Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (27 page)

At last it was over. We gathered up the tools and dragged them to a little shed. Then we began the march back. I didn’t think I would make it. I fell over four times in the last kilometre, and each time
Issa
or Monique helped me up. I remembered how I used to be the strong one, and wondered if after a few weeks of this I’d be as tough as these women. I wondered if I’d ever get any strength from a diet of mouldy oranges and canned tomatoes. I remembered how I’d almost laughed when the officer said I had thirty years. I wasn’t laughing now. I didn’t see how I could survive six months of this, let alone another day.

We got back to the tent. I collapsed onto my bed, and I mean collapsed. But I did have enough energy to ask Monique: ‘Are there any showers?’

She and
Issa
both looked at me.

‘Didn’t you notice the smell when you moved in?’
Issa
asked.

I blushed. ‘Well, yes, I guess ... but I don’t really notice it now.’

They laughed, but like all the laughter in Camp 23, it wasn’t very funny. Not a lot of sweetness in it.

‘That’s because you smell so bad yourself, with that mud. We’re all pretty rank.’
Issa
was like that, direct and honest. She’d been studying architecture before she got arrested.

‘So aren’t there any showers?’

‘There are.
If you want to use them.’

‘Why wouldn’t I want to use them? Are they cold? Right now I wouldn’t care if they were melted ice.’

‘We keep ourselves smelling bad,’
Issa
said. ‘It’s the only contraceptive we’ve got.’

It took me a bit of time to work out what she was saying,
then
I started to figure it. ‘You mean ... the guards?’

‘You got it, baby,’ Monique said.

‘You deliberately make yourself smell bad?’

‘There are women here who rub cow shit over themselves,’
Issa
said, staring straight at me, like she was daring me to say it was disgusting. Or maybe she was seeing how tough I was, whether I was going to be tough enough to survive Camp 23.

‘These guards are bad news,’ Monique said, joining in. Don’t ever get in a situation where you’re on your own, if you can help it. They’re dangerous.’

‘But most of the ones I’ve seen are women.’

‘Yeah.
But there’re eleven males. And some of the female ones don’t mind helping them. You’re young and good-looking, and that’s a dangerous combination around here.’

I shivered, feeling again the stain of Colonel Long’s hand on my leg. That was another thing I hadn’t mentioned to Monique and
Issa
. I was glad, that I hadn’t. Compared to what had been happening in this camp, Colonel Long sounded pretty small-time.

I felt very shy with Monique and
Issa
. Apart from the
ferals
, and Ryan, who didn’t really count, I hadn’t been with any new people for a long time. I certainly hadn’t been with any girls near my age, except
Fi
.

They started telling me the facts of life in Camp 23. They could see I didn’t want to say much, so they did the talking. They explained the camp was for ‘
recalcitrants
’, which seemed to mean ‘hardliners’. I knew that by now most of the population on the outside were back in normal houses, even if they were small and crowded. They were doing all the boring and dirty jobs for their new bosses. So I’d already figured out that anyone in this camp was likely to be special in one way or another. When I’d arrived I thought they might be crims; like, bank robbers and rapists. But as I listened I realised that they all seemed to have done stuff like me, but in different ways.

I already knew
Issa’s
crime. Monique’s had been to crash a car when she was the driver for a general. The general got two broken
legs,
Monique got three broken ribs and a fifteen-year jail sentence. She was twenty, and had a baby boy who’d been killed in a New Zealand air raid. She cried in her sleep every night.

Monique had been a trainee journalist on a little country newspaper in
Malton
.

I’d been lucky in my
tentmates
. But in the middle of their conversation I fell into a sleep so heavy that they had to pull me off my bed onto the floor to wake me for tea. I don’t know why they bothered. The entire meal consisted of dry white bread with spots of mould all over it. Oh, and sorry, I forgot to mention the hot water with a few tea-leaves at the bottom of the cup.

The thing about Camp 23 that was different from any thing or any place else I’d been in my life was that here soldiers were vicious and cruel all the time, without any reason. Just for the hell of it. Sure, there was a group of boys at school who could be horrible to someone they didn’t like. But it was a quantum leap (whatever that means) to the guards of Camp 23. They bashed and battered people because ... well, that was it, there was no because. They just did it.

I saw terrible things. On my second day at the quarry, shovelling mud, a girl near me got mud pushed down her throat by a guard who decided he didn’t like her attitude. He made her swallow, I don’t know, about a litre of the stuff, until she lay on the ground spewing and choking. He walked away laughing.

I took my lead from the others, like the day before, and didn’t try to interfere. I asked
Issa
that night: ‘Why doesn’t anyone do anything?’

‘Because we don’t want to get our arms broken.’

‘OK.’

Sometimes ‘OK’ is the only thing you can say.

‘You know that tall girl on crutches? Vanessa? The reason she’s on crutches is that she tried to stop them raping a friend of hers. So the guards broke her leg by holding her down with her head on one chair and her feet on another, and then jumping on her leg till the bone snapped.’

The next day, when a girl was pistol-whipped across the face until her mouth was a red hole in a bleeding mess of flesh I kept my head down. I felt sick, I felt sweat break out all over my body, I felt tears fill my eyes until they dropped one by one into the sticky black mud, but I kept my head down.

Issa
and Monique kept me going. Nothing else could have. I was just about ready to give up, not once but a hundred times. While I was in 23
Issa
and Monique were stronger than me.
Indomitable.

It showed in a hundred ways. A hug when you’d just walked past something brutal and awful. A quick comment like, ‘Come on, Amber, don’t let them get to you’, when I was struggling to keep my wheelbarrow moving along the plank.
A joke when you looked at your plate and saw the crap that the guards called food.

We didn’t have a lot of laughs though. There weren’t many merry moments. The only truly fun episode I saw was when a guard accidentally shot his foot off. A rabbit suddenly sprinted across the floor of the quarry where we were working, and the guard tried to get his pistol out of his holster so he could have some target practice. Unfortunately for him he was in such a hurry that the gun went off while he was still pulling it out. God he screamed. That was what we called entertainment in Camp 23: someone shooting himself.

For once, the bleakness I felt inside matched the bleakness around me. The pain I felt over the deaths of my friends got lost in a more general pain, the pain of being alive in this terrible wasteland, a desert of the human spirit.

Nothing here was fun.
Nothing.
The
food, the work, the mud, the guards, even
the toilet facilities. The Hell I’d lived in for more than a year was a distant memory now. This place was called Camp 23, but it really was hell.

All week I looked forward to Sunday, the day of rest. In fact
Issa
and Monique and I spent a lot of time planning how to spend the precious spare time.

One thing we didn’t need to worry about much was washing clothes. I hated the smell of my clothes and my body, the salty musty smell, and I hated the deep grime in my skin, that looked like it was sandblasted in there, but I realised the others were right: better to be dirty and smelly than the alternative.

My first Sunday all I wanted to do was sleep. God I looked forward to it. But instead, just after breakfast,
Issa
came and got me.

‘Judy wants to see you.’

‘Judy?’

‘You’ve met Judy. She’s the one who brought you to our tent. She’s the Senior Prisoner. That’s one of the changes they’ve brought in recently. We were allowed to appoint someone to be in charge of us, and to be our spokesperson. She’s the one the Administration deals with now.’

Judy turned out to be a tough proposition.
Issa
and Monique had accepted my story about the train wreck so easily it hadn’t occurred to me that I might have trouble with anyone else. But Judy was different. I told her the same stuff I’d told
Issa
, but right away she started picking holes in it. I suddenly realised I’d have to be very careful. I didn’t know then that she’d been a lawyer before the war, but I should have guessed.

‘So you left the train and it derailed a few moments later?’

She didn’t need to add: ‘That’s some coincidence.’ It was in her eyes and the tone of her voice.

‘Well, yes, not just moments later. It was a few minutes after I’d got off.’

‘It must have been very close if the soldiers from the train chased you and caught you.’

‘I guess it was close, but not that close.’

I was embarrassed by such a lame answer.

‘What made the train derail?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was sabotage. I think there have been some Kiwis operating around Cavendish, blowing up stuff.’

‘Was there an explosion?’

‘Ah, yeah, I think there was, yeah, well a sort of explosion. It was hard to tell.’

I knew I wasn’t doing this too well, but I was so mentally exhausted, and this woman had taken me by surprise. She’d derailed me.

‘Something blew up, but I’m not sure if it was before the thing derailed or as it derailed. Like, whether something in the train blew up when it left the line. Look, does it really matter?’

‘Well, it could. I deal with the Administration here, and they’re very different to the guards. If a prisoner’s been unfairly convicted we prepare a submission to try to get them released again. We’re actually making some headway on a couple of cases. Anyway,’ she smiled, ‘at the very least we’re annoying them, and keeping them busy in another area. It’s part of our campaign of harassment.
Which of course is why most of us are here in the first place.

‘Now tell me, you say you were living out in the country, ever since the invasion?’

‘Yes.’

The interrogation was back on again.

‘Where exactly?’

‘Uh, sort of, through
Wirrawee
.’

‘Really?
That’s
funny,
I thought that area was very strictly controlled.’

‘Oh yeah, closer into town, sure, but where we were, it’s pretty slack.’

‘When you say “we”, you mean you and your parents?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you were all allowed to stay out there? Together?’

I suddenly realised how stupid I’d been. Not only because my story was falling apart but by what I’d just said, and by sticking to my false name, I’d missed out on the one thing I was desperate to do: ask for information about my parents. I sat there like an asthmatic in a basketball game, gasping for breath.
Judy just watched, her head cocked.
It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

‘Well,’ I said finally, ‘we got separated a while back. I was actually looking for them when I took the train ride.’

‘We might be able to help you there. We have people from all over. We could find someone in the camp who’s seen them.’

I groaned inwardly. This was getting worse and worse. My big chance to track them
down,
and I was making a mess of it.

All I could think of was the old line I’d used so many times at
Wirrawee
High.

‘Can I be excused please?’ I mumbled. ‘I don’t feel well.’

‘Of course.’
She stood up. ‘I can see you’ve been through a lot. This war’s certainly taken its toll on all of us.’

I really did feel awful as I left. She seemed like a nice and capable person. I hated having to lie to her.

Back at the tent there were more questions. ‘What did she want? What did you say to her? What did she say about your sentence?’

Too many questions.
I was sick of questions. Suddenly I felt sick of everything. I turned my head into the pillow and scrabbled and kicked my legs until they were under the blanket. I suppose it must have looked pretty stupid. Like an echidna digging itself into the earth. But the questions weren’t over yet. A few hours later, just before lunch, I got another message to go see Judy. I went with a lot of reluctance, dragging my feet like I was in the quarry pushing mud uphill. And no sooner was I sitting in her office than she went on the attack.

‘I’ve made a few enquiries, Amber. There seems to be no doubt that the train was sabotaged using a high-powered explosive.’

I didn’t answer, just sat staring dumbly at her.

‘There’s also a rumour that you may have been involved in an attack on a truck depot, where they suffered heavy casualties.

‘I don’t understand, Amber. If you managed to blow up an enemy train, at such a critical stage of the war, you would be regarded as a hero in this camp. Why do you think we’re all locked up? In our different ways, we’ve all opposed the invasion, resisted it,
fought
against it. Most of us haven’t done something as spectacular as destroying a train, but we’ve each done what we can.’

She sat back, waiting for me to say something. It was like she was inviting me to trust her. I couldn’t make my mind work. I kept pressing every button in my brain, but it was totally dead. I got no response. This wasn’t like a tractor with a flat battery in the middle of winter. Even that’ll turn over slightly. Even that’ll give a tired little whirr. I got nothing.