John Marsden - While I live

We got to school. I noticed that Homer had finished his book. ‘Can I borrow that?’ I asked as he went to put it away.

‘Sure.’

I had no idea what it was but an old book that fascinated Homer was worth a bit of a look.

Wirrawee High was a different place these days. There were so many new kids! The population of the school had gone from three hundred and fifty to six hundred and fifty. We didn’t have nearly enough teachers or buildings anymore. Every class had at least forty students and every bit of space was a classroom. Walk into the gym anytime and there’d be at least four classes going on, with each teacher trying to stop her kids from distracting the others.

Some things hadn’t changed though. I smiled as I walked down the corridor every day, because every day I passed the window we had broken during the war. The school, deserted and silent, had been a good hiding place for us back then. We had smashed a window to get in, then stuck masonite and tape over it to make it look like old damage. No-one had touched it since. Maybe we should have offered to pay for new glass but what the hell, money was short, and schools were meant to have a budget for repairs, weren’t they?

These days, luckily, being seniors, we got the best conditions, but even so, it was hard. There was no hope of getting any work done in your frees because the library was so crowded and noisy.

The first few days back I got no work done. I sat through period after period and they could have been talking about making drugs out of pineapples or a school excursion to the top of Mount Everest or World War II being caused by someone popping a paper bag. I didn’t hear a word, didn’t learn a thing. Now that I wasn’t physically active, now that I wasn’t racing around pulling calves or cementing posts into the cattle yards, I could think of nothing but my parents.

Time and time again the memory of their bodies, and the feelings of desolation, washed backwards and forwards, like a great internal tide. The way everyone avoided me or treated me like I had the Ebola virus made it all the worse. There’s nothing lonelier than grief. Sometimes I wanted to cry out to them all, in the middle of History, ‘Please, please, look at me, help me, can’t you see how unhappy I am?’

But what would have happened? They would have gathered round, making soothing noises, helping me out of the room maybe, offering me tissues… And none of that would touch the deep dark ocean that circled silently inside. They could not see it, touch it, stop it. I didn’t know any way to do that.

It was a relief to get home in the afternoons and get physical again. I actually felt good when I saw Gavin on the bus each afternoon. It was like he and I shared something that no-one else could understand. It was like we were linked by blood: literally, my parents’ blood, that had stained our hands and our clothing, and in another way the same kind of blood link that brothers and sisters, or parents and children, share.

I can’t imagine that before the war he would have been left in my care but now things had changed so much that no-one even came enquiring after him.

The first few days though, Gavin was so exhausted by being back at school that I stuck him in front of the TV with a bunch of cushions and left him to it. That first afternoon he slept for two and a half hours. I felt guilty, that I’d worked him so hard, but what choice did we have?

Gradually the kids on the bus and the atmosphere at school started to go back to normal. During the war there’d been so much grief and loss that now people were more used to it maybe. I think if my parents had died in such a way before the war it would have taken months for our friends and neighbours to get back on track. But now, by the second week of school, the bus was a mobile comedy and gossip club again and people were no longer treating me like I was contagious. I even started to absorb a skerrick of information from my classes.

I got to know Bronte a bit too. The night she had come out to my place with Homer and Jeremy and Jess she’d hardly said a word. And because she was a year below me at school we didn’t share any classes. But I noticed her in the queue at the canteen one day and we smiled at each other. I waited for her to get served and then we walked to the elm tree that looks over the footy oval.

We’d just had a History lesson before lunch and somehow, instead of talking about History, the conversation had swung around to a story from the radio that morning, about prisoners who weren’t released at the end of the war. These rumours came along every few days, and a lot of people believed them. I simply didn’t know if I did or not. There were so many people ‘unaccounted for’, and the theory was that they were still being held in secret out-of-the-way places. It was an emotional issue for anyone with friends and rellies who hadn’t been traced. There were four people in our class with family members who’d disappeared during the war and hadn’t been heard of since.

Jake Douglass, whose father had been one of the Wirrawee cops before the war but was now a security consultant or something, had been shooting off his big mouth, talking about raids across the border to find prisoners, and how he and his mates were ready to fight back any time.

I’d been pretty upset myself, listening to Jake going on and on, and I wanted someone to talk to. I told Bronte what Jake had said. She listened in silence.

‘Things are still so dangerous,’ she said at last. ‘Especially around here. Some of these boys are dangerous to be around.’

‘Jake Douglass thinks he’s such a hero. What did he do in the war? Let down a few tyres.’ She didn’t say anything to that and I had to add, ‘I know I sound like I think we’re the big heroes, when I talk that way. But the truth is, we did do a lot, and now all I want is to try to make some sort of normal life for myself, and the way these boys talk, I’m like you, it really disturbs me.’

I didn’t know why I was saying all this to her but she was one of those people you instinctively trust. ‘On the one hand there’s Jake Douglass, who’s got about as much guts as a disembowelled guinea pig and who’s so stupid he’s dangerous, and on the other hand there’s Homer, who really is brave, but sometimes he seems to be dropping hints about some sort of gung-ho stuff too. Like Jess, when you guys came out to my place the other night. It’s very confusing and I don’t like things that are confusing.’

‘I don’t think we can expect things not to be confusing at the moment,’ Bronte said, which, when you translated it, I think meant that things would stay confusing for a while yet. The way she said that kind of proved she was right.

Jess joined us. I liked Jess but I’d had the feeling the other night that Bronte wasn’t so keen on her.

‘Great History lesson,’ Jess said.

‘Yeah, I was just telling Bronte. Honestly, I don’t know what’s come over these boys. They’re all out of their tiny minds. So many people seem like they haven’t had enough war yet to satisfy them. I don’t know how much they want. I’ve had enough for a few lifetimes. People like Jake Douglass make me paranoid. More paranoid than I already am, that is.’

‘Hey, I’ll make you really paranoid,’ Jess said. ‘You know what my father thinks? He says the enemy are sussing us out, getting ready for the next invasion.’

I couldn’t cope with this conversation. I rolled away and started playing with a spider’s web. I tried putting a leaf on it, to see if it would break. I heard Bronte ask, ‘Why would they invade again?’ She sounded calm, but she seemed like a calm person.

‘Because a lot of their radicals are really angry with their government. They say they gave in too easily, they shouldn’t have compromised, they shouldn’t have given so much away.’