John Marsden - Circle of fight

Toddy said a whole lot of stuff to them but they didn’t look particularly interested, just kept playing cards. Occasionally one of them would grunt a comment or an answer. They held the whip hand, that was obvious. Toddy seemed even more nervous. I wondered when my turn would come and whether I would be expected to speak.

Then Toddy turned to me. He cleared his throat. ‘These men know a bit about the group who are holding your brother. They don’t get on with them at the moment. There’s a — I think in New York they would say a “turf war”. These men don’t know who you are or who your brother is but they know there’s a little boy being held as a hostage. But they don’t trust me very much. They think I’m running an operation of my own. I brought you here as proof that I’m not involved in some double-cross or even triple-cross.’

I felt like I was in Sleazeville. The idea of a bribe seemed to have floated in through the door. I didn’t know if this was the right time to do it so I asked Toddy, ‘Should I offer them money?’

‘You have some?’ he asked quickly. He was sure onto that fast.

‘A little,’ I said.

‘No, don’t talk about that yet. Tell them a bit about yourself and why you’re here.’

It was a weird situation. I had to make a speech in a language these guys didn’t know and the life of a child might depend on it. I wasn’t feeling too inspiring in this grotty smoke-filled room with a bunch of guys who were apparently gang members of some kind. But I had to be inspiring. I just started off slow, feeling my way, trying to put some words together. Pausing at the end of each sentence for Toddy to translate was good in one way, bad in another. The good part was that it gave me time to think about what I wanted to say next. The bad part was that I couldn’t get a flow going. It soon became obvious that I wasn’t going to have them swaying in the aisles shouting ‘Halleluiah’ while I inspired them with a sermon about giving their life to the Lord Jesus.

So I told them about Gavin mostly, how Gavin’s stepfather had murdered Gavin’s mother in the last few minutes of the peace or the first few minutes of the war, how Gavin had run off and lived as a street kid in Stratton, seeing other kids coming and going around him, seeing them dying sometimes, of neglect and injuries and in one case at least from being lost in the bush, how I’d found him and kept him with me, and how Gavin’s stepfather had only recently tried to kill the poor kid. I didn’t say much about me because I didn’t want them to guess who I was — assuming they’d heard of me in the first place — but I did say I had no family left and Gavin was now my brother and the only person I had in the whole wide world.

At the end there was a short silence and I said to Toddy, ‘I’ve got a few hundred dollars American, if they want money to tell me where he is.’

‘Just wait,’ he said.

But one of the men had heard the magic word and he looked at me directly for the first time. ‘One thousand dollars,’ he said.

‘I haven’t got that much,’ I lied.

Suddenly they all forgot their card game and everyone was talking at each other. I couldn’t work out what was going on but they were pretty agitated. I looked at Toddy and he gave a little shake of the head. When they kept going hammer and tongs at each other he said quietly to me, ‘They’re arguing about the money. The others don’t like him asking for it.’

The man nearest to me turned around in his chair and looked at me. I hadn’t seen anything much of him before, just the back of his head. Now I realised he was the youngest of them, only about nineteen, and quite goodlooking. He put his cards down on the table where they could all see them. Obviously he wasn’t going to win that hand. ‘We’ll tell you where he is,’ he said. He didn’t speak in English, and to my left Toddy was translating, but I didn’t need the translation. Somehow I knew exactly what the guy was saying. ‘We’ll tell you where he is, but that’s all we’ll do. You’re on your own after that. If you’re going to get him out of there it’s up to you.’

I nodded to thank him. The other men had all gone silent and they’d chucked their cards on the table too. They just watched the young guy like they no longer had anything to do with this. The man glanced at his watch, turned to Toddy, and started talking to him in their own language, pretty fast, Toddy nodding at the end of every sentence. Then it was over. They picked up their cards, the young guy turning back to the table, and Toddy signalled to me that it was time to leave.

‘Thanks very much,’ I said awkwardly to the young guy’s neck. He didn’t respond. I followed Toddy down the corridor, past the bedrooms and through the front door. We continued downstairs without saying a word. Out into the street, towards the bright lights again, walking very fast, this time Toddy right beside me, kind of pulling me along. A hundred metres from the main street he stopped abruptly and dragged me to the right into the grounds of the church.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘listen good. They told me the place and I take you there now. I leave you there and what you do, it’s up to you.’ His English started to collapse under pressure. ‘You live, die, I don’t know, I only Toddy, I no fight. You want little, you take little, I do nothing.’

I realised he meant ‘little boy’, but I didn’t say anything. ‘You get him, you don’t come to my house, you go to place I tell you, if I can find you I help you, OK? You don’t never come to my place, you understand? You never come my place.’

‘All right,’ I said. I resented this, but I could see it from his point of view too. It wasn’t his war. He had to survive. He didn’t want to lose his life for a couple of strangers.

‘All right,’ he echoed me. ‘All right. You stay here. I get motorbike. I bring your stuff. Then you never need my place.’

‘So you’re going to take me to Gavin right now?’

I nearly gagged with the fear of what I was about to do, the situation I was about to enter. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘These people, they move all the time. We go fast, before they move again. They move, we never find them.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You go get the bike. I’ll wait here.’

Although my feelings about Toddy were now pretty mixed I clung to him as I rode on the back of his motorbike. He might be the last human I ever clung to. The only comment he made when he came back with the bike was, ‘You shouldn’t have said about the money,’ but I didn’t care. Maybe it was a mistake but it had changed the atmosphere in that room and somehow it had made things happen. I think Toddy just liked being in control of the situation, didn’t like that I’d ignored his instructions. Now I didn’t compare him much to Homer at all. Homer had more, I don’t know, well, not more, less… Less vanity, less fear, less ‘I’m in charge here.’

We rode through the sweet cool night air, which made it hard to understand why sweat kept dripping down the back of my neck. Why my face felt so hot. On the edge of town Toddy stopped to show me a hiding place where he said he’d look for me the next day. Me and Gavin, I reminded him, and he was, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, of course,’ and I realised he was sure he’d never see me again, let alone have the pleasure of meeting Gavin. It made me determined to succeed, if only for the completely stupid reason that I wanted to prove to Toddy that I wasn’t helpless and hopeless.

The hiding place was on the edge of an old cemetery, which seemed appropriate. One way or another it seemed likely I’d end up in a cemetery by the next day. I took a quick look around and then got back on the bike. Away we went, towards an unknown and probably impossible destination. To my surprise we headed back into town. I’d always had a picture of these guys holed up in the countryside somewhere, a remote place where I’d have to sneak across paddocks and in and out of trees to reach them. That was the way we’d operated a lot of the time in the war. But now we rode right towards the CBD, Toddy occasionally pointing out something that would help me navigate back to the cemetery.