Incurable

CHAPTER 3

‘Wake up, dear,’ the nurse said.

No, just kidding. I don’t know what it was that had run so hard through the blood of this mob, whether it was rage or fear or a desire for freedom or a force that has no word. I suspect it was the last one. But whatever it was, the charge up to the ridge from where Gavin and Homer had turned them was enough to slow them just a little and calm them just a little more. And my yelling and zigzagging and flashing lights turned them again. They ran along the western boundary of the paddock and soon the stragglers were standing with sides heaving and heads down, ignoring us three; the leaders lost their drive then, with no followers, and they fizzled out and wandered off into the scrub, snatching at grass as they went. They almost looked embarrassed.

We were puffing harder than the cattle, but we still had a lot of work ahead. I divided the paddock into three and we split up and went looking for injured beasts. The rain kept going, not spectacularly, quite light most of the time, but it was soaking and cold and got you down a bit.

While the other two were still looking I nicked off home, mainly because I needed the rifle, but I grabbed a loaf of bread and a jar of apricot jam and three cans of Coke as well. I could hear Marmie yelping with excitement and anxiety and loneliness from her pen — whenever she heard one of the bikes she went off big-time — but I had to be hard-hearted and ignore her. This was not a dog party. I went back to the paddock and met up with the other two and we had a picnic, trying to keep the bread dry under my Drizabone as I spread slice after slice and handed them around.

It was three-twenty a.m. The boys ate every slice I gave them. Gavin was shivering and Homer was too cold and tired to speak. I said to Gavin, ‘Have you done your homework yet?’ but it took him four goes to get what I meant and then he just turned away as if I were demented. It wasn’t much of a joke to begin with and by the fourth time around it had gone beyond lameness into permanent disability.

Gavin took me to a couple of steers who were injured. One was up, but with a leg hanging uselessly. I thought he was a chance but the other one had a leg fracture so severe that twenty centimetres of bone were sticking out, and I had to shoot him. I shot another one, a small beast with a funny face, all red and white squares. I’d noticed him before. But there was nothing funny about him now. He’d fallen off a bank, pushed by the rush of cattle I guess, and he’d impaled himself on a sharp old gum stump. Too many of his insides had become outsides for him to have any chance.

Homer had found a couple of others but they looked like they might get through with a bit of stitching and TLC. It would be a close thing though. Shock and blood loss and cold wet weather were three reasons they mightn’t make it. Altogether we had four who looked like they’d qualify for disabled parking stickers.

I left Homer and Gavin to bring in the ones that could be moved while I went home to ring the vet. I had the after-hours number for Mr Keech but it rang out, so I rang the surgery, which was annoying because then I had to sit through all the ‘If your cat has a headache press 3’ stuff. Finally I got an emergency number, which was different from Mr Keech’s so I tried that. It rang and rang. At last a bloke answered. He said, ‘Hello,’ but he didn’t sound like any of the vets I knew. I thought, ‘Oh no! I’ve rung some poor bloke at four in the morning and it’s a wrong number.’

I said, ‘Is that the vet?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ so we were making progress. I said, ‘It’s Ellie Linton here, out at Mirrimbah. I’ve got four cattle who need looking at. The mob took off in the storm and quite a few got injured.’

He said, ‘Oh fuck.’

I struggled to keep my temper, then lost the struggle. ‘So far you’ve said four words,’ I said, sounding as cold as the weather. ‘ “Hello”, “yes”, and “oh fuck”. Are you coming out here or aren’t you?’

He didn’t sound the slightest bit bothered. ‘Oh yes. Where’d you say you were from?’

‘Mirrimbah. It’s on the…’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know it.’

The phone made that little durrup noise as he hung up.

As we waited for him we did a bit of cleaning up of the cattle that Homer and Gavin had brought lumbering in. We didn’t bother to take them up to the new yards and put them in the press, just used the old wooden yard behind the house. They were in shock, shivering and shuffling around. It was like some of the boys at the B amp;S’s, when they were supposedly dancing but they just moved their feet backwards and forwards, left and right, right and left, forwards and backwards. The cattle did their clumsy dance, grunting and rolling their eyes. We did a bit of cattle whispering, calming them down and shoving lucerne into their gobs. The lucerne probably helped more than the whispering. Three of them had big wounds, which would have sent a human straight to the floor, but even with their guts sticking out the cattle wanted to waltz.

They looked how I felt. My head seemed detached from my body. The jawbone wasn’t connected to the neck bone. I wanted to put my head in a cupboard for a few days until it stopped throbbing.

Gavin and Homer were talking about the stampede and where they’d been and what they’d done and how smart and heroic they were. I didn’t have the energy to listen. I think they probably had been heroic and smart but they were so good at telling each other about it that they didn’t need me.

The vet arrived in a Falcon Ute so splattered with mud that you couldn’t see if it had number plates or not. I had to admit he’d got here in record time. And then he was so nice that all the angry speeches I’d been planning went out of my head. He was a young bloke named Seamus, and he went to his work so neatly and quickly that I watched in fascination. We were all so tired — including Seamus — that I don’t know how we stayed awake. That heavy feeling behind my eyelids, the ache in my head… I did everything in slightly slow motion, and only the presence of my friends made it OK.

Homer stood holding the torch while I held the head of the beast who was being stitched, and Gavin was a general gofer, sitting on the step leading into the food shed when I didn’t have a job for him. I thought he would fall asleep but each time I looked his eyes were still open. Most of the time I watched Seamus at work. He had good, strong, patient hands and he worked steadily, pulling the edges of the wound together, stitching away, swabbing occasionally. Homer watched too, and the light of the big Dolphin torch gave us both a good view of the bleeding flesh, the torn edges, the white muscle and severed veins.

Then it happened. Homer said to me quietly, ‘Can you hold the torch for a sec, El?’

‘Sure.’

As I took it he added, ‘I’m not feeling all that well.’

With those words he slid straight to the ground and lay there unconscious under the big steer.

I yelped, which wasn’t all that helpful. The beast was penned well enough but we hadn’t allowed for a human coming at him from that direction. He shook his head and bellowed and started to step backwards. Homer was about to have a five hundred kilo-plus beast step on him. With cattle and horses the weight is all resting on those four thin legs and hard hooves. A steamroller running over you would have a totally different effect, but I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I dropped the torch, which meant no-one could see anything, although I was aware of the light rolling over and over and pointing away towards the stars. Seamus and I dived simultaneously under the steer, cracked our heads and somehow got a grip on Homer and started dragging him out. For one terrible moment I realised we were pulling him in different directions, like a Christmas cracker. Then we seemed to be going the same way.

All of this would have been too late, with Homer cored like an apple, if not for one thing which is that the steer, having taken two steps back, and about to take a third step which would disembowel my best friend, suddenly shook his head, gave a low grunt, kicked a leg, and inexplicably took a step forwards. It saved Homer’s life. All we’d needed was that extra second. We had Homer out of there just as he was starting to stir and give a grunt that sounded very like the steer. Come to think of it, he might have become a steer if he had been in there any longer.

I suppose this is another ‘amazing Gavin’ story. When we got Homer out, Seamus handed me my torch and in its strong beam I saw Gavin coming calmly towards us. I suddenly got suspicious. I put the torch on my face and waved at him and asked, ‘Where did you go?’

He shrugged and pointed and said casually, ‘Round the back.’

‘What did you do?’

I realised how pleased he was looking, and excited, behind his calm and cool face.

He shrugged again. ‘Made him go forwards.’

‘You did?’

‘He was going to step on Homer. Squish. Squash. Yuk.’ Gavin was beaming away like he was the face on Luna Park.

‘So how did you make him go forwards?’

‘Bit him.’

‘You what?’

‘Bit him. Like a dog.’

Homer was sitting up, holding his head. Seamus looked at me. ‘That’s the fastest thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘You should rent him out.’ He asked Gavin: Where exactly did you bite him?’

‘Where the dogs do.’ Gavin demonstrated on the back of his own leg. ‘Not too hard,’ he added. ‘I didn’t want him to go psycho.’

‘Give us your torch for a sec, Ellie,’ Seamus said. He took it over to the rear of the beast and, making sure he didn’t cop a quick kick to the head, bent down and had a look just above the hoof. ‘You can see the teeth marks,’ he said to me. He shook his head. ‘How’d you miss the kick?’ he asked Gavin.

‘Uh?’ Gavin looked at me for a translation. I demonstrated the steer’s kick.

‘Oh,’ said Gavin and mimed dropping flat.

‘My God,’ said Seamus. ‘He is a cattle dog. We’d better test your beast for rabies.’

It was fairly amazing. We hadn’t had any working dogs since the war, but Gavin had seen them at the saleyards in town and at some of the neighbours’ places, like the Youngs’, where Dad had taken him. Cos of course that’s exactly what they do: bite just above the hoof, drop flat so they don’t get kicked, then bite again.

Homer was standing, looking embarrassed. ‘Can’t believe I did that,’ he said. ‘Never done that before.’

‘It can make you queasy,’ Seamus said. ‘Staring at it for so long. Happens quite often. You’d be surprised,’

We went back to the steer to finish the job.

I didn’t give Homer a hard time about fainting, although it was extremely tempting, and I hope he’s grateful to me for the rest of his life for being so restrained. He did look at me very hard on the bus, when I started telling Shannon and Sam about the stampede. And I did take him close to the edge, when I told them about Seamus the vet, and stitching up the steers, ‘… and Homer was holding the torch.’ Homer shifted a little closer and glared at me. ‘And I tell you what, there were some pretty chunky wounds. It’d knock some people flat just to look at them. There was a faint…’ I paused for a sec, just to annoy Homer some more. ‘A faint chance that one of them had internal bleeding, but he seems to be mending OK.’

The weekend slipped away. I had to take Mr Young on a tour of the cattle and I had to repair a lot of fences, but the priority for all that stuff was in the reverse order to the way I’ve written it, because I didn’t want Mr Young to see our fences when they were in anything other than great condition. And much as I was desperate for sleep I had to take care of the customer first, and Mr Young was our only customer. He coped pretty well with his cattle casualties. Some farmers seem to have an amazing sense of fairness, and he was like that.

Somehow we got to school on Monday. These days it felt like a TV show that you try to watch while you’re cooking dinner. You’re in and out of the room and then you’re concentrating on the chicken stock and then you’re in the pantry or asking Gavin to give you a hand with the onions, and suddenly the credits are rolling and you’ve missed two-thirds of the program. I was dropping into school and finding that they were talking about integration of polynomials in Maths and someone had changed the rules about who could use the computer room and Belinda Norris was now with Andy Farrar, not Ranald…

It was the same on that Monday. I was lucky in a way to run straight into Jess, who always knew everything and was one of those natural-born-leader people who everyone turns to when they’re confused. ‘Have you seen Ms Maxwell?’ she asked. ‘She’s looking for you. And Mr Addams said can you play soccer Thursday?’

‘Soccer? God! Me! Any more messages?’ But I smiled as I said it. I decided this was one of those days when I liked Jess.

In her best Telstra voice she said, ‘You have two new messages. Message received — yesterday — at two — thirty — four p.m…’

‘OK, I’m pressing the hash button. That does something, doesn’t it?’

‘I can see you haven’t had a mobile for a long time. Actually there was only one other message. Jeremy Finley said to say hi.’

‘Oh really?’

She’d thrown me with that one. I knew she liked Jeremy, but so did I. He was a nice-looking guy with a great personality — you know, too good to be true, but he actually seemed fair dinkum. For better or worse he was the son of General Finley, whom I’d had a lot to do with during the war. Since Steve, my love life had been all to do with Lee and Homer, mainly Lee, with Homer running interference. Jeremy popping up in Stratton, and spending a good bit of time around Wirrawee, made a nice complication. I didn’t know if he was interested in me or Jess or anyone else, but I knew I tingled when I saw him. I also wanted to cross-examine Jess on exactly what Jeremy had said, the actual words, the look on his face, the tone of his voice, the way his hands had moved. Stuff like that means a lot to a girl. There’s a big difference between saying, ‘Tell Ellie hi,’ and ‘Make sure you give Ellie a special hello from me.’ What if he’d said: ‘My life is stale bread and cold tea until I see Ellie again’ or ‘Jess, if you die at the gates of the school, make sure that with your last breath you tell Ellie I’m thinking of her’?

But what if it had been: ‘Say hello to Homer and Shannon and Sam and Bronte and Alex and Eleanor and that other girl, what’s her name’?

It was cruel getting this message second-hand and confusing getting it from someone who had her own feelings for him. But better than not getting it at all. I tried to figure out how I could get more info without letting Jess know I was interested.

‘Oh really? Jeremy? So has he been around?’ I tried to keep my voice casual. The trouble is that I had the feeling Jess was almost impossible to fool. No matter how much I tried to sound cool, that girl had special antennae. If she were a teacher you wouldn’t even bother with the ‘Yeah, miss, I’ve done it, it’s just that the guinea pig crapped on it.’ You wouldn’t waste your time.

Still, I wasn’t going to give in easily. It was a challenge to try.

‘Around? God yes! Didn’t you know?’

Owhh. Did she have to make this so hard? All I could do was grit my teeth and plough a straight furrow.

‘Know what?’

‘You haven’t heard the big news?’

‘So are you saying Jeremy’s got some reason to be around Wirrawee more often?’

‘God yeah.’

‘Jess, I’d love to stand here all day hearing about Jeremy Finley’s movements, but why don’t you just tell me. In fifty words or less. Seeing I do have a life.’

‘Well, he and his mum are moving here.’

‘Serious?’ No good pretending now. She had me.

‘Ellie, you really like him, don’t you?’

‘What? God no, not like that.’ I hoped I was doing OK with that ‘Jeremy Who?’ voice, but I doubted it. The strange thing was that I didn’t get any vibe from Jess that she had a personal interest any more. Maybe she’d moved on.

‘Well, I believe you but I believed Mrs Barlow when she said the first convicts came out here on Qantas. Anyway, his mum’s got a contract at the military base, putting in a new computer system that she’s designed with some guy in Stratton. She’s a pretty smart cookie I think.’

‘My dad always said that New Zealand women were the strongest women in the world.’

‘Well, that’s fine except she’s Australian. But she is strong. She told me that she wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of Jeremy making it to Vet at uni. I think she meant people who might distract him with invitations to wild parties. Or even long phone calls. She’s kind of fierce with him.’

I privately thought that Jeremy was the person most likely to be organising Homer and Lee and I didn’t know who else into the Scarlet Pimples. Or Liberation, which was their official name, if you can have an official name for an unofficial organisation. I didn’t see how that could help Jeremy with his school work. To be honest, I didn’t see how any of my friends were going to pass anything much. I didn’t know many people who were settling into regular school life, because we were still too stirred up and busy and crazy after the war.

I couldn’t keep up with the social life of school let alone school work, but even though my uni ambitions were sinking slowly over the horizon, I didn’t want to drop out. School was still my normal place, the place where I could pretend that I was just Ellie again. Rather than drop out, it was the place where I could drop in, and the place where life was closest to normal, as though there never had been a war. Even reading the noticeboard was reassuring. ‘Year 9 and 10 social on Friday night, come as a character from a James Bond movie’, ‘Mrs Savvas wants to see students attending Twelfth Night at the staff room at one o’clock’, ‘If you want to try out for a game of lacrosse against Stratton High School see Daniel Ciao NOW|’ ‘LOST: one recorder, left in B3 on Monday afternoon, come on guys, please look out for it, I need it and I can’t afford to buy another one.’ A lot of boring stuff about careers and uni and the school’s policies on sexism and racism and bullying and the rights of students and trees and aluminium cans and retired lollipop ladies.

We never learnt anything much in school, it was just that by the time you stayed there enough years you’d somehow picked up quite a lot of information. The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle equals the sum of the square of the other two sides, Madrid is the capital of Spain, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. At best I suppose you learnt useful information like how to treat snakebite and how to use PowerPoint. At worst you wasted a lot of time memo-rising the first twenty elements in the periodic table, the definition of personification, and the economic effects of the Gold Rush. It was like school was taking us on a road from ignorance to knowledge but there was another road from ignorance to somewhere else that school didn’t take into account. What was that road called? The one from ignorance to wisdom, I suppose. The girl at the Wirrawee market who told me about Taoism knew about it but school didn’t. If school had bothered with that road, if they’d even taken us to the start of it and shown us where it went, if they’d so much as lent us a map, I would say that school might have been worthwhile. I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time, but I think we could have picked up that info about snakebite and PowerPoint much faster and more efficiently somewhere else. So really what we were left with was school as a social club, and sometimes I thought the adults were happy with that: they secretly saw it as a place where they could park kids till we grew up and were useful to them. Giant childcare centres.

I liked the new-look Wirrawee High School though. Not everyone did. It was a lot more crowded, and the organisation was a joke, and it didn’t feel like our own place any more. We had to share it with so many people. The corridors were crowded and it was hard to get time alone with your old friends. The difference was that before the war it had been boring and now it had three times the action. The new kids brought a new energy. I mean, lacrosse against Stratton High School? I didn’t even know what lacrosse was but I was sure we wouldn’t have been playing games of lacrosse in the old-style Wirrawee. School was noisier, it was messier, but it had more life. Now, with Jeremy Finley, it could get more interesting yet.