John Marsden - Incurable

Lee and Pang left and I missed Pang’s bright friendly chatter but I didn’t miss Lee much. I was scared of the way he looked at me, those dark brooding eyes, sombre and impenetrable. I didn’t know what he expected of me any more, but whatever it was, I was fairly certain that I couldn’t provide it.

I didn’t hear from Homer but I assumed he was chained to the bed and banned from leaving the house again until 2050. Then he rang and said he’d had to tell his parents a bit about Liberation, and they weren’t happy, and Liberation wasn’t happy, but the Scarlet Pimple was trying to get him a new motorbike and he’d asked for a four-wheeler for me.

Jess rang twice and Bronte twice a day. Bronte and I talked a lot. I told her about Jeremy but needless to say I didn’t tell Jess.

I didn’t see Jeremy, or hear from him. In a way that didn’t matter to me. I felt a kind of security, knowing that he was out there. I felt like now we had an understanding and it wouldn’t go away in a hurry. I was in a strange mood. I felt a great tiredness after escaping from the shopping centre and the helicopter. Suddenly I was eighty years old. I’d been tired plenty of times during the war, but never like this. This was in my bones. I wandered the house, looking after Gavin but not after myself. I travelled the paddocks dreaming of life with Jeremy. I didn’t know if I was in love or just distracted for a short time by his warm hands and strong presence. The thing I found strange was that most of the time I felt not happy but sad. Is that love? Or was it just the sadness of living my life?

Sometimes a river of sadness flowed through me. Not depression, not grief, not despair, just sadness. I moved heavily and I was clumsy, I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t laugh very much. I wanted my parents back. I wanted them so badly that nothing else mattered. And all the time, shadowing my sadness, was a terrible fear, the fear that I would never recover. If only someone could have assured me that one day the sadness would go, that one day I would charge up the hills running and puffing and laughing, one day I would roll down the hills giggling and wheezing and hurting myself on rocks and thorns. I wanted to see a hill that was warm and bright in the full open light of the sun. I knew I couldn’t be on that hill yet, but I wanted someone to tell me, ‘Ellie, you will play there one day. It is your hill and you will be there.’

I think the worst thing is to know that you will be sad forever. When parents lose a child, isn’t that what they know from the moment the policeman opens his mouth? When a sister loses a brother, isn’t that the truth that fills them in an instant? There is no cure for that kind of sadness.

Laughter and carefree love, all the bright things, it seemed like they gleamed and glistened for other people.

I think I was starting to understand one of the great paradoxes. I love paradoxes. I think they contain all the truth in the world. The only trouble is that I can’t understand them. ‘The more things change, the more things stay the same.’ ‘The greater your knowledge, the less you know.’ ‘Most people aren’t brave enough to be cowards.’ ‘Every exit is an entry to somewhere.’ ‘Less is more.’ I mean, I understand those, but I have to work at it. I remember during the war Homer saying to me, ‘I’m an atheist,’ and then adding, ‘Thank God.’

The paradox about love is that it hurts and it heals. It makes you feel better, only to make you feel worse. You go into it knowing it will betray you but you go into it anyway. And another paradox is that you go into it as an individual, because you as an individual are in love with someone, but from the start you lose so much of your individuality. I was starting to fall seriously in love with Jeremy, so right away, what happens? I start worrying about what Jeremy thinks of me, trying to guess what he likes and doesn’t like about me, thinking about ways of changing myself so that he will like me even more. It’s pretty dumb when you think that I’m the person he seemed to like, not the me I was contemplating changing myself into.

I’d always had this image of myself standing on top of Tailor’s Stitch singing ‘The Sound of Music’. Not really. But I did go to the hills when my heart was lonely. If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I’m a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I’m a mountain girl. When the weekend rolled around and Gavin got a rare invitation for a sleepover, from Mark, even though Mark was born standing up and talking back, even though Mark would choke a chook that clucked the wrong way, I thought, ‘This is my chance,’ and pushed Gavin out the door with his bag packed.

As soon as he’d gone, I took the long walk up the spur. It’s a bit strange, I suppose, but I hadn’t connected that spur with the deaths of my parents and Mrs Mackenzie. I mean, it’s not like they were killed there, but I was climbing it when I heard the shots that ended their lives and ended my world. As I got close to that place again I started to feel quite weird. My legs got heavy and didn’t want to do what they were paid for; my arms tingled; my throat blocked up and started saying no to oxygen.

Melissa Carpenter, who lived about three k’s from us and got the same bus, was one of those mad horse people, along with her parents. Everyone knows the thing about how you gotta get back on the horse after you fall off. When Melissa was twelve she fell off big-time. Her favourite horse bucked at a snake and threw her. She knew right away she’d done some serious damage, and in fact it turned out she’d broken three bones in her back. She’s been lucky — at one stage they thought she was heading for life in a wheelchair. So anyway, she’s lying on the ground, waiting for the ambulance and wondering if she’s ever going to walk again, and her father kneels beside her and whispers, ‘Honey, I know you’re in a bit of pain but do you think you could manage to get back on Barney for a minute, just so you don’t lose your confidence?’

I thought about that as I stood a hundred metres from that place on the spur and sweated with memories and fear. It was kind of funny the way Mr Carpenter had been so determined to get Melissa back onto Barney, because even though we all laughed when we heard the story (and once we knew Melissa was going to be OK), in a way Mr Carpenter was right, because from that day on Melissa never got on Barney or any other horse again.

Now here I stood gazing at the spur, suddenly awash with memories and wondering if I would ever be able to get up on Tailor’s Stitch again. Because I couldn’t get past that spot where I’d been when I heard the shots. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t known this was going to happen. The violence of my life was threatening to close the mountains to me. The war and the fighting and the killing were blocking the promise of good things in the future. I needed to get up that rocky slope and walk the high ridge.

I took a few more steps but my legs wouldn’t move any further. I knew I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t been beaten by many things over the last eighteen months but I could not make this simple climb. The air wouldn’t give way for me, the paralysis was too powerful.

I was lonely and I wanted to go to the hills and hear the songs I had heard before. I wanted my heart to be filled with the sound of music. I felt that if my future were to include love I’d have to find a way to get past that spot on the spur. But it wasn’t going to happen today. It mightn’t ever happen again.

Seemed like it hadn’t been a very successful sleepover either. Gavin was already home, which wasn’t in the script. I didn’t realise for a while. Normally I could tell where he was, as he often didn’t know when he was making a noise. He’d figured out of course that certain sounds attract attention and certain sounds were louder than others, but he forgot.