John Marsden - Circle of fight

‘What kind of things would they want?’ I asked, gripping the table with both hands. I was as bad as Homer. It was the only way I could stop the trembles from breaking out all over.

Homer flushed. ‘It could be you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It could be both of us. It could be the whole group. They probably have quite a high awareness of us.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said miserably. We hadn’t thought about this enough. It certainly hadn’t been part of our consciousness during the war, and only in recent times had I started to realise that yes, actions do have consequences, even actions that seem right and justifiable. I’d done nothing I’d been ashamed of during the war, or after the war for that matter, leaving aside a few personal things, like the party in New Zealand, but even so, I couldn’t expect the enemy to see it that way, and I was starting to realise that they definitely didn’t.

I stood and walked up and down the room, hands under my armpits. Jeremy wanted to put his arms around me, but I threw him off. I didn’t want that. I wanted to go and do something. It seemed unforgivable to do nothing. It seemed like a betrayal. The one thing Gavin wouldn’t understand was inaction.

No-one tried to go to bed. No-one tried to sleep. We sat around, even though there wasn’t much point. I know we all dozed at times, because at one point I woke up and Jeremy and Homer were both asleep in their armchairs. One of the women cops came in twice and told me to get to bed, but I shrugged her off too.

At last the room got a little lighter. I went to the kitchen and made more tea and coffee, as well as putting out heaps of cereal and bread and stuff, then asked the cops if they wanted breakfast. They looked grateful.

They had that grey appearance you get when you’ve been up all night, tense, on guard, wondering if that piece of bark flapping in the distance is a human arm or a piece of bark. God I knew how they felt. There had been so many nights like that for me during the war.

Anyway, they came in and hoed into pretty much everything I had. Then Homer and Jeremy wandered in, and by the time they finished I think we’d blown the breakfast budget for the next month and a half. I just had a few slices of toast. I hadn’t felt like eating, but the smell of toast is hard to resist, and I knew I needed to have something.

Henry turned up again at about 7.45 am. He didn’t have any news. They’d brought some dogs, and I went outside and watched as they cast around for a scent. It didn’t work too well, but one of the handlers told me that they hadn’t expected much. ‘There are too many smells around here already,’ he said. ‘Not only the little boy, but other animals, and all the police who’ve been coming and going, as well as your friends.’ More cars arrived even as I was talking to him, and then a police minibus. Out piled a whole bunch of young cops dressed in orange overalls. They didn’t look much older than me. Henry came over and explained that they were cadets from the police academy, and they were going to search the paddocks. He took them away, and half an hour later I saw them in a line, slowly traversing the paddock we call One Tree, eyes down, scanning the ground. I knew that most likely they were looking for a body, so I wished them all bad luck, hoping they’d fail miserably.

The day inched along at a desperately slow speed. To stop myself from going crazy I kept feeding people. Mrs Yannos arrived, and luckily she’d been to the supermarket. Actually it wasn’t luck. It was yet another example of how thoughtful she was, thoughtful in both senses of the word. She’d thought about how we’d need heaps of food to cater for the visitors, and she’d been thoughtful in the sense that she was kind as a saint.

And so it went on. And on. Really, nothing changed for the next couple of days. It was just one long toothache, but the worst toothache I’d ever had. A throbbing intense pain that took all my strength and energy. I could focus on nothing else. Henry tried to persuade me to move into town, but I wouldn’t leave. He kept the patrols going every night, but as he said, he couldn’t do that forever, and sooner or later I had to make a decision about my own security. He was right, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t listen.

Then, like water from a burst dam, everything rushed at me. It was Friday afternoon. I was getting exhausted by the flow of visitors. The full range, from friends to acquaintances to strangers like the police, from adults to kids, from neighbours to teachers to Fi’s mum who drove all the way out from the city. Fi had gone to Japan on a school trip. She wanted to pull out of it when she heard about Gavin but her mum had dragged her kicking and screaming to the airport.

I talked to Lee a few times on the phone, but when he arrived at the house on the Friday afternoon I wasn’t necessarily pleased to see him. Well, I wasn’t unpleased to see him either. He just seemed like another visitor, but more welcome than most. He didn’t waste any time on greetings though. He nodded to the machinery shed, ‘Let’s go look at tractors.’ Those were his opening words. I’d never known that Lee had an interest in tractors, but on the other hand I was getting used to guys taking me away for urgent talks. So I led the way out there without asking any questions.

He jumped up and sat on the workbench while I leant against the front right wheel of the John Deere. ‘The Scarlet Pimple thinks they might know where he is,’ he said, without wasting any more words.

A great flower of something that could be called hope slowly unfurled inside my chest. It didn’t actually blossom, but it did unfurl quite a little way.

‘Where?’ I asked. How difficult it was to keep my voice steady, even though it was only for a one-syllable word.

‘In Havelock.’

‘Havelock? Christ, that’s hundreds of k’s away.’

‘Yes, I know. But it’s quite a reliable report. It may not be him, but it’s the best lead they’ve had.’

‘Why would they take him there? Has someone seen him? Did he look all right? Who saw him?’ I couldn’t get the questions in the right order, and I knew there were hundreds of them queuing up in my brain, jostling to get to the front.

‘No-one knows much about anything,’ he said. ‘But there is a nasty little group of bandits who apparently have their headquarters in Havelock. They’re quite professional at doing border raids, revenge raids. A lot of them are on the government list of war criminals. It’s the sort of game they’d play, grabbing a kid and using him to bargain.’

‘So how do we get him back?’ I asked, forgetting all the other questions, or at least sending them to the back of the queue.

He paused then, for the first time, and frowned, and looked at the ground. I knew these signs as well as I knew Lee. Someone had made a suggestion, someone had a plan even, but it wasn’t Lee’s idea and he didn’t agree with it.

‘Come on, come on,’ I said with teeth clenched.

‘I think it’s crazy. The only part of it I agree with is that the government isn’t going to be able to do anything. Well, if they are, it’s going to take a long time, and bad stuff could happen in the meantime. These guys aren’t interested in negotiating with governments, and their own government can’t control them. I think it’s a situation that probably does call for a bit of individual action.’

‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked, trying not to grind my teeth.

‘It’s not a plan as such,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s just a concept, an idea. The beginning of a plan.’

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

He grinned then. ‘Yeah, well I kind of expected you’d say that.’ He paused. ‘Like I said, it’s not a plan, in fact it’s not even the beginning of a plan, but there’s quite a large population of expatriates in Havelock.’