John Marsden - While I live

‘It’s possible,’ Homer said, straight away.

I suddenly had the feeling they’d had this conversation already, out of my hearing. Maybe at the funeral. Maybe by phone. ‘What you think?’ I asked Homer.

‘General Finley thinks most of them just target places at random, looking for stuff to steal.’

‘Oh! General Finley! He sent the nicest flowers.’

General Finley was the New Zealand officer who organised some of our ‘guerilla’ stuff during the war. He was pretty important in the Army. I thought of him as a friend, even though we hadn’t spent a lot of time together.

‘Huh,’ Fi said. ‘You remember his flowers, but you don’t even remember me being there.’

Homer said: ‘Well, according to General Finley, there’s been a pattern of killings, groups coming across the border in search of whatever they can find. And he reckons the media only report about a quarter of the cases.’

‘So the rumours were true. I knew I should have listened to them.’ I gazed at Homer, trying to process all this information. ‘You’ve been talking to the General?’

‘Only by phone. But we’ve had a couple of long conversations. Plus his son’s here.’

‘His son? Here in Wirrawee? You’re kidding!’

‘He is in Wirrawee at the moment. But he’s been living in Stratton, and going to school there. His mother lives in Stratton — she’s Australian, but she and the General are divorced.’

‘How old is he?’

‘About our age. I’ve been talking to him too. Good bloke. Got a bit of common sense. You could take him fox-shooting and be pretty certain you wouldn’t get a bullet up your bum.’

Coming from Homer, this was high praise.

‘So why aren’t they doing anything about these raids? How come soldiers can just come over the border any time they want and kill anyone they want?’

Homer tapped a fork on the edge of the table and gazed out the window, frowning. ‘I suppose it comes down to politics in the long run,’ he said. ‘These guys who killed your parents and Mrs Mac. You just called them soldiers, and we all know they are soldiers, everyone knows that, but how do you prove it? They don’t wear uniforms, they don’t carry any papers ID’ing them as military, and every time there’s one of these raids their government says they’re very sorry but they can’t be responsible for criminal elements who take the law into their own hands. I mean, they say all the right things. They even say they’ll track them down and bring them to justice but funnily enough they never seem able to do it.’

He leaned back on the chair. I thought that at any moment we’d have another one broken. ‘Ellie, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this, but the truth is that it’s too dangerous to let you stay here anymore. We think you should sell the place and move into town. Somewhere safe. General Finley thinks so too.’

Trust Homer to choose words that were bound to stir me up and get the opposite result to the one he wanted. He did that every time. I blamed his Greekishness. He had to be the boss. Well, stuff that for a joke. I had to be the boss.

‘ Let me stay here!’ I exploded. ‘Since when do you decide whether you’re going to let me stay here or not?’

He pushed the chair back about a metre. Gavin retreated towards the pantry. Fi stayed where she was but she kept her head down.

‘That’s the trouble with you, Homer, you think everything on this goddamn planet should be under your control. That no-one should eat breathe sleep or shit unless it’s with your permission. You know how long my family’s been here? You know what we’ve been through to keep this place? Homer, my family’s eaten dirt and dug dams with their bare hands to keep it going. You think I’m going to walk out on it now, after my parents died to defend it? I tell you what, Homer, I’m not quitting. I’m here to stay.’

‘Go Ellie!’ Gavin yelled.

I looked at him in astonishment. How could he have lip-read all of that?

‘Have you got the slightest idea what we’re talking about?’ I asked him.

‘Sure,’ he replied straight away. ‘Homer wants you to quit the farm and you’re saying “No way”.’

I shook my head. I never could work out how Gavin understood so much of what was going on, but he had his ways. Maybe he had an aerial on his head, buried in his thick mop of hair.

‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked him.

Since my parents got killed, no-one had mentioned the problem of Gavin. I hadn’t thought much about it myself. There’d been no time for that. Everything was still too fresh, too raw, too recent. Was I going to be left to look after him myself? In this new world, even that was possible. There were so many orphans, so many homeless kids. If there was a scale that gave a ‘one’ to kids living in dumpsters and a ‘ten’ to the Brady Bunch, Gavin still rated a three or a four with just me to take care of him, no parents of his own, and my mum and dad, his foster-parents, killed in a massacre.

‘Stay here,’ he said promptly.

‘But it’s dangerous,’ I said.

‘Life’s dangerous,’ he said, with a funny little shrug of his shoulders.

It was a breath-stopping moment. I realised how much I underestimated Gavin sometimes. It was too easy to forget that this boy, with nothing but the strength of his personality, had not only survived many months of the war in the ruins of Stratton but had held together a group of other feral kids under his leadership. He was something special.

‘Well,’ I said to Homer and Fi, ‘you heard him.’

Fi looked distressed, Homer grumpy. They both began talking at once, in urgent voices. ‘Ellie, you’ve got to listen to reason — ’ Homer started saying. ‘Ellie, you might want to think about this a bit longer — ’ Fi said.

For the first time since the death of my parents I felt real strength. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m staying right here. I don’t care what I do. If I have to fight I’ll fight. Don’t you understand? You two, of all people?’ I felt like I didn’t need to shout anymore. I was certain now. ‘Homer, Fi, my roots go as deep into this earth as any old redgum. That creek down there is my life’s blood. These paddocks, I know them like I know my own skin. I can take you to the jumper ant nest in Nellie’s, I can show you where the lichen on the southern side of the fenceposts is red and the eastern side is yellow. You know that gully over there beyond the shearing shed? Those willows in it are the ones my grandfather planted to stop the soil erosion. I know where the pink fingers flower and the coral-peas, and the sundews, and I know how to make them catch crumbs of bread.’

‘The flowers?’ Fi said, looking startled, but I wasn’t going to let her interrupt me. I could hear that I was talking wildly but I couldn’t shut up.

‘I know the kind of moo a calf makes when it’s got bracken poisoning. I know the cow whose udder looks good but whose milk is poor. I know the way Romneys graze differently to Polwarths. I can tell you how many bags of seed potatoes you need to the acre. Dammit, I can castrate lambs with my teeth.’

Gavin jumped away fast, holding his hands to his crotch. We all laughed then. Once again I had no idea how he followed such a long speech. Lip-reading is seriously hard! But he sure had understood that last sentence.

At least he’d broken the mood. We started talking more sensibly. And I began to realise just how serious the problems were. Fi spelt it out. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t know anything about farming. But if I’ve got it right, you’re planning to keep going with school, keep running the property on your own, and somehow keep yourself and Gavin safe from guerillas who might come roaming through the countryside. And as if all that’s not enough, you’ve got to try to cope with the death of your parents and Mrs Mac. It’s a pretty tough order, Ellie. I mean, I can stay a while, like I said, because we’ve only got a week of term left, and then two weeks holidays, but after that my parents’ll probably want me back. And I don’t know how much use I’m going to be to you anyway. I can hardly tell the difference between a cow and a sheep.’