Incurable

C HAPTER 12

I don’t know whether this is anything to do with love but over the next few days I made a fool of myself a zillion times, except that luckily most of the time no-one was there to notice. Maybe it was just total exhaustion, but I managed to spray the griller with eucalyptus instead of cooking oil, then I left nearly a dozen eggs on top of the stove when I was doing a roast, which didn’t do much for their freshness. The eucalyptus spray had been standing around in the kitchen for as long as I could remember. We used it for pretty much everything, like spraying around the room after I’d made a sardine sandwich (Mum hated the smell of sardines), spraying on burns, spraying on beds to get rid of dust mites, spraying on Gavin when he was being a nuisance.

Lee and Pang left and I missed Pang’s bright friendly chatter but I didn’t miss Lee much. I was scared of the way he looked at me, those dark brooding eyes, sombre and impenetrable. I didn’t know what he expected of me any more, but whatever it was, I was fairly certain that I couldn’t provide it.

I didn’t hear from Homer but I assumed he was chained to the bed and banned from leaving the house again until 2050. Then he rang and said he’d had to tell his parents a bit about Liberation, and they weren’t happy, and Liberation wasn’t happy, but the Scarlet Pimple was trying to get him a new motorbike and he’d asked for a four-wheeler for me.

Jess rang twice and Bronte twice a day. Bronte and I talked a lot. I told her about Jeremy but needless to say I didn’t tell Jess.

I didn’t see Jeremy, or hear from him. In a way that didn’t matter to me. I felt a kind of security, knowing that he was out there. I felt like now we had an understanding and it wouldn’t go away in a hurry. I was in a strange mood. I felt a great tiredness after escaping from the shopping centre and the helicopter. Suddenly I was eighty years old. I’d been tired plenty of times during the war, but never like this. This was in my bones. I wandered the house, looking after Gavin but not after myself. I travelled the paddocks dreaming of life with Jeremy. I didn’t know if I was in love or just distracted for a short time by his warm hands and strong presence. The thing I found strange was that most of the time I felt not happy but sad. Is that love? Or was it just the sadness of living my life?

Sometimes a river of sadness flowed through me. Not depression, not grief, not despair, just sadness. I moved heavily and I was clumsy, I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t laugh very much. I wanted my parents back. I wanted them so badly that nothing else mattered. And all the time, shadowing my sadness, was a terrible fear, the fear that I would never recover. If only someone could have assured me that one day the sadness would go, that one day I would charge up the hills running and puffing and laughing, one day I would roll down the hills giggling and wheezing and hurting myself on rocks and thorns. I wanted to see a hill that was warm and bright in the full open light of the sun. I knew I couldn’t be on that hill yet, but I wanted someone to tell me, ‘Ellie, you will play there one day. It is your hill and you will be there.’

I think the worst thing is to know that you will be sad forever. When parents lose a child, isn’t that what they know from the moment the policeman opens his mouth? When a sister loses a brother, isn’t that the truth that fills them in an instant? There is no cure for that kind of sadness.

Laughter and carefree love, all the bright things, it seemed like they gleamed and glistened for other people.

I think I was starting to understand one of the great paradoxes. I love paradoxes. I think they contain all the truth in the world. The only trouble is that I can’t understand them. ‘The more things change, the more things stay the same.’ ‘The greater your knowledge, the less you know.’ ‘Most people aren’t brave enough to be cowards.’ ‘Every exit is an entry to somewhere.’ ‘Less is more.’ I mean, I understand those, but I have to work at it. I remember during the war Homer saying to me, ‘I’m an atheist,’ and then adding, ‘Thank God.’

The paradox about love is that it hurts and it heals. It makes you feel better, only to make you feel worse. You go into it knowing it will betray you but you go into it anyway. And another paradox is that you go into it as an individual, because you as an individual are in love with someone, but from the start you lose so much of your individuality. I was starting to fall seriously in love with Jeremy, so right away, what happens? I start worrying about what Jeremy thinks of me, trying to guess what he likes and doesn’t like about me, thinking about ways of changing myself so that he will like me even more. It’s pretty dumb when you think that I’m the person he seemed to like, not the me I was contemplating changing myself into.

I’d always had this image of myself standing on top of Tailor’s Stitch singing ‘The Sound of Music’. Not really. But I did go to the hills when my heart was lonely. If people are either mountain people or ocean people then I’m a mountain person. I love the ocean, the few times I get a chance to see it, but I’m a mountain girl. When the weekend rolled around and Gavin got a rare invitation for a sleepover, from Mark, even though Mark was born standing up and talking back, even though Mark would choke a chook that clucked the wrong way, I thought, ‘This is my chance,’ and pushed Gavin out the door with his bag packed.

As soon as he’d gone, I took the long walk up the spur. It’s a bit strange, I suppose, but I hadn’t connected that spur with the deaths of my parents and Mrs Mackenzie. I mean, it’s not like they were killed there, but I was climbing it when I heard the shots that ended their lives and ended my world. As I got close to that place again I started to feel quite weird. My legs got heavy and didn’t want to do what they were paid for; my arms tingled; my throat blocked up and started saying no to oxygen.

Melissa Carpenter, who lived about three k’s from us and got the same bus, was one of those mad horse people, along with her parents. Everyone knows the thing about how you gotta get back on the horse after you fall off. When Melissa was twelve she fell off big-time. Her favourite horse bucked at a snake and threw her. She knew right away she’d done some serious damage, and in fact it turned out she’d broken three bones in her back. She’s been lucky — at one stage they thought she was heading for life in a wheelchair. So anyway, she’s lying on the ground, waiting for the ambulance and wondering if she’s ever going to walk again, and her father kneels beside her and whispers, ‘Honey, I know you’re in a bit of pain but do you think you could manage to get back on Barney for a minute, just so you don’t lose your confidence?’

I thought about that as I stood a hundred metres from that place on the spur and sweated with memories and fear. It was kind of funny the way Mr Carpenter had been so determined to get Melissa back onto Barney, because even though we all laughed when we heard the story (and once we knew Melissa was going to be OK), in a way Mr Carpenter was right, because from that day on Melissa never got on Barney or any other horse again.

Now here I stood gazing at the spur, suddenly awash with memories and wondering if I would ever be able to get up on Tailor’s Stitch again. Because I couldn’t get past that spot where I’d been when I heard the shots. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t known this was going to happen. The violence of my life was threatening to close the mountains to me. The war and the fighting and the killing were blocking the promise of good things in the future. I needed to get up that rocky slope and walk the high ridge.

I took a few more steps but my legs wouldn’t move any further. I knew I couldn’t do it. I hadn’t been beaten by many things over the last eighteen months but I could not make this simple climb. The air wouldn’t give way for me, the paralysis was too powerful.

I was lonely and I wanted to go to the hills and hear the songs I had heard before. I wanted my heart to be filled with the sound of music. I felt that if my future were to include love I’d have to find a way to get past that spot on the spur. But it wasn’t going to happen today. It mightn’t ever happen again.

Seemed like it hadn’t been a very successful sleepover either. Gavin was already home, which wasn’t in the script. I didn’t realise for a while. Normally I could tell where he was, as he often didn’t know when he was making a noise. He’d figured out of course that certain sounds attract attention and certain sounds were louder than others, but he forgot.

When I heard a thump from his bedroom I thought we were being attacked. I grabbed the rifle, which nowadays I kept close at hand. It was behind the kitchen door. I broke out in a sweat, wondering whether to head for the bush or check out the bedroom. Marmie was asleep on the kitchen floor, which was a good sign, so I hesitated. I loaded half-a-dozen rounds into the magazine and slid one into the barrel, all of which was difficult to do quietly. But it did make me feel more confident. Another thump from the direction of Gavin’s room. Marmie opened one eye and yawned. She wasn’t the greatest watchdog in the world but she should do better than this.

I stole out of the kitchen into the corridor, only a metre, and swung open the door of the linen press so I could hide behind it. Standing there put me into a totally different theatre of sounds. Now the vibration of the fridge motor, Marmie’s breathing, the buzzing of the early blowie, the flapping of the fly strips in the doorway… all of these were in the background and instead I could hear a magpie in the distance, beyond the end of the house, a moth flapping against the lead-light window in the door that led onto the little lawn, and the drone of a light plane.

Thump. What the hell was going on? If it was an invasion of the house they’d be doing more than hanging around Gavin’s room kicking the furniture. I decided to take one more step. This could be extremely dumb, but I was getting more and more convinced that the biggest problem in Gavin’s room could just be Gavin. OK, he wasn’t due home until tomorrow, but he was a kid who made his own rules, and besides that, a sleepover at Mark’s was as likely to last one hour as it was the whole weekend.

I took the one step, and as I did heard Gavin’s distinctive voice yelling one of the most powerful swearwords in his vocabulary, and trust me, when it comes to swearing, Gavin has been hanging around Homer too long. I assumed that he was not talking to a terrorist who had climbed through his bedroom window. I sighed, flicked the safety catch forwards, unbolted it and let the bullet in the barrel slide out. I really didn’t feel like a big discussion with Gavin about why on earth he was home when he was meant to be having a good time at Mark’s. But a whole lot of thumping was going on and I couldn’t walk away from that.

I put the rounds into my pocket, propped the rifle against the wall so that Gavin wouldn’t think I was going to shoot him, and went into the room. Where Gavin was concerned there wasn’t much point knocking. He was standing with his head in the corner, like he’d sent himself there already, like he was one jump ahead of the teacher. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was rocking up and down. As I stood there, he drew back, then snapped his head forward into the wall. Now I knew what those thumps had been. I couldn’t hear any Metallica, and neither could he, so it wasn’t their fault. I picked up a cushion and chucked it at him. He spun around and glared at me. If looks could have killed I might as well have lain down then and there and got ready for the autopsy.

I was in the mood to be compassionate, forgiving and understanding.

‘Gavin, what the hell did you do this time?’

He hurled the cushion back, following it with a volley of Lemony Snickets. All hardbacks unfortunately. ‘Ow! Gavin! You little shit! That hurt.’

The ringing of the phone saved innocent blood from being shed. I’m just not sure whose blood it would have been.

‘Ellie! I’ve been trying to get you all afternoon. I left three messages.’

Mark’s mother. I felt like I’d suddenly put on three or four kilos and it was all around the heart. She was definitely not ringing to tell me about Gavin’s lovely manners.

‘Yes, sorry, I was out in the paddocks.’

‘I had to leave Gavin at the house. He said you wouldn’t be far away. Did you find him all right?’

‘Yes, no problem. He’s in his room. I haven’t talked to him though. I thought he wasn’t coming back till tomorrow?’

‘Yes, well, that’s what I’m ringing about.’

I sighed and sat on the little leather stool next to the phone. I could almost hear her lips pressing tighter and tighter together.

‘Ellie, I don’t know what that boy’s problem is, but I think he needs help, and the sooner the better. I’ve never seen anything like what he and Mark got up to today. I know he hasn’t had an easy life, but I’m afraid I can’t have him here again.’

I didn’t know Mark’s mother too well, but I had the impression she was always a bit confused, trying to do six things at once and not finishing any of them. I’d never really thought about it before but it struck me then that one of the things she never quite finished was looking after Mark.

Feeling tired, too tired to be bothered asking her what crimes the boys had committed, I sat in silence, doodling crosses with a blunt pencil.

‘Are you there?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I wish there was someone I could talk to about him, Ellie. I really don’t know how it is that you’re looking after him.’

I understood that she meant I was not ’someone’. I was ‘no-one’, because of my age. I wondered at what age I’d become someone. I felt I was slipping into a sulk, my lips pressing into each other too, and I wanted to be rude and rebellious.

‘Well, I’d better tell you, I suppose. I’ve always been worried about Gavin’s influence on Mark, so up till now I’ve said to Mark that he can play with him but not to sit next to him in class. But I’m afraid Mark is too easily led sometimes. And of course you’ve got to feel sorry for Gavin.’

Grrr. My doodles were turning into sharp pointy things. The pencil was reaching that horrible state where there was so little lead that the wooden ends were scratching the paper, which is almost as bad as fingernails down the blackboard. I didn’t feel sorry for Gavin. Didn’t have the time or energy for it. I don’t think he felt sorry for himself either, although he did feel angry, which is a bit different.

‘So what did they do?’

‘Oh! I can hardly… my neighbours are the Chaus. They’re very nice and we’ve never had any trouble with them and they’ve been so good to Mark. And they have this lovely cat, a little grey thing about three years old, called Missy.’

My heart was heavy now. I knew how these stories always ended, these stories that started with, ‘We had this new car, we’d only had it a fortnight,’ or, ‘My mum had this Royal Doulton vase that her grandmother gave her and it was sitting on top of a bookcase…’

‘They had this lovely cat.’ I formed a great fear for the cat as Mark’s mum continued.

‘And the boys, I don’t know what came over them, but they somehow got hold of this poor little cat and Gavin tied it on the ground… this is awful, Ellie, I don’t know how I can tell you the next bit.’

I didn’t know how I was going to be able to hear it. I was starting to hate Gavin.

‘And Mark’s got this jump for his bike, and it seems like Gavin aimed the bike off the jump, aimed for the cat…’

‘Did he kill it?’ I asked. My voice was husky hoarse.

‘Oh yes. It’s hard to get the full story of course, because of his disability, but I think he landed on it quite a few times.’

His disability. Stuff disability. If Gavin wanted to communicate something, he’d communicate it. He didn’t have any disability.

‘I’ll call you back,’ I said to Mark’s mum, and hit the off button on the phone.