The Ellie Chronicles (54 page)

Jeremy told me to put all those issues out of my head. He was quite . . . a word I like . . . curt about it. Curt. I knew a guy called Kurt once, who was anything but curt. And Jeremy was normally so uncurt. But now he was all business. ‘Keep away from those moral dilemmas, Ellie. They’re a waste of energy. You’ve got plenty else to worry about before you worry about that. Now, when’s your birthday?’

‘December 5,’ I replied promptly.

‘Not yours, stupid. Paula’s – the new you. When’s your birthday?’

‘Oh shoot, I knew this . . . October?’

‘Yeah, October 31.’

‘Oh that’s Halloween. That’s easy to remember. Hope it’s not symbolic of anything.’

‘Parents’ names?’

‘Jerry McClure and Dr Suzanne Spring. Dunnno what she’s a doctor of, though.’

‘Yeah, I can’t believe they left that out of the information. I don’t think it’s medicine or they would have said.’

‘Yeah, or she’d be working as a doctor.’

‘OK, now what’s your mother’s maiden name?’

‘Oh, something funny. I mean complicated. Tennyson-Barnes?’

‘Barnes-Tennyson. What’s your unit number?’

‘One twenty-seven. Block D, UN Staff Residence.’

‘Parents’ place of business?’

‘You mean where do they go to work?’

‘Of course that’s what I mean. Come on, Ellie, wake up.’

‘I am awake. It’s just that you’re so grumpy.’ I moved sideways so that my head was near his shoulder, and then snuggled into him. I needed some warmth. The separation from Gavin had been too long. ‘Come on, tell me, where do my mummy and daddy work?’

‘Have a guess.’

‘The Department of the Inferior?’

‘Very funny. Except it won’t be if you give that answer once you’re over there. Now what’s the telephone number for this Department of the Interior?’

‘444 something. 1725?’

‘Good. What’s your home number?’

‘I just want to get to Havelock as fast as I can and do something. I feel so helpless. During the war we made things happen. We didn’t have to sit around like this waiting for other people to organise stuff for us.’

‘You’re going to have to live with it, I’m afraid. Sounds like it’ll be at least twenty-four hours before they can organise to get you there. That gives you twenty-four hours to know this stuff so thoroughly that you don’t even have to think when someone asks you the questions. Now, what’s your phone number?’

‘Oh God, I can never remember numbers. It starts with 455 I think. I can’t remember the other four. They must have shorter numbers than ours.’

‘1215. The year of the Magna Carta.’

‘Magna what what what?’

‘I knew you’d say that. Do you have any siblings?’

‘Yes, a twenty-four-year-old sister named Laura. But she’s overseas too, doing a postgraduate degree in law at Princeton. She’s a real pain. She always wants the remote control, and she’s so fussy about food and she tries to boss me around when Mum and Dad are out.’

‘Where’d you get all that from?’

‘I just made it up.’

‘OK, but you can’t say “too”.’

‘Huh?’

‘You said, “She’s overseas too.” You can’t say that. You’re not overseas. You’re in Havelock.’

‘Oh yeah, so I am. Or at least I wish I was. God, you’ve got so much lint in your belly button.’

‘Do you drive your teachers completely and utterly crazy?’

‘Most of the time.’

‘Do you pull up their T-shirts and molest their belly buttons?’

‘Oh yuck, what a gross thought. You’re disgusting. Ask me another question.’

‘No, you don’t know it well enough. Go away and study for a couple more hours and then I’ll test you again. I’m going to Homer’s to use a safe phone. I’ve gotta make some calls.’

‘Oh yes? Anyone I should be jealous of?’

‘No. It’s to try to get you to Havelock faster. Come on, learn that stuff. There won’t be any fifty-fifty or dial a friend if a soldier stops you on the streets of Havelock and starts asking questions about your identity.’

Off he went.

He seemed so detached. He wasn’t acting like a boyfriend. Although he’d just made a joke, it did cross my mind that he didn’t have much sense of humour. On the other hand he was right to insist that this stuff was serious and I had to know it inside out and backwards. Of course I’d already figured that out for myself, but it was so hard to concentrate. It was interesting that he said he would try to get me to Havelock faster. It made me wonder again if he was the Scarlet Pimple.

STEPPING OUT ONTO the streets of Havelock was not the scariest thing I’d ever done, but it made it through the home and away series and into the finals. It wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d ever done either, but it was definitely a contender for the flag. The only other country I’d been in was New Zealand, and sure, it’s another country, but everything there looks so similar. The people certainly do, and they speak more or less the same language, even if they have trouble with a few vowels and the boys have their teeth soldered together.

Going to Havelock was going to the City of Weird for a few reasons, one being that I was in another country, even though I still thought of it as my country, and even though the landscape was the same. The cityscape was changing, had changed quite a lot, but the landscape was still those smoky blue mountains and green-grey gum leaves and strong hot sky that was the background to my life.

At least I’d had that experience a few times now, from crossing the border, so I was getting more used to it.

The cityscape did come as a shock. I’d never been to Havelock before, so I’m making assumptions, but I don’t think any of our cities or towns had looked like this before the war. Of course the capital cities had their ethnic areas, where you could almost pretend you were in another country, and I loved going there, enjoying the food and the shops and the energy. But when a whole city is different, when you know that block after block, suburb after suburb, will be like this, then you’re in a different headspace. You know that you’re the alien, you’re the outsider, you’re the ethnic. You’re locked into a lot of things in life, but with most of them, like your personality and your feelings and your coolness or lack of coolness, you kid yourself that you can change them at any moment. Even your weight. But you can’t kid yourself about your skin colour or the way your eyes and nose and mouth are shaped and arranged. You’re locked into your body for life. There was some white journalist in America, back in the fifties or whenever, who took chemicals to make his skin go black for a while, and then wrote a book about being a dark-skinned person in a white society. It sold squillions but someone told me the guy died young from the toxic effects of the chemicals. It did strike me as interesting that white people had to have a white guy explain to them what it was like to be black. They couldn’t hear it from a black person.

When I was in Year 9 I got the gig to go to Stratton and sit on a stage with half-a-dozen students from other schools at a conference for school librarians. We were like a panel, and the audience could ask us questions about what we liked in school libraries and what we didn’t like, and what made us go into the library and what drove us away, and our opinions about reading, all that sort of stuff. Well, it went like a bushfire. In fact the session ran twenty minutes overtime and most of the teachers missed their afternoon tea. But all the time, while I was on the stage taking my turn at answering questions, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Why don’t they ask the kids at their own schools? They could have got the answers to these questions a million years ago. How come they have to put us on a stage before they take us seriously or listen to us?’

People get locked into roles and attitudes. On a normal day at school we are just the sheep, teenagers who get herded around in flocks. But once they put us on that stage we became experts. We were authorities on teenagers and reading. People listened. They wrote down what we said. They applauded as we left.

You’re assigned roles all the time. Baby, girl, rural, child, daughter of the Lintons, teenager, war hero, person who looks after Gavin. White. Or black. Or Asian or Hispanic or Polynesian. When it comes to being assigned roles in life, skin colour’s a biggie. And for me, I was officially white. It’s not even an accurate name, just like black isn’t accurate when you think about it. I mean there are major colour differences between Australian Aborigines and Sudanese and African-Americans and West Indians. Me, on the tanned bits, which are my face, and my arms, because I wear short-sleeved shirts most of the time, I’m a sort of brown-pink, and on the rest, a very light rose pink which does become almost white when you look at it. But then all the veins give a blue-grey background and there’s such a network of them that they make quite a difference too.

I read this book called
Hawaii
by James Michener. It’s a really seriously very very very long book. More than eleven hundred pages. Now that’s long. Obviously I liked it or I wouldn’t have bothered. Anyway, towards the end he wrote about this idea called ‘The Golden Man’. He wrote this ages ago, so I thought he was being quite prophetic. Hawaii was like a melting pot, and he said a new type of human was emerging there, who was not golden in terms of skin colour, by blending black and white and Asian and Polynesian and whatever else. He said it was entirely to do with the mind, the way you think, so you can be a golden man, or a golden woman, or a golden kid for that matter, even though you’re racially Portuguese or Chinese or Caucasian or Hawaiian. Michener said that the secret is that these people understood the flow of movements around them. They were open to the world, I suppose. And that gave them the ability to be aware of the future, but most importantly it gave them the ability to stand at the place where all the rivers meet. It wasn’t James Michener’s idea really, it came from some university professors after World War II, not that it matters.

So my ambition in life is to be a golden woman. And looking around my friends, I can see that some of them, in fact most of them, are heading that way already. Maybe that’s why they are my friends. I mean who wouldn’t be attracted to people like Bronte and Jeremy and Lee and Fi? Not that Jeremy or Lee are in the running to become golden women. Golden men, definitely. Homer? Yes, and I’m not just saying that because he might read this one day. Even though he’s so sexist and blunt and anti-greenie and all the rest of it, he is very aware of the world. And deep down he’s not prejudiced or anti-conservation. He knows those things are right, it’s just that he would prefer it if they weren’t. They don’t suit his personal convenience. He would love a world where he was serviced by beautiful slave girls all day long, who fed him and massaged him and pampered him – actually, I wouldn’t mind a world like that myself, with slave boys preferably – but he knows it ain’t possible. Homer would love to flatten all the paddocks on their place and just sit on the tractor and go up and down without having to do fancy manoeuvres around clumps of trees. He’d love to leave the TV on all day and take twenty minute showers and drive a Porsche. But he’s smart enough to know that it’d be plain wrong if he did live like that. Occasionally people – new teachers for example – made the mistake of thinking he was just another redneck and they treated him accordingly. He always played right up to it as soon as they started patronising him. Sometimes it took them a long time to realise, and they were always so shocked and off balance when they did.

Anyway, there I was, in the great metropolis of Havelock, feeling shocked and off balance myself, that for the first time in my life I looked completely out of place. Nothing I could do, short of taking chemicals or getting extreme plastic surgery, would make my skin and facial features the same as everybody else’s. My appearance didn’t matter when we were doing raids across the border, because that was hit-and-run stuff, trying to damage them then get out as fast as possible. But now I was part of their society, trying to fit in, and that made all the difference.

The funny thing was that when I looked in the mirror I seemed an alien to myself. I’d had the makeover. Not like in the magazines, to make me into a glamorous supermodel. They would have needed a lot more time to do that. Like, years. But Bronte had suggested I change my appearance as much as I could, to reduce the chances of being recognised. I had to do it quickly so they could take photos of me with my ‘new’ face, to go in the identity papers.

Liberation had done something else as well as Paulaise me. Before I left, Jeremy had pulled a wad of money out of his computer bag and chucked it on the kitchen table. It was like we were doing a drug deal or in a gangster movie or something.

‘What’s this?’ I picked it up. Unlike our currency it was all the same colour. Someone had neatly sorted it into piles of ten notes, with the tenth one folded around the others. There were ten piles. ‘Is this worth anything or is it just Monopoly money?’

‘It’s about two thousand bucks in our money. It’s very popular over there.’

‘Wow. Can I get some DVDs?’

‘I think that if you don’t spend it, they’d like it back. It’s for bribes, basically. And anything else you might need money for.’

I looked at it more closely and realised it was American. Ten dollar bills. ‘Jeremy, are all Liberation groups seriously well organised? Or is it just the one that you guys belong to? Cos they seem to think of everything. And the way they can just cough up a thousand bucks American . . .’

‘Put it down to leadership,’ Jeremy said.

‘The Scarlet Pimple?’

‘You got it.’ Jeremy’s eyes were suddenly alight. ‘You’ve got no idea, Ellie. The Scarlet Pimple’s amazing. Talk about smart. And like you say, organised. We’re the best Liberation group for hundreds of miles. Everyone knows it, even the Army. But it’s all because of one person.’

I was suddenly jealous of the guy who could inspire that kind of admiration in Jeremy. Jeremy wasn’t easy to impress. And it seemed like either he wasn’t the Scarlet Pimple or else he had a very big head. Enormous.

‘Maybe I should join after this is over,’ I said. ‘I would like to work with someone like that.’

‘Well, you know they’d have you in a moment,’ Jeremy said. ‘You’d be the star signing. The hot new recruit.’

Lee had rushed back to Stratton because Pang had suspected appendicitis, but Bronte turned up a few minutes later. Seemed like she was always there to see me off. Good old Bronte. She was no action-woman but she was calm and reliable. I wondered how she’d handle real pressure. Jess and Jeremy had both come through OK in their first raids over the border, so she probably would too, especially as she was mentally stronger than Jess, I thought. But I couldn’t picture Bronte doing stuff like that. It wasn’t her scene. She was like the CWA ladies who make tea and sandwiches at bushfires, the steady workers who make the foundations strong.

She was going to camp at my place in case there were more phone calls from the kidnappers. It was the kind of thing Bronte was made for. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather leave at home to do a job like that.

I’d taken about six hours to get to Havelock. Liberation were confident that I could get away with being on the city streets, but they were equally confident that I’d have no hope if I were seen anywhere else. So they had to get me there without anyone spotting me. Even the first part wasn’t as easy as it used to be. I rode with Homer to the border, but now there was a big wire fence across it, and signs saying
No Access
in English and more signs in the distance, not in English but somehow they still managed to say
No Access
.

Despite their famous efficiency Liberation hadn’t given us any warning about a fence. We looked at each other. ‘Now what?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got pliers. I guess we can cut through.’

‘What if it’s wired up to ten thousand volts?’

‘I was just thinking the same thing.’

He pulled out his Leatherman and unfolded the pliers and passed it to me. ‘There you go.’

‘No, no, really, I’m only a girl. This needs a big strong man.’

‘I might wreck my nails. I think you should do it.’

‘Rock paper scissors?’

‘OK.’

We both went rock, then I went scissors and he went rock again. Damn. I took the Leatherman and went over to the fence. While I got some leverage on the pliers he did the stalk of grass thing, testing for an electric current. The grass didn’t cry, didn’t scream. It made sense. If it was alive, I would have expected warning signs. What did worry me was that it might be hooked up to some electronic gadget that would warn the authorities we were trying to break through.

Cutting was hard work, because they weren’t proper pliers of course, and I soon had red, sore hands from the pressure I had to apply. Homer took over after a while. Between us we made a hole big enough for the bike. Lucky we’d brought the two-wheeler, not the fourwheeler, or we’d still be there.

We got through and went on our way, much more cautious now. If they’d built a fence, what else might they have done? But we got to the rendezvous OK, about half an hour early in fact. A windmill was the landmark. It was a hundred metres down from an intersection, under the shade of a clump of wattles. ‘You’d better go back as fast as you can,’ I said to Homer. ‘In case anyone’s on their way to check the fence.’

‘Yeah, righto,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking the same thing. Good luck then. Hooroo.’ He started the bike and got on, put it in gear, turned it around, and started off with a quick wave. I watched him go, feeling a bit dismal. If one of us got killed in the near future – and that’d probably be me – those would have been our last words to each other.

I sat staring into a nearby paddock. What hope did I have of finding Gavin? This whole thing was so vague and unplanned. The only reason Liberation and the Scarlet Pimple thought it was worth a chance was – well, there were two reasons really. One was that we had no other avenues, no other hopes. This was Plan A, but there was no Plan B.

And the other reason was that they thought I could get good intelligence once I was ‘on the ground’. ‘On the ground’ meant, once I was in the heart of Havelock. The message from the Pimple was: ‘These people only trust face to face. They won’t tell us much by phone and they won’t put anything in writing. The group who’s got Gavin seem to be renegades, out-of-control, with no friends. Everyone’s scared of them. But if someone’s there, on the ground, we think people will give you serious information.’