‘Oh shoot, I knew this… October?’
‘Yeah, October 31.’
‘Oh that’s Halloween. That’s easy to remember. Hope it’s not symbolic of anything.’
‘Parents’ names?’
‘Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring. Dunnno what she’s a doctor of, though.’
‘Yeah, I can’t believe they left that out of the information. I don’t think it’s medicine or they would have said.’
‘Yeah, or she’d be working as a doctor.’
‘OK, now what’s your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Oh, something funny. I mean complicated. Tennyson-Barnes?’
‘Barnes-Tennyson. What’s your unit number?’
‘One twenty-seven. Block D, UN Staff Residence.’
‘Parents’ place of business?’
‘You mean where do they go to work?’
‘Of course that’s what I mean. Come on, Ellie, wake up.’
‘I am awake. It’s just that you’re so grumpy.’ I moved sideways so that my head was near his shoulder, and then snuggled into him. I needed some warmth. The separation from Gavin had been too long. ‘Come on, tell me, where do my mummy and daddy work?’
‘Have a guess.’
‘The Department of the Inferior?’
‘Very funny. Except it won’t be if you give that answer once you’re over there. Now what’s the telephone number for this Department of the Interior?’
‘444 something. 1725?’
‘Good. What’s your home number?’
‘I just want to get to Havelock as fast as I can and do something. I feel so helpless. During the war we made things happen. We didn’t have to sit around like this waiting for other people to organise stuff for us.’
‘You’re going to have to live with it, I’m afraid. Sounds like it’ll be at least twenty-four hours before they can organise to get you there. That gives you twenty-four hours to know this stuff so thoroughly that you don’t even have to think when someone asks you the questions. Now, what’s your phone number?’
‘Oh God, I can never remember numbers. It starts with 455 I think. I can’t remember the other four. They must have shorter numbers than ours.’
‘1215. The year of the Magna Carta.’
‘Magna what what what?’
‘I knew you’d say that. Do you have any siblings?’
‘Yes, a twenty-four-year-old sister named Laura. But she’s overseas too, doing a postgraduate degree in law at Princeton. She’s a real pain. She always wants the remote control, and she’s so fussy about food and she tries to boss me around when Mum and Dad are out.’
‘Where’d you get all that from?’
‘I just made it up.’
‘OK, but you can’t say “too”.’
‘Huh?’
‘You said, “She’s overseas too.” You can’t say that. You’re not overseas. You’re in Havelock.’
‘Oh yeah, so I am. Or at least I wish I was. God, you’ve got so much lint in your belly button.’
‘Do you drive your teachers completely and utterly crazy?’
‘Most of the time.’
‘Do you pull up their T-shirts and molest their belly buttons?’
‘Oh yuck, what a gross thought. You’re disgusting. Ask me another question.’
‘No, you don’t know it well enough. Go away and study for a couple more hours and then I’ll test you again. I’m going to Homer’s to use a safe phone. I’ve gotta make some calls.’
‘Oh yes? Anyone I should be jealous of?’
‘No. It’s to try to get you to Havelock faster. Come on, learn that stuff. There won’t be any fifty-fifty or dial a friend if a soldier stops you on the streets of Havelock and starts asking questions about your identity.’
Off he went.
He seemed so detached. He wasn’t acting like a boyfriend. Although he’d just made a joke, it did cross my mind that he didn’t have much sense of humour. On the other hand he was right to insist that this stuff was serious and I had to know it inside out and backwards. Of course I’d already figured that out for myself, but it was so hard to concentrate. It was interesting that he said he would try to get me to Havelock faster. It made me wonder again if he was the Scarlet Pimple.
CHAPTER 9
Stepping out onto the streets of Havelock was not the scariest thing I’d ever done, but it made it through the home and away series and into the finals. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d ever done either, but it was definitely a contender for the flag. The only other country I’d been in was New Zealand, and sure, it’s another country, but everything there looks so similar. The people certainly do, and they speak more or less the same language, even if they have trouble with a few vowels and the boys have their teeth soldered together.
Going to Havelock was going to the City of Weird for a few reasons, one being that I was in another country, even though I still thought of it as my country, and even though the landscape was the same. The cityscape was changing, had changed quite a lot, but the landscape was still those smoky blue mountains and green-grey gum leaves and strong hot sky that was the background to my life.
At least I’d had that experience a few times now, from crossing the border, so I was getting more used to it.
The cityscape did come as a shock. I’d never been to Havelock before, so I’m making assumptions, but I don’t think any of our cities or towns had looked like this before the war. Of course the capital cities had their ethnic areas, where you could almost pretend you were in another country, and I loved going there, enjoying the food and the shops and the energy. But when a whole city is different, when you know that block after block, suburb after suburb, will be like this, then you’re in a different headspace. You know that you’re the alien, you’re the outsider, you’re the ethnic. You’re locked into a lot of things in life, but with most of them, like your personality and your feelings and your coolness or lack of coolness, you kid yourself that you can change them at any moment. Even your weight. But you can’t kid yourself about your skin colour or the way your eyes and nose and mouth are shaped and arranged. You’re locked into your body for life. There was some white journalist in America, back in the fifties or whenever, who took chemicals to make his skin go black for a while, and then wrote a book about being a dark- skinned person in a white society. It sold squillions but someone told me the guy died young from the toxic effects of the chemicals. It did strike me as interesting that white people had to have a white guy explain to them what it was like to be black. They couldn’t hear it from a black person.
When I was in Year 9 I got the gig to go to Stratton and sit on a stage with half-a-dozen students from other schools at a conference for school librarians. We were like a panel, and the audience could ask us questions about what we liked in school libraries and what we didn’t like, and what made us go into the library and what drove us away, and our opinions about reading, all that sort of stuff. Well, it went like a bushfire. In fact the session ran twenty minutes overtime and most of the teachers missed their afternoon tea. But all the time, while I was on the stage taking my turn at answering questions, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Why don’t they ask the kids at their own schools? They could have got the answers to these questions a million years ago. How come they have to put us on a stage before they take us seriously or listen to us?’
People get locked into roles and attitudes. On a normal day at school we are just the sheep, teenagers who get herded around in flocks. But once they put us on that stage we became experts. We were authorities on teenagers and reading. People listened. They wrote down what we said. They applauded as we left.
You’re assigned roles all the time. Baby, girl, rural, child, daughter of the Lintons, teenager, war hero, person
