John Marsden - Incurable

Thunder growled from the other side of the ranges. Maybe it was coming out of Hell. I had left Marmie in the dog run but I felt guilty because I knew how much she hated thunder.

‘Won’t it spook the cattle more having us go round and round them all night?’ I asked.

‘This brings me to the good bit. They won’t be spooked because we’ll be singing as we go round and round them all night.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘The hills will be alive, Ellie, with the sound of music.’

‘They will?’

‘I’m not singing,’ Gavin announced.

Homer turned serious, but only because he knew singing did not come naturally to Gavin and it would be a hard job to persuade him.

‘You have to sing, mate. I don’t really mean singing, like the national anthem or something. But you’ve got to make a noise, a steady noise, all the time you’re going around the mob. Just a blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah is fine. The main thing is not to stop. It’s so they know who you are and where you are. These guys are so twitchy that if you come out of the darkness at them with no warning they’ll start running and they won’t stop till they’re in Wirrawee.’

Gavin was — and I’ve been waiting to use this word ever since I learnt it — nonplussed.

For a short time I felt like an idiot as we began our circuits. We stuck to the same route and the idea was not to catch up with the person in front or let the person behind catch up with you. I went first and it took me a few minutes to even think of a song. My mind had gone completely blank. But I heard Homer behind me calling quietly, ‘Come on, Ellie, can’t hear you.’

So in a voice that sounded like a windmill needing urgent maintenance I launched into ‘So Much Water’. And if that wasn’t sad enough I followed up with ‘Revelator’, trying to sound like Gillian Welch. How would she feel, I wondered, if she knew her words were being sung in a paddock ten thousand or so k’s from where she lived, to stop a mob of cattle from rioting?

Behind me Gavin’s tuneless voice gradually grew in confidence, with a chant that had no connection with any song I’d ever heard, except that I’d heard Gavin chant like that before sometimes, when he was tired or unhappy and he didn’t think I could hear him. And then behind him, fainter because he was further away, Homer launched into the kind of stuff Triple J was playing now that Triple J was back on the air.

In some situations it might have been quite nice doing this. And there were moments when I felt quite nice doing it. But too much had changed in my life. Since the attack on the house I didn’t feel safe out here in the darkness. I didn’t know if there might be another attack, and if there was, what would happen to me. I didn’t want to die. It dawned on me gradually that the murder of my parents might have taught me something I didn’t properly know about before. Oh of course I’d known about fear and felt fear, known what it was like to be scared. But it hadn’t stopped me. Now I felt in my gut that maybe I had a new fear and it would stop me, it was already stopping me. I kept looking around, not at the cattle, but in the other direction, half expecting something to leap at me out of the shadows. And that something was death. I felt lonely so often nowadays, and being out here was like putting myself in the loneliest situation I could find. Like someone with claustrophobia locking herself into a tea-chest for a few hours.

The other problem that night was a bit more ordinary, a lot more ordinary, but in the end it kind of drove the first one away. And it was the good old problem that dominated our lives and had done since I was born and would keep doing so forever. Dad said to me once: ‘YouVe got the land and you’ve got the stock and you’ve got the weather, and that’s all there is to farming.’

I was too young to figure out what the point of this was so I just looked at him blankly and he said, ‘See, all you’ve got to do is know everything there is to know about those three things and you’ve got farming under control.’

Then I understood that he was being funny — well, as funny as Dad ever got — and that if something can be reduced to one simple word, like ‘weather’, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is simple. A friend of mine had a saying, ‘If you don’t talk about the weather, what else is there to talk about?’ and that’s hilariously amusing, ROFL too, but he was still making a serious point, that country people talk about the weather because it matters to them, it controls them, it is the be-all and end-all of their lives.

Well, the weather wasn’t simple that night. The thunder rumbled again, and lightning wiggled across the sky in the distance, just a little bolt, but enough to have my skin prickling. The dark sky felt closer and heavier. We all had torches but I didn’t want to waste the batteries so I tried to make do without mine most of the time. A scatter of rain fell across me, then stopped, then started again, this time with more dedication. We were so well organised that as well as torches we had rain jackets. I stopped and unrolled mine and put it on, trying hard not to let it wave around or make a noise in case it sparked the cattle. Looking back I caught a glimpse of Gavin in the light of his torch. He seemed to be doing the same as me.

The rain got quite enthusiastic. We were just doing personification in English the other day. This rain was having more fun as it went along, and soon it was having a party. I hunched up and kept going, singing louder to make up for the quiet drumming on the dead leaves and the bark of winter. Now I was onto ‘My dad picks the fruit that goes to Cottees…’ Perhaps it should have made me sad about my dad but it didn’t.

The thunder got louder, rolling and rolling. Ten-pin bowling by the Gods? That was Kevin’s theory. I’d never been ten-pin bowling. Forget bowling and pay attention to the cattle, Ellie. All the beasts I could see were on their feet. I moved faster, to head off half-a-dozen who were peeling away for an unknown destination. It was hard to run and sing at the same time but I got to them and turned them. Then, just as they swung reluctantly around, a huge crack went off somewhere to my right, I saw a shower of blue sparks, the ground vibrated, the smell of lightning burnt into my nostrils, and the cattle were away.

My first thought was to sprint for the four-wheeler. I wasn’t far from it and without it I’d be useless. But the cattle were surging towards me and they weren’t going to stop. The white faces of the Hereford-crosses stood out but I saw the dark bodies too, and the earth quivered with the accelerating mass of the mob. They would run over me like they were gravel trucks and I was an empty drink carton in the middle of the road.

As they built up speed the ground and sky shook with their power. I sprinted for a tree on my right. It wasn’t the closest but it would get me nearer to the four-wheeler. I knew if I tripped on a log or a bump in the ground I was dead. I had about two seconds to reach the safety of the white trunk. My God, the speed of a stampeding steer, the speed of a mob. They came at me, they were in my face, but they didn’t see me. Their eyes were fierce and focused. I’d never seen cattle like this. All that breeding we’d done, that thousands of farmers had done over so many generations, all those carefully worked-out bloodlines, so we could get stock with good temperament, all that was gone, and in the primitive world of lightning and thunder the crack of one bolt had fused something ancient in their brains and bodies. They were still accelerating as I raced for the tree. One of them did actually see me and swerved slightly; the others never deviated for a moment, but I flung myself at the tree, feeling the hot breath of the mob wrapping itself around me, and smelling something that wasn’t fear or rage or desperation, that was beyond fear, was something the English language is still trying to find a word for.