by Tim Slee
In the end it turns out we wouldn’t have been allowed to leave the town anyway. The Sorrento police have already organised for us to pull up at the reserve and there are some people from the cricket club there and they’ve opened up the change rooms for showers by the time we get there and are pulling sausages out of a big fridge and they’ve opened the bar.
The clubhouse is a big two-storey place with a balcony but Mum says we have to stay on the ground floor and not go exploring and we’ll all be having an early night so don’t get any ideas. The club is called the Sharks and pretty soon there’s lots of people in the bar. Most of the cricketers have stayed on and I recognise a few people from the pub balcony who gave us money. Geraldine is interviewing people to see if they heard about the funeral horse and cart and most of them say they have but I don’t know, maybe they’re just saying it to get their name in the Melbourne paper.
‘I support the farmers,’ one of them is saying to her. ‘All right? I think it’s really sad what happened to the lady there.’ He’s pointing with his beer glass. ‘But this shit, sorry, this stuff with burning down businesses? I’m not saying I have sympathy for the banks, no way, but there’s people who work in that supermarket, what about them? They have to live too, just like the farmers.’
‘Fuck the banks,’ says the guy next to him, really quiet. ‘Fuck big business.’ He’s just standing at the bar, looking up at a telly and not really in the conversation.
Geraldine looks over at him. ‘You don’t feel the same?’ she asks. ‘Would you like to tell me what you think about this funeral procession?’
‘I just did,’ the man says. ‘You can quote me on it.’
Geraldine looks a bit disappointed, but then she sees another group of men and goes over to them instead.
‘Fuck the fucking banks,’ the man says again and looks down at me. ‘Sorry, kid, but you come into a bar, you’re going to hear stuff.’
‘It’s people’s jobs, Rhys,’ the first guy says. ‘You burn down the banks, where does it stop? Supermarkets too? You work at the servo. How about if they burned that down? Whole town goes up in flames and you’re out of a job, how about that?’
‘My dad died,’ I tell the first guy. I don’t know why. Anyway, I’ve said it.
‘Oh shit,’ the man says. ‘I’m sorry, all right.’
‘Don’t be saying that to people,’ the angry man says to me. ‘I might agree with what your mum is doing, but it’s not the fault of people here your dad died.’ He puts a hand on my shoulder and gives me a little push. ‘Go find your mum, eh.’
I don’t go looking for Mum. I decide it’s more interesting following Geraldine around and working out who’s with us and who’s against us. After talking to another ten people she notices me standing there. ‘What’s up?’
‘Six-four,’ I tell her. ‘With the two other guys, that’s seven-five.’
‘Seven-five what?’ she asks, putting away her recorder.
‘Seven who support us, five who don’t,’ I tell her.
‘Hadn’t looked at it like that,’ she says. ‘I’ll call that a majority in my next article, shall I?’
The cricket club captain gets up on the bar and announces that the money from the sausage sizzle and the bar will ‘go to the widow’, and this gets a cheer. Jenny and me are sitting in a little office where a lady said we could use the internet to check Jenny’s Facebook and GoFundMe and things.
‘What are you doing?’
She pulls on her bottom lip and clicks on a page. ‘How do you make a petrol bomb?’
I reach for the mouse. ‘Don’t even joke about it.’
‘I’m not joking,’ she says, pushing my hand away. ‘Is it like, just petrol in a bottle or something? How do you light it without blowing yourself up? Can you . . .’
‘You are not going to google “petrol bombs”,’ I say. ‘You moron. I bet the police are already watching your Facebook . . .’
‘Wow, paranoid much?’ she asks.
‘They would be,’ I say. ‘They’ll be watching all of us, just waiting for an excuse to arrest us.’
She sighs. ‘So because you’re afraid, we shouldn’t do anything, we should just sit on that stupid milk cart behind that stupid horse all the way to Melbourne and then bury Dad, if he’s even dead, and then what?’
‘I don’t know, find a house and a school in Melbourne I guess.’
‘You think too small, Jack,’ she says. She clicks the mouse, pushes her screen so I can see it. ‘One hundred and twenty-two now,’ she says. ‘Thousand. I moved about two thousand of it out of PayPal to Mum’s bank account so she can give it to the people who need money for petrol and food and the ferry.’
‘She’ll ask where it came from.’
‘She won’t. She never checks how much is in there. I asked her how much we had and she said she has no idea, but one day she’ll go to the machine and it will say no and we’ll be broke and that’ll be that.’
‘Could I get new soccer boots?’ I ask her.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘After we buy back our farm.’
‘OK.’
‘And the cows.’
‘Yeah yeah, I get it.’
‘And rebuild the house.’
‘Shut up.’
‘And buy all new furniture and plates and glasses and knives and forks and a telly because Mum and Dad sold ours.’
‘So funny.’
‘Oh, and a soccer ball, because you’d need something to kick with your new boots.’
Luckily before I hit Jen, Geraldine comes up to us. ‘You two just going to sit there arguing all night, or do you want to come out to the road and plant your crosses?’
I swear it wasn’t Jenny. I know she was talking about it and for a minute, when we heard about it, I looked at her like, you did not, did you? but she shook her head. It wasn’t her.
But someone burned down one of the banks on Ocean Beach Road overnight and according to Mr Alberti they must have had balls like a Brahman bull because there was a police car parked right out the front and whoever it was piled a huge stack of wood up against the back door and set it on fire and then the door caught fire and then the ceiling inside caught fire and in about ten minutes by the time the policeman out the front knew what was happening the whole back of the bank was on fire. But the fire brigade put the fire out before the whole building went up and the shops next door were OK.
Apparently there were sirens going for hours and you could smell the smoke from where we were camped but Jenny and I didn’t hear a thing.
And that’s not the big news, according to Deb. She’s been sitting in her car with Ben, listening to the early morning radio news, thinking they might hear about the fire in Sorrento some more.
‘There were two other fires,’ she says, coming over to the milk cart. ‘One yesterday afternoon, one last night, up north.’
‘I know,’ Mr Garrett says. ‘Someone in the shower block was saying. Supermarket in Gruyere and a bank in the Fleurieu.’
‘Gruyere’s in the Dandenongs,’ Mum says. ‘Where’s Fleurieu?’
‘South Australia.’
‘You started something now, Dawn,’ Mr Alberti says, and he sounds scared. ‘This is really something now.’
‘I didn’t start this,’ Mum says and she looks at Coach Don. ‘I didn’t start any fires.’
‘Don’t give me your evil eye, woman,’ Coach Don says. ‘You think I have some sort of magic X-Man rocket plane that can transport me from Sorrento to the Dandenongs and over to South Aussie and back again while you’re asleep?’
‘Did you hear?’ Karsi says, running up. ‘Apparently there was a phone call before the fire in South Australia. They said someone sprayed the bank window with your hashtag.’
‘What’s a hashtag?’ Mum asks.
Karsi looks at us. ‘It’s what the kids have put on all their crosses, #BURN. It’s on the banners on the side of the milk cart. People were waving it on placards in Colac. How could you not have seen it?’
Mum gets annoyed. ‘Don’t patronise me, Hussein Karsioglu. I’ve had just about all I can take from you lot,’ she says and she stumps off in the direction of the ladies’ toilets. Jenny runs after her.
Jenny and I felt a bit funny doing the thing with the crosses last night, but Geraldine said it was important to keep up routines. She even suggested we set fire to it because that would make a good picture but I pointed out there was a fire ban and we’d get in trouble and she dropped it.
After breakfast Jenny and me get the harness on Danny all by ourselves in a world-record twelve and a half minutes, and even Mr Garrett is impressed. Danny looks like he’s had a good rest because he’s stomping and snorting and wants to get rolling before Mr Garrett even has himself sat down. We have about fifteen cars in the procession, because some more have come across on the morning ferry from Queenscliff, but Mr Alberti, Coach Don, Mum and Alasdair have to go to the police station down by the wharf to talk to police about the latest fire, and say they’ll catch us up later.
Aunty Ell sends Darren to ride with us for company and Mr Garrett has Ben up front with him but they aren’t talking much, mostly they just listen to Ben’s phone which has a radio app on it.
As we pull out of the reserve onto the Nepean Highway, I look to see if our cross has fallen over in the night, or if it’s still standing up, because we didn’t dig it in too deep. It was kind of awkward after Geraldine’s dumb idea of setting fire to it, so we just wanted to get it done and get back to the camp.
‘Bloody hell,’ Darren says.
‘Wow,’ Jenny gasps. ‘Hold this, I want to get a photo,’ and she gives me the bread roll she’s eating and jumps down off the back of the milk cart. She’ll have to jog to catch us up but we’re used to jumping on and off when we need to go to the toilet and Danny Boy never goes much faster than a quick walk so it’s easy to grab on and jump up using the steps at the front if one of the adults gives us a hand-up.
There’s a forest of white crosses in the grass on the side of the road by the stone gates at the entrance to the racetrack. Big ones and little ones and some people standing there looking at them, and some flowers too, that people have put there. Geraldine is there, taking video, talking to a lady who’s putting a bunch of flowers down with the crosses and taking her photo. Half of the crosses are just plain white, but half of them have #BURN written in the middle or at the top.
Jenny catches us up at the roundabout going down to the main street where there are some people standing and they don’t look too happy. One of them calls out something rude and gives us the finger and he bends down and picks up a rock and throws it after us but he misses by a mile.
Jenny is going to yell something at him but Ben has turned and he pulls Jenny up onto the milk cart then puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘No, mate,’ he says. ‘That’s what he wants you to do – don’t let him think you even noticed him.’
‘He threw a rock!’ Jenny says. ‘What if he hit us?’
‘He didn’t,’ Ben says. ‘You have to realise, there’s a few people who know what we’re doing and they’re with us. And then there’s most people who have no clue who we are and only see we’re driving a horse on a main road with a coffin in the back in a procession full of cars with their lights all on, so maybe they work out it’s a funeral, but that’s all. Then there’s a few, like him, who think it’s our fault these idiots are setting fire to banks and supermarkets and they can’t get angry at those people because the police haven’t caught any of them yet, so they get angry at us.’
‘Yeah, but what are we going to do if one of them does hit us with a rock, or something worse?’ Jenny asks again.
‘We’re gonna love ’em to death, aren’t we, Ben?’ Mr Garrett laughs. ‘You bloody tree huggers,’ he shakes his head. He turns around to Jenny. ‘I got a licensed twelve-gauge shotgun in the box under my feet, girl. Anyone hits you with a rock, I’ll put a dozen pellets into their backside and see if they still want to throw rocks after that.’
‘Way to be a role model, mate,’ Ben says.
‘Can I try the gun next time we stop?’ Darren asks.
‘No. And the box is locked, right, Garrett?’
‘Yep, combi lock. Code is 000,’ Mr Garrett says with a grin.
‘It is not. That isn’t the code, Darren. Don’t listen to him.’ But then they both stop stirring each other and listen to Ben’s phone as the radio program gets cut by a news bulletin.
. . . interrupt the program for a news update. Victoria Police have advised that a third fire yesterday involving a milk truck that was parked overnight in a fenced lot in Goldwins’ Dairy Co-op in Rochester is believed to have been deliberately lit. The truck tyres and cabin were set on fire and the hashtag #BURN was spray-painted on the body of the truck. Police are reviewing CCTV footage and are asking for anyone with information about the fire to contact Crime Stoppers.
‘It’s a crowning fire now,’ Mr Garrett says, almost to himself. ‘Jumping along the tops of trees faster than the wind. We have to face it.’
We get to Dromana mid-morning and there’s a park there by the beach with a playground and something like an ice-cream van that also sells coffee and everyone decides we’ll stop for a few minutes because there’s a toilet there too. There’s just enough room for about fifteen cars and the milk cart. The police park on the main road. It’s one of those cold blue-sky days, so no one is up for a swim. The playground is a sad one made for kids under five and even they’d reckon it was boring. Just a wooden castle with a yellow plastic slide and a set of swings.
‘Swing me!’ Jenny says, like she’s about four again, and runs for one of the swings. Darren takes the other one and I push them both – one left-handed, the other right-handed, both complaining I’m not pushing hard enough. Then we go down to the water to throw stuff as Mum and the others arrive. Mum comes over, stands watching us, breathing in the air with hands on her hips and a smile on her face. A real one. The first real one I’ve seen since the house went up. She’s so pretty I almost forget again that I should still be mad at her about the coffin. Don walks over too, and she puts a hand on his shoulder.
‘I recognise this place,’ she says. ‘We stopped here once, Tom and me and the kids. For ice cream.’
‘Where have you been? Did you get arrested?’ I ask her.
‘No, hon, but the police have a lot of questions right now,’ she explains. ‘There’s been a lot of banks and things being set on fire. Three or four people have tried to burn their own properties to the ground too, like Ron did. City people, not country. People with houses who can’t pay their mortgages.’
‘Copycats,’ Jenny says.
‘I guess . . .’ Mum says. ‘Anyway, every time they do it, people are using that sign you made. The BURN one.’
‘Hashtag BURN,’ Jenny says.
‘Well anyway,’ Mum says. ‘This is bigger than your dad’s funeral now. Bigger than just dairy farmers. Centrelink sent out thousands of debt recovery notices last week and some protesters lit a fire in a Centrelink office.’
‘Are they going to let us finish the funeral?’ I ask.
Mum looks at Coach Don. ‘You just spoke to Karsi. What do you think?’
‘There’s a lot of pressure to shut us down now. Political pressure,’ Coach Don says. ‘I’m getting mixed messages. Fed Square management has given permission for a memorial speech, but Vic Police are saying it could draw in thousands of people and they don’t have the manpower. Karsi said the Highway Patrol wants us to hold here. I reckon they’re shaping to try to force us to hand over the coffin.’
‘Where’s Alasdair?’ Mum asks, looking up and down the convoy.
‘On his way,’ Coach Don says. ‘He was up in Melbourne talking to the city council – he thinks they’ll support us, if we can get there.’
‘Did the police tell you directly that we can’t go any further?’ Mum asks. She looks up the road where the police are climbing out of their patrol cars, fanning themselves w
ith their hats. A couple are waiting in the queue for coffee and ice cream.
‘Well, not in so many words . . .’ Coach Don says.
‘But not a direct order,’ Mum says, deciding something. ‘Back on the cart, kids.’ She yells out to Mr Garrett who’s filling a bucket with feed for Danny Boy, ‘Saddle up, Garrett, let’s see if they’re serious!’
He looks at her and frowns, then grabs another bucket. ‘Get some water, girl!’ he yells at Jenny and throws it to her. ‘Wet the horse down.’
Coach Don starts running down the line of cars telling people to get back in and get ready to move.
Jenny and I fill the bucket with water from a plastic barrel at the back of the milk cart. It slops everywhere as I run around to Danny Boy, who’s sweating hard from the morning sun and he tosses his head as soon as he can smell the water, nearly knocking the bucket out of my hand as he sticks his nose in. He nearly empties the bucket in a single draw, but I pull it away and throw what’s left over his flanks. Jenny refills it and does the same on the other side of him. His whole hide shivers but he looks pretty glad about it.
‘Pour some over yourselves too while you’re at it,’ Mum yells, and motions with her finger over her head to show she means it. Jenny and I look at each other and shrug, fill up our buckets again and start tossing water at each other and laughing.
‘Enough of that! All aboard!’ Mr Garrett yells and I pull away, throw my bucket up on the milk cart and climb up at the back which is not easy because it’s moving, jerking forward with big jumps as Danny Boy gets up to a quick walk. I pull Jenny up after me.
The traffic police in the ice-cream queue are a bit slow seeing us pulling back into traffic and we’re about level with their empty cop car before they realise. The people in our convoy are quicker and are already rolling.
‘Get a move on, Garrett!’ Mum yells. She’s sitting in the middle of the drivers’ bench on the left of Mr Garrett and to the right of Coach Don, looking ahead like she can will Federation Square closer just by giving the horizon fierce looks. ‘I want to see what they’re willing to do to stop us!’