While I live

CHAPTER 7

When you’ve only got sixty head of cattle, each one suddenly becomes very precious. The cows started calving three days after my visit to Mr and Mrs Yannos. From checking them once a day we went up to three times a day. It wasn’t just a simple matter of driving round the paddock and admiring the nice cows. You have to decide whether each one is better or worse than the day before, how close she is to calving, whether she’s showing signs of distress, if she’s gone off on her own, if her fanny’s all floppy and she looks uncomfortable. At the same time as you’re doing that, you’re also looking for weeds or insects in the pasture, you keep an eye on the fences and gates, you make sure the drinking troughs have got water, and you clean them out if they need it. And so it goes on.

At least the cows still weren’t too fat, which was a good thing. For some reason that I don’t understand, cows who are too fat often have trouble calving.

Most calves drop without problems, but there’s always a few that won’t behave. The trouble was that if my father hadn’t been killed, the new yards would have been finished. As it was they were a long way from being finished. That meant we were faced with having nowhere to hold a cow who needed help. So Gavin and Fi and I put in a frantic twenty-four hours to get the crush done at least, and a race into it, which meant we could look after one cow at a time. I just hoped there wouldn’t be half a dozen suddenly demanding admission to the Maternity Ward.

What you look for is a calf that presents with two front legs and its head coming out first. They seem to find every imaginable way of twisting and turning around though. Different signs show you that the mother’s in trouble. You usually see her acting strangely, and when you get a close look you see that the little hoofs are pointing upwards, for example. Or you see dry yellow hooves sticking out. Or you see nothing, even though the cow’s been in labour a long time.

There are times when you have to pull the calf to get it into a good position to be born, and there are times when the only way to pull it is to tie a rope to a hoof at one end and at the other end a car or a tractor. This is very bad news though. The death rate is high for calves who need that kind of drastic treatment. Can’t say I’d like it done to me.

The second calf looked like a shocker. He was bum first, which is a big problem. You don’t get any warning of that. I moved the four wheel drive in and told Gavin to get the winch ready while I pushed my arm in and started working the calf ’s leg around. Eventually I got the chain on, then the same with the hook, into the socket. I gave Gavin a wave and away we went with the winch, nice and slowly. It went well. Within a few minutes we had a new little wet and wobbly calf. And the cow eating the placenta, which is not the most attractive sight in the world. This sloppy big thing, about the size of a family pizza, rolling around in its mouth.

I’m glad it worked. If it had been a disaster I might have lost confidence, which would have been dangerous with the calving just started.

Fi, to be honest, was pretty hopeless with the cattle, because she was too scared of them. She thought they’d bite her. ‘Fi,’ I kept telling her, ‘they don’t even have upper teeth! They can’t do you much damage. They might gum you to death.’

But she made the cattle nervous so I gave her jobs she could do at a safe distance.

The neighbours were great. Mr Yannos came round every day, or else he sent Homer, or Homer’s big brother, George. Mr Sanderson, who’d got the other part of our farm, never missed a day. He didn’t know a lot about cattle but he was a fast learner. Other people called in regularly or occasionally.

I carried a couple of rifles in the ute these days. One was my father’s. 222, the other had belonged to the dead soldiers who’d killed my parents. Homer had knocked off their rifles before the police came. I don’t know what he did with the other three; I didn’t ask. I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws, but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid, the immature, the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent. I knew that if the killers came back I wouldn’t be getting any help from the police or the Army: not help that would come in time. And I knew I was responsible with guns. I kept the ammo in a locked tin behind the seat of the ute and I kept the key around my neck, so Gavin couldn’t get it. But I had to have some protection, even though it probably wouldn’t be enough if the time came.

The calving finished. Out of forty cows I got thirty-six calves. For a while I thought I had thirty-five. One of them, who was only a few days old, died. I found his body in the cold wet grass one morning so I picked him up on the forks of the tractor and took him down to the tip and dumped him. Two days later I’m down there again with the usual rubbish from the kitchen and there’s the calf tottering around on weak little legs yelling for his mother. I felt like a complete idiot at the same time as I was ecstatic to see the impossible. How did it happen? I have no idea. I could have sworn he was dead. For a moment I wondered if it meant that maybe my parents would come walking across the hilltop, hand-in-hand, but although I tried I couldn’t link up the two things.

Some cows were good mothers, a lot weren’t. It figured. The first cows every farmer wants off his place are the poor mothers. By picking up this mob at low prices we were pretty much guaranteeing that there’d be a high ratio of second-rate mums. So, some accepted their bubbas with instant enthusiasm, others had to be talked or tricked into it. Some had to be put in the crush and tied, and then we’d lead the calf in to her, hoping that if he sucked hard enough she’d let her milk down and it’d be a happy ending.

We set about castrating the bull calves, and ear-tagging both boys and girls. Gavin seemed to find the idea of castrating the boys a bit off-putting. I think it made him feel insecure. We used an elastrator, which has four prongs, that expand a little green rubber ring when you squeeze the handles. You get the ring over the scrotum, making sure you’ve got both the balls, then release it. The ring snaps tight. Very tight.

The calf goes off with the ring around its bag, cutting off the blood supply, so the scrotum gradually perishes and drops off. It was a good method and it worked well, a tad better than biting, but it took a while.

Any time I had trouble with Gavin I just waved the elastrator at him and he backed off fast.

At least things were quiet on the financial front, and the legal front. I’d rung Fi’s mother and told her I wanted Mr and Mrs Yannos as my guardians, and I wrote a letter to Mr Sayle telling him the same thing.

By the time we were through with calving it was time to go back to school. Gavin and I had missed the last two weeks of the term, and now the holidays were over. Some holidays. The jolly old holidays. There should be a new word for holidays like these.

The last night Fi and I watched a video. Not a rented one, just Grease that I’d taped off TV ages ago. Fi sat on the floor. I was behind her, doing her hair, Gavin was sound asleep. Sandy, the Olivia Newton-John character in the movie, reminded me a bit of Fi. I’d never have said that to her though. She hated people saying she was ‘sweet’ or ‘innocent’. But knowing she was leaving the next morning was getting to me. When Sandy sang ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’ I was struggling not to cry. Not that I was hopelessly devoted to Fi, but I felt hopelessly shattered by all the stuff that had happened, and hopelessly lonely at the thought of her going back to the city.

Fi heard one of my muffled little noises that could have been a sob. She twisted around and bent back her head and looked at me.

‘Don’t,’ I sniffled. ‘You’ll need a physio.’

‘You want me to do your eyebrows?’

‘No.’

She faced around again. After a bit she said, ‘Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Omar.’

‘Omar who?’

‘Omar goodness, I got the wrong address. Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Max?’

‘Max who?’

‘Max no difference. Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?

‘Sarah.’

‘Sarah who?’

‘Sarah doctor in the house? Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘I love.’

This was an old joke between us. I groaned but asked anyway.

‘I love who?’

‘How am I supposed to know? You tell me.’ She paused. ‘Is this helping?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think it would. I’m not very good at telling jokes.’

I asked her one. ‘Knock knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Moo.’

‘Moo who?’

‘Make up your mind. Are you a cow or an owl?’

Fi clapped. ‘That’s the first funny knock knock joke I’ve heard.’

‘It must be funny if you laugh when I tell it. I’m hopeless at jokes too.’

‘There are more important things in life. Those boys who do nothing else but tell jokes… I just want to cover my ears and run screaming out of the room.’

And then ‘Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee’ started and we were suddenly doing a dance number in front of the TV, and even though we hadn’t done anything like that for more than a year we synchronised perfectly. We didn’t need a choreographer. Our friendship was our choreographer.

The funny thing was that Gavin actually started kicking up a fuss when I told him we’d go to school on Monday. I thought I’d given him such a bad time, making him work so hard all day every day, that he’d be out to the bus-stop Monday morning at the rate of knots. But round about Friday I realised he didn’t want to go. Amazing. He wouldn’t say why. I thought it was a mixture of all that security stuff, wanting to stick close to me, and somehow the fact that he was so bloody useful and important on the farm. I mean, if he hadn’t been there I would have sold up, not just because of the financial pressures, but because you simply can’t run an operation like ours with one person. You’ve got to have someone else to be on the other side of the mob when you’re moving them into a new paddock, to inch the tractor forward when you’re pulling a calf, to start the engine of one car when you’re jump-starting the other, to help cut an injured steer out of the mob, and so on and so on.

And even more importantly, it’s the company. When you see a cow accept a calf that she’s been rejecting for hours, there’s got to be someone you can turn to for an exchange of high fives. When you see Marmie eating cow poo, there’s got to be someone to share your groans of disgust. When you watch the little yellow robins bopping around your feet as you dig up a rock in the new cattle race, there’s got to be someone to watch them with you.

I never said anything corny to Gavin about how important he was, how much I needed him, but he must have known it. He must have known it from the time we got up in the morning to the time we went to bed at night. And I thought maybe that’s why he preferred being on the farm to going back to school. After all, in secondary school you get treated like you’re eight years old. I guess it follows that in primary school you’d get treated as though you’re three years old.

I couldn’t treat him like he was three years old. A three-year-old was no good to me. I treated him like he was sixteen years old, because that’s the only way the farm could survive.

Mind you, there were still plenty of moments when I treated him like he was four years old.

On the wall above my desk I’ve got a quote which says ‘Don’t treat people as you think they are, treat them as you think they are capable of becoming’. These days with Gavin were maybe the first time in my life that I’d actually done what the quote said. To be honest, I didn’t do it because of beautiful principles but because it was the only way we were going to make it.

Fi left on the Saturday morning to go back to school in the city. It’d been great having her there. She’d helped me like no-one else could have. I stood in Wirrawee watching the bus disappear down the highway, wondering when I’d see her again. I felt awfully lonely that day. For all that Homer and Gavin were like my brothers, and I loved the big brat and the little brat (not counting the days I wanted to kill them), nothing beats a girl-friend who speaks your language and knows what you’re thinking. And nothing beats a girlfriend like Fi.

After Fi left I went in to Elders with Gavin, to pick up some bags of concrete. We needed to cement in the posts for the new cattle yards. But the trouble with places like Elders is that you see all this stuff, and you know it would make your life so much easier, but you can’t afford it, so all you can do is gaze and drool. For instance they had a post driver with a hands-free automatic auger. Dad would have loved that for the cattle yards.

The next day, Sunday, Gavin and I were sitting looking at the yards as we ate our lunch. I’d brought sandwiches, in an Esky, to save time. We’d done a pretty good job with the cement, considering. I said to him, ‘Why don’t you want to go back to school?’ I’d already tried to have this conversation, but this time he seemed more open.

He got a terrible frown on his face. ‘I don’t like school.’

‘Well, of course I am totally in love with school.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘It was a joke.’

‘Well, I don’t care. I don’t like it.’

‘Yeah, you’ve made that pretty clear. But why?’

‘It’s boring.’

‘Schools have to be boring. It’s against the law for them to be interesting.’

‘You’re stupid.’

‘Seriously, why don’t you like it?’

He did get serious then. He gave me a long sideways look, as if trying to figure out whether he could trust me or not. I didn’t say anything. If he hadn’t worked that out by now, there wasn’t much more I could do.

Finally, looking away, he said, ‘The other kids don’t like me.’

That did surprise me. I knew he’d had trouble early on, but I thought he’d been travelling quite well since then.

I waved to get his attention. ‘They don’t? Are you sure?’

After a long pause, looking away again, he said, ‘They call me “Deafy”.’

‘Oh.’ My sandwich suddenly coagulated in my mouth. I put the rest of it down. ‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does.’

He shrugged.

‘Those little creeps.’ I was starting to get angry. ‘What do you do when they call you that?’

‘I used to punch the crap out of them. But I got in trouble. So now I don’t do anything.’

‘Oh.’ I felt both angry and helpless. It was typical of Gavin to have kept all this to himself. He might have told my parents, but I didn’t think so. I wanted to tell him to go back and punch the crap out of the other kids again, but I realised that mightn’t be the best advice. I couldn’t think what to tell him. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’? Yes, but being called names can break your spirit, break your heart. Which was worse?

I’d rather have a broken arm than a broken heart any day.

‘What would happen if you dob on them?’

He looked offended. ‘I’m not doing that.’

‘Have you got any friends?’

‘Yeah. Mark.’

I knew Mark. He was famous for being the naughtiest kid in Wirrawee. Naughtier than Homer even, when Homer was in primary school. In fact next to Mark, Homer would have been school captain.

I could see how Gavin might have ended up with Mark as a friend. I’d noticed even back in primary school that although the other kids laugh at what the naughty kids do, naughty kids usually don’t end up with a lot of close friends. Homer was the exception.

It struck me that living wild on the streets of Stratton during the war might have been a good time for Gavin. He had a gang, a group of feral lost and homeless children, and he’d ended up in charge, so there was no question about his popularity. Away from school, in a situation where deafness was just a minor inconvenience, all his strengths had been shown to maximum advantage.

The next day he came to the bus with not much more than the usual amount of grumbling, complaining, whingeing, dawdling, sulking, and insulting remarks directed at me. Querulous, that’s another good word. I can definitely say he was querulous.

It was my first day back since the funeral, and it was a little weird, the way the other kids treated me. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like. We’re nearly at the start of the run, so when Gavin and I got on the bus there were only the Sanderson kids, Jamie Anlezark, and Melissa Carpenter. They were just the usual ‘Hi, Ellie’, ‘Hi, El’, but they did look at me that little bit longer than normal, and their faces were that little bit redder.

The next stop is Homer’s and he sat next to me as always. To my absolute astonishment no sooner had he sat down than he pulled out a book, turned to a bookmark near the end and settled down to read. I lifted it up as he read to see what it was. It looked old and dusty. The name was The Scarlet Pimpernel. I put it down again, gently, feeling really disorientated. This would be something like Van Gogh playing full-forward for the West Coast Eagles.

After Homer got on, there was a long haul to the Boltons, at ‘Malabar’, then the Grahams and the Pereiras, then the Young twins at ‘Adderley’, and then the bus filled up so fast you couldn’t keep track of them all. There were lots of new kids on the buses these days, but we were lucky; we still had a friendly group, and once we got the Young twins it was like a party every morning. Shannon and Sam Young were a laugh a minute — no, sorry, take that back, a laugh a second. It didn’t matter how sleepy you were in the mornings, when they came bouncing down the aisle of the bus everyone woke up. Even Brad Davis, who slept through parties, footy games and exams, sat up to attention when the Young twins climbed on board.

But today it was different. Everyone was so quiet. Everyone glanced at me as they got on and everyone waved or nodded or said hi or all three, but then they just sat in their seats murmuring away like magpies very early in the morning.

In the seat ahead of me Sam Young picked up a black beetle on a tissue and was about to chuck it out the window. Before he did though he knelt up and showed it to me over the back of his seat. ‘Hey, Ellie,’ he said, ‘look what came out of my nose.’

I laughed. But the laugh strangled itself in my throat when I saw Shannon frown at him from across the aisle. They were treating me like I was an emotional cripple. Well, maybe I was, but I didn’t like to be reminded of it.

We got to school. I noticed that Homer had finished his book. ‘Can I borrow that?’ I asked as he went to put it away.

‘Sure.’

I had no idea what it was but an old book that fascinated Homer was worth a bit of a look.

Wirrawee High was a different place these days. There were so many new kids! The population of the school had gone from three hundred and fifty to six hundred and fifty. We didn’t have nearly enough teachers or buildings anymore. Every class had at least forty students and every bit of space was a classroom. Walk into the gym anytime and there’d be at least four classes going on, with each teacher trying to stop her kids from distracting the others.

Some things hadn’t changed though. I smiled as I walked down the corridor every day, because every day I passed the window we had broken during the war. The school, deserted and silent, had been a good hiding place for us back then. We had smashed a window to get in, then stuck masonite and tape over it to make it look like old damage. No-one had touched it since. Maybe we should have offered to pay for new glass but what the hell, money was short, and schools were meant to have a budget for repairs, weren’t they?

These days, luckily, being seniors, we got the best conditions, but even so, it was hard. There was no hope of getting any work done in your frees because the library was so crowded and noisy.

The first few days back I got no work done. I sat through period after period and they could have been talking about making drugs out of pineapples or a school excursion to the top of Mount Everest or World War II being caused by someone popping a paper bag. I didn’t hear a word, didn’t learn a thing. Now that I wasn’t physically active, now that I wasn’t racing around pulling calves or cementing posts into the cattle yards, I could think of nothing but my parents.

Time and time again the memory of their bodies, and the feelings of desolation, washed backwards and forwards, like a great internal tide. The way everyone avoided me or treated me like I had the Ebola virus made it all the worse. There’s nothing lonelier than grief. Sometimes I wanted to cry out to them all, in the middle of History, ‘Please, please, look at me, help me, can’t you see how unhappy I am?’

But what would have happened? They would have gathered round, making soothing noises, helping me out of the room maybe, offering me tissues… And none of that would touch the deep dark ocean that circled silently inside. They could not see it, touch it, stop it. I didn’t know any way to do that.

It was a relief to get home in the afternoons and get physical again. I actually felt good when I saw Gavin on the bus each afternoon. It was like he and I shared something that no-one else could understand. It was like we were linked by blood: literally, my parents’ blood, that had stained our hands and our clothing, and in another way the same kind of blood link that brothers and sisters, or parents and children, share.

I can’t imagine that before the war he would have been left in my care but now things had changed so much that no-one even came enquiring after him.

The first few days though, Gavin was so exhausted by being back at school that I stuck him in front of the TV with a bunch of cushions and left him to it. That first afternoon he slept for two and a half hours. I felt guilty, that I’d worked him so hard, but what choice did we have?

Gradually the kids on the bus and the atmosphere at school started to go back to normal. During the war there’d been so much grief and loss that now people were more used to it maybe. I think if my parents had died in such a way before the war it would have taken months for our friends and neighbours to get back on track. But now, by the second week of school, the bus was a mobile comedy and gossip club again and people were no longer treating me like I was contagious. I even started to absorb a skerrick of information from my classes.

I got to know Bronte a bit too. The night she had come out to my place with Homer and Jeremy and Jess she’d hardly said a word. And because she was a year below me at school we didn’t share any classes. But I noticed her in the queue at the canteen one day and we smiled at each other. I waited for her to get served and then we walked to the elm tree that looks over the footy oval.

We’d just had a History lesson before lunch and somehow, instead of talking about History, the conversation had swung around to a story from the radio that morning, about prisoners who weren’t released at the end of the war. These rumours came along every few days, and a lot of people believed them. I simply didn’t know if I did or not. There were so many people ‘unaccounted for’, and the theory was that they were still being held in secret out-of-the-way places. It was an emotional issue for anyone with friends and rellies who hadn’t been traced. There were four people in our class with family members who’d disappeared during the war and hadn’t been heard of since.

Jake Douglass, whose father had been one of the Wirrawee cops before the war but was now a security consultant or something, had been shooting off his big mouth, talking about raids across the border to find prisoners, and how he and his mates were ready to fight back any time.

I’d been pretty upset myself, listening to Jake going on and on, and I wanted someone to talk to. I told Bronte what Jake had said. She listened in silence.

‘Things are still so dangerous,’ she said at last. ‘Especially around here. Some of these boys are dangerous to be around.’

‘Jake Douglass thinks he’s such a hero. What did he do in the war? Let down a few tyres.’ She didn’t say anything to that and I had to add, ‘I know I sound like I think we’re the big heroes, when I talk that way. But the truth is, we did do a lot, and now all I want is to try to make some sort of normal life for myself, and the way these boys talk, I’m like you, it really disturbs me.’

I didn’t know why I was saying all this to her but she was one of those people you instinctively trust. ‘On the one hand there’s Jake Douglass, who’s got about as much guts as a disembowelled guinea pig and who’s so stupid he’s dangerous, and on the other hand there’s Homer, who really is brave, but sometimes he seems to be dropping hints about some sort of gung-ho stuff too. Like Jess, when you guys came out to my place the other night. It’s very confusing and I don’t like things that are confusing.’

‘I don’t think we can expect things not to be confusing at the moment,’ Bronte said, which, when you translated it, I think meant that things would stay confusing for a while yet. The way she said that kind of proved she was right.

Jess joined us. I liked Jess but I’d had the feeling the other night that Bronte wasn’t so keen on her.

‘Great History lesson,’ Jess said.

‘Yeah, I was just telling Bronte. Honestly, I don’t know what’s come over these boys. They’re all out of their tiny minds. So many people seem like they haven’t had enough war yet to satisfy them. I don’t know how much they want. I’ve had enough for a few lifetimes. People like Jake Douglass make me paranoid. More paranoid than I already am, that is.’

‘Hey, I’ll make you really paranoid,’ Jess said. ‘You know what my father thinks? He says the enemy are sussing us out, getting ready for the next invasion.’

I couldn’t cope with this conversation. I rolled away and started playing with a spider’s web. I tried putting a leaf on it, to see if it would break. I heard Bronte ask, ‘Why would they invade again?’ She sounded calm, but she seemed like a calm person.

‘Because a lot of their radicals are really angry with their government. They say they gave in too easily, they shouldn’t have compromised, they shouldn’t have given so much away.’

‘Given so much away!’ I shouted back over my shoulder. ‘It wasn’t theirs to give away! It wasn’t theirs in the first place.’

Boy, that Jess, she had an answer for anything. I put a piece of bark on the spider’s web. It still didn’t break.

‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Keep your shirt on. Bad choice of words. Although I suppose it was theirs to give away, really, because they had a whacking great slab of it and we didn’t. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.’

‘So,’ said Bronte, in the voice of someone who’s had this discussion quite a few times before. It was like a teacher asking a class for the seventeenth year in a row, ‘So, class, what do you think our rules should be for this year?’ Bronte went on, ‘What do you think they’d do if they invaded again?’

I stacked a twig on the web. It sagged but it held all that weight without snapping.

‘Well, what they started doing in some places before. Resettle as fast as they can and turn us into fringe dwellers. We’d live in the crap places and do all the crap jobs and anyone who gave trouble would be locked up or they’d mysteriously disappear.’ She paused, then added, ‘According to the rumours, that’s why they’re not returning some prisoners. It’s because they’ve identified certain people, certain prisoners, as troublemakers, the people who’d give them a hard time if they invaded again. They figure “Why create extra problems for ourselves? Let’s just announce that these guys are dead, or we don’t know where they are, and that way we’ll make it all the easier when we launch the next invasion”.’

‘Next invasion,’ I snarled back at her. ‘No way is there going to be a next invasion. Not if I have anything to do with it.’

But even as I said that I knew I couldn’t have anything to do with such a big issue. Nobody was going to come to me asking for permission to invade.

I karate-chopped the cobweb with my hand. It broke.