John Marsden - While I live

I’m glad it worked. If it had been a disaster I might have lost confidence, which would have been dangerous with the calving just started.

Fi, to be honest, was pretty hopeless with the cattle, because she was too scared of them. She thought they’d bite her. ‘Fi,’ I kept telling her, ‘they don’t even have upper teeth! They can’t do you much damage. They might gum you to death.’

But she made the cattle nervous so I gave her jobs she could do at a safe distance.

The neighbours were great. Mr Yannos came round every day, or else he sent Homer, or Homer’s big brother, George. Mr Sanderson, who’d got the other part of our farm, never missed a day. He didn’t know a lot about cattle but he was a fast learner. Other people called in regularly or occasionally.

I carried a couple of rifles in the ute these days. One was my father’s. 222, the other had belonged to the dead soldiers who’d killed my parents. Homer had knocked off their rifles before the police came. I don’t know what he did with the other three; I didn’t ask. I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws, but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid, the immature, the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent. I knew that if the killers came back I wouldn’t be getting any help from the police or the Army: not help that would come in time. And I knew I was responsible with guns. I kept the ammo in a locked tin behind the seat of the ute and I kept the key around my neck, so Gavin couldn’t get it. But I had to have some protection, even though it probably wouldn’t be enough if the time came.

The calving finished. Out of forty cows I got thirty-six calves. For a while I thought I had thirty-five. One of them, who was only a few days old, died. I found his body in the cold wet grass one morning so I picked him up on the forks of the tractor and took him down to the tip and dumped him. Two days later I’m down there again with the usual rubbish from the kitchen and there’s the calf tottering around on weak little legs yelling for his mother. I felt like a complete idiot at the same time as I was ecstatic to see the impossible. How did it happen? I have no idea. I could have sworn he was dead. For a moment I wondered if it meant that maybe my parents would come walking across the hilltop, hand-in-hand, but although I tried I couldn’t link up the two things.

Some cows were good mothers, a lot weren’t. It figured. The first cows every farmer wants off his place are the poor mothers. By picking up this mob at low prices we were pretty much guaranteeing that there’d be a high ratio of second-rate mums. So, some accepted their bubbas with instant enthusiasm, others had to be talked or tricked into it. Some had to be put in the crush and tied, and then we’d lead the calf in to her, hoping that if he sucked hard enough she’d let her milk down and it’d be a happy ending.

We set about castrating the bull calves, and ear-tagging both boys and girls. Gavin seemed to find the idea of castrating the boys a bit off-putting. I think it made him feel insecure. We used an elastrator, which has four prongs, that expand a little green rubber ring when you squeeze the handles. You get the ring over the scrotum, making sure you’ve got both the balls, then release it. The ring snaps tight. Very tight.

The calf goes off with the ring around its bag, cutting off the blood supply, so the scrotum gradually perishes and drops off. It was a good method and it worked well, a tad better than biting, but it took a while.

Any time I had trouble with Gavin I just waved the elastrator at him and he backed off fast.

At least things were quiet on the financial front, and the legal front. I’d rung Fi’s mother and told her I wanted Mr and Mrs Yannos as my guardians, and I wrote a letter to Mr Sayle telling him the same thing.

By the time we were through with calving it was time to go back to school. Gavin and I had missed the last two weeks of the term, and now the holidays were over. Some holidays. The jolly old holidays. There should be a new word for holidays like these.

The last night Fi and I watched a video. Not a rented one, just Grease that I’d taped off TV ages ago. Fi sat on the floor. I was behind her, doing her hair, Gavin was sound asleep. Sandy, the Olivia Newton-John character in the movie, reminded me a bit of Fi. I’d never have said that to her though. She hated people saying she was ‘sweet’ or ‘innocent’. But knowing she was leaving the next morning was getting to me. When Sandy sang ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’ I was struggling not to cry. Not that I was hopelessly devoted to Fi, but I felt hopelessly shattered by all the stuff that had happened, and hopelessly lonely at the thought of her going back to the city.

Fi heard one of my muffled little noises that could have been a sob. She twisted around and bent back her head and looked at me.

‘Don’t,’ I sniffled. ‘You’ll need a physio.’

‘You want me to do your eyebrows?’

‘No.’

She faced around again. After a bit she said, ‘Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Omar.’

‘Omar who?’

‘Omar goodness, I got the wrong address. Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Max?’

‘Max who?’

‘Max no difference. Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?

‘Sarah.’

‘Sarah who?’

‘Sarah doctor in the house? Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘I love.’

This was an old joke between us. I groaned but asked anyway.

‘I love who?’

‘How am I supposed to know? You tell me.’ She paused. ‘Is this helping?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think it would. I’m not very good at telling jokes.’

I asked her one. ‘Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Moo.’

‘Moo who?’

‘Make up your mind. Are you a cow or an owl?’

Fi clapped. ‘That’s the first funny knock knock joke I’ve heard.’

‘It must be funny if you laugh when I tell it. I’m hopeless at jokes too.’

‘There are more important things in life. Those boys who do nothing else but tell jokes… I just want to cover my ears and run screaming out of the room.’

And then ‘Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ started and we were suddenly doing a dance number in front of the TV, and even though we hadn’t done anything like that for more than a year we synchronised perfectly. We didn’t need a choreographer. Our friendship was our choreographer.

The funny thing was that Gavin actually started kicking up a fuss when I told him we’d go to school on Monday. I thought I’d given him such a bad time, making him work so hard all day every day, that he’d be out to the bus-stop Monday morning at the rate of knots. But round about Friday I realised he didn’t want to go. Amazing. He wouldn’t say why. I thought it was a mixture of all that security stuff, wanting to stick close to me, and somehow the fact that he was so bloody useful and important on the farm. I mean, if he hadn’t been there I would have sold up, not just because of the financial pressures, but because you simply can’t run an operation like ours with one person. You’ve got to have someone else to be on the other side of the mob when you’re moving them into a new paddock, to inch the tractor forward when you’re pulling a calf, to start the engine of one car when you’re jump-starting the other, to help cut an injured steer out of the mob, and so on and so on.

And even more importantly, it’s the company. When you see a cow accept a calf that she’s been rejecting for hours, there’s got to be someone you can turn to for an exchange of high fives. When you see Marmie eating cow poo, there’s got to be someone to share your groans of disgust. When you watch the little yellow robins bopping around your feet as you dig up a rock in the new cattle race, there’s got to be someone to watch them with you.