Incurable ec-2

by John Marsden

  I went back to the house, got dinner and talked it over with Gavin. For all that Gavin could be a headache on the scale of a major migraine, it could be quite comforting to have someone to talk things over with. I don’t know what I would have done without him. I don’t think I would have stayed on the property. The loneliness was still pretty severe with Gavin there, because there were so many things we couldn’t talk about. At first his deafness had been a big part of this, but as time had gone on, I’d gotten so used to him that I didn’t notice it any more. The stuff we didn’t talk about was more to do with his age and personality — and sex. Like, he just wasn’t good to talk to when you were having mental struggles about whether you missed Lee so badly that you wanted to scream down the phone at him, ‘Come back, please Lee, I have to see you and feel your strong arms around me again.’ And the same when I was trying to figure out whether I liked Jess or whether she was too overpowering. And Gavin also didn’t show a lot of interest in whether I should buy that pink top at Main Drag.

  Cattle, they were a different matter. Gavin had hardly seen a cow till after the war ended but he was a natural cattleman. What he said about cattle was often pretty smart. He’d never seen a mob of cattle in riot mode — I hadn’t seen it too often myself — but he knew something was wrong with these beasts. I mean I knew it too, but I just thought they were restless, toey. He seemed to know it was something more than that.

  We were a good team, because he had more intuition but I was the one who knew what to do about it. I got the Yamaha and the four-wheeler out and checked the fuel and oil. Told Gavin to find some torches, put in fresh batteries and get us both some warm clothes. Did an extra delivery of hay, which was expensive, but I figured a well-fed steer was a happy steer. They still didn’t feel right though. So I swallowed my pride and rang Homer’s dad, Mr Yannos.

  For once he didn’t bother with the jokes and the questions about my health and life. ‘I’ll send Homer over,’ he said briefly. ‘I’d come myself but someone has to look after the cattle here and George is away.’

  We waited out in the paddock for Homer. I stayed close to the worst offenders. It was dark now but I could pick out some of the ringleaders. They were the sulky ones, who wouldn’t look at you and who poohed their great plops like it was personal. They pawed impatiently at the ground and tossed their heads. Him, with the perfect little white circle on his forehead. Him, with the piggy eyes and tough face. Her, with the roan coat, and her, who looked at you sideways. It was funny how quickly cattle took on their own personalities and funny how quickly you got to know them. I mean, it was deliberate on my part too. My dad had always taught me to notice those cattle in the mob you could use as pointers. Some cattle like to lead, some like to huddle in the middle, some like to dawdle behind, others prefer to be out on the flanks, going along with the crowd but keeping a bit apart. ‘I want to be in charge,’ ‘I don’t want to be noticed,’ ‘I want my own space,’ ‘What’s the rush — why is everyone always in such a hurry? And where are we going anyway?’

  I felt more and more justified that I’d called Mr Yannos. Beasts were settling on the cold ground then getting up again a minute later and walking away to another position. I didn’t like that.

  But who knows what sets a mob off? Homer arrived with a list of stories he’d heard: a placcy bag blowing across a paddock; someone walking between a fire and the mob, so that their shadow looked like a giant looming out of the darkness. I added my stories: the clatter of a tank being rolled off the back of a ute; someone shaking out a tarp with a crack of the fabric; a kid screaming suddenly in the middle of hide’n’seek. And of course anything at night was a thousand times worse than anything in daytime. It was the same for humans. I often wondered about that. Why did night-time have that spooky atmosphere? How come it was the time for witches, hobgoblins, vampires, ghosts, cattle stampedes?

  We held a committee meeting at the edge of the mob. Homer was being funny and wanting to pretend that it was like a meeting of Liberation or something. ‘So,’ he said, looking carefully at the closest cattle, who were only a couple of metres away, ‘if our friends decide to go for a picnic, and I think you know who I mean by our friends, and I think you know what I mean by a picnic, then what direction do we think they’ll go?’

  This just confused Gavin but once we’d sorted it out he pointed north and I pointed south.

  ‘Well, that’s very helpful,’ Homer said. ‘Personally I’d say east. Or maybe west.’

  ‘I think they’ll go that way because it’s all open once you get past those trees,’ Gavin said.

  ‘I think they’ll go south, because it’s downhill, plus that’s the way they came in,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ Homer confessed. ‘But Dad said to keep circling them so they’re all together, and to do it all night. But if they calm down we can take it in turns.’

  Thunder growled from the other side of the ranges. Maybe it was coming out of Hell. I had left Marmie in the dog run but I felt guilty because I knew how much she hated thunder.

  ‘Won’t it spook the cattle more having us go round and round them all night?’ I asked.

  ‘This brings me to the good bit. They won’t be spooked because we’ll be singing as we go round and round them all night.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The hills will be alive, Ellie, with the sound of music.’

  ‘They will?’

  ‘I’m not singing,’ Gavin announced.

  Homer turned serious, but only because he knew singing did not come naturally to Gavin and it would be a hard job to persuade him.

  ‘You have to sing, mate. I don’t really mean singing, like the national anthem or something. But you’ve got to make a noise, a steady noise, all the time you’re going around the mob. Just a blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah is fine. The main thing is not to stop. It’s so they know who you are and where you are. These guys are so twitchy that if you come out of the darkness at them with no warning they’ll start running and they won’t stop till they’re in Wirrawee.’

  Gavin was — and I’ve been waiting to use this word ever since I learnt it — nonplussed.

  For a short time I felt like an idiot as we began our circuits. We stuck to the same route and the idea was not to catch up with the person in front or let the person behind catch up with you. I went first and it took me a few minutes to even think of a song. My mind had gone completely blank. But I heard Homer behind me calling quietly, ‘Come on, Ellie, can’t hear you.’

  So in a voice that sounded like a windmill needing urgent maintenance I launched into ‘So Much Water’. And if that wasn’t sad enough I followed up with ‘Revelator’, trying to sound like Gillian Welch. How would she feel, I wondered, if she knew her words were being sung in a paddock ten thousand or so k’s from where she lived, to stop a mob of cattle from rioting?

  Behind me Gavin’s tuneless voice gradually grew in confidence, with a chant that had no connection with any song I’d ever heard, except that I’d heard Gavin chant like that before sometimes, when he was tired or unhappy and he didn’t think I could hear him. And then behind him, fainter because he was further away, Homer launched into the kind of stuff Triple J was playing now that Triple J was back on the air.

  In some situations it might have been quite nice doing this. And there were moments when I felt quite nice doing it. But too much had changed in my life. Since the attack on the house I didn’t feel safe out here in the darkness. I didn’t know if there might be another attack, and if there was, what would happen to me. I didn’t want to die. It dawned on me gradually that the murder of my parents might have taught me something I didn’t properly know about before. Oh of course I’d known about fear and felt fear, known what it was like to be scared. But it hadn’t stopped me. Now I felt in my gut that maybe I had a new fear and it would stop me, it was already stopping me. I kept looking around, not at the cattle, but in the other direction, half expecting something to leap at me out of the shado
ws. And that something was death. I felt lonely so often nowadays, and being out here was like putting myself in the loneliest situation I could find. Like someone with claustrophobia locking herself into a tea-chest for a few hours.

  The other problem that night was a bit more ordinary, a lot more ordinary, but in the end it kind of drove the first one away. And it was the good old problem that dominated our lives and had done since I was born and would keep doing so forever. Dad said to me once: ‘YouVe got the land and you’ve got the stock and you’ve got the weather, and that’s all there is to farming.’

  I was too young to figure out what the point of this was so I just looked at him blankly and he said, ‘See, all you’ve got to do is know everything there is to know about those three things and you’ve got farming under control.’

  Then I understood that he was being funny — well, as funny as Dad ever got — and that if something can be reduced to one simple word, like ‘weather’, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is simple. A friend of mine had a saying, ‘If you don’t talk about the weather, what else is there to talk about?’ and that’s hilariously amusing, ROFL too, but he was still making a serious point, that country people talk about the weather because it matters to them, it controls them, it is the be-all and end-all of their lives.

  Well, the weather wasn’t simple that night. The thunder rumbled again, and lightning wiggled across the sky in the distance, just a little bolt, but enough to have my skin prickling. The dark sky felt closer and heavier. We all had torches but I didn’t want to waste the batteries so I tried to make do without mine most of the time. A scatter of rain fell across me, then stopped, then started again, this time with more dedication. We were so well organised that as well as torches we had rain jackets. I stopped and unrolled mine and put it on, trying hard not to let it wave around or make a noise in case it sparked the cattle. Looking back I caught a glimpse of Gavin in the light of his torch. He seemed to be doing the same as me.

  The rain got quite enthusiastic. We were just doing personification in English the other day. This rain was having more fun as it went along, and soon it was having a party. I hunched up and kept going, singing louder to make up for the quiet drumming on the dead leaves and the bark of winter. Now I was onto ‘My dad picks the fruit that goes to Cottees…’ Perhaps it should have made me sad about my dad but it didn’t.

  The thunder got louder, rolling and rolling. Ten-pin bowling by the Gods? That was Kevin’s theory. I’d never been ten-pin bowling. Forget bowling and pay attention to the cattle, Ellie. All the beasts I could see were on their feet. I moved faster, to head off half-a-dozen who were peeling away for an unknown destination. It was hard to run and sing at the same time but I got to them and turned them. Then, just as they swung reluctantly around, a huge crack went off somewhere to my right, I saw a shower of blue sparks, the ground vibrated, the smell of lightning burnt into my nostrils, and the cattle were away.

  My first thought was to sprint for the four-wheeler. I wasn’t far from it and without it I’d be useless. But the cattle were surging towards me and they weren’t going to stop. The white faces of the Hereford-crosses stood out but I saw the dark bodies too, and the earth quivered with the accelerating mass of the mob. They would run over me like they were gravel trucks and I was an empty drink carton in the middle of the road.

  As they built up speed the ground and sky shook with their power. I sprinted for a tree on my right. It wasn’t the closest but it would get me nearer to the four-wheeler. I knew if I tripped on a log or a bump in the ground I was dead. I had about two seconds to reach the safety of the white trunk. My God, the speed of a stampeding steer, the speed of a mob. They came at me, they were in my face, but they didn’t see me. Their eyes were fierce and focused. I’d never seen cattle like this. All that breeding we’d done, that thousands of farmers had done over so many generations, all those carefully worked-out bloodlines, so we could get stock with good temperament, all that was gone, and in the primitive world of lightning and thunder the crack of one bolt had fused something ancient in their brains and bodies. They were still accelerating as I raced for the tree. One of them did actually see me and swerved slightly; the others never deviated for a moment, but I flung myself at the tree, feeling the hot breath of the mob wrapping itself around me, and smelling something that wasn’t fear or rage or desperation, that was beyond fear, was something the English language is still trying to find a word for.

  Wow. That was as close as I ever want to be to death, I told myself, panting like mad and for the first time in my life wanting to hug a tree.

  The gap between the next tree and me was a shambles of bushes and bark and a broken branch. A cow was floundering around in it, but the rest of the mob had avoided it so I scrambled through without much danger except that my breathing was still crazy. I’ve never had asthma but I got an idea then of how it would feel, the chest heaving without my being able to control it, the lungs begging for air but not getting any, the white lights going off in my brain as I waited for the oxygen to arrive.

  Unfortunately I didn’t have time to wait for the oxygen. I ran to the next tree, dodging the last few cattle as I went. I thought I was home free but a young steer came charging at a different angle to the others. He came out of nowhere. I didn’t see him till the last moment. I spun to try to get away but he caught me with his flank and knocked me sideways. I deliberately kept rolling as he thundered past. He wasn’t interested in me, just in the mindless fury of the stampede. His back hoof caught me and the blow seemed to echo through my head. There was a dull shocked feeling. I thought the left side of my skull had been caved in. I got on my hands and knees and shook my head. It seemed to still be there, although I didn’t shake too hard in case it flew off and I had to waste time looking for it in the undergrowth. With no eyes it would take a long time.

  I did think I heard my teeth rattle, and I certainly felt them. Trying to ignore the pain and the instant headache, I got up and went on towards the motorbike. For a few minutes I wasn’t even sure why I was looking for it, but I knew it was something to do with cattle and by the time I’d found it my head was a bit clearer.

  Really all this took only thirty seconds. Cattle were still blundering around on all sides but the main mob were well away. I could hear Gavin’s motorbike, the farm Yamaha, but not Homer’s Honda. The Yammie was going up towards the ridge. ‘Clever Gavin,’ I thought. ‘He’s going to swing them back north.’

  If they ran into the fence I didn’t know what would happen. A fence wouldn’t stop a mob of stampeding cattle but it could cause a disaster. If the leaders went head-on into it and the fence wasn’t immediately flattened, if there was a pile-up with the first twenty or so, then another hundred or two ramming them, we’d have an instant abattoir. It wasn’t difficult to get a mental picture of a mob of cattle piled on top of each other, with broken legs, broken ribs, broken necks. Mr Young would be a little slow with the next agistment cheque if that happened.

  My head still felt numb and strange as I got on the bike. I went flat-chat though. If Gavin could swing them to the north, I wanted to be in a position near the western fence so I could turn them again.

  Riding through the night at high speed like that is pretty crazy. You can keep your Luna Parks and the Wild Mouse and the Shock Drop. I knew that sooner or later I’d be in the clear part of the paddock, where it’d be safer, but those first few minutes, going through scrub, making instant decisions every second, with a head that felt like an overripe pineapple, were on the wrong side of fun for me. There were no tracks but there was bracken, fallen branches, bark, a log here, a hole there, a wallaby trying to outgun the bike, a couple of bewildered-looking cattle suddenly looming up in the glare of the headlights. I never knew whether high-beam was a good idea or not on that bike, because with high-beam you can see further but you can’t see the ground immediately in front of you. I kept switching from low to high and back again.

  The rain started coming in hard. ‘Like w
e haven’t got enough problems already,’ I thought. Tiny ferocious drops stung my face. More strange-looking cattle appeared. They looked strange to me because I wasn’t used to cattle who’d turned their back on humans. And they looked at me strangely, as if they didn’t seem to know who they were any more. I ignored them and raced on, squinting through the rain, trying to get into some clear space. I crossed a narrow bit of grass and suddenly nearly slammed into the mob. Above the rat-a-tat-tat of the motorbike I could hear the thump-thump-thump of their hooves on the earth, like there was a band playing at the Anlezarks’ place and the beat of the bass guitar was travelling through the ground from five k’s away.

  The cattle were focused now. They must have been tired, although you wouldn’t think it to look at them. But all their energy was going into the stampede. They didn’t have the strength to bellow. They were rushing to nowhere but all their strength was needed for the race. Reminded me of some of the kids at school.

  I had to trust Gavin to turn them. I waited till they had passed then gunned the bike up the hill. I was getting coldly wet. At the top of the hill I let the bike idle and tried to guess from the throbbing of the earth where they were going. The noise sharpened, seemed to rise a note, became louder. The throbbing of the bike and the ground were now synchronised. Gradually the beat of the cattle hooves got louder and stronger. I squared myself around a little on the bike, to face them, at the same time thinking how amazing it was that one average-size human could have the cheek to think she could have any influence on a mob of huge mad beasts coming straight at her.

  Before I could think about that any more they were there, the leaders toiling up over the ridge, galumphing now instead of galloping. I strained to look at their eyes, hoping I’d see tiredness instead of madness, but they were still too far away and the rain made it impossible.