On the Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta

Author:Melina Marchetta
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742281285
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

chapter

seventeen

On one of those days during the holidays, when they were completely bored, Webb came up with a plan. The five of them sat by the river, at the very spot where Webb dreamed of building a house.

‘We build a tunnel,’ Webb said. ‘It runs from my House to Tate and Narnie’s and then we take a detour and it goes from their House, underneath the driveway and then to the clearing.’

‘Purpose?’ Jude asked, practising his overarm with rocks against the tree.

‘To get around after hours. It’ll be tops.’

‘Tops, will it be?’

‘The Great Escape. They built a tunnel,’ Fitz said, enthused.

‘They needed to, morons. It was a matter of life and death,’ Jude said dryly.

‘We’re bored to death, Jude, so isn’t that a matter of life and death?’ Tate asked.

Webb was grinning. Tate, too. They always grinned in unison. like they were thinking with the same mind, sharing the same heart. Ever since any of them could remember, Webb and Tate had been like that. Jude knew it was why he was drawn to them. They were like beacons for Narnie who couldn’t seem to operate without them, and Fitz and Jude loved the three, unashamedly.

‘They think I saved them, but they saved me,’ Fitz once told him. ‘I didn’t exist before I belonged to the Fucked-Up Four.’

‘Five,’ Jude had corrected.

He could hear Webb, Tate and Fitz discussing the tunnel as if it already existed.

‘Narnie, explain to the delusional trio why the POWS needed that tunnel more than we do,’ he said.

‘Nazis,’ she muttered, sitting against the tree. Bad day for Narnie.

‘Weren’t your grandparents Nazis?’ Fitz asked, lining up at least five imaginary enemies and, with his finger and popping sounds, eliminating them one by one.

‘They were Germans,’ Narnie said. ‘Big difference.’

‘Although Oma Rose vas a Nazi vhen it came to eating za sauerkraut,’ Webb said in a bad German accent, and for the first time in a long time, Narnie laughed.

‘I’m all for the tunnel. It could save our life one day,’ Tate said. ‘We could be chased by evil and have to hide down there.’

‘Evil out in Jellicoe? I wish,’ Fitz said.

‘Think of how tunnels saved people from Hitler,’ Tate said.

‘Yeah, but last I heard Hitler was dead. The bunker, a gun, Eva. Ring a bell?’ Jude said.

‘Cyanide,’ Narnie corrected.

‘We’ll pretend we’re the East Germans trying to escape to West Germany. No Nazis.’

‘Just Communists.’

All we need is to be able to get from one House to the other and then from that House to the clearing,’ Webb said, slightly frustrated by the fact that nobody but Tate was taking him seriously.

Jude looked from Tate to Webb, shaking his head.

‘You know what?’ Webb asked. ‘I’m getting another fantastic idea.’ The seven p.m. call bell rang in the distance, but Webb was in another world.

‘Skirmish,’ he said, impressed with himself. ‘let’s have a war.’

There was a new plan every day, bigger and better than the day before. Each afternoon at four o’clock they would meet to discuss it.

On Jude’s last day they met at midnight and camped under the oak by the river.

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