‘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.
CHAPTER 15
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
