I went down to the lagoon and noticed again the care with which my father had rehabilitated it. Fences and tree guards to protect it, nesting boxes along the banks, the way he’d bulldozed out the whole northern end to make it bigger and more viable. He was a Hall of Fame father. I wondered what he’d think about the things I’d done, the things I was doing, and the thing I was about to do.
I wandered past the tip and wondered if I should have thrown out that armchair. Maybe it would have been worth restoring. And the table from the shearing shed. And all that wire. And the big birdcage, sure it was a mess, but we might need it the next time we got an injured bird, especially if it was a raptor. I did this all the time at the tip. It was the big disadvantage of having your own rubbish dump. You always had the choice of getting something back again. When it was gone forever, out of your life, when you’d kissed it goodbye, when you’d finally achieved closure — well, you knew it was really just over the hill and you could always go and retrieve it if you changed your mind. Gavin was a shocker. Whenever I chucked anything of his out he always, eventually, marched down here and collected it.
This was the spot where Dad had killed the brown snake. Lucky. It had been a bit too close for comfort that time. Brown snakes can be so aggressive, and their poison is deadly. In the world’s top ten, according to Jeremy. We saw heaps of snakes but we only killed them if they were close to the house or the sheds. But we’d lost a few cattle to snakes, and a few sheep. Not to mention the dogs — I couldn’t even remember the name now of that working dog who’d died right in front of me, swelling up like a tyre when air’s being pumped into it. It had been horrible to see, and I had felt so helpless.
Past the machinery shed, where the swallows nested every year. They had created a housing estate now, with their nests and mud and droppings. They were more used to us than they had been at the start. These days they still took off if we got too close, of course, with that sudden silent dash past your ears that was always such a shock, but they tolerated us pretty well. I never got tired of seeing their babies in the nest, then eventually seeing them perched on protuberances nearby, little fluff balls still not big enough to fly.
A farm is just an accumulation of stories really. Same with people. That’s where Dad shot the fox, with the duck still in her mouth. Talk about incriminating evidence. Down to the shearing shed, where we kept the poddy lambs, when we used to have sheep. As a little kid I fed them anything. Watermelon, bread, cake, apricots from the tree, biscuits. They ate it all and seemed to thrive on it. Through Coopers, remembering the musters. Coopers is a difficult paddock, because it doesn’t have a particular shape to it, so there’s no obvious path for the sheep to take. You have to just about do a rollcall, issue a personal invitation to each sheep, collect each one individually. Getting the lambs over the creek really did involve a one-on-one encounter. The best way was simply to throw them, but first you’d have to catch them. One would come scrambling past, all fired up and frantic because of the dogs, and you’d dive and either miss, in which case you’d get another graze or bruise or scratch, or you’d connect with a leg if you were lucky; then you’d drag the lamb in and chuck her over the creek and turn and look for another one.
Up through the paddocks. ‘A farmer’s footsteps are the best fertiliser,’ Dad used to say, which just means that the more you walk around your place the better everything seems to grow and flourish. I was pleased to see that things generally were looking all right. Mr Young’s cattle seemed halfway decent and mine were doing OK. I’d have to do a proper check later, and see if there’d been any casualties while I was locked in an attic in Havelock, but I noticed now that the place had a decent well-looked-after feeling. That made me proud. I’d inherited quite a legacy, and I knew there were ghosts looking over my shoulder. Friendly ghosts, but if I’d been lazy or destructive they would have let me know about it pretty damn quick, and they mightn’t be too friendly then.
CHAPTER 19
‘So how on earth did you get involved in Liberation?’ I asked the Scarlet Pimple as we sat on the grass overlooking the oval, shivering as we ate our lunch. It was one of those grey-blue days, more grey than blue, and the wind wore away our clothes till we might as well have been wearing nothing. I don’t know why we were out there really. To get away from the boys, I suppose. Not to mention the teachers.
She laughed. ‘It wasn’t any deliberate plan. I realised my parents were doing stuff that was clandestine, my father mostly…’
‘What’s clandestine?’ I asked, annoyed that anyone knew a word I didn’t, especially when she was a year below me.
‘Oh, you know. Secret, sneaky, undercover. So naturally I listened and asked questions, started snooping around. It was very exciting to think that my father was some sort of spy. Quite a lot of it got done from home. They’d go for walks in the park next door and sometimes I’d be allowed to go along. The good thing about my parents is that they’ve always trusted me. They know I don’t repeat stuff. And of course as I got to know how this stuff was working, I noticed that most of the people in Liberation weren’t much older than me. The war changed everyone’s ages I think. So after a while I became pretty good friends with some of them, and they talked to me completely openly, because they assumed I knew everything. Then I got asked to do little jobs, like take a message to someone, or pick up a parcel, or meet someone at a coffee shop and look after them until a member of Liberation turned up.
‘And then, drum roll, it all went horribly wrong. My parents were out and I got a phone call at the house from Oliver, this young guy who was in charge of one of the units. They’re never never meant to ring the house, so I knew he must be desperate. I told him to ring back in ten minutes and I raced down to the public telephone at the corner and got the number from that and when he rang again I told him to call that number in five minutes. So I raced back to the public phone and took the call, and when he explained what had gone wrong I gave him some suggestions and then spent the night working the phone, organising a whole lot of people and stuff to help him. My parents were out of mobile range, but by the time they got home, which was 1 am, I was still down at the corner using all the coins I’d found in the house, but everything was under control. I’d fluked a few pretty good outcomes with the suggestions I’d made to Oliver, so I was suddenly flavour of the month. Oliver wanted me as his second in charge and when he moved to Stratton I found myself running the group. It was only a little group, mind you, but then it started growing a lot. My father finds that quite disconcerting. I think he gave in to Oliver and let me do it because he thought he could control the whole thing, but it hasn’t worked out that way. We’ve become one of the biggest units around, and because we’ve been successful at a lot of the stuff we’ve taken on, we keep getting asked to do more. Most of it doesn’t come through my father at all now. It’s exciting but it’s also terrifying.’
She didn’t look at all terrified. I decided it would take a volcanic eruption to scare Bronte, and even then it would have to be in her back yard.
‘Your father’s playing a dangerous game, isn’t he?’ I asked. I was still bothered by this idea of people running a secret war, which could have big consequences for us all, even though we hadn’t voted for it and had no say in it. Like I said, I’d never thought about this before. I don’t think it bothered Bronte though. I guess when it’s your parents you follow them blindly, to some extent anyway. I guess that’s how those Mafia families, where there’s, like, six generations of crims, get to be the way they are.
‘Both of them are.’ She frowned. ‘It’ll all blow up sooner or later and there’ll be a scandal and they’ll have to take early retirement from the Army. But my dad’s prepared for that. It’s already happened to a couple of his friends. He likes the Prime Minister’s attitude though. You never sack anyone, or admit you could possibly be guilty of anything, even if you’ve bashed a baby or hijacked a plane, because by this time next week there’ll be a bushfire, or an old lady’ll win a million bucks in the lottery, or a pig’ll give birth to a twoheaded piglet or something, and it’ll all be forgotten.’
‘Yeah, he’s got that right,’ I couldn’t help but agree.
‘But you know, Ellie,’ she said, looking at me hard over her chicken and avocado sandwich, ‘I don’t think you should join Liberation. The opposite. I think you should take a break from all this stuff. It’s not good for your health. In wartime, pilots are only allowed a certain number of sorties, and then they have to take a rest. I think they do twenty before they get sent for a holiday. And that’s for guys who don’t even see the enemy, most of them anyway. You’ve been doing stuff on the ground, close up, face to face. You’ve seen too much blood.’
I nodded. My eyes filled with tears. That was happening all too easily these days. She patted me then hugged me and we sat in silence for a while. In the distance the bell rang, like it always does sooner or later. She squeezed me and we got up and collected our bits and pieces and headed off, me to English her to PE.
Bronte was an amazing person, not only because she was strong and clever, but because she understood
