While I live ec-1

by John Marsden

  ‘So if I wanted to keep the place going, what would I have to do?’ I asked.

  For the first time Gavin turned and looked at Mr Sayle.

  Mr Sayle grimaced. ‘Well, it’s just not feasible. You’d have to generate more income than is possible. There’s the thousand dollars a week to cover the lease payments, plus seven hundred and thirty dollars a week to the bank. These payments had been made by your father up to the end of this month, which is next Tuesday. Plus of course there’s also the normal running expenses of a property of this size. That would be everything from fuel to seed to pesticides to tractor parts to the food for your table and the clothes on your back. You and the youngster here. I’ve heard about him.’

  Sitting on the escarpment and looking down at the house now, I could see the youngster emerge into the courtyard. He picked up a stick, which triggered instant excitement in Marmie, the new border collie. I assumed he was going to throw it for her. It was a game that could keep both of them amused for hours. ‘He’s such a kid still,’ I thought, looking down at him.

  He marched out of the courtyard, Marmie following eagerly. Instead of throwing the stick he carried it across his shoulder. Without a glance to left or right he went on down into the gully. The first yellow flowers of the broom infestation were already starting to show through. Gavin tossed the stick aside. Marmie reared back in excitement then pounced on it. But to her disappointment, and even though she paraded it right in front of him, Gavin ignored her.

  ‘What is he doing?’ I wondered.

  He went to the fenceline, rolled up his sleeves, and to my utter astonishment pulled out a broom plant, then another and another and another.

  I nearly fell over and rolled all the way to the bottom of the escarpment. Instead I watched with my mouth open as he pulled out plant after plant. He worked steadily and methodically. It was the perfect time to pull out broom, before it flowered and set its seeds, but also because the ground was soft. Pulling it out was the best treatment. Chemicals were expensive and toxic. Slashing caused it to come back the next year with three or four stalks that were much harder to pull, but in some places slashing was the only option. I couldn’t get a slasher into this gully, though.

  The thing about broom is that it spreads so quickly and takes over so much good pasture. Dad had always been trying to persuade Gavin and me to join his anti-broom campaign, but without much success, because it’s pretty boring work.

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ I whispered in my head, ‘come back and I’ll pull out broom forever. I’ll be your broom princess.’

  I’d never really been his princess of anything, but I’d been his mate, his offsider, his advisor, his daughter.

  After twenty minutes I couldn’t stand it any longer. I walked down the hill. Gavin was so absorbed that he didn’t see me coming but Marmie suddenly noticed me and came cavorting over to say hello. Empty-mouthed. She’d given up on the stick.

  Gavin straightened up then. I’d noticed before how aware he was of any change in the environment. Although he had his back to Marmie he seemed to sense that she was reacting to something.

  He took a glance at me and went back to work. That didn’t surprise me. He’d hardly spoken to me the night before. He was furious that I’d given in to Mr Sayle.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. That was a waste of time as he had his back to me again.

  I shrugged and found my own line of broom parallel to his and started pulling those out. After a while I almost forgot he was there. I got into a rhythm, the way you do. I reduced the boredom by counting the number of plants. I reached my first hundred in four or five minutes.

  I was halfway to my second when suddenly I was attacked. A wild little whirling dervish was whipping me with a long broom plant. I backed off, defending myself with my hands, trying to grab the plant and pull it away.

  ‘Gavin, what is this all about?’

  ‘You’re stupid,’ he yelled. ‘You’re pathetic.’ His eyes were full of tears.

  I screamed back. ‘What do you think? That I want to sell the place? You know I love it here. It’s my home. I thought we’d always be here. I feel as bad as you do. Worse.’

  ‘No you don’t! You’re not even fighting! You don’t care! You’re pathetic!’

  He started ripping broom out of the ground, not caring whether he was getting the roots or not, sobbing as he did it. Suddenly he stopped and turned on me again. ‘You’re a coward! You don’t have guts!’

  ‘It’s not a matter of guts! It’s common sense. It’s money. What would you know about it?’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t give in.’

  I started to answer, then realised with a shock that he was talking about my father. Occasionally he had called him ‘Dad’, but it always seemed like an accident. It took me a moment to recover, then all I could say was, ‘He would when things were this bad,’ which sounded pretty weak even to me.

  I walked away and went down to the lagoon. I stood there looking out over the water. This had been my father’s dream. To the horror of my grandfather he’d resurrected this area, taking it out of production and turning it over to trees and native plants and birds. It was as though my father had brought life back to this tired and over-grazed area, as though the breeze that stirred the long green reeds was my father’s breath. I felt then what I hadn’t felt in the cemetery, like he was alive again, that maybe he hadn’t died after all.

  My shadow was beside me and he put an arm around my leg as Marmie wandered along the edge of the water, in it up to her knees, sniffing for nests in the undergrowth.

  ‘Gavin, we’d need to make two thousand bucks a week,’ I said to him. ‘That’s so much money.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘There’s eight thousand in the bank. That’d only keep us going for a month.’

  He frowned up at me.

  ‘I don’t know the first thing about money,’ I said. ‘Not a damn thing. Every time we play Monopoly I lose.’

  He looked away.

  ‘There’s a hundred cents in the dollar, that’s about all I know,’ I told the back of his neck, which couldn’t hear me.

  He looked around at me again, impatiently.

  I held him at arm’s length and spoke straight into his face. ‘Gavin, do you understand that we could end up losing everything? At the moment we’d have enough to get a little house in Wirrawee and keep us fed and clothed. Doing what you want, we could end up sleeping in dumpbins.’

  He shook his head and hit me on the arm. He was strong enough; he really hurt.

  ‘Fight,’ he said. ‘If you fight, you win or you lose. If you don’t fight, you lose.’

  I stood there gazing at the lagoon, my mind in an agony of indecision. Finally I turned to him.

  ‘We’d both have to work like we’ve never worked before,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to pull up broom for ten minutes and then get sick of it, well, say so now, so I know where we are. We’re going to have to work before we go to school and work when we get home. You can forget about sleepovers with your mates and birthday parties and blue-light discos. You can forget about weekends and school holidays. You can forget about your social life. We can’t afford to employ anyone. We’ll have to do it on our own.’

  He gazed at me with his face and jaw set in the bulldog glare I knew so well. Then he marched away over the rise. I followed him, thinking we were heading home. But I got it wrong again. He swung left, back into the gully, and we both started pulling up more broom.

  CHAPTER 5

  That same evening my social life actually seemed to take a turn for the better. I was totally exhausted. We’d pulled broom for more than two hours, with a bit of help from Fi when she finally surfaced. Then we fed the cattle, and the surviving poultry, while Fi organised lunch. After that we put in a hard afternoon on the new cattle yards. The old yards had been OK, but they were built sometime before Captain Cook. While the farm was occupied by the enemy, during the war, it seemed like one of them had lost control of a veh
icle, probably a tractor, and kaboodled it through the rails, smashing part of the holding yard. Then Dad had pinched a lot of the old timber crossbars for the turkey and geese sheds.

  When we got the farm back he’d decided to start again from scratch and build the yards he’d always wanted. With double races, hot showers, cappuccino machine, satellite television, you get the idea. Nothing’s too good for our cattle. He’d done some of the hard yakka already, but not enough of it. At least he’d dug the holes. We had a post-hole digger that was run off the tractor, so it wasn’t really such hard work, but I wasn’t sure if I could operate it without his help.

  He’d also put in a set of scales, which was something he’d always wanted. I just hoped he’d paid for them. They cost around twenty thousand dollars but they were useful. Or so Dad said. When it comes to guys and gadgets I’m always a bit suspicious. But it’s true that a 300 kilogram beast can lose twenty of those kilos after twelve hours in the yards, and at the same time it’s compulsory to yard them for twelve hours before sending them in to be sold, so you do need to know what’s going on in terms of their weight.

  I’d spend twelve hours in the yards myself if I thought it’d knock twenty kilos off me.

  I explained all this to Gavin as we worked, in the same way that Dad had always explained stuff to me. Gavin did seem like one of those kids who had a genuine interest in farming. By God he was good that day too. He stuck to his guns. He’d said he was going to work — not in so many words but near enough — and he did. He never complained once, hardly ever got distracted, only took a break when I did, and — this is the mark of the true worker, I reckon — started anticipating.

  Dad always said there were three types of workers. The ones who stood there saying ‘Is there anything I can do?’, and did nothing. Most of our city guests were like that. The ones who said ‘Tell me what you want done and I’ll do it’, and did. Most of our workers over the years had been like that. And the ones who didn’t say anything but were always a jump or two ahead of you. When you were changing a flat tyre and you took the old one off and turned to pick up the new one they’d already have it in their hands, and they’d move in and put it on from your left while you were still turning round to the right.

  Dad reckoned one of those was worth two of the second type and five of the first type.

  And there were quite a few times when Gavin was like that. I’d be on my knees and I’d reach behind me for the ratchet wrench to tighten a nut, and he’d come in from the other side and be doing it while I was still wondering where I’d put the bloody thing.

  I think I had my first glimmerings of the possibility of happiness that day. It wasn’t the free light-hearted happiness I’d known as a child, because I’d never have that again. From now on any good feelings were going to be under-shaded by the awfulness of what had happened. My personal castle was always going to have a big dark basement. Guess it already did, after the war, and losing my grandmother and Robyn and Corrie and Chris and the others. But the basement had got a hell of a lot bigger recently. Maybe that day I had the first faint awareness that I could still live in the castle. It hadn’t been totally demolished.

  It got dark early of course, and we were both pleased to call it a day and stagger back to the house. I’d had plenty of hard days on the farm, but it was different now, because before it had all been just physical. I’d do the different jobs, sure, but Dad decided the important stuff. I’d be responsible for doing each of my jobs properly, but I didn’t have the feeling of responsibility for the whole thing, the big picture. I didn’t have the mental weight, back then.

  Just as I flopped down in front of the TV, having put away a kilo of Fi’s pasta, and made a few admiring remarks about the way she’d cleaned up the house, I heard a car outside. I was so jumpy that I lifted a metre out of the chair. Of course if the gunmen returned they wouldn’t be likely to drive straight up to the house, but sometimes your mind doesn’t function very calmly.

  It turned out to be Homer, but not ‘Homer alone’, as I said to Fi, adding, ‘Hey, good name for a movie.’ That was my best joke of the year, which gives some idea of how badly things were going. But I was seriously annoyed when I saw that he’d brought a bunch of people. It wasn’t just that I was still in a severe state of shatter over what had happened to my parents, but as well I was exhausted from the day’s work, I was stressing over how I could tell Mr Sayle that maybe I didn’t want to sell the property after all, I was grubby and smelly and in my work clothes because I’d been too tired to take a shower before tea. And now I was expected to be the host of a party.

  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 b
ut 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.