‘Yeah, you know, I think you might be right.’

He got embarrassed at admitting even that much, and spent a few more minutes scratching for gold.

‘Guess she thinks I’m just a big loudmouth, huh?’ he said at last.

‘I don’t know. I haven’t got a clue Homer. But I don’t think she hates you. You were chatting on like old buddies last night.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ He cleared his throat. ‘That’s when I first ... when I realised ... Well, it’s the first time I really took much notice of her. Since I was a little guy anyway. I always thought she was just a stuck-up snob. But she’s not. She’s really nice.’

‘I could have told you that.’

‘Yeah, but you know, she lives in that big house and she talks like Mrs Hamilton, and me and my family, I mean we’re just Greek peasants to people like her.’

‘Fi’s not like that. You ought to give her a chance.’

‘Gee I’ll give her a chance. Trouble is I don’t know if she’ll give me one.’

He stared moodily into the gravel, sighed, and stood up. Suddenly his face changed. He went red and started wriggling his head around, like his neck had got uncomfortable after all these years of connecting his head to his body. I looked around to see what had set him off. It was Fi, coming down to the creek to brush her perfect teeth. It was hard not to smile. I’d seen people struck by the lightning of love before, but I’d never thought it would happen to Homer. And the fact that it was Fi took my breath away. I just couldn’t imagine what she’d think or how she’d react. My best guess was that she’d think it was a big joke, let him down quickly and gently, then come and have a good giggle with me about it. Not that she’d laugh to be cruel; it was just that no one took Homer very seriously. He’d always encouraged people to believe he had no feelings – he used to say ‘I’ve got a radium heart, takes five thousand years to melt down’. He’d sit in the back of the class encouraging the girls to criticise him. ‘Yeah, I’m insensitive, what else? Sexist? Come on, is that all you can think of? You can do better than this. Oooh Sandra, get stirred up ...’ They’d get madder and madder and he’d keep leaning back on his chair, smiling and taunting them. They knew what he was doing but they couldn’t help themselves.

So after a while we started believing him when he said he was too tough to have emotions. It seemed funny that Fi, the most delicately built girl in our year, looked like being the one to bring him undone, if that’s the right way to put it.

I went for a walk back up the track, to the last of Satan’s Steps. The sun had already warmed the great granite wall and I leaned against it with my eyes half shut, thinking about our hike, and the path and the man who’d built it, and this place called Hell. ‘Why did people call it Hell?’ I wondered. All those cliffs and rocks, and that vegetation, it did look wild. But wild wasn’t Hell. Wild was fascinating, difficult, wonderful. No place was Hell, no place could be Hell. It’s the people calling it Hell, that’s the only thing that made it so. People just sticking names on places, so that no one could see those places properly any more. Every time they looked at them or thought about them the first thing they saw was a huge big sign saying ‘Housing Commission’ or ‘private school’ or ‘church’ or ‘mosque’ or ‘synagogue’. They stopped looking once they saw those signs.

It was the same with Homer, the way for all those years he’d been hanging a big sign around his neck, and like a fool I’d kept reading it. Animals were smarter. They couldn’t read. Dogs, horses, cats, they didn’t bother reading any signs. They used their own brains, their own judgement.

No, Hell wasn’t anything to do with places, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.

Chapter Five

We got fat and lazy, camping in the clearing. Every day someone would say ‘OK, today we’re definitely going up the top and doing a good long walk’, and every day we’d all say ‘Yeah, I’ll come’, ‘Yeah, we’re getting too slack’, ‘Yeah, good idea’.

Somehow though we never got round to it. Lunch-time would creep up on us, then there’d be a bit of serious sleeping to do, a bit of reading or paddling in the creek, then it’d be mid-afternoon getting on to late afternoon. Corrie and I were probably the most energetic. We took a few walks, back to the bridge, or to different cliffs, so we could have long private conversations. We talked about boys and friends and school and parents, all the usual stuff. We decided that when we left school we’d earn some money for six months and then go overseas together. We got really excited about it.

‘I want to stay away for years and years,’ Corrie said dreamily.

‘Corrie! You got homesick on the Year 8 camp, and that was only four days!’

‘That wasn’t real homesickness. That was because Ian and them were giving me such a hard time.’

‘Weren’t they such mongrels? I hated them.’

‘Remember when they got caught bombing us with firelighters? They were crazy. At least they’ve improved since then.’

‘Ian’s still a dork.’

‘I don’t mind him now. He’s all right.’

Corrie was much more forgiving than me. More tolerant.

‘So will your parents let you go overseas?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. They might, if I work on them long enough. They let me apply for that exchange thing, remember.’

‘Your parents are so easy to get on with.’

‘So are yours.’

‘Oh, most of the time I guess they are. It’s only when Dad’s in one of his moods. And he is awfully sexist. All the stuff I had to go through just to come on this trip. If I was a boy it’d be no problem.’

‘Mmm. My dad’s not bad. I’ve been educating him.’

I smiled. A lot of people underestimated Corrie. She just quietly worked away on people till she got what she wanted.

We figured out our itinerary. Indonesia, Thailand, China, India, then up to Egypt. Corrie wanted to go from there into Africa, but I wanted to go on to Europe. Corrie had this idea that she’d have a look at everything, come home, do nursing, then go back and work in the country that needed nurses most. I admired her for that. I was more interested in making money.

So the time drifted by. Even on our last full day, when food was getting short, no one could be bothered going all the way back to the Landrover to get more. Instead we improvised, and put together snacks that at any other time we would have chucked at the nearest rubbish tin. We ate meals that I wouldn’t have fed to our chooks. There was no butter left, no powdered milk, no condensed milk because we’d sucked the tubes dry on our first day. No fruit, no tea, no cheese. No chocolate – that was serious. But not serious enough to motivate us to get off our butts. ‘It’s catch twenty-something,’ Kevin explained. ‘If we had chocolate it’d give me the energy to get up to the Landie to get some more. But without it I don’t think I could make it to the first step.’

It was hot, that was our main excuse.

Homer was still rapt in Fi, always wanting to talk to me about her, trying to accidentally put himself wherever she happened to be going, turning red every time she spoke to him. But Fi was being very frustrating. She wouldn’t discuss it with me at all, just pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about, when it must have been obvious to anyone short of a coma.

The seven of us had got through five days without a serious argument, which was good going. Quite a few little arguments, I admit. There was the time Kevin had blown up at Fi for not doing any cooking or washing up. It was after the Great Snake Shemozzle; I think Kevin was embarrassed that he hadn’t come out of that with much credit. Then his Sausage Surprise got such a poor response, so he probably was feeling a bit sensitive. Still, Fi was getting a reputation for disappearing when work appeared, so Kevin wasn’t too far wrong.