While I Live Read Free Page B

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