John Marsden - Circle of fight

The man wasn’t sure himself now and he peered around looking for me. I came out from behind the thresher. The young guy heard me, turned, looked me over, and said in almost perfect English, just a trace of an accent: ‘Oh, nice, we got a good-looking one. About time.’

The older man didn’t react. I gave a weak kind of smile. The motorcyclist said, ‘You should have seen the last female we helped. We nearly turned her over to the police for being so ugly.’

I couldn’t help but give a bigger smile. I’d expected an atmosphere of secrecy and terror and here was another version of Homer, larger than life, outrageous and, to be honest, better looking. And here was the kind of humour I’d grown up with, the humour I was used to, the jokes that, for better or for worse, I’d been hearing all my life. For worse, actually, but that’s another story.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m Toddy.’

‘Hi. I’m Ellie.’

‘Well, we got no time to waste. Here, we cover your beautiful face with this.’ He handed me a wig of black hair and a white mask, adding, ‘Don’t mind me, you get used to me, everyone does, sooner or later.’

I put the wig on carefully, tucking away any loose strands of my own hair. It came down below my shoulders, quite a long way, about fifteen or twenty centimetres. It felt weird. I’ve never had long hair. But I love black hair and was quite happy to get some suddenly. The mask was one of the ones you see people on TV wearing when there’s a plague, or nurses if they’re in an infectious area. Just a tissue-paper thing with a string. It was a clever disguise. Two items, both so easy to find, and my whole appearance was changed.

Or I assumed it was. I didn’t have a mirror, and although I went around the barn looking for a reflective surface, I didn’t find anything much. It was a pretty dusty old barn, and most of the metal surfaces were blotched and worn. Dust and rust, that was the story of that place.

‘Come on,’ said Toddy, ‘we don’t have time for you to go staring at yourself. You women, all the same, it doesn’t matter what you look like, it’s the personality guys go for, don’t you understand?’

I laughed. It was hard not to, even in such an unfamiliar and dangerous situation. I picked up my bag and followed him outside, calling out ‘Thank you’ to the older man, and waving. As before he said nothing, didn’t look at me, showed nothing. He was probably keen to wipe me from his memory, as fast as possible. I guess that reminded me just how dangerous everything was, the risks that he and this Toddy guy ran.

It was a cool day, pretty smoggy. We were in a scrapyard of some kind, with a pile of roofing iron on my left and a mountain of bolts and nuts and stuff to my right. Some of them were pretty big. Toddy led me to his bike, which was a Ducati, polished to within an inch of its life. You know, there’s this word, salubrious, and it means attractive or something, but there’s no way it should. Salubrious? Excuse me! Does that sound enchanting and fragrant? It’s gotta mean grey and depressing and gloomy. So as far as I’m concerned, this scrapyard was salubrious, and in that salubrious place the Ducati shone like a butterfly in a butcher’s shop. Pity it sounded so bad. He started it up — after three goes — and I felt like sticking my fingers in my ears and begging him to turn it off.

But instead of doing that I took a peep at myself in the rear-vision mirror. Firstly, without the mask on. It was dramatic. The change was amazing. I looked older and, to be honest, better, I thought. More, I don’t know, sophisticated or something. More like a city girl. Well, that was good. I might have to be a city girl for a while. I slipped on the mask. Unrecognisable. I was lost, gone, my identity removed simply by adding hair and covering my face. But there was still the problem of my eyes. Before I could say anything Toddy handed me a pair of sunglasses. ‘There you go, princess,’ he said. Princess? God, he was worse than Homer. But he’d thought this through. Maybe he did it every day, took girls from our side of the border into these dangerous situations. It’d make for an unusual job.

We rode down a dirt track which was the driveway into the place and turned left. OK, now I had some sense of where I was. City, probably, but on the outskirts. Could well be Havelock. I sure hoped it was. This was the poor side of town though, boring buildings, dull factories, nothing beautiful, no style. I called into Toddy’s ear, ‘Are we in Havelock?’ and he called back, ‘Well it’s not New York.’ Then he added, ‘No more talking.’

I saw the sense in that. You never knew how far your voice might carry, and I didn’t want people to hear voices speaking English as we rode past.

It was cold on the bike and I used Toddy as a windbreak. I had a million questions. Where was he taking me? Did he know anything about Gavin? How were we going to find Gavin? How had all this been arranged? Who was Toddy anyway? Could I trust him? How did I know that? He could be taking me straight to the nearest police station.

Soon, though, I stopped concentrating on those questions as there was just too much else to look at. The traffic was getting heavier and with every block we seemed to be moving towards the centre of town. Seemed like people got to work pretty early around here. There were a lot of motorbikes but I felt quite conspicuous, more and more vulnerable. We stopped at a red light and a moment later another motorbike pulled up beside us. A girl was riding it. She was about one metre away, jammed between two lines of traffic. We could almost have rubbed noses. She stared straight at me. I stared back. Wig, sunglasses, paper mask… that was all I had. Underneath was all Ellie. The light seemed to stay red forever. She never took her eyes off me. With a jerk Toddy’s Ducati moved forwards again. She followed a second after us. For three blocks I knew she was right behind. I didn’t dare look around. Nothing spells guilt louder than looking around. But under the highpitched quivering of the Ducati I could hear her bike. It was a deep and powerful throbbing. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth block it disappeared. Now I looked around. There was no sign of her. I hoped she hadn’t gone straight to the nearest authorities to report the suspicious-looking girl on the shining motorbike.

Travelling openly through a foreign city — because that’s what it was now — felt strange and exciting. I wished I could just be a tourist and walk these streets even more openly. I wished I could travel overseas and go to places with exotic names like Beijing and Uttar Pradesh and Ulan Bator. Oh yeah, Mongolia, that was another country I’d forgotten when I was stuck in the hay bales. That made fifty-one.

If only my mind wasn’t tortured by thoughts of Gavin lying desperate in a cell somewhere. If only I could be sure he wasn’t dead or injured. If only my life wasn’t in constant jeopardy every second I was on this side of the border. Well, if wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets in the sea. Or, as my Stratton grandmother once said, ‘If wishes were dishes we’d all have cupboards full of Royal Doulton.’

‘But you do, Grandma,’ I’d replied, which for possibly the only time ever stopped her in her tracks.

If it wasn’t for my fears for Gavin — and for myself — I could have enjoyed the motorbikes loaded with boxes of electric kettles and cages of chooks and big bottles of water for office workers. The shops bulging with fruit or car parts or shoes or baby clothes. The mess of traffic at every second intersection, the constant honking of car horns, the little stands along the footpaths with people selling food, the kids so neat and pretty on their way to school. But every time I started to relax a little I saw something else, something sinister. Soldiers. Everywhere. Half-a-dozen marching loosely along a footpath, a group standing smoking and talking at an intersection, a truckload in the traffic in front of us. At no stage did we pass a whole army, but by the time we got to Toddy’s place we’d seen a fair part of an army, scattered around a city where there was no escaping them, almost no street or park where they were not in evidence, soldiers, soldiers, soldiers.