John Marsden - While I live

‘That’s a long address,’ I said. ‘What state did they live in?’

But it turned out the Gettysburg Address was a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln, and all Bronte knew about it was that it included the words ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

Major Gisborne read through my sheet of paper, taking another three or four minutes. This time I stared at the top of his head, trying to count the number of hairs. For a guy who looked about twenty he was pretty bald.

Suddenly he looked up, catching me staring at him.

‘So let me get this straight,’ he said, gazing at me over the top of his glasses. ‘You wanted your neighbours as your guardians, and the court appointed the executor instead, but you’ve taken a dislike to him.’

I was already a bit red and now I blushed more. Put like that it all sounded pathetic. ‘Well, yes, but when I got this stuff, it made it look like I was right.’

‘This is illegally obtained evidence,’ he said. ‘Not admissible in court.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You opened his files, took papers from them, copied them on his paper using his chemicals in his photocopier powered by his electricity. That’s theft. You might think it’s silly, but courts have sometimes convicted people for stealing a couple of sheets of paper, or a few cents worth of electricity, when they can’t get them on any other charge.’

‘Really?’

‘For instance, if an employee steals an idea from his employer but there’s no law covering the situation, it might be possible to get him for stealing the sheets of paper that the idea’s printed on. And that then gives the employer a legal remedy.’

I gaped a bit at that. ‘Well, I don’t want to be arrested for stealing a few sheets of paper.’

For the first time he smiled. ‘I don’t think you’re on the “Most Wanted” list.’

‘So, what can I do? Surely I can do something.’

He launched into a long speech about what he recommended, which included going to the Law Society or Law Institute or something, and making a complaint about Mr Sayle’s behaviour, or lodging an appeal with the court against him being my guardian. Or, I could ask him for the contents of my file and sue him if he wouldn’t hand it over. But he didn’t have to give me his personal notes anyway. Then he explained that any of those remedies might take years and that wasn’t the only problem.

‘If you appeal against the guardianship order, you have two main grounds,’ he said. ‘One is that your friend Sayle seems to have prior knowledge of a development plan for the property, and what’s worse, a plan in which he may have a financial interest. And the second is that he seems to have malice towards you, as demonstrated by the handwritten memo, which he’ll never let you get. You need to find admissible ways of proving both those points in court. A lot would depend on the secretary you’ve mentioned being prepared to give evidence.’

‘I don’t know if she’d do that,’ I said.

He stood up and handed me back the papers. ‘I can see it’s a lot to take in,’ he said. ‘I’ll write a summary and send it via Bronte.’

‘That’d be really nice of you,’ I said. But before I could thank him any more he’d gone again, straight out the door.

I was a bit off-balance after this. He sure didn’t muck around. He seemed so cold compared to Bronte.

I went back to school, counting the number of periods I’d missed this week. I was nowhere near my record but I wasn’t doing badly. So many missed periods. I should have been pregnant.

I looked for Bronte but couldn’t find her till the next day. When I did, she was in the library, in the middle of a Chemistry lesson with Mr Bracken. I don’t know why they were doing it in the library. Bronte gave me a wink and gradually sidled over to where I’d sat myself at a computer.

To my amazement she already had a letter from her father.

‘Wow, that was quick,’ I said.

‘He’s Major Action Man,’ she said and sidled back to her class.

I stayed there and read the letter. It spelt things out pretty clearly, although it was longer than 272 words. The only part that was fuzzy was the bit about how I got the papers. He’d written: ‘The origin of the documents is uncertain’.

But most of the time he was outlining the different strategies I could use. They all seemed incredibly long and incredibly legalistic, not to mention expensive and not even guaranteed to work. A lot seemed to depend on whether Mrs Samuels would testify. He didn’t spell it out, but it was obviously because I’d got the papers illegally, and he was saying that if she testified it’d solve that problem.

I didn’t think Mrs Samuels would testify. She seemed scared enough when she left that file out. If she testified, she’d lose her job, for a start, and she might find it hard to get another one.

I didn’t realise Bronte had been watching me, but as soon as I put the letter down she appeared again.

‘Finished?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. It’s all a bit depressing.’

‘That’s what he said you’d think.’ She gave me another piece of paper. ‘This is from him too but he didn’t sign it, because it’s kind of unofficial.’

I opened it. It was a brief message, all typed. ‘Forget the legal approach, Ellie. You know how effective direct action is. You’ve proved that often enough. Use your brains and your imagination and you’ll come up with better solutions than these.’

I knew what he was getting at. Even before the war I guess I was pretty straightforward. I preferred to go at life full-on, not to sneak around the edges. I got sick of people at school who got into corners with their friends and bitched about how Chelsea had said something to Ilka about the way Meg had treated Simone. I preferred to march over to Chelsea and demand, ‘Has Meg been getting up your nose?’

Maybe it’s just another of those farm things. When you find a cow who’s decided to have her calf halfway up an eroded cliff, and the calf has fallen into one of the cracks and he seems like he’s only got minutes to live, there’s not much point going for a walk around the paddock and thinking that God can be very cruel sometimes. You go as fast as you can to get a shovel and you start digging your butt off, and the only thanks you get is that the cow licks your arm all the time you’re doing it, and later, when you see them together in the paddock, you get a nice warm feeling.

In the war we had times when we had to be sneaky, sure, and times when we planned attacks, but mostly we made it up as we went along. And mostly that meant fighting flat out, going at the enemy with everything we had, whether it was on an airfield or up among the rocks of Tailor’s Stitch or on a train-ride to hell.

So that approach does kind of suit me I guess.

I still couldn’t think of a direct solution. But later that morning I was sitting in History while Mr Baddiley went through his overheads, doing a big number on the Korean War. Because of the shortage of projectors he told Jake Douglass to pretend he was an overhead projector, and Jake sat there holding up each bit of plastic while Mr Baddiley talked about it.

It was boring, but the thing about Mr Baddiley was that if you got him distracted he could be quite interesting. That particular day I was so inattentive that I don’t know who got him distracted or how he could jump from the Korean War to France in 1898, but I realised suddenly he was talking about a guy called Dreyfus, and a writer called Emile Zola.

As far as I could put the story together, what happened was that a French Army officer called Dreyfus had been outrageously framed as a spy. The real spy was a member of the ruling classes but they didn’t have the guts to go after him, so they blamed Dreyfus instead, partly because he was Jewish. Dreyfus got kicked out of the Army, which had been the great love of his life, God knows why, and he was sent to an island prison to live on cockroaches and his own fingernail clippings.