John Marsden - While I live

It was a long tough ride home. A number of times I made them stop so we could disguise our tracks. I couldn’t afford to have clear motorbike tyre marks leading straight to my place. We did a few different things. Went on some major detours through kilometres of bush that was just scrubby stuff, no good to anyone. Went down a nice wide section of a creek for quite a way and left it again over an area of rocks that wouldn’t show any marks once the tyre tracks had dried out. Mostly though we just got off from time to time and went back and used branches to smooth out the dirt where our marks were too obvious.

It was difficult, because the four-wheeler, with its wide tyres, ploughed up the ground pretty badly. It was also difficult because everyone was so tired. Nick, poor bugger, couldn’t do a thing. I don’t know what he’d been through but it was worse than a birthday party. Lee got progressively more wrecked — this was his second long return trip on the bikes. Homer didn’t have much energy left after the stress of being locked up, thinking he was about to be executed at any moment. Gavin, despite his age, kept going pretty well. But to be honest I had to do most of the work.

The last hour or so we reached new depths of tired-ness. None of us was any good by then. There were moments when the noise from the Yamaha seemed far far away, and more like the rumble of surf than the mumble of a motorbike. At those moments I had to make a huge effort to wake up. I remembered asking my father years ago if you could fall asleep on motorbikes. It seemed an amazing idea to me. It should be impossible, to sleep when you’re sitting on a motorbike that might be going at a hundred k’s an hour, and you’re getting the full blast of air in your face. It was against all the laws of sleep, surely? But my father said, ‘You can fall asleep anywhere,’ and told me a story about how he’d been harvesting day and night and then gone to play cricket for Wirrawee on Saturday and fallen asleep while he was fielding at fine deeper legside, or somewhere like that.

Homer was definitely falling asleep against my back. I gave him the big elbow shove, nearly knocking him off the bike, and said, ‘Come on, wake up, you’re not allowed to go to sleep. You’ve got to keep me awake.’

He retaliated by launching into his full repertoire of the songs that he knew irritated me the most. But there was nothing else for it. If I was going to stay awake I had to join in. There were even occasional bursts from the other bike too. This is the song that never ends,

It just goes on and on my friends,

Some people started singing it,

Not knowing what it was,

And now they keep on singing it,

Forever just because

This is the song that never ends… A million green bottles,

Sitting on the wall.

And if one green bottle

Should accidentally fall,

There’d be nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine green bottles,

Sitting on the wall.

This was not much good to Gavin. At one stage Lee had to stop and move Gavin to a position between Nick and him, because they were worried he would fall asleep and disappear off the back of the bike. He looked quite comfortable wedged between the two older guys though.

We set off again, with another burst of awful music. The only other song Homer knew required a bit more imagination. You had to make up verses using people’s names. In the store, in the store:

There was Ellie, Ellie, getting pretty smelly, in the Quartermaster’s store.

My eyes are dim, I cannot see,

I have not brought my specs with me,

I have not brought my spectacles with me. There was Lee, Lee, he’d gone for a pee, in the Quartermaster’s store.

My eyes are dim, I cannot see,

I have not brought my specs with me,

I have not brought my spectacles with me.

Oh we were regular karaoke machines that evening. But I’d better not mention what we rhymed Homer with. It wasn’t a true rhyme anyway.

It was really dark by the time we got home. The answering machine was full: mainly with worried messages from Homer’s mum and dad. He was meant to have been home after school and when they couldn’t get any answer at my place they started getting panicky. And there were a couple from Jeremy Finley and from Jess. I was sure one of them was the leader of Liberation and their carefully worded messages didn’t do anything to change my mind.

Homer rang his parents straight away and told them I’d had a cow stuck in the lagoon and it had taken all that time to get her out, which was true enough, just a couple of weeks out of date. Then he rang Jeremy and told him in fairly guarded language what had happened. Nick was keen to get to a phone too, but I persuaded him to have something to eat first. I thought he was going to pass out at any moment and I didn’t want him fainting on the phone. We were all desperately hungry. We sat at the kitchen table hoeing into minestrone that I’d made at the weekend. The only way I’d been able to manage the food side of life was to get in the habit of making a whole lot of stuff at weekends and freezing it. As I took the minestrone out of the microwave I thought ruefully that this weekend’s work hadn’t lasted long. Thanks to Lee’s bad influence, the minestrone was all I’d done.

I asked Nick, ‘Have you been a prisoner since the war ended?’

He did seem a nice guy. He was very tall and serious looking, but why wouldn’t you be serious after what he’d been through?

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just the last seven weeks.’

He didn’t talk much at first but with each spoonful of minestrone he seemed to get strength back. Good advertisement for my soup. I hoped Gavin was paying close attention. He’d never been crazy about my mine-strone. But Gavin looked like he could hardly get the spoon to his mouth. He was a fair bet to fall asleep by the halfway mark.

‘So how’d it happen?’ I asked Nick.

‘I’m a member of Cross-Country.’

‘Oh, OK.’

I could kind of guess the rest, although Nick told me anyway. Cross-Country was an organisation of people who believed that the best hope for the future lay in reconciliation, trying to build bridges between the two countries, trying to understand each other’s cultures, that sort of stuff. They had friends and enemies on both sides of the border. I knew quite a few people who thought they were disloyal, or to put it a bit stronger, traitors. To be honest, I wasn’t too keen on them myself.

Nick’s particular group had gone over there, legally, to give advice on agriculture. Even though the peace settlement meant that ninety per cent of the best country was in enemy hands, they were making a mess of it, because they didn’t know anything about local conditions.

‘I’m an agricultural economist,’ Nick explained, ‘and I was going round the place giving advice on cereal crops. It seemed to go well at first. Then, I don’t know, I felt that they were getting more hostile. There was a different mood. My interpreter disappeared one night, just wasn’t there suddenly, and late the following morning these guys turned up at my hotel and said they were taking me to meet a group of farmers. The atmosphere wasn’t good, I’d have to say, but I didn’t feel I had much choice. Well, as you can imagine, I never got to meet the group of farmers. I got in the car, and no sooner were we out of town than they pulled guns on me and took me to this camp, not the one where you found me. Originally it was down by the river, in quite a nice open area, but then they moved into the bush. We’ve been there ever since.’

‘Why’d they kidnap you anyway?’ Lee asked.

‘They said I’d been preaching Christianity.’