While I Live

by John Marsden

  I don’t think Homer noticed any of that. He ushered them into the kitchen happily and introduced them to Fi and me. Not to Gavin, who as soon as he realised what was happening stomped off sulkily to watch TV. He was so jealous of me now, Gavin, and he didn’t like sharing me with anyone. But a carload of teenagers was too much competition, and all he could do was retreat.

  There were three of them, besides Homer. The one who first caught my attention was Jeremy Finley, the son of General Finley, who’d helped us so much during the war. General Finley had also caused us a lot of problems but, like the Chinese say, ‘the cured patient forgets the pain’, and these days I felt pretty good about him.

  Jeremy was tall and skinny and seemed like a nice guy: and he had a sense of humour. He immediately handed me this plastic bag. ‘Chocolate and avocados,’ he said as I opened it to peer inside. ‘My dad said that’d really impress you. And sorry, but they don’t make Iced Vo-Vos anymore.’

  I blushed a bit, with pleasure. General Finley had surprised me again. It was many months since I’d yelled into a radio to tell him how desperate I was for chocolate and avocados and Iced Vo-Vos. We’d been at the top of Tailor’s Stitch, near our hiding place during the war, trying to get in touch with New Zealand, and General Finley had asked if we wanted anything. I couldn’t believe he’d remembered my list of requests. Maybe he had it programmed into his computer, in the Ellie file.

  ‘They don’t make Iced Vo-Vos anymore?’ I asked Jeremy.

  ‘Yeah, I think the Vo-Vo trees got blown up in a guerilla raid,’ he said.

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yep,’ Homer said. ‘War sure is hell.’

  He introduced me to Bronte, who had one of those thoughtful looking, attractive faces. I like people with eyes like oceans, where you know straight away that even if you talk to them for a thousand years they’ll still have secrets from you.

  I already knew Jess, who was dark-skinned, with lively eyes that were forever scanning the room. She seemed like she noticed everything. Jess used to live in Stratton but they’d moved to Wirrawee. Their house had been bombed so they arrived in Wirrawee with whatever they had in their pockets, which wasn’t much. At first Jess often wore a black top to school, a black top with silver edging. One day Bridget Allen, who can be a real bitch when she wants to be, and most days she definitely wants to be, told Jess how it was my top, which I’d put into one of the charity bins that we all gave heaps of stuff to, and funny about that, Jess never wore the top again.

  Jess’s father was an IT teacher and her mother had gone off to America with another woman, which by the standards of the old Wirrawee was spectacular gossip. These days people didn’t take a lot of notice.

  I did start to warm up a bit. I got three coffees, a tea, a cordial and a water, and we sat around the kitchen table. Bronte and Jess were at Wirrawee High. At the start of the year Homer and I had enrolled in a special accelerated course, but we couldn’t do the workload, so we’d both gone back into normal streams. We were still a year above Bronte. There was a time when that wouldn’t have mattered, I’d have known her anyway, but since the war Wirrawee High had suddenly grown to nearly twice its previous size, and there were heaps of people I didn’t know.

  Jeremy was from Stratton. I had the feeling that he and Jess might be an item, or were on the verge of becoming an item. Or they would become an item eventually but didn’t know it themselves yet.

  Bronte was pretty quiet. Jess and Jeremy did most of the talking, with Homer contributing an occasional grunt. Fi and I were both too tired, even with the caffeine hits. We probably needed a litre of caffeine intravenously.

  Jess started asking me about the guys who’d killed my parents. Gradually she probed deeper and deeper.

  ‘I think they just pick places at random,’ I said, although I know I always went a bit white-faced when I thought about the alternatives.

  ‘What do you think they wanted?’

  ‘To steal stuff I guess.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose. Did they steal anything?’

  ‘Well, no. But with four of them killed, I imagine the others panicked and took off.’

  ‘How many do you think there were?’

  ‘I don’t know. The police looked at the tracks. But I haven’t heard anything from them for nearly a week. So I’m not sure if they came up with much evidence. I get the feeling that there’s so much happening with border fights and everything, and so many new people moving into the district . . . I think they’re just overwhelmed. And face it, what chance do they have of finding these guys?’

  ‘Not much I guess. But there are a few rumours going around.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, you know, camps of renegade soldiers, right near the border. People say they’re responsible for a lot of the raids.’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t heard about that.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s just a rumour.’

  ‘Jess is the Rumour Queen,’ Jeremy said. ‘You want to know who you’re with? She knows it before you do.’

  I blushed a bit, thinking of how a few minutes earlier I’d been thinking that maybe he was with Jess.

  Jess came back to the murders again.

  ‘Does it make you mad?’ she asked me.

  I nodded. Our eyes locked together. It was weird, like I was being interrogated almost. She asked me a series of quick questions.

  ‘What do you think should happen about it?’

  ‘It has to be stopped of course. How can we live like this?’

  ‘Stopped by who?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Army. The police.’

  ‘What if they can’t? Or won’t?’

  ‘If they really won’t, I suppose people have to protect themselves.’

  ‘The law of the jungle?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know that’s not the best way. But we can’t let them just wander around killing anyone they want.’

  ‘So people have to defend themselves?’

  ‘Maybe. Seems like it.’

  ‘How far do you reckon they should go to defend themselves? Across the border, for example?’

  I leaned back and sighed and pushed my hair out of my face.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s too early for me to think about all this.’

  Jess immediately switched off. ‘Oh yes, sorry. I didn’t mean to throw so many questions at you. You’re in such a horrible situation.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Ellie?’ Jeremy asked.

  ‘Depends on which day you ask me. A couple of days ago I would have said sell up and move out. Today it looks like I’m going to try to make the place work.’

  Homer rolled his eyes. ‘Make up your mind,’ he said. ‘I thought you were broke?’

  ‘I am. But, I don’t know, I don’t want to give up without a fight.’ I was too embarrassed to admit that Gavin had talked me into staying.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Homer said. ‘Shame in one way. My old man was all fired up to buy your place and expand his empire. But he’ll cope with the disappointment. Count on me for any help you want.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘If things go like I’m expecting, you’ll probably hear our pathetic fingernails scratching on your door one night, and our pathetic voices crying out for a crust of bread.’

  Gavin came swinging into the kitchen, went to the fridge and got himself some Linton’s cordial. I tried to introduce him to the three visitors as he poured the cordial into the glass, but he deliberately wouldn’t look up. Somehow though he managed to spill half the drink onto the bench. I sighed and went for a Chux.

  That night I lay in bed staring up into the darkness. I couldn’t sleep a wink. It wasn’t just the worry of how we were going to make two thousand bucks a week, although God knows, that was enough to keep anyone awake. I couldn’t understand how my father had ever managed to get a peaceful night’s sleep in his life. But it was also Jess’s questions. I knew what she was getting at of course, but up until then I’d managed to avoid thinking about
it.

  I put a lot of energy into avoiding thinking about things these days. Since the murders I hadn’t slept much. It wasn’t only that the vastness of night gave room for dark and sad and awful thoughts. It was also that a lot of memories of my parents were associated with night-time. Lying in bed as a little kid I would hear the sound of their voices washing down the corridor and over me, my father’s chuckles, my mother’s dry laugh, my father reading articles from the latest issue of Inland Outback and my mother commenting from time to time. I’d hear my father going outside to check the dogs and I’d hear his footsteps on the gravel, then on the dust, then echoing along the verandah as he circumnavigated the house, just a habit he had before he went to bed, making sure everything was ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’, as he called it.

  I heard a sound in the corridor, and a moment later Gavin came into my room, his feet padding across the floor. I shifted over and let him in. He grunted like a koala. Couldn’t even have my bed to myself these days. But he made a nice hot-water bottle.

  He went back to sleep within a minute but I still couldn’t. I started wondering what my parents would have said, what they would have wanted me to do. I’m not necessarily a big fan of that approach though. It’s like those Grand Prix car races – when a driver or a spectator is killed they always go on with the race, because they say ‘That’s what he would have wanted’. Well, I’ll tell you now, if I’m ever stupid enough to be a spectator at a Grand Prix and I get killed, I want the race stopped there and then. I want everyone to go straight home. I want three days of mourning, make that three days minimum, and I want all the cars painted black for the rest of the season. And five minutes silence before every race from then on. And the drivers to dedicate their future victories to Ellie Linton. Stuff the ‘She would have wanted us to keep going like normal’ approach.

  When it came to the farm, I think my father would have said ‘You don’t have to carry it on if you don’t want to’, but all the time he’d be hoping like hell that I would. I think my mother would have said ‘You don’t have to carry it on if you don’t want to’, and she would have meant it. When it came to getting revenge for their deaths, going after the people who’d killed them, both of them would have said ‘Don’t worry about that, don’t put your life in danger, we just want you to stay alive’.

  Well, I was quite keen to stay alive too, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, and although I hadn’t had time to think it through, I was quite certain that something severe had to happen to the people who’d killed my parents and Mrs Mac.

  And yes, if I had to get involved in bringing that about, I would do whatever I had to do.

  I gave a big sigh and rolled over. Against my back Gavin wriggled and made a few mumbling noises. I still hadn’t faced up to the other big issue, and I didn’t want to. But it seemed like I wasn’t going to get a choice. Like a monster this huge fear had sneaked out of the cupboard and even now was tiptoeing across the room towards me. This would have to happen in the middle of the night. I felt my tongue go dry. The monster was all around the bed now, sucking the air from the room. I heard myself make a whimpering noise. The monster was leaning over me, I could feel the heat of its body. I took a deep breath. My eyes were wide open in the darkness, but not seeing anything. If it had to be faced, I’d face it. I worked my throat a few times, trying to get some moisture back in my mouth. OK then. If these people had come to the farm deliberately, if they were looking for me, if this was a revenge attack because of what I’d done in the war . . . that was what Jess was getting at of course. It was the thought that kept creeping into my mind on a daily basis.

  And now I could give up any thought of sleeping for this or any other night.

  When would they be back? How could we protect ourselves? Maybe they wouldn’t be back. Maybe they’d feel that they’d achieved what they wanted. They’d killed the two most important people in my life. They’d ended the lives of the two people I cared about more than the rest of the world put together. I would have sacrificed my own life for those two people, no questions asked. Wouldn’t that satisfy them? Wouldn’t they be thinking ‘Well, we got her a good one, that’ll teach her a lesson’?

  Maybe. Or maybe they were specifically out to get me, and my parents had died to stop that happening. Maybe these people had sentenced me to death and they’d return sometime soon to carry out the sentence. If it wasn’t that, if it was a raid aimed at hurting me in whatever way possible, then the fact that they had lost four of their own men might have left them thinking that it still hadn’t worked. They still hadn’t achieved the clear-cut victory which would ‘teach me a lesson’.

  So if it were one of those two things, they would be back.

  Oh God. I hadn’t wanted to come to that conclusion. I turned and twisted in the bed, until I felt that I was making Gavin restless. I had to calm down.

  What were we to do? Give up the farm? After the scene with Gavin this morning, and all the hard work we’d done since, I knew now that I didn’t want to do that.

  Have sentries? Couldn’t afford it. Carry rifles everywhere? Well, we already were. But it wasn’t likely to be very effective. It’s hard to help with calving, keep a lookout in every direction and have a finger on the trigger all at the same time.

  Fight back? I didn’t want to even start thinking about that.

  At some stage I did drift into sleep. But in the morning, at the kitchen bench, waiting for the toast to pop, my mind returned to the monster of the night before. A monster confronted is a monster defeated, that’s what I’ve always believed. But this time it was more complicated. This monster was capable of recreating itself, of coming back in a different form and shape on each visit. As a group of renegade soldiers with guns, last time, arriving in daylight and shooting everyone they saw. But next time it might be as a sniper up in the rocks on the escarpment, or as a gang sent to kidnap me. Or maybe they were really smart, and they’d figured out the best way of all. Maybe they’d come back time after time and kill Gavin and Fi and Homer and Lee and anyone else I was close to, so that I’d end up with no-one to love me and no-one for me to love. That would be smart all right.

  With such thoughts tormenting me, and no easy answers, no obvious path to follow, I was faced with the problem of deciding what to do.

  And like a lot of people in an impossible situation I did nothing.

  After breakfast Gavin and I went out with a load of hay for the cattle, then checked and fed the poultry, then fuelled the vehicles, and all the time I was tense and watchful, but I didn’t actually change anything. Normally I like to make things happen, to be proactive, but for once I was in a position where I didn’t know how. I was waiting for someone else to make a move, so I could figure out how to respond.

  CHAPTER 6

  MR SAYLE WAS thunderstruck. Lightning-struck even. If he’d climbed to the top of an electricity pole with wire between his teeth and flown an aluminium kite on an aluminium string, he couldn’t have been more struck. He gaped at me for what seemed like three minutes before he could answer.

  ‘But . . . what on earth . . . ?’ he finally stammered. ‘Have you gone completely mad? You’ll lose everything. I’m not even sure that it’s legal. You’re underage, remember?’

  It was hard to keep my nerve in the face of this attack, which was as bad as anything I’d imagined. I tried to stay calm. I knew the worst thing I could do would be to act like a stupid emotional kid who wasn’t mature enough to make big decisions.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘the way I figure it is that my father made these business decisions, leasing the other places and borrowing the money and buying the cattle, because he knew it could work. So that means it must be possible to make the place pay. I mean, the only thing that’s changed is that he’s not here anymore. The farm’s the same and so are the stock and so’s the financial situation.’

  ‘That’s true on the face of it,’ he said. ‘But . . .’

  I wondered how long an adult could
talk to a kid without using the word ‘but’. About forty seconds’d be the record for most of them, and that’s on a good day.

  ‘But that’s a very superficial analysis. I’d have to say, and I don’t know how to put this kindly, your father did not make prudent decisions. I mean, the exercise with turkeys and geese was misjudged, and as I said to you before, it’s resulted in the property being saddled with debts, which in my professional opinion are more than can be sustained.’

  ‘But,’ I said, thinking it was about time I used the magic word myself, ‘land has suddenly become more valuable, now that there’s a lot less of it. And food is getting dearer by the day, especially food that needs a lot of space to produce, like beef and lamb.’

  ‘In the first place,’ he said, ‘your land has no value unless you sell it. Until that time it’s not worth anything in cash to you. In the second place, livestock production is a very chancy business. Disease, drought, theft, fire . . . there are so many slips twixt cup and lip. And the costs are enormous.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on the land all my life.’

  ‘There are lots of things on the land,’ he said. ‘Including manure.’

  I didn’t like him very much after that. He went on though, without noticing my reaction. ‘For example, how do you plan to keep going in the next few months?’

  ‘Use the money in the bank,’ I said. ‘That’ll give us another month. After that, I’m not sure. Sell some cattle I guess.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ he said in a tone of disgust, pushing himself back from his desk. ‘The cattle are your future profit. If you sell them now, so soon after buying them, where do you get your income after that? Anyway, that eight thousand dollars in the bank’ll soon be swallowed up. You have to eat and drink, remember. And pay electricity bills, and gas, and doctors’ bills if you get sick, and vet bills if the animals need attention. What about the funerals? I’ve just received the invoices for those.’