who looks after Gavin. White. Or black. Or Asian or Hispanic or Polynesian. When it comes to being assigned roles in life, skin colour’s a biggie. And for me, I was officially white. It’s not even an accurate name, just like black isn’t accurate when you think about it. I mean there are major colour differences between Australian Aborigines and Sudanese and African-Americans and West Indians. Me, on the tanned bits, which are my face, and my arms, because I wear short-sleeved shirts most of the time, I’m a sort of brown-pink, and on the rest, a very light rose pink which does become almost white when you look at it. But then all the veins give a blue-grey background and there’s such a network of them that they make quite a difference too.
I read this book called Hawaii by James Michener. It’s a really seriously very very very long book. More than eleven hundred pages. Now that’s long. Obviously I liked it or I wouldn’t have bothered. Anyway, towards the end he wrote about this idea called ‘The Golden Man’. He wrote this ages ago, so I thought he was being quite prophetic. Hawaii was like a melting pot, and he said a new type of human was emerging there, who was not golden in terms of skin colour, by blending black and white and Asian and Polynesian and whatever else. He said it was entirely to do with the mind, the way you think, so you can be a golden man, or a golden woman, or a golden kid for that matter, even though you’re racially Portuguese or Chinese or Caucasian or Hawaiian. Michener said that the secret is that these people understood the flow of movements around them. They were open to the world, I suppose. And that gave them the ability to be aware of the future, but most importantly it gave them the ability to stand at the place where all the rivers meet. It wasn’t James Michener’s idea really, it came from some university professors after World War II, not that it matters.
So my ambition in life is to be a golden woman. And looking around my friends, I can see that some of them, in fact most of them, are heading that way already. Maybe that’s why they are my friends. I mean who wouldn’t be attracted to people like Bronte and Jeremy and Lee and Fi? Not that Jeremy or Lee are in the running to become golden women. Golden men, definitely. Homer? Yes, and I’m not just saying that because he might read this one day. Even though he’s so sexist and blunt and anti-greenie and all the rest of it, he is very aware of the world. And deep down he’s not prejudiced or anti-conservation. He knows those things are right, it’s just that he would prefer it if they weren’t. They don’t suit his personal convenience. He would love a world where he was serviced by beautiful slave girls all day long, who fed him and massaged him and pampered him — actually, I wouldn’t mind a world like that myself, with slave boys preferably — but he knows it ain’t possible. Homer would love to flatten all the paddocks on their place and just sit on the tractor and go up and down without having to do fancy manoeuvres around clumps of trees. He’d love to leave the TV on all day and take twenty minute showers and drive a Porsche. But he’s smart enough to know that it’d be plain wrong if he did live like that. Occasionally people — new teachers for example — made the mistake of thinking he was just another redneck and they treated him accordingly. He always played right up to it as soon as they started patronising him. Sometimes it took them a long time to realise, and they were always so shocked and off balance when they did.
Anyway, there I was, in the great metropolis of Havelock, feeling shocked and off balance myself, that for the first time in my life I looked completely out of place. Nothing I could do, short of taking chemicals or getting extreme plastic surgery, would make my skin and facial features the same as everybody else’s. My appearance didn’t matter when we were doing raids across the border, because that was hit-and-run stuff, trying to damage them then get out as fast as possible. But now I was part of their society, trying to fit in, and that made all the difference.
The funny thing was that when I looked in the mirror I seemed an alien to myself. I’d had the makeover. Not like in the magazines, to make me into a glamorous supermodel. They would have needed a lot more time to do that. Like, years. But Bronte had suggested I change my appearance as much as I could, to reduce the chances of being recognised. I had to do it quickly so they could take photos of me with my ‘new’ face, to go in the identity papers.
Liberation had done something else as well as Paulaise me. Before I left, Jeremy had pulled a wad of money out of his computer bag and chucked it on the kitchen table. It was like we were doing a drug deal or in a gangster movie or something.
‘What’s this?’ I picked it up. Unlike our currency it was all the same colour. Someone had neatly sorted it into piles of ten notes, with the tenth one folded around the others. There were ten piles. ‘Is this worth anything or is it just Monopoly money?’
‘It’s about two thousand bucks in our money. It’s very popular over there.’
‘Wow. Can I get some DVDs?’
‘I think that if you don’t spend it, they’d like it back. It’s for bribes, basically. And anything else you might need money for.’
I looked at it more closely and realised it was American. Ten dollar bills. ‘Jeremy, are all Liberation groups seriously well organised? Or is it just the one that you guys belong to? Cos they seem to think of everything. And the way they can just cough up a thousand bucks American…’
‘Put it down to leadership,’ Jeremy said.
‘The Scarlet Pimple?’
‘You got it.’ Jeremy’s eyes were suddenly alight. ‘You’ve got no idea, Ellie. The Scarlet Pimple’s amazing. Talk about smart. And like you say, organised. We’re the best Liberation group for hundreds of miles. Everyone knows it, even the Army. But it’s all because of one person.’
I was suddenly jealous of the guy who could inspire that kind of admiration in Jeremy. Jeremy wasn’t easy to impress. And it seemed like either he wasn’t the Scarlet Pimple or else he had a very big head. Enormous.
‘Maybe I should join after this is over,’ I said. ‘I would like to work with someone like that.’
‘Well, you know they’d have you in a moment,’ Jeremy said. ‘You’d be the star signing. The hot new recruit.’
Lee had rushed back to Stratton because Pang had suspected appendicitis, but Bronte turned up a few minutes later. Seemed like she was always there to see me off. Good old Bronte. She was no action-woman but she was calm and reliable. I wondered how she’d handle real pressure. Jess and Jeremy had both come through OK in their first raids over the border, so she probably would too, especially as she was mentally stronger than Jess, I thought. But I couldn’t picture Bronte doing stuff like that. It wasn’t her scene. She was like the CWA ladies who make tea and sandwiches at bushfires, the steady workers who make the foundations strong.
She was going to camp at my place in case there were more phone calls from the kidnappers. It was the kind of thing Bronte was made for. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather leave at home to do a job like that.
I’d taken about six hours to get to Havelock. Liberation were confident that I could get away with being on the city streets, but they were equally confident that I’d have no hope if I were seen anywhere else. So they had to get me there without anyone spotting me. Even the first part wasn’t as easy as it used to be. I rode with Homer to the border, but now there was a big wire fence across it, and signs saying No Access in English and more signs in the distance, not in English but somehow they still managed to say No Access.
Despite their famous efficiency Liberation hadn’t given us any warning about a fence. We looked at each other. ‘Now what?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got pliers. I guess we can cut through.’
‘What if it’s wired up to ten thousand volts?’
‘I was just thinking the same thing.’
He pulled out his Leatherman and unfolded the pliers and passed it to me. ‘There you go.’
‘No, no, really, I’m only a girl. This needs a big strong man.’
‘I might wreck my nails. I think you should do it.’
‘Rock paper scissors?’
‘OK.’
We both went rock, then I went scissors and he went rock again. Damn. I took the Leatherman and went over to the fence. While I got some leverage on the pliers he did the stalk of grass thing, testing for an electric current. The grass didn’t cry, didn’t scream. It made sense. If it was alive, I would have expected warning signs. What did worry me was that it might be hooked up to some electronic gadget that would warn the authorities we were trying to break through.
Cutting was hard work, because they weren’t proper pliers of course, and I soon had red, sore hands from the pressure I had to apply. Homer took over after a while. Between us we made a hole big enough for the bike. Lucky we’d brought the two-wheeler, not the fourwheeler, or we’d still be there.
We got through and went on our way, much more cautious now. If they’d built a fence, what else might they
