Then came the Wide Game. It seemed a strange name to the uninitiated like Bronte, but meant only, it seemed, that they weren’t confined to their Scout Halls around the region and could wander far – and wide.
Camp Trafalgar, where all the different troops met up, was in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Even Google Earth confirmed that. The scouts arrived by the carload and set up their tents by the creek because there was nothing there. Only nothing always turns into something as soon as you look at it. The site was alive with that sort of nothingness. Creepy, crawly stuff. Bronte tried not to look too far as she cast her eyes down to her feet; as she scuffed about in the fine, powdery dirt.
She did try to listen to the rules of the Wide Game but that is difficult when you’re taken up with the agony of what has to come before the start of a game. It was an ancient torture, handed down generation to generation – from even before the Spanish Inquisition most probably – that thing where large groups are divided into teams: when the choosing begins. Bronte just knew she’d be left standing over on the side until last. The team leaders would pick their mates first, the likely fit next. Those large and unmistakable, the fat kids, were paradoxically unable to gain a hold on their vision.
Bronte had no satisfaction in being right. She was left in the last three to be allowed into a team, alongside the boy with the learning disability and the girl with the coke-bottle glasses. Bronte stood there wishing her mum and dad could get on better so she could stay home on the weekends and not join what her mum insisted on calling the rough and tumble of real life. She almost missed her name being called out, when it was, finally. She looked up slowly. The torture was over for now; Bronte shuffled towards her team in an imitation of camaraderie.
‘This is not a war game,’ boomed the head Scout leader, known as Skip, from behind his wispy moustache. Groans of disappointment bounced back like exploding daisy-cutters.
Not a war game, but the ten teams were divided in two, half to be the authorities of the country, the other half to be fleeing from them. If any these second teams got past the authorities and to the paddock gate on the north edge of the field – past the scrubby bush, over the creek, far, far away – then they were free. Inescapably, the team Bronte was on ended up being one of the teams instructed to flee. The far paddock gate was hidden from where they stood: it was something they simply had to believe was there.
Jeremy skinny-boy Gao, stood beside Bronte, mouth characteristically agape, his hands uncharacteristically empty of his Gameboy. He could defeat the Flame Eaters of Krall, but life? Bronte didn’t acknowledge him as they were assigned coloured tape to tie around their upper arms. They may have arrived in the same car but she knew her resale value would plummet even further if they were linked on the same shelf.
‘We’re the Americans, you’re the Afghanis,’ a big blond kid taunted as he passed with his red tape tied over his sleeve in a sloppy reef knot.
Bronte had forgotten about Afghanistan. She stared after him and missed some mustering noises from the tall boy with the pimple in the crease between his nose and his lip. He was the tallest, so it followed that he was their band’s leader. ‘Hurry up,’ Christopher called. It appeared his name was never shortened, kept long to fit his legs. ‘We have to get passports at the checkpoint if we want to get out.’
But first they had to find the checkpoint, coloured, they were told, a nice UN blue.
Twenty minutes later they were alone on the overgrown path. Christopher’s dark head was bent over the map, his index finger worrying a flaring pimple, and Jeremy was holding the compass up, inexplicably, to the sun. His made-in-China eyes were screwed up in concentration.
‘Why don’t we follow them?’ whispered Bronte. The five Scouts in her team stood as still and alert as meerkats in a desert. The crack of breaking branches suspended their breath. Yes, there moving through the underbrush were the shadows of another team of green-banded escaping Scouts.
‘Good idea,’ acknowledged Christopher. He’d exhausted all of his own.
The meerkats bent back onto metaphorical all-fours, and scuttled off toward the others. That was until blood curdling war cries pierced the air. Shadows broke cover and flew out of the wattles, and straight through Bronte’s group. Red-taped authorities whooped out behind, finding more quarry than they’d imagined.
Bronte instinctively kept moving in her initial direction, against the flow of the attack and into the running enemy. The sheep instinct got the better of her group. For the enemy, full pelt in one direction, it was easier to continue the hunt for the original prey; they ignored Bronte’s group and ran on.
Once in amongst the prickly wattle, Christopher whacked Bronte of the back. ‘Good on you,’ he congratulated her. Bronte’s skin smarted between her shoulder-blades, but she was blushing suddenly with pride.
‘It was nothing,’ she demurred. But they all knew it was the sort of nothing that’s always really something.
‘How about we go without passports?’ Christopher suggested at last.
They were all on their bellies watching the checkpoint. Bark and dead grass were doing horrible things to Bronte’s stomach. Bronte, indeed none of them, questioned that the game had to be played. They were not yet at the age for sneaking behind the bush for a fag. Any disobedience Bronte had was hoarded for her parents.
Yet they simply couldn’t get passports. Three uniformed Scout leaders were sitting at an old Laminex kitchen table, covered in a blue cloth, in the shade of a lemon scented gum. It was a lovely place for a picnic, and they weren’t being disturbed by any Scouts demanding passports as they took time to share Smiths Crisps and marshmallows. The paraphernalia of officialdom gathered crumbs and scythe shaped leaves. Rubber stamps grew squidgy in the growing heat. And no teams with green-bands approached because to the north and to the south, imperfectly camouflaged, packs of Authority team members lurked. Not teams, not groups. Wolves move in packs, like Scouts.
Bronte’s group had watched one lone Scout make a break only to be beaten back into hiding. There seemed no other choice: they’d have to go without passports. They formed a circle around the map and pooled the skills they’d learned in their respective Scout Halls every Wednesday night.
‘There’s a bridge over the creek,’ Christopher pointed.
‘They’ll be watching it,’ said Jeremy. Bridges were bottlenecks. Billy-Goat Gruff places.
‘Any fords?’
The creek did seem to be even more narrow at one point.
‘I can’t swim,’ whispered Bronte.
‘Surely it’ll be low in this drought,’ countered Christopher, growing into the enforced leadership. ‘We’ll be able to wade.’
So they did. Over the other side of the creek they left great wet footprints in the dust, like Neil Armstrong’s on the moon. That’s not what gave them away though. It was probably their oohing and aahing over the echidna. The animal’s soft sweet snout curled itself into the spiky ball of its body and they all roared with delight. They’d seen native wildlife in captivity but not in the real wild wide world. It was luck that they’d stumbled across it: good luck for them, bad luck for the echidna’s nerves.
Or bad luck all round as it turned out.
‘Get them,’ one henchman of the Authorities screamed out above the incessant scratch of the cicadas.
Bronte didn’t think; again it was instinct. Fight or flight was no contest. She ran. And a miracle happened. Out of the other side of the trees that lined the creek, the gate came into view. Across the paddock, old and rusted and closed with a heavy chain, stood their goal: the border to freedom.
The ground thumped under her feet. Bronte could feel it reverberating up through her blood, into her temples. The flab around her tummy kept the beat. Her lungs were bursting, her feet throbbing in the tight rubber of her thongs. Her nipples rubbed and chaffed against the material of her shirt and her brain decided enough was enough. Only her heart remembered some Scout promise about doing your best and not giving in to yourself.
She tripped then. Tripped over her own earnestness. Landed with the heals of her hands each in a cow pat as big and flat as a deflated football. Powdered excrement puffed up. Bronte couldn’t help but swallow some as she heaved air back into her lungs. She spat and spat. Nothing would erase the dryness, the hint of taste. The taste of defeat.
‘Gotcha,’ a kid hissed as if from a tower very high above her. He put a canvas-shoed foot on her bum in more than mock victory.
The rest of the team too were sprawled under the heel of the Authorities. Christopher’s captor said, ‘that was fun as,’ while Christopher screamed frustration into the dirt.
‘It’s just a game,’ mollified Skip, head Scout leader, man of experience, as he joined them.
Not for everyone it’s not, Bronte realised. The ripple of her thought began to spread. Only at that moment, another team surged past, green tapes flying a semaphore signal of victory. They leapt the rusty gate. Crossed. Their joy flooded Bronte’s small ripples.
The half dozen cows in the next paddock didn’t look up from their grazing.
After lunch, a huge tray of watermelon was brought out. It was cut thick in wedges, and no-one had taken the seeds out, not like Bronte’s mother always did. The other Scouts sat around on the ground, spitting the seeds into the dust at their feet. Bronte couldn’t spit. The seeds would dribble down her chin for sure. But it was hot and dry and she wanted the watery pink flesh; she needed it. So Bronte had to swallow the watermelon seeds instead.
With each swallow Bronte could feel a watermelon vine growing inside. First through her small intestines, then coiling into her stomach, flowering in her chest; the fruit ballooning in her abdomen.
This was only an interlude. Soon she’d have to go back home with all the snarkey bickering and the constant unreeling of the knowledge that this game of life was not fair, not fair, not fair.
Jeremy spat indecisively next to her. There was a pair of shiny black seeds on his skinny knee. Christopher flanked her other side. They’d discussed it quietly, the Wide Game. Just them. That they knew it was in the rules, but they didn’t think it was fair that the team who’d jumped the gate had been disqualified for not having passports.
‘You did well but,’ Christopher told Bronte, ‘for a first camp.’
Bronte couldn’t take her eyes off the ground, but the watermelon vine inside her stopped growing for a moment.
‘Clean up. Pronto,’ shouted a leader, and the Scouts worked in a quick emu-bob to pick up the rubbish. Christopher stayed beside Bronte as they bent and cleaned up. And he stayed with her on the way into the bush to collect wood for the evening’s bonfire.
‘The flames are awesome in the dark,’ he told Bronte. A little flicker of doubt crossed his face, whether from the word flames or the word dark or a flash of memory from the year before.
Bronte only came up to his shoulder, nose at armpit height. A gust of stale sweat enveloped her. She didn’t crinkle her nose or make a face though. She turned to make sure Jeremy was keeping up.
