Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (28 page)

I’m not sure how long Judy sat there. I could see she was completely baffled, and I actually felt sorry for her, embarrassed that I was giving her such a hard time. But what could I do?

Finally she put both her hands flat on the desk in front of her, palms down, and gazed at me. ‘Amber, I don’t know what else I can say to you. We have occasionally had spies and informers planted in the camp. I certainly hope you’re not one of them. I don’t think you are, but I’m bound to warn you, if you are, you’re in a very dangerous situation, and I suggest you get out of the place again, as fast as you can arrange it.’

I shook my head slowly, and keeping my voice expressionless I said: ‘I’m not a spy or an informer.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can believe that.’

It seemed another interview was at an end. I got up to go. Still facing her I asked: ‘If I wanted to get information on some friends, people I knew before the war, how
would I
go about it?’

‘We’ve just opened a tracing service, in Tent 29, with the help of the Red Cross. Go and see them.’

‘Thank you.’

I still didn’t know how to do it. If I turned up at Tent 29 and asked about my parents, Judy would hear about it within three minutes. All those media appearances we’d done in New Zealand, about a hundred years ago it seemed like, meant that my name was too well known. To be honest, one of the weirdest side-effects of the war was that we’d become famous. When I’d dreamed before the war of being famous, I’d never thought of it being for this kind of stuff.

What it meant was that Judy, and anyone else who could even spell IQ, would work out who I was. And if one person knew, as far as I was concerned, a thousand people would know.

I worried about it all through lunch. But it was still too hard to concentrate. It wasn’t just my own state of mental white-out; it was the noise of the dining hall. I guess any time you get one hundred females and nine hundred males in a small space it’s likely to be noisy.

So I kept walking, past the last line of tents, to the first fence. I was now at the extreme end of the camp. Beyond the fence was the bare earth of the fifty-metre no-go zone, with a guard tower to my right, and another to my left. I stood gazing out at the wall of the quarry. I wanted to be alone but I knew the guards were watching from their towers. If I looked up I could see them: automatic carbines pointing towards me, bored faces over the edge of the railing, eyes hidden by dark glasses. I didn’t dare go right to the fence, even though I think it was legal, but I hadn’t been there long enough to know all the rules.

Suddenly the sense of loss for my friends overwhelmed me. I’d been fighting it, denying it, ignoring it, but I couldn’t any longer. I didn’t know who to mourn most, and my feelings got torn between the four of them. Growing up in a small community, like we all had, everyone and everything becomes so significant. There’s nothing that doesn’t matter. A tree falls, a garden grows, a baby’s born,
an
old person dies. And it all goes to the heart of you. It rearranges you. The bigger the event, the more you’re rearranged.

But somehow that wasn’t enough for Homer, Lee,
Fi
, Kevin. It wasn’t enough for Chris or Robyn or Corrie. It wasn’t enough for me. Old people could accept the way things happened, but we couldn’t.

When I set out to write what we’d done in the war, it was like a public thing. We wanted to know that we’d made a difference on a big scale. I wrote it because we wanted to be remembered, because we wanted to believe that our lives had some meaning. We wanted to know that we hadn’t passed through the world unchanged, and that we hadn’t left the world unchanged. We didn’t want to come and go from this planet without leaving a mark. Looking around me sometimes, even before the war back at school, I’d had the feeling that the only mark some people were going to leave on the world was a
skidmark
.

As time went on, writing became my private thing, done for myself.
A habit, a compulsion, a way of remembering and understanding.
Writing it down made it real.
But now I thought, standing at the
fence, that
I had to put it on paper because that was how I could tell other people about my friends, their lives and their deaths.

I’d changed my mind quite a bit about what it meant to have a big audience. The only people who really matter are the ones who are close to you, who know you as you are, and love you as you are. It didn’t really take seven deaths to teach me that. But I still think
it’s
wrong the way people who live and die quietly don’t get noticed. I don’t know why we mourn the death of a celebrity more than the death of a postman or a Papuan baby or a Bolivian widow. ‘Any man’s death diminishes me. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. No man is an island.’ The instructor on Outward Bound kept quoting that.

When I was much younger I’d been reading the paper over Mum’s shoulder. I pointed to a little paragraph with the headline: ‘Over the Limit’. It said something like: ‘A brewery worker in Osaka Japan drowned yesterday in a vat of beer. Police said the man may have already been unconscious when he fell into the vat. It was some hours before his workmates noticed he was missing.’

I giggled when I read it. My mother didn’t giggle. She said: ‘That’s terrible, and sad.’

I felt that I’d done something wrong by giggling. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘A man died. His family will be crying for him today. His friends will be missing him. There is a great emptiness in their lives right now. It’s wrong for the newspaper to try to turn it into a joke.’

Sometimes I think my mother is the wisest person I’ve ever met.

The last thing that died on our farm before the invasion was Boris, this feral peacock who had flown in one afternoon, decided he liked the place, and stayed. It wasn’t quite as unlikely as it sounds, because there was an old retired guy a few
k’s
down the road who had heaps of peacocks and quails and pigeons and stuff like that, and Boris had obviously done a midnight flit. Dad rang the guy and told him we had one of his escapees, but the guy didn’t care.

Boris was a complete lunatic of a bird. He had an obsession with houses. Every time we left a door open Boris popped inside and
pooed
all over the floor. I hated cleaning it up. I hated Boris. One evening I found him in the house and chased him out but a bit later I realised he’d roosted on the lowest branch of the pine tree outside my window. I mean, we’re talking about a metre off the ground. I thought, ‘Well, that’s no good, because a
fox’ll
get him’, so I tried to lift him and put him up higher. He was incredibly heavy, but somehow I got him to the next branch. As soon as I let go he crashed straight to the ground. It was terrible. I’ve never seen a bird do that, before or since. Maybe at night he just shut down all his systems, including his sense of balance. I thought he’d broken his neck. He hadn’t, but it took two of us, Mum and me, to get him into a bole in the tree where he wouldn’t fall out again.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, one morning I saw a trail of Boris’ feathers leading across a paddock. I followed them for a while, until I got to the ones that were red with blood, and then I knew I wasn’t going to see Boris ever again. It must have been a huge struggle for a fox to get him away, but the fox had won.

And I felt terrible about it. I felt so sad for Boris. Even though I didn’t like him, even though he was a complete dag, I wanted him not to be dead. Why? I don’t know. Just because he was such a proud, stupid, beautiful bird, with his own annoying personality and his own weird lonely lifestyle.

Life is just so precious and strange and beautiful and sad and special, I guess that’s all I’m saying, and I hate to see it thrown away or taken away or crushed and destroyed.

I still couldn’t shed any tears that day for Homer and
Fi
and Lee and Kevin though. I gradually found myself sinking lower and lower on the ground until I was a little ball lying there. I suppose I must have looked like those ultrasounds of babies in the womb, the way I was curled up.
Weird.
I don’t know how long I was there. Two or three
hours
maybe. I really don’t know.

Suddenly it seemed like Sunday was over, and I felt furious that I hadn’t enjoyed it. I’d wasted my day of rest.

But my Sunday wasn’t quite over. That night I had a visitor. Judy had decided I needed a medical, so Dr Muir made a house call.

He took me by surprise. I’d never expected to see a male prisoner in our area, but he had the freedom to wander around. Likewise the guards let us go through the male area if we were going to the camp hospital, and if we were escorted by Judy.

Dr Muir was quite nice actually. Young guy, very blond, with pale skin and pale eyes and ginger eyebrows, slow and careful in the questions he asked and the way he examined me. He spent a lot of time checking my eyes and ears and mouth, in particular. He didn’t have much equipment, just a stethoscope and a thermometer and a rubber hammer for belting my knees, to test my reflexes.

‘So will I live?’ I
asked,
when he’d finished.

‘You’re in better shape than you should
be,
considering what you’ve been through. Your hospital records arrived today, much to my surprise. You can never tell what’ll turn up in this war. Judging by your test results, you should be dead. But you’re very fit. That would have helped.’

He looked at me curiously. ‘Judy is quite puzzled by you.
Calls you the mystery girl.’

‘Nothing mysterious about me.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that. You’ve been in this place nearly a week, and still no-one knows anything about you. I’d call that pretty
mysterious,
the way the grapevine works around here.’

He made me even more nervous, saying that. I glanced at
Issa
, who was sitting in the entrance to the tent, her back to me. I didn’t know if she could hear or not. The last thing I wanted was for people to be talking about me. That was terribly dangerous, in a place that thrived on gossip.

Issa
and Monique had gone through a stage of being really curious, asking a heap of questions. When I survived that, they pretty much gave up, like they realised I didn’t want to talk and wasn’t about to start. That would have been all right, except it put a wall between us: I felt left out, like I couldn’t be admitted to their friendship full-on. They were great to me, and I tried hard in every other way, like doing most of the work to keep the tent clean, but they were a bit reserved with me.

A week later I was sweeping the area around the back of the dining hall. It was a nice day and sweeping was quite a good job. For the previous six days we’d been loading bricks onto trucks. My hands were blistered and raw and bruised. The skin had been rubbed off them in a dozen different places. Every half an hour or so one of my fingers got crushed or pinched or scraped, until they were twice their normal size, looking like colourful pork sausages.

Maybe the biggest problem was that the bricks were ideal for the guards to use as weapons. A girl working right next to me had been hit so hard on the side of the head with a brick that her eye had been pushed out of its socket. She was still in the camp hospital. If the guards didn’t like what you were doing, they’d chuck bricks at you from ten metres away. You had to watch them the whole time.

I’d volunteered to do the sweeping. It was Judy’s policy for everyone to do some work on Sundays to keep the camp neat and tidy. I didn’t mind, except holding the broom hurt my hands. Judy said a clean camp was good for morale, and it probably was. At least this was one of those mindless jobs where you could think about other stuff. For once I was thinking more about the future than the past. I was dreaming of being back on the farm with my parents, after the war, when everything would be back to normal. I’d be on the motorbike, accelerating through wet cowpats to splatter my father as he followed on his bike, I’d be creosoting the new posts for the cattle race and ignoring the warnings on the drum about how carcinogenic it was, I’d be winching the Land Rover out of the river as fast as I could, before Dad found I’d taken it ‘where I should have known better’.

Of course in dreaming about the future I was really dreaming about the past. Sometimes it’s impossible to separate the two. I guess it’s always impossible. It’s like the future is a building you put up on the foundations of the past.

I’d been sweeping for half an hour or so, and had worked my way around to the front of the dining hall, where already a few dozen people were waiting for lunch. Although the food was so utterly disgusting, meals were still a big deal in the camp.
Partly because they broke the monotony, partly because you got to see the men.

Suddenly my past caught up with me. A woman’s voice screamed: ‘Oh my God!
Ellie!’

My head whipped up like a Jack Russell that’s seen a rabbit. I felt my eyes almost pop, the hair on my head stand up like a
willy-willy
had hit it. I stood holding the broom and gazing at the woman as she advanced on me. I didn’t even recognise her. That was the biggest joke.

‘Ellie,’ she kept saying, as if once wasn’t enough. ‘Ellie Linton! Oh I don’t believe it! Ellie! Oh, everyone’s been talking about you! And you’re actually here!’

She had been a big woman once, you could see that, and it hit me then who she was. Mrs Samuels, who’d done the
mail
run out past our place for years. The trouble was
,
you rarely saw the person behind the wheel of the little station wagon delivering the letters, so it was no wonder I hadn’t recognised her. Plus she’d lost weight of course, like everyone else in this war.

I dropped the broom and held out my hands to stop her. But it was too late. Already curious people were moving in on us, including
Issa
and Monique. I heard someone say: ‘Her name’s Amber.’ Mrs Samuels rounded on her with all the pride of someone who’s just bought the most expensive heifer at the annual sales. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know who this is? You know the young people who blew up the ships in Cobbler’s Bay?
And the ammunition factory at Point Nelson.
You’ve got a very famous person here.’