The Other Side of Dawn

by John Marsden

  ‘I wouldn’t say anyone slept well,’ Homer continued. ‘We were too scared, and we even spent an occasional moment wondering what might have happened to you. Of course we didn’t even notice you were missing for a long time, but eventually someone pointed out that we were one short.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I chucked a handful of sand at him.

  ‘When it got light we crawled further into the bush, where it looked safer. Our big worry was dogs. We knew no-one could see us from the air, and ground troops would have taken a month to find us, but dogs would have smelt Kevin in thirty seconds flat. I could smell him myself, a couple of kilometres away. Luckily no-one turned up, and when it got dark we set off for Cavendish again via the place we’d stashed our packs.’

  ‘We were bloody hungry by the time we got there,’ Kevin contributed.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll say. Not for the first time in this war, but we were feeling the strain. Especially without our trusty leader. We snuck up on the packs slowly, but there was no sign of anyone around. We were rapt that your pack was missing, even if you did have the last bag of licorice allsorts. We were a bit confused though. We figured, “If she’d had time to get her pack, she must have been feeling pretty safe, she must have lost the soldiers. But why wouldn’t she hang around and wait for us?” So we hung around and waited for you, but after a while it became obvious that this was going to end up as one of those “Unsolved Mysteries” on TV.’

  Homer left his tree and shuffled a bit closer to Fi, but she didn’t look at him.

  ‘We thought you might have grabbed your stuff because you’d seen a good target you could attack in a hurry,’ Lee said.

  ‘Actually when I think about it, someone did suggest you might have gone down to the train track,’ Homer said. ‘But there was no evidence you had. We didn’t know you’d gone off on a joy-ride, like it was Puffing Billy.’

  ‘I was sick of walking everywhere,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there seemed to be some problem with the train line, because although we hung there for a day and a half, we didn’t hear or see a single train go past. Eventually we hauled ass again, leaving a nice little love letter from Lee to you, that suggested a few meeting places in Cavendish, should we ever get there. I suppose the letter’s still sitting under the tree.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  I shifted into a more comfortable position, and found another gumleaf to tear into tiny pieces. ‘What did you do then?’ I asked.

  ‘After we gave up on you? We thought about detonating the train line, but it seemed a bit pointless with no traffic on it. It wasn’t a centre of gravity any more. I’m starting to form the impression that there may have been some damage done to it by an irresponsible young vandal, further up the line, but we didn’t know that at the time. So we just put our packs on our backs and started walking. We’ve walked a lot of kilometres in this war. I tell you, I don’t care what cars are going to cost now that the war’s over, I’m getting one, and once I’ve got it I’ll never walk anywhere again.’

  ‘They say there’ll be no new cars for sale for at least two years,’ Fi said. She rolled over on the sand and lay on her back, a couple of metres away from Homer again now.

  ‘Well I’ll get a bike. Anyway, we walked all the way to Cavendish, El, and it took a while. But the good thing was, we could see the effect of blowing up the servo. They had ten times more security along the road. Guys riding shotgun on the trucks, tanks escorting all the convoys, patrols racing backwards and forwards. Guess Ryan was right when he said we could tie up a lot of troops.

  ‘So we kept away from that and got to Cavendish about nine o’clock one night. Poor old Gavin’s legs were dropping off again. He was losing interest in the war pretty fast. Fi and Kevin and Gavin holed up in a Scout Hall in the first suburb we came to—Rennie Park it’s called—and Lee and I went for a bit of an explore.

  ‘It’s such a boring flat ugly city, Cavendish. I don’t care if I never go there again. We found one good target, a power station, and a couple of other possibles—a hotel they’d turned into some kind of officers’ club, another servo, and a bank. So we headed on back and convinced the others that blowing up a power station would make General Finley, or Colonel Finley as we naively called him then, very happy indeed. It didn’t take long to talk them into it.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by a power station?’ I asked.

  ‘Well I mightn’t have the right word. One of those big paddocks where they have massive power pylons, and the whole thing’s got a big fence around it.’

  ‘Oh OK. Good target all right.’

  ‘Reckon. The only problem was that as well as the fence, they had half-a-dozen soldiers guarding it. Which at least showed how much they valued the place. Convinced us all the more we should knock it off.’

  ‘Tough gig.’

  ‘Yeah. Well we worked out the coolest plan. Lee still had his uniform from the servo, so we decided we’d borrow a truck and Lee would drive it up to the front gate. He’d stop the truck a bit short, get out and go towards the sentry, holding a bunch of forms in his hand, like he was there on some big-time official mission. And at that moment we’d blow the truck sky high.’

  ‘Oh yeah? How’d you plan to do that?’

  ‘No problem,’ Kevin said. ‘Well, no major problem. As Lee got out he’d light a thirty-second fuse and start counting. He had to reach the sentry as he got to thirty. Then he’d dive off the bank as the truck exploded into smithereens, and we’d come over the slope beside the road, blasting away with every weapon we had. We’d have wiped them out before they’d stopped blinking.’

  ‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe you’re still alive to tell me about it.’

  ‘It was a great plan,’ Homer said firmly. ‘It would have worked.’ He wriggled closer to Fi and put a hand on hers, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Well, except every enemy soldier for ten k’s around would have come for us like bees at a honey-pot,’ she said.

  They’d obviously had this argument many times before.

  Homer shrugged. ‘Everyone agreed to it,’ he said to me. ‘Kevin and Fi did the charges while Lee and I went for a truck. We got one from a milk bar a couple of suburbs away. The driver left the keys in the ignition when he went inside to buy something. We just hopped in from the other side and took off. Good truck too. Just a nice size. It was a Nissan or something I think.’

  ‘Mitsubishi,’ Lee said.

  ‘Whatever. We kept to the back streets in case anyone followed us, or in case we ran into a patrol, but things were cool. I think everyone in Cavendish was so busy dealing with the D-Day stuff that normal life was suspended.

  ‘That’s what we thought, anyway. Maybe we convinced ourselves of that a bit too easily. We got back to the hall and parked the truck behind a shed, where you couldn’t see it from the road. But there was one thing we didn’t think of.’

  ‘Helicopter?’ I asked, being a smart-ass.

  Homer looked seriously annoyed. ‘Did someone tell you that?’ he asked suspiciously.

  I laughed. Fi took her hand back and smiled at me and said, ‘See? I told you we needed Ellie.’

  I got the impression this was the last thing Homer wanted to hear. He kept going with his story, but kind of grim-faced.

  ‘We heard the helicopter and we thought it’d just pass over on its way to somewhere, so we weren’t that worried. By the time we realised it wasn’t going away it was too late. I wouldn’t exactly say we panicked but we weren’t happy. The first thing was to get rid of the weapons and explosives. If we were going to be caught we didn’t want to have those on us. Kevin basically saved our butts. There was a stage at the end of the hall where they have Gang Shows and stuff I guess, and in the corner he’d found a little trapdoor that opened into a storage space under the stage. We shoved everything in there, then we dragged an old cupboard across to cover the trapdoor. Fi did a bit of dusting, so you couldn’t tell the cupboard had just been moved.

 
‘I mean, I know this probably sounds like half an hour’s work, but it literally took about a minute.

  ‘Then we were prepared to break out. I suppose we could have tried to keep the weapons and shoot our way out, but we just saw that as a fast route to suicide.

  ‘We squeezed open the back door; well at least I did, with the others looking over my shoulder. And I saw a very ugly sight. An enemy soldier had his face about one metre in front of me, with a bloody great rifle pointed up my nose.’

  ‘And at that moment,’ said Kevin, joining in, ‘the door at the other end crashed open and three soldiers came racing in. They smashed straight through the door, just like in the movies. And for us the war was over.’

  ‘It was awful,’ said Fi. ‘But it was almost a relief in a way. There was nothing we could do. And being caught wasn’t really our fault. I mean we shouldn’t have parked the truck there, but once we’d made the mistake we were dead ducks. At least we didn’t have to feel guilty about not shooting it out with them. They had us cold.’

  ‘And they didn’t find the explosives?’ I asked. ‘They couldn’t have, or you wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

  ‘Right,’ Homer said. ‘That was our only lucky break. We sweated while they were bringing our packs out. We had to wait outside, with our hands in the air, and we could hear them inside, kicking stuff around and generally vandalising the Scout Hall. Honestly, nothing’s sacred to these people. But they weren’t trying too hard. The place looked so bare and empty. There was a bit of gym equipment, and a box of old uniforms, and not much else. It was obvious we were just passing through.’

  ‘Is that what you told them?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, it was good because they fired all these questions at us while we were standing together under the trees, so we heard each other’s answers, and we knew what story to stick to. They started with Fi, because she’s so sweet and little, and she said we’d spent the war hiding in Stratton, but when the fighting got too scary we bailed, and now we were on our way further outback, where we hoped it’d be safer.’ Homer turned ninety degrees and moved like a centipede until his head was resting on Fi’s right leg.

  Fi continued the story, patting Homer’s hair as she talked. ‘And we stole the truck because we were tired of walking. We looked as pathetic and childish as we could, like we were just naughty kids. Having Gavin actually helped quite a lot I think, because to anyone who doesn’t know him he looks pretty harmless. And when they realised he was deaf they were quite impressed.’

  ‘So instead of shooting us on the spot, which must have crossed their minds as a possibility, they took us to the local military lockup. We spent the night with soldiers who’d been busted for different crimes,’ Lee said.

  ‘It was awful there,’ Fi said. ‘They really were the dregs of the army. I think half of them got themselves put in the lockup so they wouldn’t have to fight.’

  ‘Seeing half of them were deserters, that’s a fair deduction,’ Lee said.

  ‘Well, interesting first chapter,’ I said, stretching and yawning. ‘What happens in the second part?’

  ‘A riveting saga of sex and violence,’ Homer said. ‘Actually, not a lot of sex. In fact no sex at all, unless there’s something these guys haven’t told me. But enough violence to satisfy even Lee’s sadistic appetite.’

  There was an awkward pause. Homer realised, I think, that he’d said the wrong thing. Lee had done more than his fair share of killing during this war, but it was hardly what he wanted. Maybe he was prepared to do it because some of us were too squeamish. Perhaps lately it was because he wanted revenge for the deaths of his parents.

  But no-one said anything, and Lee just looked away.

  Homer sat up again, cleared his throat and hurried on. ‘Well, the next day we got taken to a prison for any old riffraff they happened to pick up. Before the war it had been a Catholic school, Our Lady Help of Christians. Unfortunately Our Lady wasn’t much help to us. The place was a hole.’

  ‘The girls’ section was OK,’ Fi said.

  ‘That’s because there were only a dozen of you,’ Homer said. ‘The guys were packed in like a rugby scrum. A mixture of nationalities, personalities, nasty habits . . .’

  ‘Nasty habits? Such as?’ I wasn’t sure how seriously Homer meant it.

  ‘Such as fights, bashings, people being totally selfish. Some of it was pretty bad. I got my head kicked in just for being Greek. A bloke in the next wing got knifed and died, I don’t even know why. And some of it was trivial, but it all adds up, you know? For instance, one day a guy in my wing got a whole heap of stale biscuits, as a present, because he fixed a guard’s computer or something, and he pigged the whole lot. Didn’t give one away. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re starving, if you haven’t had a meal for forty-eight hours, it’s a lot. And he had about a kilo of the bloody things. The only good news was he got sick as a dog from eating them all.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kevin said, ‘the guy next to me set records for dobbing. He got me three times in my first week. Dobbed me in for nicking a cigarette lighter from a guard, for slipping a note to Homer, for vandalising a telephone. I was totally innocent on the telephone, but I still copped a bashing every time. Lee fixed him though.’

  I grinned at Lee, but I was kind of anxious, the way Kevin said that. ‘What did you do?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing you’d want to know about.’

  ‘How did you go generally?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not bad.’ No-one said anything for a minute so he was forced to say a bit more. ‘Look, it was a bloody awful place, but I don’t want to dwell on it for the rest of my life. The war’s over. I’ve got other things to think about.’

  It sounds kind of rough, written down like that, and he said it fairly aggressively, but I was on his side. He had a new war to think about already. His brothers and sisters were his responsibility; he still wanted an education, a career, a life. Out of all of us he had the toughest future. And he was on his own. We might be able to help a bit, from time to time, but basically it would all be up to him.

  It was a long afternoon by the time I told them my story. I got a bit emotional towards the end, mainly because of Dr Muir. From the moment when he whispered to me at the incinerator, no-one has heard from him or seen him again, and I can’t help feeling he must have died, and that it was my fault.

  On the way back to the house, we stopped and looked at the daffodils Homer and his brother George had put in a few years ago. They were peeping out of the rich earth, worth every penny of the ten cents their mum and dad paid them for each bulb they planted.

  Lee knelt and took one between his fingers and gazed at it intently, as if trying to read its secrets. Fi picked a dozen to take home. Homer used a stick like a golf club and knocked a couple of flowers flying. Kevin said, ‘You should have put in jonquils. They smell better.’

  I smiled, watching them. Maybe war didn’t change people much after all.

  Lee stood up and came past me. Suddenly he grabbed me and danced me around a patch of anenomes.

  ‘We survived, Ellie, we survived.’

  Epilogue

  It all got really strange. Every second person I met said, ‘God, you can make a fortune now’. We did get approached by at least a dozen publicity agents wanting to talk about business deals, especially film deals. Most of them seemed OK, like they weren’t totally tacky or anything, but it was weird to be even talking to them in the first place. As well as that we got direct calls from heaps of companies. Money was so short we figured we couldn’t be too precious about earning some, especially in US dollars, so we did quite a few interviews, including the one with the American 60 Minutes.

  Dad and I used the money for turkeys and geese. I never thought I’d see the day we’d go into poultry, but with the small amount of land we had left, we couldn’t keep going with sheep or cattle. Nearly everyone else went into chickens or vegetables or both. Dad figured that turkeys and geese would be bette
r, for the simple reason that they were different and people’d get sick of chicken pretty fast.

  But like everyone else we had to diversify, so we put in spuds too, and Mum started a mustard business with Homer’s mum.

  It’s amazing to me that we’ve adjusted to the new life so quickly. I guess humans are an adaptable species. I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, and there have been lots of depressing and ugly moments, with people not able to accept change, but in general I’d say we’re taking three steps forward for every two back.

  Really, there’s no point my writing about all that, because everyone knows what it’s like.

  The only other thing I want to do, to finish off this record, is to say what’s happened to Homer and Kevin and Lee and Fi and the ferals.

  Kevin went back to New Zealand. His mum and dad had been wanting to get off the land for some time before the war, so they took the compensation and went to live in Cavendish, where they opened a place that sells and services chainsaws and mowers, stuff like that. Kevin didn’t seem to be getting on too well with his parents, and after a few months he got a free plane flight to New Zealand, through General Finley, and off he went. He planned to give some talks to schools again, like we’d tried that other time, but I think mainly he just wanted to get away from home. I hope he does better with the school talks than we did. I don’t know though. I haven’t heard from him for ages.

  Chris’ parents are still overseas. I don’t know whether they’ll come back at all now. I wrote to them, in Ireland, but I haven’t had an answer.

  Fi’s family went to the city. Her mum was too stressed after doing the land redistribution and as they said to my parents, they felt there was no future in Wirrawee. They never commented once to me about how we’d wrecked their house. Typical. I’d rather they had said something.

  Fi’s going to a private school, all girls. We talk every few days, now that the phones are up and running, and she’s coming to stay next holidays.

  Of all the people in the world Fi has become the one I feel most comfortable with. It just seems like we’re going to be friends forever.