John Marsden - While I live

‘Good on you.’

‘Then there’s the usual jobs. Cleaning. Laundry. Shopping. Cooking. I try to make a lot of stuff over the weekend and freeze it for during the week.’

‘So how much of the stuff you’ve got lined up is urgent?’

‘Oh well,’ I said reluctantly. ‘Checking the cattle. Doing the laundry. The shopping.’

‘If I give you a hand with those, why don’t you take the rest of the weekend off? Have a holiday?’

‘Yeah!’ Gavin cheered. ‘A holiday!’

‘This sounds like a conspiracy.’

Gavin made a face at me. ‘What’s that?’

I sighed, grabbed his notepad, which for the first time in about a month he had with him, wrote the word down for him, then struggled to explain what it meant. But I was too tired. Finally I said, ‘Ask Uncle Lee.’

Gavin wouldn’t go to bed and I didn’t care much, seeing it was Friday night. So we watched TV and talked till quite late. To tell the truth I was getting nervous about where Lee planned to sleep. It had been so long since I’d seen him, and even longer since we’d had sex, and I had no idea where we’d parked our relationship. Although I’d been thinking about him so much recently, and with a lot of longing, I didn’t want to jump straight back into bed with him. I was still too upset about my parents to have sex with my boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, in their home, such a short time after they’d died.

I didn’t really want to have sex with anyone anywhere. Maybe not for the rest of my life. I think that was one of the effects of the murders on me. I hadn’t felt that way before.

At about eleven o’clock I got up and said, ‘Well, better make you up a bed.’

Lee didn’t move a muscle, just kept that poker face. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, getting up.

I put him in the spare room, said a quick safe good-night, then headed back out through the TV room, where Gavin was gazing at re-runs of ‘Touched by an Angel’. He looked up at me. ‘Isn’t Lee going to sleep in your bed?’ he asked, with a cheeky grin.

‘What? What did you say?’

I grabbed a cushion and attacked him, pounding him without mercy. Somehow he got out from under that and before I could turn round he jumped on my back and grabbed another cushion and laid into me. I raced around the room trying to throw him off. Eventually I went into a death roll on the old sofa and loosened his grip until I could break free. By then we were both panting and sneezing with the dust. Made me think I hadn’t been doing enough house cleaning. But we were both armed with cushions and we closed in on each other, in a no-holds-barred fight-to-the-death world-championship-wrestling duel. God that little tyke was a fighter. I backed him into a corner but only by using my bigger size and strength. And even when he was stuck firmly in the corner he never let up. After a while I let him fight his way out again, and just then I got ambushed by Lee from behind, so from then on I didn’t have a hope.

Later, in bed, I thought about how much fun it had been and realised that Lee was right. I couldn’t be a parent to Gavin the whole time. I had to remember to be a kid sometimes too, for both our sakes.

Next day I chucked a load of laundry in the machine, while Gavin and Lee checked the cattle. Then we went into Wirrawee and did the shopping. For a start I had to stock up on chillies. And bloody expensive they were too. I didn’t get any refrigerated or frozen stuff, because this was meant to be our holiday so I didn’t want to go back home just to put groceries in the fridge.

Then we went to Juicy’s, the new coffee shop in Barker Street, where Gavin ordered this revolting bowl of chocolate ice-cream, lime flavouring, nuts, wafers, banana, malt and cream. All it needed was tomato sauce. I sat looking at it as I drank my cafe latte, thinking, ‘You know you’ve grown up when you realise that whatever looks good isn’t necessarily good.’ Then I said to the waitress, ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’

We wandered down to Jubilee Park to have a look at the market. Markets are kind of cool. I bought a candle for Lee and a balaclava for Gavin. Lee bought me a pair of uggies. I talked for quite a while to the girl who sold me the balaclava. She was into Taoism, which is a faith I’d never heard of, but it’s all about how everything has its own nature and the more you try to interfere with stuff the more you mess it up. That’s more or less what I thought she said, anyway. The bush and the ocean and everything from elephants to buttercups have their own inner rightness, but humans keep wanting to improve them, or change them into something that will be useful for the humans, but this isn’t actually a great idea. And she talked about wu wei, the Chinese name for the idea that you let things follow their natural laws.

She said something which struck home with me. She said, ‘It’s only humans who believe in mistakes. Nature doesn’t have any understanding of mistakes. If a branch falls from a tree, it doesn’t mean the tree’s made a mistake. Nature just reorganises itself around the fallen branch. So now it becomes a home for the insects that live on the ground. Its leaves rot down and make the soil richer. If the branch falls into a creek, fine, the water now flows in a different way.’

‘Yeah, I guess that’s true,’ I said.

‘So, life goes on. Things happen. If you let things happen, they do.’

‘So,’ I said, feeling myself go a bit red, ‘if people you love die, or get killed, what does Taoism say about that? How are you meant to cope with that?’

I waited on her answer as though it would be very important.

‘You do nothing,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘This has happened. It doesn’t matter in the long run how they died. They’ve died, so your life reorganises itself. It will affect you in different ways. So, let it affect you. Feel what you feel, do what seems right to you. Don’t imagine there is a right way to act or a wrong way. Just let your life continue according to its own inner nature.’

‘OK,’ I said.

I turned away to leave.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘good luck.’

‘Bit of an angel encounter, that one,’ I thought.

We went to a four o’clock movie, not a very Taoist one I’d say. But Gavin chose it. It amazed me that after all he’d seen in the war, all he’d experienced, he still liked violent movies, but they were always his first choice. He was still quite violent by nature, as he’d proved with the cushions last night — not that I could talk — but I don’t think his violent behaviour came from the violent movies. The movies must have seemed a bit tame sometimes, compared to what he’d gone through.

It wasn’t a bad film. The special effects were cool, and it had Jed Barrett, who I can look at for quite a long time without getting a headache.

It had been a good afternoon and it had been fun. We went to Macca’s — sign of the times, Wirrawee had grown so much since the war that it now had a Macca’s — then headed home.

That night in bed I was thinking about the way creeks and streams operate. They start off little, gurgling and bubbling and jumping over rocks and stuff, full of energy, going all over the place. Then they get older and bigger, become rivers, take a more definite course, stick to their path, know where they’re going, get slower and wider. And eventually they reach the ocean and become part of this vast mysterious world of water that stretches away forever.

Yep, just like people.

My parents had joined the ocean. I was back up in the hills, bubbling around. What I’d seen and done in the war had made me grow up pretty fast, and what had happened since, even faster, but I was still a kid and I had a way to go yet before I became one of those slow old rivers just cruising along, not noticing too much and not bothering about the rocks and the rapids.