‘Well, I’d like to. Wait a sec, and I’ll go and ask.’
It was a long wait. At last she came back with a series of questions. She relayed my answers to her mother or father, or both, in the background. After about ten minutes of this there was another long conversation; then Fi picked up the phone again.
‘They’re being difficult,’ she sighed. ‘I’m sure it’ll be OK but my mum wants to ring your mum to make sure. Sorry.’
‘That’s cool. I’ll put you down with a question mark and I’ll talk to you at the weekend, OK?’
I hung up. It was getting hard to use the phone, because the TV was yelling at me. Mum had it turned up too loud, so she could hear the News in the kitchen. An angry face filled the screen. I stopped and watched for a moment. ‘We’ve got a wimp for a Foreign Minister,’ the face was shouting. ‘He’s weak, he’s gutless, he’s the new Neville Chamberlain. He doesn’t understand the people he’s dealing with. They respect strength, not weakness!’
‘Do you think defence is high on the Government’s agenda?’ the interviewer asked.
‘High? High? You must be joking! Do you know what they’ve cut from the defence budget?’
Thank goodness I’m getting away from this for a week, I thought.
I went into Dad’s office and rang Lee. It took a while to explain to his mother that I wanted her son. Her English wasn’t too crash hot. Lee was funny when he came to the phone, almost suspicious. He seemed to react slowly to everything I said, as though he was weighing it up. ‘I’m meant to be playing at the Commemoration Day concert,’ he said, when I told him the dates. There was a silence, which I finally broke.
‘Well do you want to come?’
He laughed then. ‘It sounds more fun than the concert.’
Corrie had been puzzled when I’d said I wanted to ask Lee. We didn’t really hang round with him at school. He seemed a serious guy, very into his music, but I just thought he was interesting. I suddenly realised that we didn’t have that much time left at school, and I didn’t want to leave without getting to know people like Lee. There were people in our year who still didn’t know the names of everyone else in the form! And we were such a small school. I had this intense curiosity about some kids, and the more different they were to the people I normally hung around with, the more curious I was.
‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked. There was another long pause. Silence makes me uncomfortable, so I kept talking. ‘Do you want to ask your mum and dad?’
‘No, no. I’ll handle them. Yeah, I’ll come.’
‘You don’t sound all that keen.’
‘Hey, I’m keen! I was just thinking about the problems. But it’s cool, I’ll be there. What’ll I bring?’
My last call was to Robyn.
‘Oh Ellie,’ she wailed. ‘It’d be great! But I’d never be allowed.’
‘Come on Robyn, you’re tough. Put the pressure on them.’
She sighed. ‘Oh Ellie, you don’t know what my parents are like.’
‘Well ask them, anyway. I’ll wait on.’
‘OK.’
After a few minutes I heard the bumping noises of the phone being picked up again, so I asked, ‘Well? Did you con them into it?’
Unfortunately it was Mr Mathers who answered.
‘No Ellie, she hasn’t conned us into it.’
‘Oh Mr Mathers!’ I was embarrassed, but laughing too, cos I knew I could twist Mr Mathers round my pinkie.
‘Now what’s this all about, Ellie?’
‘Well, we thought it was time we showed independence and initiative and all those other good things. We want to do a bushwalk along Tailor’s Stitch for a few days. Get away from the sex and vice of Wirrawee into the clean wholesome air of the mountains.’
‘Hmm. And no adults?’
‘Oh Mr Mathers, you’re invited, as long as you’re under thirty, OK?’
‘That’s discrimination Ellie.’
We kidded around for five minutes till he started getting serious. ‘You see Ellie, we just think you kids are a bit young to be careering around the bush on your own.’
‘Mr Mathers, what were you doing when you were our age?’
He laughed. ‘All right, one to you. I was jackarooing at Callamatta Downs. That was before I got smart and put on a collar and tie.’ Mr Mathers was an insurance agent.
‘So, what we’re doing’s small time compared to jackarooing at Callamatta Downs!’
‘Hmm.’
‘After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Hunters in four-wheel drives? They’d have to come through our place, and Dad’d stop them. Bushfires? There’s so much rock up there we’d be safer than we would at home. Snakebite? We all know how to treat snakebite. We can’t get lost, cos Tailor’s Stitch is like a highway. I’ve been going up into that country since I could walk.’
‘Hmm.’
‘How about we take out insurance with you Mr Mathers? Would you say yes then? Is it a deal?’
Robyn rang back the next night to say it was a deal, even without the insurance. She was pleased and excited. She’d had a long conversation with her parents; the best one ever, she said. This was the biggest thing they’d ever trusted her on, so she was keen for it to work out. ‘Oh Ellie, I hope there’s no disasters,’ she kept saying.
The funny thing about it was that if parents ever had a daughter they could trust it was the Mathers and Robyn, but they didn’t seem to have worked it out yet The biggest problem she was ever likely to give them was being late to church. And that’d probably be because she was helping a boy scout across the road.
Things kept going well. Mum and I were in town shopping, Saturday morning, and we ran into Fi and her mum. The two mums had a long serious conversation while Fi and I looked in Tozers’ window and tried to eavesdrop. Mum was doing a lot of reassuring. ‘Very sensible,’ I heard her say. ‘They’re all very sensible.’ Luckily she didn’t mention Homer’s latest trick: he’d just been caught pouring a line of solvent across the road and lighting it from his hiding place when a car got close. He’d done it half a dozen times before he got caught. I couldn’t imagine the shock it must have given the drivers of the cars.
Anyway, whatever Mum said to Fi’s mum worked, and I was able to cross off the question mark next to Fi’s name. Our list of eight was down to seven, but they were all definite and we were happy with them. Well, we were happy with ourselves, and the other five were good. I’ll try to describe them the way they were then – or the way I thought they were, because of course they’ve changed, and my knowledge of them has changed.
For instance, I always thought of Robyn as fairly quiet and serious. She got effort certificates at school every year, and she was heavily into church stuff, but I knew there was more to her than that She liked to win. You could see it at sport. We were in the same netball team and honestly, I was embarrassed by some of the things she did Talk about determined. The moment the game started she was like a helicopter on heat swooping and darting around everywhere, bumping people aside if she had to. If you got weak umpires Robyn could do as much damage in one game as an aerial gunship. Then the game would end and Robyn would be quietly shaking everyone’s hands, saying ‘Well played’, back to her normal self. Quite strange. She’s small, Robyn, but strong, nuggety, and beautifully balanced. She skims lightly across the ground, where the rest of us trudge across it like it’s made of mud.
I should exempt Fi from that though, because she’s light and graceful too. Fi was always a bit of a hero to me, someone I looked up to as the perfect person. When she did something wrong I’d say, ‘Fi! Don’t do that! You’re my role model!’ I love her beautiful delicate skin. She has what my mother calls ‘fine features’. She looked like she’d never done any hard work in her life, never been in the sun, never got her hands dirty, and that was all true, because unlike us rurals she lived in town and spent more time playing piano than drenching sheep or marking lambs. Her parents are both solicitors.