by John Marsden
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 s
abotaged 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.
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.’