John Marsden - Incurable

Pang had ignored the spare room and was asleep in my bed but Bronte had kept awake somehow. She came to the door. It was strange, I was being welcomed into my own home by someone I still didn’t know all that well.

She ushered us in and with no fuss got us organised with Milo and noodles and toast. I don’t know what it is about toast. It’s the most comforting smell in the world. Even if you’re not feeling hungry, once you get a whiff of someone else’s bread in the toaster, you find yourself hypnotically drawn towards the loaf, and before you know it you’re pulling out a couple of slices and dropping them in. That liquorice smell that hangs around Darrell Lee’s, which someone told me they get by burning liquorice oil in an aromatherapy thing, that has a strong effect on me too, and so do chooks cooking in supermarkets, but nothing beats toast. I reckon home is where the toast is.

Anyway, even though I could hardly keep my eyes and lips open, it was incredibly comforting to sit around the table and talk. If anyone’s going to keep a secret, it’d be Bronte. She has such calmness and strength that you know you can trust her with the name of your newest boyfriend, the password for your emails and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls. If we were going to stop news of our activities spreading around Wirrawee, we didn’t have to worry about it coming from Bronte. All that aside, I was still worried about how much we could tell her, because of it being Liberation business, but the others didn’t hold back at all. So I went along with their judgement.

Homer did most of the talking, but this time he had a bit of competition from Jess. ‘The intelligence was pretty good,’ Homer said. ‘We found them approximately where we were supposed to find them. They had three houses, right next to the shopping centre, and at least four vehicles. We watched for about forty-five minutes, and there were a heap of them, getting themselves organised. They were obviously planning a major raid. But we’re good boys and girls, and we did like the Scarlet Pimple said, and we didn’t attack, just watched.’

‘We counted eighteen guys,’ Jess said. ‘They were pretty open about what they were doing. Carrying rifles around and loading ammunition into the car. Anyone who was wandering past could have stopped and taken a look.’

‘Yeah, like we did, more or less,’ Homer said. ‘Anyway, we decided to move on to phase three, and head down the highway a few hundred metres and wait for them there. We’d seen a good spot. But at that point things went horribly wrong. We’d borrowed a couple of utes, so we piled into one and left the other as a back-up. Our quickest way out was through the supermarket car park, and we figured that it was dark enough to be safe. So off we went, but unfortunately we didn’t get very far.’

‘I’d better interrupt at this point,’ Lee said. ‘Because otherwise Homer will take half an hour to get this out, but the fact is I ran over a woman in the car park.’

I did stop eating my toast when he said that. I sat there with the slice halfway to my mouth, staring at Lee.

‘It’s okay,’ Lee added. ‘I didn’t mash her into a pizza shape. She bounced right up again. But you know how it is, you can’t just drive on, although if I had my time again I would have. But I was so shocked, I stopped the car and I opened the door. The woman was standing right in front of us, looking pretty wild, which is fair enough, and I didn’t think I should run over her a second time.’

‘Then,’ Jess said, ‘before we knew it her husband or someone appeared jabbering away, getting all excited, and we were in the middle of a diarrhoea epidemic.’

I did laugh at that. But now I understood how things had gone so badly wrong.

‘To cut a long story short,’ Homer said, ‘we had to abandon the vehicle. We had a couple of cars up our arse, which was pretty uncomfortable, as you can imagine, but it also meant we couldn’t reverse. Lee jumped back in and did this amazing manoeuvre to the corner of the car park and then we piled out and ran for it. We hid about a hundred metres down the road and waited till we thought the excitement would have died down. Then we tiptoed delicately back, feeling very happy that it seemed so quiet.’

‘Too quiet,’ Jess said.

‘Seems like they were waiting for us,’ Jeremy said.

‘And then,’ Homer continued, ‘Ellie arrived.’

Lee made a trumpet noise.

‘She practises doing this,’ Homer said to Bronte and Jess.

I had the feeling that Homer and Lee were getting a bit sick of me saving them, or worse, me getting credit. Well, I was happy to stop any time.

Jess stuck up for me though. ‘God, it was amazing,’ she said. ‘Ellie, you are an amazing hunk of womanhood. You sure came at the right time, and you had so many smart ideas. I swear, if you hadn’t turned up, we’d be in the dump masters, and not because we were making an escape either. We’d be on our way to the tip, in little pieces.’

‘Oh, shucks,’ I said. ‘You know the trouble with the world nowadays? There’s no telephone booths for superheroes to get changed. Everyone’s got mobiles. I had a serious problem with that.’

‘What happened?’ Bronte asked me.

‘Well, I’d tracked them to this coconut tree place,’ I said, ‘because I remembered these guys mentioning it before they left. They were in a slightly complicated situation when I found them, but there was a four-wheel drive with keys in it and the door open. So I suggested they get in the dump master, because I figured the steel sides would keep bullets out, and then I got a bit of chain and used the four-wheel drive to tow them across the car park. When I think back, it seems like a crazy idea, but it worked. Then we just piled in a ute they’d laid on, and drove home. Except that we lost the ute along the way.’

‘It’s been the most amazing twenty-four hours of my life,’ Jess told Bronte. ‘You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been through. We were being followed by these guys on motorbikes, and we ambushed them, with petrol. It was terrible. But Ellie…’

I could see that the next little while was going to be uncomfortable. I wasn’t just being modest, like ‘Oh no, really, I’m not that great,’ it was a bit more than that. I felt that if they all had to sit there telling Bronte how good a job I’d done (because I knew I had done a good job) it would make them uncomfortable and they’d even get a bit jealous. No matter how much you like someone, or admire something they’ve done, there’s a limit to how long you can sit around praising them to other people, especially in front of their face. So I went to the bathroom.

By the time I’d got back, Gavin was asleep in the old brown armchair and the others were staggering around like zombies. I put Gavin to bed, then crawled in beside Pang, leaving the older kids to their own devices. They were big enough to find beds for themselves, and they knew where the spare blankets and pillows were stored.

It’s amazing how adaptable humans are. I guess it’s not just humans. Cows can adjust from one paddock to the next, from thunderstorms to sunshine and back to thunderstorms, from eating lucerne to eating clover, from being on a truck to not being on a truck.

At school one day I’d been walking behind a Year 10 kid who was going down the long corridor from Block A to Block B. It struck me, because I didn’t have anything else to think about, how flexible she was at reacting to so many different things just in that short time. She smiled and gave a huge ‘Hi’ to a Year 11 guy, she picked up a book for a Year 7 kid who was having trouble balancing all his stuff, she said, ‘Good morning Mrs Barlow,’ very politely as Mrs Barlow headed past, she yelled, ‘Love the eyebrows, Daphne,’ to another Year 10 girl, she said, ‘Why don’t you stand in the middle of the frigging corridor and stop everybody getting past?’ to a group of Year 8’s who were standing in the middle of the frigging corridor and not letting anybody get past. She jogged ahead of me to catch up with a friend, put her arm around her friend’s shoulders, and said, ‘Hi Laura,’ as they turned left together into the classroom.