The Dead of Night (5 page)

Most of the others seemed well enough, except for Homer's brother, George, slicing his hand open when he was cutting vegetables for a meal, and Fi's little sister getting some bad asthma attacks. But life at the Showground sounded terrible. Nell said they were too crowded; the sewerage system couldn't cope; often there wasn't enough food to go around. There were a couple of showers in the horse pavilion for the grooms, but no one was allowed to use them, so they all stank and itched. Scratches and cuts got infected easily, and there were epidemics all the time. The current one was chickenpox; the last one had been mumps. People were depressed and bad-tempered and tired. There were fights all the time; some people not talking to other people; a few attempts at suicide; a dozen deaths. Most of these were old people, some who'd been kicked out of the Hospital, but one had been a baby, and one a girl of
twenty, named Angela Bates, who'd been murdered. No one knew much about it: they'd bund her body dumped outside the dunnies one morning. Everyone was sure it was the soldiers of course, but complaining to them was a waste of time. The murder remained unsolved.

There had been some rapes while people were being rounded up and brought in to the Showground, but none since. Nell said the soldiers there were well disciplined most of the time, but they'd bashed dozens of people who'd disobeyed orders. A guy called Spike Faraday, a young cockie from out near Champion Hill, had been shot in the kneecap for assaulting a soldier, and six people who'd tried to escape had been bashed, and dragged off to the Wirrawee lock-up. Another Spike, a guy called Spike Florance, a jackaroo, had been beaten up repeatedly because he just wouldn't back down, kept antagonising the guards.

It was all much worse than we'd thought. The little information we'd picked up from prisoners' work parties, and the comments on the radio about a "clean" invasion, had lulled us into a false sense of optimism. Things seemed to be deteriorating. There was nothing clean about all this. I wanted to go and wash my hands.

There were two things Nell said from her mattress on the floor that really shocked me. One was when she told us that a lot of people were cooperating with the soldiers. I didn't know what to think when I heard that. I hadn't read a lot of war books or seen a lot of war movies, but I'd always had the impression that the goodies in them were all heroes. You were on one side or the other—either a goodie or a baddie—and you
staved that way from start to finish. Nell said that some people were sucking up to the soldiers, real brown-nosers, and what's more, some of them were actively helping, offering to do jobs for the guards, and going out of their way to support them. Others were spending the night with them.

We were both bewildered. "Why?" Lee asked. "Why are they doing that?"

Nell laughed her little bitter laugh, that I was getting used to. "Listen love," she whispered, "I'm a hairdresser, and hairdressers are all amateur psychologists. We reckon we know everything there is to know about people. But I've seen stuff at that Showground that I'll never figure out, not if I live to be a million. Who knows what goes on in the brains of those bastards? Some of them do it because they're scared. Some do it for food or cigarettes or grog, or even for a shower and a bottle of shampoo. Some do it because they want to get power for themselves, I reckon. Some are such sheep they like being told what to do. They don't care who's giving the orders, as long as there's someone doing it. Personally I reckon they're mad. Things are going to get worse before they get better."

There was another silence, while we digested all this. I didn't seem able to focus on anything except the word "sheep." Most people are so rude about them, but you won't find many farmers talking that way. So I said, "You're wrong about sheep, Nell. They don't like obeying orders. And they're not as stupid as people make out. They have a good set of survival instincts..."

"Oh shut up Ellie," came Lee's tired voice.

I can't help it if I like sheep.

Nell started telling us the second thing that shocked us. She said lots of people—our people—were looking forward to what the soldiers called the "colonisation." What this meant was that when the soldiers were satisfied they had the country under control they would bring in millions of their own people. Each family would get some acres of land and they'd farm that, using us as slave labour, to do all the crap jobs: crutching sheep, digging spuds, cleaning houses.

"Why are they looking forward to that?" I whispered. I was getting thoroughly scared, deep down. It seemed that everything was becoming too bad, too awful, and there was no hope for any of us.

"Oh well," Nell said. She was getting vague, and was tired too. "They just ... if you were in the Showground you'd understand. It's so awful in there, so crowded. We just want to get out. Fresh air, being able to walk around. That's why people volunteer for the work parties now. Seems like any change'd be a good change."

It was while she was telling us this that the soldiers did their check. We heard them easily enough—they weren't making any special effort to be quiet. They opened the door to the room and flashed the lights on, then turned them off again, a second later. It was so long since I'd been in a room with electric lighting that I felt like I'd been bashed over the head. It was so powerful. Lee and I flattened ourselves, breathing in dust and the smell of old wood.

"They don't normally turn the lights on," Nell whispered after they'd gone. "Your fire alarm might have spooked them a bit."

Still, I was sure they couldn't have worked out the
source of the smoke, or there would have been a much more frenzied search. Homer had carried a sack to throw over the smoke bomb when they burst into the room above him. All they would have found was a room full of smoke, with no obvious cause. He'd been aiming for the X-Ray Department, because with its complicated electrical equipment they wouldn't have known what to blame.

We heard the tread of the soldiers' footsteps as they returned down the corridor to their post. At last the moment I'd prayed for had arrived. I wanted it so badly, but why did I feel so frightened? I suppose I didn't know what I'd see in B10: my best friend, my oldest mate, Corrie ... or some kind of unrecognisable monster, a vegetable.

"You ought to be safe now," Nell was whispering, "lust be careful."

I didn't really need that advice. I wasn't about to go cooeeing down the corridor, or playing Demolition Derby with the trolleys.

We slithered out from under our bed, like snakes from a blackberry bush.

"Good luck," Nell said.

"We'll come and see you before we go."

"Righto love."

I opened the door gingerly, and peered out. The passageway was quite dark, and empty. It was cold, after the close warm human smell of B8. As lightly as possible I fled along the corridor, knowing Lee was with me. But when we got to Corrie's door I didn't have the courage to open it. Since the invasion I'd had to reach for courage many times. Surprisingly to myself, it had
always been there, even if sometimes I'd had to dredge deeply, even if sometimes there hadn't been much left to draw on.

Now I just leaned weakly against the door, my head pressed into it. That was not a smart thing to do, not quite as bad as yelling cooee or going for rides in the wheelchairs, but not far off it. Lee put his arm around me and I turned and buried my head in his chest. I didn't cry, but I was grateful for his strong hold and his silent understanding. Deep inside Lee there seemed to be a place that I didn't think I had. Maybe it was the place his music came from. Whatever it was, I connected with it then for a few seconds and gained a little strength. It was like a blood transfusion.

"Would you go first?" I asked, lifting my head out of his nice warm chest.

He did, letting me go, twisting the handle of the door and opening it. He went in and held the door open for me. I slipped in there, into the darkness. A frightened voice gasped "Who's there?" For a moment I thought it was Corrie and I too gasped. I thought it was a ghost, or a miracle, that Corrie had suddenly recovered consciousness and was talking to us. Then I remembered Mrs Slater.

"It's me, Mrs Slater. Ellie. And Lee's here too."

"Ellie! Oh! Lee!" She jumped up, knocking something over.

We knew Mrs Slater pretty well. She was one of those people who packed about thirty-two hours into every twenty-four. Her husband had died in a tractor accident years ago, and since then she'd run the farm, raised the kids, written two gardening books, learnt calligraphy
and quilting, and done half an Arts degree through the Open University. She even found time to do canteen duty at school: her last kid, Jason, was in Year 10.

She'd said to me once, "There are two kinds of people in the world, Ellie. The ones who watch TV and the ones who get things done."

Now she gave me the biggest hug of my career, and finally I cried. It had been a long time since the last tear. But she was the first adult I'd seen who I knew, the first one to hug me, the first link with my old, loved, happy world. The first link with my parents, because she was such a good friend of Mum's.

"Oh Ellie," she said. "You poor kid. And you smell terrible."

"Oh Mrs Slater!" She made me laugh, and I thumped her in the chest in protest. Then she hugged Lee.

I guess we'd been living together so long we didn't notice how bad we smelt. We took regular baths in the creek, but with the water getting so cold we hadn't been doing it a lot lately.

"Don't worry," she said. "They all smell worse at the Showground. A lot worse. But we patients get a shower every second day, so we forget."

But I wasn't listening any more. I'd turned to the bed, where Corrie lay so silently. The only light in the room came from the car park, through the windows. You could see where condensation had misted the glass. The room itself was very dim, like a church in the late afternoon before the lights come on. The things that stood out were the things that were very dark and the things that were very light. A cupboard door was like a dark scar on the wall. The bedside locker was a
white shape crouching watchfully beside Corrie's bed. It seemed quite bright. The sheet that covered Corrie glowed with a quiet luminosity. Her head on the pillow was a little black patch, an unmoving round stone. I could not make out her features. I tried to see her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Not seeing them I was suddenly frightened of the black patch, as though it was not human, was not Corrie at all. I peered and peered, fighting to keep the fear in my stomach, to stop it coming up my throat and into my mouth. Was that her mouth, or just a shadow? Were those her eyes, or just black marks, tricks of the light? I wasn't aware of Lee or Mrs Slater. Not only were they not in the room; they had ceased to exist. There was just me and the shape in the bed. I slowly took three short steps towards it. And suddenly, with the different angle and the light falling differently across the bed, I found Corrie again. There she was; her soft skin, her plump face, her closed eyes. My own mouth was slightly open, in wonder, because she looked so different to the Corrie of my past friendship, and the Corrie of my fearful imaginings. She did not look gaunt and battered and bruised, but neither did she look happy and lively and talkative. She looked like a wax doll, a fully formed impression of Corrie. I could see her lips move slightly with each breath in and breath out but there was no other movement. She was alive, yet somehow not with us any more.

I was not scared of her, but I was scared to touch her. I had meant to ask Mrs Slater if I could touch, if it was safe, but now that thought had fled my mind. So after a while I leant forward with a shivering finger and ran the
tip of it down the side of her right cheek. This was not the Corrie who I hugged and used as a pillow and beat up on, the Corrie who'd sat on my lap so often on the crowded school bus. That Corrie had slipped quietly away, leaving behind this peacefully breathing, pale replacement. I leant further forward and kissed her on the forehead, then lay my head on the pillow beside her. I didn't say anything. I didn't really think anything either. Her skin was cool, but I didn't notice that at the time, just thought about it afterwards. Through her cheek, next to mine, I could feel her breathing. I stayed like that for some time, a long time.

Finally I got up again and whispered in her ear, "Take care out there Corrie. Look after yourself," and I slipped out into the corridor and waited for Lee. I didn't even say goodbye to Mrs Slater, which was a bit rude.

Lee was quite a while, so I hid behind a laundry basket, but eventually he came out. I popped up and went ahead of him back to B8 to say goodbye to Nell.

"Are you OK, love?" she asked. "Did it upset you?" But I didn't answer that. Instead I asked her a question that had been bugging me.

"You know how you said before that Kevin was all right now'?" I asked.

"Oh, did I?"

"Yes, you did. What did you mean 'now'?"

She tried to think of a reassuring lie, but she couldn't. After a minute of silence she gave in and told me.

"They beat him up pretty bad Ellie."

We snuck along the corridor, towards the exit. We knew from Nell where the soldiers would be—at the
nurses' station near the exit door. Hiding in the little kitchen about twenty metres away, I grabbed Lee's head and pulled it down so I could whisper in his ear.

"I want to find a knife."

"Why?"

"So I can kill the soldiers."

I felt his body give a little jerk, like he'd touched the terminals of a battery. But he didn't say anything for a minute, just stood up straight, while I continued to crouch beside him like the animal I'd become. Then he bent down again and put his mouth to my ear.

"You can't do that Ellie."

"Why not?"

"There'd be reprisals against the patients."

We didn't speak again, just waited. We were waiting for a break in the soldiers' routine, a chance to slip past their defences. We could hear them talking occasionally, in their guttural language. There was a kind of wailing music in their voices that was almost attractive. Occasionally, too, we could hear a girl's voice, low and husky, usually laughing, sometimes making a comment that sounded like English, but pitched too low for us to make out the words. After what Nell had said I had the worst suspicions of what the girl was doing, and I raged against her, there in the darkness.