John Marsden - While I live

‘I don’t know the first thing about money,’ I said. ‘Not a damn thing. Every time we play Monopoly I lose.’

He looked away.

‘There’s a hundred cents in the dollar, that’s about all I know,’ I told the back of his neck, which couldn’t hear me.

He looked around at me again, impatiently.

I held him at arm’s length and spoke straight into his face. ‘Gavin, do you understand that we could end up losing everything? At the moment we’d have enough to get a little house in Wirrawee and keep us fed and clothed. Doing what you want, we could end up sleeping in dumpbins.’

He shook his head and hit me on the arm. He was strong enough; he really hurt.

‘Fight,’ he said. ‘If you fight, you win or you lose. If you don’t fight, you lose.’

I stood there gazing at the lagoon, my mind in an agony of indecision. Finally I turned to him.

‘We’d both have to work like we’ve never worked before,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to pull up broom for ten minutes and then get sick of it, well, say so now, so I know where we are. We’re going to have to work before we go to school and work when we get home. You can forget about sleepovers with your mates and birthday parties and blue-light discos. You can forget about weekends and school holidays. You can forget about your social life. We can’t afford to employ anyone. We’ll have to do it on our own.’

He gazed at me with his face and jaw set in the bulldog glare I knew so well. Then he marched away over the rise. I followed him, thinking we were heading home. But I got it wrong again. He swung left, back into the gully, and we both started pulling up more broom.

That same evening my social life actually seemed to take a turn for the better. I was totally exhausted. We’d pulled broom for more than two hours, with a bit of help from Fi when she finally surfaced. Then we fed the cattle, and the surviving poultry, while Fi organised lunch. After that we put in a hard afternoon on the new cattle yards. The old yards had been OK, but they were built sometime before Captain Cook. While the farm was occupied by the enemy, during the war, it seemed like one of them had lost control of a vehicle, probably a tractor, and kaboodled it through the rails, smashing part of the holding yard. Then Dad had pinched a lot of the old timber crossbars for the turkey and geese sheds.

When we got the farm back he’d decided to start again from scratch and build the yards he’d always wanted. With double races, hot showers, cappuccino machine, satellite television, you get the idea. Nothing’s too good for our cattle. He’d done some of the hard yakka already, but not enough of it. At least he’d dug the holes. We had a post-hole digger that was run off the tractor, so it wasn’t really such hard work, but I wasn’t sure if I could operate it without his help.

He’d also put in a set of scales, which was something he’d always wanted. I just hoped he’d paid for them. They cost around twenty thousand dollars but they were useful. Or so Dad said. When it comes to guys and gadgets I’m always a bit suspicious. But it’s true that a 300 kilogram beast can lose twenty of those kilos after twelve hours in the yards, and at the same time it’s compulsory to yard them for twelve hours before sending them in to be sold, so you do need to know what’s going on in terms of their weight.

I’d spend twelve hours in the yards myself if I thought it’d knock twenty kilos off me.

I explained all this to Gavin as we worked, in the same way that Dad had always explained stuff to me. Gavin did seem like one of those kids who had a genuine interest in farming. By God he was good that day too. He stuck to his guns. He’d said he was going to work — not in so many words but near enough — and he did. He never complained once, hardly ever got distracted, only took a break when I did, and — this is the mark of the true worker, I reckon — started anticipating.

Dad always said there were three types of workers. The ones who stood there saying ‘Is there anything I can do?’, and did nothing. Most of our city guests were like that. The ones who said ‘Tell me what you want done and I’ll do it’, and did. Most of our workers over the years had been like that. And the ones who didn’t say anything but were always a jump or two ahead of you. When you were changing a flat tyre and you took the old one off and turned to pick up the new one they’d already have it in their hands, and they’d move in and put it on from your left while you were still turning round to the right.

Dad reckoned one of those was worth two of the second type and five of the first type.

And there were quite a few times when Gavin was like that. I’d be on my knees and I’d reach behind me for the ratchet wrench to tighten a nut, and he’d come in from the other side and be doing it while I was still wondering where I’d put the bloody thing.

I think I had my first glimmerings of the possibility of happiness that day. It wasn’t the free light-hearted happiness I’d known as a child, because I’d never have that again. From now on any good feelings were going to be under-shaded by the awfulness of what had happened. My personal castle was always going to have a big dark basement. Guess it already did, after the war, and losing my grandmother and Robyn and Corrie and Chris and the others. But the basement had got a hell of a lot bigger recently. Maybe that day I had the first faint awareness that I could still live in the castle. It hadn’t been totally demolished.

It got dark early of course, and we were both pleased to call it a day and stagger back to the house. I’d had plenty of hard days on the farm, but it was different now, because before it had all been just physical. I’d do the different jobs, sure, but Dad decided the important stuff. I’d be responsible for doing each of my jobs properly, but I didn’t have the feeling of responsibility for the whole thing, the big picture. I didn’t have the mental weight, back then.

Just as I flopped down in front of the TV, having put away a kilo of Fi’s pasta, and made a few admiring remarks about the way she’d cleaned up the house, I heard a car outside. I was so jumpy that I lifted a metre out of the chair. Of course if the gunmen returned they wouldn’t be likely to drive straight up to the house, but sometimes your mind doesn’t function very calmly.

It turned out to be Homer, but not ‘Homer alone’, as I said to Fi, adding, ‘Hey, good name for a movie.’ That was my best joke of the year, which gives some idea of how badly things were going. But I was seriously annoyed when I saw that he’d brought a bunch of people. It wasn’t just that I was still in a severe state of shatter over what had happened to my parents, but as well I was exhausted from the day’s work, I was stressing over how I could tell Mr Sayle that maybe I didn’t want to sell the property after all, I was grubby and smelly and in my work clothes because I’d been too tired to take a shower before tea. And now I was expected to be the host of a party.

I don’t think Homer noticed any of that. He ushered them into the kitchen happily and introduced them to Fi and me. Not to Gavin, who as soon as he realised what was happening stomped off sulkily to watch TV. He was so jealous of me now, Gavin, and he didn’t like sharing me with anyone. But a carload of teenagers was too much competition, and all he could do was retreat.

There were three of them, besides Homer. The one who first caught my attention was Jeremy Finley, the son of General Finley, who’d helped us so much during the war. General Finley had also caused us a lot of problems but, like the Chinese say, ‘the cured patient forgets the pain’, and these days I felt pretty good about him.