‘Coming back from Commem Day,’ Fi said, as she had during the night. ‘You know how they have all those flypasts and displays and stuff.’
‘If you were going to invade that’d be a good day to do it,’ Lee said. ‘Everyone’s out celebrating. The Army and Navy and Air Force are all parading around the cities, showing off. Who’s running the country?’
‘I’d do it Christmas Day,’ Kevin said. ‘Middle of the afternoon, when everyone’s asleep.’
It was a pretty typical conversation I guess, but for some reason it was getting on my nerves. I got up and went down the creek, where I found Homer. He was sitting on a gravel spit, combing through the stones with a flat rock.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Looking for gold.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘Nuh.’
‘Found any?’
‘Yeah, heaps. I’m putting it in piles behind the trees, so the others don’t see it.’
‘That’s pretty selfish.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the kind of guy I am. You know that.’
He was right about one thing, I did know him well He was like a brother. Being neighbours, we’d grown up together. And although he had a lot of annoying habits he wasn’t selfish.
‘Hey El?’ he said, after I’d sat there for a few minutes watching him scrutinising gravel.
‘Yeah?’
‘What do you think of Fi?’
I nearly fell into the creek. When someone asks you that question, in that tone of voice, it can only mean one thing. But coming from Homer! The only women Homer admired were the ones in magazines. Real women he treated like beanbags.
And Fi, of all people!
Still, I wanted to answer his question without putting him off.
‘I love Fi. You know that. She seems so ... perfect sometimes.’
‘Yeah, you know, I think you might be right.’
He got embarrassed at admitting even that much, and spent a few more minutes scratching for gold.
‘Guess she thinks I’m just a big loudmouth, huh?’ he said at last.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue Homer. But I don’t think she hates you. You were chatting on like old buddies last night.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ He cleared his throat. ‘That’s when I first ... when I realised ... Well, it’s the first time I really took much notice of her. Since I was a little guy anyway. I always thought she was just a stuck-up snob. But she’s not. She’s really nice.’
‘I could have told you that.’
‘Yeah, but you know, she lives in that big house and she talks like Mrs Hamilton, and me and my family, I mean we’re just Greek peasants to people like her.’
‘Fi’s not like that. You ought to give her a chance.’
‘Gee I’ll give her a chance. Trouble is I don’t know if she’ll give me one.’
He stared moodily into the gravel, sighed, and stood up. Suddenly his face changed. He went red and started wriggling his head around, like his neck had got uncomfortable after all these years of connecting his head to his body. I looked around to see what had set him off. It was Fi, coming down to the creek to brush her perfect teeth. It was hard not to smile. I’d seen people struck by the lightning of love before, but I’d never thought it would happen to Homer. And the fact that it was Fi took my breath away. I just couldn’t imagine what she’d think or how she’d react. My best guess was that she’d think it was a big joke, let him down quickly and gently, then come and have a good giggle with me about it. Not that she’d laugh to be cruel; it was just that no one took Homer very seriously. He’d always encouraged people to believe he had no feelings – he used to say ‘I’ve got a radium heart, takes five thousand years to melt down’. He’d sit in the back of the class encouraging the girls to criticise him. ‘Yeah, I’m insensitive, what else? Sexist? Come on, is that all you can think of? You can do better than this. Oooh Sandra, get stirred up ...’ They’d get madder and madder and he’d keep leaning back on his chair, smiling and taunting them. They knew what he was doing but they couldn’t help themselves.
So after a while we started believing him when he said he was too tough to have emotions. It seemed funny that Fi, the most delicately built girl in our year, looked like being the one to bring him undone, if that’s the right way to put it.
I went for a walk back up the track, to the last of Satan’s Steps. The sun had already warmed the great granite wall and I leaned against it with my eyes half shut, thinking about our hike, and the path and the man who’d built it, and this place called Hell. ‘Why did people call it Hell?’ I wondered. All those cliffs and rocks, and that vegetation, it did look wild. But wild wasn’t Hell. Wild was fascinating, difficult, wonderful. No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell, that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying ‘Housing Commission’ or ‘private school’ or ‘church’ or ‘mosque’ or ‘synagogue’. They stopped looking once they saw those signs.
It was the same with Homer, the way for all those years he’d been hanging a big sign around his neck, and like a fool I’d kept reading it. Animals were smarter. They couldn’t read. Dogs, horses, cats, they didn’t bother reading any signs. They used their own brains, their own judgement.
No, Hell wasn’t anything to do with places, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.
Chapter Five
We got fat and lazy, camping in the clearing. Every day someone would say ‘OK, today we’re definitely going up the top and doing a good long walk’, and every day we’d all say ‘Yeah, I’ll come’, ‘Yeah, we’re getting too slack’, ‘Yeah, good idea’.
Somehow though we never got round to it. Lunch-time would creep up on us, then there’d be a bit of serious sleeping to do, a bit of reading or paddling in the creek, then it’d be mid-afternoon getting on to late afternoon. Corrie and I were probably the most energetic. We took a few walks, back to the bridge, or to different cliffs, so we could have long private conversations. We talked about boys and friends and school and parents, all the usual stuff. We decided that when we left school we’d earn some money for six months and then go overseas together. We got really excited about it.
‘I want to stay away for years and years,’ Corrie said dreamily.
‘Corrie! You got homesick on the Year 8 camp, and that was only four days!’
‘That wasn’t real homesickness. That was because Ian and them were giving me such a hard time.’
‘Weren’t they such mongrels? I hated them.’
‘Remember when they got caught bombing us with firelighters? They were crazy. At least they’ve improved since then.’
‘Ian’s still a dork.’
‘I don’t mind him now. He’s all right.’
Corrie was much more forgiving than me. More tolerant.
‘So will your parents let you go overseas?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. They might, if I work on them long enough. They let me apply for that exchange thing, remember.’
‘Your parents are so easy to get on with.’
‘So are yours.’
‘Oh, most of the time I guess they are. It’s only when Dad’s in one of his moods. And he is awfully sexist. All the stuff I had to go through just to come on this trip. If I was a boy it’d be no problem.’
‘Mmm. My dad’s not bad. I’ve been educating him.’
I smiled. A lot of people underestimated Corrie. She just quietly worked away on people till she got what she wanted.
We figured out our itinerary. Indonesia, Thailand, China, India, then up to Egypt. Corrie wanted to go from there into Africa, but I wanted to go on to Europe. Corrie had this idea that she’d have a look at everything, come home, do nursing, then go back and work in the country that needed nurses most. I admired her for that. I was more interested in making money.