Free The Night Is for Hunting by John Marsden Page B

while my head and my heart tried to deal with the big mess of feelings stirred up by Fi. I was so unhappy and angry about it, but at the same time I had a horrible idea that she wasn’t exactly wrong.
    ‘But,’ I said angrily to myself, ‘I’ve been trying so hard; the way I was nice to everyone back at Stratton. I made a big effort to talk to people more; I even put flowers in the house. She hasn’t given me credit for that. And I do heaps of work, more than anyone else. I went and got mushrooms and vegetables and fruit all the time. No-one ever notices that stuff. No-one even thanked me for getting them out of Stratton last night. I saved their lives.’
    On the other hand ... well, on the other hand, maybe I was a bit critical of others, and a bit tough on the kids. And because I felt that way, inside, it probably was hard for me to conceal it. Like, it might have seeped out in ways I didn’t even notice. The tone of my voice, the way I’d listen to people differently. But I’d always been critical of others. Maybe Fi hadn’t noticed it before the war. We’d been really good friends, but in those days there were so many people around. We never knew each other then the way we did now.
    I was avoiding some of the things Fi said though. Was I worse these days? Was I hard? Oh yes. Yes. We all were. How couldn’t we be? I’d done stuff I could never have contemplated. I felt often, and very strongly, that my life was ruined. Yet other times I surprised myself by laughing, feeling love, admiring a cobweb, skipping stones across water, enjoying the sight of a new lamb on its wobbly legs.
    In depressing times all I had was a flimsy belief that the things we did would give other people a better life, somewhere down the track. In other words, we were doing the dirty work for them.
    But the more I thought about it, as I clambered over another slippery rock, the more I was forced to admit that the others, Fi and Homer anyway, had kept something that I hadn’t. I’d become grimmer, more humourless. They’d kept some sweetness. The other day Homer had spent half-an-hour putting Kevin’s hair in braids. My mind flashed back to the word that floated through it a moment earlier. Humour, humourless. That was one thing I’d definitely lost, my sense of humour. I couldn’t remember the last time I cracked a joke. A proper joke, I meant. Not a dry clever joke, but a silly funny one that had everyone giggling helplessly.
    As for my treatment of Lee ... well, that was the one thing I still couldn’t face. My whole body burned with such a sense of loss and pain when I thought of what he’d done. Fi brushed it off too easily. I felt so betrayed. I felt so angry. I felt I’d lost him.
    We got to our familiar old campsite without me having made a decision about anything. And the struggle of thoughts and feelings in my head was suddenly washed away in the flood of emotion as we walked into that little clearing. This had become the centre of my world, the one stable place, the only safe spot left in the Universe. These days, this was home. It felt good to be back.
    I gazed around it fondly, lovingly. I wanted it to be just as we’d left it. I didn’t want a single leaf to have dropped from a tree.
    And it was pretty much like that. About time something in our lives was predictable. Sure there was a fallen branch here, more strips of bark scattered across the ground, a fresh scatter of possum poo just where Fi and I liked to sunbake. But our little stacks of things were still there: Fi’s and mine together, the boys’ in separate piles. And over near our fireplace, the bigger pile of billies, frypan, plates and mugs and cutlery, and our food supply. For the first time in our mad rush away from Stratton I realised that we had somehow to provide shelter for these kids. Lucky it was summer. We still had Chris’s things, and Corrie’s, and some of Robyn’s, that she’d left behind when she’d packed up. So there were two