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exploded. ‘Since when do you decide whether you’re going to let me stay here or not?’
    He pushed the chair back about a metre. Gavin retreated towards the pantry. Fi stayed where she was but she kept her head down.
    ‘That’s the trouble with you, Homer, you think everything on this goddamn planet should be under your control. That no-one should eat breathe sleep or shit unless it’s with your permission. You know how long my family’s been here? You know what we’ve been through to keep this place? Homer, my family’s eaten dirt and dug dams with their bare hands to keep it going. You think I’m going to walk out on it now, after my parents died to defend it? I tell you what, Homer, I’m not quitting. I’m here to stay.’
    ‘Go Ellie!’ Gavin yelled.
    I looked at him in astonishment. How could he have lip-read all of that?
    ‘Have you got the slightest idea what we’re talking about?’ I asked him.
    ‘Sure,’ he replied straight away. ‘Homer wants you to quit the farm and you’re saying “No way”.’
    I shook my head. I never could work out how Gavin understood so much of what was going on, but he had his ways. Maybe he had an aerial on his head, buried in his thick mop of hair.
    ‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked him.
    Since my parents got killed, no-one had mentioned the problem of Gavin. I hadn’t thought much about it myself. There’d been no time for that. Everything was still too fresh, too raw, too recent. Was I going to be left to look after him myself? In this new world, even that was possible. There were so many orphans, so many homeless kids. If there was a scale that gave a ‘one’ to kids living in dumpsters and a ‘ten’ to the Brady Bunch, Gavin still rated a three or a four with just me to take care of him, no parents of his own, and my mum and dad, his foster-parents, killed in a massacre.
    ‘Stay here,’ he said promptly.
    ‘But it’s dangerous,’ I said.
    ‘Life’s dangerous,’ he said, with a funny little shrug of his shoulders.
    It was a breath-stopping moment. I realised how much I underestimated Gavin sometimes. It was too easy to forget that this boy, with nothing but the strength of his personality, had not only survived many months of the war in the ruins of Stratton but had held together a group of other feral kids under his leadership. He was something special.
    ‘Well,’ I said to Homer and Fi, ‘you heard him.’
    Fi looked distressed, Homer grumpy. They both began talking at once, in urgent voices. ‘Ellie, you’ve got to listen to reason –’ Homer started saying. ‘Ellie, you might want to think about this a bit longer –’ Fi said.
    For the first time since the death of my parents I felt real strength. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m staying right here. I don’t care what I do. If I have to fight I’ll fight. Don’t you understand? You two, of all people?’ I felt like I didn’t need to shout anymore. I was certain now. ‘Homer, Fi, my roots go as deep into this earth as any old redgum. That creek down there is my life’s blood. These paddocks, I know them like I know my own skin. I can take you to the jumper ant nest in Nellie’s, I can show you where the lichen on the southern side of the fenceposts is red and the eastern side is yellow. You know that gully over there beyond the shearing shed? Those willows in it are the ones my grandfather planted to stop the soil erosion. I know where the pink fingers flower and the coral-peas, and the sundews, and I know how to make them catch crumbs of bread.’
    ‘The flowers?’ Fi said, looking startled, but I wasn’t going to let her interrupt me. I could hear that I was talking wildly but I couldn’t shut up.
    ‘I know the kind of moo a calf makes when it’s got bracken poisoning. I know the cow whose udder looks good but whose milk is poor. I know the way Romneys graze differently to Polwarths. I can tell you how many bags of seed potatoes you need to the acre. Dammit, I can