‘Ellie,’ Robyn said, and fainted. She’d always been a bit prone to fainting. I remember when the School Medical Service came around and in Home Room Mr Kassar had announced the girls would be having rubella injections. As soon as he’d mentioned the word injections, Robyn had been on the floor. And in Geography, while we were watching a film on face carving in the Solomon Islands, we’d lost her again that time.
Homer had a torch and we got some water from the bathroom and splashed it in her face till she came around. We seemed to be giving a few facewashes that day. I was interested to see that the town water supply was still working. There was no electricity at Robyn’s, even though we’d seen the power on in other parts of Wirrawee.
I was still pretty calm through all this but one of our worst moments was about to come. When Robyn sat up, the first thing I asked her was ‘Where’s Lee?’
‘He’s been shot,’ she said, and I felt as though I’d been shot and everything in the world had died.
Homer gave a terrible deep groan; in the torchlight I saw his face distort, and he suddenly looked old and awful. He grabbed Robyn; at first I thought it was to get more information from her, but I think it was just that he needed to hold on to someone. He was desperate.
‘He’s not dead,’ Robyn said. ‘It’s a clean wound, but it was quite big. In the calf.’
Robyn looked ghastly too; the torchlight didn’t help, but her face was more like a skull than a face, high cheekbones and gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes. And we all smelt so bad. It seemed a long time since our swim in the river, and we’d sweated a lot in the meantime.
‘How do we find him?’ Homer asked urgently. ‘Is he free? Where is he?’
‘Take it easy,’ Robyn said. ‘He’s in the restaurant. But it’s too early to go back there. Barker Street’s like rush hour in the city. I took the worst risks to get here.’
She told us what had happened. They’d had trouble at every street corner, nearly running into a patrol, having to hide from a truck, hearing footsteps behind them. Lee’s parents’ restaurant was in the middle of the shopping centre, and their house was above the restaurant. As Homer and Fi had found, Barker Street, the main shopping drag, was a mess. Robyn and Lee had come in from the opposite end to Homer and Fiona, but their problems were the same. They’d taken an hour to travel one block, because there were two groups of soldiers looting; one group in the chemists and one in Ernie’s Milk Bar.
As they waited, hiding in the staircase of City and Country Insurance, they’d heard a noise at the top of the stairs. They’d turned around and found themselves looking at Mr Clement, the dentist, crouching there furtively, peering down at them.
Lee and Robyn had been wildly excited to see him, just as Homer and I were to hear about it. But he hadn’t been so excited to see them. It turned out that he’d been there the whole time, watching them without saying anything. It was only when he got a cramp that he made a noise. When they asked why, he just said something about least said, soonest mended’.
He did give them some valuable information, however grudgingly and impatiently. He said everyone who’d been caught was held at the Showground. He said that there were two types of soldiers: professionals and the ones who were just there to make up the numbers. Conscripts probably. The professionals were super efficient but the conscripts were badly trained and poorly equipped, and some of them were really vicious. Oddly enough, it was the professionals who treated people better.
He said that the soldiers hadn’t got the numbers to search the town thoroughly, house by house. Their policy was to preserve their own lives at any cost. If they suspected danger in a house they’d set up a rocket launcher and destroy the house, rather than go in to a possible ambush. He said he thought there were a few dozen people like himself hiding out, but after they’d seen what happened to people who, in his words, ‘tried to be heroes’, they were all keeping well out of sight. Robyn got the impression that Mr Clement had his family hidden somewhere close by but he wouldn’t answer any personal questions, so they gave up asking. Then a patrol went past the building, and Mr Clement got really agitated and told them to go.
They crept along the street, but there was little cover and not enough darkness, as the lights were on in several shops. They were dodging towards the door of the newsagency when shots started pouring down the street. Robyn said they sounded so loud it was like they were from ten metres behind, but in reality they didn’t know who was firing or where the shots were coming from. But Robyn and Lee were definitely the targets.
‘We were two steps from the glassed-in bit that takes you to the door of the newsagents,’ Robyn explained. ‘That was the only thing that saved us. It was like we already had the momentum up to go those two steps. Even if we’d been hit by a dozen bullets we’d still have gone the two steps.’
They got into that little bit of cover and went straight on, through the smashed door of the news-agency itself. Robyn took the lead, not realising that Lee had been shot. The newsagency was dark but there was enough light from the street for them to see their way. The trouble was there was enough light to make them good targets, too.
Both of them knew of course that the newsagency goes right through to the carpark and Glover Street. Their idea was to get out the back and then go in whatever direction seemed better at the time. But when Robyn was nearly at the back door she realised two things: that the door was locked, and that Lee was a long way behind her. ‘I thought he’d stopped to look at the pornos,’ she said. But when she turned around she could see by the paleness of his face that he was hurt. He was limping heavily, staring at her but biting his lip, determined not to cry out. She hoped he’d just pulled a muscle but she said ‘Were you hit?’ and he nodded.
Robyn skipped over the next bit pretty quickly but it’s one of the reasons for writing all this down, because I want people to know about stuff like this, how brave Robyn was that night. I don’t want medals for her, and neither would she – well I don’t know, I haven’t asked her, she’d probably love it – but I think she was a bloody hero. She picked up the photocopier that sits on a stand near the lottery desk and chucked the whole thing through the door. Then she ran to Lee, heaved him onto her back, across her shoulders, and carried him through the shattered door, kicking out bits of glass as she went. Now I know Robyn’s fit, and strong, but she’s not that strong. Don’t ask me to explain it. I reckon it’s like those stories of mothers lifting cars to get trapped babies out from underneath, then you ask them the next day to do it again and they can’t even move it, because the urgency’s gone. Robyn, being religious, has got a different explanation, and who knows? I’m not stupid enough to say she’s wrong.
Well, carrying Lee, she staggered along the five buildings to get to the restaurant. The old door at the back, facing the carpark, had been broken open, so she got in there OK. She dropped Lee onto the loading dock and pulled up the roller door and dragged him into the darkness. Then she raced out to the front to have a look into Barker Street. There were three soldiers looking into the newsagency. After a couple of minutes two more came out and joined the other three, then the five of them came walking past the restaurant, lighting cigarettes and talking and laughing. They seemed to just walk off into the distance without showing much interest, so she figured there wouldn’t be any more problems from them for a while.
‘They probably thought you were looters,’ Homer said. ‘Like Mr Clement said, there must be a few around, so the patrols’d see them quite often. They wouldn’t bother mounting a big operation just for that. And they wouldn’t want to blow up Barker Street unnecessarily.’
‘But they blew up Corrie’s,’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ Homer agreed. ‘But the shops in Barker Street are still full of stuff. And maybe they found some way of connecting Corrie’s with the lawn-mower bomb. Or maybe it was just an easy low-risk target for them. Maybe they’re wiping out all the farm houses.’