by John Marsden
We drove straight through the CBD. It was a bigger mess than the suburbs. I didn’t know if the damage had been done by the enemy during the invasion, or by the Kiwi air attacks after it. But big bombs had been used. Tozer’s, the department store that had been three-storeys high, covering the best part of a block, now looked like it’d make a good car park. The back wall of the electricity building was still standing, but there was nothing else of Stratton’s biggest building.
The saddest sight was the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. It had been a beautiful old stone church, quiet and peaceful, with glowing stained-glass windows. I wouldn’t have liked to be standing near when it was blown up. Those huge stone blocks had been thrown around like bits of Lego. One of them was a hundred metres along the street, where it had fallen on the iron-railing fence of the Mackenzie Botanical Gardens.
We accelerated up the hill then turned abruptly right at the top. I suddenly realised where we were going. To the most obvious place: the prison. I almost smiled. Many times we’d been past its grim grey walls on the way to visit Grandma, but I guess no one had thought that I’d end up in it before I’d even finished school. What a disgrace. We’d never live it down.
Then the fear got hold of me again. I’d been hoping that we’d go to some camp, like the Wirrawee Showgrounds, and I’d already dreamed that we’d escape from there in a blaze of glory. But Stratton Prison was different. It was a maximum-security institution, designed for the toughest offenders. We wouldn’t be escaping.
Our convoy came to a halt at the huge steel doors of the prison. There was much shouting and slamming of car doors. Only the soldiers in our truck didn’t move, just sat there watching. An officer came and spoke to our driver through the window of the truck. The driver put the truck in gear and we began to move forward. The steel doors rolled silently aside and we drove through. They closed behind us just as quietly. We were in a dark concrete chamber, like a big garage, but completely bare. We only had to wait a second before a door at the other end opened and we drove on again. I glanced at the others. They were all sitting forward like me, as far as our cuffs would let us, gazing through the windscreen, wondering what horrors would be revealed.
What we saw was a vast area of buildings and lawns. A high fence enclosed the whole place, but it was like a little village inside; a village of concrete and wire and steel. There were covered walkways connecting the various buildings. They looked like extended aviaries, long cages that prisoners could be moved along without having any taste of the free air.
In the few open spaces were a swimming pool and two tennis courts, but I had the feeling we wouldn’t be getting much of a chance to use them.
The truck was only moving at walking pace, and it stopped now on a big bitumen square near a building marked ‘Administration’. I wondered who we’d be sharing Stratton Prison with – prisoners of war, or the ‘normal’ criminals from before the invasion: the murderers and rapists and bank robbers.
We continued to sit in the back of the truck and wait. I became aware of a lot of movement around us, and looking out the back I realised what it was. Soldiers were coming from different buildings. I could see fifteen or twenty of them. But they were not aggressive soldiers with rifles, coming to torture or shoot us. It took me a while to figure out their mood. But finally it hit me. They were tourists. They were spectators. At last I understood something that only the radio conversation with Lieutenant Colonel Finley had given any clue to: we were celebrities. This was like the arrest of Ned Kelly. Not that these people would have heard of Ned Kelly, but our capture was on about the same scale.
We sat there in shock as the soldiers crowded round the back of the truck, staring at us and talking to each other. Their voices amazed me. They were so hushed, like they were in church. They pointed to us and made comments, then people at the back of the crowd pushed their way through. They were all shoving and crowding, trying to get the best views.
I just hoped we wouldn’t get the same punishment as the Kelly gang. I cursed the Jackaroo. If we hadn’t been caught in it we might have been able to bluff, to pretend we were normal kids who’d been hiding in the bush since the invasion. But now we had no hope, especially when we weren’t getting any chance to put a story together, a story we could all stick to.
After twenty minutes sitting there shivering, being studied like specimens in the zoo, a senior officer appeared. He had more gold on him than you’d see in a jewellery shop window. The crowd parted and this man, a little guy with oiled black hair, walked up, took one look at us and rattled off a series of orders. Our guards jumped to their feet and started waving their rifles and yelling. I think they were trying to impress the officer. We didn’t have the spirit to resist any of them.
When we were untied we stumbled down from the back of the truck, one by one, and stood in a little group on the bitumen. They prodded us with rifles to get us into single file and marched us to one of the covered walkways. A guard with keys opened a gate and in we went, leaving the tourists behind.
When the gate was locked behind us we were marched along the walkway. I kept looking around trying to suss things out, but there wasn’t much to see. Every few metres we passed rooms but it was hard to tell what they were used for. Obviously some, the ones with steel bars in small windows set into the doors, were cells, but a lot seemed to be just offices or storerooms. One looked like a lunchroom for the warders; another was a control room, with video monitors and telephones and people sitting at desks looking at screens with lots of green and red flashing lights. We went through another gate, waiting as it was unlocked for us and locked behind us, then we turned left and straggled along to a low fawn-coloured building that was sealed off by yet another gate.
When we had passed through that gate we found ourselves in our new home. This was E Wing, the maximum-security section of the maximum-security prison. In peacetime it was the home of serial killers. Well, maybe that’s what we had become. Whether we deserved to be there or not, our lives were now out of our control. Whether we lived or died would be decided by others.
Chapter Twenty-three
At that point I was separated from my friends, and marched to a little concrete room. From the glimpses I’d had of the other cells I’d say they were all identical. Mine was five paces by four and pretty bare. There was a bed, low to the ground and on a solid base, so that nothing could be hidden under it, I guess. There was a toilet and washbasin, both of which worked, as I quickly, and with relief, found out. Only cold water in the washbasin – and it was freezing – but I was grateful to have that much. A desk and chair were the only other furniture and they were fixed to the floor by big steel bolts. All the furniture was gleaming white but the walls were a light pink. The bed was neatly made, as though it had been waiting for me. I checked it out. The sheets were striped flannelette and the bedspread was a cheap white cotton thing with a crisscross holey pattern.
I had the trivial thought that at last I’d be able to sleep in a proper bed again. I couldn’t imagine how long it had been since I’d done that.
But there was nothing else in the cell. It was the coldest, barest, starkest, most boring room I’d ever been in. There wasn’t even a light switch. The power must have been controlled from outside. There were two lights, both set in the ceiling, both covered by thick glass that I guessed was unbreakable. When I was put in there the lights were on, and the room was almost unbearably bright. Later I found that when the lights were off it was almost unbearably black.
My eyes ranged around, trying to find something to look at, to break the monotony. In a corner of the ceiling, almost invisible in the dazzle of the lights, was a lens, like a thick glass eye. I guessed there was a camera behind it, and remembering how I’d just used the dunny I blushed with embarrassment.
With much rattling of locks and clatter of mechanical parts the door was unlocked, and three guards came in. All were women, one in officers’ uniform, the other two in soldiers’ gear.
The officer had a handgun at her waist in a highly polished leather holster, and her offsiders carried handguns which they held pointed at me. I still couldn’t believe how respectfully – well, fearfully – they were treating us.
Although none of them seemed to speak English they made it clear what they wanted. I had to get undressed and they searched my clothes, emptying the pockets, then carefully checking the hems and linings. They were so thorough. When they’d finished they started on me. That was embarrassing and painful, but I put up with it. Not that I had a choice. Then they let me get dressed again. I thought I’d start to try my luck, so I mimed eating, to show that I wanted food, but they didn’t react at all. When I was dressed they left, taking the contents of my pockets with them. I realised numbly that I’d now lost everything, even my little bear, Alvin, that Lee had retrieved for me from the wreckage of the Harvey’s Heroes campsite. Alvin had survived that, but it looked like he wouldn’t survive this.
I lay on the hard bed. It did feel funny to have a bed under me again. I wondered if anyone had ever made a cell aerobics video, and if so, where I could get a copy. Maybe I could make one and become a millionaire, selling it to mass murderers all around the world.
The next thing I knew I was waking up. I’d been asleep? How was that possible? What if I were about to be executed and I’d wasted the last few hours of my life by sleeping? How stupid and tragic was that?
But I’d been woken by sounds from the cell door again. The lights were still on and they were hurting my eyes. But a smell was coming in that had me sitting up in excitement. I realised I was about to be fed. I couldn’t believe my luck. One of the female soldiers came in carrying a tray, while the other two stood at the door covering her with their guns. She put the tray on the desk and went out again without looking at me. I hardly noticed her. I was still barely awake but I hobbled across to the desk and sat on the white chair. The cold metal woke me in a hurry. I peered at the plates and cup. There was a bowl of boiled rice and a plate with three small pieces of steamed fish. Another plate held two slices of dry white bread. The only colour contrast came from the cup, which held weak black coffee. It was not an attractive-looking meal, nor a big one, but it was something, and I was grateful enough for it. I took my time, chewing each mouthful dozens of times before swallowing, to make it last, and having sips of coffee in between. But the coffee was only lukewarm, as was the rice and fish, so it wasn’t too good. We’d eaten better meals out in the bush, rough and ready though those meals were.
Still, the fact that they were prepared to feed me was encouraging, suggesting they weren’t about to kill me straight away. I ate everything, then – I swear this is true – with a guilty look at the camera, I licked the plate. Yes, Ellie the Fearless was embarrassed to be seen with bad table manners. I think that’s when I knew for sure I wasn’t a natural born terrorist.
After that there was just nothing to do. I tapped on the walls a few times but got no answer. Every half hour or so a face appeared at the inspection panel in the door and stared at me. I didn’t know what to do with myself. The camera made it worse, not knowing whether someone was watching every move. At one stage – probably about midmorning, there was no way of telling – I caught myself actually wishing something would happen. Then I realised that any something that happened was bound to be bad, so I started wishing nothing would happen. I lay on the bed again and stared up at the ceiling.
One of the awful things was the silence in the cell. It must have been well soundproofed. From time to time I’d hear a door slam but that was the only sound that penetrated. I hummed to myself, then started singing under my breath, just to make a little noise. I wondered how long I’d spend in the cell and how long it’d take before I went mad. I’m a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that’s me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I’d die; I don’t know what of, I just knew I’d die.
At lunchtime the breakfast tray was taken away and a lunch tray put in its place. The food was much the same: rice and dry bread, but they’d added about half a cupful of curried meat and a small apple with ugly black spots on it.
‘Dear God,’ I thought, ‘how long can I last?’ I could feel a terrible dark depression slowly moving into me, not like any depression I’d had before, more like a physical thing, as if some dreadful black fog was drifting into my landscape and wasn’t going to go away. It was a disturbing, uncomfortable feeling. I ate my lunch as slowly as I’d eaten my breakfast, thinking about my situation. I decided I had to get myself organised. If I was starting to sink into depression after a few hours, what would I be like after a week or a month or a year? People had told me how strong I was, and now I had to prove it. I knew that more than any other time in my life I was on my own. My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things. I remembered the poem Robyn had in her bedroom at Wirrawee, the one about the person saying how when she looked back along the beach she saw two sets of footprints, hers and God’s, except at the tough times, when there was only one set of footprints. And she says to God, ‘How come at the times when I most needed you, you weren’t there?’ And God answers, ‘My child, I was there. Those footprints were mine; I made them when I carried you.’
When I’d first read the poem I’d thought it was nice, but that was all. It was only now, when I needed it, that the poem became important to me. During the time I spent in the cell, that poem became about the most important possession I had.
I decided to divide the time between meals into shifts. I had no way of telling the time, because they’d taken my watch. And in the cell I couldn’t tell day from night. So meals were the only measure I had. I decided I’d spend time on physical activities, and time on mental, and time on creative. I started with the physical, because I guess I’m a physical kind of person. My first session of cell aerobics consisted of stretching exercises, followed by a dance of my own invention, which had a lot of stepping backwards and forwards. I had to avoid anything that would aggravate my knee, because it was still tender and swollen. But apart from that I went OK. The worst thing was that the air was not fresh enough. There was so little new air coming in. Normally it didn’t matter much, but as soon as I started working out I used it all up. Within sixty seconds I was sweating heavily.
After that I made my brain sweat a bit. I went through some Maths, multiplying fractions in my head – three-eighths by two-thirds equals a quarter, that sort of thing – then went on to Social Ed, mentally listing things like the three main types of erosion, the major causes of erosion, the definitions of terminal moraines, stuff like that. That part was all memory work.
I also set out to remember the words of four different songs. That was quite fun. I chose ‘Public Friends’, ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’, ‘Sitting on the Dock of the Bay’, and ‘Reason for it All’. I deliberately chose ones that were a real variety, some from my parents’ tapes, some from my CDs. It was amazing how when I worked at it, when I made myself go over the songs four or five times, more and more bits came back into my memory. By the time I’d finished I’d remembered nearly all of them, ‘Reason for it All’ giving me the most trouble. ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’ wasn’t too hard.
Quite a lot of time had passed, or so it seemed to me. I’d almost stopped being obsessed with thoughts of imprisonment and death, which was good. So I was taken by surprise when I heard the locks on my door being worked open again. I didn’t think it could be tea time already, and I was right. When the door opened, two men in uniform were standing there, with two women behind them. They motioned for me to get up from the bed, which I did. They then stood back, inviting me to step out from the cell. I walked into the corridor, beginning to tremble uncontrollably. Was this my death? Had I spent my last afternoon of life trying to think of the words to ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’? Was I going to die without the chance to say good
bye to my family, my friends?
My escort fell in around me and we started along the corridor. For the first few steps I was so frightened I could hardly walk, but by the time we reached the first security gate I was in more of a rhythm and moving a bit more easily.
We marched back past the cage, through the gate on my right that we’d come in before. We walked almost the full length of the prison, stopping at a light green building on the left. All the colours in this place seemed to be mild, pastels. This building looked a bit like the new library at Wirrawee. It seemed to have more glass than the other buildings in the compound. There was a guard on the door who ticked a list on a clipboard before letting us in. The four guards and I marched inside. It was more like a doctor’s waiting room than a library: a row of chairs and a coffee table. All it needed was a stack of magazines. But none of us sat down. We stood there uncomfortably. I said to the guards: ‘What are we waiting for?’ I didn’t expect them to answer; I was just trying to kid them that I wasn’t scared. And they didn’t answer. I don’t even know if they understood English.
We waited at least half an hour. It was incredibly boring. My greatest hope was that it really was a doctor’s waiting room. It was possible that they would give us a medical examination. That would have been normal prison procedure in peacetime, surely. Maybe they would still do it.
But no, I couldn’t be that lucky. A door opened along the corridor to my left and the guards prodded me down towards it. All my terror returned in an instant and I wallowed along as though I were a waterlogged boat in a heavy sea. Sick deep in my stomach, I turned at the doorway and stepped across the threshold.