Chapter 40: Welcome Home

Friday 12-Oct 2007

It was fun on the train with Mandy and Greg. They were nice people, and everyone was getting on real well. In fact, he reckoned his parents would like them.

It was also nice because Shahia was leaning hard against him, unwilling to let him stop touching her. Very nice. He liked that.

He was a bit surprised when Alyssa came to him and asked him to help her find the toilet. When they found it, instead of going in, she dragged him over to the nearest empty seat, and pushed him into it. She sat on his lap, and put her arms around him.

"You made me a promise."

"Yeah, I did." And he'd been wanting to talk to her about that.

"You know that I didn't like you."

Chris nodded. He remembered when that had been pretty evident.

She looked at him oddly. "I still don't want you to be Shahia's boyfriend."

"No?"

"No. I want a new promise."

Hmm. "What's that? If I can, I'll promise."

"I want you to be promise to be my new dad."

"You don't ask for easy promises do you?"

"No. If they were, I wouldn't need to ask for them, would I?"

Chris laughed. Then he thought about what she was asking, not a boyfriend, but to be her dad. He understood what that meant: commitment.

He might be willing to make that commitment, but it wasn't something he could promise her, because it was about Shahia, and about all of their futures.

"Alyssa, that's not something I can promise to just you. It involves everyone in the family, and most of all Shahia. But I can promise you something nearly as good.

"I can promise you that I want to be your new dad, and that I'm going to work hard to make it that way."

Alyssa nodded. "I accept that promise. And you can be her boyfriend now."

Chris laughed. "Well, thank you."

"That's all right," she said gravely, "someone has to look after Shahia the way she looks after everyone else."

Nervously, Chris looked out the train window. There were a lot of people waiting in the park to meet them. The park was full, and he figured that there were at least both full schools present. He could also see some media, television vehicles.

He turned to Shahia. "Well, here goes."

She pushed everything into the stroller and picked up Maria. "Alyssa, can you push the stroller for us?"

When Alyssa looked a little unwilling, Greg said, "I'll do it."

They passed through the turnstiles and turned around the corner of the building. They found themselves confronted with a welcoming party: Lisa, and Chris's family, and behind them, their class, Mr Hanson, and Mr Cartwright.

The first to react were Lisa and his mum, running to them, wrapping them in big hugs. None of them could decide who to do first, so they just went for one big group hug between the four of them with Maria in the middle.

After that, there was a big exchange of hugs all round. It felt like one of those meetings at the airport, when long lost relatives finally meet, only more confusing, because it was such a big group. But Chris did get to finally give his dad a big high-five, right in the middle of the group.

Finally, once the confusion was over, Mr Cartwright led them over to a microphone on a little platform, and for the first time Chris noticed the TV cameras. Chris stood on the platform, his family — Shahia with Maria, Hassan and Alyssa — by his side. The park had a little bowl-shaped depression, which meant that almost the entire audience could see them.

He turned to Shahia, "Well, here goes!" They'd talked about this on the train, figuring that something like this would happen.

He stepped up to the microphone, holding Shahia tightly.

"Hello, everyone."

The sound reverberated across the park, and sounded too loud. He turned to see a sound technician from the TV networks giving him the thumbs up. When the welcome cheers had died down, he continued "It's so great to be back."

The sound level was a little lower, right on, and so he went on. "Going on the run was such a scary thing. Hassan and Alyssa started it, and we — that is, Shahia and I - we'd like to thank them for being so cool when they needed to be. Mr Parslow, sorry about the damage and disruption, and we hope that all the excitement for your students has made up for that.

"We'd also like to thank the few students that I asked to help us on the spur of the moment. Lisa and David helped Shahia, and Joe, Malcolm, and Geno helped me. You guys stepped forward without any warning, and it really made a difference. We're so relieved that you guys won't face any charges from what we did. Also, it's a hard thing, being a prisoner or war, so we were quite relieved that the police used such a cruel and unusual punishment to break Geno."

When the laughter from that had died down, Chris continued. "So then we were gone. When we finally found somewhere to stay and turned on the TV, we were just so blown away by what we saw. Of course, it's terrifying to be wanted for kidnapping, especially when they waved that stupid Nightrider thing around on TV. But we could see that you were going to get the truth out, and that gave us the strength to go on.

"Mum, you were awesome, thanks so much. Mr Cartwright, you were great too. You have both supported us through everything, with moral strength, and with advice, and that's a debt we can never repay.

"We have to specially thank the small community that welcomed us into their hearts for a couple of days. We couldn't have made it without you either. Tony, Joe, Mary, and others, thank you.

"The police have been great. Not only in the way they supported the protest, but also in the way they treated us. I'd like to thank Officer Prescott for escorting us home today, and particularly for having the presence of mind to know that we weren't dangerous.

"All of you, and many thousands of others, went into the city to protest about the way we and our family were being treated. We'd like to say thank you to everyone, but how do you go about that?

"I missed out on the soccer match! They said on TV that there was maybe eighty thousand people playing, maybe five hundred balls. I hope some of you here scored in the match. How amazing that was to watch on the television! We so wanted to be in for that, but we did have our own little soccer game. A big hello to the kids who played with us.

"So this brings us to Lisa. Lisa, you are so totally awesome."

Chris had been going to continue, but he had to stop and wait for the crowd to stop chanting Lisa's name.

"Lisa, you've been such a friend all year, so great to us. We were blown away by what you did at the working bee, but this — wow. And we'd like to tell you how happy we are that you scored too. So, thanks to you too, Andrew."

The crowd laughed and cheered while Andrew and Lisa kissed, and again, Chris had to wait.

"So that brings us to the end of our list. It's great to be back home, back to school, back as part of our community, with our mates and friends."

Chris stopped, thinking. Was that it? He saw Mandy coming forward. "Mandy, I mean Officer Prescott, would like to say a few words, I think."

"Thanks Chris. We police noted that Lisa didn't ask for her own charges to be dropped, but due to an administrative slip-up, we dropped them anyway. So we're issuing Lisa with a special citation. Lisa, come up here." Lisa approached, somewhat tentatively. When she got to Mandy, Mandy gave her a slip of paper. "The charge is that Lisa is just too totally awesome. We will be seeking as a penalty that Lisa must accept our thanks for organising a completely peaceful protest on a divisive emotional issue."