The Ellie Chronicles (39 page)

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.

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 streaming 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.

The third thing is that you do get mobbed a bit, which might look quite glamorous when you see it happen to superstars on TV but is a bloody nuisance when you’re in a hurry and in a bad mood, and it does seem like the girls who most want to mob you are often the obnoxious ones. I’m talking about the ones I knew from the swimming pool or I knew their sisters or brothers or parents, or they were on my bus and their main reason in coming up to me seemed to be to show off to their friends that they knew me. Most of them could talk to me just about any time, so I don’t know why they suddenly had to make a big deal about it. This is pretty horrible to the nice ones, because of course there were plenty of those, but I was too stressed to notice them.

So I was motoring across the yard like a car through floodwater, throwing up a wake that consisted of Year 4 and 5 girls saying, ‘Hi Ellie, what are you here for, Ellie, you here to see Gavin’s teacher, are you coming to Brendan’s eighteenth, Ellie?’ and it was all I could do not to turn around and screech at them, ‘Bugger off, the lot of you.’

I knew her name was Mrs Rosedale, and of course I’d seen her plenty of times, but we’d never talked for more than a minute. And even then it was only about basic things like, ‘We could do with some rain,’ ‘Did Gavin give you his excursion money?’ ‘Sorry he was away yesterday but we had a couple of trees down after the storm,’ ‘Thanks for finding his library book.’

You’d think someone with a name like Mrs Rosedale would be really nice. I mean, it’s like that book where the kid stays with Aunt Bridget Wonkham-Strong, and then at the end he goes off to live with Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet, and you figure he’s got to be better off. Like, it wasn’t as if she was Mrs Grumpybitch or Mrs Sourtits. Gavin seemed to like her well enough. He never said much about her really, but then he never said much about school. She seemed nice enough from what I’d had to do with her, just one of those straight-down-the-line, you-know-what-you’re-getting, middle-of-the-road primary school teachers.

I didn’t even know what I wanted to say to her, just, more than anything I think, to talk to an adult who knew Gavin well and could give me some idea of how to deal with him. That nice dream of us all living together as a family, and Gavin being the brother I never had, was disintegrating fast, now that I had to be his mother and father as well as his sister.

I was actually a bit pissed off at my parents for leaving me with this problem, conveniently forgetting that I was the one who had lumbered them with ‘this problem’ in the first place.

Mrs Rosedale was in the library and she didn’t give me the brush-off, like I expected. I thought I’d have to make an appointment and come back later. ‘Sure, the kids have got Music,’ she said. ‘I’ll just be five minutes.’

While I was waiting I wandered along the shelves having a little nostalgic meander. The library had survived the war almost untouched: I remembered one of the teachers telling Mum that although people had obviously borrowed books, they’d returned them too. There were about sixty that they couldn’t find. That was weird, all these invaders borrowing books from the Wirrawee Primary School library and returning them, like regular people.

It seemed in pretty good order now. I got a little thrill out of seeing my old friends,
The Magic Faraway Tree, Who Sank the Boat?, Tiger in the Bush, Charlotte’s Web, Robinson Crusoe, Where’s Wally?, The Long Red Scarf
. . . I ran my finger along their spines, wondering why I hadn’t shared more of them with Gavin. With each book came a film clip that ran in my mind: curled up in a cubby reading
Tiger in the Bush,
being in bed with Dad reading
The Magic Faraway Tree,
spilling orange juice on
The Long Red Scarf.

‘Now, what can I do for you, Ellie?’ Mrs Rosedale said, and it was like a little slap, startling me back into the real world.

She led me into the side room. Before I could sit down she said, ‘I’m hoping you can give me a few tips on dealing with young Gavin.’

I felt like I’d been given a quick elbow to the stomach. I’d been rather hoping that she would sit down, open the inner taps of wisdom that most adults seem to have, and pour out wonderful words of advice that would solve all my problems.

‘Has he been a bit difficult?’ I asked. I felt embarrassed, as though Gavin’s behaviour was entirely my responsibility, so I should feel ashamed if he was not one of the best kids in the class.

She stretched her arms wide, rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘A bit difficult!’ she agreed. ‘He’s the original barrel of monkeys. Little bugger. We have a fight just about every day, but he still gets away with a lot, because with these big classes you can’t keep an eye on half of what’s going on.’

She got up and opened a window, then, still standing beside it, took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘I can get away with this in here, just,’ she said with another laugh. I started to think that she was rather a nervous person. ‘Ellie, the farm you live on, there wouldn’t be any empty houses, would there? That you’d be interested in renting? Or my partner could do some work around the place in exchange for rent?’

I felt more and more dejected. I wanted to get this conversation back on track. It was like going to the station and expecting to catch the seven forty-five to Stratton, only to find yourself on the eighty-thirty to Cobbler’s Bay.

‘No, sorry, there’s nothing like that,’ I said. It was awkward being put in this position, although it had happened a few times already, with the demand for housing, not to mention all the people who wanted a nice house in the country with fresh air and space. ‘Do you think Gavin’s been getting worse?’

‘Gavin? Well, possibly, a little, yes. He wasn’t too great to begin with.’

‘Has he been violent?’ I asked.

Violent!’ she said, puffing on her cigarette and pushing a strand of hair away from her eye. ‘God, every story he writes and every picture he draws. Mind you, there’s a few of them who see life that way, which won’t come as any surprise to you. But he is among the worst.’ She gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘If you had to read the number of gory stories I’ve marked since school started again . . . severed limbs and decapitated torsos and blood gushing like fountains. And some of the pictures are just collages of tanks and guns and body parts. Even the kids who didn’t see much violence during the war have been infected by it.’

‘So what am I meant to do about Gavin?’ I asked, feeling more helpless with every minute. ‘He seems to be acting a bit violently at times too.’

I wasn’t really being honest about him, but I didn’t want to give him too bad a name.

She had that teacher suspicion thing though, where they can smell a copied essay or a cruel joke or a fake excuse from a kilometre away. She frowned at me through the cigarette smoke. What’s he done now?’

It was too early in the morning for me to avoid teachers’ suspicious questions. And after all, I had come there for a bit of comfort and support. ‘Something to a cat,’ I stammered. ‘He was staying at Mark’s, and they did something pretty horrible to a cat.’

She pressed her lips together and looked away. ‘It might be time to do something about him,’ she said. ‘In the old days he would have been at the therapist’s long ago, but the resources are few and far between at the moment. Still, I think he’s about ready for some intervention. It’s a scandal that there are no integration aides.’

‘I don’t want to get him into trouble,’ I said. ‘I just want some ideas on how to handle him.’

‘Oh God, I’ve got every sympathy with you,’ she said. ‘And with him too for that matter. I haven’t got much idea of what he went through in the war, but I know it was horrendous, and then there was the terrible thing out at your place . . .’

‘The terrible thing’ – seemed like that was its new name.

‘Yeah, that came at the worst time,’ I agreed, and a moment later thought, ‘What a stupid comment.’ As if there’s ever a best time.

Mrs Rosedale looked at the end of her cigarette. ‘You know, I’ve really got to give these up,’ she said. A whole lot of children’s voices, laughing and squealing and chattering, suddenly came through the other row of windows behind me. It sounded like a horde of wasps setting out for a day in the garden.

‘You just have to try to ignore the bad behaviour and reinforce the good,’ Mrs Rosedale said. When he does something good, give him lots of praise, and don’t take any notice when he’s been naughty. And I’ll have a chat to Mrs Howell about him. That business of the cat sounds serious.’

Walking back to the high school, I felt pretty miserable. It wasn’t only that Mrs Rosedale had been no help, but there was the feeling that I might have made things worse. The last thing I wanted was a whole bunch of people who didn’t know anything much about our situation to come poking around. I knew I wasn’t doing a very good job with Gavin on my own, but I had the feeling that they might do worse.

MY FIRST DATE with Jeremy was a wild and exotic experience. We didn’t limo into Stratton for an expensive dinner and the movies, we didn’t helicopter to New Zealand to spend the weekend with his father, we didn’t camp on Taylor’s Stitch and feast on lamb and wild mushrooms, we didn’t even go to McDonald’s.

We met under a tree at lunchtime, at the scoreboard end of the Wirrawee High School footy ground. I swapped him one of my curried lamb shanks for one of his cheese and Vegemite sandwiches. That’s what you do when you like someone.

It wasn’t a very good date, because I was depressed and irritated but trying to be bright and positive, not wanting Jeremy to see my worst side too early. But he seemed kind of distracted anyway. Neither of us even touched each other. It was hard to remember how warm and strong his hands had felt on my skin. Ten minutes before the bell we finally agreed to be honest and say what was bugging us, because by then it had become pretty obvious to each of us that the other one was pretty bugged.

Of course, as always, Jeremy, being the guy, got to go first. That increased my bugging just slightly, only by a couple of clicks, but I figured I’d be lucky to get two or three minutes by the time we’d sorted out his problems.

‘It’s this Liberation thing. It’s all getting pretty crazy. I think what we did was worth doing, because we basically prevented major terrorism, and there’s no way anyone official could have gone over the border and done it. But it’s getting out of hand. Have you seen all the stuff in the papers?’ His eyes were really beautiful, so full of life and intelligence.

I shook my head. ‘Haven’t had time.’

‘Well, I read papers, and my father keeps me up to date. Every drunken lunatic who wants to be a hero is charging across the border and attacking people. It’s still easy to get across, as you know better than anyone, and it’ll be ages before they manage to put up decent fences and all the rest. They’re talking about a DMZ, which could be quite wide, and filled with mines even–’

‘What’s a DMZ?’ I interrupted. Jeremy had slightly curly hair and it was quite mussed up. I wanted to comb it into shape with my fingers.

‘De-militarised zone,’ he said. ‘A neutral area, but no-one’s allowed into it.’

‘Tell that to the kangaroos.’

‘Yeah, well, there won’t be any of those if it’s mined. Anyway, there were three guys from Stratton killed two nights ago when their car got shelled.’

‘On our side of the border?’ His skin, when his shirt was open, looked brown and smooth.

‘No, on their side. No-one even knows why they were over there, but there’s a theory that they were just joyriding. They’d been drinking or smoking or both. And then last weekend there was a revenge attack at a truck stop near Cobblers Bay, with this bunch of anonymous people who sure looked like they were enemy soldiers and they acted like they were enemy soldiers except they weren’t wearing uniforms, and they came out of the bush, killed six people, took their money and nicked off down the highway in a large new Mer.’

Yes, I heard about that one.’ I loved the pattern the sunlight and leaves made on his face. I shook my head, trying to concentrate on what he was saying.

‘So my father’s pushing pretty strongly for Liberation to do more, because they’re organised and efficient, and he thinks that strength is good, weakness is bad, and history shows you have to fight stuff like the attack at Cobblers. He’s not interested in the other stories, the ones about unprovoked attacks from our side. I keep telling him that history always repeats itself and history never repeats itself. Every situation–’

‘Hey that’s a paradox.’

‘Huh?’

‘History always repeats itself and history never repeats itself. Paradox.’

‘Yeah, well every situation’s different, even if it does have similarities to what’s happened in the past. And then–’

‘So every situation’s the same and every situation’s different? There’s another one.’

‘Ellie, we don’t have much time. I was going to say that it’s complicated by the fact that he doesn’t want me personally to get involved, which is really hypocritical of him, although he says it’s not, it’s just because I’m too young and inexperienced. But he knows that half the people in Liberation are young, and the ones who have experience train the ones who don’t.’

‘What does the Scarlet Pimple think?’ I asked, with a little smile just to show that if Jeremy was the Scarlet Pimple, I already knew, if that makes sense.

He laughed. ‘Huh. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Well, the Scarlet Pimple thinks that we should lie low for at least a week or two, to get a whiff of which way the wind is turning. But if something desperate comes up, something really important . . . And to make it more complicated, the whole thing scares the crap out of me. Like, it was a totally insane rush when we were out there, and even after we came back in a way, but there’s also the total terror and the feeling that I aged about twenty years, and the fact that I couldn’t stop choking for about a week afterwards.’

‘You hid that pretty well.’ Those two little ridges, from your nose to your mouth, I don’t know if they’ve got a name, Jeremy’s were a little longer and more prominent than most people’s.

‘Well, you do don’t you? Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Oh, am I? Sorry.’

‘Anyway, it’s time for you to spill your guts. There’s only about two minutes left.’

Yes, there was, just like I’d expected.

‘Oh, it’s just Gavin,’ I said lamely. ’He’s getting in more trouble than normal. He and his friend Mark did something pretty horrific the other day.’

The bell rang. Jeremy started getting up, brushing bits of grass and leaves off him. ‘Yeah, I can imagine he’d be a bit of a problem,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you do with a kid like that.’

Deep down I had known that Jeremy wasn’t perfect, but the only reason I’d known that was because no human being is perfect, and sometimes, especially when you meet someone new, you try to keep that in mind. But at least now I knew for sure that he wasn’t perfect even if he was good looking. I tried not to grind my teeth as we walked back towards the lockers. Teeth grinding is so unattractive.

I tried again with Homer on the way home on the bus. He laughed when I told him that Gavin was being difficult. To be fair, I had made the same comment to him quite a few times before. I’m not saying that Gavin or Jeremy or Mrs Rosedale or anyone else was insensitive or uncaring. I think it was partly that people were so busy in their brave new worlds. Dealing with their own war scars, physical and mental, the injuries and the damage, was enough to keep everyone busy. And I guess I always understate things, so when I tried to tell people I was worried about Gavin, I didn’t pitch it strongly enough.

When I mentioned something about the cat, Homer launched into a monologue about cow-tipping. This quickly became a conversation, because Sam Young got involved. Sam leant up from the seat in front of Homer, turned around, and they started comparing notes.

Cow-tipping is illegal, according to Shannon Young, who was sitting next to me. I suppose I should mention that cow-tipping is when you go up to a cow who’s sound asleep in the paddock, give her a push in the right spot, and she just rolls over and lies on the ground, still asleep. It is pretty funny, because their legs stick out, but it’s very bad for cows, although I’m not quite sure how. Probably bruises their meat for one thing, and even more probably gives them bad sleep patterns. I mean, how would you be if every time you went to sleep you did so with the fear that in the middle of the night some teenage idiot might sneak up to you and tip you over? Probably about the same as I felt every time I went to sleep since the war started, not sure whether some guy with a rifle might appear in the middle of the night and do something a lot worse than tipping me over.

Maybe that’s why, when it came to cow-tipping, I took the side of the cow. Since the war anyway.

It was time to have a second attempt at the mountains. I was determined not to let them get the better of me. After all, what would they know? Just because they’d been around for thousands of years, just because they were made of rock, just because they covered thousands of k’s, didn’t mean that I, made of skin and bone and squishy internal bits like heart and liver, weighing as much as a fairly small boulder, but with a vast experience of life, couldn’t conquer them. After all, I was a mountain girl. Just call me Maria.

This time I took Gavin, because I figured it would be harder for me to run away if he was there. And I thought it might be a good idea for us to have a break, spend an afternoon somewhere beautiful, even do a bit of bonding. A positive time, far away from Mark’s place, and the poor dead cat.

Not that we actually needed bonding. Our relationship was good, despite all the frustrations and arguments. I could see how he still had big issues, was carrying a lot of baggage, was being inappropriate, etc, etc, but neither of us let that poison what we had. I knew he loved me, and if he didn’t know that I loved him, then he couldn’t tell the sun from the moon.

After the awful thing with the cat, and my visit to the school, he became painfully, painfully good. Not just doing his homework, but doing it conspicuously – coming and asking me for help every five minutes, and using some fake excuse to show me what he’d done, so I would realise how hard he was trying. Not only that, but doing all his chores like he loved them, going to bed without any fuss, getting up early in the morning, and being on time to the bus. I felt like gently pouring a cup of water over his head and saying, ‘Don’t worry, just be yourself again, it’s OK,’ but there were two reasons for me not to do that. One was I figured I might as well enjoy the peace while it lasted, and the other was my deep fear that maybe it wasn’t OK.

Anyway, doing something reasonably normal seemed like a good idea. At first Gavin didn’t want to go but he gradually changed his mind. We decided we’d make a picnic of it, and in the end we both got quite revved up by the whole thing. I’d made some relish the weekend before, using an old recipe of Mum’s, with ginger plus the usual tomatoes and onions and vinegar. We had some cold roast lamb from Mrs Yannos, which she’d sent over on Thursday, so I made sandwiches out of that, with some cos lettuce from the supermarket. Sometimes I get sick of beef, but never lamb, and Gavin’s totally carnivorous, so I knew we’d both be happy with that.

Climbing, climbing, climbing. There were a few steep bits that I really hated, but most of it was good, even when it was hard work. I stopped once to let Gavin catch up, but I think he saw that as an insult, because he went on past me without a word, and from then on continued to lead.

Everything felt so familiar. The gum trees, the spur, the sky, and Gavin’s stocky little body, head down, relentlessly ploughing forwards. I often felt grateful that we could walk through the bush in broad daylight again, and almost as often I wondered how we could have been so mobile at night. Of course, when the moon is good, you can go just about anywhere, but on those dark nights you can hold your own hand up in front of your face and say, ‘How many fingers?’ and you don’t have a clue.

As we got closer to the spot where I’d packed it in last time I wondered if Gavin would react. It must have held the same memories for him as it did for me. I fixed my gaze more and more steadily on the back of his neck, trying to concentrate on it. Not for the first time I appreciated the strength in him. I knew I was sweating more than the sun and the physical effort of climbing could explain. I just kept shoving one foot in front of the other. My heart was fluttering in my chest like the beating wings of a little bird that you find on the ground after a storm and hold in your cupped fist. Gavin didn’t look left or right. I felt like he was towing me through the danger zone.

And suddenly, much faster than I would have expected, we were at the top. I broke into a huge smile and bopped him on the head. I felt like the mountains were mine again. I forgot about mangled cats and farm mortgages and war and put my head up and threw back my arms and drank in the sky instead. I ran in zigzags among the rocks and moss and tufty grass, then ran straight until I had almost lost sight of Gavin. Perhaps if Gavin had not been there I would never have come back. The sight of his sad little figure, watching me from the top of the track, didn’t change my mood completely but it reminded me that I was still connected to the world. I couldn’t fly. My wings were working well again but the anchors were holding fast.

I ran back and tackled him and we rolled down the hill a few metres, wrestling and laughing. I really had to fight to get the better of him these days. Just when I thought I’d pinned him he wriggled out and somehow got on top of me and sat on my head. I scrabbled my legs up under me and used my neck muscles to throw him off, then went after him again. I was on my hands and knees. He jumped up and ran straight backwards, with his arms out, like he was fending me off, still laughing, and he went straight over the edge like that, still laughing, still with his arms towards me.

Sickness ran through me. Every spot on my skin prickled, every hair on my head and neck and arms stood, and all the saliva in my mouth and throat dried. I tried to call as I ran forwards, and couldn’t, then realised it was a waste of time anyway with Gavin being deaf. I saw the crumble of fresh dirt, the smear of it, where his shoes had scraped the edge, and only just stopped myself from following him over.

Instead I got down on my stomach and slid forwards and looked down. Jesus! What a place to pick. There weren’t many sheer cliffs along here but this was as sheer as they got. I saw him straight away. He’d fallen, I don’t know, twelve or fifteen metres. Somehow he’d been caught on a bump of earth and somehow he’d stuck there; somehow it had held. I didn’t know what damage he’d done himself but he was still alive. He was lying face down over this bump sticking out from the face of the cliff but it wasn’t big enough to reach even halfway under his body, so he was tipping over it quite a bit. Like someone not lying properly on a sofa and about to roll onto the floor.