John Marsden - While I live

‘Who do you go as?’

‘I’m the Phantom, Ghost who Walks. Phantom never die. Phantom King of the Jungle. You can go as Princess Cattle-drencher. You get to wear an Akubra and a Driza-Bone and a flynet over your face.’

‘Yeah, that’s me, Princess Cattle-drencher, does a hundred bullocks an hour, all on my own. But I want some corks for my hat.’

Homer made himself another coffee.

‘Drink it fast,’ I said, ‘and then you can help me move those steers to Burnt Hut. Now that you’ve taken Gavin out of the running for the day, it’s the least you can do.’

As we walked up there and I looked across at the farm, the cattle cropping at the short grass in Parklands, the patches of bracken in Nellie’s, the blackberry at the back of the barn that should have been sprayed months ago and was now a nice little suburb for snakes, the heap of firewood waiting to be stacked, I made my decision about Liberation.

‘I don’t want to join,’ I said. ‘Not yet anyway. There’s too much else going on, keeping this place afloat, trying to get some school work done, looking after Gavin. Once this thing with Sayle has been sorted out, then I might give it a go. But even so, even though we agreed that it’s a buzz, I don’t know how much more I can take. Walking on the edge of death all the time, it gets a bit unnerving. I haven’t slept too well since I saw what they did to Shannon. And you know, it worries me with Gavin. I thought I’d be able to protect him from all this once the war ended, give him a normal life, let him grow up away from the violence.’

‘Just what my parents wanted for me. Just what your parents wanted for you. Shame life can’t be a choose-your-own-adventure book, where if you don’t like the way it’s going you pick a different path.’

‘Choose-your-own-adventures’d be the only books you’ve ever read,’ I said. ‘Oh, sorry, plus The Scarlet Pimpernel.’

‘No way. I’m reading Alibrandi even as we speak.’

‘You are?’

‘Sure. Good book. That Josephine needs a good smack though.’

I just laughed but I was impressed that he was reading so much. You never knew with Homer. I mean, the guy was wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Tomorrow is just a fiction of today’. I didn’t even know what it meant and I’m pretty sure Homer didn’t either.

After we’d moved the steers we hung on the fence for a while and talked. ‘So are you going to tell me what’s happening with Sayle?’ Homer asked. ‘I mean, the full story.’

‘Don’t think I’d better tell you the full story. I don’t want to get someone in trouble. Let’s just say I got access to stuff he didn’t want me to see. I don’t know whether it’ll change things but I think it will. I’ve been trying to talk to Fi’s mum but now she’s on the Advisory Council it’s bloody hard to track her down. Poor Fi, she’s going crazy trying to get her mum to ring me. She keeps apologising to me and feeling guilty and I tell her not to worry, but of course she does.’

‘So what kind of stuff have you got exactly?’

‘Some papers. I can’t understand all of it, but what I can understand is pretty nasty. You want to see them?’

‘Oh yeah.’

I went back to the house. Gavin had emerged and was in the kitchen. That was pretty good for him. I don’t know what his record sulk was, but there were times when you could go climb Everest, come back and write a novel, then diet and lose ten kilos before Gavin would come out of his bedroom. Or maybe he was amusing himself in there and it was nothing to do with sulking at all.

I said, ‘I told Homer I’m not joining Liberation because there’s too much else to worry about at the moment,’ but he didn’t react, although I’m sure he understood.

I went back to Homer with the papers. I was glad I’d photocopied that handwritten note. The full wording was nasty all right. Don’t worry about it mate, I’ve got her wrapped up tighter than a Sumo jockstrap. The magistrate is all for me, and the courts are that clogged up it’d take a Scud missile to get an appeal through. She’s a tough little bitch but mate, I wrote the book on tough. You’ll have the place in three months, and it’ll cost you about five bucks for her and a slab of stubbies for me.

‘Charming,’ Homer said.

‘I thought you’d approve. “Tough little bitch.” That’d be your wording, wouldn’t it?’

He gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything.

The Council document was definitely a planning application, like I’d thought. I’d had a proper look through it now, and it seemed that a company called Kelsey Developments Pty Ltd was going to turn our property into a luxury hotel called Kelsey Resort, the Gateway to the Mountains.

‘What is it with that “Pty Ltd” stuff?’ Homer asked. ‘They’re all called that. Even our family company.’

‘I don’t know. But what do you think about it all?’

‘I think you’ve been right all along, and that he’s a giant bullshit artist. But that’s no surprise. What else have you got?’

I only had two other documents, one of which was just a typed summary of the stuff he’d said in court. I think it was the notes that he’d used to make his speech. The other one was a photocopy of something from a law book, about guardianship. It was from a case in the Supreme Court, called R v. Ellis, which apparently said, from what I could make of it, that the principles a magistrate uses for choosing guardians can be different for older kids than for younger ones, which I thought was pretty obvious anyway.

We wandered back to the house. ‘What do you do now?’ Homer asked.

‘Stuffed if I know. Keep trying to get Fi’s mum on the phone and see what she says.’

‘Why don’t you ask Bronte’s dad?’

‘Bronte? From school? Her parents are in the Army, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah, but her father’s a lawyer in the Army.’

‘Is that right? OK. Gosh. I might ask her on Monday.’

Bronte’s father was a bit of a surprise. For one thing he was really young, compared to the parents of my friends. Compared to the age my parents had been for that matter.

It had been difficult getting in to see him. I didn’t think a major was as important as all that, but by the time I’d talked my way in there I was quite nervous. The security was full-on. It was like when Mr King was on bus duty after school.

Major Gisborne wasn’t all that friendly at first; not exactly unfriendly, just acting like he was too busy for this. I was already uncomfortable enough, after being interrogated about twenty-six times by men and women with guns, having to stand around while they rang each other to check that I had an appointment.

Eventually I got to the biggest building on the place, a concrete hangar half the size of Wirrawee, and was interviewed by Major Gisborne in a room the size of a washing machine. Life’s full of contrasts, that’s what I love about it.

There was no small talk, just, ‘You’ve got some papers? Let’s have a look,’ and then I sat there wondering what I could do while he read everything. The choice was between studying the heavy wire mesh on the window, the light globe on the long cord from the ceiling, the scratches on the old brown desk, or the poster on the wall headed ‘EVACUATION PROCEDURES ’. There were a lot of posters like that around these days, but somehow it seemed funny to see one on an Army base. I’d figured Army people would know how to do that stuff without needing to be told on a poster, like the rest of us.

Major Gisborne took another piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. I recognised it as the summary I’d done for Bronte, of what had happened since my parents died. Bronte had told me to be brief. ‘My dad says the Gettysburg Address was two hundred and seventy-two words long, so nothing else needs to be longer than that.’