Darkness Be My Friend Read Free Page A

New Zealand's so expensive. Five cents a tissue'd be more like it.
    Andrea didn't say anything for ages. She's the only person I've ever met who lets you have time to think about what you want to say. She never puts pressure on you in that way. She just sits there and watches and waits.
    But finally I was sitting up a bit and hiccupping and blowing my nose. She explained how I was still reacting to Robyn's death, using different things as anaesthetics, and that was all really. She had another appointment to go to, so the next thing she'd left. I did actually feel a bit better—it surprised me, but it's true. I'd never thought of any connection between Robyn's death and the way I'd acted.
    But I was angry at Adam. I thought, "If I ever see him again he'll get more than wax in his mouth."
    I didn't want to write about it here, and I wouldn't have, except I think maybe it's one of the reasons I ended up not putting up so much of a fight about going
back. I just felt awful about how I'd behaved and how I'd let myself down and everything.

    Maybe I thought going back would be a way of making up for that.
    I was desperate for some self-respect.

Two
    It was only a day later that the bushfire started burning stronger. There'd been the rumour about using refugees as guerillas, then the next thing, the five of us were called up for medicals.
    We got the full treatment, not just a physical but a mental as well. About three thousand questions, from "What did you eat for breakfast?" to "Do you still want to be a farmer when the war is over?" from "What's your favourite TV show?" to "Which is more important, honesty or loyalty?"
    We got weighed, measured, pinched and probed, inspected and injected. My bad knee and my bad vertebrae. My eyesight and hearing and reflexes and blood pressure.
    At lunch, munching on Saladas and cheese, breathing on the celery to warm it because it had just come out of the fridge, I said to Homer: "What do you think that was all about?"
    "I don't know," he said slowly. "It's like they're checking
us out. Seeing if we're in good shape again. Maybe the holiday'll be over soon."

    That's the first time I took it a bit more seriously. But only for a minute or two. I'd almost forgotten that rumour, and Lee's comment about the shopping list. I said to Homer, "We're still a bunch of wrecks. They won't want us to do anything for ages vet."
    I believed that too. Secretly I thought they'd never ask us to do anything again.
    What was next? Another interview with Colonel Finley, I think. That was quite unusual. He was a busy man. But at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon he rang Homer and asked if we could come for a meeting.
    You don't say no to Colonel Finley so we cancelled our plans for a wild Saturday night—in other words we turned off the TV—and went to see him. It was quite some meeting. There were six officers, two Australian and four from New Zealand. They weren't even introduced to us, which seemed a bit rude. Everyone was too busy, I suppose. But one of them had so much gold braid on his uniform that he could have melted it down, sold it, and retired on the proceeds.
    It was amazing we all fitted into Colonel Finley's little office, with its nice old-fashioned pictures on the walls and the clouds of blue pipe smoke. Maybe it was bigger than it looked. It must have been, because it always looked tiny. Somehow we all found chairs. I perched on the edge of Fi's. We sat there for half an hour getting grilled about a whole lot of stuff. They had maps of the Wirrawee district and Cobbler's Bay and Stratton, but they wanted all kinds of other information, down to
details like the size of the trees in Barker Street and the condition of the four-wheel-drive track going into Baloney Creek.

    The questions came thick and fast and everything should have gone fine, but somehow it didn't. We know most of that country pretty well, or we thought we did, but the officers wouldn't have been too impressed. The