John Marsden - Circle of fight

God, I had an anger-management problem at that point.

I realised I’d rung the old gang first, all except Kevin, and he was still in New Zealand as far as I knew. Old friends are the best friends. But I rang Bronte then. There was something about her calmness and strength that I needed right then. And at least she was home.

‘Have you called the police?’ she asked.

Duh, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Shows how far I’d come since the war. In other words, nowhere. I still hadn’t adjusted to this world where, if I killed someone, like I’d done at the Youngs’ when enemy raiders attacked them, the police had a major investigation. I was now living in a world where a man who tried to stab Gavin and I to death actually got arrested and put on trial. Where if hostiles grabbed the kid you were meant to be looking after, you could call the cops and they might do something.

So I took a deep breath and called the cops.

The deep breath was because I had a feeling I’d be in for a lot of complicated explaining, namely about my illegal trips across the border, plus something I wasn’t used to: having a problem taken out of my hands and being told to go and sit in the waiting room and ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.’

Bronte was right, of course I had to ring them, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence in what they might do.

‘Constable Brickwater.’

Funny name. ‘This is about a kidnapping. The little kid I look after, who lives with me, I think he’s been — ’

‘Whoa, whoa. What’s your name?’

‘Ellie. Ellie Linton.’

‘OK. And where are you from?’

I told him. I realised later how clever he was. He’d taken control of the conversation, and that calmed me down and put everything into some kind of order. Otherwise it would have been a huge mess, with me yelping and stammering and sounding like a whole mob of cockatoos in the last light of day trying to settle in a gum tree.

‘Now who’s been kidnapped?’

‘This little boy, Gavin, he lives with me, he’s lived with me since the war and he’s deaf and this afternoon when I got home from school he’d gone and the TV’s been smashed and there’s a magazine full of bullets in the hallway.’

The bit about the bullets got his attention. ‘They’re not your bullets? They don’t fit any of your weapons?’

‘No way. He’s been abducted or something. We did a lot of stuff during the war, and seems like we’ve been targeted since then. My parents got killed here earlier in the year…’

‘Ah, OK, yes, now I know who you are.’

From then on things went into serious mode. I found myself talking to a detective sergeant and when I got impatient and said, ‘But you should be doing something, they could be a hundred k’s away by now,’ he said, ‘There are three cars on their way out to you,’ and not much more than five minutes later they arrived, pretty much one after another.

In the meantime I made a quick call to Jeremy, and he was home, thank God, and he said he’d be right out here too. That was good. Sometimes I needed a guy with me. And Jeremy was quite a guy. I had big-time feelings for him. I spent most of my spare time at school with him now, and we’d been to two parties and a barbeque. I loved being with him and lit up inside when I saw him at school each day. I scanned the crowd for his face every morning, and felt restless and empty till I found it.

I hung up when I saw the police cars. Coming out of winter there was enough dust for them to raise a bit of a cloud as they came down the driveway. I don’t know if they took any precautions against being ambushed but I didn’t notice any. Homer, Lee and I, coming into a situation like that in cold blood, I think we would have.

There is something stirring and terrible and exciting about having three police cars parked in your front driveway. There were probably more than three when my parents and Mrs Mackenzie were killed, but I was in the kitchen most of that day and don’t remember too many details. Now, seeing them all lined up, with their headlights on and their blue lights slowly turning, the police labels and logos all over them… Gavin would have loved it.

I answered their questions but in a kind of blank state. What could they do? If he was dead, find his body. If he was over the border, they might take a year to get him back. It would all have to be done through official government channels. Investigations, denials, negotiations, I knew that script. I’d read about it in newspapers, with other cases of kidnappings. The man we’d gone over the border to find, Nick Greene, was a typical example. My only chance was for us to do what we had done all through the war, and since the war for that matter. Take charge. Act for ourselves. When the tsunami hit south-east Asia I saw a guy on TV who’d lost his brother. He said to the camera, ‘Where’s the government? The government should be over here looking for him.’ I felt sorry for the guy — and for his brother — but I did think that he was asking too much of the government. If Gavin was dead it didn’t matter who found him, and when and where. If he was alive the person who had the best chance of finding him was standing in the kitchen wasting her time helping the cops to fill in forms. This realisation dawned on me gradually as I answered their endless questions, but after a while I felt an impatience for them to be gone.

Some of the cops had been searching the sheds and the paddocks but as darkness dropped over the house they drifted back in, shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders. The cop in charge was a guy called Henry, who seemed pretty important. He was quiet but efficient. I think he was an inspector at least. He talked to a circle of other police for a few minutes then came back and sat me down at the kitchen table. In front of him was a little pile of plastic bags. Evidence. The magazine full of bullets, Gavin’s ug boot, a grubby red cap that they thought might have belonged to the terrorists but I knew was an old one of my father’s that Gavin wore occasionally. Henry gave that back to me and dropped the bag in the kitchen waste bin. Then he came back to the table and sat down again.

He went through the options. He thought Gavin was probably alive. ‘If they’d wanted to kill him they’d have done it here.’ I’d already thought that, but it gave me more hope to hear an adult in uniform say it. It was the only encouraging thing he did say though.

‘These acts are nearly always carried out by groups of renegades who, as you know, have no support from their own government. No official support anyway. They have different agendas. Some are just out-and-out bad, men who come here to rape or plunder. Some are politically motivated and they carry out assassinations and terrorist attacks to try to soften us up. Some have personal motivations. I’m guessing that the people who came here might fit into the last group. The only reason I say that is because the attack on your parents didn’t seem to have any obvious motive, and the abduction of a child is unusual too. I believe you published a book about your guerrilla activities during the war?’

I nodded. ‘Three books.’

‘And you described various attacks you and your friends carried out?’

‘Yeah, only a few. But there was a lot of publicity for a while… Some of the other stuff we did got written about in newspapers and magazines. There was some stuff on TV too.’

‘I wonder if someone who read your books or saw you on TV formed the belief that you were responsible for something they felt strongly about. The death of someone they were connected with, for example.’

I nodded again. ‘Probably. I got a tip-off not long ago that we might be a target.’

‘How did you get that tip-off?’