The Ellie Chronicles (66 page)

AND SUDDENLY THEY came out of the woodwork. I don’t actually know what that expression means. What come out of the woodwork? Cockroaches maybe. Mice? Are these rhetorical questions, like I just learned about on one of my rare visits to school? Was that a rhetorical question? Is it a paradox when you ask rhetorically if a rhetorical question is a rhetorical question? I think I’d better stop this before I get a headache.

Well, I’ll come back to the woodwork in a minute. So much happened during the next couple of days, the next month, that I felt like I was in a tumble-dryer most of the time and the heat was on high. It was hard to keep control of my own life, impossible at times. The first and worst and least expected thing was the speed of the Department of Social Responsibility. Everyone always says that government departments move slowly, and this one had for many many months, but now, suddenly, they were as fast as a car accident. Two days later a grey Commodore arrived when I was in the machinery shed, out gets Ms Randall as I come out of the building and from the back seat two lanky men who look a bit like the Blues Brothers and are dressed like them too and I suddenly realise what’s happening and I move swiftly for the house thinking, ‘Oh God, Gavin, don’t appear at this moment, see them before they see you, go bush, go to Homer’s, go to Hell, go anywhere’, but Gavin’s timing has never been good and he’s excellent at turning up in the very place I especially don’t want him to be, so I shouldn’t be surprised when he chooses that exact moment to walk out of the house eating an apple and looking like a kid who hasn’t got a care in the world.

And so he got kidnapped for the second time, and in a way I think this was the worse of the two, because it wasn’t done by people who were identifiably ‘baddies’. You couldn’t fight them. Oh we did of course. Gavin struggled and screamed and begged me for help and although my first reaction was to jump at them they held me off pretty easily, and I realised from the babble coming out of Ms Randall’s mouth that she was right, and it would us more harm than good to fight them in this way.

It was the first time that I hadn’t been able to help him.

So I convinced Gavin to calm down. To cooperate with the kidnappers, to allow himself to be led away to a new type of captivity. They let him pack some stuff and they took him away. White and trembling as he was, looking like a statue on a grave at the cemetery, they took him away.

I could barely take in the enormity of what had happened, and although Madeline left an envelope with a whole lot of paper in it and although she wrote some more notes on the outside of the envelope for me and although I tried time and again to read all this after the Commodore had driven away, I couldn’t comprehend it. I sat in the yard, about a metre from where the car had parked, a metre from where I’d said goodbye to him, and that was as far as I could go. It was like they’d succeeded in doing what soldiers and guns and high explosive and prison and murder and beatings had never done, and that was to defeat me.

But that’s what friends are for, I guess, in the words of the old song. It’s such a corny phrase that I’m embarrassed to write it, but I gotta record the facts here, as always, I hope, and the fact is that my friends came out of the woodwork. First one of them, a big ugly Greek guy who lives next door, then another one, a Thai-Vietnamese guy from Stratton, then Bronte the Scarlet Pimple, then Jess, then – and my heart leapt to see her – Fi. Jeremy was still away sulking but when Homer asked where he was – because to Homer it was incomprehensible that when your girlfriend’s in trouble you don’t immediately arrive with everything you can think of, from soup to guns to a Blackberry – Bronte said he was ill and when Homer said, ‘What with?’ she said ‘Depression or something’, which scared me because I didn’t know if I was the cause. I suspected that at some stage I’d have to do something about it. But I knew I couldn’t do anything right then and there, I had an even more urgent problem to work on.

These friends were followed by the adults. Homer’s parents of course – well they were my guardians after all – followed by Fi’s mother and, to my surprise, Bronte’s father. To my greater surprise Rosie’s foster parents drove out from Wirrawee with Rosie. They’d already been out to the farm three or four times and Rosie loved it. But now they were on a serious mission. They couldn’t stay long but I guess they were keen to let me know that they were on our side.

After they’d gone, and the Yannoses too, Fi’s mother and Bronte’s father disappeared into Dad’s old office for a legal conference. The rest of us stayed in the kitchen and talked tactics, but I had the feeling that the two lawyers were the most important people in the house and part of my mind was away with them, wondering what they were talking about, what they’d come up with. It’d need to be good.

Meanwhile, once we got over ideas like using Liberation to storm the offices of the Department and take Madeleine hostage, or plucking Gavin out of their arms in a daring 3 am raid, we got into the serious stuff. I told them that I was going to sell the property. I’d told Mr Young the day before, because even though I knew deep down he was mostly agisting his cattle at my place because he felt he owed me a favour, at the same time he had three hundred head of stock and he’d have to find a new home for them. Depending on who bought my place of course. I’d thought it might be Homer’s parents; he said they wanted it but didn’t think they could afford it. They already carried a lot of debt, as did we all I guess. I know I did.

Then there were the Sandersons, the people who’d been given a part of the place after the war, when all the big properties were broken up by the government. They were making a good go of their farm, unlike the other three families who’d got half the place between them, until we leased it back. But I’d be happy enough for the Sandersons to buy it all. They were nice people, kind, and hard-working, and it’d be a great break for them, if they could raise the money.

But the real issue was what I would do, where I would live, where we would live, me and Gavin hopefully, if we somehow managed to prise him out of the grip of the Department. The obvious thing was to buy a place in Wirrawee, so we could keep going to the same schools and hang out with the same people, etc etc. And that was OK, and I thought I’d be happy enough with that. But deep down inside me something hankered for a bit more. Something different. Something special. A new stage, a new era.

Fi put me through a funny little cross-examination. She must have been learning from her mother.

‘Now Ellie, do you want to keep farming? Cos you could buy a little place, just a few acres maybe.’

‘No, no, I think I actually want a break from it. It does tie you down. If I’m going to leave it I might as well take a complete break.’

‘Do you want to finish this year at school?’

‘Well I guess, except I think I’ve almost left it too late. I’m so far behind and I’ve missed so much . . .’

‘Claim special circumstances,’ Lee said. ‘I told you that before. I don’t know why you’re so against it.’

‘God I would,’ said Jess. ‘I’d do it in thirty seconds. Just watch me.’

‘Well, maybe I should . . . I guess I have been a bit stubborn about that.’

‘Ellie? Stubborn? Who said that?’ Homer jumped up, looking around him as if my worst enemy had just come in. ‘Not Ellie, surely! Never!’

Fi ignored him. ‘What do you want to do next year?’

It was hard to concentrate on her questions. I felt like I had a headache even though I didn’t. ‘Oh I don’t know, it seems impossible to think that we could be let loose on the world already. I don’t have the energy for that. I wouldn’t mind crawling back into kinder for a while.’

‘Go to uni?’

‘Well, eventually, maybe. It’s so boring the way everyone does that and it’s just taken for granted that we will. I’d just as rather do something else. Start a business or travel or something.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Fi said.

‘You can’t travel if you’re looking after Gavin,’ Lee said.

Fi continued. ‘Do you want to live in a city at some stage?’

‘Actually I wouldn’t mind it for a while.’ For the first time the idea did appeal. I felt a kind of stirring of energy within me. Bright lights.

‘We can share a house and share the kids,’ Lee said. ‘Stratton’s not a bad place actually.’

I just laughed but Fi said, ‘You know that’s really quite a good idea.’

‘Wait a minute, have you two been cooking something up?’ I asked, instantly suspicious.

‘No, no,’ Fi said. ‘I never thought of it before. But it could be quite a good solution for both of you. Instant babysitters.’

‘What about Jeremy?’ Homer asked.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t know about Jeremy,’ I answered.

Fi’s mum and Bronte’s dad reappeared, demanding coffee, in the nicest possible way. Major Gisborne asked me if I wanted to talk to them away from the others but I knocked that back so we all sat around the kitchen table.

‘Three things,’ he said. ‘One is that you’ll need a court order to get the boy back. There’s no other way of doing it in the short term, although if the court rejects us we can try enlisting public opinion and putting pressure on them that way.’

‘Which you are better placed than most to do, Ellie,’ Mrs Maxwell said. ‘But it’s messy and it might not work. It could even backfire on you. But if that’s all you’re left with, once the legal options are exhausted, well, it is there as a possibility.’

‘That’s what I thought she should do,’ Homer said.

‘OK, next thing,’ Major Gisborne continued. ‘You’ll need an SC, or QC as they used to be called. It’s no good mucking around with anything less. It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, but if I can get the fellow I want, he might knock a bit off the bill. He owes me a few favours. Even so, you should allow upwards of thirty thousand dollars for this.’

Homer whistled, but the Major ignored him. ‘Now, Bronte tells me you should be pretty well off when you sell this place, but let me know now if that kind of money is going to be a problem.’

I swallowed hard. ‘No, I can sell some of my cattle. I’m going to have to sell them anyway. Only, what’s an SC?’

‘State Counsel. They’re the top guns, barristers who are used for the big cases, the famous cases. And the important cases, like yours. Now, finally, we think you should go for broke and demand the right to be appointed as the boy’s legal guardian.’

That shocked me. I couldn’t see how someone my age would ever get that kind of right from a court. But Mrs Maxwell explained why they thought it might work.

‘For one thing Ellie, if you gave birth yourself, say at sixteen, you would undoubtedly be the mother of the child and no court would take away from you the right to nurture the child and protect him and look after him and make decisions on his behalf. Now these circumstances are different because of Gavin’s age, but we’re both inclined to the view that since the war a number of guardianship orders have been made that would never have been countenanced before the war. For example, you may have seen in the papers, about two months ago, a mentally disabled woman was given the guardianship of a teenager because they were already in that kind of relationship and had been since the war, and it was working well for them. There were various conditions imposed by the court, as to supervision and monitoring and so forth, and if you get an order like this you can expect the same. But we think there is a chance of getting a court to look at your situation with a fresher eye than you could have expected a couple of years ago. That’s the best-case scenario for you and Gavin.’

‘Now the SC might well disagree with us,’ Major Gisborne cut in. ‘But we’ll soon find that out. If you want us to take this path, if you give us permission to go ahead, I’ll ring and see if he’s available. I assume you’ll want us to apply for an urgent hearing.’

‘Yeah, this afternoon would be nice,’ I said.

MR NEIL BLAINE, sorry Neil Blaine SC, was quite something. A week later I was in Stratton waiting in a dowdy dark room to meet him. I was shivering with the tension of the past seven days and with the fear of what was to come. If I lost Gavin I would put that down as having lost everything. Of course I still had my friends, and good friends they were, but family are as different from your friends as your dog is from your cat. Families are cats I think.

I’d visited St Bede’s three times, and rung them every day, but of course Gavin couldn’t talk to me on the phone. When I went there he seemed OK, but it was impossible to have a normal time: we were like two polite cousins at a family reunion. Too many other people, staff and kids, hanging around.

Anyway, the pile of tired-looking magazines on Mr Blaine’s table, every one with a doll-like actress on the front and articles inside about how some boring person had switched partners or lost weight or had a fight with another equally boring person, didn’t have a lot of appeal for me. I sat looking at the covers wondering how I could ever have read that crap. Funny, because I am such a magazine person when I’m in the mood.

Then I was taken into a room so thin that some of the anorexic models in the magazines would have felt right at home, and there was this little guy who looked like a jockey bowing and ushering me to a chair. It was hard not to laugh. Here I was expecting a distinguished man with white hair and a bow tie maybe, speaking in slow pompous tones, and instead I get a garden gnome in a T-shirt and shorts.

‘Take a seat, Ms Linton, please,’ he said. ‘I do apologise for my appearance but I wasn’t expecting to be working today, until my very good friend Major Gisborne rang me.’

‘No problem,’ I mumbled. ‘And call me Ellie, please.’

He didn’t answer – he certainly didn’t invite me to call him Neil – but instead sat at his desk for at least five minutes reading a pile of papers from a folder that had been tied with a pink ribbon. It was sweet, all the piles of paper tied with pink ribbons, along one entire side of the room. I sat there with the tension in my tummy feeling like a hard lump of metal that I’d eaten a week ago and was now trying to come out. I kept wondering what was so special about this man that I should give him a huge amount of money. How could anyone be worth so much?

Suddenly he put down the papers and turned to me. ‘What on earth makes you think you and Gavin should live out there on your own without someone responsible to look after you?’

His voice shocked me. It had changed and now it filled the narrow room and made flakes of plaster fall off the ceiling. Well, anyway, it was a big voice. He wasn’t shouting, not at all, quite the opposite, but from somewhere deep inside this little person came such a huge voice. I stared at him then stammered, ‘We are responsible. I am responsible.’ I hadn’t known what to think of him before but now he was quite scary.

‘Oh everybody thinks they’re responsible, everyone tells you how responsible they are, then they go off, kill their best friend in a high-speed car accident, and blow .15 into the bag.’

‘Well that’s not me,’ I said angrily. ‘I’m running a big property with three hundred and fifty head of cattle. I haven’t got time to be drinking and joy-riding.’

‘You’re a teenager and you don’t drink alcohol?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, thinking I’d better not admit to any under-age drinking if I wanted to get Gavin back.

‘Come now, Ellie, are you telling me that no taste of alcohol has ever passed your lips?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that exactly, just that I don’t drink at all now, and I never did drink much. Not as much as some people out our way.’

‘So you have had alcoholic drinks?’

‘Well, some, of course ages ago, but not now.’

I was floundering. Already he had caught me out in an embarrassing lie. I wondered whose side he was on. He seemed so hostile. I decided I didn’t like him much at all.

‘
Alcoholic drinks
,’ he wrote down on a little yellow notepad, saying the words out loud as he wrote them.

‘That’s not fair!’ I said. ‘ I don’t drink. Occasionally before the war and during the war I did some stupid stuff, but that was ages ago. I don’t drink!’

He completely ignored me. ‘How many days off school have you treated yourself and Gavin to this year?’

‘We don’t treat ourselves to days off school. When we can’t get there we can’t get there. And yes, it does happen quite a lot, more than I’d like, but I try my butt off to get us both there. It’s a bit difficult though when the ute won’t start or some cattle have got out and are on the road or the bank manager is coming to have a look at how we’re spending her money.’

‘How many days off school have you and Gavin had this year?’

I realised with further embarrassment the point he was making, that I hadn’t answered the question. I slumped a little and said, ‘Probably about fifteen to twenty each.’

‘The school records show twenty-three for you and twenty-one for Gavin.’

I felt like saying, ‘Well if you knew, why did you ask?’ but if he wanted to beat up on people, that was his problem so I didn’t say anything.

‘Have you ever hit Gavin?’

‘What?’ I sat up again. Now he was going to accuse me of child abuse? Neil Blaine SC was the one inflicting bruises on me!

‘It’s a simple question. Have you ever hit Gavin?’

‘Has he ever hit me, you mean. He beats me up half the time. We play wrestle and stuff like that, just mucking around.’

‘Have you hit him in anger and frustration, when you can’t get him to do what you want, when you’re running late for school and he won’t switch off the television, when he hasn’t fed the dog like you asked him to and he still won’t move although you’ve told him a dozen times, when he’s whingeing and grizzling and picking at you for hour after hour?’

‘God,’ I thought, ‘he’s been talking to Gavin,’ and with even more embarrassment, and thinking that I was going to lose my custody battle before I’d even started, I said, ‘Yes.’

‘How many times?’

‘Well I’m not like a child basher! I just occasionally lose my temper and shake him or smack him on the back of the head or something, but not hard. Or I pull him out of a chair or I push him out the door to make him go and do his jobs.’

‘How many times?’

Oohhh this man was so frustrating.

‘About once in a blue moon. Every couple of months.’

‘About once a week would be more like it, wouldn’t it?’

‘No way!’ Who had he been talking to? Surely Gavin wouldn’t say something like that? ‘Once a month maybe. Not even that. He’s a really annoying kid sometimes, well he can be, but we have a good relationship. It’s true there are times I feel like giving him a good smack, plenty of times, but I know it’d be the worst thing if I did. He’s been smacked around a lot. I want to teach him that there are other ways of solving problems.’

And so it went on. I’d rather have faced a dozen enemy soldiers armed with AK47s than be interviewed by Neil Blaine SC. In the next ten minutes he got me to admit that we sometimes watched M15+ rated DVDs, although I’ve never let Gavin watch an R one; that in the last few months I’d been getting takeaways quite often, bringing them home and reheating them for dinner; that the house was nowhere near as neat and tidy as it had been when my mother was alive, and that Marmie practically lived in Gavin’s bedroom.

By the end of the interview I wouldn’t have entrusted a headless cockroach to my care, let alone an emotionally deprived child.

Then, with no warning, he jumped up and went over to the door, opened it and waited for me to leave. I thought he was giving me the flick, I’d failed the test and he was throwing me out of his office. Or chambers, they call them. But instead, as I got up hesitantly and walked to him, feeling quite ill, he stuck out his hand and said, ‘We’ll get him back from those Rottweilers, Ellie. They get a firm grip but once we start kicking them in the balls they’ll change their minds fast enough.’

I gaped at him. In a flash I saw what he’d been doing. He’d put me through the kind of experience I could expect in court. He was on my side after all. I said in a feeble voice, ‘So you’re going to take the case?’

‘Of course. We’ve got a fight on our hands, but we’re in with a chance. We need to teach the court to be imaginative, and sometimes that’s not as impossible as you might think. I’ll be in touch soon about information I’ll need from you. Goodbye for now, Ellie. You might like to talk to my clerk on the way out about making the first payment. I don’t come cheap you know. Hooroo.’

And I found myself out in the corridor, shellshocked, as the door closed quietly behind me.