Текст книги "Tomorrow, When the War Began"
Автор книги: John Marsden
Соавторы: John Marsden
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Chapter Two
The plan was to leave at eight o’clock, nice and early. By about ten o’clock we were nearly ready. By 10.30 we were about four k’s from home, starting the ascent to Tailor’s Stitch. It’s a long slow grunt up a track that’s become a real mess over the years; holes so big that I thought we’d lose the Landrover in them, mud slides, creek crossings. I don’t know how many times we stopped for fallen trees. We’d brought the chain saw and after a while Homer suggested we keep it running and he’d nurse it as we drove along, to save having to start it when we came to another log. I don’t think he was serious. I hope he wasn’t serious. It had been a long time since anyone had been up there. We always know, because they have to come through our paddocks to get to the spur. If Dad had known how bad the track was he’d never have let us take the Landrover. He trusts my driving, but not that much. Still, we bounced along, me wrestling with the wheel, doing a steady five k’s, with occasional bursts up to ten. There was another unscheduled stop about half way when Fi decided she was going to be sick. I stopped fast, she exited through the rear door looking white as a corpse, and donated a sticky mess in the bushes for the benefit of any passing feral dogs or cats.
It was not a pretty sight. Everything Fi did she did gracefully, but even Fi found it hard to be graceful while she was vomiting. After that she walked quite a while, but the rest of us continued to lurch on up the spur in the Landie. It was actually fun, in a strange sort of way. Like Lee said, it was better than the Cocktail Shaker ride at the Show, because it was longer – and it was free.
We were actually missing the Show to come on this trip. We’d left the day before Commemoration Day, when the whole country stops, but in our district people don’t just stop. They stop and then they converge on Wirrawee, because Commemoration Day is traditionally the day of the Wirrawee Show. It’s quite an occasion. Still, we didn’t mind missing it. There’s a limit to the number of balls you can roll down the clown’s throat, and there’s a limit to the number of times you can get excited over your mother winning Best Decorated Cake. A year’s break from the Show wouldn’t do us any harm.
That’s what we thought.
It was about half past two when we got to the top. Fi had ridden the last couple of k’s, but we were all relieved to get out of the Landie and stretch our bones. We came out on the south side of a knoll near Mt Martin. That was the end of the vehicle track: from then on it was shanks’s pony. But for the time being we wandered around and admired the view. On one side you could see the ocean: beautiful Cobbler’s Bay, one of my favourite places, and according to Dad one of the world’s great natural harbours, used only by the occasional fishing boat or cruising yacht. It was too far from the city for anything else. We could see a couple of ships there this time though; one looked like a large trawler maybe. The water looked as blue as royal blood; deep and dark and still. In the opposite direction Tailor’s Stitch seamed its way to the summit of Mt Martin, a sharp straight ridge, bare black rocks forming a thin line as though a surgeon had made a giant incision centuries ago. Another view faced back down the way we’d come; the track invisible under its canopy of trees and creepers. Way in the distance you got glimpses of the rich farmland of the Wirrawee district, dotted with houses and clumps of trees, the lazy Wirrawee River curving slowly through it.
And on the other side was Hell.
‘Wow,’ said Kevin, taking a long look into it. ‘We’re going to get into there?’
‘We’re going to try,’ I said, having doubts already but trying to sound strong and sure.
‘It’s impressive,’ said Lee. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘I’ve got two questions,’ said Kevin, ‘but I’ll only ask one of them. How?’
‘What’s the other one?’
‘The other one is “Why?”. But I’m not going to ask that. Just tell me how and I’ll be satisfied. I’m easily satisfied.’
‘That’s not what Corrie says,’ said Homer, beating me to it.
A few rocks were thrown; there was some wrestling; Homer nearly took the fast route into Hell. That’s two things guys are addicted to, throwing rocks and wrestling, but I’ve noticed these guys don’t seem to do either any more. I wonder why.
‘So how are we going to get in there?’ Kevin asked again, at last.
I pointed to the right. ‘There it is. That’s our route.’
‘That? That collection of cliffs?’
He was exaggerating a bit, but not much. Satan’s Steps are huge granite blocks that look like they were chucked there in random descending order by some drunken giant, back in the Stone Age. There’s no vegetation on them: they’re uncompromisingly bare. The more I looked at them the more unlikely it all seemed, but that didn’t stop me making my big motivational speech.
‘Guys, I don’t know if it’s possible or not, but there’s plenty of people round Wirrawee who say it is. If you believe the stories, there was an old ex-murderer lived in there for years – the Hermit from Hell. If some pensioner can do it, we sure can. I think we should give it our best shot. Let’s make like dressmakers and get the tuck in there.’
‘Gee Ellie,’ said Lee with respect, ‘now I understand why you’re captain of the netball team.’
‘How do you get to be an ex-murderer?’ Robyn asked.
‘Eh?’
‘Well, what’s the difference between an ex-murderer and a murderer?’
Robyn always did go straight to the point.
‘I’ve got one more question,’ Kevin said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you actually know anyone who’s been down there?’
‘Um, let’s get the packs out of the Landie.’
We did that, then sat against them, admiring the views and the old blue sky, and munching on chicken and salad. Fi’s pack was in direct line of vision from me, and the more I looked at it the more I began to realise how swollen it seemed.
‘Fi,’ I said at last, ‘just what have you got in that pack?’
She sat up, looking startled. ‘What do you mean? Just clothes and stuff. Same as everyone else.’
‘What clothes exactly?’
‘What Corrie told me. Shirts. Jumpers. Gloves, socks, undies, towel.’
‘But what else? That can’t be all.’
She started looking a bit embarrassed.
‘Pyjamas.’
‘Oh Fi.’
‘Dressing gown.’
‘Dressing gown? Fi!’
‘Well, you never know who you’ll meet.’
‘What else?’
‘I’m not telling you any more. You’ll all laugh at me.’
‘Fi, we’ve still got to get the food into these packs. And then carry them God knows how far.’
‘Oh. Do you think I should take out the pillow then?’
We formed a committee of six to reorganise Fi’s backpack for her. Fi was not a member of the committee. After that we distributed the food that Corrie and I had so carefully bought. There seemed to be a mountain of it, but there were seven of us and we planned to be away five days. But try as we might we couldn’t get it all in. Some of the bulky items were a big problem. We ended up having to make some tough decisions, between the Vita Brits and the marshmallows, the pita bread and the jam doughnuts, the muesli and the chips. I’m ashamed to say what won in each case, but we rationalised everything by saying, ‘Well, we mightn’t get far from the Landie anyway, so we can always come back for stuff’.
At about five o’clock we got moving, packs on our backs like giant growths, strange protuberances. We set off along the ridge, Robyn leading, Kevin and Corrie quite a way in the rear, talking softly, more absorbed in each other than in the scenery. The ground was hard and dry; although Tailor’s Stitch was straight, the track wound around, on it and off it, but the footing was easy and the sun still high in the sky. We were each carrying three full water bottles, which added a lot to the weight of the packs, but which still wouldn’t last us long. We were relying on finding water in Hell, assuming we could get in there. Otherwise we’d return to the Landie in the morning for more water. When the supply in the jerry cans there gave out we’d drive a couple of k’s down the track to a spring where I’d often camped with Mum and Dad.
I walked along with Lee, and we talked about horror movies. He was an expert: he must have seen a thousand. That surprised me because I knew him mainly for his piano and violin, which didn’t seem to go with horror movies. He said he watched them late at night, when he couldn’t sleep. I got the feeling he was probably quite a lonely guy.
From the top, Satan’s Steps looked as wild and forbidding as they had from a distance. We stood and looked, waiting for Kevin and Corrie to catch up.
‘Hmm,’ said Homer. ‘Interesting.’
That was about the shortest sentence I’d ever heard from him.
‘There must be a way,’ Corrie said, arriving at that moment.
‘When we were kids,’ I said, ‘we used to say that looked like a track, down to the left there. We always told ourselves that it was the Hermit’s path. We used to scare ourselves by imagining that he’d appear at any moment.’
‘He was probably just a nice, misunderstood old man,’ Fi said.
‘Don’t think so,’ I said. ‘They say he murdered his wife and baby.’
‘I don’t think it’s a path, anyway,’ Corrie said, ‘just a fault-line in the rock.’
We kept standing and looking for quite a while, as if staring at the tumbled rocks would cause a path to appear, as if this were Narnia or somewhere. Homer wandered along the escarpment a bit further. ‘We could get over the first block I think,’ he called back to us. ‘That ledge on the other side, it looks like it drops pretty close to the ground at the far corner.’
We followed over to where he stood. It certainly looked possible.
‘Suppose we get down there and can’t go any further?’ Fi asked.
‘Then we climb back and try something else,’ Robyn said.
‘What if we can’t get back?’
‘What goes down must come up,’ Homer said, making it clear how much attention he’d been paying in Science over the years.
‘Let’s do it,’ Corrie said, with surprising firmness. I was glad. I didn’t want to push people too much but I felt that the whole success or failure of this expedition reflected on me, or at least on Corrie and me. We’d talked them into coming, we’d promised them a good time, and it was our idea to take the plunge into Hell. If we had a miserable failure I’d feel awful. It’d be like throwing a party, then playing Mum’s ‘Themes from Popular TV Shows’ all evening.
At least they seemed willing to take a shot at the first of Satan’s Steps. But even the first step was difficult. We had to drop into a tangle of old logs and blackberries, then scramble up the tilted scarred face of the rock. We got quite scarred ourselves. There was a fair bit of swearing and sweating and pulling other people up and hanging on to other people’s packs before we were all standing on top, peering down at Homer’s ledge.
‘If they’re all as difficult as this ...’ Fi panted, without needing to finish the sentence.
‘Over here,’ Homer said. He got on his hands and knees, turned to face us, then slid backwards over the edge.
‘Oh yes?’ Fi said.
‘No worries,’ we heard Homer say. There was a worry, and that was how we were going to get back up again, but no one else mentioned it so I didn’t. I think we were too caught up in the thrill of the chase. Robyn followed Homer; then Kevin, with much scrabbling and grunting, lowered himself cautiously after them. I went next, scratching my hand a bit. It wasn’t easy because the heavy packs kept wanting to overbalance us, to pull us backwards. By the time I got down, Homer and Robyn were already jumping off the end of the ledge and fighting their way through the scrub to inspect the second huge block of granite.
‘The other side looks better,’ Lee said. I followed him round there and we inspected the possibilities. It was very difficult. There was quite a sheer drop either side of the block, despite the bushes and grasses growing out of the cliff. And the rock itself was sheer and high. Our only hope was an old fallen log that disappeared into the shadows and undergrowth but at least seemed to be going in the right direction.
‘That’s our path,’ I said.
‘Hmmm,’ Homer said, coming up beside us.
I straddled the log and started a slow slide down it.
‘She loves it, doesn’t she?’ Kevin said. I grinned as I heard the slap of Corrie’s hand hitting some part of Kevin’s exposed flesh. The log was soft and damp but was holding together. It was surprisingly long, and I realised it was taking me under the front of the rock. Huge black beetles and slaters and earwigs started spilling out of the wood between my legs as I got towards the thin and more rotten end. I grinned again, hoping I’d scared them all away before Fi followed me down here.
When I stood up I found I was under an overhang, free of vegetation but facing a screen of trees that almost concealed the next giant block. We’d be able to force a way through the screen, no doubt getting torn and scratched a lot more, but there was no guarantee we could get around or over or under the granite. I sidestepped along, peering through the screen, looking for possibilities, as the others started joining me. Fi was the fourth, arriving a little breathless but without fuss; funnily enough it was Kevin who was unnerved by the insects. He slid the last few yards down the tree in a rush, yelling hysterically, ‘God no, help, there’s creepy-crawlies everywhere! Get them off me! Get them off me!’ He spent the next three minutes brushing himself fiercely, spinning round and round in the narrow space we had, trying to catch glimpses of any more that might be on him, shaking his clothes frantically. I couldn’t help wondering how he coped with fly-struck sheep.
Things calmed down with Kevin but we still couldn’t see any way out of the overhang.
‘Well,’ said Robyn cheerfully, ‘looks like we camp here for a week.’
There was a bit of a silence.
‘Ellie,’ Lee said kindly, ‘I don’t think we’re going to find a way down. And the further we go, the harder it’s going to be to get back.’
‘Let’s just try for one more step,’ I asked, then added, a little wildly, ‘Three’s my lucky number.’
We poked around a bit more, but rather doubtfully. Finally Corrie said, ‘There might be a chance if we wriggle through here. We might be able to get around the side somewhere.’
The gap she’d picked was so narrow we had to take our packs off to get through it, but I was game, so I took Corrie’s pack while she wrestled her way into a prickly overgrown hole. Her head disappeared, then her back, then her legs. I heard Kevin say, ‘This is crazy’, then Corrie said, ‘OK now my pack’, so I pushed that through after her. Then, leaving Robyn to look after my pack, I followed.
I soon realised that Corrie had the right idea, but it sure was difficult. If I wasn’t such a stubborn pig-headed idiot I would have surrendered by this point. We ended up crawling along like myxo’d rabbits, me pushing Corrie’s pack ahead of me. But I caught glimpses of a wall of rock on my left, and we were definitely going downhill, so I figured we were probably getting around the third of Satan’s Steps. Then Corrie paused, in front of me, forcing me to stop too.
‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Can you hear what I hear?’
There are some questions that really annoy me, like ‘What do you know?’, ‘Are you working to your full capacity?’ (our Form teacher’s favourite), ‘Guess what I’m thinking?’, and ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing young lady?’ (Dad, when he’s annoyed). I don’t like any of them. And ‘Can you hear what I hear?’ is in the same category. Plus I was tired, hot, frustrated. So I gave a bad-tempered answer. After a minute’s pause Corrie, showing more patience than me, said, ‘There’s water ahead. Running water.’
I listened, and then realised I could hear it too. So I passed the word back to the others. It was only a small thing, but it kept us going that little bit longer. I crawled on grimly, listening to the sound get louder and closer. It had to be quite a busy stream, which at this altitude meant a spring. We could all do with a fresh cold drink of the water that came from these mountain springs. We’d need it for the struggle back up to the top of Hell. And it was time we started that struggle. It was getting late; time to set up a campsite.
Suddenly I was at the stream and there was Corrie, standing on a rock grinning at me.
‘Well, we found something,’ I said, grinning back.
It was a pretty little thing. The sun didn’t reach it, so it was dark and cool and secret. The water bubbled over rocks that were green and slippery with moss. I knelt and soaked my face, then lapped like a dog as the others started to arrive. There wasn’t much room but Robyn started exploring in one direction, stepping gingerly from rock to rock, as Lee did the same in the other direction. I admired their energy.
‘It’s a nice creek,’ said Fi, ‘but Ellie, we’d better start heading back up the top.’
‘I know. Let’s just have a relax first, for five minutes. We’ve earned it.’
‘This is worse than the Outward Bound course,’ Homer complained.
‘I wish I’d gone on that now,’ Fi said. ‘You all went, didn’t you?’
I’d gone on the course, and enjoyed it. I’d done a lot of camping with my parents but Outward Bound had given me a taste for something tougher. I’d just started thinking about it, remembering, when suddenly Robyn reappeared. The look on her face was almost frightening. In the dense overgrowth I couldn’t stand, but I straightened up as far as I could, and quickly.
‘What’s happened?’
Robyn said, with the air of someone who is hearing her own voice but not believing her own words, ‘I just found a bridge’.
Chapter Three
The path was covered with leaves and sticks, and was a bit overgrown in places, but compared to what we’d been down, it was like a freeway. We stood spread out along it, marvelling. I felt almost dizzy with relief and astonishment and gratification.
‘Ellie,’ Homer said solemnly, ‘I’ll never call you a stupid dumb obstinate slagheap again.’
‘Thanks Homer.’
It was a sweet moment.
‘Tell you what,’ said Kevin, ‘it’s lucky I wouldn’t let you pikers give up back there, when you all wanted to wimp out.’
I ignored him.
The bridge was old but had been beautifully built. It crossed the creek in a large clearing and was about a metre wide and five metres long. It even had a handrail. Its surface was made of round logs rather than planks but the logs were matched and cut with perfect uniformity. Joints cut in each end married the logs to crossbars and the first and last ones were then secured to the crossbars by wooden pegs.
‘It’s a lovely job,’ said Kevin. ‘Reminds me of my own early work.’
Suddenly we had so much energy it was as though we were on something. We nearly decided to camp in the clearing, which was cool and shadowy, but the urge to explore was too strong. We hoisted our packs on our backs again, and chattering like cockatoos we hustled down the path.
‘It must be true about the hermit! No one else would have gone to all that trouble.’
‘Wonder how long he was here for.’
‘How do you know it was a he?’
‘The locals always talked about him as a male.’
‘Most hims are talked about as males.’ That was Lee, being a smartarse.
‘He must have been here years, to go to all that trouble with the bridge.’
‘And the track’s so well worn.’
‘If he did live here years he’d have time to do the bridge and a lot more. Imagine how you’d fill your time!’
‘Yeah, food’d be the big thing. Once you’d organised your meals, the rest of the day’d be yours.’
‘I wonder what you’d live on.’
‘Possums, rabbits maybe.’
‘Wouldn’t be many rabbits in this kind of country. There’s wallabies. Plenty of possums. Feral cats.’
‘Yuk.’
‘You could grow vegetables.’
‘Bush tucker.’
‘Yeah, he probably watched that show on TV.’
‘Wombats.’
‘Yeah, what would wombats taste like?’
‘They say most people eat too much anyway. If he just ate when he was really hungry he wouldn’t need much.’
‘You can train yourself to eat a lot less.’
‘You know Andy Farrar? He found a walking stick in the bush near Wombegonoo. It’s beautifully made, handmade, all carved and everything. Everyone said it must be the Hermit’s but I thought they were joking.’
The track was taking us downhill all the time. It wound around a bit, looking for the best route, but the trend was always downhill. It was going to be quite a sweat getting back up. We’d lost a lot of altitude. It was beautiful though, quiet, shady, cool and damp. There were no flowers, just more shades of green and brown than the English language knows about. The ground was deep in leaf litter there were times when we lost the track beneath heaps of bark and leaves and twigs, but a search around under the trees always found it again. Every so often it brought us back to Satan’s Steps, so that for a few metres we’d be brushing alongside the great granite walls. Once it cut between two of the steps and continued down the other side: the gap was only a couple of metres wide, so it was almost a tunnel through the massive hunks of rock.
‘This is pretty nice for Hell,’ Fi said to me as we paused in the cool stone gap.
‘Mmm. Wonder how long since anyone’s been down here.’
‘More than that,’ Robyn, who was in front of Fi, said. ‘I wonder how many human beings have ever been down here, in the history of the Universe. I mean, why would the koories have bothered? Why would the early explorers, or settlers, have bothered? And no one we know has. Maybe the Hermit and us are the only people ever to have seen it. Ever.’
By that stage it was getting obvious that we were close to the bottom. The ground was levelling out and the last of the sunlight was filtering through to warm our faces. The overgrowth and the undergrowth were both sparser, though still quite dense. The track rejoined the creek and ran alongside it for a few hundred metres. Then it opened out into our campsite for the night.
We found ourselves in a clearing about the size of a hockey field, or a bit bigger. It would have been hard to play hockey on though, because it wasn’t much of a clearing. It was studded with trees, three beautiful old eucalypts and quite a few suckers and saplings. The creek was at the western edge; you could hear it but not see it. The creek was flatter and wider here and cold, freezing cold, even on a summer day. In the early mornings it hurt and stung. But when you were hot it was a wonderful refreshing shock to splash your face into it.
That’s where I am now of course.
For any little wild things living in the clearing we must have seemed like visitors from Hell, not visitors to it. We made a lot of noise. And Kevin – you can never cure Kevin of his bad habit of breaking branches off trees instead of walking a few extra metres to pick up dead wood. That’s one reason I was never too convinced when Corrie talked about how caring and sensitive he was. But he was good with fires: he had the white smoke rising about five minutes after we arrived, and flames burning like fury about two minutes after that.
We decided not to bother with tents – we’d only brought two and a half anyway – but it was warm and no chance of rain, so we just strung up a couple of flies for protection against the dew. Then Lee and I got stuck into the cooking. Fi wandered over.
‘What are we having?’ she asked.
‘Two-minute noodles for now. We’ll cook some meat later, but I’m too hungry to wait.’
‘What are two-minute noodles?’ Fi asked.
Lee and I looked at each other and grinned.
‘It’s an awesome feeling,’ Lee said, ‘to realise you’re about to change someone’s life forever.’
‘Haven’t you ever had two-minute noodles?’ I asked Fi.
‘No. My parents are really into health foods.’
I’d never met anyone who hadn’t had two-minute noodles before. Sometimes Fi seemed like an exotic butterfly.
I can’t remember any hike or campout I’d been on where people sat around the fire telling stories or singing. It just never seemed to happen that way. But that night we did sit up late, and talk and talk. I think we were excited to be there, in that strange and beautiful place, where so few humans had ever been. There aren’t many wild places left on Earth, yet we’d fluked it into the middle of this little wild kingdom. It was good. I knew I was really tired but I was too revved up to go to bed until the others started yawning and standing up and looking towards their sleeping bags. Five minutes later we were all in bed; five minutes after that I think I was asleep.
