by John Marsden
‘Because it’s the fourth time she’s said it?’ said Jess.
That really got up my nose. Partly because Homer’s joke really didn’t need an interpreter, but with Jess everything has to be spelt out. Forget subtlety when she’s around. She’d make an RG–31 going through a roadblock look subtle.
But also because Jess had known about Bronte being the Scarlet Pimple and I hadn’t. Fair enough, Jess had joined Liberation and I hadn’t. But there were plenty of people in Liberation who didn’t know the identity of the Scarlet Pimple. Anyway, whether it was fair or not didn’t matter. I just felt violently jealous.
I’d learned quite a lot in the last twenty-four hours, including the name of the vehicle that had rammed the roadblock with such frightening force. Gavin was already nagging me to buy an RG–31, and I could see that it would have a thousand and one uses, but even so it wasn’t high on my shopping list. They cost a cool half million or thereabouts, but for that you get a vehicle that can drive over two landmines and live to tell the story.
That piece of information wasn’t all that crucial to me. But some of the other stuff . . . like the number of off-duty soldiers who had come with the Scarlet Pimple and the others on the raid across the border to get Gavin and me back. The inner workings of Liberation were being laid bare to me. No way in the world could the government or the Army condone or bless what Liberation did, but gee, the amount of unofficial help they gave was pretty spectacular. As Homer said, since the war ended a lot of Army medics had treated a lot of fresh combat wounds, which was funny considering there was meant to be no combat going on. Sometimes soldiers would come back very late from leave and instead of getting into major trouble, like they normally did, they’d just get a nod from their commanding officer, and he might even make the soldier a cup of tea. Rifles and ammo were strictly guarded, but sometimes a door was left open and later a few hundred rounds of ammo would be written off as having been fired on the practice range. A damaged RG–31 with many little dents all over it must have been caught in a hailstorm. Funny kind of storm though, where the hailstones came from the side instead of from above. But nothing was said, and it was just taken quietly into an Army workshop for repairs.
And so it went on. I was living in a country with two levels of government, so it seemed. The stuff we saw on TV and read about in the newspapers, that was one level, and it was all most people ever saw or heard, but on another level was a group of high-powered people who were doing what they thought was best for the rest of us. It made me uneasy. I thought we were meant to be a democracy. Who elected these people? What gave them the right to decide foreign policy for the rest of us? If they read the situation wrongly, if they stuffed everything up, then we would have to wear the consequences, even though we didn’t know they’d been doing it in the first place! Had this happened before the war too? Surely not. But maybe it had?
I started feeling guilty about the stuff I’d done for Liberation. Not a huge amount, but still . . . I’d never thought it through but then I didn’t know how much of it had been going on, or rather, how unofficially official the whole thing was.
And I didn’t really think it through on that particular day. It wasn’t the time or the place. Gavin and I had been rescued under spectacular circumstances by a whole bunch of people who’d responded to a tip-off from Toddy that something appeared to have gone horribly wrong. It was the time and place for gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. And I gave it out, big time. I had nothing left in me but gratitude, and I was happy to give it. Strength, energy, courage, stamina, determination . . . I had none of that stuff left. I was gutted. All I could do was thank them over and over.
And then be amazed at the stuff I was learning. Bronte. Of course, Bronte. Of course! The quiet achiever. She was perfectly placed to be the Scarlet Pimple. During this long ‘debrief ’ back at my place she’d mentioned her father three times already. There were a lot of brains behind Liberation and I clearly remembered her father, the lawyer, a major in the Army, and how quiet and efficient and ruthless he had seemed to me. I realised that he was probably a big force in the whole organisation. And another thing about him: he was quite happy to go outside the normal rules, to find other solutions to a problem. He’d even written that to me when I’d been trying to deal with Mr Rodd and Mr Sayle, the horrible pair who wanted to get a guardianship order on me and then steal my land: Forget the legal approach . . . you know how effective direct action is . . . use your brains and your imagination and you’ll come up with better solutions . . .
Damn, I hadn’t even thought about that when I’d been trying to work out the identity of the Scarlet Pimple. Another thing suddenly struck me, another piece of the puzzle dropped into place: the way he’d got that note to me. He’d had Bronte give me all the official stuff, all the official legal advice, and then afterwards she’d slipped me the unsigned note, also from him. I realised how that little transaction summed him up perfectly. Mr Respectable Army Lawyer, working away doing all the regular stuff from 9 to 5, sorry, from 0900 to 1700, and at the same time running a different operation in secret, using his own daughter. Bronte had once called him Major Action Man; that had been another clue I’d missed. He was into action all right. And come to think of it, so was his daughter. I didn’t know how much of this came from her father and how much came from Bronte herself, but I remembered now that she’d told me she was into boxing, and then when I’d complained about Mr Sayle she’d told me to firebomb his office. How on earth had I ever decided she was calm and gentle? Well, OK, she was both of those things too, but just because she was a year behind us at school and because she spoke quietly I’d marked her down as Beth out of Little Women. Couldn’t imagine Beth suggesting firebombing as a solution to a problem, or doing a bit of boxing as an after-school activity.
‘The Scarlet Pimple,’ I said for the fifth time, shaking my head at Bronte, although now I was doing it as much to annoy Jess and Homer as for any other reason.
‘Yes, and I’ve been getting a few lately,’ she said, touching a bit of acne on the left side of her cheek.
‘Very funny.’
Lee and Gavin came in and I got up, pulled out the cutting board and started in on the evening meal. If life were fair both Gavin and I would have had three months off to recover from what we’d been through. However, life has never been fair, is not fair and will never be fair. This is Ellie’s First Law. Ninety percent of the rage in the world is because most people don’t understand that. I don’t know where everyone got the idea that life was meant to be fair, but they sure got a bum deal with that message. Once you know fairness is not required, is not compulsory, and in fact often has nothing to do with anything, you can get on with it.
If life were fair our country would never have been invaded, Lee and Gavin and I would still have parents; Robyn and Corrie and Chris would be alive; and Wirrawee would have beaten Risdon in the last Grand Final of the Wirrawee-Holloway Netball League, instead of being ripped off by an umpire whose seeing-eye dog needed a seeing-eye dog.
So there I was, having to do housework, when I should have been in a tropical resort recuperating after a few of the nastiest days of my life.
Still, I’d trained the boys well over the years and they did useful things like chop onions and peel spuds and shell peas while Gavin set the table. Gavin still looked pale and thin and there were shadows in his eyes that I’d seen before and had always hoped I’d never see again. My biggest worry was that one day those shadows would become permanent.
While I stirred the gravy I thought about the topic that mattered most to Gavin and me now. The future.
I’d come to a decision while I lay under the body of that man on the stairs, but I didn’t know how to communicate it to the others – especially Gavin – or how to go about carrying it out. In the meantime members of Liberation had a twenty-four hour guard on our farm, and people like Toddy kept people like Bronte informed about the state of play in Havelock. So far the state of play was all right, a
nd the word was that the damage done to the particular gang of thugs who’d kidnapped Gavin and me was pretty much terminal. Not many had survived the raid on the house, and the ones who had were now scattered to the four winds. But I wouldn’t like to ask an insurance company for a quote on our long-term safety on the farm. Might as well ask them for a quote on a chicken in a crocodile farm.
But for now we had to keep going. As soon as I could drag my weary body around the farm I’d done a check of the place. Everything about it had particular significance for me now. Of course I’d always valued it. Never taken it for granted. Yet now I noticed stuff almost as if for the first time. The way the wisteria was regrowing after that huge tree branch smashed most of it to pieces. The splatter of paint drops on the concrete outside the machinery shed, where I’d been a bit careless when I was painting it with Dad. A couple of roses Mum had grown from cuttings, down near the shearing shed, at last looking quite healthy, after years of being in the intensive care ward, with most of us giving them no chance. I’d made a joke to Mum once, when I was certain the roses were going to die, a joke about taking flowers to the flowers. You know, like they were in hospital, so you take them flowers . . . oh forget it.
Anyway, I should have known better about the roses. Whatever Mum planted grew eventually. Take me for instance.
I went down to the lagoon and noticed again the care with which my father had rehabilitated it. Fences and tree guards to protect it, nesting boxes along the banks, the way he’d bulldozed out the whole northern end to make it bigger and more viable. He was a Hall of Fame father. I wondered what he’d think about the things I’d done, the things I was doing, and the thing I was about to do.
I wandered past the tip and wondered if I should have thrown out that armchair. Maybe it would have been worth restoring. And the table from the shearing shed. And all that wire. And the big birdcage, sure it was a mess, but we might need it the next time we got an injured bird, especially if it was a raptor. I did this all the time at the tip. It was the big disadvantage of having your own rubbish dump. You always had the choice of getting something back again. When it was gone forever, out of your life, when you’d kissed it goodbye, when you’d finally achieved closure – well, you knew it was really just over the hill and you could always go and retrieve it if you changed your mind. Gavin was a shocker. Whenever I chucked anything of his out he always, eventually, marched down here and collected it.
This was the spot where Dad had killed the brown snake. Lucky. It had been a bit too close for comfort that time. Brown snakes can be so aggressive, and their poison is deadly. In the world’s top ten, according to Jeremy. We saw heaps of snakes but we only killed them if they were close to the house or the sheds. But we’d lost a few cattle to snakes, and a few sheep. Not to mention the dogs – I couldn’t even remember the name now of that working dog who’d died right in front of me, swelling up like a tyre when air’s being pumped into it. It had been horrible to see, and I had felt so helpless.
Past the machinery shed, where the swallows nested every year. They had created a housing estate now, with their nests and mud and droppings. They were more used to us than they had been at the start. These days they still took off if we got too close, of course, with that sudden silent dash past your ears that was always such a shock, but they tolerated us pretty well. I never got tired of seeing their babies in the nest, then eventually seeing them perched on protuberances nearby, little fluff balls still not big enough to fly.
A farm is just an accumulation of stories really. Same with people. That’s where Dad shot the fox, with the duck still in her mouth. Talk about incriminating evidence. Down to the shearing shed, where we kept the poddy lambs, when we used to have sheep. As a little kid I fed them anything. Watermelon, bread, cake, apricots from the tree, biscuits. They ate it all and seemed to thrive on it. Through Coopers, remembering the musters. Coopers is a difficult paddock, because it doesn’t have a particular shape to it, so there’s no obvious path for the sheep to take. You have to just about do a rollcall, issue a personal invitation to each sheep, collect each one individually. Getting the lambs over the creek really did involve a one-on-one encounter. The best way was simply to throw them, but first you’d have to catch them. One would come scrambling past, all fired up and frantic because of the dogs, and you’d dive and either miss, in which case you’d get another graze or bruise or scratch, or you’d connect with a leg if you were lucky; then you’d drag the lamb in and chuck her over the creek and turn and look for another one.
Up through the paddocks. ‘A farmer’s footsteps are the best fertiliser,’ Dad used to say, which just means that the more you walk around your place the better everything seems to grow and flourish. I was pleased to see that things generally were looking all right. Mr Young’s cattle seemed halfway decent and mine were doing OK. I’d have to do a proper check later, and see if there’d been any casualties while I was locked in an attic in Havelock, but I noticed now that the place had a decent well-looked-after feeling. That made me proud. I’d inherited quite a legacy, and I knew there were ghosts looking over my shoulder. Friendly ghosts, but if I’d been lazy or destructive they would have let me know about it pretty damn quick, and they mightn’t be too friendly then.
CHAPTER 19
‘SO HOW ON earth did you get involved in Liberation?’ I asked the Scarlet Pimple as we sat on the grass overlooking the oval, shivering as we ate our lunch. It was one of those grey-blue days, more grey than blue, and the wind wore away our clothes till we might as well have been wearing nothing. I don’t know why we were out there really. To get away from the boys, I suppose. Not to mention the teachers.
She laughed. ‘It wasn’t any deliberate plan. I realised my parents were doing stuff that was clandestine, my father mostly . . .’
‘What’s clandestine?’ I asked, annoyed that anyone knew a word I didn’t, especially when she was a year below me.
‘Oh, you know. Secret, sneaky, undercover. So naturally I listened and asked questions, started snooping around. It was very exciting to think that my father was some sort of spy. Quite a lot of it got done from home. They’d go for walks in the park next door and sometimes I’d be allowed to go along. The good thing about my parents is that they’ve always trusted me. They know I don’t repeat stuff. And of course as I got to know how this stuff was working, I noticed that most of the people in Liberation weren’t much older than me. The war changed everyone’s ages I think. So after a while I became pretty good friends with some of them, and they talked to me completely openly, because they assumed I knew everything. Then I got asked to do little jobs, like take a message to someone, or pick up a parcel, or meet someone at a coffee shop and look after them until a member of Liberation turned up.
‘And then, drum roll, it all went horribly wrong. My parents were out and I got a phone call at the house from Oliver, this young guy who was in charge of one of the units. They’re never never meant to ring the house, so I knew he must be desperate. I told him to ring back in ten minutes and I raced down to the public telephone at the corner and got the number from that and when he rang again I told him to call that number in five minutes. So I raced back to the public phone and took the call, and when he explained what had gone wrong I gave him some suggestions and then spent the night working the phone, organising a whole lot of people and stuff to help him. My parents were out of mobile range, but by the time they got home, which was 1 am, I was still down at the corner using all the coins I’d found in the house, but everything was under control. I’d fluked a few pretty good outcomes with the suggestions I’d made to Oliver, so I was suddenly flavour of the month. Oliver wanted me as his second in charge and when he moved to Stratton I found myself running the group. It was only a little group, mind you, but then it started growing a lot. My father finds that quite disconcerting. I think he gave in to Oliver and let me do it because he thought he could control the whole thing, but it hasn’t worked out that way. We’ve become one of the bigg
est units around, and because we’ve been successful at a lot of the stuff we’ve taken on, we keep getting asked to do more. Most of it doesn’t come through my father at all now. It’s exciting but it’s also terrifying.’
She didn’t look at all terrified. I decided it would take a volcanic eruption to scare Bronte, and even then it would have to be in her back yard.
‘Your father’s playing a dangerous game, isn’t he?’ I asked. I was still bothered by this idea of people running a secret war, which could have big consequences for us all, even though we hadn’t voted for it and had no say in it. Like I said, I’d never thought about this before. I don’t think it bothered Bronte though. I guess when it’s your parents you follow them blindly, to some extent anyway. I guess that’s how those Mafia families, where there’s, like, six generations of crims, get to be the way they are.
‘Both of them are.’ She frowned. ‘It’ll all blow up sooner or later and there’ll be a scandal and they’ll have to take early retirement from the Army. But my dad’s prepared for that. It’s already happened to a couple of his friends. He likes the Prime Minister’s attitude though. You never sack anyone, or admit you could possibly be guilty of anything, even if you’ve bashed a baby or hijacked a plane, because by this time next week there’ll be a bushfire, or an old lady’ll win a million bucks in the lottery, or a pig’ll give birth to a twoheaded piglet or something, and it’ll all be forgotten.’
‘Yeah, he’s got that right,’ I couldn’t help but agree.
‘But you know, Ellie,’ she said, looking at me hard over her chicken and avocado sandwich, ‘I don’t think you should join Liberation. The opposite. I think you should take a break from all this stuff. It’s not good for your health. In wartime, pilots are only allowed a certain number of sorties, and then they have to take a rest. I think they do twenty before they get sent for a holiday. And that’s for guys who don’t even see the enemy, most of them anyway. You’ve been doing stuff on the ground, close up, face to face. You’ve seen too much blood.’
