While I live

CHAPTER 24

Gavin was in tantrum territory, and looked likely to be there for quite some time. What is it with guys and tantrums? I mean, not counting me with Mr Sayle, most girls have grown out of them by the age of four. I think for boys it’s around twenty, maybe: best case scenario.

The problem was that Homer had officially invited me to join Liberation, but he’d done it in front of Gavin. Gavin hadn’t quite figured out who or what Liberation was — neither had I for that matter — but he knew they were to do with fighting the enemy, and they were to do with Homer and Lee, and it was a secret society where either you were in or you were out.

That was enough for him. But to make matters worse, when he asked if he could join, Homer said, ‘No, you’re too young.’

This was not helpful, and not really fair, as Gavin had proved time and time again how brave and useful he was. But other people wouldn’t understand that, and I could see how Gavin might lower the average age of the Liberation members by a year or so.

Homer had delivered the invitation as we sat around the kitchen table after lunch Saturday afternoon. ‘They’ll understand if you don’t want to,’ he said, ‘but they’d love it if you did. Face it, you’ve been involved in exactly half the stuff they’ve done in the last couple of months.’

‘Would I get to find out who the Scarlet Pimple himself is?’ I asked.

‘Hmm, maybe. You might be that lucky,’ he said, smiling like there was a secret joke going on. I wondered, not for the first time, if Homer himself was the Pimpernel.

That’s when Gavin announced that he wanted to join, and Homer brushed him off with the ‘you’re too young’ bit.

The kitchen table was the place for so many of our — wait for it, another of my favourite words coming up — confabulations. Gavin stood up, shoved the chair back, looked for a moment like he was going to cry, then kicked the chair over, swept everything within reach onto the floor and headed for the door, pausing only to chuck a half-empty jar of SPC raspberry jam at Homer, who caught it one-handed without blinking.

‘That was tactful of you,’ I said.

From the other end of the house I heard a door slam as Gavin sealed himself off from the world.

Homer shrugged. ‘It’s the truth. Anyway, he just proved he’s not old enough. Anyone who acts like that isn’t ready for what we do.’

‘Oh, cut him some slack,’ I said, getting up. ‘He’s done more in his short life than most people do in a hundred years.’

I went down the corridor and tried to open his door. It’s difficult when someone’s deaf: it’s a waste of time knocking, so you keep violating his privacy by charging in. Only a week before I’d violated Gavin’s privacy big-time, and caused him great embarrassment. I backed out thinking, ‘God, he’s starting young.’ I thought it was pretty funny but Gavin was red-faced all morning and I didn’t dare mention it or make jokes about it.

I thought that maybe it was time I bought him a book and left it lying around, because I couldn’t see myself actually giving him the big talk, but someone had to do something, and who else was there? I could have asked Homer, except Homer would have taught him that ‘Get over here’, ‘Sit’, ‘Heel’ and ‘Beg’ were not just for cattle dogs but for girls as well. If Gavin grew up with the same attitude to girls as Homer had, I’d be seriously worried.

Anyway, this time Gavin had used a wedge or something to stop me getting in. I rattled the door a few times, hoping it would let him know I was there, then wrote him a note and slipped it underneath. There wasn’t any more I could do, short of shooting the door down. There were times when Gavin made me feel like doing stuff like that, proving again that I was perfectly capable of having my own tantrums.

Back in the kitchen I asked Homer some more questions about Liberation but I didn’t get very far.

‘You know me,’ he said, holding his big hands out, palms up, and making a face. ‘I keep secrets. I’m not like you girls. If someone asks me not to repeat something, I don’t repeat it.’

‘Stop doing all the Greek body language,’ I said, flicking his nearest hand with the flyswat. It was true though, he didn’t repeat stuff. You could trust him that way. You could trust him most ways actually. ‘So what happens if I join? Do I have to practise the secret handshake? Learn the passwords? Dress up in uniform and go to a weekly meeting?’

‘Yeah, all of the above. You wear a mask and go as your favourite superhero, so no-one knows your true identity.’

‘Who do you go as?’

‘I’m the Phantom, Ghost who Walks. Phantom never die. Phantom King of the Jungle. You can go as Princess Cattle-drencher. You get to wear an Akubra and a Driza-Bone and a flynet over your face.’

‘Yeah, that’s me, Princess Cattle-drencher, does a hundred bullocks an hour, all on my own. But I want some corks for my hat.’

Homer made himself another coffee.

‘Drink it fast,’ I said, ‘and then you can help me move those steers to Burnt Hut. Now that you’ve taken Gavin out of the running for the day, it’s the least you can do.’

As we walked up there and I looked across at the farm, the cattle cropping at the short grass in Parklands, the patches of bracken in Nellie’s, the blackberry at the back of the barn that should have been sprayed months ago and was now a nice little suburb for snakes, the heap of firewood waiting to be stacked, I made my decision about Liberation.

‘I don’t want to join,’ I said. ‘Not yet anyway. There’s too much else going on, keeping this place afloat, trying to get some school work done, looking after Gavin. Once this thing with Sayle has been sorted out, then I might give it a go. But even so, even though we agreed that it’s a buzz, I don’t know how much more I can take. Walking on the edge of death all the time, it gets a bit unnerving. I haven’t slept too well since I saw what they did to Shannon. And you know, it worries me with Gavin. I thought I’d be able to protect him from all this once the war ended, give him a normal life, let him grow up away from the violence.’

‘Just what my parents wanted for me. Just what your parents wanted for you. Shame life can’t be a choose-your-own-adventure book, where if you don’t like the way it’s going you pick a different path.’

‘Choose-your-own-adventures’d be the only books you’ve ever read,’ I said. ‘Oh, sorry, plus The Scarlet Pimpernel.’

‘No way. I’m reading Alibrandi even as we speak.’

‘You are?’

‘Sure. Good book. That Josephine needs a good smack though.’

I just laughed but I was impressed that he was reading so much. You never knew with Homer. I mean, the guy was wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Tomorrow is just a fiction of today’. I didn’t even know what it meant and I’m pretty sure Homer didn’t either.

After we’d moved the steers we hung on the fence for a while and talked. ‘So are you going to tell me what’s happening with Sayle?’ Homer asked. ‘I mean, the full story.’

‘Don’t think I’d better tell you the full story. I don’t want to get someone in trouble. Let’s just say I got access to stuff he didn’t want me to see. I don’t know whether it’ll change things but I think it will. I’ve been trying to talk to Fi’s mum but now she’s on the Advisory Council it’s bloody hard to track her down. Poor Fi, she’s going crazy trying to get her mum to ring me. She keeps apologising to me and feeling guilty and I tell her not to worry, but of course she does.’

‘So what kind of stuff have you got exactly?’

‘Some papers. I can’t understand all of it, but what I can understand is pretty nasty. You want to see them?’

‘Oh yeah.’

I went back to the house. Gavin had emerged and was in the kitchen. That was pretty good for him. I don’t know what his record sulk was, but there were times when you could go climb Everest, come back and write a novel, then diet and lose ten kilos before Gavin would come out of his bedroom. Or maybe he was amusing himself in there and it was nothing to do with sulking at all.

I said, ‘I told Homer I’m not joining Liberation because there’s too much else to worry about at the moment,’ but he didn’t react, although I’m sure he understood.

I went back to Homer with the papers. I was glad I’d photocopied that handwritten note. The full wording was nasty all right. Don’t worry about it mate, I’ve got her wrapped up tighter than a Sumo jockstrap. The magistrate is all for me, and the courts are that clogged up it’d take a Scud missile to get an appeal through. She’s a tough little bitch but mate, I wrote the book on tough. You’ll have the place in three months, and it’ll cost you about five bucks for her and a slab of stubbies for me.

‘Charming,’ Homer said.

‘I thought you’d approve. “Tough little bitch.” That’d be your wording, wouldn’t it?’

He gave me a funny look but didn’t say anything.

The Council document was definitely a planning application, like I’d thought. I’d had a proper look through it now, and it seemed that a company called Kelsey Developments Pty Ltd was going to turn our property into a luxury hotel called Kelsey Resort, the Gateway to the Mountains.

‘What is it with that “Pty Ltd” stuff?’ Homer asked. ‘They’re all called that. Even our family company.’

‘I don’t know. But what do you think about it all?’

‘I think you’ve been right all along, and that he’s a giant bullshit artist. But that’s no surprise. What else have you got?’

I only had two other documents, one of which was just a typed summary of the stuff he’d said in court. I think it was the notes that he’d used to make his speech. The other one was a photocopy of something from a law book, about guardianship. It was from a case in the Supreme Court, called R v. Ellis, which apparently said, from what I could make of it, that the principles a magistrate uses for choosing guardians can be different for older kids than for younger ones, which I thought was pretty obvious anyway.

We wandered back to the house. ‘What do you do now?’ Homer asked.

‘Stuffed if I know. Keep trying to get Fi’s mum on the phone and see what she says.’

‘Why don’t you ask Bronte’s dad?’

‘Bronte? From school? Her parents are in the Army, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah, but her father’s a lawyer in the Army.’

‘Is that right? OK. Gosh. I might ask her on Monday.’