Free The Night Is for Hunting by John Marsden Page A

like that could happen, and you’d have gone out of your way to make him feel better. But now you’re so hard that you think no-one’s allowed a single mistake, and if they make one, you punish them for ... well, I don’t know how long, because you haven’t stopped punishing Lee from the moment it happened. And Kevin, just because he’s having trouble coping with all this ...’
    ‘But Kevin drives everyone crazy. You included.’
    ‘He drives you a lot crazier than he drives anyone else.’
    I was red in the face, scarlet, and it wasn’t from the exertion of climbing. But Fi went on relentlessly.
    ‘It’s not as though you’ve never made a mistake. Like, leaving that door open in Tozer’s, and not ...’
    ‘All right, all right, I know every mistake I’ve made since this war started. You don’t have to remind me.’
    I was scared she was going to mention my screaming at the soldier, in Wirrawee, the terrible mistake that might have cost the New Zealand soldiers their lives. Instead she brought out a name I was trying to forget.
    ‘Well, what you did with Adam in New Zealand was just the same as what Lee did with the girl.’
    ‘It wasn’t the same,’ I said hotly.
    ‘If you leave out the stuff about her being the enemy, which affects all of us the same way, then what’s left is exactly the same as you going off with Adam.’
    ‘But ...’
    I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wanted to tell her how I’d had too much to drink and how Adam had more or less forced me into it and how I had no spirit or energy to resist him after all the stuff that had happened to us. But I knew it’d sound too lame.
    ‘Anyway,’ Fi said again, ‘in a way it doesn’t matter what Lee did. The whole point is, how long are you going to hold it against him? We’ve only got each other, you know that, and if we go on clinging to grudges, inside a week none of us will be talking to anyone else.
    ‘But even that’s not the main thing for me Ellie. The main thing is, I want the old Ellie back. The Ellie who always helped people in trouble, who was there for her friends. If the war’s killed that Ellie, then there’s no hope for any of us.’
    I still hadn’t looked at her. I climbed the last rocks, my face burning, and walked towards where we’d left Homer and Kevin. All I could think of was a conversation with Fi a millennium ago in Hell, where she’d told me I was going fine, and the only reason I had arguments was my strong personality. Something like that. Seemed like she’d changed her mind a bit since then. Or else I’d changed.
    I couldn’t speak as Fi explained our deal with the kids. Homer and Kevin weren’t too excited to hear that someone had to go down into Hell for food.
    ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Kevin said disgustedly. ‘Why do we have to go to all that trouble?’
    ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it. No-one else has to come.’
    I sort of took it for granted that someone would volunteer to go with me, but no-one did. I think that was one of my lowest points in the war. I felt terribly unpopular. None of them even wanted to walk with me, to have anything to do with me. I took myself off towards Wombegonoo, feeling that things had never been worse. I’d gone right to the turn-off when I heard the rattle of gravel behind me, and looked around.
    ‘You could have waited,’ Fi said.
    ‘I didn’t think you were coming.’
    ‘I went to the toilet and when I came back you’d gone.’
    I realised she hadn’t been behind me when I thought she was, back at our rest-place.
    So I was a bit more cheerful, that Fi didn’t mind being with me, but I was still so upset at what she’d said that my stomach felt like a wrestling pit for snakes.
    We did a quick slide over the other side, in case anyone in the distance happened to be looking our way, and dived down into the big tree that hid the start of the track. At least it was downhill all the way now. I took the lead, letting my legs do the work