Incurable

by John Marsden

  It was the same on that Monday. I was lucky in a way to run straight into Jess, who always knew everything and was one of those natural-born-leader people who everyone turns to when they’re confused. ‘Have you seen Ms Maxwell?’ she asked. ‘She’s looking for you. And Mr Addams said can you play soccer Thursday?’

  ‘Soccer? God! Me! Any more messages?’ But I smiled as I said it. I decided this was one of those days when I liked Jess.

  In her best Telstra voice she said, ‘You have two new messages. Message received – yesterday – at two – thirty – four p.m. . . .’

  ‘OK, I’m pressing the hash button. That does something, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I can see you haven’t had a mobile for a long time. Actually there was only one other message. Jeremy Finley said to say hi.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  She’d thrown me with that one. I knew she liked Jeremy, but so did I. He was a nice-looking guy with a great personality – you know, too good to be true, but he actually seemed fair dinkum. For better or worse he was the son of General Finley, whom I’d had a lot to do with during the war. Since Steve, my love life had been all to do with Lee and Homer, mainly Lee, with Homer running interference. Jeremy popping up in Stratton, and spending a good bit of time around Wirrawee, made a nice complication. I didn’t know if he was interested in me or Jess or anyone else, but I knew I tingled when I saw him. I also wanted to cross-examine Jess on exactly what Jeremy had said, the actual words, the look on his face, the tone of his voice, the way his hands had moved. Stuff like that means a lot to a girl. There’s a big difference between saying, ‘Tell Ellie hi,’ and ‘Make sure you give Ellie a special hello from me.’ What if he’d said: ‘My life is stale bread and cold tea until I see Ellie again’ or ‘Jess, if you die at the gates of the school, make sure that with your last breath you tell Ellie I’m thinking of her’?

  But what if it had been: ‘Say hello to Homer and Shannon and Sam and Bronte and Alex and Eleanor and that other girl, what’s her name’?

  It was cruel getting this message second-hand and confusing getting it from someone who had her own feelings for him. But better than not getting it at all. I tried to figure out how I could get more info without letting Jess know I was interested.

  ‘Oh really? Jeremy? So has he been around?’ I tried to keep my voice casual. The trouble is that I had the feeling Jess was almost impossible to fool. No matter how much I tried to sound cool, that girl had special antennae. If she were a teacher you wouldn’t even bother with the ‘Yeah, miss, I’ve done it, it’s just that the guinea pig crapped on it.’ You wouldn’t waste your time.

  Still, I wasn’t going to give in easily. It was a challenge to try.

  ‘Around? God yes! Didn’t you know?’

  Owhh. Did she have to make this so hard? All I could do was grit my teeth and plough a straight furrow.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘You haven’t heard the big news?’

  ‘So are you saying Jeremy’s got some reason to be around Wirrawee more often?’

  ‘God yeah.’

  ‘Jess, I’d love to stand here all day hearing about Jeremy Finley’s movements, but why don’t you just tell me. In fifty words or less. Seeing I do have a life.’

  ‘Well, he and his mum are moving here.’

  ‘Serious?’ No good pretending now. She had me.

  ‘Ellie, you really like him, don’t you?’

  ‘What? God no, not like that.’ I hoped I was doing OK with that ‘Jeremy Who?’ voice, but I doubted it. The strange thing was that I didn’t get any vibe from Jess that she had a personal interest any more. Maybe she’d moved on.

  ‘Well, I believe you but I believed Mrs Barlow when she said the first convicts came out here on Qantas. Anyway, his mum’s got a contract at the military base, putting in a new computer system that she’s designed with some guy in Stratton. She’s a pretty smart cookie I think.’

  ‘My dad always said that New Zealand women were the strongest women in the world.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine except she’s Australian. But she is strong. She told me that she wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of Jeremy making it to Vet at uni. I think she meant people who might distract him with invitations to wild parties. Or even long phone calls. She’s kind of fierce with him.’

  I privately thought that Jeremy was the person most likely to be organising Homer and Lee and I didn’t know who else into the Scarlet Pimples. Or Liberation, which was their official name, if you can have an official name for an unofficial organisation. I didn’t see how that could help Jeremy with his school work. To be honest, I didn’t see how any of my friends were going to pass anything much. I didn’t know many people who were settling into regular school life, because we were still too stirred up and busy and crazy after the war.

  I couldn’t keep up with the social life of school let alone school work, but even though my uni ambitions were sinking slowly over the horizon, I didn’t want to drop out. School was still my normal place, the place where I could pretend that I was just Ellie again. Rather than drop out, it was the place where I could drop in, and the place where life was closest to normal, as though there never had been a war. Even reading the noticeboard was reassuring. ‘Year 9 and 10 social on Friday night, come as a character from a James Bond movie’, ‘Mrs Savvas wants to see students attending Twelfth Night at the staff room at one o’clock’, ‘If you want to try out for a game of lacrosse against Stratton High School see Daniel Ciao NOW|’ ‘LOST: one recorder, left in B3 on Monday afternoon, come on guys, please look out for it, I need it and I can’t afford to buy another one.’ A lot of boring stuff about careers and uni and the school’s policies on sexism and racism and bullying and the rights of students and trees and aluminium cans and retired lollipop ladies.

  We never learnt anything much in school, it was just that by the time you stayed there enough years you’d somehow picked up quite a lot of information. The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the square of the other two sides, Madrid is the capital of Spain, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. At best I suppose you learnt useful information like how to treat snakebite and how to use PowerPoint. At worst you wasted a lot of time memo-rising the first twenty elements in the periodic table, the definition of personification, and the economic effects of the Gold Rush. It was like school was taking us on a road from ignorance to knowledge but there was another road from ignorance to somewhere else that school didn’t take into account. What was that road called? The one from ignorance to wisdom, I suppose. The girl at the Wirrawee market who told me about Taoism knew about it but school didn’t. If school had bothered with that road, if they’d even taken us to the start of it and shown us where it went, if they’d so much as lent us a map, I would say that school might have been worthwhile. I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time, but I think we could have picked up that info about snakebite and PowerPoint much faster and more efficiently somewhere else. So really what we were left with was school as a social club, and sometimes I thought the adults were happy with that: they secretly saw it as a place where they could park kids till we grew up and were useful to them. Giant childcare centres.

  I liked the new-look Wirrawee High School though. Not everyone did. It was a lot more crowded, and the organisation was a joke, and it didn’t feel like our own place any more. We had to share it with so many people. The corridors were crowded and it was hard to get time alone with your old friends. The difference was that before the war it had been boring and now it had three times the action. The new kids brought a new energy. I mean, lacrosse against Stratton High School? I didn’t even know what lacrosse was but I was sure we wouldn’t have been playing games of lacrosse in the old-style Wirrawee. School was noisier, it was messier, but it had more life. Now, with Jeremy Finley, it could get more interesting yet.

  CHAPTER 4

  SCHOOL TAUGHT ME personification but the war taught me suspicion. If it hadn’t,
the death of my parents would have done the job. I don’t think I’m paranoid yet but I could easily end up there. I don’t know why I wouldn’t trust voices in my head. They’d have to be as reliable as some of the voices I hear from outside my head. Take Homer for instance. I know you’d only take Homer if you were desperate, but if you were, and you did take him, would you listen to him? Or believe anything he tells you? So when Homer and Lee and Jess all suddenly turn up at my place, and Homer tells me it’s coincidence, I’m like, yeah, right, and people in France speak French, that’s another amazing coincidence.

  I didn’t know Lee was coming until I got home from school, because the only warning he gave me was a message on the answering machine, and it seemed like no sooner had I played the message than he was there. Jess had given him a lift. And in the back seat was Lee’s little sister, Pang, because she wanted to see me again and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Hhhmm. ‘Wait a sec, it’s my birthday and this is a surprise party, right?’ I asked them. ‘Anyone else coming?’

  But as soon as I got Homer alone I hissed at him, ‘This is about Liberation, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nah, just a fluke.’

  Since I’d knocked back the invitation to join the group I’d been left out of the information circuit. Disconnected from the bush telegraph.

  ‘I don’t want you guys doing stuff without my knowing about it. Don’t go running off over the border again. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Pang wanted to stay with you for a few days, that’s why Lee’s here.’

  ‘So will Lee be staying here too, with her? Or am I meant to look after her while you go off on another crazy raid? Am I the babysitter now?’

  ‘No, of course not, he would have left her in town with the others, but she’s mad keen to hang out with you.’

  ‘Well, you might have thought about Gavin before you planned all this. You’re getting him all revved up.’

  I had to talk in a funny way, twisting up my face, so Gavin couldn’t lip-read. He hovered around anxiously. Normally he’d have attached himself to Lee or Homer, as he was a big fan of both of them. I was pretty sure that Pang’s arrival made him feel insecure.

  I heard a loud rap-rap-rap-rap on the kitchen door and broke off the conversation with Homer to answer it. I nearly fell over to see Jeremy Finley. ‘OK, so it is a meeting of Liberation,’ I said to him straight away.

  ‘Could just be a get-together of a few buddies,’ Homer said. He’d followed me into the kitchen.

  ‘Thanks for organising it at my place without even telling me. Good one, guys.’ I let Jeremy in anyway. I didn’t have much choice.

  ‘It could be something so urgent that we didn’t have time to do it any other way,’ Jeremy said, looking straight at me. I was sure he was the Scarlet Pimple.

  ‘Well, Lee must have known hours ago,’ I said. ‘You don’t just blow in here from the city ten minutes after getting the phone call.’

  ‘It wasn’t urgent last night, when I rang Lee,’ Jeremy said. ‘The rating changed about an hour ago. Lee was on his way already, but we were going to do it differently. By the time he got here we realised we needed a closer place to meet. I couldn’t ring you because we can’t talk about this stuff on the phone without using codes.’

  ‘And Pang did want to come and stay with you,’ Lee said with a small quick smile at me. ‘So did I.’

  I turned back to Jeremy. ‘You said “closer”. Closer to what? The border?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh great.’ I felt quite sick. ‘So are you going to tell me what it’s all about?’

  There was a moment of indecision. I knew the Scarlet Pimple was one of them – well I thought so anyway – and I’d been so convinced that it was Jeremy. But now Jeremy was acting like it wasn’t his decision. Jess was the one who, after a pause, looked around at the group and said, ‘Sure.’

  It was like the rest of the group weren’t convinced though. Then Jeremy clinched it by saying, ‘Yeah, good idea. It’s insurance for us.’

  ‘Are you all going?’ I asked. I looked around the room at them. Homer, leaning against the doorframe, solid and reliable, leaving the planning to the others. Lee, watching through narrow eyes, scanning the room, assessing the situation. Jess, strong and sure but nervous too, I thought: probably the first time for her to go into this kind of stuff. And Jeremy, eyes alert and eager, face shining. He wanted to do this, whatever it was that had to be done, and he wanted it to work perfectly. He was taking after his father all right. I wondered if he and General Finley had a lot of contact, and if so what they talked about and what Jeremy thought of his father. That was a conversation we hadn’t had, but then we hadn’t had too many conversations full stop.

  No-one put up their hand to say they were staying. So Jess and the three boys were going out there into danger. Together. Jealousy jumped in my stomach and made an angry noise. I mean literally, my tummy rumbled. Or maybe I was just hungry.

  I didn’t say anything after that though. It was up to them to organise themselves and get under way as fast as they could. What they didn’t need was someone standing there giving helpful hints. ‘Wear sensible shoes.’ ‘Make sure you go to the toilet before you leave.’ ‘Have you got enough ammo?’

  At least Gavin wasn’t around. I think the presence of Pang had scared him off to his bedroom, or some other safe hidey-hole, like Marmie’s pen. Good thing too. With a bit of luck the group would be across the border before Gavin realised there was a raid happening and he’d been left behind.

  As the meeting in my kitchen went on I started to get a sense of what was happening. There’d been intelligence – a tip-off – that members of the same group which raided the Youngs’ and did unspeakable things there were going to come across to our side of the border and raid another farmhouse. I already knew that Liberation was a group who got tip-offs from people in our Army, people who wanted stuff done that was illegal for the Army to do. By feeding info to Liberation these Army officers were guaranteeing that people from our side would cross the border and fight, but if they were caught, or if there were any protests, the government could say quite honestly that they knew nothing about it and they sure didn’t authorise it.

  It meant that Liberation had to be as careful on one side of the border as on the other. Everyone was out to get them. Still, I’d rather be caught on our side. Your life wouldn’t be worth much if you got busted over there.

  As far as I knew the Liberation group in our area was the only one run by teenagers, but I didn’t know much. Just what I read in the paper. And some of that was about members of the group in other areas being caught and copping serious jail terms as the government tried to demonstrate that they were seriously trying to stop them. And then there were the stories about members of the group who went across the border and didn’t come back. In one case just their heads had come back, five of them, in a bag dumped outside a railway station at Padapada. I felt sorry for the person who opened that bag. I felt sorry for the people whose heads were in the bag, too.

  So, here were the four of them in my kitchen working out what to do about a group of thugs heading in our direction to rape or kill or burn or loot or, most likely, all of the above. Kitchens are meant to be the heart of a house but I’d have to cook a lot of comfort food to get this bad energy out of my kitchen.

  It surprised me in a way but Lee was the one who was the least gung-ho. ‘Why don’t we wait on our side of the border till they get here, then the Army can round them up legitimately?’ he wanted to know. Then he answered his own question. ‘I suppose we don’t know where they’ll cross into our territory.’ He looked at Jeremy. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘But we know they’ll be coming along Rawson Road at some point. Or what we used to call Rawson Road. So we could follow them till they’re on our side and then use this fancy radio equipment to call in the Army and get them arrested.’

  ‘Yes. The trouble is it’ll be at
night and the chances of losing touch with them would be pretty high.’

  Lee lapsed into silence then. That was less surprising.

  I could see the sense in Jeremy’s arguments. They really only had two options. One was to catch these guys in their home base, before they set out. Time was against that, and so was the problem that people are in a strong position when they’re at home. They know their way around pretty well. On the other hand, when you attack people at home you’ve got the advantage of surprise. I’d seen that from both sides, as the attacker and the attacked.

  The other option was an ambush. That wasn’t ideal either, but perfection never seems to be a goal in war situations. Only in school. And the ambush idea had a lot going for it.

  ‘Under the coconut tree,’ said Jeremy.

  I didn’t know what that meant but before I could ask Lee said, ‘Well, if we’re going to do it we’d better do it.’ Suddenly the kitchen was alive with movement. Then Jeremy asked the question that I’d amused myself with just a short time ago: ‘Have you got enough ammo?’

  ‘Of course,’ Homer said, getting up from the kitchen chair that he’d been promising to fix for about three months now. Then he did that double-take thing like in the movies when the guy turns around and sees that it’s a grizzly bear blowing on the back of his neck and not his girlfriend, but for a moment he thinks that it’s his girlfriend and she just needs a shave. ‘Oh momma,’ he said. ‘It’s still on the bench.’

  It turned out he was referring to the bench in their shed at home. So there was a short intermission as Jess and Homer raced back to his place to pick up the ammo.

  I got the feeling that Homer might have quite a lot of Liberation stuff stashed at his place. I bet his parents didn’t know about it. He probably had it hidden under his bed. As I never intended to get close to his bed I wouldn’t find that out. But I had a mental picture of Homer sleeping on top of a pile of hand grenades and detonators and bombs.