John Marsden - While I live

I heard a sound in the corridor, and a moment later Gavin came into my room, his feet padding across the floor. I shifted over and let him in. He grunted like a koala. Couldn’t even have my bed to myself these days. But he made a nice hot-water bottle.

He went back to sleep within a minute but I still couldn’t. I started wondering what my parents would have said, what they would have wanted me to do. I’m not necessarily a big fan of that approach though. It’s like those Grand Prix car races — when a driver or a spectator is killed they always go on with the race, because they say ‘That’s what he would have wanted’. Well, I’ll tell you now, if I’m ever stupid enough to be a spectator at a Grand Prix and I get killed, I want the race stopped there and then. I want everyone to go straight home. I want three days of mourning, make that three days minimum, and I want all the cars painted black for the rest of the season. And five minutes silence before every race from then on. And the drivers to dedicate their future victories to Ellie Linton. Stuff the ‘She would have wanted us to keep going like normal’ approach.

When it came to the farm, I think my father would have said ‘You don’t have to carry it on if you don’t want to’, but all the time he’d be hoping like hell that I would. I think my mother would have said ‘You don’t have to carry it on if you don’t want to’, and she would have meant it. When it came to getting revenge for their deaths, going after the people who’d killed them, both of them would have said ‘Don’t worry about that, don’t put your life in danger, we just want you to stay alive’.

Well, I was quite keen to stay alive too, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, and although I hadn’t had time to think it through, I was quite certain that something severe had to happen to the people who’d killed my parents and Mrs Mac.

And yes, if I had to get involved in bringing that about, I would do whatever I had to do.

I gave a big sigh and rolled over. Against my back Gavin wriggled and made a few mumbling noises. I still hadn’t faced up to the other big issue, and I didn’t want to. But it seemed like I wasn’t going to get a choice. Like a monster this huge fear had sneaked out of the cupboard and even now was tiptoeing across the room towards me. This would have to happen in the middle of the night. I felt my tongue go dry. The monster was all around the bed now, sucking the air from the room. I heard myself make a whimpering noise. The monster was leaning over me, I could feel the heat of its body. I took a deep breath. My eyes were wide open in the darkness, but not seeing anything. If it had to be faced, I’d face it. I worked my throat a few times, trying to get some moisture back in my mouth. OK then. If these people had come to the farm deliberately, if they were looking for me, if this was a revenge attack because of what I’d done in the war… that was what Jess was getting at of course. It was the thought that kept creeping into my mind on a daily basis.

And now I could give up any thought of sleeping for this or any other night.

When would they be back? How could we protect ourselves? Maybe they wouldn’t be back. Maybe they’d feel that they’d achieved what they wanted. They’d killed the two most important people in my life. They’d ended the lives of the two people I cared about more than the rest of the world put together. I would have sacrificed my own life for those two people, no questions asked. Wouldn’t that satisfy them? Wouldn’t they be thinking ‘Well, we got her a good one, that’ll teach her a lesson’?

Maybe. Or maybe they were specifically out to get me, and my parents had died to stop that happening. Maybe these people had sentenced me to death and they’d return sometime soon to carry out the sentence. If it wasn’t that, if it was a raid aimed at hurting me in whatever way possible, then the fact that they had lost four of their own men might have left them thinking that it still hadn’t worked. They still hadn’t achieved the clear-cut victory which would ‘teach me a lesson’.

So if it were one of those two things, they would be back.

Oh God. I hadn’t wanted to come to that conclusion. I turned and twisted in the bed, until I felt that I was making Gavin restless. I had to calm down.

What were we to do? Give up the farm? After the scene with Gavin this morning, and all the hard work we’d done since, I knew now that I didn’t want to do that.

Have sentries? Couldn’t afford it. Carry rifles everywhere? Well, we already were. But it wasn’t likely to be very effective. It’s hard to help with calving, keep a lookout in every direction and have a finger on the trigger all at the same time.

Fight back? I didn’t want to even start thinking about that.

At some stage I did drift into sleep. But in the morning, at the kitchen bench, waiting for the toast to pop, my mind returned to the monster of the night before. A monster confronted is a monster defeated, that’s what I’ve always believed. But this time it was more complicated. This monster was capable of recreating itself, of coming back in a different form and shape on each visit. As a group of renegade soldiers with guns, last time, arriving in daylight and shooting everyone they saw. But next time it might be as a sniper up in the rocks on the escarpment, or as a gang sent to kidnap me. Or maybe they were really smart, and they’d figured out the best way of all. Maybe they’d come back time after time and kill Gavin and Fi and Homer and Lee and anyone else I was close to, so that I’d end up with no-one to love me and no-one for me to love. That would be smart all right.

With such thoughts tormenting me, and no easy answers, no obvious path to follow, I was faced with the problem of deciding what to do.

And like a lot of people in an impossible situation I did nothing.

After breakfast Gavin and I went out with a load of hay for the cattle, then checked and fed the poultry, then fuelled the vehicles, and all the time I was tense and watchful, but I didn’t actually change anything. Normally I like to make things happen, to be proactive, but for once I was in a position where I didn’t know how. I was waiting for someone else to make a move, so I could figure out how to respond.

Mrs Ayle was thunderstruck. Lightning-struck even. If he’d climbed to the top of an electricity pole with wire between his teeth and flown an aluminium kite on an aluminium string, he couldn’t have been more struck. He gaped at me for what seemed like three minutes before he could answer.

‘But… what on earth…?’ he finally stammered. ‘Have you gone completely mad? You’ll lose everything. I’m not even sure that it’s legal. You’re underage, remember?’

It was hard to keep my nerve in the face of this attack, which was as bad as anything I’d imagined. I tried to stay calm. I knew the worst thing I could do would be to act like a stupid emotional kid who wasn’t mature enough to make big decisions.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the way I figure it is that my father made these business decisions, leasing the other places and borrowing the money and buying the cattle, because he knew it could work. So that means it must be possible to make the place pay. I mean, the only thing that’s changed is that he’s not here anymore. The farm’s the same and so are the stock and so’s the financial situation.’

‘That’s true on the face of it,’ he said. ‘But…’

I wondered how long an adult could talk to a kid without using the word ‘but’. About forty seconds’d be the record for most of them, and that’s on a good day.

‘But that’s a very superficial analysis. I’d have to say, and I don’t know how to put this kindly, your father did not make prudent decisions. I mean, the exercise with turkeys and geese was misjudged, and as I said to you before, it’s resulted in the property being saddled with debts, which in my professional opinion are more than can be sustained.’