John Marsden - While I live

Gavin held his nose. ‘Yeah, they stink,’ he said.

‘So what is it with Liberation?’ I asked. I hate not to be part of a secret or a mystery. Homer knew that, and it maddened me to have to ask him straight out, because it guaranteed he’d enjoy telling me as little as possible.

‘Hey, I told you, it’s all secret.’

‘Don’t we get automatic membership for saving your ass?’

‘Do you want to join?’

‘I don’t know.’ I sat back and considered.

Gavin piped up: ‘I want to join.’

‘Look,’ Homer said, ‘it’s not like the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. We’re not some club with passwords and secret handshakes.’

‘Oh. Well, in that case I don’t want to join,’ I said.

‘But seriously…?’ he asked.

‘I’ll be totally honest with you,’ I said slowly. ‘Yesterday was frightening. Trying to get that hole to open up in the demountable, thinking that at any moment these guys would pop around the side and start shooting, yeah, on the terror scale that was right up there with the best of them.’

‘But…’ Homer said, staring at me, knowing there was more to come.

‘OK, yes, there is a but.’

‘And I bet I know what it is,’ Homer said.

‘It was bloody exciting,’ I said slowly.

‘Exactly,’ Homer said, leaning back in his chair.

‘I know what you mean,’ Lee said. He leaned back too, and folded his arms.

‘So are we turning into thrill junkies?’ I asked. ‘Do we have to put our lives on the line every few days just to get a bit of satisfaction in life?’

Homer shrugged. ‘Why are you acting so surprised? Didn’t you know that already?’

‘No, I didn’t as a matter of fact.’

‘Think back to before the war,’ he said. ‘If you can remember that far back. The way Sam Young jumped on the bull in the stockyard? Or Jamie Anlezark and Melissa Carpenter surfing on the cattle trucks as they came into the saleyard. Or you and me playing polo on the motorbikes? Without helmets? How many times did we come off? How come we didn’t kill ourselves sixteen times over? What about that time you knocked yourself out on the rock? I thought you were dead then.’

I shuddered. ‘Don’t remind me. And we agreed not to tell my parents, because we thought we’d get in so much trouble.’

Homer went on: ‘Why do you think people went canyoning before the war? Parachuting? Bungy jumping?’

‘OK, wise guy, you tell me why.’

‘It’s because the only real enemy humans have is death. Every other enemy, like a kid who slags you off at school, or a cop who pulls you over, you think they’re enemies, but they’re not really. They’re just, I don’t know, irritations. But death, that’s the serious one, because you know he’ll win eventually. And that makes you, like, you’ve got to try to beat him. The bigger the challenge, the harder you try. That’s true of anything. In a way our enemies aren’t these soldiers themselves, our enemy is death, and the soldiers are just his little local representatives.’

‘Yeah,’ Lee said. ‘You know fun parks, all those rides. People think they’re spitting right in the face of death when they go on those things. They’re not of course, but they think they are.’

‘So you’re saying that we’ve got to do this? To prove we’re immortal?’

‘Well, it’s not that simple. It started off that we had to do it. But even though we were so scared and sick and confused, right from that first day I can remember something else: just a little tingle of I don’t know what… “We’re on our own and this is a massive adventure”. Something like that.’

‘And then it did become a bit of the death-defying stuff,’ Lee said. ‘Along with a lot of other things.’

‘Yeah, I admit I was aware of that at times,’ I said. ‘At Cobbler’s especially. And the airfield. But ninety-nine per cent of the time I was like “I hate this, get me out of here, I want to go home to Mummy and Daddy”.’

Through the window I could see Gavin, who’d given up on this discussion and gone out to the courtyard. He was up on the high wall doing the tightrope walk to the other end. Just like I’d done when I was his age.

‘Oh sure,’ Lee said, ‘we were all “Help, I want out”, most of the time. But you can’t just choose that out of the war and say it’s the whole story. People are always doing that. They announce that teenagers do drugs because they’re bored. Or because of peer-group pressure. Or because, I don’t know, because they get coded messages when they read a magazine in reverse or something. Well, here’s a bit of Asian wisdom for you. It takes many ropes to make a fishing net. And what’s more, if one rope’s missing, you don’t get no fish.’

‘So one of our ropes is that we love danger and we want to defy death?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Homer said.

‘Hmm, one time I would have laughed at all this. But now… I don’t know. Yesterday I was more aware of this stuff than I was before. I knew I was on a high at the same time as I wanted Superman to fly in and do the job for me.’

‘So do you want to join Liberation?’ Homer asked.

‘But why do you need Liberation? Why can’t the Army or someone do it? What do they do exactly?’

Homer shrugged. ‘That’s easy. There’s no way official Army units or people can go over the border for this stuff. If they were caught and interrogated and it turned out they were in the Army, it’d be a disaster. It’d be obvious the government had condoned it. It’d mean another war. But there are a lot of occasions when people are needed to go over the border, like to get Nick Greene, nice geek, I mean guy, that he is. So there’s actually quite a bit of unofficial encouragement for groups like ours. It’s my guess that we’re getting information from the Army about what’s needed and where to go and how to find people.’

‘I can guess where that would come from,’ I said, thinking of Jeremy Finley. I could imagine a line stretching right across the Tasman, from the Australian military to General Finley in New Zealand, and the line coming all the way back across the water to Stratton or Wirrawee.

Ignoring me, Homer went on: ‘For example, we even knew what hut Nick was in. Usually Liberation’s intelligence is pretty good, although sometimes they make mistakes, or of course things can change between their getting information and us arriving on the scene. I think a lot of it comes from paying people on their side. It all seems pretty corrupt.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I’m just repeating what I’ve been told really. I’ve only done two of these raids. And the first one was easy. Four of us went and it was tame. See, the thing is, their Army’s kind of slack. That group holding Nick seemed a cut above the average.’

‘They weren’t bad,’ I said, remembering how quickly they’d fallen in when their boss yelled at them. ‘But why do they get young people to do this stuff?’

‘Why not? Plenty of people our age have been involved in wars over the years. But in fact I think most of the other Liberation groups are older people. There are at least five groups in other districts. We’re known by different colours, like Green, Purple. We’re Scarlet, just as a joke, after the book. And our head honcho, the Scarlet Pimple, happens to be a teenager who happens to be in a unique situation to do it. Also, don’t forget what our little group achieved during the war. We did get kind of famous for five minutes, remember. In fact nearly ten minutes. We basically did a better job than any other group operating behind the lines.

‘There’s quite a few people in the Army who’ll tell you that teenagers are especially good for this stuff, because we think more flexibly. We’re faster on our feet. It makes sense. I mean the older you get the more likely you are to be locked into certain ways of doing things, certain patterns of thinking.’