John Marsden - Circle of fight

By now it was 1.30 am. I thought it was time to do something. If I waited too long I wouldn’t have the strength or energy I was going to need. And if by some crazy fluke I was successful, I needed time to get both Gavin and myself out of town to that cemetery. It had to be an hour’s walk. God knows how we’d do that. I’d have to wait and see.

I left the park and slowly crossed the road, quite a way up the street from the house. I didn’t want some wideawake sentry seeing me heading purposefully towards the place. I wondered again if I had the right house. If I didn’t this could be one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. Not to mention the fact that I’d be back where I started, with even less hope of rescuing Gavin.

It was about 1.40 when I reached number 503 again. Now I didn’t pretend to be an innocent passer-by. There was no point. It was better to try not to be seen at all. From two houses away I sidled along the fence as quietly as I could. Being quiet wasn’t difficult; I was on a bitumen footpath and there were no dried leaves or twigs or bark, the stuff that makes it so difficult when you’re out in the bush.

At the house I paused for a moment only. It all seemed innocent. I slipped down to the gate and eased it open. Bloody thing, hadn’t they ever heard of lubricating oil? It squeaked like a wounded rabbit. Trying not to breathe I snuck into the pretty little garden. What were my instincts telling me? My basic instincts? Was anyone watching? Was I about to get clobbered? And you know, something funny happened. I didn’t know if I was being watched or not, although I was terrified. I didn’t know if someone was about to jump me. But I suddenly knew with absolute certainty that Gavin was very close. It sent my whole spine tingling, all the way down to my tail bone. This nice suburban house in the middle of Havelock with its daffodils and early rosebuds and a big hydrangea was holding my favourite person in the world. I knew it.

It motivated me. I actually muttered something corny like, ‘OK Gavin kiddo, I’m coming to get you.’ I went to the right-hand corner and took a hold of the wall and searched upwards to see what I would find. My fingers gripped the corner of the top of the window and I got up on the sill. I was going to try to avoid the windows but at least this one had a curtain across it.

From there the climb immediately started getting difficult. I had to rely on the ivy, which I wasn’t too happy about as it didn’t have that great a grip on the wall. It was thick enough and strong enough, cos it had obviously been growing there a long time, but from the start it kept pulling away when I put weight on it. I got above the ground-floor window quite easily, which I was pleased about as it meant I was now up a good way. But I didn’t feel at all safe. I thought my best chance was to get over to that box-window arrangement and from the roof of that use a drainpipe to get to the closed-in veranda.

I started to reach across to the left and at that very moment a car came slowly along the street. I cursed it. Talk about timing. These people were making no effort to help me at all. I waited there, suspended, knowing that if you don’t make a movement you can be amazingly invisible. On the other hand a faint tremor of your eyelashes and you can be spotted a k away. That’s how it worked in the bush anyway, and I had to assume it’d be the same here.

Then the ivy pulled out by the roots and I fell backwards into the garden.

I landed on the hydrangea. I don’t mind hydrangeas normally but now I realised just how strong and hard those branches are. Spiky even. The ivy was on top of me and I lay there for a moment too shocked to move. The fall had knocked the wind out of me. I was wondering who’d catch me first, the people in the car or the people in the house. I started to struggle. Humans are so stupid at times like that, well at least I am. Caught between the minor pain of being spiked by the hydrangeas, and the major pain of being splattered into pieces by high-velocity bullets, I was pretty much six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. Cursing the hydrangeas and feeling some really sharp, horrible pain in different places, struggling to get out of the bush, and at the same time listening for an opening door, running footsteps, shouts of alarm, rifles rattling as they were lifted into position… with one eye I was looking at my left arm to see if it was bleeding, with the other I was looking at the house to see if lights were coming on.

The amazing thing was that no-one appeared from any direction, running or walking, questioning or shouting, no-one with guns and no-one without them. The silence of the district continued unbroken. I heard the car going on down the street and a truck changing gears in the distance, and I heard all the little creaks and rustles that hydrangeas probably always make when someone’s fallen into them and is getting out again, but that was it.

It seemed incredible, but I wasted no more time thinking about it and took full advantage of the second chance I’d been given. Trying to ignore the sore bits all over my body I limped to the darkest corner of the little garden and stood there for a moment trying to work out a new plan.

Despite my certainty about Gavin being close, I still did wonder if I’d come to the right house. Where were the sentries? The place seemed so normal, so quiet, so suburban. But one thing I’d learned in the war, if I hadn’t known it already, was that ultimately people always slip up. I’d done it myself often enough. It doesn’t matter how organised you are or how important the situation is. It didn’t matter that my dad had all the joined ewes so neatly separated from the unjoined ones, and that for year after year nothing had ever gone wrong. Sooner or later some idiot slipped up and left a gate open and you had a big problem. I knew that idiot all too well.

Sooner or later a guard goes to sleep or nicks off to have a cigarette or to visit the toilet. Or you forget to have someone on sentry that night. Or you’ve rented a great DVD and everyone wants to watch it and you agree you’ll go back on guard straight afterwards. Or you’re on the phone or you’re with your girlfriend. Or you’re drunk.

They’d had Gavin for a while now and maybe they were getting casual. No human in the history of the planet has stayed alert and focused 24/7, more like, well, I’d guess, about 3/7.

That didn’t help me formulate a plan though. I couldn’t see any way into the house. It was only out of desperation, and a sort of Monty Python sense that anything lunatic is possible, that I did what I’d thought briefly about before. I snuck over to the front door and turned the handle.

It turned smoothly and easily. That still didn’t prove anything. I turned it to its fullest extent and pushed slightly. The seal that a closed door makes with the doorframe pops like a whisper. I heard it and I felt it and in the dim light I even saw it. I still could hardly believe it. Maybe the door was held by a loose kind of lock that would make itself known in the next few centimetres. I pushed a little, to see. Nothing. No resistance at all.

The aches from simultaneous multiple hydrangea pokes dropped away suddenly. My skin felt so hot I thought it might blister. I hoped the door was as smooth as it felt so far, that it wasn’t going to creak and groan as I squeezed it open. I hoped the person in charge of oiling the front gate wasn’t also in charge of this door. I hoped someone oiled this one frequently, like daily. Most of all I hoped there was no-one waiting for me on the other side. I stopped breathing. The door had become my heart. All my energy was now out of me and in it. I pushed it open.

It did go pretty quietly, that was the good news. I got it open to about sixty degrees, and stared down the corridor. It was long, a sort of pale orange with a square wooden table halfway down, and a dim light showing at the far end. Not very attractive I gotta say. The light was coming from somewhere round the corner; the corridor light itself was off. I could see at least two doors, but there might have been a third one. At the end of the corridor you could either turn right or go up a staircase. The good news was that there were no soldiers standing there. There was no-one at all.