John Marsden - Circle of fight

We weeded on in silence for a while, after my long speech. Then we took the piles of thistles and sorrel and God knows what else to the dump, in the back of the ute. It’d be someone else’s dump after tomorrow. Someone else would see the discarded packing of our lives. As I swept the last bits out of the back Bronte propped herself on a rake and looked at me.

‘Are you still in love with Jeremy?’ she asked.

‘No, I don’t think so. Not because he’s got mental problems. I don’t know. I don’t think I was ever that in love with him in the first place.’

‘But you are in love.’

I paused. Yes I was. And always had been. I just hadn’t noticed for a while. Trust Bronte. She was the cleverest person I’d ever met. She knew everything.

‘He loves you too,’ she said.

‘Do you think so?’

‘I know it.’

‘Has he said something to you?’

‘Not specifically. Not that. But when he talks about you, especially when he talks about what you went through during the war, it’s like he’s bursting with love. He adores you.’

‘Wow. Wow. Are you sure? Oh wow.’

We got in the car and drove back. Luckily the ute knew the way to the house without my having to do anything. If I’d needed to navigate we might have ended up at Uluru.

I was up bright and early. Well, early anyway. Bronte had stayed the night and Lee turned up for breakfast, along with Homer. Fi arrived about ten, so we had a good chance to get a lot done, although there were heaps of interruptions. I knew that no matter how much work we did, the place wasn’t going to be perfect, so I just had to accept that.

Fi brought a lot of flowers with her, because there weren’t too many in our garden compared to when my mother looked after it, so she started putting those in vases all through the house. Homer and Lee got stuck into the machinery shed, tidying it up a bit more, and Bronte and I cleaned away breakfast. Then I did a mow while Bronte cut back the grass around the dog pens. Fi started baking scones, so there’d be a nice smell through the house for the final inspection. Not everyone can cope with our stove but Fi handled it with ease.

Marmie ran around and got in everyone’s way, while I tried to check that she wasn’t doing a dump anywhere.

After Madeleine’s report I was very self-conscious about dogs doing stuff they weren’t meant to. Well, doing it in places they weren’t meant to, anyway.

At least the auction and all the preparations were taking my mind off Gavin. I hadn’t seen him since Thursday and I’d told him I probably wouldn’t be able to visit today, although maybe I’d get there if the sale was over quickly. The cottage he was in didn’t look too bad and he said the other kids were OK, but they were all older than him, and I noticed he didn’t mix with them. He said the food was crap, but Gavin always says that, even about the meals I make sometimes. Which admittedly aren’t always perfect.

We’d already had a couple of open days for buyers to come and have a look, plus Jerry Parsons had been bringing people for private inspections almost every day, so the place wasn’t really too messy. At one-thirty they were allowed to poke around again, so we had to be done by then. It was such a violation, having all these strangers trample around making loud comments on the way you do things, but that’s the way it was and if all went well I wouldn’t have to worry about it again after today.

Mr Parsons was good, he got there at about noon, with his son and daughter, who came along for the ride. They even brought their own lunch. I knew Justin from school. He was a good kid who was into outdoors stuff and wanted to be a farmer. They pitched in and helped too, moving a pile of roofing iron which we hadn’t had time to move ourselves. Don’t know how many snakes they found under it but I reckon there would have been one or two. The crowd started coming in early, about one-fifteen. Jerry Parsons had an assistant at the front gate, and they were in contact by walkie-talkie, but it got to the point where he said he couldn’t hold them much longer, so in they stampeded. It was like an endless convoy coming up the driveway. I didn’t know there were that many people in Wirrawee. But there’s nothing like an auction to get people out and about. Everyone loves an auction, except when it’s your own I guess, cos I wasn’t too much in love with this one.

I was glad Gavin wasn’t there to see it. His bedroom was the neatest it had ever been, thanks to Fi, but he wouldn’t have recognised it. There could have been three hundred people go through it during the afternoon. As Homer said, I wish I’d sold tickets. Homer was great and I stuck close to him. Lee kept a low profile. This kind of thing wasn’t his scene.

I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, along with all the old familiar faces of course. Homer’s parents were there, being potential bidders, not to mention being my guardians. But really, it was like Ms Randall had picked up on, they didn’t often waste too much time with that. There were all the other neighbours: the Youngs, whom I’d grown to love like they were a second family; the Lucases; the Nelsons, who were as bad as Mr Rodd. Mrs Rowntree, from Tara, with her new husband, a horse trainer. They were turning their place into a horse stud. Young Tammie Murdoch, who was as wild as her grandmother, and had inherited the family property just the other day. Jodie Lewis, from Wirrawee, who’d been run over ages ago, and was in hospital for ages, and she still wasn’t right, even though she was walking again. The McPhails and Randall, the big lout, still living at home and sponging off his parents. Col McCann. I felt so guilty about his bull. I wondered if he’d sent it to the abattoir. He’d never mentioned the two dead men to me, but I hadn’t asked either. Mr Roxburgh, from Gowan Brae, one of the best farmers in the district; Mrs Leung, who’d lost her husband in the war; and Mr Jay, who must have been ninety-five but hadn’t aged a day in the last five years and who I was now convinced would live forever. Sal Grinaldi was there, wanting to tell me a joke, and Mr George, and Morrie Cavendish complaining about rainfall, and my good mate Jack Edgecombe. Even the Kings came down from the hills.

At the same time, though, there were so many people I didn’t know, most of the crowd in fact, that it made me realise even more forcefully how things were changing. The old days were gone, that was for sure, and after today they’d be a bit more gone.

I don’t know how many people were actually thinking of buying the place. Could have been none. It wouldn’t have surprised me. No, the Linton place was the main tourist attraction in the Wirrawee district this weekend and everyone had turned up for the free entertainment.

The CWA were doing a sausage sizzle so we got our lunch from them. At least they didn’t charge me.

The auction started about ten minutes late, out the front. Jerry Parsons said to wait inside the house but I couldn’t, so I perched on the lowest branch of the old oak tree on the other side of the driveway, the tree I had spent so many hours in as a kid, and, with a hand on Homer’s head below me, tightly watched and listened as Mr Parsons started firing up the crowd.

I can’t remember everything he said, but there was a lot of stuff about this being a famous property, one of the best in the district, ‘lovingly developed and maintained by successive generations of the Linton family’, with improvements including ‘this gracious home behind me, which I’m sure you’ve all had a good chance to look through by now, and the very spacious machinery shed, along with the shearing shed which is one of the oldest in the district and has been recognised by the National Trust as being of historic significance, and most recently a fine new set of cattle yards which have just been completed’. He read a lot of that stuff off the brochure.