Going Bush Read online

  An incredible smell of bacon wafted over from where Vern was cooking.

  Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacon.

  Despite how tired I was, that stuff smelled good, but then you’d have to be in a coma not to love the smell of bacon in the morning. I wondered if the vegetarians in our group felt the same way. Probably not.

  Anyway, whatever, who cares? It was a big improvement on the mouldy vegemite back at Bigbottom Creek, and I was going to wrap my mouth around as much of the stuff as I could get. Especially since, from what Brushes was saying, we were getting back on the bus. I was hoping these cave paintings were real close to camp but, in a place the size of Australia, you never knew.

  “Awwch, noooo,” growled a shapeless lump of green cloth over to my right. It sounded like Glen wasn’t too happy about being woken up. I doubted there’d be any poems about rainbows and lollipops coming from his direction today.

  About an hour after waking up we were all aboard the bus, clutching our various bits of art gear as the events of the previous night began to fade.

  I took a large sketchbook and some pastels. A couple of the others—Vloot and Thiago—did the same while tiny Monique hauled out a thick wad of paper. Ellie had her trusty video camera around her neck. Denny took a remote satellite transmitter and laptop and was planning to live-blog the whole thing right from the caves. Yrsa had a violin and a neat sound recorder—she was going to tape the noises inside the caves and use them in a composition. Linda had a special “toolbox” with a ton of empty drawers she was going to fill with colored dirt, leaves, bits of rock, and anything else she could use in her ceramics. Eric carried a huge bag of wool. I had no idea what he was planning but he looked like he knew what he was doing. Glen had the least to carry—just a chewed-up pencil and a battered black notebook.

  Suddenly, I realized something—this was why I was here.

  These were the kinds of people I wanted to be around. It was all cool. It was all fun. I felt like a proper art student.

  I felt creative.

  UP AHEAD, A red hill stuck up straight out of the flat desert like a pimple. Brushes pulled the bus off the road and we bumped along a winding track through a bunch of weird-looking boulders.

  “There she blows,” Brushes shouted. He pointed out the window at a sharp black slice cut into the big red rock. “The McGarrity Caves!”

  “Are they called that?” I asked Denny. “Officially, I mean.”

  “That’s what he calls them,” Denny said. “But it’s a dead cert they were called something else before Brushes came along.”

  Denny opened his laptop.

  “There you go,” he said, reading from the screen. “This place used to be part of the traditional lands. The caves belonged to the local Aboriginal people, not blow-ins like McGarrity.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why aren’t the cave paintings named after them?”

  “Good question,” Denny said. “They’re long gone from around here.” He sounded different—a bit harder somehow. “They were chased away when they found valuables in the ground.”

  “There’s gold here?”

  Denny looked back at his laptop. “Not sure. It doesn’t say exactly what was mined but, whatever it was, it all ran out long ago,” he said. “Too late for the locals even if they did come back.”

  “We’re here,” Ellie said.

  “What does it matter if we’re here?” Denny snapped. “The real owners of the land don’t care if we’re—”

  “No,” Ellie said. “I mean, we’re here.”

  Denny and I looked up to see Brushes pulling the bus to a stop outside the cave entrance.

  “IT’S COLDER THAN a Canberra July down there, so you better put on your jackets,” Brushes warned us. “Once you get below ground, the temperature drops right quick and no mistake. Now, is everyone ready to see the best cave art in the whole of Australia?”

  I swallowed hard.

  There was something I hadn’t told him or anyone else. It was something I’d been worrying about ever since I’d got that letter inviting me on the camp, something I’d shoved right down to the back of my mind and not thought about—until now.

  I don’t like caves.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not claustrophobic. I’m fine in elevators or closets or whatever. No, it’s real specific. There’s even a name for it.

  I mean, I’m not nutty about it. I don’t freak out or start screaming or anything, but as we approached the narrow gap in the rock wall, I felt a cold globule of fear trickle down my spine. Close up, the cave looked about as inviting as a shark’s mouth, and I wasn’t keen to accept the invitation.

  What if the whole thing collapsed on us?

  What if we got trapped inside?

  What if I got lost and spent the rest of my life looking for the way out by feeling my way through inky blackness until my strength gave out and I tried to climb the walls but slipped and got wedged upside down in a crevasse, screaming and screaming but there’s no one there?

  Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but there’s always some guy getting trapped upside down in a cave in the news.

  They always get trapped upside down too. No idea why, it’s just what happens. I didn’t want to be trapped upside down in a cave. I didn’t even want to be in the cave. But there was no going back now, not unless I wanted to look like a total yellowbelly in front of Ellie and the rest of them.

  “Not an option,” Leo said.

  I looked at him. “Who asked you?”

  “You did.”

  BRUSHES STOPPED IN front of the cave entrance and gathered us around in a semicircle. “Okay, blokes and blokesses, this first part is a bit of a fair dinkum squeezeroo. It’ll get stickier than a pollie’s beak about twenty yards in, but unless you’re a total drongo with a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock, you shouldn’t cark it, so I don’t want to see any of you going off like a frog in a sock, right?”

  I understood about six words of that.

  Ellie leaned over. “He says the gap gets tight in there but you won’t die unless you’re an idiot. Oh, and don’t panic.”

  “What about the kangaroos?” I asked.

  “Forget the kangaroos.”

  “Now,” Brushes said, while waving to Vern to come closer, “you’re going to need these.”

  Vern opened the large bag he was carrying and handed us orange hard hats with LED torches attached. We put them on and I looked around at the group, laughing and taking photos of each other. I guessed no one else was speluncaphobic.

  “Cheer up,” Ellie said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I did that thing with your mouth where you smile but the person looking at you knows you’re not really smiling. And the reason was that Ellie was almost right. I hadn’t seen a ghost but I’d watched this scene before—a bunch of laughing kids heading into a cave—and I knew exactly how it ended. It was a late-night flick I’d secretly watched on my computer about six months back and immediately regretted. The McGarrity Caves looked exactly like the cave in Blood Cave 3.

  And we were going in.

  We followed Brushes to the cave entrance with Vern waving as we went. He was too big to fit through the entrance. Lucky Vern.

  Brushes went in first, turning sideways and disappearing into the darkness, his torch flickering across the cave walls. The rest of the group went in one by one while I hung back. It wasn’t until everyone was almost inside that I realized I’d forgotten something very important.

  I couldn’t be the last in line. No freakin’ way!

  Everyone knows that in any horror movie the kid at the end of the line is the one who cops it first. It doesn’t matter where they are—in the jungle, haunted house, abandoned fairground, whatever—they’re a surefire goner.

  It was right up there with volunteering to go outside to check what that weird noise was, or suggesting everyone splits up, or putting your face right up close to a darkened window … all things that, in the movies, mean
t you were for the chop.

  * * *

  Scary Movie Rule #1: Don’t be last in line.

  * * *

  I sprinted forward, elbowed Monique out of the way (which I kind of felt bad about but not bad enough to stop me from doing it … If we survived I’d apologize to her afterwards), and slid sideways into McGarrity’s Cave.

  THE INSIDE OF the cave wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be.

  It was much, much, much worse.

  For one thing, it was way darker. It was like being the filling in some giant sandwich. The light from the torch kept bouncing off the rock wall and into my eyes, which meant that I was pretty much blind. My heart was beating real quick and my breathing was shallow. I sounded like an asthmatic poodle. I’d only taken about three steps and I already felt trapped. What was it going to be like further in?

  I tried to be braver, or at least act braver (which I’ve noticed are pretty much the same thing), and inched along. (Do people “inch” in Australia? They have the decimal system here, so maybe they don’t.) We centimetred along. Is that better?

  I shuffled sideways, the rock walls getting closer and closer until it seemed impossible to go any further.

  “Okay, mates,” Brushes called from up ahead, “this is the sticky bit.”

  This is the sticky bit? I thought. How can this nightmare get any worse?

  “Everyone drop to the ground and crawl,” Brushes instructed. “The ceiling gets pretty low about here.”

  Okay, that’s how it could get worse.

  Now I was regretting letting Monique go last.

  It meant I couldn’t get out even if I wanted to—not unless Monique went with me, and even I wasn’t going to be that much of a coward. Not with Ellie there. I dropped to the ground and started crawling.

  The cave seemed to shrink to nothing and the tops of our helmets began to scrape against the roof as we crawled forward. I could feel the ground sloping away and I had to dig in with my elbows to stop from sliding.

  Directly ahead of me, the soles of Eric’s feet scrabbled along the tunnel floor. Everyone was very quiet as we crawled and crawled and crawled for what seemed like forever.

  It wasn’t funny anymore.

  I was going to die in here. This was it for Rafe Khatchadorian.

  I might not be dangling upside down but I knew that we were all going to get wedged in this impossibly narrow cave tunnel and …

  … just like that, like so many candy bars dropping through a slot, we popped out of the tunnel. I landed facedown in a patch of dust and began sneezing.

  “Wow,” I heard Ellie say.

  I sneezed one last time and looked up.

  I STOOD UP, dusted off the worst of the dirt, and looked around.

  “Not too shabby, eh?” Brushes said. He spread his arms out wide. There was no mistaking his pride. It was like he owned the place. Maybe he did. I was a bit sketchy on the land ownership laws in the remote areas of Australia—or anywhere, really. He was right, though. This place was not in any way shabby.

  We stood at the base of a towering cavern dotted with pillars of sandstone that reached up to the cave roof, which glittered as our torch beams crisscrossed over it. It was double awesome with sprinkles on top. And strawberry sauce.

  For a few seconds we all just stood and stared.

  Vloot said something in Dutch before switching to English. “Gold?” he said, pointing at the ceiling.

  Brushes shook his head and smiled. “No, Clogs”—(Brushes had nicknamed all of us in tasteless ways like that. Vloot was Clogs, Yrsa was the Snow Queen … you get the picture)—“that’s iron pyrites, better known as fool’s gold. Looks pretty, hey? But it’s totally worthless.”

  “There used to be gold here, though, right?” Denny asked. “Before the British came?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Brushes said, his smile vanishing faster than a snowflake on a barbecue grill. He turned and walked across the cavern. “This way.”

  Denny glanced at me and Ellie and raised his eyebrows.

  Brushes stopped at the far wall of the cavern. He took a lantern from his pack and switched it on. “Can you all turn your head torches off?” he said. “These cave paintings are light-sensitive.”

  We did as he asked, leaving the cavern bathed in a soft, warm glow. Brushes walked the lantern a few paces to his left and placed it on the floor.

  “Behold the McGarrity Paintings!” Brushes stood back as the lantern lit up the cavern wall.

  This time it was my turn to say “wow”.

  THE CAVERN WALL was absolutely full of paintings and patterns drawn and scratched into the surface. It was easy to make out images of various animals. I looked meaningfully at Ellie when I saw an enormous crocodile picked out in white, and hunters throwing spears or running. There were some symbols in there—things I couldn’t recognize. It was amazing.

  “It all looks so fresh!” Ellie said.

  Brushes nodded. “That’s the atmospheric pressure down here. It’s beaut for preserving everything just as they did it twenty thousand years ago.”

  “Twenty thousand years?” I said.

  Beside me there was a chorus of “oohs” and “aahs”. People took out their cameras and sketchbooks, and Brushes kept up a commentary on the paintings while we got busy.

  I began to wonder if I had been a bit hard on old Brushes. The cave paintings were totally awesome. Twenty thousand years! Even Grandma Dotty wouldn’t remember that far back (if you’re reading this, G.D., I’m only joking).

  “You’ve got about thirty minutes,” Brushes said. “Just being here can affect the pigments in the paintings. Any longer and we risk destroying them with the carbon dioxide in our breath. That’s why I need you all to stay well back.”

  Brushes sounded a lot less like an Aussie bushman and more like an Aussie professor. We settled in and did our thing.

  After about twenty minutes, I noticed Thiago moving closer and closer to the wall. He seemed real interested in a painting of some kind of antelope. When he was about an arms length from the cave wall, I saw him frown.

  “HEY!” Brushes yelled, his voice echoing off the cavern walls, making about half of us drop our pencils. “Get back!”

  Thiago gave a short, high-pitched , leapt about two feet in the air, and scooted back to the rest of us, his hands held up in apology. “I—”

  “Let’s go!” Brushes yelled, cutting the little farty Brazilian short. “Right now!” He began making shooing motions like we were a herd of badly behaved sheep. “There’s always one who ruins things for everyone else! Pack up your stuff, we’re heading back to camp!”

  “NICE GOING, THIAGO,” DENNY SAID, knocking him with his shoulder as he passed.

  To be honest, leaving the cavern was sort of okay with me. I mean, the paintings were like triple-super-cool and all but we were still in Blood Cave 3. We packed up our stuff and walked back to the crawl tunnel.

  With one last angry glance at Thiago, Brushes scrambled up. “Everyone follow me,” he said, and headed into the tunnel. “Move it!” His feet disappeared and, one by one, the rest of the group slipped in behind him.

  In a couple of minutes it was my turn. As I started moving, I felt a hand on my arm.

  It was Thiago.

  He put a finger to his lips and motioned for me to follow him, dragging me away from the mouth of the tunnel.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed. I shook my head and stopped dead. Thiago held my arm firmly. For a little guy, he sure had a strong grip.

  “Come,” he said, and began pulling me back to the cave paintings.

  I glanced at the tunnel. Everyone else had gone.

  Thiago kept tugging my arm.

  “Okay, okay!” I said. “But make this quick.”

  We ran across the empty cavern to the cave paintings. With everyone else gone, the place seemed even bigger and way spookier.

  “This is so bad,” I said. I could almost see Mrs. Stricker’s face as I showed up
back at Hills Village Middle School, having been booted out of Australia in disgrace for destroying one of their cultural treasures.

  “See,” Thiago said, beckoning me over to the antelope drawing.

  “What?” Close up, the drawing looked even better but I still couldn’t see why old Thiago was getting so worked up. I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

  Thiago rolled his eyes and pointed to his nose and then at the antelope’s butt. He made a sniffing sound.

  I bent my head to the antelope’s butt and sniffed.

  “WHAT KEPT YOU two so long?”

  Brushes glared at me and Thiago as we wriggled out of the cave, blinking against the glare of the sun. I was kind of glad I was all squinty because otherwise I’m pretty sure Brushes would have spotted how guilty I was right away.

  “I got stuck in the tunnel,” I said. “Thiago was behind me so …”

  I didn’t sound too convincing, even to me. Thiago said something in Portuguese, which went on for so long that Brushes eventually made a kind of gah! noise and stalked off to the bus. Thiago turned to me and winked. I was beginning to like Thiago. Apart from the farting, obvs.

  “What was that all about?” Ellie said once we were all back on the bus.

  She, along with Denny, me, and Thiago, occupied the two back rows. It was even bumpier and smellier back there but it was as far away from Brushes and Vern as we could get.

  At the front of the bus, Brushes seemed to be concentrating on his driving, although I did see his eyes flick up to his rear-view mirror more than a couple of times. I half-turned in my seat so he couldn’t see my face.

  “Thiago noticed something funny down there,” I whispered.