“The car’s in a really bad shape,” she said.
I shook my head. “Never mind the car. It’s just a piece of metal. You can use mine before yours is repaired, anyway. You’re ice cold, let’s go inside. I’ll make you some tea.”
I led her inside the house and she was as easy to guide inside as a limp rag doll. I put the kettle on and brought her a fluffy blanket from the laundry room. She let me tuck her in as if she was a child.
She looked towards Ruby’s room. “Where’s she?”
“I put her to bed a moment ago, she’s fast asleep,” I replied and after a short hesitation added: “She was asking about you.”
She missed her Mum. She had been glancing at the door today nearly as much as I had. But I wasn’t going to say that to my daughter. She still looked ill at ease and I wasn’t going to add to that by making her feel guilty. Connie deserved some space to deal with this distress.
I got two big mugs of tea and sat next to her on the sofa. She settled into the pillows and stretched her legs so that her feet were nearly touching my thighs. The main thing was she’d made it home.
Me–a mother hen! I never would have thought…
Neither of us said anything, even though Connie must have been bottling up a lot and I had lots of questions; but the silence between us wasn’t uncomfortable. We were sipping from our mugs and after a while she reached for the remote. She was never a fan of watching TV, so I guessed she was probably looking for something to occupy her thoughts. I understood that only too well.
She switched through a few channels before she got to a news report. They were talking about a large bushfire in New South Wales, followed by a surfer attacked by a shark, resulting in the man’s leg being amputated, and then showed photos of a car accident in Melbourne which turned fatal for all eight people involved.
I was surprised Connie didn’t turn the TV off. The news was usually mostly negative which she normally summed up with “one big depression” before pressing a button to silence this or that news reporter. But not today.
I didn’t protest and continued to watch world events. Since she started working at the police, Connie had shared various things with me and it didn’t seem so unbelievable anymore that the information released to the public was only about ten percent of the full story.
“Two days ago a video made by an activist group called The Collective appeared on myvideo.com, and since then it has reached more than seventeen million views. The reaction is intense,” the fervent news reporter was saying. “Speculations are rising, whether The Collective plans a protest or an attack against the government. This is now being investigated by police forces. We advise that the video is not suitable for younger audiences.”
The reporter and her studio disappeared and were replaced by a video made up of brief clips edited together in quick succession, narrated by an older female voice. It was over in two minutes and I was sure that it was just a shorter, edited version of the original video. If I was shocked by what got into the evening news, what could be in the rest of the video?
Connie must have been thinking on a similar note, she quickly turned off the TV, where the reporter had now moved on to another topic. We looked at each other silently, my daughter then put down her tea and reached for her laptop. She found the website and the video. She sat closer to me so we could both see the screen.
“Imagine there is cancer growing inside your body,” a voice of an older woman told us urgently over a microscopic picture of two cell samples, one clearly healthy, the other infected with a disease. “It demands space, multiplies, and kills. It causes your organs to fail, one after the other. You want to get rid of it. You want to live.”
A patient on a hospital bed, a team of surgeons working on him. An operating theatre, drips, screens.
“There isn’t a place for it in your body, in your world. Only one can survive, never both. Cancer must be eradicated.”
A tin bowl with a blob covered with blood, removed from the body. Perhaps a tumour?
“And that’s how it is with everything that causes harm, isn’t useful, or stands in the way.”
Mold on a loaf of bread. Weeds in a garden bed. A rat under a wardrobe.
“From the beginning of time, everyone and everything on the planet has been striving for order and prosperity.”
A wide shot of lush green nature, forests, a lake, mountains.
A girl drinking a glass of water. A boy gathering blueberries.
“But what if a great imbalance develops? What if some take more than they give?”
Men with a saw on the edge of a forest, next to them a pile of cut down trees.
A butcher with a knife at a pig’s neck.
“What if someone leaves behind more than they should?”
An underwater shot of a coral reef covered with plastic of various sizes.
A fish stuck in a plastic shopping bag.
A beach, barely visible under a layer of rubbish.
“Every plant, every animal helps the ecosystem and the healthy life of the planet… except mankind.”
A factory and its high smoking chimneys releasing dark grey smoke towards the sky.
A person in a white lab coat injecting a balding rabbit, its skin scarred by previous attempts.
“Only mankind lays claim on that which doesn’t belong to it.”
An emaciated lioness in a tiny cage.
A hippo walking around on a small footpath in an enclosure that wouldn’t have been large enough for a Chihuahua.
A tiger obediently walking on its back legs on a circus stage.
A fox fur coat.
“It oppresses other species and drives them
