Tomorrow When The War Began by John Marsden Read Free Book Online

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