Needles In The Haystack


Copyright (C) Will Kemp 1993


For reproduction rights see file sp001039.txt


CHAPTER FOURTEEN

     After they'd been at Happy Christmas for a couple of weeks, 
Sally and Julie decided it was time to go back to Goonabah. Luckily, 
around the time they planned to leave, a couple of people from 
Nowhere were going most of the way there in a car. As they drove 
back out towards the highway, Sally and Julie both felt a strong and 
disturbing sadness descend on them. "We'll have to come back real 
soon, eh?" Julie said. 
     "Yeah. It seems a shame to be leaving." Sally replied. "I'd 
really like to come back and live here."
     About half way between Happy Christmas and Goonabah, they 
sped past a white ute, heading in the opposite direction. Neither of 
them even registered the ute as being any different to the rest of 
the cars they were passing all the time. And they certainly didn't 
notice the driver. If they had, maybe a lot of things would have 
turned out very differently for both Sally and Anton - who was at 
the wheel of the ute. He didn't notice them either.
     John had begun to get bored with Mainline and wanted to go back 
to Sydney to "sort out some business." They'd both started using 
again, but neither of them had much money. And there really wasn't 
much of an opening for scamming in Goonabah. It was too small, and 
whatever minor scams there were had been snapped up by other people 
years ago. New faces didn't have a hope.
     Phil got back from Sydney the morning Anton and John left 
Goonabah. When he saw him, Anton almost decided to hang around 
for a few more days. But John would probably just have gone 
straight back to Sydney and all the effort Anton had put into 
convincing him to go via Happy Christmas would have been wasted. 
Besides, he really wanted to see Sally by this time. It had been a 
couple of months now and he was missing her quite badly. He felt 
he'd done his smack binge for a while, and he'd rather be with Sally 
and straight,than using without her. The novelty had worn off a bit 
with his last habit and he'd almost come back to the point he'd been 
at when he and Sally had first met. Not quite the same - as he 
didn't feel too bad about himself using any more - but getting that 
way.
     So they left Goonabah finally, and arrived at Happy Christmas 
late that afternoon, when the sun was just going down over the hills 
behind Here.
     I won't describe, in too much depth, Anton's feelings at 
finding Sally had left just that day. You can imagine how he felt. 
Needless to say, he wasn't very happy. He wandered off into the 
darkening fringes of the forest, a great weight of depression and 
frustration bearing down on him. At first he thought about going 
back to Mainline. But he knew there was no way John would go too. He 
could have hitched, although after seeing how empty the last couple 
of hundred kilometres of highway had been, he didn't fancy the 
prospect. And anyway, the thought of going back on his tracks over 
four or five hundred kilometres was really depressing and crazy.
     In the end, he just gave up. He decided the only thing he could 
do under the circumstances was carry on moving and go back to Sydney 
with John. Any other option was just too hard at that time for him 
to get his brain around.
     The whole trip so far seemed like it had been a complete waste 
of time and energy. He'd had quite a good time on the coast, but for 
half of it he'd wanted to be moving on. Mainline had been ok, but 
his stay there had been strange and quite strained. He'd felt really 
unsettled the whole time, wondering what he was doing in the place. 
Most of it had felt like he was just marking time, waiting for 
something. For Sally mainly. He hadn't even been able to see Muz, as 
she'd gone off to the coast to spend a couple of weeks living on the 
beach.
     And now he was here. It seemed totally pointless. The 
attractiveness and the power of his surroundings were not completely 
lost on Anton, but his preoccupation with the situation he was in 
effectively blanked out most of it. Which was a shame, because if 
he'd just relaxed a bit and accepted what was happening to him, he 
would have experienced the strength of where he was much more 
strongly. This would almost certainly have made him feel a lot 
better about what was going on in his life. And he would have got a 
lot of benefit from Happy Christmas. It would have helped him in 
whatever he decided to do - to go back to Mainline, or to go on to 
Sydney. Whichever way he'd gone, he would have carried with him a 
renewed strength from the land he was then on. But it didn't happen 
that way and he and John ended up driving back down the dirt track 
to the highway the next morning. Heading for Sydney.
     That short visit to Happy Christmas marked the beginning of a 
long, low period in Anton's life. Up to that point, he'd been 
happier than he'd been for a long time. But the novelty of being so 
far from home, of meeting new people and of going to completely new 
and different places abruptly vanished. It was replaced by a deep 
loneliness, a feeling of being lost and a disturbing doubt about 
what he was doing on this side of the world in the first place.
     When he got back to Sydney, he got caught up in the vicious 
circle of heroin addiction again. Although he knew it was really 
best to lay off drugs at a time like this, that it was best to be 
straight, to sort your head out in times of crisis, he slipped 
almost uncontrollably back into using every day. While he was 
stoned, his troubles seemed a lot further away, less worrying, 
easier to handle. But as soon as he started coming down, they grew 
to gigantic proportions and conspired with the other effects of 
withdrawal to take away his power of reason. All he could do was 
have some more and keep it all under control for another day. He 
knew what was happening to him, but he couldn't find the strength to 
do anything about it.
     In contrast to this, Sally began to find herself feeling 
happier and more settled. She'd been quite upset at getting back to 
Mainline and finding she'd missed Anton - not once, but twice. 
However, this didn't last more than a couple of days. She half 
expected Anton to turn up again to follow her back from Happy 
Christmas, although she knew deep down he wasn't going to. But she'd 
come to terms with his absence a long time before (whereas he'd only 
just begun to miss her) and this latest development wasn't really a 
major setback.
     On top of that, she came away from Happy Christmas with an 
unusual feeling of strength - of being able to handle anything. Life 
had taken on a new meaning during her stay there and she felt like 
she'd left with a little bit of that place inside her. Or she'd left 
a little bit of herself there, which was still channelling some of 
the powerful energy of that land into her, wherever she might be.
     She settled back into Mainline quite quickly and almost 
straight away began to try and get her life into some kind of usable 
state. She began working on the pirate radio station, just doing 
small bits at first. But she rapidly got to the point where she was 
knocking up hour long programs about this and that. She learnt a few 
techniques from the others and developed a few of her own. It came 
as a surprise to her when she realized she was actually really good 
at radio despite the primitive equipment she had to work with. 
People would come up to her in the Starlight and say: "I heard your 
program on the radio the other day..." They were always 
complimentary and one or two of them gave her ideas for new things 
to do, or new angles to approach old topics.
     During this period, she started sleeping with Phil. She thought 
about it for a while before it happened. It was obvious he was 
interested in her. And she found him really attractive. But she 
hesitated for a while, feeling that a relationship with him would 
really complicate things if Anton came back. One day, though, Muz 
left Goonabah again to go to Sydney and Sally realized she was going 
there mainly to see Anton. Although she didn't mind this, it 
triggered something inside her and she thought "why not?" That night 
she slept with Phil for the first-time. 

                                  *

     One dark and dingey day, one of those days you get in space now 
and then - if you can talk about "days" in space, that is - a 
strange-looking spaceship rocketted at super high speed into the 
solar system. The crew were a miserable and depressed mob. They'd 
been zooming around the galaxy for a long time now and were 
beginning to get thoroughly sick of the sight of all those 
stupid-looking planets whizzing past them out of the boring black 
void of space. But it would soon be time to go home again - if the 
beaten up and unreliable navigation computer could remember where 
home was!
     There was just one more job to do, before they could turn 
round, step on the gas and prepare for the year-long sleep that 
would take them back to the pleasant and orderly planet they came 
from. But what a scummy hole to have to go to first - a dirty 
overgrown dump that would one day in the far distant future be 
called "Earth" by it's inhabitants. They felt sorry for the poor 
bastards they had to drop off there. Well, sort of sorry, anyway. 
Fancy being stuck for ever on that place!
     But they knew the risks when they broke the law. They should 
have just conformed like everyone else and then they wouldn't be 
here now. They were all guilty of scratching up bits of concrete and 
trying to grow things. Growing plants had been illegal for centuries 
Once, their planet had been wild and overgrown like this one they 
were heading for now, but years of hard work had cured that. Now 
they could proudly say that not a single living thing existed on 
that world. Except for humans, of course!
     Using all the ingenuity of their extremely intelligent race 
they'd replaced trees with solar-powered oxygen-producing machines 
and all their food came from vast antiseptic factories. None of that 
dirty plant muck their ancestors used to eat. And the entire surface 
of that wonderful paradise was paved in beautifully landscaped, 
coloured concrete. The hideous mess called "nature" was once and for 
all done away with.
     But somehow seeds had survived, passed on from generation to 
generation of social misfits, reactionaries whose emotional 
inadequacy made them crave the old ways. And these fools had been 
caught trying to plant them. A pathetic attempt, of course - the 
concrete was so thick that not even an atom bomb could crack it. But 
they'd tried anyway and been caught. And now they were on their way 
to face their punishment. A just punishment, and one which fitted 
the crime perfectly. They would be condemned for ever to the 
nightmarish jungles of earth.
     "We've hidden your means of escape somewhere on the planet." 
the captain told the convicts, just before they took off and left 
them there. "You'll have plenty of time to look for it!"
     The crew laughed as they shot up into the black depths of space 
again, leaving the group of convicts standing there watching, 
frightened and bewildered. That was a clever twist to their 
sentence: a means of escape!
     The convicts survived somehow in that disturbing and alien 
environment. It's amazing that they did, really, as it was so 
opposite to what they were used to. No concrete. And trees 
everywhere. Naturally, they developed a two-edged relationship with 
their new environment. They loved it, because it was like something 
they had always dreamed of: green, damp, natural. But at the same 
time they had to fight it, because they didn't understand how to 
live with it - they'd never had the opportunity to learn before. Now 
it was a question of survival and they had to make a few decisions 
fast.
     Sadly, in their ignorance, they made the wrong decisions. 
Instead of relaxing and flowing with their new surroundings, they 
pushed and fought against it, not realizing, of course that it was 
just this approach that had left their planet the way it was. And of 
course as they survived and bred and spread out, so it became 
ingrained in their culture and they moved around the planet ripping 
it apart in all sorts of small ways as they went.
     The combination of their light skin and the unfriendliness of 
the darker people who already lived on the planet, forced them into 
the colder regions. The natives weren't naturally unfriendly, but 
they didn't like the way this new mob did so much damage wherever 
they went. So they pushed them back, out of the bits where they 
lived.
     Thousands of generations later, the descendents of the 
castaways were still at it and, partly as a result of having all but 
destroyed their bit of the planet, and partly because of a 
hereditary feeling of being lost and searching for something, they 
began to spread out over the rest of the planet. Unfortunately, 
after a while, bits of it started to look like the place where their 
ancestors had been thrown out of for fighting against that very same 
thing. (That civilization, by the way, had long since destroyed 
itself with some nightmarish chemical death. And now the plants, 
buried centuries before, had finally found a few flaws in the 
concrete and weakened it enough to break through again.)
     But what about the means of escape that the space travellers 
hid on the planet all those centuries ago? you might ask. Did they 
ever find it?
     Well, yes ... and no ... That is, they found it, but by then 
they'd forgotten they were looking for it, so they didn't recognize 
it as having any special extra-terrestrial significance. But that 
didn't stop them using it. And they're still using it today, to free 
themselves from life in the penal colony they don't even know they 
live in.
     Whoever added the means of escape to that sentence had a cruel 
and ironical sense of humour. The crew had planted seeds before they 
left. And these seeds had quickly sprouted and grown into ... white 
poppies.

                               ***