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.But we did not need the television to tell us about the force of the storm.We watched the way our fathers tensed with each unfamiliar noise from outside; listening for the crack of falling branches, or the scream of nails pulling free.Our mothers were either silent and serious as they served up our meals, or they put on masks of jovial good humour.Which was more painful was hard to say.Tug Gardiner woke in the night.He lay listening to the rain, which was still throwing itself against the roof and walls of his raised room.The room now felt to him like a boat trying to ride out the storm.The red numbers on his alarm-radio glowed 12:30.He'd been woken by a dream.It had been about Lucy.The dream had snapped him into consciousness like a slap.He was wide awake and his pyjamas were soaked with sweat, though it was cold in his room.'I knew for sure I had to go,' he told us later.He dressed in the dark and climbed down the steep steps from his room as quietly as he could manage.His raincoat was in the hall cupboard, where he also found his father's golf bag.Tug pulled a wedge free and felt its weight.He swung it experimentally in the narrow hall and then, satisfied, he let himself out into the night.At houses up and down Rocking Horse Road we were doing the same.Each of us had woken at the same time as Tug, 12:30.We woke sure of what we had to do.We are the first to admit that the whole idea is ridiculous when committed to paper.Here on the page, in black and white, it is absurd — something we would normally dismiss as the worst sort of nonsense.But the truth is that the dream was exactly the same for each of us.We all dreamt of Lucy that night.She was standing on the beach at the spot where Pete Marshall had found her body.She was clothed in a soft white light and there was a small finger-bone of driftwood in her matted hair.We could see the circling bruises around her neck.Lucy's eyes were fixed on ours.She did not speak but wore an expression of unfathomable sadness.She implored us.Even without words we knew what she was asking.Only Jase Harbidge encountered any difficulty in getting away.When Jase passed, fully dressed, through his darkened kitchen on his way to the back door, he found his father sitting at the kitchen table staring at one of his wedding photographs by the light from the hall, where the bulb was always left burning.Bill Harbidge took in the heavy crowbar that hung from Jase's hand.'I've gotta go out,' said Jase.'Sure,' his dad said and glanced towards the window where the rain dripped down the glass.He went to the fridge and began making himself a sandwich.Jase watched him but was unsure of what else to say, so he just turned and walked out of the house.The wind seemed to have lessened slightly but the rain was still falling when we slipped from our homes.Like the stormwater systems down south, the gutters and underground pipes down New Brighton could not cope with so much water in such a short period of time.Rocking Horse Road had started to flood hours before and large pools of rainwater were now lapping against the edges of the footpaths.In some places the water from both sides of the road had met in the middle, forming dark lakes through which we waded.Tug met Pete Marshall near the Ashers' dairy.As though their meeting had been planned, they fell into step, although neither of them spoke.Jim Turner reported seeing Jase ahead of him on the road.Others were drawn to the beach and the light from their torches flickered and wove down through the sand dunes as they followed the tracks.Behind the dunes, foaming white waves stampeded on to the beach.We converged on SJ's house, coming out of the surrounding darkness singly and in pairs.Tug and Pete were the first to arrive.Tug's hood was back up.He tapped the head of his golf club with a metallic watch-tick against a fencepost as he waited.Jim Turner had blacked his face with shoe polish so that the whites of his eyes showed bright in what little light there was.Both Al Penny and Matt Templeton wore balaclavas and Mark Murray carried a softball bat.Pete Marshall had stopped to collect Lucy's trophy from the Turners' garage and bore it through the night like a silver talisman.No one mentioned the dream.When we had all gathered on the street, we walked on to SJ's front lawn.For a moment we were at a loss.The dream had brought us here but had not told us what to do when we arrived.The only light came from a naked bulb above the front door.We were facing south and the rain drove into us; those who weren't already saturated, soon were.Although we did not notice it straight away, the rain had already formed puddles on the lawn where the ground was low-lying.One puddle was reaching out to embrace another and another.If we'd cared to look we would have seen the same thing happening in front of all the houses we had passed.The road flooding was not unprecedented, but elsewhere on the Spit puddles were unnatural.Water normally vanished instantly into the sand.But we were not interested in the puddles or even in the storm.Our focus was on the house.Mild Al Penny was the first to throw one of the whitewashed rocks that ringed the garden.The rock arced through the darkness.We watched its progress as it travelled through the air and then carried on through the bedroom window.The shatter of glass cut through the noise of the wind and the rain.There was a pause, and then the bedroom lit up.We could all see SJ clearly as he peered out through the ragged pane.He had been startled from sleep and was wide-eyed.As more rocks began to hit the house, his head darted back inside and the light in the bedroom was turned off.There were more than enough rocks, hundreds.Some bounced off the weatherboards, others found their mark.More glass shattered and fell and not just in the bedroom either.The windows of the darkroom and the lounge and the louvred panes in the toilet all shattered.The rocks that went high landed on the iron roof.They roared and growled as they rolled back down, adding their voices to the storm's.And then SJ was standing on his front step.He had pulled on a T-shirt but was still wearing his pyjama pants.He was lit from above so that we could not see his eyes.Where they should have been there were only dark sea-caves inside which, we were certain, lurked a black soul.He shouted garbled, angry threats into the darkness but he might as well have been yelling at the slanting rain.We knew that he could not see us, or if he could, that we were only darker shadows in the night.Who threw that next rock? We don't know (even if we did, we wouldn't tell, right to this day).All that we will say is that it was a good throw, hard and accurate.The rock struck SJ on the forehead just above his left eyebrow.A communal sigh of satisfaction rose from us.There was immediately blood and SJ clutched at his head and staggered forward.That involuntary movement took him down the single concrete step, out of the light from the bulb above the door.Perhaps if we had been able to see him more clearly, what happened next would have been avoided.Then again, probably not.More white rocks flew, striking him on the body.Nobody was holding back now and we were not kids any more [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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