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‘Yes! I mean, I know he was born out here, but he’s still Greek when it comes to girls.’
‘Do you mind that he’s Greek, or part Greek, or whatever you call it?’
‘No! I love it. Greek is sexy.’
‘Sexy’ sounded fu
‘So is that the only thing stopping you, that you don’t feel as strongly as he does?’
‘Sort of. I feel like I have to keep him at arm’s length or he’ll just take over. It’s like, you build a dam upstream to stop the village being washed away. I’m the village, and I build a dam by being cool and casual with him.’
‘That might just make him more passionate.’
‘Oh, do you think so? I never thought of that. Oh, it’s so complicated.’ She yawned. ‘What would you do if you were in my position?’
That was a tough question, because I was half in her position anyway. It was my feelings for Homer that were stopping me from taking the plunge with Lee. It would have been just my luck to be a castaway on a desert island with two guys and to like both of them. But Fi’s saying ‘sexy’ had made me realise that with Homer it was pretty physical. I didn’t want to spend hours with him talking about life; I wanted to spend hours with him making animal noises, like sighs and grunts and ‘Press harder’, or ‘Touch me there again’. With Lee it was something else. I was fascinated by his ideas, the way he thought about things. I felt I would see life differently, the more I talked to Lee. It was like I could learn from him. I didn’t know much about his life, but when I looked at his face and eyes it was like looking into the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to know what I could find in there, what interesting secrets he knew.
So in answer to Fi’s question I just said, ‘Don’t string him along forever. Homer likes excitement. He likes to get on with it. He’s not the world’s most patient guy.’
She said sleepily, ‘So you think I should try it?’
‘“Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” If you go for it and it doesn’t work, well, what have you lost? But if he loses interest, so you never have anything with him, then you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have been.’
Fi drifted off to sleep, but I lay awake listening to the night sounds, the breeze in the hot trees, the howls of feral dogs in the distance, the occasional throaty call of a bird. I wondered how I’d feel if Fi got off with Homer. I still couldn’t quite believe that I suddenly liked Homer so much. He’d been a neighbour, a brother, for so long. I tried to think back to the way he’d been a month ago, a year ago, five years ago when he was just a kid. I wanted to work out when he’d become attractive, or why I hadn’t noticed it before, but I couldn’t feel anything much for the way he’d been in those days. It was like he’d metamorphosed. Overnight he’d become sexy and interesting.
A dog howled again and I started wondering about the Hermit. Maybe that howl was the Hermit coming back to his violated house, coming to look for the people who’d trespassed into his secret sanctuary. I wriggled closer to Fi, feeling quite spooked. It had been strange, finding that little hut, so skilfully concealed. He must have really hated people to go to so much trouble. I’d half expected the place to feel full of evil, satanic powers, as though he’d huddled there for years holding black masses. What sort of man could do what he’d done? How could he have gone on with his life? But the hut hadn’t felt all that evil. There had been an atmosphere there, but one that was hard to define. It was a sad, brooding place, but not evil.
As sleep crept up on me I turned my mind to my evening ritual, that I performed now, no matter how tired I was. It was a sort of movie that I ran in my head every night. In the movie I watched my parents going about their normal lives. I made sure to see their faces as often as possible, and I pictured them in all kinds of everyday situations: Dad dropping bales of hay off to sheep, waiting at the wheel while I opened a gate, swearing as he tightened the belts on the tractor, in his moleskins at the field days. Mum in the kitchen – she was a real kitchen person, Mum; feminism had made her more outspoken maybe but it hadn’t changed her activities much. I pictured her looking for her library books, digging up spuds, talking on the phone, swearing as she lit the fuel stove, swearing that she’d change it for an electric one tomorrow. She never did. She claimed she was keeping the Aga because when we started taking tourists for farm stays they’d think it was picturesque. That made me smile.
I didn’t know if I was making myself feel bad by trying to make myself feel good, thinking about my parents, but it was my way of keeping them alive and in my thoughts. I was scared of what might happen if I stopped doing that, if I let them start drifting away, the way I was drifting away now, into sleep. Normally I’d be thinking about Lee, too, at about this time, hugging him to me and imagining his smooth brown skin and firm lips, but tonight I was too tired, and I’d already thought about him enough today. I fell asleep and dreamt about him instead.
The couple of days with Homer and Fi and Lee had promised to be interesting and that’s the way they were turning out. In fact they were almost too interesting – it was getting to be a strain on my emotions. We were all edgy anyway, wondering how the other four were getting on. But Tuesday started cooler and proved to be cooler in most ways. It was an intriguing day; a day I won’t forget.
We’d agreed to get up early again. I’d noticed that the longer we stayed in Hell, the more we fell into natural rhythms, going to bed when it was dark and getting up at dawn. That wasn’t the routine we had at home, no way. But here we gradually started doing it without noticing. It wasn’t quite that simple. We often stayed up after dark to light a fire, to do some cooking for the next day or even just to have a cup of tea – quite a few of us missed our cups of tea during the day – but before long people would be yawning and standing and stretching and throwing out the dregs in the mug, then wandering away to their tents.
So, when it was still cold and damp on that Tuesday morning we gathered at the dead fire, talking occasionally, and listening to the soft voices of the magpies and the startled muttering of the chooks. We had our usual cold breakfast. Most nights now I soaked dried fruit in water, in a tightly covered billy so the possums couldn’t get at it. By morning the fruit was juicy and tasty, and we had it with muesli or other cereal. Fi usually had powdered milk, which we also reconstituted the night before, to have it ready for the morning. We’d scrounged a few more tubes of condensed milk on our trip to the Grubers’, but again they hadn’t lasted long: all we diabetics-in-training sucked them dry within twenty-four hours.
Our major job that morning was to get firewood. We wanted to build up a big pile, then camouflage it. It sounds crazy with all the bush around us, but firewood was quite hard to get, because the bush was so dense. There were lots of little jobs needed doing too – chopping wood, digging drainage trenches around the tents, digging a new du
The plan was to work hard most of the morning, have a break after lunch, then go out that night to bring more loads in from the Landie. And we did get a lot done before the day warmed up enough to slow us down. We got a stack of firewood that was about a metre high and three metres wide, plus a separate pile of kindling. We dug our trenches and du