by John Marsden
There was nothing for me to do except let myself be held, and to stroke his back and pat his head and put aside thoughts of strangulation. I couldn’t let myself admit the obvious, that as glad as he was to see me, I was that and more to see him. I did have the horrible thought that even though the bullet had missed us three it might have got Jeremy, coming along behind, but he came trotting up a few moments later, without any holes through him.
Everyone patted Gavin for a while, without making remarks about checking your target before you pull the trigger. That would have to wait for another day. In the meantime, we still had a long walk home.
We dumped the bikes, taking them well into the bracken and hiding them behind fallen logs. We hadn’t yet sat down to figure out the trouble we’d be in if the shoot-up at the mall was traced to us, but as long as we went out and got the utes and the Yamaha back, it was unlikely we’d be connected with it. We’d be just as likely to cop the blame for global warming or tasteless strawberries or World War II.
After covering up the bikes it was trudge, trudge, trudge, the familiar part of war, which I’d almost forgotten about but which seemed to form the majority of my experiences during the time of the invasion. Plod plod plod. Slog slog slog. Gavin kept so close to me that he kept getting his feet tangled up with mine, but I bit my tongue and reminded myself of what an awful night he’d had. Even if it was his own fault.
Plod plod plod. I kept thinking about home. Home is where you go and they have to let you in. Home is whoever loves you. There’s no place like home. All of that seemed true enough, but there was no-one at my home to let me in, and there was no-one there to love me any more. It seemed so empty with my parents gone. The house was too big now, and Gavin and I rattled around in there like a couple of grains of wheat in a silo. When I walked the corridors I heard echoes. There had never been echoes before.
When we did get within sight of the farm I was quite shocked to see lights on in the house. Like, someone’s broken in? This is the revenge attack already? But the others kept walking, and then I remembered Bronte and Pang.
Pang had ignored the spare room and was asleep in my bed but Bronte had kept awake somehow. She came to the door. It was strange, I was being welcomed into my own home by someone I still didn’t know all that well.
She ushered us in and with no fuss got us organised with Milo and noodles and toast. I don’t know what it is about toast. It’s the most comforting smell in the world. Even if you’re not feeling hungry, once you get a whiff of someone else’s bread in the toaster, you find yourself hypnotically drawn towards the loaf, and before you know it you’re pulling out a couple of slices and dropping them in. That liquorice smell that hangs around Darrell Lee’s, which someone told me they get by burning liquorice oil in an aromatherapy thing, that has a strong effect on me too, and so do chooks cooking in supermarkets, but nothing beats toast. I reckon home is where the toast is.
Anyway, even though I could hardly keep my eyes and lips open, it was incredibly comforting to sit around the table and talk. If anyone’s going to keep a secret, it’d be Bronte. She has such calmness and strength that you know you can trust her with the name of your newest boyfriend, the password for your emails and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls. If we were going to stop news of our activities spreading around Wirrawee, we didn’t have to worry about it coming from Bronte. All that aside, I was still worried about how much we could tell her, because of it being Liberation business, but the others didn’t hold back at all. So I went along with their judgement.
Homer did most of the talking, but this time he had a bit of competition from Jess. ‘The intelligence was pretty good,’ Homer said. ‘We found them approximately where we were supposed to find them. They had three houses, right next to the shopping centre, and at least four vehicles. We watched for about forty-five minutes, and there were a heap of them, getting themselves organised. They were obviously planning a major raid. But we’re good boys and girls, and we did like the Scarlet Pimple said, and we didn’t attack, just watched.’
‘We counted eighteen guys,’ Jess said. ‘They were pretty open about what they were doing. Carrying rifles around and loading ammunition into the car. Anyone who was wandering past could have stopped and taken a look.’
‘Yeah, like we did, more or less,’ Homer said. ‘Anyway, we decided to move on to phase three, and head down the highway a few hundred metres and wait for them there. We’d seen a good spot. But at that point things went horribly wrong. We’d borrowed a couple of utes, so we piled into one and left the other as a back-up. Our quickest way out was through the supermarket car park, and we figured that it was dark enough to be safe. So off we went, but unfortunately we didn’t get very far.’
‘I’d better interrupt at this point,’ Lee said. ‘Because otherwise Homer will take half an hour to get this out, but the fact is I ran over a woman in the car park.’
I did stop eating my toast when he said that. I sat there with the slice halfway to my mouth, staring at Lee.
‘It’s okay,’ Lee added. ‘I didn’t mash her into a pizza shape. She bounced right up again. But you know how it is, you can’t just drive on, although if I had my time again I would have. But I was so shocked, I stopped the car and I opened the door. The woman was standing right in front of us, looking pretty wild, which is fair enough, and I didn’t think I should run over her a second time.’
‘Then,’ Jess said, ‘before we knew it her husband or someone appeared jabbering away, getting all excited, and we were in the middle of a diarrhoea epidemic.’
I did laugh at that. But now I understood how things had gone so badly wrong.
‘To cut a long story short,’ Homer said, ‘we had to abandon the vehicle. We had a couple of cars up our arse, which was pretty uncomfortable, as you can imagine, but it also meant we couldn’t reverse. Lee jumped back in and did this amazing manoeuvre to the corner of the car park and then we piled out and ran for it. We hid about a hundred metres down the road and waited till we thought the excitement would have died down. Then we tiptoed delicately back, feeling very happy that it seemed so quiet.’
‘Too quiet,’ Jess said.
‘Seems like they were waiting for us,’ Jeremy said.
‘And then,’ Homer continued, ‘Ellie arrived.’
Lee made a trumpet noise.
‘She practises doing this,’ Homer said to Bronte and Jess.
I had the feeling that Homer and Lee were getting a bit sick of me saving them, or worse, me getting credit. Well, I was happy to stop any time.
Jess stuck up for me though. ‘God, it was amazing,’ she said. ‘Ellie, you are an amazing hunk of womanhood. You sure came at the right time, and you had so many smart ideas. I swear, if you hadn’t turned up, we’d be in the dump masters, and not because we were making an escape either. We’d be on our way to the tip, in little pieces.’
‘Oh, shucks,’ I said. ‘You know the trouble with the world nowadays? There’s no telephone booths for superheroes to get changed. Everyone’s got mobiles. I had a serious problem with that.’
‘What happened?’ Bronte asked me.
‘Well, I’d tracked them to this coconut tree place,’ I said, ‘because I remembered these guys mentioning it before they left. They were in a slightly complicated situation when I found them, but there was a four-wheel drive with keys in it and the door open. So I suggested they get in the dump master, because I figured the steel sides would keep bullets out, and then I got a bit of chain and used the four-wheel drive to tow them across the car park. When I think back, it seems like a crazy idea, but it worked. Then we just piled in a ute they’d laid on, and drove home. Except that we lost the ute along the way.’
‘It’s been the most amazing twenty-four hours of my life,’ Jess told Bronte. ‘You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been through. We were being followed by these guys on motorbikes, and we ambushed them, with petrol. It was terrible. But Ellie . . .’
I could see that the next litt
le while was going to be uncomfortable. I wasn’t just being modest, like ‘Oh no, really, I’m not that great,’ it was a bit more than that. I felt that if they all had to sit there telling Bronte how good a job I’d done (because I knew I had done a good job) it would make them uncomfortable and they’d even get a bit jealous. No matter how much you like someone, or admire something they’ve done, there’s a limit to how long you can sit around praising them to other people, especially in front of their face. So I went to the bathroom.
By the time I’d got back, Gavin was asleep in the old brown armchair and the others were staggering around like zombies. I put Gavin to bed, then crawled in beside Pang, leaving the older kids to their own devices. They were big enough to find beds for themselves, and they knew where the spare blankets and pillows were stored.
CHAPTER 11
IT’S AMAZING HOW adaptable humans are. I guess it’s not just humans. Cows can adjust from one paddock to the next, from thunderstorms to sunshine and back to thunderstorms, from eating lucerne to eating clover, from being on a truck to not being on a truck.
At school one day I’d been walking behind a Year 10 kid who was going down the long corridor from Block A to Block B. It struck me, because I didn’t have anything else to think about, how flexible she was at reacting to so many different things just in that short time. She smiled and gave a huge ‘Hi’ to a Year 11 guy, she picked up a book for a Year 7 kid who was having trouble balancing all his stuff, she said, ‘Good morning Mrs Barlow,’ very politely as Mrs Barlow headed past, she yelled, ‘Love the eyebrows, Daphne,’ to another Year 10 girl, she said, ‘Why don’t you stand in the middle of the frigging corridor and stop everybody getting past?’ to a group of Year 8’s who were standing in the middle of the frigging corridor and not letting anybody get past. She jogged ahead of me to catch up with a friend, put her arm around her friend’s shoulders, and said, ‘Hi Laura,’ as they turned left together into the classroom.
Only stupid little stuff, and we do it all the time, but that’s the point. As well as doing that, she’d probably swatted at a fly, taken a piece of chewy out of her pocket and put it in her mouth, adjusted her hair, flicked a look out the windows to see what was going on, and so on. I just think it’s seriously impressive that humans can do all that, and maybe we can do it more than cows.
So anyway, the night after we got back from the Battle at the Coconut Tree, I was sitting in the office doing accounts.
It was quite a change of pace and I found it hard to concentrate. So much had happened, not just the night before, but even during the day. Jeremy, Gavin and I went and got the utes and found the Yamaha. Homer had homed, so to speak. He was no doubt in the middle of a very very long explanation to his parents as to how he had managed to lose a motorbike. I had no idea what he would tell them. Knowing how shrewd Mr and Mrs Yannos were, I guessed they would have a fair idea of some of the stuff Homer was up to, but that didn’t necessarily make them happy to contribute an expensive motorbike to the cause. I could imagine Homer’s conversation with them might last for a few days.
For that matter I had lost the Polaris. As much as I felt for Mr and Mrs Yannos, the loss of the Polaris was a disaster for me. In many ways it was the most useful vehicle on the farm, and not only because it was quick and convenient. The other motorbikes were quick and convenient too. But being a quad meant that I could tow stuff in the little red trailer, and tow it easily. All you had to do was lift it onto the tow bar, pull up the sealing bit and drop it down again, and you were ready to roll with a load of kindling, a couple of bales of hay, some bags of chook food or whatever.
Of course that would apply to any quad bike, but having a Polaris was a bit of a bonus. They are so powerful. Dad’s policy was always to buy the best, even if it meant more money, and the Polaris was bloody expensive, but it could go anywhere, and it could tow big weights. It even towed me when I was younger. I loved riding in the trailer, hanging on to both sides while Dad bounced me over every bump he could find. Its only disadvantage was that it was heavy to steer in four-wheel drive, and the big wide wheels chopped up the lawns.
To replace it, the way prices of vehicles were going, I figured would cost fifteen thousand dollars minimum, although I was only guessing. They could have gone up to twenty thousand dollars since the war ended. I definitely didn’t have that kind of money, but I definitely needed a quad bike.
So there I was, going through the accounts yet again, worried sick about losing the Polaris, trying to shut out the noises of Lee and Pang, Gavin, Jess and Jeremy, who were meant to be getting a meal ready but sounded like they were banging on saucepans with every implement they could find, like toddlers with wooden spoons, and at the same time wondering why there was no noise from Bronte, who I hadn’t seen all afternoon.
I guessed she was asleep, but looking for any excuse to get away from the books, I thought I’d go and check on her.
I didn’t know who’d slept in which bed, but I found Bronte in the little spare room up the far end of the veranda, the one that no-one ever used. I opened the door. It was dim in there, with the curtains drawn, but I felt her presence, and also felt that she was awake. I’m not saying I was psychic, I think it was just that I didn’t hear her breathing the way people do when they’re asleep.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked.
There was no answer, so I went over to the bed. She was awake all right, lying on her back gazing at the ceiling. But as my eyes adjusted to the dim light I could see the tear trails on her cheeks.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said, and then added, ‘God, that’s a terrible answer, isn’t it?’
‘I guess it’s the reflex answer,’ I said.
To be totally honest I wasn’t very much into the idea of having this conversation. Not only was I wrecked in every possible way from the stuff that had happened the night before, but I think since my parents were killed I needed all my emotional energy for myself, with any surplus going to Gavin. And believe me, there wasn’t much surplus. But I liked Bronte a lot, and the same as anyone, I hate to see people upset, and after all, she was in my house and there was no-one else around to do this.
Anyway, she didn’t say anything for quite a long time, just continued to lie there looking at the ceiling. Then, like a robot, she said, ‘I sat and listened to their description of the helicopter flying into the powerlines . . .’
Suddenly I remembered, and realised.
‘. . . and how it exploded, and I listened to the way they celebrated it and were so relieved and excited . . .’
‘Yes, I know now,’ I said. It had been such a short time since our conversation about her little brother getting killed when a helicopter hit powerlines, but so much had happened in the meantime that it had gone from my mind. Afterwards though I did wonder whether my noticing the powerlines and realising I could trap the helicopter in them might have come from my unconscious memory of that conversation.
She continued to lie there. I took her hand. Even now that I understood why she was so upset, I still didn’t have the energy or intelligence or imagination to think of a whole lot of comforting and inspiring things to say. After about ten minutes she said, ‘Well, back to duty,’ and started getting up. I still couldn’t think of anything. ‘War is hell’? ‘I wish I could bring him back for you’? ‘You must feel awful’? It was vaguely like a time when I was about six and we were shopping in Stratton and my mother had bought all the stuff we needed, all the boring stuff, and I’d been nagging her in every shop for something for me: sweets, toys, dolls, ice-creams, anything. Finally, to shut me up, she said, ‘You can have whatever money’s left over in my purse after I get the ammo.’ We went into the gun shop, and she bought fifty or a hundred rounds or whatever, and paid for it, and then gave me the purse. I was quivering with excitement, because I thought her purse always contained quite a lot of money. I opened it and found fifteen cents.
With Bronte, I wanted to open my own purse and gi
ve her everything inside it, but it was empty. I’d spent it. I stood back and let her leave the room, then followed her down the veranda, watching her back, feeling guilty and ashamed and inadequate.
Anyway, it was hard to concentrate on invoices and bank statements and cheque butts while all that was running so powerfully through my mind. But I wondered if it might be possible to buy a second-hand quaddy. I never thought that at my young age I’d already be sitting around with my friends saying, ‘Ah yes, I can remember in the good old days, when you could buy a Paddle Pop for . . .’ But we were having those conversations all the time. Prices had inflated to levels that were insane, but you didn’t get much choice: you either paid them or starved. The good news was that the price of cattle was going up just as fast, if not faster. To be honest we had overvalued our stock when we used them as security to get loans from the bank, but already it looked like our overvaluations weren’t so over.
After tea I went back to the office and sat at the desk staring at the big sheet of paper where I’d done my calculations. Mr Yannos had been at me to do a budget and I thought I’d better get on with it, but it was difficult because every day came something I hadn’t thought of or hadn’t expected. Like the quaddy. But there was always something. One day the pump would break down, the next I’d have to get a drum of Roundup, then a falling branch wiped out the TV aerial and cracked a few tiles. Luckily the aerial saved the roof from worse damage.
I knew a lot of the figures off by heart. With the new loan from the bank I was now paying $3760 a month in interest. The leases were a $1000 a week, or $4333 a calendar month. That was eight grand a month going out the door without me getting up from the desk. I hoped interest rates would stay on hold for a while, as the bank had already mugged me with one rise. Well, I had no control over that.