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All I could think of to do was to trust to instinct. That was all I had really. Human laws, moral laws, religious laws, they seemed artificial and basic, almost childlike. I had a sense within me – often not much more than a striving – to find the right thing to do, and I had to have faith in that sense. Call it anything – instinct, conscience, imagination – but what it felt like was a constant testing of everything I did against some kind of boundaries within me; checking, checking, all the time. Perhaps war criminals and mass murderers did the same checking against the same boundaries and got the encouragement they needed to keep going down the path they had taken. How then could I know that I was different?

I got up and walked around slowly, around the top of Mt Martin. This was really hurting my head but I had to stay with it. I felt I was close to it, that if I kept my grip on it, didn’t let go, I might just get it out, drag it out of my begrudging brain. And yes, I could think of one way in which I was different. It was confidence. The people I knew who thought brutal thoughts and acted in brutal ways – the racists, the sexists, the bigots – never seemed to doubt themselves. They were always so sure that they were right. Mrs Olsen, at school, who gave out more detentions than the rest of the staff put together and kept complaining about ‘standards’ in the school and the ‘lack of discipline’ among ‘these kids’; Mr Rodd, down the road from us, who could never keep a worker for more than six weeks – he’d gone through fourteen in two years – because they were all ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘insolent’; Mr and Mrs Nelson, who drove their son five kilometres from home every time he did something wrong and dropped him off and made him walk home again, then chucked him out for good when he was seventeen and they found the syringes in his bedroom – these were the ones I thought of as the ugly people. And they did seem to have the one thing in common – a perfect belief that they were right and the others wrong. I almost envied them the strength of their beliefs. It must have made life so much easier for them.

Perhaps my lack of confidence, my tortuous habit of questioning and doubting everything I said or did, was a gift, a good gift, something that made life painful in the short run but in the long run might lead to ... what? The meaning of life?

At least it might give me some chance of working out what I should or shouldn’t do.

All this thinking had tired me out more than the work hiking up and down the mountains. The moon was shining brighter than ever but I couldn’t stay. I got up and went down the rocks to the gum tree and the start of the trail. When I got back to the campsite I was disgusted to find Lee sound asleep. I could hardly blame him, considering how late it was, but I’d been looking forward all evening to seeing him and talking to him again. After all, it had been his fault that I’d been going through this mental sweat-session. He’d started it, with his talk about my head and my heart. Now I had to console myself with crawling into his tent and sleeping next to him. The only consolation was that he would wake in the morning and find he had slept with me and not even known it. I think I was still smiling about that when I fell asleep.

Chapter Seventeen

Robyn and Kevin and Corrie and Chris were beaming. It wasn’t hard to beam back. It was such a relief, such a joy, to see them again. I hugged them desperately, only then aware how frightened I’d been for them. But for once everything seemed to have gone well. It was wonderful.

They hadn’t told Homer and Fi much, because they were tired, and because they didn’t want to repeat themselves when they reached Lee and me. All they’d said was that they hadn’t seen any of our families, but they’d been told they were safe and at the Showground. When I heard this, it was such a relief that I sat down quickly on the ground, as though I’d had the breath knocked out of me. Lee leant against a tree with his hands over his face. I don’t think anything else mattered to us much. We did have lots of questions, but we could see how exhausted everyone was, so we were content to let them have their breakfasts before they told us any more. And with a good breakfast in them – even a few fresh eggs, cooked quickly and dangerously on a small fire, which we put out just as quickly – they settled down, full of food and adrenalin, to tell us the lot. Robyn did most of the talking. She’d already been their unofficial leader when they left, and it was interesting to see how much she was running the show now. Lee and I sat on a log holding hands, Fi sat against Homer in the V formed by his open legs, and Kevin lay on the ground with his head in Corrie’s lap. It was like Perfect Partners, and although I still wondered if I might have liked to swap places with Fi, I was happy enough. It was just too bad that there was no chance of Chris and Robyn getting off together, then we really could have had Perfect Partners.

Chris had brought back a few packets of smokes and two bottles of port that he’d ‘souvenired’, as he called it. He sat on the log beside me, until he lit up and I politely asked him to move. I couldn’t help wondering how far we could go with this ‘souveniring’ idea. It made me reflect on what I’d been thinking about the night before. If we were going to ignore the laws of the land, we had to work out our own standards instead. I had no problem with all the laws we’d broken already – so far we could have been charged with stealing, driving without a licence, wilful damage, assault, manslaughter, or murder maybe, going through a stop sign, driving without lights, breaking and entering, and I don’t know how many other things. It seemed like we’d be committing under-age drinking soon too, not for the first time in my life, I have to admit. That didn’t bother me either – I’d always thought the law on that was typical of the stupidity of most laws. I mean, the idea that at seventeen years, eleven months and twenty-nine days you were too immature to touch alcohol but a day later you could get wasted on a couple of slabs wasn’t exactly bright. But I still didn’t like the idea of Chris picking up grog and cigarettes whenever and wherever he felt like it. I suppose it was because they weren’t as essential as the other things we’d knocked off. Admittedly I’d taken some chocolate from the Grubers’, which wasn’t much different, except that at Outward Bound they’d given us chocolate for energy, so there was at least something good you could say about chocolate. There wasn’t an awful lot you could say for port or nicotine.

I wondered what would happen if Chris brought anything stronger into Hell, or if he tried to grow dope or something down here. But meanwhile Robyn was starting on the big speech, so I stopped thinking about morality and started concentrating on her.

‘OK boys and girls,’ she began. ‘Everyone ready for story time? We’ve had a pretty interesting couple of days. Although,’ she added, looking at Lee and me, and Homer and Fi, ‘you guys seem to have had an interesting couple of days yourselves. It mightn’t be safe to leave you here alone again.’

‘OK Mum, get on with it,’ Homer said.

‘All right, but I’m watching you, remember. Well. Where do I start? The first thing, as we’ve said already, is that we haven’t seen any of our families, but we’ve heard about them. The people we talked to swear they’re all OK. In fact everyone in the Showground is meant to be in good nick. What we said jokingly a while back is quite true: they have got plenty of food. They’ve eaten the scones, the decorated cakes, the sponges, the home-made bread, the matched eggs, the novelty cakes ... Have I left anything out?’

‘The fruit cakes,’ said Corrie, who was an expert on these subjects. ‘The jams, preserves and pickles. The Best Assorted Biscuits.’

‘OK, OK.’ About three people spoke at once.

‘And,’ said Robyn, ‘they’re eating their way through the livestock. It’s a shame really, because it’s some of the best stock in the district. So they should be getting some top quality tucker. They bake bread in the CWA tearooms every morning – there’s a couple of stoves in there. For a while they were running short of greens, once they’d eaten the Young Farmers’ display, which I might add I helped set up, the day before we went on our hike.’