspapers, when I saw Homer's face contort suddenly, as though he'd been stung by a wasp.

"Ellie! Look out," he yelled.

Almost at the same second I heard it. The roar of truck engines, in low gear. At first I thought it was just one truck, then I realised it was more than that. Homer and the others disappeared inside the hut. They seemed to fall backwards into it, in one move, like circus clowns. If there'd been time for jokes I could have turned that into one. But there was only time for fear. I leapt at the hut myself. It was stupid to put ourselves in such a deathtrap but we had no choice. Around the hut was clear ground. The nearest cover was scrub, sixty or eighty metres away. If we'd run for that we'd have been seen before we got halfway.

As it was I didn't know if they'd seen my back and heels when I dived into the little galvanised-iron shed. I would have been in their line of sight. And movement stands out so strongly. It always catches the eye. I'd got there as fast as I could; I just didn't know if it was fast enough. I fell on top of the others, knocking Homer and Fi half over. But no one wasted words discussing those little problems. As soon as we'd sorted ourselves out we got in positions where we could see what was happening. Already the trucks were going past the shed: that's how close it had been.