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smiling now. People stood in the road, staring towards where the march had ended. More sirens wailed to a stop behind him, by the big office building. Darryl didn’t look back.
    A little kid started trotting across the footpath, heading in the direction of where angry shouts and barked orders still rose. A woman rushed after him, seized him and clutched him to her. Two other women called out to Darryl in French, asking something. He shook his head and kept moving.
    Guests and a few workers in uniforms stood clusteredin front of the hotel, gazing towards the market. ‘What’s going on?’ an Australian voice demanded. Darryl shook his head again. ‘Don’t know.’ He just wanted to get to his room.
    When he tried to fit his key in the lock, his hands were shaking so much that it took him three attempts to get the door open. He’d dropped his pineapple somewhere, he realised.
    For ten, twenty, minutes, he sat on his bed, watching a bar of sunlight edge down the wall opposite. His hands had stopped shaking, but his back and stomach felt stiff and cramped. He must have been holding his whole body tense without even noticing.
    He saw again the waving signs. The young guy rushing forward; red paint splattering over the ambassador and steps. The police charging into the crowd; the frightened, fleeing bodies. Someone could have been hurt. Someone
did
get hurt. He kept staring at the wall. What did those protestors think they were doing? Why did so many people think like them?
    The wall said nothing.
    His mother wasn’t due back for a couple of hours. He could have set out for another walk. He could have gone down to the beach again. Instead, he stayed in the room.
    The TV showed some woman singing in French. There was nothing to read except his
Deadly Cloud
book. Darryl opened it at the page where he’d dropped it the night before, and tried to concentrate. A full-out atomic attack on the United States or the Soviet Union could cause 5 million deaths from cancer in the years afterwards, because of radioactivity …
    Darryl smacked the book shut. He’d felt so excited about coming here; but he’d never expected anything like this to happen. He pictured the young guy from the plane standing above the fallen policeman, wooden shaft raised to strike. If Darryl ever saw him again, he’d tell him he was a maniac. If the maniac understood English, that was.
    A key turned in the lock and his mother bustled in. ‘Hello, love. I thought you’d still be out exploring. There are sirens all over the place – I wonder what’s been happening?’
    Darryl didn’t answer. He couldn’t at first: his mum was too busy telling him about the church youth group; how the kids had wanted to know if they had any boiling mud pools in their street in New Zealand, if you could eat snow, if lots of people owned pet kiwis.
    ‘Then I talked to a few of the girls who might becoming to New Zealand, and the first thing
they
asked was what New Zealand boys were like! So I told them I had one back at the hotel, and how handsome you were.’
    Darryl snorted.
    ‘What did you do?’ his mum finally asked. ‘Did you find the market?’
    ‘Yeah. And you know those sirens? There was a march. Some anti-nuclear thing. Some idiot threw red paint over this ambassador guy, and it turned violent.’
    His mother stared. ‘Are you all right? I
told
you to be careful!’
    ‘It wasn’t my fault! I was just coming out of the market when it all started. I didn’t know it was all going to—’
    His mum held up a hand. ‘All right, Da. Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Tell me what happened.’
    He did. Most of it, anyway. The chanting and the signs, the church minister, the ambassador and the police, and the paint and the fighting that came afterwards. He didn’t mention the batons thudding down on bodies, the bleeding faces, the screams of frightened kids, the young guy with his furious face.
    ‘Both sides feel so strongly, don’t they?’ his mother said. She