The Ellie Chronicles (47 page)

I sat there, continuing to figure. It was like a sudoku. Mrs Barlow, my English teacher, had been saying the other day how when you write a story you should think sudoku. Give the reader a few bits and they’ll figure the rest out, no problem. She used me as an example. ‘If I say “Ellie got on the tractor” then you can figure Ellie’s on a farm, you don’t need to tell the reader that, they can work it out for themselves.’

‘She could be at a field day,’ Sam Young called out.

I put him and Mrs Barlow out of my mind and tried to concentrate on my own sudoku. ‘So you think they’re coming back here,’ I said. ‘They’ve got unfinished business. How come you didn’t tell me this straightaway? They could have come last night. Or the night before. Gavin and I could have been murdered by now.’

‘We thought we’d wait till the right moment. And Dad and George and I have been hanging round here for a few nights.’

‘What?’

‘You know . . . with rifles. These raiding parties are always small. We thought we could take care of them. Dad was right into it. Never knew he was so bloodthirsty. Guess that civil war got into his blood.’

I was dumbstruck. My first instinct was to say, ‘I don’t need looking after! How dare you do that without telling me? I don’t like people making decisions on my behalf.’

But I had to recognise the generosity of my neighbours who would put themselves in danger and go without sleep to protect me. I had to recognise the kindness of it. ‘The highest wisdom is kindness.’ Where had I read that?

‘Thanks,’ I said, trying not to choke on the word. ‘Civil war?’

‘Greek Civil War.’

‘Oh. Was there a Greek Civil War?’

‘Ask him, he’ll tell you. For weeks. Anyway, the Scarlet Pimple did a bit of checking around with the experts from the Army and so forth, and they didn’t have any reports of anyone about to launch an attack. So we thought that you’d probably be OK in the short-term. And face it, if you can’t trust an expert, who can you trust?’

‘Exactly.’

My mind was churning now, fit to match my stomach. I was just one big churn. You could have made butter in me, easy.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘The short-term. That’s all there is now, isn’t there? The bloody short-term. In the medium-term they’ll come in here and kill Gavin and me and burn the place down. And in the long-term we’ll be rotting in our graves. Well bury me with my parents, that’s all I ask. And Gavin too thanks.’

Homer didn’t say anything. We sat there looking through the windscreen of the ute at the eroded gully, the ugly evidence of a landscape wrecked by humans.

BEFORE THE RAID and the conversation with Homer things had actually been going rather well. Maybe the problem is that I don’t touch wood enough. Maybe the problem is that God likes to play with us. Teasing us the way a kid does with a spider, when he harasses it for a while then lets it crawl away into a hidey-hole, and after a few minutes the spider thinks he’s safe and comes out again and there’s the kid, waiting, ready for the next round. And so on and so on until the kid decides that he’s had enough fun now, he’s bored, and he squishes the spider.

We’d been through a terrible experience in Stratton, Gavin and I, which was about as terrible as experiences get. Gavin’s my adopted brother more or less, and when we went looking for his little sister, we found her, but unfortunately the man who had been their stepfather found us first. No-one but Gavin knew the truth about him, that he had murdered Gavin’s mother. And when you’re the only person in the world who knows about a murder, you’re not in a very comfortable position. We found ourselves in a very uncomfortable position, getting wet and bloody, in a fountain in a park, trying to defend ourselves against a knife attack, and not making a very good job of it for a while. We both had the scars to prove that.

What it did lead to was a new experience for both of us, going to court for a criminal trial. It was one of those things where you feel kind of excited, but guilty for feeling excited. Nervous as well of course, definitely nervous. OK, I’ll be honest, scared, but you can’t help having the other feelings as well. The trial was in Stratton. One thing that was good these days was that the legal system had been streamlined under the new constitution so things got dealt with faster. A law student I was talking to at the court said that in the old days it might have been a year before this case got heard.

We stayed with Lee and his siblings again. I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced this was a good idea, given that Lee’s catering depended on how many pies were in the freezer, and his housework depended on whether the path through the lounge room to the front door was still open to traffic. When it was completely blocked he’d schedule a ten minute clean-up.

The filter in the dryer had like three kilos of lint in it. OK I’m exaggerating again, but I don’t think anyone had cleaned it since they bought it. I explained to Lee about the fire hazard but I had the feeling it wasn’t going to make a substantial difference in his life, and I didn’t feel really confident until I’d found Pang, his little sister, and explained it to her. Honestly, without Pang that family would have to call in Meals on Wheels. Lee’s in his own world half the time. Phillip, the nine year old, is a bit obsessive. His three main interests are computer games, footy stats and reading Deltora Quest books. This does not necessarily make for good conversation. I mean, the kid collects light globes. Used ones. He has about twenty of them in a cupboard. Pang showed me.

Paul, who’s seven, is the quiet one, with his nose in a book, quite like Lee in some ways but not as determined. Then every once in a while he just gets the devil in him and goes through the house looking for ways to create havoc. Intira, the smallest, is a four year old with anger-management problems. As all four year olds have anger-management problems I wasn’t too concerned about this, but in a small apartment it’s not so good.

When we got to Stratton for the trial I suddenly thought that I should get them presents, but there wasn’t much time, so I grabbed a box of chocolates at a shop near the station. Stupid really, everything’s so expensive nowadays, and you only get about twenty choccies for thirty bucks. I’d have been better off going for quantity instead of a nice box with lots of packaging inside. Anyway, before anyone else realised, Intira had raided the box and wiped out half the chocs, and if that wasn’t bad enough she then had a monstrous tantrum when Lee took the box away and told her she was a greedy little guinea pig, or words to that effect.

The one thing that didn’t happen while I was staying with Lee was a sudden romantic windstorm that blew us both away. Maybe I’m looking for excuses but I gotta say there’s not a lot of room for romance when five kids are bouncing off the walls of a flat that doesn’t have bounceable walls. That sounds so middle-aged, like a suburban mother in the
Women’s Weekly
explaining why the romance has gone out of her marriage, but for the first time in my life I had a bit of sympathy for suburban mothers living unromantic lives. Not that I wanted a relationship with Lee any more, now that I had Jeremy, but bloody Lee, something about him, we couldn’t be in the same building without my getting funny feelings inside. They weren’t even necessarily nice feelings – I got sort of squirmy in the stomach, plus my breathing changed – but there was still definitely something smoky about him.

The last thing I wanted him to do was fall on his knees in front of me, red roses in hand, but I thought, without really thinking about it, that life would be more interesting if he did keep after me. I mean, face it, the more guys who are after you the more interesting life is, even if you aren’t totally rapt in some of them, and even if you’re making it hard for other girls by causing a bottleneck in the supply line. I was hardly in that league, but I knew I’d prefer Lee to have me for his first priority than some other girl who wasn’t good enough for him. No other girl would ever be good enough for Lee, in my opinion.

Anyway nothing happened. Well, a lot happened of course. As well as attending the trial Gavin and I witnessed or were involved in Pang slapping Paul when he spilt Pepsi on her homework, Lee trying to make Phillip clean the griller when he left melted cheese all over it after cremating his sandwich, Phillip huddling in the broom cupboard for two hours when Pang said he couldn’t have his move back in a game of chess, kids refusing to go to bed, refusing to get out of bed, refusing to go to school, refusing to leave school in the afternoon, refusing to eat meals, refusing to stop eating junk, refusing to go to the park, refusing to come home from the park . . . refusing to put new fuses in when the lights went out . . . in other words refusing to refuse . . . that was a joke by the way . . . 

It wasn’t all bad though. I mean, Lee would kill me if he read this. They really loved each other and they had a heap of nice moments together. When Paul discovered Phillip having his tantrum in the broom cupboard, he was really sweet, huddling in there with him for ages trying to talk him into coming out. Succeeding too, eventually. Intira and Paul spent many a happy hour at the kitchen table with crayons and coloured pencils and stuff. They had this game where they made up little cartoon creatures with special powers. One had the ability to grow wings and another could change into a worm and another could make himself invisible. I wouldn’t say I found it too exciting but the kids loved it. They were based on stuff they’d seen on TV, I think, and I hadn’t had much time to watch TV lately.

So, action 24/7, but romance, no. If ever there was a moment when something seemed possible it’d be interrupted by a scream from one of the bedrooms or a crying kid demanding justice or a crash from the kitchen. After a few nights of this I realised that my relationship with Lee was still in the deep freeze. As long as I had Jeremy I shouldn’t have worried about that, because I didn’t want to two-time him, but I just wanted to keep a connection open between Lee and me. We stayed at Lee’s three nights and on the last I wrote a letter to Jeremy.

Hi, just wanted to tell you how much I’m missing you. It’s a bit of a madhouse here and the trial has been totally nasty so I can’t wait to get home and see you again. We’ve been going to court every day waiting to be called as witnesses and today it finally happened. It was a pretty weird experience but I guess it went all right. Gavin wants to stay and see whether his stepfather gets convicted. I think he hopes the jury will come in with a guilty verdict and then the horrible Mr Manning’ll be taken straight outside and hung from the nearest tree. Come to think of it I wouldn’t be too sorry myself if they did that. I’m crapping myself a bit over the chance that the guy might get off. I know there’s no way in the world he should, but God knows how things happen in courts and everyone keeps telling me stories about criminals who got away with murder, which isn’t very comforting.

We’ve seen quite a bit of Rosie, Gavin’s little sister. I don’t know whether you remember but she lives with people called Russell who are really nice, even if Mrs Russell is the main one who tells me about court cases gone wrong. But we took Rosie to the park yesterday and had a game of daylight Capture the Flag, which I made up on the spot. They’re still kind of awkward with each other, Gavin and Rosie I mean, but it’s sweet to see them together and it gets better every time. Rosie’s even bossier than Gavin, if you can believe that, but he’s starting to give her as good as he gets, which I think’s probably a good sign.

I’m lonely, Jeremy, and I want to be home and back at Wirrawee High and sitting next to you and listening to your soft voice. You do things to me that I can’t describe, but all I know is that with your arms around me I feel safer than I’ve ever been and I just hope you’re not cheating on me while I’m away, with Jess or anyone else. Just kidding. But think of me all the time, OK. We should be home by the time you get this, so ring me, or I’ll ring you,

Lots of love, Ellie.

I posted that on the way to court, but I didn’t know then that we’d be able to go home the same day. Turning up for the last day of the trial was Gavin’s idea. I wouldn’t have come back for any money, now we were no longer needed. When we’d been waiting to be called as witnesses we weren’t allowed to watch any of the case. I think that’s because they don’t want you to hear what the other witnesses are saying in case you change your story. Bit like Mrs Gilchrist when she’s interrogating students to find out who really did assassinate the lollipop lady or rock the roof or get a preview of the questions for the science test.

It was better as a spectator though. The pressure was off us. I soon realised that things were moving faster than I’d expected and the jury was going to be sent on their way pretty soon to decide the result. Mr Manning hadn’t been charged with murder, the murder of Gavin’s mum, because the police said there wasn’t enough evidence. Well, the police said there was enough but the prosecutor apparently disagreed and told the cops they couldn’t run that one, so it was only knifing us that put him in the dock.

I thought that was outrageous, but of course the only evidence about the murder was from Gavin. They’d found a couple of old neighbours who said Mr Manning was violent and a liar, and no-one had seen Gavin’s mum once the war started, but there was nothing else that could pin the actual murder on him. They never found her body. And I could see that Gavin in a witness box wouldn’t necessarily be enough to persuade a court to lock up an adult and throw away the key.

Anyway, this being the last day of the case there were no more witnesses. It was just the lawyers trying to convince the jury. We got there late and it turned out that the prosecutor, whose name was Mr Lucas, had already had his turn and Mr Manning’s lawyer was on the job. He looked like a really nice man, like anyone’s grandfather, kind face, glasses, friendly voice, but I didn’t trust him after the questions he’d asked us. The stuff he told the jury was outrageous, about how Gavin and I had pestered and harassed ‘the defendant’, how we’d exaggerated the whole thing; but as he went on, something told me that his heart wasn’t really in it, and I started to see him differently. Gradually the mask slipped and I saw him as an old guy who had this nasty client who he probably knew was guilty, but he’d been given the job of going through the motions and making sure he seemed to be getting a fair trial. At the end of the day it was pretty hard to argue with the fact that Gavin and I had both been taken to hospital in an ambulance, and it was because we’d been knifed by Mr Manning.

The judge made a speech to the jury, mostly about how in murder you can be convicted if you set out to give someone a severe bashing and they die of it even if you didn’t want that to happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can be convicted of attempted murder if you set out to give someone a severe bashing and they don’t die of it. Or in our case a severe knifing. She said the jury had to be sure that Mr Manning meant to inflict grievous bodily harm on us, and she added, ‘You may well be of the opinion on the evidence you have heard that he did,’ which seemed to me like she was telling them what to think. But even if they agreed with her on that one, by itself it still wasn’t enough. They also had to be sure that he was reckless. ‘You can make up your own minds as to that,’ she said, but it seemed pretty obvious that she’d come to her own conclusion on that as well.

Then she went into a bit of a spiel about ‘present facts’ and ‘future facts’. ‘If someone in a country town batters another person with an axe handle and a bystander calls the town’s only ambulance and the ambulance is involved in an accident on the way to the scene and never arrives, and the victim subsequently dies, then the attacker is guilty of murder. But if the same circumstances occur, and the victim does not die, the attacker is not guilty of attempted murder. He is not expected to know future facts, only present ones. If a person points a gun at the head of another, knowing the gun probably has rounds in one or two of its chambers, and he pulls the trigger and the gun goes off, wounding the victim but not killing him, then the person is guilty of attempted murder, because he had present knowledge and failed to act appropriately in relation to it.’

So apparently if Mr Manning knew that plunging a knife into us was very dangerous, the jury could convict him of attempted murder. I thought the judge was making the whole thing a lot more complicated than it needed to be. But what would I know? And maybe I didn’t understand it properly anyway. I actually thought it was quite interesting and I did listen more attentively than I do at school.