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‘I’d better go and see how Chris is getting on.’
Chris was getting on all too well. He was asleep, and I was furious. I shouted, screamed, and then kicked him, hard. Even while I was doing it I was shocked at myself. Even now, as I think about it, I’m shocked at myself. The thing that scared me most was the thought that maybe all the violent things I’d been doing, with the ride-on mower and the truck, had transformed me in the space of a couple of nights into a raging monster. But on the other hand, it was unforgivable for Chris to have gone to sleep. He’d risked the lives of all of us by being so slack. I remember on our Outward Bound camp, talking one lunchtime, someone had said that in the Army the penalty for going to sleep on guard duty was death. We’d all been so shocked. We could see the logic in it, but maybe that was the shocking part, that it was so utterly logical. Cold-blooded, merciless, logical. You don’t expect real life to be like that, not to that extreme. But I really felt for a moment like I could have killed Chris. He certainly looked scared of me when he rolled away and stood up.
‘Geez Ellie, take it easy,’ he mumbled.
‘Take it easy?’ I yelled into his face. ‘Yeah, that’s what you were doing all right. If we take it easy any more, we’re dead. Don’t you understand how it’s all changed Chris? Don’t you understand that? If you don’t, you might as well get a rifle and finish us all off now. Because you’re as good as doing that by taking it easy.’
Chris walked off, red-faced and muttering under his breath. I sat down in his spot. After a minute or two I think I did go into some sort of delayed shock. I’d blocked off all my emotional reactions because there hadn’t been the time or the opportunity for those luxuries. But it’s like they say, ‘emotion denied is emotion deferred’. I’d done so much deferring, and now the bank had called in the loan. Most of that afternoon is a blank to me. Homer told me much later that I’d spent hours wrapped in blankets, sitting in a corner of the haystack, shivering and telling everyone to be careful. I guess I went down the same path as Corrie had, just in a slightly different way. I have a clear memory of refusing all food and becoming very hungry, but not eating because I was sure I’d be sick if I did. Homer said I was ravenous and I ate so much that they thought I would be sick and they refused to give me any more. Weird.
I was very upset when they wouldn’t let me drive the Landrover, because I’d promised Dad so faithfully that I wouldn’t let anyone else behind the wheel. Suddenly though I got tired of arguing, crawled in beside Lee in the crowded back section, and went to sleep. Homer drove it up to Tailor’s Stitch. If I’d known that I wouldn’t have given up the argument so suddenly and so completely.
Somehow I walked into Hell late that night, crawled into a tent beside Corrie, who was hysterical with joy to see us, and slept for three days, waking only for occasional meals, toilet trips, and brief mumbled conversations. I do remember consoling Chris, who was sure that he’d been the cause of my having a nervous breakdown. I didn’t think to ask how Lee had got in to Hell, but when I gradually got my wits back I found that they’d made a bush stretcher and carried him in; Robyn and Homer taking turns at one end of the stretcher and the lightly built Chris carrying the other, all the way down in the dark.
So I guess he atoned.
During my three days I had the nightmares I hadn’t had that morning on the haystack. Demonic figures ran screaming from me, I felt skulls crush under my feet. Burning bodies stretched out their hands, begging for mercy. I killed everyone, even the people I loved most. I was careless with gas bottles and caused an explosion which blew up the house, with my parents in it. I set fire to a haystack where my friends were sleeping. I backed a car over my cousin and couldn’t rescue my dog when he got caught in a flood. And although I ran around everywhere begging for help, screaming to people to call an ambulance, no one responded. They seemed uninterested. They weren’t cruel, just too busy or uncaring. I was a devil of death, and there were no angels left in the world, no one to make me better than myself or to save me from the harm I was doing.
Then I woke up. It was early in the morning, very early. It was going to be a beautiful day. I lay in the sleeping bag looking at the sky and the trees. Why did the English language have so few words for green? Every leaf and every tree had its own shade of green. Another example of how far Nature was still ahead of humans. Something flitted from branch to branch in the top of one of the trees – a small dark-red and black bird with long wings, inspecting each strip of bark. Higher still a couple of white cockatoos floated across the sky. From the cries I could tell that there was a larger flock out of my sight, and the two birds were merely outriders, strays. I sat up to see if I could glimpse the rest of the flock by leaning forward, but they were still out of sight. So I shuffled out of the tent, clutching my sleeping bag to me like some kind of insect half-emerged from a chrysalis. The cockatoos were scattered across the heavens like raucous angels. They drifted on, too many to count, until they were out of sight, but I could still hear their friendly croaks.
I shed the sleeping bag and walked down to the creek. Robyn was there, washing her hair. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Good.’
‘Hungry?’
‘Yes, I am a bit.’
‘I’m not surprised. You haven’t had anything since teatime the day before yesterday.’
‘Oh. Haven’t I?’
‘Come on. I’ll fix you something. You like eggs?’ I had cold boiled eggs – we couldn’t have a fire during the day – with biscuits and jam, and a bowl of muesli with powdered milk. I don’t know if it was the cockatoos or Robyn or the muesli, but by the time I’d finished breakfast I felt I could maybe start to cope again.
Chapter Thirteen
One of the small rituals that developed each day was Corrie’s Testing the Tra
One evening I happened to be sitting near her when she went through another fruitless search of the dial. As usual there was nothing but static. She turned it off with a sigh. We were chatting about nothing in particular, when she casually said, ‘What are all these other things for?’
‘What other things?’
‘All these other settings.’
‘How do you mean?’
She embarked on a long explanation about how the few times her father had lent her the radio he’d said that her stations would be on PO or FM.
‘PO and FM? What are you talking about? Let’s have a look.’
She handed it over a little reluctantly. I realised from the writing on it that it was a French one. I started translating for her. ‘“Recepteur Mondial a dix bandes”, that’s “world reception to ten bands”. FM’s FM, obviously. PO’s probably AM. “OC Etendue”, well, “etendue”, that’s extended or expanded or something.’ The implications of all this slowly began to dawn on me. ‘This is no ordinary transistor, Corrie. This is a short wave.’