Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (10 page)

I delivered my present, and got a grunt of thanks from Lee, and a ‘Where have you been?’ from
Fi
, then climbed a tree with Homer to do the radio check. At least my little walk had succeeded in one way. For a short time I’d been able to put off thinking about this moment, this critical moment. Climbing the pine tree though, with Homer’s big hairy legs above me, and the radio bumping against his hip, I had to face it: this might be the beginning of the end for us. We were about to become serious, like professional soldiers, in this horribly serious war.

I was panting when we got to a good possie, not from the effort of climbing, but from tension and fear. I tried to say something but my mouth was too dry, and I had to use a trick Andrea had taught me, scratch the underneath of my chin with the tip of my finger, to get some saliva flowing and lubricate my throat. After a few moments of that I was able to croak: ‘There’s a patrol coming.’

We waited silently.
Would have been silly to wait any other way.
The motorbikes snarled past, sounding louder than ever. It was like they had a mind of their own, like they were alive, like one of them might come crawling up the tree and grab my legs and drag me down. I clutched the trunk tighter and closed my eyes and prayed.

When they’d gone Homer switched on the radio and in his familiar low rumbling voice began transmitting our call code.

‘Charlie Baker Foxtrot. Charlie Baker Foxtrot.’

Ryan had given us a list of the possible responses we might get from New Zealand. Each of them had a separate meaning. Within a minute and a half we got one.

‘Pineapples,’ repeated three times.

Pineapples meant: ‘D-day postponed twelve hours. Give us a call some time if you’re not doing anything, and we might be able to go out, catch a movie, whatever.’

Well, maybe I didn’t get that last bit quite right.

Anyway, like it or not, we’d got ourselves a twelve-hour reprieve.

And it was the last thing I wanted! My nerves were screaming for action. In some ways the best message would have been Wallaby, which meant D-Day postponed indefinitely: ‘Abandon all plans’. But that wouldn’t have been the best news in the long run. The tough reality of our situation was that the best message for us now was to go straight into action. Get it over and done with.

Instead we had more of this awful waiting.

In a temper I threw myself on a bed and started reading the magazines from the newsagent, hoping to find something I could get into. It was impossible to concentrate. I turned page after page, not noticing whether I was seeing ads or articles or horoscopes or crosswords. Then suddenly I did take notice. In
Who Weekly
I was looking at a photo of a bike racer flying through the air. The bike was somersaulting over a wall with the rider somersaulting in the opposite direction. The headline said ‘Isle of Man Tragedy’.

It gave me an idea.

Homer was on sentry so I climbed our lookout tree again to talk to him. Unfortunately I made the mistake of giving him a tractor magazine before telling him my idea, which meant that from then on I had to work extremely hard to get his attention.

I got it eventually though. ‘You know those motorbike patrols?’ I asked.

‘Motorbikes?
Sure.’

‘And how scary they are?’

‘Uh huh.
Look, that’s the John Deere 8300, the tracked one. Dad wanted to buy one of those before the war.’

‘Beautiful.
Very sexy.
Well, while we’re waiting, waiting for the green light, I reckon we should do something with these patrols.’

‘Yeah, fair enough.’

He still wasn’t concentrating.

‘I want us to start attacking the patrols.’

‘Attacking the patrols? Are you serious?’

At least now he was listening.

‘We have to do something. I’m like an addict waiting for a fix. I’m jumping out of my skin. I think this war’s made me into an action junkie.’

He laughed.

‘And we’re all the same. We’ve got to do something tonight. I mean, what else is there? Go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep? I don’t think so. No-one’s going to sleep a wink. All we have to do is work out ways to attack which won’t put us in danger.’

‘Like, drop something on them from a rooftop?’

When Homer did catch on he was quick.

He added: ‘What we really need is to sabotage them and make it look like an accident.’

‘Yeah.
That’d be better still.’

We sat in the tree, talking over ideas. It was funny: there we were, held by the strong smooth white arms of the gum tree, stopping every few minutes to watch the little green and yellow birds with their black and white crests as they ripped at the bark, listening to their noisy confident babble, and working out how to kill people. Is there any comeback after a war? Can normal transmission ever resume? I didn’t know the answers but I guessed not. After World War II my grandfather had come back to the old way of life, right away resuming the yearly cycle of drenching, crutching, lambing, shearing, dipping,
selling
. But I had no idea of what he’d really done in the war. I knew he’d gone overseas, to Italy and
Malaya
, that
he’d been in the Artillery, firing huge guns like cannons, and every year he went to reunions with his mates. But I didn’t know the answers to the big questions. Had he killed anyone? Had he seen their faces? Did he kill in cold blood? I suspect he probably had, but I never got to know him very well, so I could be wrong.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that there’s quite a difference between strangling someone with a belt, and firing a shell into a distant patch of jungle.

When Lee came out of the house to take over sentry from Homer we included him in the discussion. Right away he added a new element. As soon as he understood what we were talking about he said: ‘If we kill them all they won’t know if it was an accident or what.’ I was trying to figure out what he meant, so he added: ‘Like the first patrol up on Tailor’s Stitch. If we set a booby trap that kills one soldier, the others will see it and know how he died. If we set a booby trap that wipes out the whole patrol, no-one need know how they died.
As long as we get rid of the evidence.’

Trust Lee to come up with a savage twist like that. It shocked me into silence.

The boys talked about how they could do it, but they didn’t have any ideas, and neither did
Fi
or Kevin when they got involved. In the end we decided to try for something a bit simpler. After all, it’s often the simplest things that work best.

As soon as it was dark we left the house. We had to do it early, to be back in time for the next radio check. Only Homer and
Fi
and I went. We decided to do it that way in case any of us were caught. It was one of those tough hard-nosed decisions we had to make so often these days. If we three were caught, Lee and Kevin would still be available to carry out Ryan’s orders.

We snuck out while Lee entertained Gavin, so he wouldn’t know what was going on.

What we did was to get under a diesel bus parked outside a truck depot in Brougham. We drained the sump into four plastic half-buckets,
then
went down the hill towards the city centre.

It was too dangerous to go all the way into town of course. We got as far as the Safeway
carpark
in

Morris Street

. The Safeway was trading again in something – clothes I think, judging by the huge pile of empty cartons out the back – but it was closed at night. We hung round for twenty minutes, watching, until Homer finally said: ‘Well, there’s no point sitting here waiting to be caught. We better do it and get clear.’

So we used the shadows of the
carpark
as cover, skulking around the edges like alley cats afraid of dog packs, until we were standing under an elm tree on the side of the road.
Fi
had two buckets, I had the other two. When the street was quiet, we stepped out into the wide-open spaces of

Morris Street

. I felt very exposed. It reminded me of the first moment when I’d taken a real risk in this war: outside the
Wirrawee
Showground, when we realised our families were prisoners there. Then I’d darted out of the safe cover of trees, across some clear ground to the next tree. At the time I felt like I was doing something
dramatic, that
would change my life forever. I was right about that.

Although there was power in this part of town, they had no streetlights. They had no streetlights anywhere; so New Zealand bombers couldn’t see them. A lot of buildings had heavy curtains over their windows, to make sure no lights showed at night. But there was a bright moon shining when we stepped onto the road, enough for me to feel we were in the middle of a footie ground with a large crowd watching.
A day-night match.

We trotted up to the corner,
Fi
and I on opposite sides of the street. We started pouring the oil. I wanted to look around, to see if anyone was coming, but I had to discipline myself. There was no point and it would waste time.

The whole thing only took twenty seconds. I watched the oil pour out onto the warm black bitumen. It seemed to lie there invisibly, black on black. I sprinted on soft feet back to Homer and
Fi
.

We decided to wait a while, in the hope of seeing some fun. We waited so long I started getting cold, but when I suggested to the others that we give up,
Fi
, who could hear the blink of an owl’s eye, said: ‘I think they’re coming.’ So I shut up and huddled in closer to the smelly overflowing
Dumpmaster
, trying to hear what
Fi
had heard.

In fact I didn’t hear anything until they turned into

Morris Street

. As usual the first sound was sudden and loud. There was the rasping roar of half-a-dozen engines, and down the road they came. I stood up a little and peered between the cartons. Two of the soldiers nearly caught me because they unexpectedly swung off left and came burning through the
carpark
. I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, this was exactly the kind of stuff they did all the time. But the big rowdy black bikes both accelerated past where I was crouched. In long curves they arced away from each other. I think they were more interested in doing some freestyle riding in the wide-open spaces of the
carpark
than in seriously looking for enemy agents. They seemed to be having a good time, going pretty damn fast.

They were way down the other end of the
carpark
when I heard the chaos from the road. To my left Homer gave me
a thumbs
up. Beyond him
Fi
watched with her hands to her face. There was a gleam in her eyes though, that was just another of the confusing things I’d noticed about her during this war.

I quickly peered through the cartons again. Two bikes were down already, and stopping, as their riders struggled to their feet. A third was on its way down. Its rider was flying, helmet aiming at the footpath ten metres away, arms in front of him. His bike slid away in the other direction. The soldier spun over onto his back, bounced on the road, and skidded along until he hit the gutter with a dull clunk. Then he lay still. The bike crashed into a telegraph pole with a ripping, smashing sound that must have echoed for a dozen blocks. Homer grabbed my shoulder, giving me a hell of a shock. I hadn’t realised he’d moved so close to me. He looked demented with joy. ‘Time to go,’ he hissed in my ear. I backed away. The two bikes that had been in the
carpark
were now out on the road, the riders rushing to help their friends. So we had clear ground behind us. We turned and ran.

We ran nearly the whole distance to my grandmother’s. It was funny really, that we did that. It was like a cross-country race. At first it was natural enough, rushing to get clear before the reinforcements arrived. But even when we were far enough away to be safe, we kept running. After a couple of
k’s
I stopped thinking about patrols and concentrated on getting my breathing right. Glancing across at Homer and
Fi
, on the other side of the street, I saw the same expression on their faces that I’m sure was on mine.
Kind of concentrated.
Panting away, skin getting paler as the streets rolled by, keeping the legs going, keeping the arms going.

But it was fun too in a way. It was the kind of dumb thing we did before the war, running for the hell of it: because we were young and didn’t need an excuse to be stupid. In the old days you’d see little kids in the main street of
Wirrawee
holding their mum or dad’s hand, and because their mum or dad was walking too boringly the kids would skip and hop and dance. It was like they had so much energy they had to work it off somehow.

We were a bit old for that but we still had some energy and there were still times when we felt like skipping or dancing. Not so many of those times lately but once in a
while ...

Back at the house we waited while Kevin and Lee did the next radio check. They came back with the same message.
Pineapples.
Nothing doing till tomorrow.
At the earliest.
Twelve hours more waiting.

We were revved up, like city kids going out to start nightclubbing at one o’clock in the morning. Lee went outside to do sentry, and Kevin came in, so we talked to him about the attack on the motorbikes. He was in a good mood: sensible and interested. He was a lot better these days.

‘I want to go out again,’ Homer said. ‘But not with the oil.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, face it, what damage did we do? Stuffed up a few bikes, gave at least one of them a headache, but that’s all.’

‘Do you think we only gave him a headache?’ I asked. ‘He looked worse than that.’

‘No way,’ Homer said. ‘He didn’t hit the gutter hard enough to do any real damage.’