by John Marsden
We spread out and started looking for empty bullet shells and shotgun cartridges. Some were easy to find. And others we got by diligent searching. Some we found by fluke, others I’m sure we never found. But we figured that if we couldn’t find them, no-one else would either.
What we did find was the campsite. They’d made a clever little shelter, like a cubby, out of sticks and bark and the branches of a low-growing tree, and they’d camouflaged it with more bark and some dead grass. We peered inside. We didn’t want to disturb it in case the cops found it later. But we did see a mobile phone on top of one of the packs. ‘Be funny if it rang,’ Lee said.
Then it was back to the paddock. I was nervous for a couple of reasons, one being that Colin McCann might have come to check on his bull by now. He was a nice guy, but a bit lazy, so he probably only went to the paddock every few days, and even then he might not get up to this boundary. But if we were unlucky, he would be standing there with his own mobile phone, and we would hear the whirring of the police helicopter in the distance.
The other reason I was worried isn’t hard to guess. I didn’t know how long the bull would take to calm down after killing two men, but I figured it could be quite a while. I knew Lee was as nervous as I was, because we kept making jokes to each other as we went back up the slope.
Well, it could have been better and it could have been worse. The bull had moved, but only about a hundred metres. A couple of kilometres would have been more to my liking. He was tearing at the grass, and looking pretty foul tempered. It occurred to me that we had not only caused the deaths of the two men, we had sentenced the bull to death as well. No farmer in the world would keep a bull that had killed people. Not for the first time I had to harden my heart and think ‘One more victim of war’. War discriminates a bit more than a tsunami does, but not by much.
We crept into the paddock, trying to keep a couple of trees between us and the bull. We had our firearms, just in case, but it would have been very complicated if we’d had to shoot the bull. They would have found him with a bullet wound from a gun that didn’t belong to either of the soldiers. Lee started dreaming up some idea about shooting the bull, wiping the weapon clean of our fingerprints, putting the rifle in the hands of one of the dead soldiers and stamping his fingers all over it. I just looked at him. He really was shooting the bull. He must have been watching too many bad American cop shows. No way was I going to let life get that complicated.
It had occurred to me a few times that the guys might not have been dead, but it was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate. My brain said they were dead and my instincts said they were dead. I think I was just trying to scare myself. Anyway, they were dead. One of them had blood from his ears and mouth but no other injuries that I could see. The other had guts hanging out of his stomach where he’d been trampled. It was pretty foul. We took the rifles but we didn’t touch anything else. The magazines were empty, so we were right about their running out of ammunition.
And then back home. We had accomplished nothing. Unless you call the deaths of two people something. Oh yes, I had a grim feeling of revenge, which fitted in nicely with my anger at the people who had committed the kidnapping. I had fantasies about hunting all of them down and killing them one by one, even if it took years. I would be the Avenging Angel. There are horrific crimes and bad crimes and minor crimes, and then there’s overdue library books. Kidnapping Gavin was a terrible thing to do. It could never be justified, never, never, never. So I didn’t shed too many tears over the bodies in the paddock. But at the same time it didn’t get us anywhere. I had been distracted by Lee’s sudden awareness that there must be people spying on the house, and in the excitement of that neither of us had stopped to think that it actually didn’t matter much.
However, Lee did have one bright idea. He said, ‘Is it okay if I ring Liberation? If there’s one thing they’re really good at, it’s gathering intelligence, and if they have a look at those blokes they might be able to work out where they came from.’
I was a bit concerned. ‘I don’t want them hanging a double murder on me. It wouldn’t look good on my school record.’
‘Don’t worry. They take their own view of the law. Nothing we did today will faze them.’
‘Bloodthirsty lot. It’s very convenient though, isn’t it? To decide that you just don’t agree with the law so you’ll follow your own path.’
He gazed at me in that special Lee way.
‘OK, figure this one then. Talking on your mobile phone while you drive is really dangerous, isn’t it? Irresponsible, reckless, and definitely against the law?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ I said that to humour him, because I was obviously being set up, but I still agreed about the phones anyway.
‘But it’s legal in New Zealand.’
‘Oh.’ I sat there and thought about this. ‘OK. I see what you mean.’
‘In one country you’re an irresponsible, dangerous law-breaker and in the other you’re a respectable lawabiding citizen. I’ll give you another example. Those flashing lights and stuff they put in for all the schools a few years back, so if you’re zooming along at a hundred you have to slow to forty when the kiddies are leaving to go home.’
‘Or arriving at school, yes, that’s right.’
‘One day it was OK to do a hundred and the very next day you’re a law-breaking lunatic. Yet nothing’s changed. You’re the same person driving in the same way as you were the day before. The only thing that’s changed is the law. Suddenly you’re a criminal.’
‘Some things are always wrong though. Murder, rape, the heavy stuff.’
‘In some societies that was part of the social fabric. Or religious fabric, or both. I’ve been reading about the early days of Bora Bora, where if they had a meeting to pay respects to their God, they killed people left, right and centre. They bred slaves especially so they could be human sacrifices. That wasn’t murder, not to them.’
‘But to us . . .’
‘That’s my point. I don’t think there are any laws that aren’t artificial. They’re just what the society decides they want or don’t want at that particular time. And once they’ve decided what they want, one of the ways to make it all work is to heap abuse on anyone who “breaks the law”, as they call it.’
‘But our laws are based on a principle . . . a philosophy.’
‘Which is?’
‘I don’t know. Something about respecting each person’s rights. Everybody has a right to live the life they want without interference from others. That sort of stuff.’
‘Oh yeah? Tell that to the refugees who came to Australia before the war. They were here legally but the government wouldn’t follow its own laws. Just locked them up and threw away the keys. Hey, check this out. Not long ago there was this thirteen-year-old kid in New South Wales. His mother was a prostitute and a heroin addict and she abused the kid. He got put in foster care when he was two or some young age like that, then later he got kicked out of multiple schools, then they diagnosed him as having a chromosomal abnormality and being intellectually impaired. Then, when he’s thirteen, he kills a little girl. Really brutally. Horrible stuff. So what does the judge do? Hits the boy with twenty years in prison.’
‘And your point is?’
‘What’s he being punished for? Being a murderer or being an abused child?’
I was silent. Sometimes Lee was way ahead of me. ‘So what should they have done with him?’ I asked finally.
He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Not send him to prison for twenty years though.’
‘If he’d killed Pang you might feel differently.’
‘Yeah, I might. And then you have to decide whether the relatives of victims are the best people to make those calls. I don’t think they are. Chances are they’ll be too blinded by grief and love and rage to see the whole picture.’
‘But as Gavin’s relatives, if that’s what you’d call us, we just went out and executed a couple of guys for what they’ve done to him
.’
‘That’s true. And there’s not much I can say about it except that we didn’t make any definite plans to kill them. But yeah, you’re right, we could have stopped it and we didn’t. When the bull was trampling them to death I didn’t actually think about Gavin, I thought about my parents.’
And on that sobering note he went off to ring the Scarlet Pimple or someone else in Liberation. It left me to do the thing I’m worst at, and that was to wait. Once again my life was in other people’s hands and I didn’t like it one bit. I had to wait for the ID documents that I would use on the other side of the border, I had to wait for more information to come from Liberation, I had to wait for transport to get me to Havelock.
I waited also for another phone call from the kidnappers but there was nothing. No news didn’t mean good news for me, it meant no news. It was impossible to know what to read into their silence. It could mean that Gavin was dead, it could mean that their phone had been cut off because they hadn’t paid their bills, it could be that they were confused by the sudden silence of their spies. Most of my friends voted for the last one.
Jeremy sat at the end of my kitchen table and I sat at the corner beside him, sipping on a homemade lemon squash. He said that if Gavin was dead they wouldn’t tell me anyway. ‘Why would they tell you? He’s their bargaining chip. They have to convince you he’s still alive or they won’t get what they want.’
‘Thanks, that’s very comforting.’
He was actually there to coach me in my homework, which was to learn my new identity. I was now Paula McClure, daughter of Mr Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring. There was a real Paula McClure. She was currently at boarding school in Maryland, in the USA, and her parents were in Havelock as part of a media liaison programme. Don’t ask me what that means. But it took my breath away when I found out that the real Paula’s parents would have no idea that I was in the same city as them, let alone that I was posing as their daughter. For that matter the real Paula would have no idea, but seeing it was a long way to Baltimore it wasn’t so likely that she’d be troubled by having a stunt double in Havelock. Still, it troubled me. If someone impersonated me I’d blow about ten fuses. And what if I ran into someone who knew the real Paula? What if I ran into Mr Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring? What would I say to them? ‘Oh hi, guys, I’ve been meaning to look you up for ages, I’m your daughter, you know, Paula. So how have you been?’
Jeremy told me to put all those issues out of my head. He was quite . . . a word I like . . . curt about it. Curt. I knew a guy called Kurt once, who was anything but curt. And Jeremy was normally so uncurt. But now he was all business. ‘Keep away from those moral dilemmas, Ellie. They’re a waste of energy. You’ve got plenty else to worry about before you worry about that. Now, when’s your birthday?’
‘December 5,’ I replied promptly.
‘Not yours, stupid. Paula’s – the new you. When’s your birthday?’
‘Oh shoot, I knew this . . . October?’
‘Yeah, October 31.’
‘Oh that’s Halloween. That’s easy to remember. Hope it’s not symbolic of anything.’
‘Parents’ names?’
‘Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring. Dunnno what she’s a doctor of, though.’
‘Yeah, I can’t believe they left that out of the information. I don’t think it’s medicine or they would have said.’
‘Yeah, or she’d be working as a doctor.’
‘OK, now what’s your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Oh, something funny. I mean complicated. Tennyson-Barnes?’
‘Barnes-Tennyson. What’s your unit number?’
‘One twenty-seven. Block D, UN Staff Residence.’
‘Parents’ place of business?’
‘You mean where do they go to work?’
‘Of course that’s what I mean. Come on, Ellie, wake up.’
‘I am awake. It’s just that you’re so grumpy.’ I moved sideways so that my head was near his shoulder, and then snuggled into him. I needed some warmth. The separation from Gavin had been too long. ‘Come on, tell me, where do my mummy and daddy work?’
‘Have a guess.’
‘The Department of the Inferior?’
‘Very funny. Except it won’t be if you give that answer once you’re over there. Now what’s the telephone number for this Department of the Interior?’
‘444 something. 1725?’
‘Good. What’s your home number?’
‘I just want to get to Havelock as fast as I can and do something. I feel so helpless. During the war we made things happen. We didn’t have to sit around like this waiting for other people to organise stuff for us.’
‘You’re going to have to live with it, I’m afraid. Sounds like it’ll be at least twenty-four hours before they can organise to get you there. That gives you twenty-four hours to know this stuff so thoroughly that you don’t even have to think when someone asks you the questions. Now, what’s your phone number?’
‘Oh God, I can never remember numbers. It starts with 455 I think. I can’t remember the other four. They must have shorter numbers than ours.’
‘1215. The year of the Magna Carta.’
‘Magna what what what?’
‘I knew you’d say that. Do you have any siblings?’
‘Yes, a twenty-four-year-old sister named Laura. But she’s overseas too, doing a postgraduate degree in law at Princeton. She’s a real pain. She always wants the remote control, and she’s so fussy about food and she tries to boss me around when Mum and Dad are out.’
‘Where’d you get all that from?’
‘I just made it up.’
‘OK, but you can’t say “too”.’
‘Huh?’
‘You said, “She’s overseas too.” You can’t say that. You’re not overseas. You’re in Havelock.’
‘Oh yeah, so I am. Or at least I wish I was. God, you’ve got so much lint in your belly button.’
‘Do you drive your teachers completely and utterly crazy?’
‘Most of the time.’
‘Do you pull up their T-shirts and molest their belly buttons?’
‘Oh yuck, what a gross thought. You’re disgusting. Ask me another question.’
‘No, you don’t know it well enough. Go away and study for a couple more hours and then I’ll test you again. I’m going to Homer’s to use a safe phone. I’ve gotta make some calls.’
‘Oh yes? Anyone I should be jealous of?’
‘No. It’s to try to get you to Havelock faster. Come on, learn that stuff. There won’t be any fifty-fifty or dial a friend if a soldier stops you on the streets of Havelock and starts asking questions about your identity.’
Off he went.
He seemed so detached. He wasn’t acting like a boyfriend. Although he’d just made a joke, it did cross my mind that he didn’t have much sense of humour. On the other hand he was right to insist that this stuff was serious and I had to know it inside out and backwards. Of course I’d already figured that out for myself, but it was so hard to concentrate. It was interesting that he said he would try to get me to Havelock faster. It made me wonder again if he was the Scarlet Pimple.
CHAPTER 9
STEPPING OUT ONTO the streets of Havelock was not the scariest thing I’d ever done, but it made it through the home and away series and into the finals. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d ever done either, but it was definitely a contender for the flag. The only other country I’d been in was New Zealand, and sure, it’s another country, but everything there looks so similar. The people certainly do, and they speak more or less the same language, even if they have trouble with a few vowels and the boys have their teeth soldered together.
Going to Havelock was going to the City of Weird for a few reasons, one being that I was in another country, even though I still thought of it as my country, and even though the landscape was the same. The cityscape was changing, had changed quite a lot, but the landscape was still those smoky
blue mountains and green-grey gum leaves and strong hot sky that was the background to my life.
At least I’d had that experience a few times now, from crossing the border, so I was getting more used to it.
The cityscape did come as a shock. I’d never been to Havelock before, so I’m making assumptions, but I don’t think any of our cities or towns had looked like this before the war. Of course the capital cities had their ethnic areas, where you could almost pretend you were in another country, and I loved going there, enjoying the food and the shops and the energy. But when a whole city is different, when you know that block after block, suburb after suburb, will be like this, then you’re in a different headspace. You know that you’re the alien, you’re the outsider, you’re the ethnic. You’re locked into a lot of things in life, but with most of them, like your personality and your feelings and your coolness or lack of coolness, you kid yourself that you can change them at any moment. Even your weight. But you can’t kid yourself about your skin colour or the way your eyes and nose and mouth are shaped and arranged. You’re locked into your body for life. There was some white journalist in America, back in the fifties or whenever, who took chemicals to make his skin go black for a while, and then wrote a book about being a dark-skinned person in a white society. It sold squillions but someone told me the guy died young from the toxic effects of the chemicals. It did strike me as interesting that white people had to have a white guy explain to them what it was like to be black. They couldn’t hear it from a black person.
When I was in Year 9 I got the gig to go to Stratton and sit on a stage with half-a-dozen students from other schools at a conference for school librarians. We were like a panel, and the audience could ask us questions about what we liked in school libraries and what we didn’t like, and what made us go into the library and what drove us away, and our opinions about reading, all that sort of stuff. Well, it went like a bushfire. In fact the session ran twenty minutes overtime and most of the teachers missed their afternoon tea. But all the time, while I was on the stage taking my turn at answering questions, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Why don’t they ask the kids at their own schools? They could have got the answers to these questions a million years ago. How come they have to put us on a stage before they take us seriously or listen to us?’
