life. All we’d needed was that extra second. We had Homer out of there just as he was starting to stir and give a grunt that sounded very like the steer. Come to think of it, he might have become a steer if he had been in there any longer.
I suppose this is another ‘amazing Gavin’ story. When we got Homer out, Seamus handed me my torch and in its strong beam I saw Gavin coming calmly towards us. I suddenly got suspicious. I put the torch on my face and waved at him and asked, ‘Where did you go?’
He shrugged and pointed and said casually, ‘Round the back.’
‘What did you do?’
I realised how pleased he was looking, and excited, behind his calm and cool face.
He shrugged again. ‘Made him go forwards.’
‘You did?’
‘He was going to step on Homer. Squish. Squash. Yuk.’ Gavin was beaming away like he was the face on Luna Park.
‘So how did you make him go forwards?’
‘Bit him.’
‘You what?’
‘Bit him. Like a dog.’
Homer was sitting up, holding his head. Seamus looked at me. ‘That’s the fastest thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘You should rent him out.’ He asked Gavin: Where exactly did you bite him?’
‘Where the dogs do.’ Gavin demonstrated on the back of his own leg. ‘Not too hard,’ he added. ‘I didn’t want him to go psycho.’
‘Give us your torch for a sec, Ellie,’ Seamus said. He took it over to the rear of the beast and, making sure he didn’t cop a quick kick to the head, bent down and had a look just above the hoof. ‘You can see the teeth marks,’ he said to me. He shook his head. ‘How’d you miss the kick?’ he asked Gavin.
‘Uh?’ Gavin looked at me for a translation. I demonstrated the steer’s kick.
‘Oh,’ said Gavin and mimed dropping flat.
‘My God,’ said Seamus. ‘He is a cattle dog. We’d better test your beast for rabies.’
It was fairly amazing. We hadn’t had any working dogs since the war, but Gavin had seen them at the saleyards in town and at some of the neighbours’ places, like the Youngs’, where Dad had taken him. Cos of course that’s exactly what they do: bite just above the hoof, drop flat so they don’t get kicked, then bite again.
Homer was standing, looking embarrassed. ‘Can’t believe I did that,’ he said. ‘Never done that before.’
‘It can make you queasy,’ Seamus said. ‘Staring at it for so long. Happens quite often. You’d be surprised,’
We went back to the steer to finish the job.
I didn’t give Homer a hard time about fainting, although it was extremely tempting, and I hope he’s grateful to me for the rest of his life for being so restrained. He did look at me very hard on the bus, when I started telling Shannon and Sam about the stampede. And I did take him close to the edge, when I told them about Seamus the vet, and stitching up the steers, ‘… and Homer was holding the torch.’ Homer shifted a little closer and glared at me. ‘And I tell you what, there were some pretty chunky wounds. It’d knock some people flat just to look at them. There was a faint…’ I paused for a sec, just to annoy Homer some more. ‘A faint chance that one of them had internal bleeding, but he seems to be mending OK.’
The weekend slipped away. I had to take Mr Young on a tour of the cattle and I had to repair a lot of fences, but the priority for all that stuff was in the reverse order to the way I’ve written it, because I didn’t want Mr Young to see our fences when they were in anything other than great condition. And much as I was desperate for sleep I had to take care of the customer first, and Mr Young was our only customer. He coped pretty well with his cattle casualties. Some farmers seem to have an amazing sense of fairness, and he was like that.
Somehow we got to school on Monday. These days it felt like a TV show that you try to watch while you’re cooking dinner. You’re in and out of the room and then you’re concentrating on the chicken stock and then you’re in the pantry or asking Gavin to give you a hand with the onions, and suddenly the credits are rolling and you’ve missed two-thirds of the program. I was dropping into school and finding that they were talking about integration of polynomials in Maths and someone had changed the rules about who could use the computer room and Belinda Norris was now with Andy Farrar, not Ranald…
It was the same on that Monday. I was lucky in a way to run straight into Jess, who always knew everything and was one of those natural-born-leader people who everyone turns to when they’re confused. ‘Have you seen Ms Maxwell?’ she asked. ‘She’s looking for you. And Mr Addams said can you play soccer Thursday?’
‘Soccer? God! Me! Any more messages?’ But I smiled as I said it. I decided this was one of those days when I liked Jess.
In her best Telstra voice she said, ‘You have two new messages. Message received — yesterday — at two — thirty — four p.m…’
‘OK, I’m pressing the hash button. That does something, doesn’t it?’
‘I can see you haven’t had a mobile for a long time. Actually there was only one other message. Jeremy Finley said to say hi.’
‘Oh really?’
She’d thrown me with that one. I knew she liked Jeremy, but so did I. He was a nice-looking guy with a great personality — you know, too good to be true, but he actually seemed fair dinkum. For better or worse he was the son of General Finley, whom I’d had a lot to do with during the war. Since Steve, my love life had been all to do with Lee and Homer, mainly Lee, with Homer running interference. Jeremy popping up in Stratton, and spending a good bit of time around Wirrawee, made a nice complication. I didn’t know if he was interested in me or Jess or anyone else, but I knew I tingled when I saw him. I also wanted to cross-examine Jess on exactly what Jeremy had said, the actual words, the look on his face, the tone of his voice, the way his hands had moved. Stuff like that means a lot to a girl. There’s a big difference between saying, ‘Tell Ellie hi,’ and ‘Make sure you give Ellie a special hello from me.’ What if he’d said: ‘My life is stale bread and cold tea until I see Ellie again’ or ‘Jess, if you die at the gates of the school, make sure that with your last breath you tell Ellie I’m thinking of her’?
But what if it had been: ‘Say hello to Homer and Shannon and Sam and Bronte and Alex and Eleanor and that other girl, what’s her name’?
It was cruel getting this message second-hand and confusing getting it from someone who had her own feelings for him. But better than not getting it at all. I tried to figure out how I could get more info without letting Jess know I was interested.
‘Oh really? Jeremy? So has he been around?’ I tried to keep my voice casual. The trouble is that I had the feeling Jess was almost impossible to fool. No matter how much I tried to sound cool, that girl had special antennae. If she were a teacher you wouldn’t even bother with the ‘Yeah, miss, I’ve done it, it’s just that the guinea pig crapped on it.’ You wouldn’t waste your time.
Still, I wasn’t going to give in easily. It was a challenge to try.
‘Around? God yes! Didn’t you know?’
Owhh. Did she have to make this so hard? All I could do was grit my teeth and plough a straight furrow.
‘Know what?’
‘You haven’t heard the big news?’
‘So are you saying Jeremy’s got some reason to be around Wirrawee more often?’
‘God yeah.’
‘Jess, I’d love to stand here all day hearing about Jeremy Finley’s movements, but why don’t you just tell me. In fifty words or less. Seeing I do have a life.’
‘Well, he and his mum are moving here.’
‘Serious?’ No good pretending now. She had me.
‘Ellie, you really like him, don’t you?’
‘What? God no, not like that.’ I hoped I was doing OK with that ‘Jeremy Who?’ voice, but I doubted it. The strange thing was that I didn’t get any vibe from Jess that she had a personal interest any more. Maybe she’d moved on.
‘Well, I believe you but I believed Mrs Barlow when she said the first convicts came out here on Qantas. Anyway, his mum’s got a contract at the military base, putting in a new computer system that she’s designed with
