Circle of Flight Read Free Page A

like in novels, where everyone seems to vomit or faint when they hear bad news or cut their little finger.
    So they hadn’t finished with us yet. Before I thought to ask Homer the most important question, he gave me the answer anyway. He said quietly, ‘It was dated two weeks ago.’
    ‘You could read the date?’
    I didn’t know what they did about dates in their language, those aliens, those monsters, those horrible people who I suddenly hated with so much passion it scrunched me up inside.
    ‘It was a computer thing, you know, downloaded from one of those websites where you can get maps of your back yard.’
    I sat there, continuing to figure. It was like a sudoku. Mrs Barlow, my English teacher, had been saying the other day how when you write a story you should think sudoku. Give the reader a few bits and they’ll figure the rest out, no problem. She used me as an example. ‘If I say “Ellie got on the tractor” then you can figure Ellie’s on a farm, you don’t need to tell the reader that, they can work it out for themselves.’
    ‘She could be at a field day,’ Sam Young called out.
    I put him and Mrs Barlow out of my mind and tried to concentrate on my own sudoku. ‘So you think they’re coming back here,’ I said. ‘They’ve got unfinished business. How come you didn’t tell me this straightaway? They could have come last night. Or the night before. Gavin and I could have been murdered by now.’
    ‘We thought we’d wait till the right moment. And Dad and George and I have been hanging round here for a few nights.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You know . . . with rifles. These raiding parties are always small. We thought we could take care of them. Dad was right into it. Never knew he was so bloodthirsty. Guess that civil war got into his blood.’
    I was dumbstruck. My first instinct was to say, ‘I don’t need looking after! How dare you do that without telling me? I don’t like people making decisions on my behalf.’
    But I had to recognise the generosity of my neighbours who would put themselves in danger and go without sleep to protect me. I had to recognise the kindness of it. ‘The highest wisdom is kindness.’ Where had I read that?
    ‘Thanks,’ I said, trying not to choke on the word. ‘Civil war?’
    ‘Greek Civil War.’
    ‘Oh. Was there a Greek Civil War?’
    ‘Ask him, he’ll tell you. For weeks. Anyway, the Scarlet Pimple did a bit of checking around with the experts from the Army and so forth, and they didn’t have any reports of anyone about to launch an attack. So we thought that you’d probably be OK in the short-term. And face it, if you can’t trust an expert, who can you trust?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    My mind was churning now, fit to match my stomach. I was just one big churn. You could have made butter in me, easy.
    ‘Great,’ I said. ‘The short-term. That’s all there is now, isn’t there? The bloody short-term. In the medium-term they’ll come in here and kill Gavin and me and burn the place down. And in the long-term we’ll be rotting in our graves. Well bury me with my parents, that’s all I ask. And Gavin too thanks.’
    Homer didn’t say anything. We sat there looking through the windscreen of the ute at the eroded gully, the ugly evidence of a landscape wrecked by humans.

C HAPTER 3
    B EFORE THE RAID and the conversation with Homer things had actually been going rather well. Maybe the problem is that I don’t touch wood enough. Maybe the problem is that God likes to play with us. Teasing us the way a kid does with a spider, when he harasses it for a while then lets it crawl away into a hidey-hole, and after a few minutes the spider thinks he’s safe and comes out again and there’s the kid, waiting, ready for the next round. And so on and so on until the kid decides that he’s had enough fun now, he’s bored, and he squishes the spider.
    We’d been through a terrible experience in Stratton, Gavin and I, which was about as terrible as experiences