Circle of fight

CHAPTER 23

And suddenly they came out of the woodwork. I don’t actually know what that expression means. What come out of the woodwork? Cockroaches maybe. Mice? Are these rhetorical questions, like I just learned about on one of my rare visits to school? Was that a rhetorical question? Is it a paradox when you ask rhetorically if a rhetorical question is a rhetorical question? I think I’d better stop this before I get a headache.

Well, I’ll come back to the woodwork in a minute. So much happened during the next couple of days, the next month, that I felt like I was in a tumble-dryer most of the time and the heat was on high. It was hard to keep control of my own life, impossible at times. The first and worst and least expected thing was the speed of the Department of Social Responsibility. Everyone always says that government departments move slowly, and this one had for many many months, but now, suddenly, they were as fast as a car accident. Two days later a grey Commodore arrived when I was in the machinery shed, out gets Ms Randall as I come out of the building and from the back seat two lanky men who look a bit like the Blues Brothers and are dressed like them too and I suddenly realise what’s happening and I move swiftly for the house thinking, ‘Oh God, Gavin, don’t appear at this moment, see them before they see you, go bush, go to Homer’s, go to Hell, go anywhere’, but Gavin’s timing has never been good and he’s excellent at turning up in the very place I especially don’t want him to be, so I shouldn’t be surprised when he chooses that exact moment to walk out of the house eating an apple and looking like a kid who hasn’t got a care in the world.

And so he got kidnapped for the second time, and in a way I think this was the worse of the two, because it wasn’t done by people who were identifiably ‘baddies’. You couldn’t fight them. Oh we did of course. Gavin struggled and screamed and begged me for help and although my first reaction was to jump at them they held me off pretty easily, and I realised from the babble coming out of Ms Randall’s mouth that she was right, and it would us more harm than good to fight them in this way.

It was the first time that I hadn’t been able to help him.

So I convinced Gavin to calm down. To cooperate with the kidnappers, to allow himself to be led away to a new type of captivity. They let him pack some stuff and they took him away. White and trembling as he was, looking like a statue on a grave at the cemetery, they took him away.

I could barely take in the enormity of what had happened, and although Madeline left an envelope with a whole lot of paper in it and although she wrote some more notes on the outside of the envelope for me and although I tried time and again to read all this after the Commodore had driven away, I couldn’t comprehend it. I sat in the yard, about a metre from where the car had parked, a metre from where I’d said goodbye to him, and that was as far as I could go. It was like they’d succeeded in doing what soldiers and guns and high explosive and prison and murder and beatings had never done, and that was to defeat me.

But that’s what friends are for, I guess, in the words of the old song. It’s such a corny phrase that I’m embarrassed to write it, but I gotta record the facts here, as always, I hope, and the fact is that my friends came out of the woodwork. First one of them, a big ugly Greek guy who lives next door, then another one, a Thai-Vietnamese guy from Stratton, then Bronte the Scarlet Pimple, then Jess, then — and my heart leapt to see her — Fi. Jeremy was still away sulking but when Homer asked where he was — because to Homer it was incomprehensible that when your girlfriend’s in trouble you don’t immediately arrive with everything you can think of, from soup to guns to a Blackberry — Bronte said he was ill and when Homer said, ‘What with?’ she said ‘Depression or something’, which scared me because I didn’t know if I was the cause. I suspected that at some stage I’d have to do something about it. But I knew I couldn’t do anything right then and there, I had an even more urgent problem to work on.

These friends were followed by the adults. Homer’s parents of course — well they were my guardians after all — followed by Fi’s mother and, to my surprise, Bronte’s father. To my greater surprise Rosie’s foster parents drove out from Wirrawee with Rosie. They’d already been out to the farm three or four times and Rosie loved it. But now they were on a serious mission. They couldn’t stay long but I guess they were keen to let me know that they were on our side.

After they’d gone, and the Yannoses too, Fi’s mother and Bronte’s father disappeared into Dad’s old office for a legal conference. The rest of us stayed in the kitchen and talked tactics, but I had the feeling that the two lawyers were the most important people in the house and part of my mind was away with them, wondering what they were talking about, what they’d come up with. It’d need to be good.

Meanwhile, once we got over ideas like using Liberation to storm the offices of the Department and take Madeleine hostage, or plucking Gavin out of their arms in a daring 3 am raid, we got into the serious stuff. I told them that I was going to sell the property. I’d told Mr Young the day before, because even though I knew deep down he was mostly agisting his cattle at my place because he felt he owed me a favour, at the same time he had three hundred head of stock and he’d have to find a new home for them. Depending on who bought my place of course. I’d thought it might be Homer’s parents; he said they wanted it but didn’t think they could afford it. They already carried a lot of debt, as did we all I guess. I know I did.

Then there were the Sandersons, the people who’d been given a part of the place after the war, when all the big properties were broken up by the government. They were making a good go of their farm, unlike the other three families who’d got half the place between them, until we leased it back. But I’d be happy enough for the Sandersons to buy it all. They were nice people, kind, and hard-working, and it’d be a great break for them, if they could raise the money.

But the real issue was what I would do, where I would live, where we would live, me and Gavin hopefully, if we somehow managed to prise him out of the grip of the Department. The obvious thing was to buy a place in Wirrawee, so we could keep going to the same schools and hang out with the same people, etc etc. And that was OK, and I thought I’d be happy enough with that. But deep down inside me something hankered for a bit more. Something different. Something special. A new stage, a new era.

Fi put me through a funny little cross-examination. She must have been learning from her mother.

‘Now Ellie, do you want to keep farming? Cos you could buy a little place, just a few acres maybe.’

‘No, no, I think I actually want a break from it. It does tie you down. If I’m going to leave it I might as well take a complete break.’

‘Do you want to finish this year at school?’

‘Well I guess, except I think I’ve almost left it too late. I’m so far behind and I’ve missed so much…’

‘Claim special circumstances,’ Lee said. ‘I told you that before. I don’t know why you’re so against it.’

‘God I would,’ said Jess. ‘I’d do it in thirty seconds. Just watch me.’

‘Well, maybe I should… I guess I have been a bit stubborn about that.’

‘Ellie? Stubborn? Who said that?’ Homer jumped up, looking around him as if my worst enemy had just come in. ‘Not Ellie, surely! Never!’

Fi ignored him. ‘What do you want to do next year?’

It was hard to concentrate on her questions. I felt like I had a headache even though I didn’t. ‘Oh I don’t know, it seems impossible to think that we could be let loose on the world already. I don’t have the energy for that. I wouldn’t mind crawling back into kinder for a while.’

‘Go to uni?’

‘Well, eventually, maybe. It’s so boring the way everyone does that and it’s just taken for granted that we will. I’d just as rather do something else. Start a business or travel or something.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Fi said.

‘You can’t travel if you’re looking after Gavin,’ Lee said.

Fi continued. ‘Do you want to live in a city at some stage?’

‘Actually I wouldn’t mind it for a while.’ For the first time the idea did appeal. I felt a kind of stirring of energy within me. Bright lights.

‘We can share a house and share the kids,’ Lee said. ‘Stratton’s not a bad place actually.’

I just laughed but Fi said, ‘You know that’s really quite a good idea.’

‘Wait a minute, have you two been cooking something up?’ I asked, instantly suspicious.

‘No, no,’ Fi said. ‘I never thought of it before. But it could be quite a good solution for both of you. Instant babysitters.’

‘What about Jeremy?’ Homer asked.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t know about Jeremy,’ I answered.

Fi’s mum and Bronte’s dad reappeared, demanding coffee, in the nicest possible way. Major Gisborne asked me if I wanted to talk to them away from the others but I knocked that back so we all sat around the kitchen table.

‘Three things,’ he said. ‘One is that you’ll need a court order to get the boy back. There’s no other way of doing it in the short term, although if the court rejects us we can try enlisting public opinion and putting pressure on them that way.’

‘Which you are better placed than most to do, Ellie,’ Mrs Maxwell said. ‘But it’s messy and it might not work. It could even backfire on you. But if that’s all you’re left with, once the legal options are exhausted, well, it is there as a possibility.’

‘That’s what I thought she should do,’ Homer said.

‘OK, next thing,’ Major Gisborne continued. ‘You’ll need an SC, or QC as they used to be called. It’s no good mucking around with anything less. It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, but if I can get the fellow I want, he might knock a bit off the bill. He owes me a few favours. Even so, you should allow upwards of thirty thousand dollars for this.’

Homer whistled, but the Major ignored him. ‘Now, Bronte tells me you should be pretty well off when you sell this place, but let me know now if that kind of money is going to be a problem.’

I swallowed hard. ‘No, I can sell some of my cattle. I’m going to have to sell them anyway. Only, what’s an SC?’

‘State Counsel. They’re the top guns, barristers who are used for the big cases, the famous cases. And the important cases, like yours. Now, finally, we think you should go for broke and demand the right to be appointed as the boy’s legal guardian.’

That shocked me. I couldn’t see how someone my age would ever get that kind of right from a court. But Mrs Maxwell explained why they thought it might work.

‘For one thing Ellie, if you gave birth yourself, say at sixteen, you would undoubtedly be the mother of the child and no court would take away from you the right to nurture the child and protect him and look after him and make decisions on his behalf. Now these circumstances are different because of Gavin’s age, but we’re both inclined to the view that since the war a number of guardianship orders have been made that would never have been countenanced before the war. For example, you may have seen in the papers, about two months ago, a mentally disabled woman was given the guardianship of a teenager because they were already in that kind of relationship and had been since the war, and it was working well for them. There were various conditions imposed by the court, as to supervision and monitoring and so forth, and if you get an order like this you can expect the same. But we think there is a chance of getting a court to look at your situation with a fresher eye than you could have expected a couple of years ago. That’s the best-case scenario for you and Gavin.’

‘Now the SC might well disagree with us,’ Major Gisborne cut in. ‘But we’ll soon find that out. If you want us to take this path, if you give us permission to go ahead, I’ll ring and see if he’s available. I assume you’ll want us to apply for an urgent hearing.’

‘Yeah, this afternoon would be nice,’ I said.