by John Marsden
Back in the kitchen I asked Homer some more questions about Liberation but I didn’t get very far.
‘You know me,’ he said, holding his big hands out, palms up, and making a face. ‘I keep secrets. I’m not like you girls. If someone asks me not to repeat something, I don’t repeat it.’
‘Stop doing all the Greek body language,’ I said, flicking his nearest hand with the flyswat. It was true though, he didn’t repeat stuff. You could trust him that way. You could trust him most ways actually. ‘So what happens if I join? Do I have to practise the secret handshake? Learn the passwords? Dress up in uniform and go to a weekly meeting?’
‘Yeah, all of the above. You wear a mask and go as your favourite superhero, so no-one knows your true identity.’
‘Who do you go as?’
‘I’m the Phantom, Ghost who Walks. Phantom never die. Phantom King of the Jungle. You can go as Princess Cattle-drencher. You get to wear an Akubra and a Driza-Bone and a flynet over your face.’
‘Yeah, that’s me, Princess Cattle-drencher, does a hundred bullocks an hour, all on my own. But I want some corks for my hat.’
Homer made himself another coffee.
‘Drink it fast,’ I said, ‘and then you can help me move those steers to Burnt Hut. Now that you’ve taken Gavin out of the running for the day, it’s the least you can do.’
As we walked up there and I looked across at the farm, the cattle cropping at the short grass in Parklands, the patches of bracken in Nellie’s, the blackberry at the back of the barn that should have been sprayed months ago and was now a nice little suburb for snakes, the heap of firewood waiting to be stacked, I made my decision about Liberation.
‘I don’t want to join,’ I said. ‘Not yet anyway. There’s too much else going on, keeping this place afloat, trying to get some school work done, looking after Gavin. Once this thing with Sayle has been sorted out, then I might give it a go. But even so, even though we agreed that it’s a buzz, I don’t know how much more I can take. Walking on the edge of death all the time, it gets a bit unnerving. I haven’t slept too well since I saw what they did to Shannon. And you know, it worries me with Gavin. I thought I’d be able to protect him from all this once the war ended, give him a normal life, let him grow up away from the violence.’
‘Just what my parents wanted for me. Just what your parents wanted for you. Shame life can’t be a choose-your-own-adventure book, where if you don’t like the way it’s going you pick a different path.’
‘Choose-your-own-adventures’d be the only books you’ve ever read,’ I said. ‘Oh, sorry, plus The Scarlet Pimpernel.’
‘No way. I’m reading Alibrandi even as we speak.’
‘You are?’
‘Sure. Good book. That Josephine needs a good smack though.’
I just laughed but I was impressed that he was reading so much. You never knew with Homer. I mean, the guy was wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Tomorrow is just a fiction of today’. I didn’t even know what it meant and I’m pretty sure Homer didn’t either.
After we’d moved the steers we hung on the fence for a while and talked. ‘So are you going to tell me what’s happening with Sayle?’ Homer asked. ‘I mean, the full story.’
‘Don’t think I’d better tell you the full story. I don’t want to get someone in trouble. Let’s just say I got access to stuff he didn’t want me to see. I don’t know whether it’ll change things but I think it will. I’ve been trying to talk to Fi’s mum but now she’s on the Advisory Council it’s bloody hard to track her down. Poor Fi, she’s going crazy trying to get her mum to ring me. She keeps apologising to me and feeling guilty and I tell her not to worry, but of course she does.’
‘So what kind of stuff have you got exactly?’
‘Some papers. I can’t understand all of it, but what I can understand is pretty nasty. You want to see them?’
‘Oh yeah.’
I went back to the house. Gavin had emerged and was in the kitchen. That was pretty good for him. I don’t know what his record sulk was, but there were times when you could go climb Everest, come back and write a novel, then diet and lose ten kilos before Gavin would come out of his bedroom. Or maybe he was amusing himself in there and it was nothing to do with sulking at all.
I said, ‘I told Homer I’m not joining Liberation because there’s too much else to worry about at the moment,’ but he didn’t react, although I’m sure he understood.
I went back to Homer with the papers. I was glad I’d photocopied that handwritten note. The full wording was nasty all right.
Don’t worry about it mate, I’ve got her wrapped up tighter than a Sumo jockstrap. The magistrate is all for me, and the courts are that clogged up it’d take a Scud missile to get an appeal through. She’s a tough little bitch but mate, I wrote the book on tough. You’ll have the place in three months, and it’ll cost you about five bucks for her and a slab of stubbies for me.
‘Charming,’ Homer said.
‘I thought you’d approve. “Tough little bitch.” That’d be your wording, wouldn’t it?’
He gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything.
The Council document was definitely a planning application, like I’d thought. I’d had a proper look through it now, and it seemed that a company called Kelsey Developments Pty Ltd was going to turn our property into a luxury hotel called Kelsey Resort, the Gateway to the Mountains.
‘What is it with that “Pty Ltd” stuff?’ Homer asked. ‘They’re all called that. Even our family company.’
‘I don’t know. But what do you think about it all?’
‘I think you’ve been right all along, and that he’s a giant bullshit artist. But that’s no surprise. What else have you got?’
I only had two other documents, one of which was just a typed summary of the stuff he’d said in court. I think it was the notes that he’d used to make his speech. The other one was a photocopy of something from a law book, about guardianship. It was from a case in the Supreme Court, called R v. Ellis, which apparently said, from what I could make of it, that the principles a magistrate uses for choosing guardians can be different for older kids than for younger ones, which I thought was pretty obvious anyway.
We wandered back to the house. ‘What do you do now?’ Homer asked.
‘Stuffed if I know. Keep trying to get Fi’s mum on the phone and see what she says.’
‘Why don’t you ask Bronte’s dad?’
‘Bronte? From school? Her parents are in the Army, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah, but her father’s a lawyer in the Army.’
‘Is that right? OK. Gosh. I might ask her on Monday.’
CHAPTER 25
BRONTE’S FATHER WAS a bit of a surprise. For one thing he was really young, compared to the parents of my friends. Compared to the age my parents had been for that matter.
It had been difficult getting in to see him. I didn’t think a major was as important as all that, but by the time I’d talked my way in there I was quite nervous. The security was full-on. It was like when Mr King was on bus duty after school.
Major Gisborne wasn’t all that friendly at first; not exactly unfriendly, just acting like he was too busy for this. I was already uncomfortable enough, after being interrogated about twenty-six times by men and women with guns, having to stand around while they rang each other to check that I had an appointment.
Eventually I got to the biggest building on the place, a concrete hangar half the size of Wirrawee, and was interviewed by Major Gisborne in a room the size of a washing machine. Life’s full of contrasts, that’s what I love about it.
There was no small talk, just, ‘You’ve got some papers? Let’s have a look,’ and then I sat there wondering what I could do while he read everything. The choice was between studying the heavy wire mesh on the window, the light globe on the long cord from the ceiling, the scratches on the old brown desk, or the poster on the wall headed ‘EVACUATION PROCEDURES’. There were a lot of pos
ters like that around these days, but somehow it seemed funny to see one on an Army base. I’d figured Army people would know how to do that stuff without needing to be told on a poster, like the rest of us.
Major Gisborne took another piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. I recognised it as the summary I’d done for Bronte, of what had happened since my parents died. Bronte had told me to be brief. ‘My dad says the Gettysburg Address was two hundred and seventy-two words long, so nothing else needs to be longer than that.’
‘That’s a long address,’ I said. ‘What state did they live in?’
But it turned out the Gettysburg Address was a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln, and all Bronte knew about it was that it included the words ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.
Major Gisborne read through my sheet of paper, taking another three or four minutes. This time I stared at the top of his head, trying to count the number of hairs. For a guy who looked about twenty he was pretty bald.
Suddenly he looked up, catching me staring at him.
‘So let me get this straight,’ he said, gazing at me over the top of his glasses. ‘You wanted your neighbours as your guardians, and the court appointed the executor instead, but you’ve taken a dislike to him.’
I was already a bit red and now I blushed more. Put like that it all sounded pathetic. ‘Well, yes, but when I got this stuff, it made it look like I was right.’
‘This is illegally obtained evidence,’ he said. ‘Not admissible in court.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You opened his files, took papers from them, copied them on his paper using his chemicals in his photocopier powered by his electricity. That’s theft. You might think it’s silly, but courts have sometimes convicted people for stealing a couple of sheets of paper, or a few cents worth of electricity, when they can’t get them on any other charge.’
‘Really?’
‘For instance, if an employee steals an idea from his employer but there’s no law covering the situation, it might be possible to get him for stealing the sheets of paper that the idea’s printed on. And that then gives the employer a legal remedy.’
I gaped a bit at that. ‘Well, I don’t want to be arrested for stealing a few sheets of paper.’
For the first time he smiled. ‘I don’t think you’re on the “Most Wanted” list.’
‘So, what can I do? Surely I can do something.’
He launched into a long speech about what he recommended, which included going to the Law Society or Law Institute or something, and making a complaint about Mr Sayle’s behaviour, or lodging an appeal with the court against him being my guardian. Or, I could ask him for the contents of my file and sue him if he wouldn’t hand it over. But he didn’t have to give me his personal notes anyway. Then he explained that any of those remedies might take years and that wasn’t the only problem.
‘If you appeal against the guardianship order, you have two main grounds,’ he said. ‘One is that your friend Sayle seems to have prior knowledge of a development plan for the property, and what’s worse, a plan in which he may have a financial interest. And the second is that he seems to have malice towards you, as demonstrated by the handwritten memo, which he’ll never let you get. You need to find admissible ways of proving both those points in court. A lot would depend on the secretary you’ve mentioned being prepared to give evidence.’
‘I don’t know if she’d do that,’ I said.
He stood up and handed me back the papers. ‘I can see it’s a lot to take in,’ he said. ‘I’ll write a summary and send it via Bronte.’
‘That’d be really nice of you,’ I said. But before I could thank him any more he’d gone again, straight out the door.
I was a bit off-balance after this. He sure didn’t muck around. He seemed so cold compared to Bronte.
I went back to school, counting the number of periods I’d missed this week. I was nowhere near my record but I wasn’t doing badly. So many missed periods. I should have been pregnant.
I looked for Bronte but couldn’t find her till the next day. When I did, she was in the library, in the middle of a Chemistry lesson with Mr Bracken. I don’t know why they were doing it in the library. Bronte gave me a wink and gradually sidled over to where I’d sat myself at a computer.
To my amazement she already had a letter from her father.
‘Wow, that was quick,’ I said.
‘He’s Major Action Man,’ she said and sidled back to her class.
I stayed there and read the letter. It spelt things out pretty clearly, although it was longer than 272 words. The only part that was fuzzy was the bit about how I got the papers. He’d written: ‘The origin of the documents is uncertain’.
But most of the time he was outlining the different strategies I could use. They all seemed incredibly long and incredibly legalistic, not to mention expensive and not even guaranteed to work. A lot seemed to depend on whether Mrs Samuels would testify. He didn’t spell it out, but it was obviously because I’d got the papers illegally, and he was saying that if she testified it’d solve that problem.
I didn’t think Mrs Samuels would testify. She seemed scared enough when she left that file out. If she testified, she’d lose her job, for a start, and she might find it hard to get another one.
I didn’t realise Bronte had been watching me, but as soon as I put the letter down she appeared again.
‘Finished?’ she asked.
‘Yeah. It’s all a bit depressing.’
‘That’s what he said you’d think.’ She gave me another piece of paper. ‘This is from him too but he didn’t sign it, because it’s kind of unofficial.’
I opened it. It was a brief message, all typed. ‘Forget the legal approach, Ellie. You know how effective direct action is. You’ve proved that often enough. Use your brains and your imagination and you’ll come up with better solutions than these.’
I knew what he was getting at. Even before the war I guess I was pretty straightforward. I preferred to go at life full-on, not to sneak around the edges. I got sick of people at school who got into corners with their friends and bitched about how Chelsea had said something to Ilka about the way Meg had treated Simone. I preferred to march over to Chelsea and demand, ‘Has Meg been getting up your nose?’
Maybe it’s just another of those farm things. When you find a cow who’s decided to have her calf halfway up an eroded cliff, and the calf has fallen into one of the cracks and he seems like he’s only got minutes to live, there’s not much point going for a walk around the paddock and thinking that God can be very cruel sometimes. You go as fast as you can to get a shovel and you start digging your butt off, and the only thanks you get is that the cow licks your arm all the time you’re doing it, and later, when you see them together in the paddock, you get a nice warm feeling.
In the war we had times when we had to be sneaky, sure, and times when we planned attacks, but mostly we made it up as we went along. And mostly that meant fighting flat out, going at the enemy with everything we had, whether it was on an airfield or up among the rocks of Tailor’s Stitch or on a train-ride to hell.
So that approach does kind of suit me I guess.
I still couldn’t think of a direct solution. But later that morning I was sitting in History while Mr Baddiley went through his overheads, doing a big number on the Korean War. Because of the shortage of projectors he told Jake Douglass to pretend he was an overhead projector, and Jake sat there holding up each bit of plastic while Mr Baddiley talked about it.
It was boring, but the thing about Mr Baddiley was that if you got him distracted he could be quite interesting. That particular day I was so inattentive that I don’t know who got him distracted or how he could jump from the Korean War to France in 1898, but I realised suddenly he was talking about a guy called Dreyfus, and a writer called Emile Zola.
As far as I could put the story together, what happened was that a French Army offic
er called Dreyfus had been outrageously framed as a spy. The real spy was a member of the ruling classes but they didn’t have the guts to go after him, so they blamed Dreyfus instead, partly because he was Jewish. Dreyfus got kicked out of the Army, which had been the great love of his life, God knows why, and he was sent to an island prison to live on cockroaches and his own fingernail clippings.
OK, OK, I made that bit up.
Anyway, as time went on, some people in France got more and more convinced that Dreyfus had been ripped off. It didn’t matter what they said though, the government wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t do anything.
Well, along came this writer called Emile Zola. He was mega-famous, like, we’re talking Charles Dickens, Tim Winton, J.K. Rowling. He wrote this letter called ‘J’Accuse’. He called it that because he was French. If he was English he probably would have called it ‘I Accuse’. ‘The most famous letter ever written,’ Mr Baddiley said, which was a big call when you think of Princess Di’s love letters to James Hewitt.
‘J’Accuse’ was a public letter, saying stuff like ‘I accuse the three handwriting experts of making lying and fraudulent reports . . . I accuse the War Council of deliberately and dishonestly convicting an innocent man . . .’
It created a huge storm. Zola got chucked in prison for it. But it did build up such pressure on the government and the Army that eventually they gave in and held an enquiry that found out the truth and Dreyfus was brought back and everyone said sorry and kissed him on both cheeks, many many times, the way the French do.
So I listened to this with a lot of interest. The roar of the pen, I thought. Louder than a submachine gun or a B52 or a surface-to-air missile. I picked up my pen and, as Mr Baddiley went back to the Korean War, I tried writing my ‘J’Accuse’.
I kept it short and simple. It was less than 272 words, but it was no Gettysburg Address.
When I’d finished I sat there figuring out what to do with it. Then I nicked off to the library and tried to negotiate a low price for multiple photocopies with the new library assistant. Didn’t have any luck though. Their rates weren’t as cheap as Mr Sayle’s.