John Marsden - Circle of fight

Cutting was hard work, because they weren’t proper pliers of course, and I soon had red, sore hands from the pressure I had to apply. Homer took over after a while. Between us we made a hole big enough for the bike. Lucky we’d brought the two-wheeler, not the fourwheeler, or we’d still be there.

We got through and went on our way, much more cautious now. If they’d built a fence, what else might they have done? But we got to the rendezvous OK, about half an hour early in fact. A windmill was the landmark. It was a hundred metres down from an intersection, under the shade of a clump of wattles. ‘You’d better go back as fast as you can,’ I said to Homer. ‘In case anyone’s on their way to check the fence.’

‘Yeah, righto,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking the same thing. Good luck then. Hooroo.’ He started the bike and got on, put it in gear, turned it around, and started off with a quick wave. I watched him go, feeling a bit dismal. If one of us got killed in the near future — and that’d probably be me — those would have been our last words to each other.

I sat staring into a nearby paddock. What hope did I have of finding Gavin? This whole thing was so vague and unplanned. The only reason Liberation and the Scarlet Pimple thought it was worth a chance was — well, there were two reasons really. One was that we had no other avenues, no other hopes. This was Plan A, but

there was no Plan B.

And the other reason was that they thought I could get good intelligence once I was ‘on the ground’. ‘On the ground’ meant, once I was in the heart of Havelock. The message from the Pimple was: ‘These people only trust face to face. They won’t tell us much by phone and they won’t put anything in writing. The group who’s got Gavin seem to be renegades, out-of-control, with no friends. Everyone’s scared of them. But if someone’s there, on the ground, we think people will give you serious information.’

It wasn’t much but it was all I had, and in search of Gavin I would be like those bloodhounds that follow a trail until they die. Literally. They were my role models now. I had such a hunger, such a need to have him back that I didn’t care what the cost might be. I guess a psychologist would say it was because of losing my parents, which is fair enough. I didn’t really care what the reasons were, but this seemed like a different feeling to the one I had about my parents. Feeling? What am I talking about? How can I leave the s off the end when my sadness about my parents included the guilt I felt when I saw people in Pakistan grieving for whole families washed away in a flood, the sense of loss that I had never collected the recipes from my mother because I’d just assumed I would accumulate them as a matter of course, the gratitude for the love and support I got from people like Homer’s parents, the confusion that came from wondering all the time how I could possibly go on, the strength that memories of my parents’ steadiness gave me… The war had hit my mother hard but she slowly put her life together again, put the calcium back in her bones, and she went through a lot of pain doing it, but she was successful, and the days finally came when she could dance to ‘Yellow Submarine’ while she was making the coleslaw and kiss my father with passion and buy bright new clothes and have coffee with old friends in Wirrawee and read difficult books by people who’d won Nobel Prizes, then not long after that, a gang of strangers came into the house and killed her. So yeah, I had strong feelings about the loss of my parents and they were different to the feelings I had now about Gavin, but perhaps it does all amount to the same thing. If you add up 2 and 2 you get 4, but if you add up 3 and 1 you still get 4, so maybe that’s how it was. I was getting the same total.

Dark shapes in the distance moved slowly back and forth. They looked like cattle and I hoped they were and I hoped they hadn’t been trained in surveillance of enemies from over the border. Occasional trucks rumbled past. I didn’t know whether I was expecting a truck or some other vehicle. I could have been waiting for a camel train for all I knew. I didn’t see a single car but there was a motorbike, with two young people, probably men. They didn’t have helmets but they were going fast and they didn’t slow down for me.

I was well hidden, behind a clump of young wattles, safe unless someone came looking for me or unless I was wildly unlucky. But the rendezvous time came and went. I realised a bit too late that I should have made arrangements with Homer for a way to get back if no-one turned up. Maybe we’d both pinned too much faith on the Scarlet Pimple and Liberation. Ten minutes late didn’t bother me, twenty made me a bit uneasy, half an hour was stressful. It was actually an hour and five minutes before an old Acco rumbled to a halt fifty metres before the windmill, and the driver cut the engine. In the silence all I could hear was the squeaking of the old mill. I was dry-throated and straining with all my senses to see and hear what was happening. A minute earlier I’d been thinking about how to get home again. I’d decided I had to wait for a full two hours before I gave up. Too much was at stake. If the guy’d had a flat tyre or something I couldn’t walk away. But I didn’t like the idea of waiting two hours, didn’t like it at all.

When a loud noise stops, the silence gets pretty oppressive. I’d heard the Acco coming for quite a while and the sound had gradually taken over the paddocks. Now there was nothing but a whingeing windmill slowly rotating. Then I heard footsteps from the direction of the truck and a voice calling softly, ‘Hey girl. Hey! You there?’

There wasn’t time for long games of Spotlight. I stepped out onto the road. ‘Here,’ I called. The man immediately turned back to the truck. All the lights were off so I couldn’t see him very well. ‘Quick,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Very late.’

Well, he didn’t need to tell me that. I jogged down the road after him. I’d only brought a light backpack so it was easy to handle. But when we got to the truck it turned out that I had some hard lifting to do. The truck was stacked with hay bales, the small ones. The guy started unloading. I realised what was going to happen. I’d be hidden in the middle of this mobile haystack. Lucky I’ve never been a hay fever person.

I swung up on the top and started throwing bales off. He stopped and stared at me. I could see his wide eyes. He was middle-aged, with a round face and grey hair cut short. ‘You very strong,’ he said in surprise. I grinned and kept dropping the bales onto the road. There would be strands of it everywhere for a while, if people were looking for evidence of where I’d been. I had to hope a strong wind would take care of them.

I heard a high-pitched grunt to my left and looked across to the paddock. Attracted by the sweet scent of hay the cattle had started lining up along the fence. I nearly got the giggles. If another vehicle came past we were in serious trouble. But now the man seemed satisfied that he’d made a deep enough compartment for me. In I went, with my bag, and he swung the first bale back into place. For a lightly built guy he was pretty strong too. It’s a lot harder throwing bales back up onto the truck than it is dropping them off. Ten times harder.

Quickly the bales piled up and then he pushed a length of poly pipe down to me. I realised it was going to give me air, but I didn’t like the idea much. The man cupped his left hand and showed me how I could breathe through it. ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ I called up to him and he said, ‘Yeah yeah no problems.’ It wasn’t much reassurance. Before I could ask any more questions he disappeared and a few moments later another bale was thrown across the top, and then another and another until I could see nothing, just hear the thump thump thump of each new brick in my wall. Then silence. Complete silence. Silence like I’ve never experienced before. Silence and darkness. I felt the truck jolt slightly as he got in, then the engine started and a shudder ran through it, ran through me. The vibration was quietly comforting. That was lucky because not much else was comforting. OK I wasn’t allergic to hay but I could have been claustrophobic. There had been a time, oh how long ago, when Corrie and I were children and the world was a different place, and we’d been crawling through gaps in her haystack. We got deep inside there, acting like we were explorers, giggling a lot, with me calling ‘Go right!’ ‘Go left!’ and suddenly Corrie had a panic attack and decided we wouldn’t be able to get out. Deep in the middle of the hay piled inside their huge barn was a bad place to have a panic attack, but she unnerved me too, and I started backing out as fast as I could but it wasn’t fast enough for either of us, and in front of me Corrie was going off her head. She kicked me about eight times as we backed up. By the time she got out she was a complete mess. I was all right, just freaked by her going so quickly from sanity to madness, so we left the barn and went back to the house and watched TV while she calmed down.