some guy in Stratton. She’s a pretty smart cookie I think.’
‘My dad always said that New Zealand women were the strongest women in the world.’
‘Well, that’s fine except she’s Australian. But she is strong. She told me that she wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of Jeremy making it to Vet at uni. I think she meant people who might distract him with invitations to wild parties. Or even long phone calls. She’s kind of fierce with him.’
I privately thought that Jeremy was the person most likely to be organising Homer and Lee and I didn’t know who else into the Scarlet Pimples. Or Liberation, which was their official name, if you can have an official name for an unofficial organisation. I didn’t see how that could help Jeremy with his school work. To be honest, I didn’t see how any of my friends were going to pass anything much. I didn’t know many people who were settling into regular school life, because we were still too stirred up and busy and crazy after the war.
I couldn’t keep up with the social life of school let alone school work, but even though my uni ambitions were sinking slowly over the horizon, I didn’t want to drop out. School was still my normal place, the place where I could pretend that I was just Ellie again. Rather than drop out, it was the place where I could drop in, and the place where life was closest to normal, as though there never had been a war. Even reading the noticeboard was reassuring. ‘Year 9 and 10 social on Friday night, come as a character from a James Bond movie’, ‘Mrs Savvas wants to see students attending Twelfth Night at the staff room at one o’clock’, ‘If you want to try out for a game of lacrosse against Stratton High School see Daniel Ciao NOW|’ ‘LOST: one recorder, left in B3 on Monday afternoon, come on guys, please look out for it, I need it and I can’t afford to buy another one.’ A lot of boring stuff about careers and uni and the school’s policies on sexism and racism and bullying and the rights of students and trees and aluminium cans and retired lollipop ladies.
We never learnt anything much in school, it was just that by the time you stayed there enough years you’d somehow picked up quite a lot of information. The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the square of the other two sides, Madrid is the capital of Spain, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. At best I suppose you learnt useful information like how to treat snakebite and how to use PowerPoint. At worst you wasted a lot of time memo-rising the first twenty elements in the periodic table, the definition of personification, and the economic effects of the Gold Rush. It was like school was taking us on a road from ignorance to knowledge but there was another road from ignorance to somewhere else that school didn’t take into account. What was that road called? The one from ignorance to wisdom, I suppose. The girl at the Wirrawee market who told me about Taoism knew about it but school didn’t. If school had bothered with that road, if they’d even taken us to the start of it and shown us where it went, if they’d so much as lent us a map, I would say that school might have been worthwhile. I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time, but I think we could have picked up that info about snakebite and PowerPoint much faster and more efficiently somewhere else. So really what we were left with was school as a social club, and sometimes I thought the adults were happy with that: they secretly saw it as a place where they could park kids till we grew up and were useful to them. Giant childcare centres.
I liked the new-look Wirrawee High School though. Not everyone did. It was a lot more crowded, and the organisation was a joke, and it didn’t feel like our own place any more. We had to share it with so many people. The corridors were crowded and it was hard to get time alone with your old friends. The difference was that before the war it had been boring and now it had three times the action. The new kids brought a new energy. I mean, lacrosse against Stratton High School? I didn’t even know what lacrosse was but I was sure we wouldn’t have been playing games of lacrosse in the old-style Wirrawee. School was noisier, it was messier, but it had more life. Now, with Jeremy Finley, it could get more interesting yet.
CHAPTER 4
School taught me personification but the war taught me suspicion. If it hadn’t, the death of my parents would have done the job. I don’t think I’m paranoid yet but I could easily end up there. I don’t know why I wouldn’t trust voices in my head. They’d have to be as reliable as some of the voices I hear from outside my head. Take Homer for instance. I know you’d only take Homer if you were desperate, but if you were, and you did take him, would you listen to him? Or believe anything he tells you? So when Homer and Lee and Jess all suddenly turn up at my place, and Homer tells me it’s coincidence, I’m like, yeah, right, and people in France speak French, that’s another amazing coincidence.
I didn’t know Lee was coming until I got home from school, because the only warning he gave me was a message on the answering machine, and it seemed like no sooner had I played the message than he was there. Jess had given him a lift. And in the back seat was Lee’s little sister, Pang, because she wanted to see me again and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Hhhmm. ‘Wait a sec, it’s my birthday and this is a surprise party, right?’ I asked them. ‘Anyone else coming?’
But as soon as I got Homer alone I hissed at him, ‘This is about Liberation, isn’t it?’
‘Nah, just a fluke.’
Since I’d knocked back the invitation to join the group I’d been left out of the information circuit. Disconnected from the bush telegraph.
‘I don’t want you guys doing stuff without my knowing about it. Don’t go running off over the border again. It’s too dangerous.’
‘Pang wanted to stay with you for a few days, that’s why Lee’s here.’
‘So will Lee be staying here too, with her? Or am I meant to look after her while you go off on another crazy raid? Am I the babysitter now?’
‘No, of course not, he would have left her in town with the others, but she’s mad keen to hang out with you.’
‘Well, you might have thought about Gavin before you planned all this. You’re getting him all revved up.’
I had to talk in a funny way, twisting up my face, so Gavin couldn’t lip-read. He hovered around anxiously. Normally he’d have attached himself to Lee or Homer, as he was a big fan of both of them. I was pretty sure that Pang’s arrival made him feel insecure.
I heard a loud rap-rap-rap-rap on the kitchen door and broke off the conversation with Homer to answer it. I nearly fell over to see Jeremy Finley. ‘OK, so it is a meeting of Liberation,’ I said to him straight away.
‘Could just be a get-together of a few buddies,’ Homer said. He’d followed me into the kitchen.
‘Thanks for organising it at my place without even telling me. Good one, guys.’ I let Jeremy in anyway. I didn’t have much choice.
‘It could be something so urgent that we didn’t have time to do it any other way,’ Jeremy said, looking straight at me. I was sure he was the Scarlet Pimple.
‘Well, Lee must have known hours ago,’ I said. ‘You don’t just blow in here from the city ten minutes after getting the phone call.’
‘It wasn’t urgent last night, when I rang Lee,’ Jeremy said. ‘The rating changed about an hour ago. Lee was on his way already, but we were going to do it differently. By the time he got here we realised we needed a closer place to meet. I couldn’t ring you because we can’t talk about this stuff on the phone without using codes.’
‘And Pang did want to come and stay with you,’ Lee said with a small quick smile at me. ‘So did I.’
I turned back to Jeremy. ‘You said “closer”. Closer to what? The border?’
‘Of course.’
‘Oh great.’ I felt quite sick. ‘So are you going to tell me what it’s all about?’
There was a moment of indecision. I knew the Scarlet Pimple was one of them — well I thought so anyway — and I’d been so convinced that it was Jeremy. But now Jeremy was acting like it wasn’t his decision. Jess was the one who, after a pause, looked around at the group and said, ‘Sure.’
It was like the rest of the group weren’t convinced though. Then Jeremy clinched it by saying, ‘Yeah, good idea. It’s insurance for us.’
‘Are you all going?’ I asked. I looked around the room at them. Homer, leaning against the doorframe, solid and reliable, leaving the planning to the others. Lee, watching through narrow eyes, scanning the room, assessing the situation. Jess, strong and sure but nervous too, I thought: probably the first time for her to go into this kind of
