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‘How do you know what boys’ toilets always have?’ Homer asked.
Corrie said, ‘Suppose we sleep in the shearers’ quarters? Whoever’s keeping watch can sit up in the treehouse. If we have a vehicle behind the shearers’ quarters we could be away and across the paddock into the bush before anyone gets too close.’
‘Would they see or hear the vehicle?’ Homer asked.
Corrie considered. ‘They might. They shouldn’t, if the sentry picks them up early enough, and if everyone moves fast.’
‘Well let’s take the bikes up there too, so we’ve got the silent option if we need it. And let’s clean up this kitchen, so there’s no sign that we’ve been here.’
Homer was becoming more surprising with every passing hour. It was getting hard to remember that this fast-thinking guy, who’d just spent fifteen minutes getting us laughing and talking and feeling good again, wasn’t even trusted to hand out the books at school.
Chapter Nine
Fi woke me at around eleven o’clock. That’s what we’d agreed, but it was a lot easier to make the agreement than to keep it. I felt heavy and stupid and slow. Climbing the tree was an ordeal. I stood at the trunk and looked up at it for five minutes before I could find the energy.
Some people wake up fast and some people wake up slow. I wake up dead. But I know from experience that if I sit it out for half an hour the energy gradually comes. So I sat lethargically in the treehouse, watching the distant road, waiting patiently for my body to begin to function again.
Once I got used to it, sitting there was OK though. I realised to my disbelief that it had been only about twenty hours since we’d emerged from the bush into this new world. Lives can be changed that quickly. In some ways we should have been used to change. We’d seen a bit of it ourselves. This treehouse, for instance. Corrie and I had spent many hours under its shady roof, holding tea parties, organising our dolls’ social lives, playing school, spying on the shearers, pretending we were prisoners trapped there. All our games were imitations of adult rituals and adult lives, although we didn’t realise it then of course. Then the day came when we stopped playing. We’d gone a couple of months without our usual games, but a few days into the school holidays I got my dolls out and tried to start up again. And it had all gone. The magic didn’t work any more. I could barely even remember how we’d done it, but I tried to recapture the mood, the storylines, the way the dolls had moved and thought and spoken. But now it was like reading a meaningless book. I was shocked that it could have all gone so quickly, sad at how much I’d lost, and a little frightened about what had happened to me and how I’d fill the future hours.
There was a sudden sound from below, and looking down I saw Corrie’s red head as she started to climb the tree. I moved to the left to make room for her, and she swung up beside me a moment later.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she explained. ‘Too much to think about.’
‘I slept, but I don’t know how.’
‘Did you have awful dreams?’
‘I don’t know. I never remember my dreams.’
‘Not like that Theo what’s-his-name at school. Every morning in Home Group he’d tell us his full dreams from the night before, in detail. It was so boring.’
‘He’s just boring full stop.’
‘I wonder where they all are now,’ Corrie said. ‘I hope they are at the Showground. I hope they’re OK. It’s all I can think about. I keep remembering all the stories we read in History about World War Two and Kampuchea and stuff like that, and my brain just overloads on terror. And then I think about the way those soldiers were shooting at us, and the way they screamed when the mower blew up.’
She picked unhappily at a piece of bark. ‘Ellie, I just can’t believe this is happening. Invasions only happen in other countries, and on TV. Even if we survive this I know I’ll never feel safe again.’
‘I was thinking about the games we used to play here.’
‘Yes. Yes. The tea parties. And dressing the dolls up. Remember when we put lipstick on them all?’
‘Then we lost interest.’
‘Mmm, it just faded away, didn’t it? We grew up, I guess. Other things came along, like boys.’
‘They seemed such i
We sat there, looking out across the paddocks to the dark fragment of road in the distance, lying across the countryside like a thin black snake. That’s where people would appear, if they came in search of us. But there was no movement, just the birds going about their unchanging routines.
‘Do you think they’ll come?’ Corrie asked presently.
‘Who? The soldiers? I don’t know, but there’s something Homer said ... about them not having the manpower to search the whole district. There’s a lot of truth in that, I think. See, my theory is that they’re using this valley as a corridor to the big towns and the cities. I reckon they’ve landed at Cobbler’s Bay, and their main interest in Wirrawee is to keep it quiet so they can get free access to the rest of the country. Cobbler’s Bay is such a great harbour, and remember, we couldn’t see it when we came out of Hell, because of the cloud cover. I bet it’s full of ships and there’s traffic pouring down the highway right now. But it’s not as though Wirrawee’s going to be a major target for anyone. We don’t have any secret missile bases or nuclear power plants. Or at least we didn’t, the last time I looked.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Corrie doubtfully. ‘You never know what Mrs Norris was getting up to in the Science Lab at school.’
‘You children come down from that tree right now!’ said a voice from below. We didn’t need to look to know who it was. ‘Great bloody sentries you are,’ Homer said, climbing to join us. ‘And I heard what you said about Mrs Norris, my favourite teacher. I’m going to tell her when we go back to school.’
‘Yeah, in twenty years.’
‘Wasn’t it Mrs Norris’s class when you went out the window and down the drainpipe?’ I asked.
‘It could have been,’ Homer admitted.
‘What?’ said Corrie, laughing.
‘Well it got a bit boring,’ Homer explained. ‘Even more boring than usual. So I thought I’d leave. The window was closer than the door, so when she turned to write on the whiteboard I went over the windowsill and down the drainpipe.’
‘And then Ms Maxwell came along,’ I chipped in.
‘And said, “What are you doing?”.’
‘Quite a fair question really,’ I said.
‘So I told her I was inspecting the plumbing,’ Homer finished, hanging his head as if he remembered the storm that followed. We were laughing so much we had trouble keeping our grip on the branches.
‘I’ve heard of people being out of their trees,’ Corrie said, ‘and you nearly are.’
A familiar sound interrupted us. We stopped talking and craned our necks, searching the sky. ‘There it is,’ said Corrie, pointing. A jet screamed across the hills, so low that we could see the markings. ‘One of ours!’ Homer yelled excitedly. ‘We’re still in business!’ The jet lifted a little to clear the range and turned to the left, belting away into the distance towards Stratton. ‘Look!’ Corrie called. Three more jets, dark and ominous, were in hot pursuit. They were flying a little higher but following the same course. The noise was piercing, splitting the peaceful sky and land, like a long Velcro tear. Homer sank back to his position in the bole of the tree. ‘Three against one,’ he said. ‘I hope he makes it.’