Incurable

CHAPTER 4

School taught me personification but the war taught me suspicion. If it hadn’t, the death of my parents would have done the job. I don’t think I’m paranoid yet but I could easily end up there. I don’t know why I wouldn’t trust voices in my head. They’d have to be as reliable as some of the voices I hear from outside my head. Take Homer for instance. I know you’d only take Homer if you were desperate, but if you were, and you did take him, would you listen to him? Or believe anything he tells you? So when Homer and Lee and Jess all suddenly turn up at my place, and Homer tells me it’s coincidence, I’m like, yeah, right, and people in France speak French, that’s another amazing coincidence.

I didn’t know Lee was coming until I got home from school, because the only warning he gave me was a message on the answering machine, and it seemed like no sooner had I played the message than he was there. Jess had given him a lift. And in the back seat was Lee’s little sister, Pang, because she wanted to see me again and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Hhhmm. ‘Wait a sec, it’s my birthday and this is a surprise party, right?’ I asked them. ‘Anyone else coming?’

But as soon as I got Homer alone I hissed at him, ‘This is about Liberation, isn’t it?’

‘Nah, just a fluke.’

Since I’d knocked back the invitation to join the group I’d been left out of the information circuit. Disconnected from the bush telegraph.

‘I don’t want you guys doing stuff without my knowing about it. Don’t go running off over the border again. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Pang wanted to stay with you for a few days, that’s why Lee’s here.’

‘So will Lee be staying here too, with her? Or am I meant to look after her while you go off on another crazy raid? Am I the babysitter now?’

‘No, of course not, he would have left her in town with the others, but she’s mad keen to hang out with you.’

‘Well, you might have thought about Gavin before you planned all this. You’re getting him all revved up.’

I had to talk in a funny way, twisting up my face, so Gavin couldn’t lip-read. He hovered around anxiously. Normally he’d have attached himself to Lee or Homer, as he was a big fan of both of them. I was pretty sure that Pang’s arrival made him feel insecure.

I heard a loud rap-rap-rap-rap on the kitchen door and broke off the conversation with Homer to answer it. I nearly fell over to see Jeremy Finley. ‘OK, so it is a meeting of Liberation,’ I said to him straight away.

‘Could just be a get-together of a few buddies,’ Homer said. He’d followed me into the kitchen.

‘Thanks for organising it at my place without even telling me. Good one, guys.’ I let Jeremy in anyway. I didn’t have much choice.

‘It could be something so urgent that we didn’t have time to do it any other way,’ Jeremy said, looking straight at me. I was sure he was the Scarlet Pimple.

‘Well, Lee must have known hours ago,’ I said. ‘You don’t just blow in here from the city ten minutes after getting the phone call.’

‘It wasn’t urgent last night, when I rang Lee,’ Jeremy said. ‘The rating changed about an hour ago. Lee was on his way already, but we were going to do it differently. By the time he got here we realised we needed a closer place to meet. I couldn’t ring you because we can’t talk about this stuff on the phone without using codes.’

‘And Pang did want to come and stay with you,’ Lee said with a small quick smile at me. ‘So did I.’

I turned back to Jeremy. ‘You said “closer”. Closer to what? The border?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh great.’ I felt quite sick. ‘So are you going to tell me what it’s all about?’

There was a moment of indecision. I knew the Scarlet Pimple was one of them — well I thought so anyway — and I’d been so convinced that it was Jeremy. But now Jeremy was acting like it wasn’t his decision. Jess was the one who, after a pause, looked around at the group and said, ‘Sure.’

It was like the rest of the group weren’t convinced though. Then Jeremy clinched it by saying, ‘Yeah, good idea. It’s insurance for us.’

‘Are you all going?’ I asked. I looked around the room at them. Homer, leaning against the doorframe, solid and reliable, leaving the planning to the others. Lee, watching through narrow eyes, scanning the room, assessing the situation. Jess, strong and sure but nervous too, I thought: probably the first time for her to go into this kind of stuff. And Jeremy, eyes alert and eager, face shining. He wanted to do this, whatever it was that had to be done, and he wanted it to work perfectly. He was taking after his father all right. I wondered if he and General Finley had a lot of contact, and if so what they talked about and what Jeremy thought of his father. That was a conversation we hadn’t had, but then we hadn’t had too many conversations full stop.

No-one put up their hand to say they were staying. So Jess and the three boys were going out there into danger. Together. Jealousy jumped in my stomach and made an angry noise. I mean literally, my tummy rumbled. Or maybe I was just hungry.

I didn’t say anything after that though. It was up to them to organise themselves and get under way as fast as they could. What they didn’t need was someone standing there giving helpful hints. ‘Wear sensible shoes.’ ‘Make sure you go to the toilet before you leave.’ ‘Have you got enough ammo?’

At least Gavin wasn’t around. I think the presence of Pang had scared him off to his bedroom, or some other safe hidey-hole, like Marmie’s pen. Good thing too. With a bit of luck the group would be across the border before Gavin realised there was a raid happening and he’d been left behind.

As the meeting in my kitchen went on I started to get a sense of what was happening. There’d been intelligence — a tip-off — that members of the same group which raided the Youngs’ and did unspeakable things there were going to come across to our side of the border and raid another farmhouse. I already knew that Liberation was a group who got tip-offs from people in our Army, people who wanted stuff done that was illegal for the Army to do. By feeding info to Liberation these Army officers were guaranteeing that people from our side would cross the border and fight, but if they were caught, or if there were any protests, the government could say quite honestly that they knew nothing about it and they sure didn’t authorise it.

It meant that Liberation had to be as careful on one side of the border as on the other. Everyone was out to get them. Still, I’d rather be caught on our side. Your life wouldn’t be worth much if you got busted over there.

As far as I knew the Liberation group in our area was the only one run by teenagers, but I didn’t know much. Just what I read in the paper. And some of that was about members of the group in other areas being caught and copping serious jail terms as the government tried to demonstrate that they were seriously trying to stop them. And then there were the stories about members of the group who went across the border and didn’t come back. In one case just their heads had come back, five of them, in a bag dumped outside a railway station at Padapada. I felt sorry for the person who opened that bag. I felt sorry for the people whose heads were in the bag, too.

So, here were the four of them in my kitchen working out what to do about a group of thugs heading in our direction to rape or kill or burn or loot or, most likely, all of the above. Kitchens are meant to be the heart of a house but I’d have to cook a lot of comfort food to get this bad energy out of my kitchen.

It surprised me in a way but Lee was the one who was the least gung-ho. ‘Why don’t we wait on our side of the border till they get here, then the Army can round them up legitimately?’ he wanted to know. Then he answered his own question. ‘I suppose we don’t know where they’ll cross into our territory.’ He looked at Jeremy. ‘Is that right?’

‘Apparently.’

‘But we know they’ll be coming along Rawson Road at some point. Or what we used to call Rawson Road. So we could follow them till they’re on our side and then use this fancy radio equipment to call in the Army and get them arrested.’

‘Yes. The trouble is it’ll be at night and the chances of losing touch with them would be pretty high.’

Lee lapsed into silence then. That was less surprising.

I could see the sense in Jeremy’s arguments. They really only had two options. One was to catch these guys in their home base, before they set out. Time was against that, and so was the problem that people are in a strong position when they’re at home. They know their way around pretty well. On the other hand, when you attack people at home you’ve got the advantage of surprise. I’d seen that from both sides, as the attacker and the attacked.

The other option was an ambush. That wasn’t ideal either, but perfection never seems to be a goal in war situations. Only in school. And the ambush idea had a lot going for it.

‘Under the coconut tree,’ said Jeremy.

I didn’t know what that meant but before I could ask Lee said, ‘Well, if we’re going to do it we’d better do it.’ Suddenly the kitchen was alive with movement. Then Jeremy asked the question that I’d amused myself with just a short time ago: ‘Have you got enough ammo?’

‘Of course,’ Homer said, getting up from the kitchen chair that he’d been promising to fix for about three months now. Then he did that double-take thing like in the movies when the guy turns around and sees that it’s a grizzly bear blowing on the back of his neck and not his girlfriend, but for a moment he thinks that it’s his girlfriend and she just needs a shave. ‘Oh momma,’ he said. ‘It’s still on the bench.’

It turned out he was referring to the bench in their shed at home. So there was a short intermission as Jess and Homer raced back to his place to pick up the ammo.

I got the feeling that Homer might have quite a lot of Liberation stuff stashed at his place. I bet his parents didn’t know about it. He probably had it hidden under his bed. As I never intended to get close to his bed I wouldn’t find that out. But I had a mental picture of Homer sleeping on top of a pile of hand grenades and detonators and bombs.

Anyway, Jeremy didn’t seem to need to do anything more to get ready. They had a ute I hadn’t seen before, as well as Homer’s, and they had a motorbike loaded on the back of each ute. So they were OK for transport.

Lee was outside. I stayed in the kitchen and got Jeremy a coffee. Pang appeared. She’d been down at the lagoon, talking to the ducks maybe. Knowing how quirky she was, she could have been running around the lagoon flapping her arms and quacking.

Gavin was still in hiding but she said she’d seen him in the big shed, fuelling the bikes. That’d be right. When a girl appears you go out to the shed and do a bit of work on the motorbikes.

I asked Jeremy how long he thought we’d need groups like Liberation. Suddenly he burst into this amazing speech about history. ‘You know, Ellie, when Churchill took over as prime minister of Britain in 1940 he realised one thing, which is that when you fight a war you have to fight it. You have to get out there. The Germans, the Nazis, knew that. They went through France at a hundred and twenty k’s an hour. The French were dug in waiting for them. They had all these great fortifications and they sat behind the walls ready to defend France, you know, and what did the Germans do? They just went around them. They went through the Ardennes Forest. Everyone thought it was too thick for the Germans so they didn’t put many defenders there, and the big panzer tanks ploughed straight through. They made their own roads. The French were still sitting behind the Maginot line waiting for the invasion, and by the time they woke up all they saw were the tail-lights of the tanks. France surrendered inside a couple of weeks. After that Hitler was sure Britain was finished too, it was just a formality. He’d knock them off in no time and that’d wrap up western Europe, pretty much.

Then Churchill took over. The first thing he had the Poms do was attack the French fleet and wipe it out, so the Germans couldn’t use the ships. It was like a declaration: “This war is still alive. Don’t write us off.” See what I mean? Churchill didn’t just put up a lot of walls and get people to sit behind them and wait for an invasion. He went out and attacked in every way he could. Sink the Bismarck, go after the Graf Spee, bomb Berlin, go here, there and everywhere.’

‘And that’s the way you think we should do it?’

‘That’s the only way to do it. Be tough neighbours. Have them scared of us instead of the other way round. Knock them around every time they think they’ve got an edge on us. Keep them off balance.’

‘I thought you were a calm and peaceful guy.’

‘I am. But it drives me crazy when people don’t learn from history. I love history. It tells you the answer to everything if people only take the trouble to read it. Being weak is as bad as being a bully. Chamberlain was weak, Hitler was a bully, Churchill was a bully.’

‘Who was Chamberlain?’

‘He was the British prime minister before Churchill. He wanted to believe Hitler wasn’t a threat so he let Hitler have Czechoslovakia. He thought that’d keep him happy.’

‘How can you give away a country that you don’t even own?’

‘Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I think he probably just said that he wouldn’t help Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs couldn’t beat Germany on their own, so they were pretty much rooted then.’

I wasn’t so sure about Jeremy’s philosophy but I was impressed by how much he knew. There’s something really attractive about people who know stuff. In a way it doesn’t matter whether it’s a science teacher or a chef on TV or an old shearer talking about the Tally Hi shearing pattern and why wide gear is no good.

Homer and Jess came back at high speed and then it was action action action. Within four minutes they were gone, leaving Pang, Gavin and me by ourselves. Suddenly I felt very funny. It was like the women and children being left behind while the others went off to war. It didn’t help that Jess was with them. Three guys and a girl. She shouldn’t be one of the tough ones, the fighters, the ones who get out there and take the risks. She didn’t have the experience. Officially she was going as a sort of back-up, because she didn’t know much about guns. But I knew how quickly that would change if they got into any hot situations. How would she handle it? She might jeopardise the whole thing. If she did she would jeopardise the lives of three of my friends.

I couldn’t decide how much of my emptiness was personal. Off went these three boys and maybe none of them would come back. Off went these three boys with Jess, one of the best looking girls at Wirrawee High School. I realised I was angry at being in a war situation again, mad at Homer and Lee for jumping into it, and furious at Jess for cutting across my tracks. I also realised that if it had not been for Gavin I probably would have signed up for Liberation and gone. Even allowing for Gavin maybe I should have gone. But the thought of Gavin without me was not good. I was all he had. If I got knocked off, Gavin’s best chance then would be to move into the dog pen with Marmie. I needed Homer and Lee, and of course Jeremy, to stay alive for a very long time to come, but Gavin needed me to stay alive for at least ten years. Funny, by then he’d be older than I was now.

Speaking of Gavin, it was time to round him up and organise the evening before it got any darker. At least looking after him and Pang would keep my mind off the danger that the other four were approaching. I called Pang. But just as she answered from the spare room, where she’d be sleeping, the phone rang.

It shocked me, because I wasn’t expecting it. I jumped, and then grabbed it, thinking, completely irrationally, that it might be Homer or Lee. It was Bronte, inviting herself to visit. She was only a couple of k’s away and calling on her mobile. Her mum had said she’d drop her off at my place and she could get the bus back to school tomorrow.

To be honest, even though I liked Bronte a lot, I thought I had enough on my plate already, but I could hardly say no when she was so close.

Pang was waiting in the doorway. ‘Let’s go find Gavin,’ I said. ‘There’s a friend of mine coming over, so we’d better think about some dinner.’

As we crossed the yard she took my hand. Funny how that little hand in mine made me feel all protective. Gavin wasn’t really one for hand-holding. It made me think, not for the first time, that it would be nice to have a sister. To have had a sister. I could never have a sister now. I would always be an only child.

I know some people would say I was irresponsible in the way I looked after Gavin. I know there are people in the Wirrawee district who are saying it right now, although of course they are the ones who have the least idea of what we do and the way we live. The most ironic thing that had happened to me in the last twelve months was that I had been put under a court-appointed guardian after my parents died, but the legal system that did that to me completely ignored Gavin. That was fine by me, and anyway, my guardians didn’t interfere much with my life except to bring around casseroles and give advice on farming. When your guardians are Homer’s parents and they’ve kind of been your guardians all your life, nothing has to change much. But it’s a bit strange when you think about it.

So, just to give people who think I’m irresponsible a bit of evidence they can use, I’ll say it straight out: I lost Gavin that evening. He wasn’t in the big shed. He wasn’t in any of the little sheds, not even the woodshed. He wasn’t in the woolshed or in the dog pens or over with the chooks. None of this might have mattered too much on a normal day. I mean, we were meant to be red-hot on security these days and taking multiple precautions every time we brushed our teeth or went on a picnic, but of course the truth was that most days there were moments or minutes or even hours when we forgot or made a mistake or simply thought, ‘Stuff it, can’t hide under the bed all day every day.’

This day though was different. There was such an atmosphere of tension that I couldn’t imagine even Gavin ignoring it and going off on his own into the paddocks. Not only that, but he wouldn’t want to be away from the action. Where there was Homer and Lee, there would be Gavin. Sure Pang’s arrival might have thrown him off balance, but not this far off balance. I cursed myself for not being more aware of him earlier, of thinking it was OK for Gavin to be missing when Homer and the other three set off.

I couldn’t hide my anxiety from Pang as I walked faster, searching a wider and wider area. She became silent, trotting beside me to keep up. I appreciated that she didn’t chatter any more. She seemed so different to Lee in every other way that I was almost surprised to find that she had the same sensitivity as her brother.

Running now, I went back to the big machinery shed. I looked more carefully. First thing I noticed was what I three-quarters expected to see. The motorbike was missing, the Yamaha that was Gavin’s favourite. I remembered Pang telling me how she’d seen Gavin fuelling motorbikes and I asked her which bikes. Where was he doing it? Did he say anything? How was he looking?

‘He didn’t take any notice of me.’

‘Did he know you were there?’

‘Oh yes, he glanced at me, but just looked away. He wasn’t very friendly. It was like he didn’t want me to be there. I thought, “Well, if you don’t want to be friends, that’s OK,” so I left.’

That didn’t prove anything. Gavin probably would have treated Pang that way at any time. Standing in the area where he’d done the fuelling — the area where we normally service the bikes — I looked around quickly. And I did notice something. The door at the back of the shed was open. Only by a metre, at the most, which is why I didn’t notice it before. I went over there. A cold breeze wafted through it. Pang slipped ahead of me and went outside as I looked at the gap. ‘Just enough room for a little kid on a Yammie,’ I thought.

‘Look here, Ellie,’ Pang said. ‘That’s from a motorbike, isn’t it?’

She was pointing to the ground. In the mud were the tracks of bike wheels. Pang was onto it. For a Thai-Vietnamese-Australian she would have made a pretty good Aboriginal tracker.

I heard a car and guessed it would be Bronte. Before going back to the house to meet her I ran with Pang along the road at the back of the machinery shed. The motorbike tracks were clear enough in the winter mud and wet grass. They were heading straight for the gate that led to the paddock that led to the lagoon that led to the next paddock that led to another paddock that led to the track that if you followed it all the way led to the border. This didn’t prove Gavin had set off for the border but it sure as hell suggested that he wasn’t thinking about his homework or making a sandwich or watching TV.

Panting hard now, from fear more than physical effort, I ran back through the shed to the other side of the building. Between the shed and the house was Bronte. Her mother’s car was already heading down the driveway. For a moment I thought of trying to call her mum back but then realised we had to deal with this on our own, for now anyway. I grabbed Bronte by the hand and tried to explain things to her. There was a problem though. I didn’t know how much she knew. But she was a smart girl, Bronte. I had the feeling she’d always know more than I expected.

Whoa, whoa, wait a sec, Ellie, surely he wouldn’t go off like that. What do you think, that he wants to be with the others? To be with Homer?’

‘No! Well, yes, but it’s not just that. He thinks they’re going off to have a look at the… well, to be honest, the other side of the border. And if Gavin thinks there’s any fighting going on, he’ll be there. He’s mad about it. Has been ever since the war.’

‘But Ellie, he’s only-’

‘Oh forget that. You know how adults love saying they’ve got an inner child? Well, Gavin’s got an inner adult.’

‘So tell me exactly what you think he might have done.’

I had to pause and work that out. What was I exactly expecting?

Carefully I said, ‘I think he’s most likely going to wait for them a long way down the track, and either join them there or, more likely, follow them right over the border and then pop up and say, “Here I am,” at a point where there won’t be anything they can do about it. If they see him too early they’ll send him back. With Jess maybe. He’s smart enough to figure that out.’

‘OK, so what are your options?’

I was impressed by Bronte, not for the first time. Even standing there I was thinking, ‘Gosh, she is just who I need at this moment.’ She didn’t ask any unnecessary questions. In fact she didn’t seem too surprised to hear what had been going on. I guess she was well aware how crazy people like Homer were, and she’d probably heard a few rumours. Not for the first time I wondered if she was a member of Liberation herself.

‘Well, to follow him, I guess. Or to stay here and do nothing. I don’t think that’s much of an option. But I’ve also got Pang to look after.’

‘I don’t need looking after,’ Pang said. ‘I look after the other kids all the time at home when Lee’s out.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘When he’s out chasing girls.’

‘Chasing girls?’ I was distracted for a moment and had to shake my head to get my thoughts back together.

‘I can look after Pang,’ Bronte said. ‘Or I can take her to Homer’s. I’m sure she’d be fine there. They’re your guardians, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. Already I was clearing my mind of the Pang Problem. I’ve noticed before how the brain doesn’t keep what it doesn’t need. If Bronte was going to take care of Pang I could erase Pang from my memory for now and concentrate on more important things. It sounds a bit brutal but I suppose it’s the way the brain keeps you functioning efficiently. In Year 9 I’d memorised heaps of stuff about the Myall Lakes Massacre and the Protector guy in Tasmania, but straight after the test all I could remember was the Protector’s name. Robinson.

I ran back into the shed, started up the four-wheel Polaris and moved it to the bowser. ‘Can you fuel it?’ I asked Bronte. She just nodded. I went back into the house and got some warm clothes, for both me and Gavin. I was pretty sure Gavin wouldn’t have thought of practicalities like that in his mad rush towards the action. I grabbed a couple of bananas, three hardboiled eggs and an apple, and filled my jacket pockets with biscuits. I shoved all the other bits and pieces into a backpack and then got the rifle and the ammo. My heart sank when I opened the gun safe, because one of the shotguns was missing. Bloody Gavin was way out of line. He had survived for so long that he thought he was invincible. I suppose the more people succeed, the more confident they become and the higher they stretch. But I knew something that Gavin was too young to understand. That the higher you stretch the closer you get to the crash. If you keep going higher forever you end up as a God. That’s not an option for most people, including Gavin and me. The time to take great risks is at the start, when you’ve got little to lose and you haven’t used up your luck. The time to get supercareful is when you’ve done brilliantly. Every success brings you nearer to the failure. For Gavin’s sake I had to hope and pray he had one more success, one more crop of luck still to be harvested.

Bronte had fuelled the Polaris, checked the oil, cleaned the headlight glass and, most amazingly of all, tied a full water bottle to the luggage rack at the front. I thanked her, said goodbye to her and Pang, and blasted out of the yard at maximum revs, wondering if I’d ever see either of them again.