by John Marsden
I still owed about $5000 in rent to the people we’d leased bits of the farm from. I’d paid the funeral directors ten grand, using the eight thousand my parents had in their account, plus two thousand from the bank. So I still owed the funeral guys about two and a half, and was getting nervous every time I went to the mailbox in case they sent me a letter threatening to dig everyone up again.
The only way I could buy a bike was to sell some cattle. The steers Dad had bought way back were in good nick. If I sold ten I could buy a new bike, pay the back rent and square up for the funerals. But it also meant that if the income from the agistment suddenly stopped – and face it, Mr Young could decide to move, or to sell his cattle any time, especially after the stampede – I’d have ten fewer of my own cattle to carry us through.
I sighed and pushed away the papers. I’d have to ask Mr Yannos. What on earth was Homer going to tell them? He had already come home minus one of their bikes such a short time ago when we’d rescued that Nick guy. Now he had another lost motorbike to explain away. Losing one motorbike is bad luck; losing two is a bit sloppy. How was I going to ring Mr Yannos, or drop in for a Sunday roast, and casually mention that I’d misplaced the four-wheeler?
I couldn’t stay awake. But as my head started to fall forwards I heard a cough – just that throat-clearing noise – from behind me. And it was Jeremy. I was a bit surprised, as he had been half asleep over the dinner table. I smiled at him and he came in behind me and started massaging the back of my neck.
I got a bit of a shock. But right away I realised what was happening. All the previous guys I’d had relationships with, all two of them, had done a lot of talking. Steve and Lee had both launched into it with a lot of ‘Is this going to work? Is this a good idea?’ although, to be fair to Lee, he was more forceful than me in the early days. I was the one with lots of reservations – well, I was the one who expressed them anyway.
Jeremy had a confidence that even Steve didn’t have. He just took it for granted that I was going to like what he was doing, and that I liked him. For a moment I tingled like I didn’t want to be touched. But his firm fingers and strong arms . . . soon they felt too good to push away. To be honest, I think anyone with those hands and arms would have done OK with me when I was so tired mentally and physically. I let myself lean back and enjoy the calm pressure. I even closed my eyes, which I don’t do with most guys. The thought, the memory, of the boy in New Zealand who had practically raped me at the party came back for a moment but I blocked it. I knew Jeremy had a good heart. His hands were good too, and his body was even better.
I can’t describe people very well so I normally don’t bother. But I’ll have a go with Jeremy. He was one of those people who’ve got all their parts in the right proportion to each other, if you know what I mean. Well, I don’t mean all their parts, but his legs and arms were the right length for the rest of him, and his head was right too. He wasn’t tall or short, just average I suppose, which sounds awful, but he was a very nice average. He looked like one of those boys who’d be good at every sport that came along – he had the balance, the co-ordination. I remember him saying once that he’d played fly half when he lived in New Zealand, and one of the boys who was listening and who knew a lot about rugby laughed and said, Yes, you’re such a fly half,’ and I said, What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘Fly halves are like dancers, plus they can kick with left foot or right foot.’
I liked the sound of that.
Jeremy had a real shine in his eyes, which his father had too, even in the middle of a war. You knew he was alive when you looked into his eyes. He was growing a bit of a goatee, which didn’t exactly work, but I don’t know, on a lot of boys it looks so bad, and I used to think if a boy with a beard wanted to go with me the first thing I’d say to him was, ‘The beard comes off.’ But on Jeremy there was something kind of cute about it. Like it seemed really sincere, or it made him look like a really sincere person, which I know makes no sense at all.
Oh yeah, and he had brown hair and brown eyes and a bit of that acne that comes with scars and his feet were size nine, and that’s about the longest description of anyone I’ve ever tried to do since I started writing about the war, so long ago.
So there I was with the fly half giving me a neck massage and he hadn’t said a word. His hands worked their way across my shoulders and down my back. I leant back a bit more and purred. In a way there was nothing sexual about it and in another way it was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever had a boy do. The only tension I felt was the tension of hoping he wouldn’t stop, that I could lie there forever, and that somehow he’d never get tired of massaging me and he’d never want me to do anything in return.
That’s the really annoying thing in relationships: you have to actually do something for the other person once in a while, instead of lying back and waiting for them to peel another grape and drop it in your mouth. Maybe robots would be better.
The funny thing was that Jeremy left again, about twenty minutes later, and in all that time we didn’t exchange a word, but when he left there was a new vibe between us. I went to bed excited for the first time in ages, and realised, lying there in the dark, that I didn’t feel that way about Lee any more, or rather, that Lee didn’t make me feel that way any more, which may be the same thing. I hadn’t planned on complicating my life any further, but love, I guess it strikes like lightning and suddenly there’s a stampede. What am I talking about? That’s not just love, that’s life in general.
Oh, Jeremy. I was so tired but I couldn’t sleep. I ran through all his beautiful qualities, over and over. His warm eyes, his firm hands, the pleasing way he stood and sat and walked, his sense of humour, his intelligence, the way he knew so much about history and was so strong and passionate when he talked about it. I love people to be passionate about something. I’d rather they were passionate about football than about nothing. I’d rather they were passionate about tractors or pigshooting or Dalmatian dogs or making marmalade. About the only exception is computer games. I don’t find passionate computer nerds all that sexy.
Jeremy was calm as well as strong. He was a bit like his father in that way. He was kind and gentle and nice to everyone. I don’t think he was too like his father in that way though. I got the feeling in New Zealand that Colonel, sorry, General Finley was pretty tough on anyone who wasn’t doing what General Finley wanted. I wondered if that included his son. He would be a pretty strict father, I think. He had Jeremy’s shining eyes without the humour. And if Jeremy was the Scarlet Pimple, well, that would be impressive. I would like that. He would have to be a real leader to do that. He’d have to be someone who could take charge and make stuff happen. He’d be respected by everyone.
Oh, if my hands could only be his hands. I drifted off to sleep a while later, smiling for the first time in a long time.
CHAPTER 12
I DON’T KNOW whether this is anything to do with love but over the next few days I made a fool of myself a zillion times, except that luckily most of the time no-one was there to notice. Maybe it was just total exhaustion, but I managed to spray the griller with eucalyptus instead of cooking oil, then I left nearly a dozen eggs on top of the stove when I was doing a roast, which didn’t do much for their freshness. The eucalyptus spray had been standing around in the kitchen for as long as I could remember. We used it for pretty much everything, like spraying around the room after I’d made a sardine sandwich (Mum hated the smell of sardines), spraying on burns, spraying on beds to get rid of dust mites, spraying on Gavin when he was being a nuisance.
Lee and Pang left and I missed Pang’s bright friendly chatter but I didn’t miss Lee much. I was scared of the way he looked at me, those dark brooding eyes, sombre and impenetrable. I didn’t know what he expected of me any more, but whatever it was, I was fairly certain that I couldn’t provide it.
I didn’t hear from Homer but I assumed he was chained to the bed and banned from leaving the house again until 2050. Then he rang and said he�
�d had to tell his parents a bit about Liberation, and they weren’t happy, and Liberation wasn’t happy, but the Scarlet Pimple was trying to get him a new motorbike and he’d asked for a four-wheeler for me.
Jess rang twice and Bronte twice a day. Bronte and I talked a lot. I told her about Jeremy but needless to say I didn’t tell Jess.
I didn’t see Jeremy, or hear from him. In a way that didn’t matter to me. I felt a kind of security, knowing that he was out there. I felt like now we had an understanding and it wouldn’t go away in a hurry. I was in a strange mood. I felt a great tiredness after escaping from the shopping centre and the helicopter. Suddenly I was eighty years old. I’d been tired plenty of times during the war, but never like this. This was in my bones. I wandered the house, looking after Gavin but not after myself. I travelled the paddocks dreaming of life with Jeremy. I didn’t know if I was in love or just distracted for a short time by his warm hands and strong presence. The thing I found strange was that most of the time I felt not happy but sad. Is that love? Or was it just the sadness of living my life?
Sometimes a river of sadness flowed through me. Not depression, not grief, not despair, just sadness. I moved heavily and I was clumsy, I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t laugh very much. I wanted my parents back. I wanted them so badly that nothing else mattered. And all the time, shadowing my sadness, was a terrible fear, the fear that I would never recover. If only someone could have assured me that one day the sadness would go, that one day I would charge up the hills running and puffing and laughing, one day I would roll down the hills giggling and wheezing and hurting myself on rocks and thorns. I wanted to see a hill that was warm and bright in the full open light of the sun. I knew I couldn’t be on that hill yet, but I wanted someone to tell me, ‘Ellie, you will play there one day. It is your hill and you will be there.’
I think the worst thing is to know that you will be sad forever. When parents lose a child, isn’t that what they know from the moment the policeman opens his mouth? When a sister loses a brother, isn’t that the truth that fills them in an instant? There is no cure for that kind of sadness.
Laughter and carefree love, all the bright things, it seemed like they gleamed and glistened for other people.
I think I was starting to understand one of the great paradoxes. I love paradoxes. I think they contain all the truth in the world. The only trouble is that I can’t understand them. ‘The more things change, the more things stay the same.’ ‘The greater your knowledge, the less you know.’ ‘Most people aren’t brave enough to be cowards.’ ‘Every exit is an entry to somewhere.’ ‘Less is more.’ I mean, I understand those, but I have to work at it. I remember during the war Homer saying to me, ‘I’m an atheist,’ and then adding, ‘Thank God.’
The paradox about love is that it hurts and it heals. It makes you feel better, only to make you feel worse. You go into it knowing it will betray you but you go into it anyway. And another paradox is that you go into it as an individual, because you as an individual are in love with someone, but from the start you lose so much of your individuality. I was starting to fall seriously in love with Jeremy, so right away, what happens? I start worrying about what Jeremy thinks of me, trying to guess what he likes and doesn’t like about me, thinking about ways of changing myself so that he will like me even more. It’s pretty dumb when you think that I’m the person he seemed to like, not the me I was contemplating changing myself into.
I’d always had this image of myself standing on top of Tailor’s Stitch singing ‘The Sound of Music’. Not really. But I did go to the hills when my heart was lonely. If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I’m a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I’m a mountain girl. When the weekend rolled around and Gavin got a rare invitation for a sleepover, from Mark, even though Mark was born standing up and talking back, even though Mark would choke a chook that clucked the wrong way, I thought, ‘This is my chance,’ and pushed Gavin out the door with his bag packed.
As soon as he’d gone, I took the long walk up the spur. It’s a bit strange, I suppose, but I hadn’t connected that spur with the deaths of my parents and Mrs Mackenzie. I mean, it’s not like they were killed there, but I was climbing it when I heard the shots that ended their lives and ended my world. As I got close to that place again I started to feel quite weird. My legs got heavy and didn’t want to do what they were paid for; my arms tingled; my throat blocked up and started saying no to oxygen.
Melissa Carpenter, who lived about three k’s from us and got the same bus, was one of those mad horse people, along with her parents. Everyone knows the thing about how you gotta get back on the horse after you fall off. When Melissa was twelve she fell off big-time. Her favourite horse bucked at a snake and threw her. She knew right away she’d done some serious damage, and in fact it turned out she’d broken three bones in her back. She’s been lucky – at one stage they thought she was heading for life in a wheelchair. So anyway, she’s lying on the ground, waiting for the ambulance and wondering if she’s ever going to walk again, and her father kneels beside her and whispers, ‘Honey, I know you’re in a bit of pain but do you think you could manage to get back on Barney for a minute, just so you don’t lose your confidence?’
I thought about that as I stood a hundred metres from that place on the spur and sweated with memories and fear. It was kind of funny the way Mr Carpenter had been so determined to get Melissa back onto Barney, because even though we all laughed when we heard the story (and once we knew Melissa was going to be OK), in a way Mr Carpenter was right, because from that day on Melissa never got on Barney or any other horse again.
Now here I stood gazing at the spur, suddenly awash with memories and wondering if I would ever be able to get up on Tailor’s Stitch again. Because I couldn’t get past that spot where I’d been when I heard the shots. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t known this was going to happen. The violence of my life was threatening to close the mountains to me. The war and the fighting and the killing were blocking the promise of good things in the future. I needed to get up that rocky slope and walk the high ridge.
I took a few more steps but my legs wouldn’t move any further. I knew I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t been beaten by many things over the last eighteen months but I could not make this simple climb. The air wouldn’t give way for me, the paralysis was too powerful.
I was lonely and I wanted to go to the hills and hear the songs I had heard before. I wanted my heart to be filled with the sound of music. I felt that if my future were to include love I’d have to find a way to get past that spot on the spur. But it wasn’t going to happen today. It mightn’t ever happen again.
Seemed like it hadn’t been a very successful sleepover either. Gavin was already home, which wasn’t in the script. I didn’t realise for a while. Normally I could tell where he was, as he often didn’t know when he was making a noise. He’d figured out of course that certain sounds attract attention and certain sounds were louder than others, but he forgot.
When I heard a thump from his bedroom I thought we were being attacked. I grabbed the rifle, which nowadays I kept close at hand. It was behind the kitchen door. I broke out in a sweat, wondering whether to head for the bush or check out the bedroom. Marmie was asleep on the kitchen floor, which was a good sign, so I hesitated. I loaded half-a-dozen rounds into the magazine and slid one into the barrel, all of which was difficult to do quietly. But it did make me feel more confident. Another thump from the direction of Gavin’s room. Marmie opened one eye and yawned. She wasn’t the greatest watchdog in the world but she should do better than this.
I stole out of the kitchen into the corridor, only a metre, and swung open the door of the linen press so I could hide behind it. Standing there put me into a totally different theatre of sounds. Now the vibration of the fridge motor, Marmie’s breathing, the buzzing of the early blowie, the flapping of the fly strips in the doorway . . . all of these were in the background
and instead I could hear a magpie in the distance, beyond the end of the house, a moth flapping against the lead-light window in the door that led onto the little lawn, and the drone of a light plane.
Thump. What the hell was going on? If it was an invasion of the house they’d be doing more than hanging around Gavin’s room kicking the furniture. I decided to take one more step. This could be extremely dumb, but I was getting more and more convinced that the biggest problem in Gavin’s room could just be Gavin. OK, he wasn’t due home until tomorrow, but he was a kid who made his own rules, and besides that, a sleepover at Mark’s was as likely to last one hour as it was the whole weekend.
I took the one step, and as I did heard Gavin’s distinctive voice yelling one of the most powerful swearwords in his vocabulary, and trust me, when it comes to swearing, Gavin has been hanging around Homer too long. I assumed that he was not talking to a terrorist who had climbed through his bedroom window. I sighed, flicked the safety catch forwards, unbolted it and let the bullet in the barrel slide out. I really didn’t feel like a big discussion with Gavin about why on earth he was home when he was meant to be having a good time at Mark’s. But a whole lot of thumping was going on and I couldn’t walk away from that.
I put the rounds into my pocket, propped the rifle against the wall so that Gavin wouldn’t think I was going to shoot him, and went into the room. Where Gavin was concerned there wasn’t much point knocking. He was standing with his head in the corner, like he’d sent himself there already, like he was one jump ahead of the teacher. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was rocking up and down. As I stood there, he drew back, then snapped his head forward into the wall. Now I knew what those thumps had been. I couldn’t hear any Metallica, and neither could he, so it wasn’t their fault. I picked up a cushion and chucked it at him. He spun around and glared at me. If looks could have killed I might as well have lain down then and there and got ready for the autopsy.