by John Marsden
If Gavin’s in his own bed I stop by on my way to the shower and give him the first of what will be a number of prods or shakes or pushes. The one sure way to get him out of bed is to kiss him, but I’m reluctant to use that tactic too often in case it loses its power.
The bathroom, yeah, well, it’s not too good at the moment because of the rats. It would be nice not to have rats, not now not ever, but it’s a part of our life that I suppose will never change. People from the city think we must live in filth and slime if we have rats but it’s not like that at all. I’m quite tidy and Gavin’s not bad and Mum was always pretty neat. Every year we get waves of mice and/or rats, and they arrive with no warning. Each time we wage war against them and eventually they’re gone, either because we’ve defeated them, or because the owls and feral cats and magpies have wiped them out, or because they’ve heard rumours of a great new chocolate factory down the road. Whatever, they go, and sometimes it’ll be twelve months before the new lot check in.
But it is really disgusting to wander into the bathroom half asleep and find rat droppings all over the floor and the soap half chewed and a roll of toilet paper that they’ve dragged to their hole and eaten away so they can make a nice soft nest with it. You wouldn’t want to wipe your bum with that paper.
So this particular morning I picked up the droppings using a tissue and dropped them into our loo and flushed them away, cos I knew I wouldn’t have time to clean the floor properly till this afternoon or tonight, then I chucked out the soap and the loo paper. We had friends from the city years ago who’d never seen rat droppings and didn’t know what they were, and when they found a half chewed apple in the fruit bowl, surrounded by these little black pellets, they thought someone had eaten part of the apple and put the rest back, so they cut it up and gave it to their little daughter. God, I practically vomited when I realised.
I put some Ratsak right down the hole, but they don’t seem to be eating it at the moment. Then I blocked the hole with steel wool, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Not far away was a perfect little star on the floor, a daddy-long-legs, with a solid circular black body. I’d never seen one quite like him, so neat and precise. When I counted, he had only seven legs, poor thing. I thought he was dead but I wasn’t sure so I touched him really fast and he didn’t move but I still suspected him and flicked him again and then a third time and he suddenly came to life and went scurrying away on his seven good legs.
My last encounter with a spider had been just a few weeks ago when I’d been getting a bag off the top of my wardrobe. I’d pulled it down and taken it into the dining room to pack it with stuff for school. As I started chucking in the books I felt a tickling across my scalp. ‘Dear God,’ I prayed, ‘please let it not be a spider.’ I thought, ‘I’ll go to the mirror, look calmly into it, and if there’s a spider crawling through my hair I am not going to panic.’
I went to the mirror, looked calmly into it, saw the biggest huntsman of all time crawling through my hair, and panicked. I scrabbled madly at my hair but I couldn’t dislodge the spider. Now I’d made it mad. I imagined it going into attack mode and filling my brain with venom. Amazingly, it didn’t do this, and I was able to have a second go, which was more successful. I swear, he was the size of my ear, and that’s not counting his legs.
Yes, between rats and spiders, not to mention fights to the death with armed enemy soldiers, life was never dull.
Anyway, I took my shower. I’m a long-shower person, because I find it the best place to think. We have a pretty good supply of water at the moment, so I can indulge myself. My favourite shampoo is the citrus with a touch of ginseng, Sunsilk I think. I have no idea whether it is any good for my hair, but it smells so good I have to stop myself from drinking it.
On the way back I generally chuck another load in the washing machine, or unload it from the night before. I pay a second visit to Gavin, then get to my bedroom, pick out which of my wardrobe of dazzling Wirrawee High School uniforms I’m going to wear, get dressed, call on Gavin’s room to deliver the very last final you’d-better-move-right-now-buddy warning, and then tackle the kitchen. It’s fairly embarrassing how many times I have to start by cleaning up from dinner the night before, and no, that’s not the reason we have rats, but once that’s done I can think about breakfast and lunch.
Neither Gavin nor I are big on breakfasts, especially since the money got so tight we can’t afford Coco Pops or Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. If I’ve got time and I’m in a good mood I’ll make porridge, which Gavin quite likes but which I’m not mad about. I just have the boring Weet-Bix with as little sugar as I can manage or some bread and jam. If the bread’s fresh I just eat bread, but if it’s stale I toast it. If the day ever comes when I get sick of bread I’ll starve to death.
By the time I’ve started eating, Gavin is probably stumbling down the corridor to the bathroom, or, on a good day, he might even be coming back showered and clean. Then he’s likely to lean against me and let me feed him pieces of bread or toast, like he’s a little bird in a nest. He seems to need this to give him the energy to go all the way to his bedroom and do the dressing thing.
As I’m eating, as well as feeding Gavin I’m also starting on the lunches. He likes the good old sandwiches with the conventional fillings, like cheese and Vegemite, chicken, or last weekend’s roast lamb with sliced tomato. He’ll still be leaning into me as I pop another square of toast into his greedy little mouth, and at the same time he has the cheek to complain about everything Fm doing with his sandwiches. ‘Err! Err! No more pepper!’
I prefer something a bit more exotic for lunch, which I’ll usually do the night before. I tried making sushi once but that was a disaster. When I say exotic, I don’t normally mean as exotic as sushi, but something like quiche or curried lamb shanks or vege kebabs.
By now the pace is starting to pick up. There might be time for coffee or there might not but there’s usually time for juice at least. I chuck a bit of fruit or a few cookies in the lunch boxes and close them up. I flick plates and cutlery at the dishwasher. I persuade Gavin to go back to his room to get dressed and I achieve this in a variety of ways depending on the mood I’m in and the mood he’s in. It could be putting him over my shoulder and running down there with him, or yelling at him to get a move on, or flicking at him with the fly swat.
I leave him to it and do a quick burn outside. I let the chooks and ducks out and scatter three tins of seed for them. Most of the seed goes to the rosellas, who’ve learnt that the Lintons’ is the place to be at around six forty-five a.m. I swear, they email each other to let everyone know there’s a free feed. As well as the rosellas, who are pretty, there’s the currawongs, who aren’t, and who steal the eggs; the magpies, who make a beautiful noise in the mornings and who are really cheeky; and the crows, who sound like death every day. We’re still investigating which bird tore the last lot of ducklings apart. When the mother ducks hatch their clutch of eggs — and they can do big numbers, like eighteen if they put in the effort — we leave them locked in the yard for weeks, until the little ones are old enough to look after themselves. But with the last lot we had a disaster. Under one of the doors was a gap just big enough for a duckling. Eight out of the flock of eleven squeezed under it and found themselves in the great outdoors. That was the end of their little lives. Something attacked them and pecked them to death one by one. I got home from school and found these tiny bodies, each one with terrible wounds, and a couple of them flattened as though they’d been stood on as well.
You never never get used to death on a farm. What really upset me about this was that the mother duck must have seen the whole thing. My old enemy, the imagination, kept playing it over and over, the mother totally distraught, running backwards and forwards, the last three ducklings equally distraught but not knowing why, running backwards and forwards after her, the mother squealing and grunting her distress and agony as she watched her kids pecked into pieces while she was unable to do a damn thing about it
.
Anyway, now we have a bit of four-by-two at the bottom of the door and so I guess it won’t happen again. Shutting the chook shed door after the ducklings have bolted.
I still want to know, though, which bird did it? The magpies, with their big and savage beaks, so out of proportion to the rest of them, stalking around like they own the place? The currawongs, hiding in the trees, peeping down like Japanese snipers in World War II? The crows, black angels, or rather, black ghosts, spirits of people who led bad lives and now can’t rest? I think it was probably the crows.
But I wouldn’t rule out the kookaburras. We have a lot of kookaburras, don’t know why. I don’t mind, as I like them, and I think they probably keep the snakes down. I saw a kookaburra eating a small snake last spring. It took him a while but he got it down. Dad told me kookaburras are ‘the true communists’, because they work together for the good of all. He said if one pair hatch some young, the other adults put aside what they’re doing and help fetch food for the new chicks. I must admit I’ve never seen this happen, although I’ve watched for it often enough.
Kookaburras are pretty — they drop the most beautiful feathers, with lovely soft brown and blue colours — but they also have beaks which to a worm or a moth or a duckling must look like an Exocet missile with a pair of eyes.
When I let the ducks out and they’ve shovelled up enough seed they head down to a small dam that we put in to provide water for the turkeys and which was a project that never got off the ground (like the turkeys actually). (In fact it was a turkey.) (And I suppose you don’t really want a dam to get off the ground.)
The turkey dam is one of the ducks’ favourite places. They love to put their food through water, dragging stale hard bread crusts under to soften them and break them up. There’s not many days when I can rush off without taking at least a minute to enjoy watching the ducks. Sure, when you watch them closely for a while you can see how they get up to some pretty ugly stuff. Drakes raping other drakes, drakes raping ducks that are too young, ducks killing their own ducklings. Somehow, though, as they launch themselves into the dam with satisfied clucks, like middle-aged ladies descending on the jam exhibit at the Wirrawee Show, you forget all that. ‘From troubles of the world I turn to ducks.’ I think that’s the first line of a poem.
It only takes the ugly caw of a crow or a bellow from Gavin or a stick falling from high in a gum tree to break the spell the ducks put on me. Suddenly I’m rushing again to check on an ailing cow or to get an LPG bottle that I want refilled or to pick up a rubber mallet I promised to lend Mr Yannos. In the meantime Gavin’s meant to be doing his jobs: making his bed, feeding Marmie and putting her in her yard, locking the house (something we never had to worry about in the past), fuelling the ute and getting it out of the shed and warming it up. Some days we take the bikes, but in winter it’s usually the ute. Time’s so tight on a school morning that I hit the ute running, like a Formula 1 driver, and take off for the front gate with a squeal of tyres. Traditionally, as we pass the shearing shed, Gavin asks me, What you forgot?’ I could never teach him any other way of asking the question. He was so eager to catch me out that he didn’t care about grammar. And there is always something. It might be trivial, like taking the clothes out of the washing machine; it might be personal, like cleaning my teeth; it might be major, like leaving the lunches on the kitchen table or forgetting to cancel the Monsanto guy who is coming out to talk about sorghum.
We herb down the driveway, spraying mud or blowing clouds of grit and dust, depending on the time of year, me driving and checking out the cattle on the right, Gavin checking them out on the left. It’s not a proper inspection of course — it’s many hundred acres short of a proper inspection — but a couple of times we’ve seen things that have suddenly terminated any plans to go to school that day. That doesn’t cause Gavin the least distress but it causes me enough for both of us.
Early in the trip we pass the skeleton of the Datsun 120Y that I used to have for these drives to the gate. It had been my personal paddock basher. Like all Datsun 120Y’s it was yellow. I think it was compulsory for them to be yellow. They were born yellow. This one was still yellow, or at least those parts that had any paint left were yellow. The rest was rusty red. Something had happened to it during the war. If its skeleton could talk, it would have told a tale of suffering and tragedy and death. However, the chances were that I would never hear its story. When I got back after the war, my beloved little Datsun was already a wreck.
The trip to the Providence Gully Road gate is exactly four kilometres, or a bit over, depending on which speedo you use. Most days it tends to be a race between us and the bus. Occasionally the bus has gone; quite often it’s waiting for us; most often it’s in sight and waiting for us by the time we hide the ute, grab our stuff and lock the car. These days we’re never quite sure who’ll be driving, out of Mr Gruber, who used to be our nearest neighbour but who retired after the war and is now living in Wirrawee and is really nice; Mrs Nelson, who lives a few k’s down the road and is really pretty horrible; and Jerry, who’s about twenty-five and is no Otto, but is a thousand light years closer to Otto than the other two.
Mr Gruber and Jerry wait for a few minutes, even if they can’t see us, but Mrs Nelson only waits if she can see the cloud of dust, and then she scowls at us as we get on. I mean, fair enough, it’s up to us to get there on time, and most days we do, even though I’ve made it sound like we’re hopelessly disorganised, but we do live in slightly difficult circumstances, and most of the days we’re late because of ‘unforeseen circumstances’, like someone else’s cow wandering up the driveway, or a fallen branch blocking the road, or a koala injured by a fox or a dog.
You can’t control nature and you can’t control your neighbours, as my father used to say.
And I couldn’t control Gavin. Sitting on the bus, the morning after the conversation with Mark’s mum, I watched the back of his head and wondered what on earth I could do with him. These days the paper was full of stories about post-traumatic stress. There was a post-traumatic stress advice column, there were articles by doctors about post-traumatic stress, there were post-traumatic stress support groups. It seemed to me that Gavin was a post-traumatic stress kid in a posttraumatic stress world.
He was digging around in the seat, aggravating the boy next to him, chipping at the rubber lining of the window with his fingernails. Then he did something to the girl in the seat in front, a Year 6 from the primary school. She suddenly turned around and knelt up and yelled over the top of her seat, ‘Stop it, you little faggot.’
My problem with Gavin was simple enough. Was he just a typical naughty kid or was he deeply disturbed and needing a lot of help? I knew one thing: I was deeply disturbed about him and I needed a lot of help.
CHAPTER 14
Gavin nearly disintegrated when he realised I was getting off the bus with him. His eyes rolled around like they weren’t attached to anything any more, and suddenly he was too weak to pick up his bag. I hadn’t said anything to him the night before about his being sent home early, or about the cat, but when I got up and headed down the aisle towards the door he knew that this was D-Day, this was the hour of power, and he was about to be nailed to the wall like the fox skins pegged out in the barn.
For a moment it seemed like he was going to stay on board, but then he realised he couldn’t do that, so he followed me off. But as soon as we were standing on the grass he ran up to me, turned me around and tried to push me back onto the bus. I wouldn’t let myself be pushed.
Instead, I set off for the school gate. He darted around and got between me and the gate, dropped his bag and, with both hands, grabbed me by the elbows.
Again he tried to push me back.
‘Gavin,’ I said into his furious eyes, ‘I have to talk to your teacher.’
I wasn’t trying to be smart by doing it this way. But if I’d told Gavin the night before, or at breakfast, he would never have got on the bus. Now, with so many kids str
eaming past, he was in a tough spot. He couldn’t throw too spectacular a tantrum without embarrassing himself big-time. Even so, he threw a very intense small one. His hands dropped down and grabbed my forearms, and he held and squeezed them so tight that I had bruises for four days afterwards. He tried to outstare me but I knew I couldn’t let myself be outstared so we locked eyes and, trying not to blink, I said, ‘I’ve got to find out what’s going on with you.’
He shook me then shook his head. Again he tried to push me away, this time down the street towards the high school, but other kids started to notice and stop and look. That didn’t stop him but it did slow him down a bit and make him more self-conscious. I felt sorry for him, but I felt sorry for the cat too. I said, ’Listen, kid, I’ve been bullied by experts,’ and I pushed him off and walked into the school.
It’s a bit strange going back to your old primary school. For one thing, they look like the same kids you were at school with and you have a weird feeling that you’ve jumped back a few years and they really are the same kids — that’s Fi over there with her back to you, Homer running past, Kevin hunched over a Game Boy with another kid who didn’t look like anyone I knew. But the ones who did look a bit like Fi and Homer and Kevin, when I saw their faces, it was quite disconcerting.
For another thing, you feel like a giant. Everything’s smaller, including the students of course, and you get a sense of just how much you have grown in the last few years. The doorways are smaller, the classrooms are smaller, the lockers are smaller, and how I ever managed to sit in those chairs is beyond the freakiest imagination.
