While I Live (32 page)

B
LOODY
H
OMER
. How often have I put those two words together? It’s like the official adjective for Homer is bloody. Or, to put it another way, there are two words for Homer, and the second is Homer. And the first one needn’t necessarily be bloody, either.

He really wasn’t interested in my great victory over Mr Sayle and Mr Rodd. Oh, he listened of course, because he knew he was expected to, but because it wasn’t about him he only half listened, and the moment I was finished he went back to talking about Liberation, which was all he seems to care about these days.

I suppose if you weren’t there you wouldn’t realise how difficult it was, and how it felt so dangerous, and how much it meant to me to have succeeded. Not only for the obvious reason that it looked like I’d saved the farm, for a short time anyway, but also because it proved that I could win my battles in the adult world of post-war Wirrawee, against the movers and shakers and lawyers and developers and sharks.

It gave me more hope that I could make a go of things by myself.

I shouldn’t say by myself, because Gavin was doing it too, and it was Gavin who seemed to understand how much it meant to get that letter of resignation from Mr Sayle. When I showed it to him he ran around the kitchen three times waving it in the air and making noises like a train that’s trapped in a tunnel.

He then kissed me, which shocked both of us I think.

So now I’m in the kitchen looking around, one minute thinking, ‘This is mine, I’m in charge, I own it all, it’s my kitchen, my house, my farm,’ and the next minute I’m, ‘Oh my God I’m too young, this is the scariest thing that’s ever happened, I can’t do this.’

Can I do it? ‘I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.’

Well, I’m not a train, and anyway, even a train can be derailed by a landslide. Or blown up. I’m just me, just Ellie, sitting at the kitchen table, trying to make my life work, barely holding it together some days, some days feeling too big a flood of grief for the house to hold, but some days feeling pride and strength.

I know my life’s different to other people’s but everyone’s life is different to everyone else’s. All I can do is keep living it, keep moving it forward every day I can. Lots of days it’s three steps forward, four steps back. If at the end of every month I’m a step or two ahead – well, I’ll settle for that.