Darkness Be My Friend by John Marsden Read Free Book Online

Wombegonoo to the old gum tree. I think we five, if we'd been on our own, would have gone for it. We were so used to feeling safe up here. But Iain didn't like the risk. He decided we'd have to wait till dark.

    So suddenly, after all the tension and fear and excitement, there was nothing much. We set up a bit of a camp on the western side of the ridge and, because it looked like being a hot day, we hung a few tent-flies for shade, down in among the scrub where aircraft couldn't see them. Iain posted three sentries and everyone else, including me—especially me—went to sleep.
    Boy, did I sleep. I can't think of any reason I would have 'slept so well and so long. I mean, sure, I hadn't slept for nearly a week, but you'd think I'd have been even worse now that I was back in the heart of danger. Maybe I was having a reaction to all the stress of the night. But whatever, I slept more than four hours, which I never do normally. Not in the daytime.
    After that, after I woke', there was just a lot of sitting around. It got pretty boring. Some of the soldiers, and Kevin and Homer, were playing cards. One was reading a book he'd borrowed from Fi —I don't think they were allowed to bring books and stuff like that themselves, they were meant to travel light—and a couple were talking about rugby, which I've noticed New Zealanders do quite a lot. Just before we left, the New Zealand Government announced the suspension of all rugby for the duration of the war, because all the young guys had
been conscripted. Even in World War Two they hadn't cancelled rugby. So they were all whingeing about that.

    It was like a school camp in some ways. You could almost forget that we were in the middle of a war zone.
    The day dragged on. I was anxious to get down into Hell. It was home to me now, in some ways. Home in Hell. What did that say about me? Who lived in Hell? I knew the answer to that. The devil and the tortured souls. Which one was I? Most times I thought I knew the answer to that, too. But sometimes I felt like I had become a devil. The things we'd done made me shudder, made me sick. I'd talked about them to Andrea, and that helped. A little. She kept saying, "Talking always helps." It was like a motto to her. But I don't think even she understood exactly what it was like. How could she? It doesn't matter how much training you've had, you're not going to suddenly become an expert in helping teenagers who've killed people. There aren't a huge number of cases around for you to practise on.
    All this stuff had made such a difference. It wrecked my relationship with Lee, for a start. I still looked at him longingly sometimes, wanting to get back what we'd enjoyed so much, wanting to hold him in my arms again, to feel the excitement, his and mine—because his excitement was one of the things that excited me—and wanting the wonderful warm feeling of being naked together. It had been so different with Adam. Nothing but aggression and selfishness and grog. It didn't feel like he loved me. It was more like he hated me, wanted to attack me. Even in the old days, at school in Wirrawee, I'd noticed that a lot of boys who made a big deal about their girlfriends and their great sex lives seemed
to have almost a hatred for girls. All at the same time. It was weird. But I felt the same thing in Adam.

    Lee was never like that. I was the one who'd stuffed him around. He'd always been generous with me. Like at the airport in New Zealand, walking back to the waiting area after we'd had our coffee. Somehow with all the terrible things happening around us I'd become dead inside, in the loving part of me anyway. I couldn't feel anything for him. I couldn't feel anything for anyone, except Fi, and mv parents. Oh, and Andrea. But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place