John Marsden - Incurable

The second miracle is that you can adjust to it, cope with it. You’d think that the shock of the upheaval would be so overwhelming that you’d need to be put in bubble wrap for six months and fed through a tube. But no, the good old human organism is so resilient that it can bounce around from place to place with only a thirty-second adjustment. Most of the time anyway.

Actually, when I think some more about it, as I have done for about three hours since writing the last bit, I realise it’s not that simple. You make the immediate practical adjustment, you don’t wither up and die, you get on with it, but there are slow, long-term shifts needed, adjustments that happen at a much deeper level, and which maybe sometimes never happen. I guess this would be very unhealthy for the average human organism.

Anyway, how we got to the city is that after the dreadful, terrible time on the cliff, after we dragged ourselves home, after we drank a lot of hot sweet tea, after we huddled under a doona watching mindless television, after all that, at about nine o’clock, Gavin started to talk.

And oh boy, once he started, he wouldn’t shut up.

I’ve always liked Gavin’s voice. It’s low and husky, and he pronounces some words, most words, slightly differently. Often he seems to clip off the ends or twist them slightly, which makes them kind of exotic. He talks quite a lot to me, although it took a long long time before we got to that kind of relationship. Like I said before, he only talks to people he trusts, which is probably quite sensible. So people who meet him for the first time, or who don’t know him very well, assume he’s the strong silent type. Strong, yes; silent, depends who he’s with.

For the first time he told me his own stories. I remember writing quite recently about how stories give you an identity. In some ways they give you your life. You think you’re a big lump of skin and bones and blood and organs and cells, and of course you are, but you’re also a big lump of stories. You know those pictures they have in butchers’ shops showing how sheep and cattle are divided into rump and blade and so on? They should have another one, in bedrooms maybe, showing humans divided into the stories of their early childhood, the stories of their primary school days, the stories of their birthdays and Christmases, the stories of their friendships, and so on.

If you know someone’s stories, you know them. If you don’t know their stories, you don’t know them.

I hadn’t really known any of Gavin’s stories. In the early days he’d told us how he’d lived with his mum and his little sister, and that his dad had been killed in an explosion at a factory. I think Gavin was only about three at the time. I always figured that this was why he attached himself so strongly to Homer and Lee, because they were like fathers to him. Bit young for it, but still.

Now he told me story after story, filling out the details of his life, so that I started to know him in a new way. I want to write it down, because like I said at the very beginning of this whole thing, when I sat by the creek in Hell with a pen and a bit of paper, writing stuff down is a way of recording it, but more importantly, making it important, giving it meaning, except most of the time I don’t know what the meaning is. I just know that putting stuff on paper makes it solid somehow.

Gavin talked randomly and he told his stories in no particular order, but I think the general outline goes something like this: his dad was a boilermaker. I had to get him to write that down before I could work out what the word was, and as both of us were stiff and sore and tired and a bit dead mentally and physically it was quite a pain to have to go get pencil and paper, and then another pain to go get the dictionary. The dictionary said a boilermaker was someone who makes boilers. I don’t know how many boilers the world needs, but probably quite a lot.

He worked either for the Army, or in a factory that supplied the Army. Gavin wanted to think that he was in the Army, but Gavin was Army mad, so he was a bit biased. I just couldn’t imagine that the Army would have its own boilermakers, but maybe they do.

Anyway, the explosion killed four people. When Gavin tells a story he doesn’t just tell it, he acts it. Even though he was so wrecked, he couldn’t help himself. I wasn’t very comfortable under the doona with his arms and legs flying in different directions though, so I cut the description a bit short.

He seemed amazed that I hadn’t heard of the accident, but I couldn’t remember anything. It was years ago, it was hundreds of k’s from Wirrawee, and since then we’d had a full-scale war. Of course to Gavin it was the most important event of his life, but I would have been a little kid myself, with no interest in newspaper headlines or the evening news.

I couldn’t quite figure out what sort of work his mum had done. He said she was an entertainer. At first I thought he was saying trainer but when I figured entertainer I immediately thought she might be a singer with five platinum records. But when I asked him what kind of entertaining he changed and said she wasn’t an entertainer, just someone who looked after customers for a business in Marlon. Marlon’s a pretty grotty area if you ask me, but Gavin’s family lived in Mount Savage, which isn’t any better… it matches its name.

After his dad died there was one of those epidemics of death that seem to happen to some people, including me, except that I’m talking about non-war stuff, where a whole string of people die in quick succession. For Gavin it was two grandparents and his aunt and his rabbit. He didn’t know what his grandparents died of: ‘They were sick,’ he said and shrugged. But his aunt committed suicide. He was more interested in talking about his rabbit. ‘Did he commit suicide too?’ I asked, which was totally tasteless and unfunny except that he didn’t notice me say it. I rather liked the idea of a rabbit locking itself in the bathroom and taking an overdose. He said he was really upset about his rabbit, and I believe it, but it made me wonder some more about the cat he had massacred. We still hadn’t talked about the cat. It was too big a topic.

The rabbit’s name was Rick. Rick the rabbit. My first reaction to any rabbit is to shoot it, so I’m not into giving them names. If we started giving names to our rabbits we’d have to employ someone to do it. Rick didn’t seem much of a name to me but again Gavin didn’t know how he got it. ‘My sister called it that,’ he said.

Gavin acted out the death of Rick, again with more energy than I could muster. I got the impression that Rick had eaten something wrong and died of stomach problems. It did occur to me, watching Gavin and listening to his stories, that there were gaps in him, and they were the gaps in his family… I don’t know what the word is, mythology maybe? Just as each person is a big pile of accumulated stories, each family, and for that matter I suppose each culture, is the same. Maybe that’s one of the problems for Aboriginal people, maybe so many of them were murdered that a lot of stories were lost and now there are too many gaps. Gavin seemed like he didn’t have enough stories. I don’t know how many stories each person should have but if you don’t have enough, if you have blank spots instead of stories for part of your life, then that would be a pretty serious thing I think.

Gavin didn’t know how his grandparents had died, didn’t know what kind of work his mother did, didn’t know how Rick got his name, didn’t know why his aunt committed suicide… I asked him how his parents met and he didn’t know that either.

It soon became obvious that another bloke had moved in about a year before the war. His name was Ken. I’d never heard about this guy before. Gavin mentioned him once, accidentally, then again a few moments later, and looked mad at himself each time. Ken had done up a bike for Gavin and Ken had taken them to the beach for a weekend. Who was Ken?