While I live ec-1

by John Marsden

  ‘Yeah, I guess that’s true,’ I said.

  ‘So, life goes on. Things happen. If you let things happen, they do.’

  ‘So,’ I said, feeling myself go a bit red, ‘if people you love die, or get killed, what does Taoism say about that? How are you meant to cope with that?’

  I waited on her answer as though it would be very important.

  ‘You do nothing,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘This has happened. It doesn’t matter in the long run how they died. They’ve died, so your life reorganises itself. It will affect you in different ways. So, let it affect you. Feel what you feel, do what seems right to you. Don’t imagine there is a right way to act or a wrong way. Just let your life continue according to its own inner nature.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  I turned away to leave.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘good luck.’

  ‘Bit of an angel encounter, that one,’ I thought.

  We went to a four o’clock movie, not a very Taoist one I’d say. But Gavin chose it. It amazed me that after all he’d seen in the war, all he’d experienced, he still liked violent movies, but they were always his first choice. He was still quite violent by nature, as he’d proved with the cushions last night — not that I could talk — but I don’t think his violent behaviour came from the violent movies. The movies must have seemed a bit tame sometimes, compared to what he’d gone through.

  It wasn’t a bad film. The special effects were cool, and it had Jed Barrett, who I can look at for quite a long time without getting a headache.

  It had been a good afternoon and it had been fun. We went to Macca’s — sign of the times, Wirrawee had grown so much since the war that it now had a Macca’s — then headed home.

  That night in bed I was thinking about the way creeks and streams operate. They start off little, gurgling and bubbling and jumping over rocks and stuff, full of energy, going all over the place. Then they get older and bigger, become rivers, take a more definite course, stick to their path, know where they’re going, get slower and wider. And eventually they reach the ocean and become part of this vast mysterious world of water that stretches away forever.

  Yep, just like people.

  My parents had joined the ocean. I was back up in the hills, bubbling around. What I’d seen and done in the war had made me grow up pretty fast, and what had happened since, even faster, but I was still a kid and I had a way to go yet before I became one of those slow old rivers just cruising along, not noticing too much and not bothering about the rocks and the rapids.

  The next morning, as we walked through the paddocks checking the cattle, Gavin far in front on the left and Marmie far in front on the right, Lee began the big conversation. It had to happen sooner or later, I knew that, but I was not looking forward to it. He was nervous too. I still didn’t know if he’d been expecting a weekend of wild sex but he would have been sadly disappointed so far. And he had to go back early in the morning, catching the school bus into Wirrawee and the bus to the city from there.

  I don’t know, I was probably doing him an injustice though. It wasn’t fair to assume that he’d come all this way for selfish motives. I still had huge respect for Lee. He was a generous guy and I think his first, second and third reasons for visiting were to see how Gavin and I were going, and to help in any way he could.

  His fourth reason could well have been to do with sex. But he had helped a lot.

  Anyway, as we wandered up the hill, leaving the ute behind, watching the cattle totally engrossed by their breakfast sandwiches of hay, he said nervously, ‘So, are you like, with anyone else? Anyone new?’

  ‘No,’ I said, then, after a pause, ‘How about you?’

  ‘No, no-one.’

  ‘So we’re both single, huh?’

  ‘Desperate and dateless,’ he said.

  ‘Speak for yourself. Just dateless, thanks.’

  ‘For a guy, we can’t be one without the other.’ But he grinned as he said it.

  ‘Have you met anyone you’ve liked?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah, you know how it is. You see someone from the bus window, or in the canteen queue at school, or a new girl comes into your class. But there’s no-one who’s totally grabbed me.’

  I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I was just thinking about the Taoist girl yesterday, and how she’d talked about letting things follow their natural laws, not trying to force people or anything — relationships for that matter — into a different rhythm, or an artificial shape.

  Lee said, ‘So, are we still, like, together, or what? I’m a bit confused.’ He said it gently but I could hear the tension in his voice.

  I gulped. ‘I wish I knew. To be honest I kind of thought it was over but when you walked into the kitchen the other night, I’ve got to admit, it felt pretty good to see you.’

  He didn’t say anything so I kept going. ‘When you moved to the city — and you had to look after your brothers and sisters, and you sounded so stressed in those phone calls — it just seemed like we were going in majorly different directions. I got caught up in the wild lifestyle of Wirrawee, and you were drifting out of sight. Now… well, I’ve enjoyed this weekend a lot. But it doesn’t mean I’m ready to jump straight back in. Can we just let things drift a little longer? Would that be OK?’

  ‘We’re pretty good together.’

  It was unusual for Lee to press like this. Normally his pride wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Well, I guess. But we’re young. And we’re coping with a lot of stuff. God are we coping with a lot of stuff.’

  ‘Has it struck you that we’re both orphans?’

  I had to blink back the tears then. We were sitting on an outcrop of rock, at the highest point in the paddock. Below us Gavin was using a stick like a golf club and trying to hit cattle dung up the hill towards us.

  ‘Oh I hate that word,’ I said, when I could trust myself to speak. ‘I haven’t let myself think that word.’

  He put an arm around me. ‘I’ve had longer to get used to it than you have.’

  But I didn’t want his arm around me and I shrugged it off.

  ‘Orphans!’ I said angrily. ‘That sounds like Anne of Green Gables, and Little Orphan Annie. I can’t think of myself like that. I can’t think of you like that.’

  But he seemed to want to rub it in.

  ‘Gavin’s an orphan too, as far as anyone knows. Three orphans in the one field. What are the odds on that?’

  ‘Oh come on,’ I said, standing up. ‘I’ve had enough of this. Let’s go home.’

  When we got there, Homer was waiting. He’d rung the day before about coming over, staying the night, and catching the bus from my place with Gavin and Lee and me the next morning.

  I told them that they could make lunch themselves, so they broke out the barbecue. I got some chops and sausages from the freezer. Our stocks were getting low. I realised that if I wanted more meat I’d soon have to kill a beast myself. I’d helped my father often enough but I didn’t like the thought of doing it on my own. Plus all the butchering afterwards. It made me feel a bit sick. Maybe I’d have to come up with a different way of getting meat.

  After I’d found them the Dickhead matches — a name which always made me smile — I sat and watched them cook, giving regular helpful advice which I feel they deeply appreciated. But I got their sudden and undivided attention when I said to Lee, ‘Get Homer to tell you about Liberation.’

  Two heads whipped around towards me, two sets of eyes gazed at me intently.

  ‘What do you know about Liberation?’ Lee asked. I was a bit shocked at their reaction. I was surprised that Lee had even heard of them.

  ‘I know quite a lot,’ I said. ‘But not as much as Homer.’

  It was a complete bluff, but I hoped it might get me somewhere. Unfortunately these two guys knew me too well.

  ‘You don’t know nuffin,’ Homer said, turning back to the sausages.

  I thought I might as well go for broke. ‘They’re
a group from around here,’ I said to Lee, but watching Homer for his reaction. ‘Well, there’s groups in different areas, but there’s one based in Wirrawee. They sneak over the border and do stuff, rescue people.’ I decided to push a bit harder. ‘Homer’s involved, but he doesn’t want me to know about it, because he thinks I’ve got enough to worry about for the time being. You know Homer, always wanting to make my decisions for me.’

  Homer had his back to me but he stabbed a sausage with a fork, so hard that it broke in two.

  ‘So who else is in it?’ Lee asked. He was watching me closely. Now he was off-balance. He wasn’t sure what I really knew.

  ‘Jeremy Finley,’ I said. ‘General Finley’s son.’ I was fairly sure of that one. ‘And Jess, this girl who came here a few weeks back with Jeremy, and hit me with a whole lot of questions.’ I asked Lee, ‘Do you know her? Or Jeremy Finley?’

  He shook his head. ‘So, who else?’

  I gave up at that point. ‘I’ll be honest. I don’t know.’ I said to Homer, ‘So, how’d I do?’

  ‘Why do you want to make your life more complicated than it is already?’ he asked, putting the chops onto a plate.

  I waved at Gavin to get his attention. When I was his age the smell of food was enough to bring me running, but not Gavin. This time he was absorbed in trying to teach Marmie to fetch a ball. I had to go and tap him on the shoulder. By the time I got back I had the distinct feeling that Lee and Homer had quickly agreed what they would tell me and what they wouldn’t.

  I settled into a chair opposite them. ‘So, what am I going to be allowed to know?’ I asked them, taking my first mouthful of food and smiling sweetly across the table.

  Lee shrugged. ‘Hey, don’t look at me. I know bugger-all.’

  ‘Bugger’s a rude word,’ Gavin chipped in.

  ‘Yeah, like you really care,’ I said. ‘Eat your vegetables.’

  ‘Look,’ said Homer. ‘It’s true, I do know something about them. And I am just a little bit involved. But the deal is that none of us is allowed to talk about it to anyone not in the group, for obvious reasons. So the thing is, do you want to join the group? You say I’m always wanting to tell you how to live your life. Well, I don’t know about that, but I did figure you wouldn’t want to get into any heavy scenes while you’re trying to cope with what happened to your parents, as well as run this place, and look after Gavin, and the whole thing.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said.

  That rocked him, although he didn’t like to have me see it. But I meant it. I understood the sense in what he was saying.

  ‘I read the book, you know,’ I told him.

  ‘What book?’

  ‘ The Scarlet Pimpernel.’

  ‘Oh, that one.’

  ‘So what I want to know is, in the book, there’s this guy who’s like the idiot, the clown, and he turns out to be the genius who’s the secret leader. Is that the way it is with your group?’

  ‘It’s not my group,’ Homer complained.

  ‘So you’re not the leader?’

  ‘An idiot who’s really a genius? Does that sound like me?’

  ‘Just give me a yes or no answer. Are you the leader? Are you Mr Pimpernel?’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  I believed him.

  ‘OK, but is there a secret genius who’s the leader?’

  Homer considered. ‘You could say that.’

  And you’re not going to say who it is, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Is it Jeremy? Jeremy Finley? I mean, he’s the one who’d have access to the kind of military information you’d need.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’s the leader.’

  ‘No. But I think he is.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Homer and Lee were pretty boring that afternoon, both of them sleeping for a couple of hours after lunch. They weren’t much help. I took Gavin off to do a bit of stick collecting in Parklands, but my heart wasn’t in it. I did think a lot about this group though. Liberation. It was a cool idea. But I had very mixed feelings about getting involved in anything like that. Of course on the one hand I wanted to avenge my parents’ death. Theirs, and Mrs Mackenzie’s. My whole body burned with a primitive desire to take the guys who’d killed them in such a foul and filthy and cowardly way and tie them to a railway track and have a train approach them very very slowly before running over them a millimetre at a time. Or tie each of their arms and legs to a different tractor and have the tractors drive away in opposite directions. Like the nice old-fashioned method of drawing and quartering people with horses.

  Oh yes, I was in a bloodthirsty mood that afternoon. A couple of times I smashed poor innocent sticks against tree trunks and broke them into matchsticks, just to express my frustration.

  By the end of the day I could have throttled Gavin too, as he was in a really aggravating mood. I think having both Lee and Homer there stirred him up. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help, and I had bitter thoughts about the promises he’d made: all the work he was going to do to keep the property in our hands.

  Then I got home and found no-one had even started cooking dinner. By then I’d had enough: more than enough. I’d had enough with strawberries and whipped cream on top. I stood in the middle of the kitchen and screeched at Homer and Lee like I was a white cockatoo separated from the flock at sunset. Neither of them looked too bothered. When I’d finished, Homer said, ‘But no-one’s hungry, Ellie. We thought we’d have dinner in an hour or two.’

  He was probably doing it to stir me and I was so tired that it actually worked. I stormed down the corridor to my bedroom, then had a shower, which cooled me off a bit. By the time I got back to the kitchen they’d put together a spinach and ricotta tortellini, and I’ve got to admit I’ve had worse.

  We watched TV for a while. About the only thing we’d agreed on all day was that the stuff on TV since the war was absolute crap.

  I went to bed about nine thirty and slept solidly.

  The next morning Homer and Lee weren’t there. It took me a while to realise. Half an hour before we had to leave I said to Gavin, ‘You’d better go and wake Homer and Lee before they miss the bus.’

  He came back and said, ‘They’re not there.’

  I thought they must be in the bathroom.

  With fifteen minutes to go I started to think it was a bit odd that I hadn’t seen or heard anything of them.

  I said to Gavin, ‘Do the boys want any breakfast?’

  Gavin was looking worried. He said anxiously, ‘They’re not there.’

  I put down the knife I was using for the sandwiches and, feeling a little sick, went down the corridor to their room. Their beds had been slept in, but not for a while. They were cold.

  ‘Where are they?’ Gavin, behind me, asked.

  I was fighting with panic, and a choking, slippery wrestle it was. Had they been abducted in the middle of the night by soldiers? Abducted and killed? I had a memory of my parents and the Websters and the McGills sitting around the barbecue one summer Sunday afternoon and Mr Webster telling the story of the Gurkhas in World War I. ‘Gherkins’, I thought he had said. I was only nine or ten. But the Gurkhas were from Nepal and they were the world’s fiercest soldiers. With shining eyes Mr Webster described how one night the Gurkhas crept across no-man’s-land into a tent filled with German troops, where they cut the throat of every second soldier. And they did it without waking the others.

  That story had haunted me. What went through the minds of the men who’d died, as they died? But almost worse than that, what went through the minds of the others when they woke in the morning? Did they have minds left after that? Did they ever sleep again?

  Sometimes the brain has to cope with events and thoughts so awful that it feels like it must explode: there is no other possibility. Like a balloon, like bubble gum, like a bloated cow.

  I actually gripped both sides of my head with my hands as I stared at the empty beds. It seemed like the only way to keep a massive blast from h
appening, deep in my brain. Through the window everything looked cold and grey, and the light was poor: it was not as though they would have set off for a run, or gone to check the cattle.

  My head no longer felt like it might explode but my mind was completely out of synch. I had to try to get the bits back together, into the right pattern. To line them up again. I fought to do it. Homer and Lee could not have been abducted. I locked up every night. I was obsessed with doing it since the killing of my parents and Mrs Mac. The windows were secure. No-one had got in. The two boys had let themselves out, closing the door behind them… and taking the spare key from the hook in the pantry.

  There had to be a reason. It wasn’t to visit anyone. They wouldn’t do that to me. And it sure as hell wasn’t to check out the Wirrawee nightclubs. Think, Ellie, think. But in the back of my mind, and already forcing its way to the front, came the reason. It was just that I didn’t want to recognise it. Those bloody Liberation people. It had to be that. I knew Homer was mixed up with them and now he’d taken Lee as well. And whatever they were doing, wherever they were, something had gone wrong. They had planned to be back by the time I woke up. That’s why they took the key. They’d made it clear they would be on the school bus. They wouldn’t have willingly left me in a situation of ignorance and raw terror.

  Gavin watched me closely. He studied my face like he did when he was anxious, as though I were a map and he a geographer with a magnifying glass. He was trying to read every contour line, every creek and river, every hill and gully. He said to me, ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  He said it so clearly, like he knew it for a fact. I was completely taken aback. But I couldn’t lie to him, and right from the start, when we first met in Stratton, there’d been no point treating him like a little kid. So I said, pointing into the distance then putting my fists up, ‘I think they might have gone across the border, to fight.’

  He nodded, like he’d suspected that.

  I went back to the kitchen, trying to think. Still trying to force my brain into logical patterns. My brain was resisting that strongly. It was telling me: ‘Throw your hands in the air. Run crazily around the kitchen table. Smash all the plates on the dresser. Scream.’