While I live ec-1

by John Marsden

After Fi left I went in to Elders with Gavin, to pick up some bags of concrete. We needed to cement in the posts for the new cattle yards. But the trouble with places like Elders is that you see all this stuff, and you know it would make your life so much easier, but you can’t afford it, so all you can do is gaze and drool. For instance they had a post driver with a hands-free automatic auger. Dad would have loved that for the cattle yards.

  The next day, Sunday, Gavin and I were sitting looking at the yards as we ate our lunch. I’d brought sandwiches, in an Esky, to save time. We’d done a pretty good job with the cement, considering. I said to him, ‘Why don’t you want to go back to school?’ I’d already tried to have this conversation, but this time he seemed more open.

  He got a terrible frown on his face. ‘I don’t like school.’

  ‘Well, of course I am totally in love with school.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘It was a joke.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Yeah, you’ve made that pretty clear. But why?’

  ‘It’s boring.’

  ‘Schools have to be boring. It’s against the law for them to be interesting.’

  ‘You’re stupid.’

  ‘Seriously, why don’t you like it?’

  He did get serious then. He gave me a long sideways look, as if trying to figure out whether he could trust me or not. I didn’t say anything. If he hadn’t worked that out by now, there wasn’t much more I could do.

  Finally, looking away, he said, ‘The other kids don’t like me.’

  That did surprise me. I knew he’d had trouble early on, but I thought he’d been travelling quite well since then.

  I waved to get his attention. ‘They don’t? Are you sure?’

  After a long pause, looking away again, he said, ‘They call me “Deafy”.’

  ‘Oh.’ My sandwich suddenly coagulated in my mouth. I put the rest of it down. ‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes it does.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Those little creeps.’ I was starting to get angry. ‘What do you do when they call you that?’

  ‘I used to punch the crap out of them. But I got in trouble. So now I don’t do anything.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt both angry and helpless. It was typical of Gavin to have kept all this to himself. He might have told my parents, but I didn’t think so. I wanted to tell him to go back and punch the crap out of the other kids again, but I realised that mightn’t be the best advice. I couldn’t think what to tell him. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’? Yes, but being called names can break your spirit, break your heart. Which was worse?

  I’d rather have a broken arm than a broken heart any day.

  ‘What would happen if you dob on them?’

  He looked offended. ‘I’m not doing that.’

  ‘Have you got any friends?’

  ‘Yeah. Mark.’

  I knew Mark. He was famous for being the naughtiest kid in Wirrawee. Naughtier than Homer even, when Homer was in primary school. In fact next to Mark, Homer would have been school captain.

  I could see how Gavin might have ended up with Mark as a friend. I’d noticed even back in primary school that although the other kids laugh at what the naughty kids do, naughty kids usually don’t end up with a lot of close friends. Homer was the exception.

  It struck me that living wild on the streets of Stratton during the war might have been a good time for Gavin. He had a gang, a group of feral lost and homeless children, and he’d ended up in charge, so there was no question about his popularity. Away from school, in a situation where deafness was just a minor inconvenience, all his strengths had been shown to maximum advantage.

  The next day he came to the bus with not much more than the usual amount of grumbling, complaining, whingeing, dawdling, sulking, and insulting remarks directed at me. Querulous, that’s another good word. I can definitely say he was querulous.

  It was my first day back since the funeral, and it was a little weird, the way the other kids treated me. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like. We’re nearly at the start of the run, so when Gavin and I got on the bus there were only the Sanderson kids, Jamie Anlezark, and Melissa Carpenter. They were just the usual ‘Hi, Ellie’, ‘Hi, El’, but they did look at me that little bit longer than normal, and their faces were that little bit redder.

  The next stop is Homer’s and he sat next to me as always. To my absolute astonishment no sooner had he sat down than he pulled out a book, turned to a bookmark near the end and settled down to read. I lifted it up as he read to see what it was. It looked old and dusty. The name was The Scarlet Pimpernel. I put it down again, gently, feeling really disorientated. This would be something like Van Gogh playing full-forward for the West Coast Eagles.

  After Homer got on, there was a long haul to the Boltons, at ‘Malabar’, then the Grahams and the Pereiras, then the Young twins at ‘Adderley’, and then the bus filled up so fast you couldn’t keep track of them all. There were lots of new kids on the buses these days, but we were lucky; we still had a friendly group, and once we got the Young twins it was like a party every morning. Shannon and Sam Young were a laugh a minute — no, sorry, take that back, a laugh a second. It didn’t matter how sleepy you were in the mornings, when they came bouncing down the aisle of the bus everyone woke up. Even Brad Davis, who slept through parties, footy games and exams, sat up to attention when the Young twins climbed on board.

  But today it was different. Everyone was so quiet. Everyone glanced at me as they got on and everyone waved or nodded or said hi or all three, but then they just sat in their seats murmuring away like magpies very early in the morning.

  In the seat ahead of me Sam Young picked up a black beetle on a tissue and was about to chuck it out the window. Before he did though he knelt up and showed it to me over the back of his seat. ‘Hey, Ellie,’ he said, ‘look what came out of my nose.’

  I laughed. But the laugh strangled itself in my throat when I saw Shannon frown at him from across the aisle. They were treating me like I was an emotional cripple. Well, maybe I was, but I didn’t like to be reminded of it.

  We got to school. I noticed that Homer had finished his book. ‘Can I borrow that?’ I asked as he went to put it away.

  ‘Sure.’

  I had no idea what it was but an old book that fascinated Homer was worth a bit of a look.

  Wirrawee High was a different place these days. There were so many new kids! The population of the school had gone from three hundred and fifty to six hundred and fifty. We didn’t have nearly enough teachers or buildings anymore. Every class had at least forty students and every bit of space was a classroom. Walk into the gym anytime and there’d be at least four classes going on, with each teacher trying to stop her kids from distracting the others.

  Some things hadn’t changed though. I smiled as I walked down the corridor every day, because every day I passed the window we had broken during the war. The school, deserted and silent, had been a good hiding place for us back then. We had smashed a window to get in, then stuck masonite and tape over it to make it look like old damage. No-one had touched it since. Maybe we should have offered to pay for new glass but what the hell, money was short, and schools were meant to have a budget for repairs, weren’t they?

  These days, luckily, being seniors, we got the best conditions, but even so, it was hard. There was no hope of getting any work done in your frees because the library was so crowded and noisy.

  The first few days back I got no work done. I sat through period after period and they could have been talking about making drugs out of pineapples or a school excursion to the top of Mount Everest or World War II being caused by someone popping a paper bag. I didn’t hear a word, didn’t learn a thing. Now that I wasn’t physically active, now that I wasn’t racing around pulling calves or cementing posts into the cattle yards, I could think of nothing but my parents.<
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  Time and time again the memory of their bodies, and the feelings of desolation, washed backwards and forwards, like a great internal tide. The way everyone avoided me or treated me like I had the Ebola virus made it all the worse. There’s nothing lonelier than grief. Sometimes I wanted to cry out to them all, in the middle of History, ‘Please, please, look at me, help me, can’t you see how unhappy I am?’

  But what would have happened? They would have gathered round, making soothing noises, helping me out of the room maybe, offering me tissues… And none of that would touch the deep dark ocean that circled silently inside. They could not see it, touch it, stop it. I didn’t know any way to do that.

  It was a relief to get home in the afternoons and get physical again. I actually felt good when I saw Gavin on the bus each afternoon. It was like he and I shared something that no-one else could understand. It was like we were linked by blood: literally, my parents’ blood, that had stained our hands and our clothing, and in another way the same kind of blood link that brothers and sisters, or parents and children, share.

  I can’t imagine that before the war he would have been left in my care but now things had changed so much that no-one even came enquiring after him.

  The first few days though, Gavin was so exhausted by being back at school that I stuck him in front of the TV with a bunch of cushions and left him to it. That first afternoon he slept for two and a half hours. I felt guilty, that I’d worked him so hard, but what choice did we have?

  Gradually the kids on the bus and the atmosphere at school started to go back to normal. During the war there’d been so much grief and loss that now people were more used to it maybe. I think if my parents had died in such a way before the war it would have taken months for our friends and neighbours to get back on track. But now, by the second week of school, the bus was a mobile comedy and gossip club again and people were no longer treating me like I was contagious. I even started to absorb a skerrick of information from my classes.

  I got to know Bronte a bit too. The night she had come out to my place with Homer and Jeremy and Jess she’d hardly said a word. And because she was a year below me at school we didn’t share any classes. But I noticed her in the queue at the canteen one day and we smiled at each other. I waited for her to get served and then we walked to the elm tree that looks over the footy oval.

  We’d just had a History lesson before lunch and somehow, instead of talking about History, the conversation had swung around to a story from the radio that morning, about prisoners who weren’t released at the end of the war. These rumours came along every few days, and a lot of people believed them. I simply didn’t know if I did or not. There were so many people ‘unaccounted for’, and the theory was that they were still being held in secret out-of-the-way places. It was an emotional issue for anyone with friends and rellies who hadn’t been traced. There were four people in our class with family members who’d disappeared during the war and hadn’t been heard of since.

  Jake Douglass, whose father had been one of the Wirrawee cops before the war but was now a security consultant or something, had been shooting off his big mouth, talking about raids across the border to find prisoners, and how he and his mates were ready to fight back any time.

  I’d been pretty upset myself, listening to Jake going on and on, and I wanted someone to talk to. I told Bronte what Jake had said. She listened in silence.

  ‘Things are still so dangerous,’ she said at last. ‘Especially around here. Some of these boys are dangerous to be around.’

  ‘Jake Douglass thinks he’s such a hero. What did he do in the war? Let down a few tyres.’ She didn’t say anything to that and I had to add, ‘I know I sound like I think we’re the big heroes, when I talk that way. But the truth is, we did do a lot, and now all I want is to try to make some sort of normal life for myself, and the way these boys talk, I’m like you, it really disturbs me.’

  I didn’t know why I was saying all this to her but she was one of those people you instinctively trust. ‘On the one hand there’s Jake Douglass, who’s got about as much guts as a disembowelled guinea pig and who’s so stupid he’s dangerous, and on the other hand there’s Homer, who really is brave, but sometimes he seems to be dropping hints about some sort of gung-ho stuff too. Like Jess, when you guys came out to my place the other night. It’s very confusing and I don’t like things that are confusing.’

  ‘I don’t think we can expect things not to be confusing at the moment,’ Bronte said, which, when you translated it, I think meant that things would stay confusing for a while yet. The way she said that kind of proved she was right.

  Jess joined us. I liked Jess but I’d had the feeling the other night that Bronte wasn’t so keen on her.

  ‘Great History lesson,’ Jess said.

  ‘Yeah, I was just telling Bronte. Honestly, I don’t know what’s come over these boys. They’re all out of their tiny minds. So many people seem like they haven’t had enough war yet to satisfy them. I don’t know how much they want. I’ve had enough for a few lifetimes. People like Jake Douglass make me paranoid. More paranoid than I already am, that is.’

  ‘Hey, I’ll make you really paranoid,’ Jess said. ‘You know what my father thinks? He says the enemy are sussing us out, getting ready for the next invasion.’

  I couldn’t cope with this conversation. I rolled away and started playing with a spider’s web. I tried putting a leaf on it, to see if it would break. I heard Bronte ask, ‘Why would they invade again?’ She sounded calm, but she seemed like a calm person.

  ‘Because a lot of their radicals are really angry with their government. They say they gave in too easily, they shouldn’t have compromised, they shouldn’t have given so much away.’

  ‘Given so much away!’ I shouted back over my shoulder. ‘It wasn’t theirs to give away! It wasn’t theirs in the first place.’

  Boy, that Jess, she had an answer for anything. I put a piece of bark on the spider’s web. It still didn’t break.

  ‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Keep your shirt on. Bad choice of words. Although I suppose it was theirs to give away, really, because they had a whacking great slab of it and we didn’t. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.’

  ‘So,’ said Bronte, in the voice of someone who’s had this discussion quite a few times before. It was like a teacher asking a class for the seventeenth year in a row, ‘So, class, what do you think our rules should be for this year?’ Bronte went on, ‘What do you think they’d do if they invaded again?’

  I stacked a twig on the web. It sagged but it held all that weight without snapping.

  ‘Well, what they started doing in some places before. Resettle as fast as they can and turn us into fringe dwellers. We’d live in the crap places and do all the crap jobs and anyone who gave trouble would be locked up or they’d mysteriously disappear.’ She paused, then added, ‘According to the rumours, that’s why they’re not returning some prisoners. It’s because they’ve identified certain people, certain prisoners, as troublemakers, the people who’d give them a hard time if they invaded again. They figure “Why create extra problems for ourselves? Let’s just announce that these guys are dead, or we don’t know where they are, and that way we’ll make it all the easier when we launch the next invasion”.’

  ‘Next invasion,’ I snarled back at her. ‘No way is there going to be a next invasion. Not if I have anything to do with it.’

  But even as I said that I knew I couldn’t have anything to do with such a big issue. Nobody was going to come to me asking for permission to invade.

  I karate-chopped the cobweb with my hand. It broke.

  CHAPTER 8

  I’ve never felt so young and inadequate as when I sat in the bank manager’s office the next day. It was lunchtime at school and I’d belted down to the bank for this appointment. I was meant to be meeting Mr Yannos but he hadn’t turned up. Much as I liked Homer’s dad I had to admit he wasn’t the most reliable person in the world. So suddenly I
found myself in the manager’s office having to explain why she should lend me a little matter of another hundred grand or so. For the first few minutes I could hardly get my breath to ask for anything except a glass of water but somehow my desperation to keep the farm got my tongue working enough to stammer out a few words. And once I started the words flowed a bit better.

  I already owed the bank a breathtaking gobsmacking heartburning $480 000. Nearly half a million. But as I said to her, that was safe for the bank, because of the mortgages over the farm and the cars and machinery. Plus I had the cattle, which were now up to ninety-six head with the new calves. Before they’d calved, Mr Sayle had valued them at $180 000, but if I kept the calves a couple of years they’d be worth another $100 000 or so at current rates, and provided the market held up. So far it had risen like a ruckman taking a speccie.

  I hadn’t been game to go and see Mr Sayle or even to ring him, but I’d written him a quick letter to tell him what I was going to do. I hadn’t heard back yet. I think lawyers were so overworked as a result of the war that they paid most of their attention to the urgent stuff.

  ‘So what do you want to do with the extra money?’ the manager asked.

  ‘Buy more stock,’ I said promptly. ‘I need to build up the herd, in quality and quantity. These cows and steers were pretty poor when my father bought them, but they’re putting on some condition. When Dad got them there was nothing else available. But there’s some better stock coming onto the market now. I’d love to get one of these New Zealand bulls that they’re shipping over but I don’t know if I could afford them. They’ll be fetching top dollar. But even if I miss out on them, I think I could get a decent bull from one of the studs that wasn’t so badly affected by the war, and then another fifty or so cows.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She didn’t look impressed. She sat back in her chair and started ticking off points on her fingers. She even spoke in point form. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who did that. She seemed to be talking to the wall, not to me. ‘One, you’re exceptionally young for such obligations. Underage to be signing contracts — guardian would have to guarantee it. Which reminds me, guardian also must guarantee existing loan. And he’s not here now. Not good.’