While I live

CHAPTER 2

My family had been cockies since before The Beatles even, back in horse and plough days. We had always been into cattle and sheep, but when the war ended and twenty million people had to be crammed into an area that used to hold six million, we lost a lot of land. My friend Fi’s mother was appointed to do the redistribution for the Wirrawee area and we didn’t come out of it all that well. That’s my opinion anyway.

Dad decided to break with tradition and go into turkeys and geese. At first I thought it was a good idea but it turned out badly. No sooner had we started than the turkeys were hit by blackhead disease and we lost three-quarters of the poor buggers.

Dad was convinced the disease had come from the other side of the border but who knows? The truth is it happened so quickly that I did wonder if the turkeys were infected before we got them. It was hard to say. Before the war the government had been really strict on agricultural stuff, and being an island made that easier. Anyone who brought in nasty diseases like fire blight was smeared with mustard and fed to sharks. But when the war ended, it suddenly became a whole different ball game, because here we were on one side of the border being strict about quarantine and there they were on the other side not giving a stuff.

As we cremated a couple of thousand dead birds on a huge bonfire, an event that put me off cooked chicken for a long time — and I’ve never been keen on raw chicken — Dad realised that turkeys and geese weren’t his scene. I suppose the blackhead disease almost did us a good turn in that way.

Equally it was obvious that three of the four families who’d gotten large bits of our farm in the land redistribution weren’t going to make a go of it. One lot had never been on the land before, another lot were lazy, and the third were on the grog. So Dad sat down with them and did a bit of negotiating. I was proud of him, because negotiating didn’t come naturally to him. But after nearly a week of bargaining he’d leased back three-quarters of the land that we’d lost, and even though I didn’t like the fact that we had to pay these people a lot of money just to get our own property back, I started to hope that maybe we could return to the way it had been in the old days.

The other good thing was that we got rid of three of the families, because we’d had to give them housing. One of the rules with the new arrangements was that we’d had to provide their accommodation while they tried to get houses built and launch their farming operations.

The ones left were the Sandersons, who were nice. They were quite a young couple with two kids. Unlike the others they’d already built their own house, in a paddock called Hillside, and moved into it about a fortnight earlier. Pretty fast going, considering how hard it was to get building materials, let alone stuff like electrical cables and poly pipe.

But Mrs Mackenzie, Corrie’s mum, was still with us. No wonder it had seemed like a small township around my place for a while there. Corrie was my friend, who was killed in the war. Well, one of my friends who was killed. Mrs Mackenzie was nice, but she was pretty depressed most of the time. No surprises there. I mean, she’d lost her only daughter, and then her husband shot through, and for someone who’d put all her energy and time and love into her husband and her daughter, suddenly Mrs Mackenzie had nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Except to our place.

At least my mother had got most of her old spirit back. The war had knocked her around pretty badly. One of the invisible victims. I’ve never been quite sure exactly what a nervous breakdown is, but I think that’s what my mother had. These days she was still thin, and she’d aged a lot, but I knew she was back to normal when she charged into my room one Sunday morning and told me to take down a poster that said ‘For people with dyslexia, UFKC OFF’, and to take the pile of washing behind my door to the laundry and put it through the machine (the pile wasn’t as big as Uluru, she definitely got that wrong), and to clean up my room in the next sixty minutes or I’d be grounded till Christmas.

It was a relief in a way, because for a while there I’d been feeling like I was the mother and she was the daughter.

So much had happened, so many changes to our life. But things had started to settle down a bit. God they needed to. In the last month or so I’d been getting to school every day, and even doing a bit of homework. A lot of homework some nights. It felt weird doing assignments on ancient Egypt and immunology and the poems of Philip Hodgins after what we’d been through. But I quite liked it. It gave me, I don’t know, detachment.

Dad had taken delivery of forty scrawny cows who were meant to be in calf, and twenty skinny steers. Stock was hard to come by but he was hopeful of getting a couple of hundred wethers and ewes from a mate near Stratton. It was going to be a long hard haul to build things up again, to get back to the way it had been for so many years, but I think we felt like we were heading in the right direction at last.

For all that, there was still plenty of stuff that kept everyone on edge. In particular, the stories about border raids. It was hard to know exactly what was going on, because we only had one newspaper and one local television station. Nearly all of our TV now came from America.

Some people reckoned a lot of the local news was censored. The government didn’t want us to get too depressed, or scared. Mr Purvis, at the Mitre 10 in Wirrawee, told me he’d written thirty-eight letters to the paper since the war ended and not one of them had been published, and that proved there was censorship, but I thought it was more likely that he wrote crap letters.

There were certainly heaps of rumours. Wirrawee these days was a regular gossip factory, spewing out stories the way the Stratton Smallgoods Factory spewed out sausages. But border raids were one of the biggest talking points, almost from the day the war ended. Some of them were reported in the news but there were plenty of people to tell you that the media only mentioned one in every ten. It was impossible for us, living so far out of town, busy trying to rebuild the farm, to know what was really happening.

It seemed pretty clear though that there were people from both sides sneaking across the border for all kinds of illegal reasons. I would say that from our side people were doing it for thrills, to steal stuff, to get revenge for the war, and looking for unreturned prisoners who were rumoured to be hidden in hard-to-reach places.

From their side, I’d say they were doing it for thrills, to steal stuff, to get revenge for the war. And some of them were pissed off about the peace settlement, and thought they should have kept the whole country.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s another reason people from our side were going over the border. Maybe they thought we should have got the whole country back, so they decided to take it a little bit at a time. A lot of people on our side, Mr Purvis included, were sure that we should have got more land. They even said we’d ended the war too early, accepted peace terms that were one-sided. I don’t know about that. Seemed to me like neither side won this particular war, but the big New Zealand counterattack at the end got us the best terms we could have hoped for. Without that we’d have ended up with Flinders Island. Twenty million people on Flinders Island. Could have been tricky. Anyway, what would I know?

But considering the experiences I’d had in the war, hanging out in the bush and fighting like a tiger cat, staying alive even with half an army chasing us, I can hardly believe, looking back, that I didn’t take more care. Dumb, dumb, dumb. You make a lot of mistakes in life. You leave your bus pass at home, you forget to take the scones out of the oven, you lose a library book, you call Mrs Mackenzie ‘Mum’ in a moment of absent-mindedness. None of those things matter an awful lot.

You don’t take the idea of a raid on your place seriously, and as a result your parents and Mrs Mackenzie are killed.

I knew a lot more about guerilla fighting than my parents did. I should have been the one to think this through.

I don’t know how to describe those first few days. I don’t know how to describe those first few minutes. Gavin went into shock. I mean real, serious shock. I’d seen a kind of shock before, during the war. My friend Kevin had it, especially when a group of us, as we ran feral and loose around the countryside, blew up Wirrawee Airfield as a contribution to the war effort. Kevin had been a mixture of catatonic, sulky and terrified while that was happening.

Now Gavin was a complete mess, lying on the verandah like he was having a fit, white-faced and shaking, his eyes way back in his head, his teeth chattering. It was completely distracting, coming back towards the house, trying to get my head around what had happened, trying to come to terms with the bodies and the blood and the death and the way my life had changed, and in the middle of all that suddenly realising that I had to look after Gavin. He didn’t reply to anything I said. He wasn’t unconscious, but he might as well have been. I had to make myself function, go to the linen press and get a blanket, and then another blanket when he still didn’t stop shaking, and sit with him and hold him and talk to him and sing to him.

I don’t suppose he heard any of what I said but I don’t think it mattered. There were times when I resented Gavin’s arrival in our family, even though I was the cause of it, but this wasn’t one of those times.

From time to time I had glimpses of Homer. He was holding Dad’s rifle and first I saw him hurrying through the kitchen, then prowling around the outside of the house, eyes searching the garden and the trees, occasionally stopping to poke into a bush or throw open the door of a shed and look inside. It was brave that he did that: if anyone was there, they would have got him pretty easily I think.

The phone in the house rang but I didn’t answer it and eventually it stopped.

After a while Gavin got some colour in his face and his skin felt a bit warmer. He’d more or less stopped shaking and I thought he might have gone to sleep. I got up. It was hard: my legs had certainly gone to sleep, and I didn’t seem able to walk properly. Gavin moved when I got up, but he didn’t open his eyes, so I took a few steps away. When he still didn’t move I hurried back into the house. Homer burst in from the other side, giving me a fright because for a moment I didn’t know who was coming through the door. He had a second rifle, obviously taken from a dead soldier, and he gave it to me and together we carefully checked each room. I was in automatic mode; I think I quite liked having something to do so I didn’t have to think, didn’t have to feel.

But then I couldn’t postpone it any longer. I went back into the kitchen.

Homer and I still hadn’t exchanged a word. I took another look at the two bodies in there, as if I wanted to see whether they might have come back to life. Then I went to the linen press again and got two more blankets.

‘Do you want to go after them?’ Homer asked. He meant the soldiers. I don’t know why I call them soldiers. They were murderers. I shook my head. I was even angry at him, that all he could think of was punishment and revenge. It was unfair, but I was filled with such rage and despair that anything would have made me angry. To be honest I was angry that he’d even spoken. A house spider ran across the kitchen bench and I slammed it so hard with an old copy of Vogue Living that its little black body disintegrated.

I sat down in Mum’s favourite chair with my head on my arms. I stayed like that for a while then got up and called the police. I felt listless. When they answered I said, ‘My parents have been shot. And Mrs Mackenzie. They’re all dead.’ Then, stupidly, I hung up. A moment later they rang back. I don’t know how they worked out I was the one who’d rung them. And I didn’t know the guy. I think his name was Elliott. He said, ‘Is this right? There’s been a shooting? At the Linton place?’

I gave the phone to Homer and went back to look at Gavin. He still seemed asleep. I took yet another blanket, from Gavin’s bed this time. One thing we did still have was a lot of blankets. I went outside. All the time I could hear Homer’s voice, low and urgent, talking to the cops. I wondered how he was feeling. He loved my mother and idolised my father. I went outside to my father and put the blanket over him. Blood was still seeping from his body but it seemed to be coagulating now. Surprisingly there was only one fly buzzing around him. I was grateful for that. I returned to the house.

I’m not sure what we did until the police came. It seems like it took them quite a while but I’m not sure about that either. Homer told me to sit with Gavin. ‘Shock can kill people,’ he said. ‘Keep him warm. Look after him.’ I guess he knew it was good for me to have something else to do.

After a while Gavin did wake up. He didn’t say anything. I just sat there rubbing his head and stroking his hair. I knew how much he loved this, like a dog, and how it calmed him. I thought about the strange route he had taken, from the wild streets of Stratton to being on our verandah as a member of our family, and I wondered if I’d done him any favours. Maybe I should have left him back there to live or die on his own.

Occasionally a little tear ran down his face, leaving a track like a snail trail, and a fit of trembling shook his body.

The police arrived and the ambulance about a second later. I’m not sure if Homer rang the ambulance; I don’t think he did. The police probably arranged that. There wasn’t much for the ambos to do.

There were two police cars, three men and one woman. I had this feeling that I only wanted to talk to the woman so I stuck pretty close to her.

Not that there was much to say. We’d been heading up the spur for a picnic on Tailor’s Stitch, just the three of us. First time we’d been up there for ages. Heard the shots, came running back. Found dead people everywhere. End of story.

There was a lot of activity. People moving around, talking in hushed voices, photos, and in the middle of it Homer got everyone coffee. I thought I didn’t want it but he made me take it and maybe the caffeine helped.

The ambulance went away again. I had thought it would take the bodies, but it didn’t, just left them. Bodies.

It seemed weird to think of my parents as being bodies. Like they had become objects. Homer’s mum, Mrs Yannos, arrived, and other neighbours and friends, I can’t even remember who they were. Gavin came in and tried to crawl into my lap but he was really too big and I didn’t have enough compassion left for him now. Mrs Yannos gave me lots of hugs but I hardly felt them.

Two more cars arrived, station wagons, and some men in grey suits. They spoke to me in voices that were so hushed and oily that I felt a little ill, like I’d eaten a sausage that wasn’t cooked properly. They gave me forms to sign and I signed them. It took me a long time to figure out who they were and what they wanted. Then I realised they were undertakers. I stood up and screamed at them, but Mrs Yannos grabbed me from one side and Homer from the other, and I had to stand and watch as they took what was left of my mother and Mrs Mackenzie away, on metal stretchers. Then to torture myself, or to do him honour, or for both reasons, I went out on the verandah and watched as they got my father. They came back for one of the killers.

‘We haven’t got room for the others,’ they said. ‘We’ll pick them up in a couple of hours.’

Clutching myself around the stomach I nodded. I didn’t want the murderer’s body in the same vehicle as my parents so I made the man put him in with Mrs Mackenzie, which was totally gross of me.

Mrs Yannos, along with Mr and Mrs Sanderson, the people who were still farming part of our old property, starting cleaning the kitchen. I took a Chux thinking I would help them but instantly felt so sick at cleaning up my mother’s life blood and fragments of her body that I had to go outside and gulp in fresh air. Homer came after me and put his arm around me and I leaned into him but I couldn’t cry. On my other side Gavin was leaning into me and I suddenly thought, ‘These are about the two most important people left in my life,’ and I felt desperate at how alone I now was.