Authors: John Marsden
‘Both of them are.’ She frowned. ‘It’ll all blow up sooner or later and there’ll be a scandal and they’ll have to take early retirement from the Army. But my dad’s prepared for that. It’s already happened to a couple of his friends. He likes the Prime Minister’s attitude though. You never sack anyone, or admit you could possibly be guilty of anything, even if you’ve bashed a baby or hijacked a plane, because by this time next week there’ll be a bushfire, or an old lady’ll win a million bucks in the lottery, or a pig’ll give birth to a twoheaded piglet or something, and it’ll all be forgotten.’
‘Yeah, he’s got that right,’ I couldn’t help but agree.
‘But you know, Ellie,’ she said, looking at me hard over her chicken and avocado sandwich, ‘I don’t think you should join Liberation. The opposite. I think you should take a break from all this stuff. It’s not good for your health. In wartime, pilots are only allowed a certain number of sorties, and then they have to take a rest. I think they do twenty before they get sent for a holiday. And that’s for guys who don’t even see the enemy, most of them anyway. You’ve been doing stuff on the ground, close up, face to face. You’ve seen too much blood.’
I nodded. My eyes filled with tears. That was happening all too easily these days. She patted me then hugged me and we sat in silence for a while. In the distance the bell rang, like it always does sooner or later. She squeezed me and we got up and collected our bits and pieces and headed off, me to English her to PE.
Bronte was an amazing person, not only because she was strong and clever, but because she understood people and she had . . . I don’t know . . . I was going to say sympathy, but that seems like a weak word sometimes. I guess compassion is better. I wasn’t sure her father had that. Her mother might have but I’d only met her a couple of times. I reckon you could probably be a really good leader without compassion, as long as you were great at strategy and analysis and all the rest, but to be one of the all-time greats I think you’d have to add compassion to your repertoire.
It’s only imagination, really, when it’s all said and done.
The very next day, in almost exactly the same spot, I had another conversation with another one of my friends, but this one worked out quite differently. It was with Jeremy and it was different to every conversation we’d had before. Pretty early on, ignoring my lunch, which I didn’t feel like eating, I said, ‘Bronte thinks I should take a break from violence for a while.’
‘Huh?’
‘You know, not join Liberation but go for nice picnics instead. Something like that.’
‘Oh! Yeah, that sounds good. Good advice I mean.’
He didn’t sound very interested, but he did add, ‘Bronte’s amazing.’
I’d heard him on the theme of Bronte before, except that I didn’t know it was Bronte he was talking about, back then. It was just the Scarlet Pimple, whom I’d always thought, in a totally sexist way, was a boy. Now I felt slightly annoyed to hear him talking about Bronte with such feeling. ‘You’re not so unamazing yourself,’ I said, getting closer and using my left hand to tickle and tease him and make him feel good.
I was feeling guilty about Jeremy. I’d hardly seen him since the day of the big rescue. I suppose I was a little pissed, though, that when I did get back, one of the first things he did was to ask me for the money he’d handed me before I left. He’d been so like an accountant for a minute there. Even Jess, who was in my kitchen with us, had said, ‘Geez Jeremy, give her a break, I don’t think that’s the main thing on her mind right now.’
Of course I didn’t have the money. It had disappeared during that first escape attempt, when they’d caught me and bashed me. I wondered if Jeremy would make me fill out a tax form or a receipt or something.
Anyway, on the bank above the oval, he seemed like he was probably still thinking about the money and not about me. Then suddenly he sat up and said, ‘Ellie, there’s something I’ve got to say to you.’
I took my hand away real fast. There are different ways you can say a sentence like that, but when a boy says it in the tone Jeremy used, and when his face is all red and he can’t look at you, you know you’re not about to have a conversation about what a fantastic person you are. And how totally in love he is. Nuh uh. For the first time in our relationship I felt doubt. I looked hard at him, which was easy, because like I said, he wasn’t looking at me, but I had the feeling he knew where my eyes were.
I thought he was going to say that he’d fallen out of love with me, but it was more complicated than that. In a voice I’d never heard him use before, speaking fast and loud, he said, ‘I’m sick of the way you hang around Homer and the way you talk about him and the way you never take your eyes off him and you listen to him more than you listen to me. You’ve got to decide, Ellie. You’re meant to be in love with me but anyone’d think Homer’s the only thing in your life, I mean the only guy. I’ve had enough of it.’
I felt sandbagged. I think that’s the right word. When you feel as though you’ve been clobbered across the head by someone wielding a large and heavy sandbag. I’d been physically beaten not all that long ago and now I was getting beaten up with words and thoughts. I swayed over to one side, like I really had been clobbered.
‘Jeremy!’ I gasped.
‘Well, it’s true. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You’ve gotta decide who you want to be with. I know he’s your childhood friend and all that, but now I’m on the scene and things are different. Things should be different! Things have got to be different.’
I just kept gaping at him. He was like a whole new person. Before I’d seen someone calm and intelligent and thoughtful and kind of perfect really. Now I saw someone selfish and possessive. It was like I’d put on a new pair of glasses. It wasn’t a black and white thing – I didn’t immediately fall out of love with him and think he was a complete dickhead – but I realised there was much more to him than I’d realised.
‘Jeremy, I don’t know what you’re even talking about. I’m not in love with Homer but I’m not going to change my relationship with him just because you don’t like it. Why should I?’
‘You have to choose,’ he said. ‘I can’t keep going like this.’
‘Like what? Nothing’s changed!’
‘No, except that I’ve started to realise that I’m just number two or three or four on your list. I want to be number one. I want to be the only one. I’m offering you something pretty good Ellie, total love, and that’s not something that comes along too often.’
He started striding up and down in front of me. I stared at him, wondering what had got into him. One thing for sure, I wasn’t about to hand over my life to him. I wasn’t some possession that he’d picked up at the summer sales and from now on was going to be what he wanted me to be. It was the opposite. He’d fallen in love with the person I was, so it’d be more than dumb of him to change me into someone different, and dumb of me to try to change into someone I thought he wanted.
And if he had made a mistake about the person I was, if he’d been seeing someone else every time he looked at me, well, tough toadies for him.
‘Jeremy, the bell’s gonna go in a sec, and I don’t know what to say to you, but my relationship with Homer isn’t something for you to control, and if you think it is, then you don’t understand much about me or about relationships. I’m too upset to talk about this any more, but maybe you better ring me tonight or something.’
And off I went, my head feeling like a shaken-up bottle of Coke had just been opened in it. All I could think was, ‘I hope he doesn’t ring. I don’t think I can cope with any more of that today.’
A
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I
A
lightning rod? Do I attract storms? Are there violent forces of nature zigzagging around the heavens looking for a way to get to earth and then they see me and they go, ‘Oh good, there’s Ellie, now’s our chance.’?
It was only a couple of weeks after we got back from Havelock, bruised and more battered than a piece of fish. I was in the kitchen, making a fruit salad; there was a call on the walkie-talkie from the soldiers down the road – we had the honour of patrols around the district all the time now – and they told me there was a lady from the Department of Something-or-other coming my way.
Now I didn’t think much about that. There were always government departments turning up for one thing or another. Checking the water, checking for GM crops, checking the road, checking our fire precautions and tractor emissions and the way we store our chemicals and whether our rifles and shotguns are in childproof safes . . . For a long time after the war everything was in chaos and we could do pretty much what we wanted – no, that’s not true, some things, like land redistribution, happened pretty fast – but in most ways it was a land without laws. Sometimes I rather liked it like that, because it meant that as soon as anything went wrong we could all say, ‘Why doesn’t the government do something about it? How come those people can get away with so much?’
But gradually the world began to get organised again and all the official stuff started to happen the way it used to, only worse, because with much less land to go around everyone was more crowded, so there were more regulations and a stronger sense of POS, ‘parent over shoulder’, of being watched and controlled and supervised. Bit by bit, detail by detail.
One part of my life had been completely ignored though, and I didn’t think about it much, didn’t let myself think about it, because I knew that things could get horribly complicated if a government department started snooping around it. So even though the name ‘Department of Social Responsibility’ didn’t mean anything specific to me, I did feel a strange tension in my stomach as I worked away on the fruit salad. I heard the car pull up outside and for a moment didn’t want to go see who it was or what she wanted. But I made myself put down the knife and go to the door.
She’d parked her Falcon next to my ute and was just straightening up from having a peep into the cab of the ute as I opened the kitchen door. She was about thirty, I’d guess, although I’m pretty hopeless at working out people’s ages. She had a face that – I don’t want to be rude, but I will be – was like a particular type of fish, except I don’t know the name of them. Round, with little eyes and a little mouth, and ears that were flat to the sides of her head. On top of that was a heap of blonde curls. She carried a blue folder and she walked towards the house as though she owned it and was about to take charge. I’m not saying all this with hindsight; this is exactly what I thought as I watched her approach. I took an instant dislike to her.
‘Ellie Linton, is it?’ she asked. She didn’t offer to shake hands. ‘Madeleine Randall. I’m from the Department of Social Responsibility. I notice the vehicle’s got its keys in the ignition?’
‘Er, yes, I suppose it has,’ I said, feeling completely off balance. It was as bad as the conversation with Jeremy already. I was totally astonished when she opened her folder and started writing in it, like she was recording the fact that the ute had its keys in it. I didn’t know whether to laugh or crack it with her big time.
She looked around, along the wall of the house. Marmie had done a poo quite a way further down. When Madeleine saw it she frowned and tossed her curls. ‘Dog faeces?’ she asked.
‘What is this?’ I said. ‘What’s it got to do with you whether the dog’s done a crap or not?’
She went a little red and looked at me coldly. ‘We understand that you have a child here who is not under the jurisdiction of his parents.’
‘Oh God,’ I thought. ‘They’ve caught up with us at last.’ It was the one fear that I hadn’t let myself think about. Occasionally I had a flicker of ‘I can’t believe no-one’s ever checked on Gavin’ in my brain, but it was rare.
I couldn’t think of what to say. It was hard to argue with her about Marmie’s bowel movements. I guess I was a little red myself as I stared back. ‘Let’s have a look inside the house,’ she said, starting for the back door.
I wanted to say, ‘What right do you have to march into my home without an invitation?’ but although I had no problem standing up to enemy soldiers, getting involved in gun battles, fighting a guerrilla war, I’d never met anyone as chilling as this lady. So I didn’t say anything, just followed her meekly inside.
At once I could see in painful detail just how unsatisfactory everything was. It was like I was suddenly seeing it through her eyes. And there was no doubt she saw every fault. She gave a running commentary as she walked around the kitchen, but she was writing all the time, and I don’t think she mentioned a lot of stuff that she wrote down. Half the time she was more or less talking to herself. ‘Microwave has food stains . . . chopping board looks too old to be hygienic . . .’ She looked into the corner of the pantry and came out muttering about the rat poison I had in a little bowl in there.
‘Gavin’s not stupid enough to help himself to Ratsak,’ I said. Neither was Marmie, although I thought I’d better not mention the possibility of Marmie ever being in the pantry.
She didn’t answer that, but when she went to the door of the fridge and said, ‘Let’s have a look in here,’ I thought I’d blow more than a fuse. Probably an entire transformer.
‘What’s this all about?’ I asked. ‘Have you really got the right to walk into people’s houses and start checking out their fridges?’
‘I’m from the Child Protection Unit,’ she said. ‘We have the right to go into any premises where we have reason to believe that a child is living in unsatisfactory circumstances.’
I was on fire inside and struggling not to breathe it out of my mouth. I knew already that if I erupted it would be bad for Gavin. Bad for me. I didn’t want to lose Gavin. I knew it would be unbearable for both of us. I was just glad he was over at Homer’s for the afternoon, but he was due back any time, and if he walked in and realised what this lady was on about, I hated to think what he might do and say.
On the other hand I didn’t know how much longer I could cope with this witch – and I’m not sure if w is the right way of starting that word – without going completely and utterly off my head. But maybe this was part of the test, to see if I was a calm, competent person. I suspected pretty strongly, though, that it didn’t matter much what I did. I was under-age, I had a guardian myself, and there was no way in the world I was going to be allowed to officially take charge of a kid. I could be Mother Teresa or Joan of Arc or the Virgin Mary herself and the Department of Social Responsibility would still knock me over the head with a dozen kilos of documentation and leave me unconscious while they took Gavin off to a foster home or an orphanage or something.