John Marsden - While I live

Bends in the track, rabbit holes, and then a series of fallen trees, four trunks, one after another, just a metre or so apart, and all the masses of dead branches that went with them. We’d laughed as we struggled over them on the way up. Now I hurdled the first one, jumped onto the second one, took a leap from there onto the third one, then had to get down and wrestle my way over the last. That’s one thing the bush is good at: passively resisting human beings.

Quite early on I’d left Gavin well behind, and at some point I passed Homer and then I was on the flat and running through a paddock, Burnt Hut, with sweat flying from me. The paddock felt airless and the heat was stealing my energy. I started to wallow, to run heavily, that horrible sensation that you’re running on the spot, running like crazy but not getting anywhere. All the way down the spur I’d heard the scattered shots, getting closer as I got closer, and all the way down I tried to think of reasonable explanations for them, and I couldn’t think of a single thing that made sense.

Not one single solitary thing. My father didn’t do a lot of shooting. He was a bit allergic to it I think. All he had these days was a. 222 and he used it for knocking off the occasional fox, or for putting down dying cattle, or to shoot kangaroos that had been hit and left for dead by cars. He didn’t even have as much ammo as I’d heard in those five or six minutes.

Ploughing across the paddock I listened for more shooting but there wasn’t any. I didn’t know if this was good news or bad news. I took a glance over my shoulder and saw Homer and Gavin a hundred metres behind, and about level with each other. I didn’t look again, couldn’t afford the energy.

To get to our house, from where we were coming, you go across a cleared paddock, One Tree, and then into my favourite paddock, Parklands. Dad never liked Parklands, because it didn’t have much feed for stock. That’s because the old driveway to the house runs through it, and many years ago the drive was planted with European trees, so what with those and the gums that had been allowed to stay, the grass doesn’t get much chance.

This time I loved those trees like never before, because they gave me good cover. I didn’t know what I was running towards, what I was likely to find, but I knew with every fibre of my being that it would be bad. The war was over. It had been over for four months. But you don’t get dozens of rifle shots four months after a war finishes without feeling sick to the bottom of your feet.

There’s a vehicle bridge over the creek, but when I was a hundred metres away I thought it mightn’t be a good idea to use that. Too exposed, too obvious. Already I was getting back into the ways of thinking that had kept me alive during the war. It’s like riding a bicycle — you never forget. You click back into it without a moment’s conscious thought.

So I swerved and crossed the creek a little further down, where there was a footbridge half lost among the periwinkle, an old yellow bridge where the boards had been rotting for years. It had been slippery with dampness and mould, but Dad had just replaced the planks. I could smell the creosote. Then I raced up the bank, at an angle, so I would keep the two big water tanks between the house and me as I approached.

At first I thought nothing was wrong. It seemed peaceful. It seemed quiet. There was no movement. But of course that was wrong. At this time of day it should have been quite busy. Mum should have been hanging out washing or weeding the herb garden or heading off down the drive to look for mail. My friend, Mrs Mackenzie, who’d been staying with us, should have been with her, keeping up the endless supply of chatter that Mum found so exhausting. Dad should have been drilling boltholes in the new rails for the cattle yards or servicing the ute or chainsawing the fallen blackwood down at the gate into Nellie’s.

The silence that I talked about before, the silence you sometimes hear in the bush around noon on a hot day, that was the silence of my home now. It engulfed me. It felt so real that I could have been running into a huge wall of cotton wool. It felt so real that I almost bounced off it.

And there was something else. The smell. You always get a smell after you fire a rifle or shotgun. The strong, almost sweet smell of gunpowder, that drives out everything else, for a little while at least. The smell of rotting kangaroos, or petrol, or a hundred sheep in the yard, it drives them all out. And the roses and the lavender and the gum trees — they don’t stand a chance.

Even though it had been, I don’t know, a bit more than five minutes since the last shot, the smell was still heavy in the air.

I ran straight into the house. I knew the risk. I had a fair idea by now what had happened. I knew gunmen might be in there. I knew it might be an ambush. But when it’s your family, what else can you do? It’s like they say, ‘You turn your back on your family, you’re no good.’

‘Girl turns her back on her parents, that girl’s no good.’

Then every thought was driven from my mind. Even the fear of the gunmen. They could have come in and shot me as I knelt on the kitchen floor. I don’t think I would have heard them. I don’t think I would have even felt the bullet.

Funny, some things, even though you’re expecting them, even though you’ve known for the last five minutes what’s probably happening and what you’re likely to see, when you’re face to face with them you realise that nothing, nothing, nothing on God’s earth can prepare you for them.

My mother was lying on the floor, on her back, twisted around and looking up at the ceiling. I could really only look at her legs. I thought, ‘She’s still very thin.’ Everything above her legs was too terrible to see. Whatever bullets these people used were high-powered. They’d done a lot of damage. There wasn’t much left. Blood and stuff had gone everywhere.

I stood up again. I felt myself falling apart, coming to pieces, right there on the spot. But I tried to hold together. I told myself it was too early to react, to feel anything. There were other things I had to do.

Homer and Gavin came bursting into the kitchen. I didn’t look at them, didn’t say anything, just turned away. I heard their gasps, could imagine their horror. I think Homer said, ‘Oh Jesus, no.’ Right there and then it was almost easier to imagine their faces than to have my own feelings. I saw Mrs Mackenzie’s feet and legs sticking out of the pantry door. Steeling myself, clenching my fists, trying to find some kind of composure, I went over there.

As I looked at her body I felt something in my throat rise like it wanted to force itself up, like there was a slimy animal who’d been living inside me and now wanted out. It slithered up into my mouth and I had to clamp my teeth and swallow it again.

At least Mrs Mackenzie hadn’t been torn to pieces like my mother. One bullet had been enough.

I guess I was in some kind of trance by then. I half ran outside to find my father. I suppose, looking back, I should have run flat out in case he needed first aid. But I was emotionally in a dead state. And I was physically wrecked from the run down the spur and across the paddocks. And I was terrified about what I might find. And I was… oh a thousand other things.

But I also knew I couldn’t stay in the house and hide in my wardrobe, which a lot of my instincts were telling me to do. I had to find my father. For better or for worse I had to find him.

The men who had done this thing, who had attacked our farm, were professionals, no doubt about that. The odds were that they’d done the same thing to my father as they had to my mother and Mrs Mackenzie. I went to the shearing shed and ran past the empty stands, sobbing a little, my fists clenched, my stomach jammed solid, like I’d swallowed wet cement. I went past the old woolpress and the classing table, into each of the dusty little rooms. I went to the machinery shed and checked round the back of each tractor, and even the plough. I hesitated between the old barn and the new feed sheds for the turkeys and geese, the ones Dad had built as part of our short-lived attempt to diversify, and I chose the feed sheds.