While I Live (28 page)

I was crouched over the body when the man reached the top of the stairs. He looked to his left first. Luckily Homer had disappeared. It gave me time to see that the man had a gun in his hand. I had been thinking of something like ‘Put your hands up’. Now I decided I’d say ‘Drop your gun’. But as he turned towards me and I tried to speak, I couldn’t. The words stuck in my throat. My throat felt like a rusted-up hinge. And I had no WD40. I knew no sounds would be coming out of there.

I saw the light of understanding flame in the man’s eyes. Understanding and fear. He started to leap to his lef t. He didn’t have much room to move. He raised his revolver.

That’s when I shot him. I didn’t mean to shoot more than once, because I knew I might need every bullet in the magazine, assuming there were any bullets in the magazine, but my finger kind of spasmed and I let off two shots before I could get control again.

The guy spun around to his left, almost a complete revolution. His mouth opened but his eyes seemed to open even wider. He fell backwards, landing on the top couple of steps. His knees were sticking up and they stopped him from sliding down the staircase. His head suddenly fell to the left and the life went out of him. You could see it go.

I was still frozen, still kneeling on the carpet. I think I would have stayed there half an hour but Gavin burst out from Alastair’s bedroom and grabbed me by the shoulder. I’m sure he heard the shots.

At the same time the door of the room below opened, and a cacophony of voices flooded out. There were shouts directed upstairs and a scrabble of boots across the polished floor. I assumed they were calling to the two missing men. I suppose at that stage they didn’t know whether the shots had been fired in error, from one of their friend’s guns, or whether someone like me was in the house and cutting loose.

When no-one answered their calls they figured out that things were not going according to their script.

By then Gavin and I had moved quickly, as quietly as we could, down the corridor. We were outside Homer’s closet. I opened the door a little and whispered, ‘They’re coming, we’ll go in Sam’s room,’ and closed the door again. We went on a few steps. We were now opposite the bedroom. I pushed Gavin in there and I stood in the doorway, trying to keep him behind me, and at the same time keeping a watch down the corridor.

Now I had time to check the magazine and the chamber. Three rounds. Sheez. It sounded like at least three men were coming up the stairs. But the revolver was all we had. Suddenly those other little weapons, the cricket bat and stumps, seemed a waste of time.

A
LONG WAIT
followed, maybe four minutes. I heard a murmur of voices at one stage: I think when they saw their dead buddy lying on the top steps. I knew they were still making their way up the stairs though. I heard occasional whispered comments, and the slow ‘urrrhhh’ noise of a step as the weight was gradually taken off it.

A head suddenly appeared, almost at floor level, looking along the corridor both ways then quickly withdrawing. It was like a tortoise sticking out its neck, but just for a moment. It happened at a speed no tortoise would have recognised. I was left wondering if I’d imagined it.

I didn’t think he’d seen me. I eased back a little further into the doorway. Gavin prodded me. ‘What?’ he asked, with a whisper. It intrigued me that a deaf kid was so good at whispering and moving quietly. Maybe he’d learned it during the war.

‘One soldier,’ I mouthed back, holding up a finger.

‘One?’

‘I saw one. There are more.’

I took another peep. Lucky I did. I was just in time to see a guy dart across the corridor, crouching low. He went straight into the main bedroom. Another one dashed across almost immediately afterwards. He seemed to be covering the first man. They were both inside the bedroom now. I heard shouts from in there. It seemed like the classic stuff, straight from the manual of how to enter a room which could be full of people with guns.

Sweat was pouring off me, and I mean pouring. I thought my shoes would squelch if I tried to move. I was having trouble seeing through my wet eyelids, wet hair. I shook my head. I tried to control my sweating by a simple act of will. Could I turn it off just with the power of my mind?

I kept peeping. The two men came out of the bedroom. At the same time another guy joined them at the top of the stairs. One guarded the left-hand side, facing my way, the other the right-hand side, towards Alastair’s bedroom, the third knelt by the guy we’d whacked with the cricket stuff. If they were drunk, it wasn’t showing. Maybe fear sobers you up pretty fast.

I didn’t dare peep anymore for a while because of the man looking our way. Instead I glanced back at the window, wishing it were open, like the ones we’d seen from the tank. I wondered what we could do if and when they came for us. Could Gavin and I leap through the glass? A spectacular head-first dive? I nodded at Gavin and then at the windows and I think he got the idea. I left him to try to get them open and had another sneak look out the door.

This time I got down low to do it. As I extended my head a few centimetres I heard a crash. I dared the snatched glance which was all I could allow. One of them was bouncing out of the door of Alastair’s bedroom looking bloody scary; I think another was just behind him. The third was getting up from where he’d been kneeling beside the guy we’d hit. Something about the way he moved made me think that his unconscious friend wasn’t going anywhere for a long time. Or to put it another way, he had already left for a long journey.

And I figured that while one was doing the quick medical inspection the other two had checked out Alas-tair’s room and found it empty. Now they knew we were down this end of the corridor.

I heard a longish squeak behind me. I whirled around and gestured at Gavin. He was trying as hard as he could, but the window was stiff and difficult. I waved him away; it was too dangerous.

I had to look again. The men might be right outside the door and about to burst in to the room. I pointed Gavin towards the bed and made wild hand movements to tell him to go under it, but I didn’t have time to see if he obeyed.

I lined up with the frame of the door and slowly let myself lean out. My flesh crawled. I saw only one of them and he was all of three metres away. I shrunk back in to the room. I ran on soft feet to the bed and took a position on the other side. It had come to a shootout then. I’d get one of them for sure, and maybe a second one if I were lucky, and I generally had been lucky since the war started. But the third one would get me and then Gavin. Homer would have to take his chances, would have to look after himself.

Suddenly one of them flashed past the door. I knew what he was doing. I could see it in my mind so clearly. He would now be standing on the other side of the doorframe, gun held high, waiting for his mates to take up their positions before two of them burst in, with the third backing them up.

As I saw it happen in my mind, so it happened in real life. Two of them, guns ready, appeared in the doorway, gazing into a room that to them looked empty.

And in the next second, the next instant, they swung around instead.

I heard it too, the sound that had distracted them. The telephone ringing. The mobile telephone. It played ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. It was Homer’s mobile phone. And as they both, with a single movement, like they were choreographed, pointed their hand guns at the cupboard door in order to riddle it and Homer with bullets, I shot them both in the back.

It was the perfect accidental ambush. I saved Homer’s ass. He maybe didn’t deserve it, but I saved him. And Gavin’s ass, and mine with it.

The third guy took off. I heard him leaping down the stairs three, four at a time. I felt too weak to follow him. A door banged. Suddenly the house was silent. From the window Gavin must have seen him because he suddenly called, ‘Ellie, shoot him.’

He pointed down into the yard. I had a bullet left but I wasn’t going to use it. A moment later I heard a vehicle start up and take off. They must have hidden it nearby.

I stepped over the bodies, getting blood on my shoes from the pools that were already puddling on the corridor floor. I opened Homer’s door, being careful to warn him in advance: ‘It’s me. Don’t smash my head in.’

I’d got that right. He had a golf club at the ready.

We went downstairs.

We found Shannon first. She was in the sitting room, tied up, not in good shape. Homer saw her, went white, looked away, folded his arms. I was angry with him, not for any logical reason. I said, ‘I’ll look after her. Go find the others.’ He muttered something I didn’t hear, and skittered out of there, collecting Gavin on the way.

I undid Shannon. She rolled onto her side and covered her face. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, one of those meaningless remarks, not at all true, and not much better than ‘You’ll get over it’, or ‘I know just how you feel’. At least I didn’t say those things.

I wondered what I would feel in that situation and what I’d want done for me if an Ellie-type person dropped in out of the blue, so I ran to the kitchen, got a big bowl, filled it with warm water, picked up some face flannels and towels and soap from the bathroom, and hurried back.

I was getting worried that I hadn’t heard from Homer about Shannon’s parents and brothers. ‘Oh God, please don’t let them be dead,’ I prayed as I knelt beside her.

I cleaned her up and dried her, as gently as I could. There was a bit of blood but I couldn’t see much sign of injury. Physical injury, that is. Then Mrs Young rushed in, pretty much hysterical, as you would be, but that didn’t worry Shannon, although she hadn’t said anything yet. They hugged and hugged. Once I realised I couldn’t do any more, I went out.

When Homer told me that the other Youngs were OK – he’d found them in the basement – the thought went through my mind: ‘That’s what I prayed for. There is a God!’

But then I figured ‘If there is a God, why did he put them through that in the first place? And in particular, why did he put Shannon through what she suffered?’ It’s like, if one survivor gets pulled out of a coalmine three days after it’s collapsed, trapping a hundred blokes, everyone shouts, ‘God be praised,’ but you’ve got to ask, ‘What was God thinking to have buried the other ninety-nine?’

Homer had called the ambos and the cops already. His mobile had been pretty useful, all things considered.

Once I knew they were on their way, I headed for the open air.

Open air feels good sometimes. I sat gazing at the big machinery shed, wondering who’d called Homer on his mobile at the critical moment. Maybe that was God, using the Royal Telephone.

D
URING THE WAR
no-one held us to account for the stuff we’d done. That figured. Back then there wasn’t anyone around asking us to fill in forms. Now I found that things had changed a lot. The three of us were at the house for hours, answering questions in between turning down multiple offers of counselling. Finally I chucked a bit of a tantrum and told them we were tired and had done enough for one day and they suddenly reversed direction. Next thing we were on our way home in a police car.

It took a long time to get Gavin to bed. He reminded me of the cow who’d been on Ecstasy. I just hoped he survived it as well as she had. She was in great shape. But Gavin was like a puppy on Ecstasy, jumping around, running around, zigzagging through the house. He broke a cup and a pot-plant holder. It was only when he fell against the window beside the front door and cracked it that he calmed down a bit, and that was only because I got so mad at him. I didn’t want my parents’ house trashed as soon as I took it over. I felt every break, every bit of damage as a failure on my part.

Poor kid, he couldn’t help himself. I made him take a bath instead of a shower and I did Milo for two, and toast with Vegemite, then said, yes, he could sleep in my bed if he didn’t take up all the room.

By the time I got to bed he was asleep big-time, like, unconscious. I stood looking at him. He seemed so relaxed, half on his back, his right arm flung out, breathing long and slow. I was glad he could find a peaceful place in sleep at least.

I was in my pj’s and had one knee on the bed when I realised, almost calmly, that I was about to fall apart. I also realised I couldn’t do this in my bed when Gavin was there. I went back out towards the sitting room but only got halfway when I started trembling and sobbing and hugging myself. I leaned against the wall then slid down until I was on the floor. It seemed like something outside me had taken control. It shook through me like I was a washing machine. I knew what it was of course. The image of Shannon, lying there naked and tied up, her blood, the death that I saw in her eyes: where was I supposed to put that? What was I supposed to do with it? In what part of my body was I supposed to store it? Please tell me. Because whichever part it was, I knew that part was full. It had been full for some time. Since the death of my parents in fact. I had my arms around my knees and I was shaking so hard that it hurt my teeth, as I tried to find a place for all this horror.

Gradually Shannon’s blood gave way to my parents’ blood, her damaged body made room for my parents’ terrible wounds. The enormity of what had happened hit me at last. Sitting there on the corridor floor in the house where my mother died, I howled for my mother and father, howled like a dog, gasping for air between the howls. At the same time crazy torn-up pictures of our lives seemed to blow down the corridor towards me, as though someone had literally pulled out thousands of photos from the family albums and confettied them, so that all I saw were my mother’s gloves tied to her stocks when we were waiting to go skiing, my father’s moustache when he grew one for a few months, the scar on my mother’s wrist that she wouldn’t talk about –and now I would never know its origin and I would never see it again – her amused expression when my Stratton grandmother commented on the new curtains: ‘Do you think this style will
last
?’ The little black dress my mother wore to the opening of the grandstand at the racecourse, my father’s pencil stub writing down the golf scores, his laugh, her fine fingers, his grunts when he was absorbed in a job and I was asking questions, her big brown nipples that she didn’t like but I loved, his long soft penis and its curious head, her pubic hair so dark and mysterious, his pubic hair so thick and curly, him planting a kiss on the new tractor while I, at the age of eight, took a photo, her laughing and saying, ‘So you’d like me better if I had four wheels and a power take-off?’, him saying, ‘I’ll show you a power take-off,’ and grabbing her and them kissing kissing kissing, passionately, as I ran around them laughing and squealing and grabbing at them, the two of them kissing, hugging, and the love between them, the love the love, always the love, the wild beautiful love that somehow survived the fights and the stresses and strains and worst of all the monotony of everyday life and I understood then what it means for a human life to end prematurely and arbitrarily, how each human being is an accumulation of wonderful and unique details, and in destroying a human being you destroy ‘all the thousand million memories’ as well as the bent little finger on his left hand and the stubble on her legs and the smile and the grimace and the frown and the way they use a spatula and the way they chop an onion at arm’s length or place the jumper leads on the car battery or hold a baby at the school fete while the mother has a go at the ‘Putt for Prizes’. ‘Does anyone really appreciate life while they have it?’ For a few moments there I think I became one of the philosophers and poets and infants and even Monets, a member of the exclusive club of those who do.