Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (23 page)

The first really ugly moment came when I was sitting up for the first time, helped by a nice young nurse who could have been younger than me. As I struggled up onto the pillows, trying not to cry with the pain, determined to get upright, one of the other patients in my ward, a middle-aged woman who looked like a dung beetle in a body-building contest, glared at me as she walked past and yelled something accusing and spat, hitting me on the forehead, just below my fringe. I know I went red, and I stared at her, trying not to let any tears come into my eyes. She stared back, even when she got to her bed, and kept staring at me as she flung herself onto the mattress. There was nothing I could do. The nurse looked embarrassed, but she didn’t say anything. How could she? Siding with the enemy wouldn’t be a good career move.

I realised the nurse wasn’t going to wipe off the gob of spit so I took a tissue from her trolley, tensing my hand to stop trembling, and wiped it off myself.

Two days after sitting up I walked for the first time, ten or twelve steps across the ward and back to my bed. It was a big moment, even if it took a quarter of an hour and I moved like an old lady with arthritis. But for a long time I hadn’t known if I would ever walk again.

Each day I tried to go a little further, and that was how I learned I was under guard. On the day I got to the door of the room and took my first step through it a young sulky-looking male soldier got up from a chair outside the door, and pushing his long black hair away from his forehead told me to go back inside.

When I turned around I noticed for the first time the bars on the windows, and realised that I was in every sense a prisoner.

I still didn’t figure out the full extent of the situation straightaway though. The next day, when the doctor with the small glasses came in I asked: ‘Can I walk up and down the corridor outside?’

‘That’s not up to me,’ he said. ‘But I doubt if they’ll let you. No-one else is allowed.’

It took me a moment to connect with what he’d said. Then I asked: ‘You mean no-one in here?’

‘That’s right.’

He was looking through my charts, and not really concentrating on my questions. But I kept asking. I had the feeling he was quite proud of the progress I’d made. Considering how limited the facilities in the hospital seemed to be, he probably had done a good job on the operation. Anyway, I sensed that he felt friendly towards me, so I took full advantage by asking him questions whenever he came in.

‘But aren’t I the only one under guard in here?’

He gave me his full attention then, lowering the notes and looking at me in surprise.

‘No. Oh no, whatever made you think that?’

I still hadn’t made all the right links in my brain. ‘Is everyone in here under guard?’

He gave me a strange look and glanced down at the charts again, made a brief note, then left. But I already had the answer. We were all prisoners. I couldn’t figure out why, but I was sure I was right. The next time the young nurse was changing the dressing on my leg I said to her, as quietly as I could: ‘Is this like a prison ward?’

She looked at me sharply.

‘Prison, yes.’

‘What did these other women do?’

She shrugged and ignored me, concentrating on the dressing. I gripped the base of the mattress, knowing how much pain I was in for. To help distract myself I asked her again, ‘What did they do?’

‘All different,’ she answered, not looking up from my leg.

‘They did different things?’

‘That right.’

‘Like what?’

I paid the price for being inquisitive as she ripped the dressing off. If the ceiling had been any lower I would have hit it. I took a sideways glance at the wound. It was big and ugly but at least it was clean.

‘Any infection?’
I asked.

‘Little bit. Not too bad.’

‘So what did they do to get put in here?’

But she wouldn’t answer, just bent her head over the dressing and ignored me.

I couldn’t imagine what crimes the women had committed, although I guessed that I was probably the only one who’d blown up trains and ships and planes and service stations. But it helped explain the bad moods of the other patients; the way they lay there sullenly. I didn’t know what injuries or illnesses they’d suffered to put them in hospital. I don’t think they’d been beaten up like me. Most of them seemed sick, with bronchitis or heart problems, stuff like that. I guess prisoners can get sick just like anyone else.
Probably more than anyone else.

Being prisoners together didn’t create any good feelings between us though. Like, we didn’t exactly bond. There were no ‘getting to know you’ games. The one who spat in my face was the extreme but the others weren’t much better. Come to think of it, they didn’t show much friendliness towards each other either.

As I got better physically I paid a price that I didn’t welcome. The thoughts about my friends, that I’d pushed behind me while I was semiconscious, started to take over. I’d lie on the bed, holding my head with both hands, wishing with every molecule that I could see and feel and hear and smell them, and be with them again. I ached with loneliness.

I still hoped I could find a way to ask the officer who had helped me what had happened to Homer and the others. But I couldn’t figure out how to do it without giving away my identity, and I knew that no matter how friendly the man was, I’d sign my death warrant if he associated me with the teenagers who’d been doing so much damage around
Wirrawee
and Cobbler’s Bay and Stratton.

When he came in the next time I tried to get a line on why he was being so helpful, and, more importantly, what more I could get out of him.

So I said: ‘Thanks for saving my life out in the bush that day.’

It was the first time I’d been lucid enough to have a proper conversation with him.

‘That right,’ he said. ‘I saved your life. You are the enemy to my people. What you did was very bad. All the same, I saved your life.’

‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much.’

He gave a brief grin. He was sweating a lot, as though this conversation was important, but at the same time it was making him extremely nervous. I was about to find out why.

He glanced around,
then
sat in the chair beside my bed, moving it a little closer. ‘I have saved your life,’ he said.
‘Is very hard work.
Even now, is very hard
work.
A lot of people say, “Why is she in one of our hospitals? Why do we not just shoot her?”’

I said carefully: ‘I guess I owe you.’

Seemed like he was pleased to hear that.
He gave an eager little nod, and moved his chair even closer.

‘For me, I am realist. I love my country, yes, of course, but also I have myself to think of, I have a family, I have a wife, two children, also mother and father, all depend on me.’

I nodded, trying to look understanding and sympathetic.

‘This war soon
be
over. Soon be finished. United Nations, be here soon.’

I felt a gleam of excitement come into my eyes, and tried to hide it. It was the first good news I’d had since coming into hospital.

‘Lots of bad things happen during war,’ the man said, giving me a sudden sharp glance. I realised we were getting to the point now.

‘Lots of bad things.
In war, sometimes things happen, everything quick
quick
, bang-bang. No time to think.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ I said.

‘After war, sometimes reporters come, judges come.
Inquiries, commissions, trials.
Things get, how you say, raked up?’

‘I guess so. Like Nuremberg.’

‘Yes. That not good.’

His face shone with sweat and his English was starting to break down under the pressure.

‘I been
very good to you.
Saved your life.
You say that to me. I save your life. That true, no?’

‘It’s definitely true.’

‘Good. Good. After war, you say that too? Anyone ask you, Colonel Long very good to you, save your life.’

At last I could see what this was all about. At last it made sense. ‘You crafty bugger,’ I thought. Choosing my words carefully I said: ‘After the war it’ll give me heaps of pleasure to tell everyone you saved my life, you were very good to me, you should get maximum praise for treating me so well.’

Colonel Long leaned back in the chair. He took a neatly folded tissue from his pocket and wiped his face. He obviously felt he’d done a good day’s work. I had to admire his cunning. Maybe he’d been looking for someone like me for a long time, or maybe he just thought of it on the spur on the moment when he saw the soldiers beating me up, but either way he was satisfied that he’d bought himself an insurance policy.

I was his protection if and when a war crimes tribunal got to work. For the moment at least I didn’t want to know whether he’d actually committed war crimes. Obviously he had something pretty heavy on his conscience, but I’d worry about that later.
If I survived that long.

What I did want was to use him now, to get information about my friends. So I said: ‘The night you caught me, was there anyone else caught that night?’

He didn’t like the question. He scowled and looked away. ‘You don’t want to be asking about those people,’ he said.
‘They very bad people.
Anyone think you know those people, I can’t save you. They do very bad things, at gas station.’

I understood what he meant. Somehow he’d managed to separate me from the attack on the truck stop. As far as the authorities were concerned, I was only wanted for one offence, blowing up the train. If they knew any more it would get too heavy for Colonel Long to protect me. Even as I lay there working this out, the Colonel whispered in my ear: ‘Amber Faulding, I don’t think that is your real name. I think I maybe know your real name, but
I
not going to say it here. But you
be
very careful. If you who I think you are, no-one can save you, I cannot save you, no-one can save you.’

I felt the blood drain away from my face. There was a long silence. Without looking at him, staring straight at the ceiling, I forced myself to ask again: ‘But just between us, were there other people caught that night?
Quite a long way from the train wreck?
Like, at that gas station you mentioned?’

‘They all dead,’ he hissed. ‘All killed at gas station.
Four teenagers, all dead.
Don’t ask about them ever any more.’

‘All dead?’
I repeated stupidly.

‘All killed. I see their bodies. They all killed. No more about that. No more never.’

By the time I could bring myself to look at him again he wasn’t there. He had left the room.

I wriggled down under the sheet and lay there shaking, out of control. It was all too much, too devastating. I remembered Mrs Slater when her garden was destroyed by bushfires, the garden that she’d built from nothing, the garden she’d spent fifteen years developing. When it happened, she told my mum that it was too big to take in. ‘If I’d lost just the
rhodies
, or just the hydrangeas,’ she said, ‘if I’d lost just the David
Austins
.’

I sort of felt like that now. I was a desert inside, a garden that was black and burnt and desolate. I felt I had no blood. A kind of numbness crept through me. My fingers were playing with a tear in the sheet, a small slit. Without even knowing what I was doing I tore it a little further. It felt kind of satisfying to do that, so I tore it some more. Then I tore it back the other way. Slowly I began to tear the sheet to shreds. It wasn’t too difficult, because it was an old sheet, and fairly thin. I don’t know how long I lay there doing that. The night duty nurses never seemed to come near us if they could help it, and I guess this night they could help it, because I didn’t notice – or I don’t remember – anyone coming in.

Methodically, carefully, inch by inch, hour after hour, I tore that sheet into tiny pieces.

By the time the first grey light of dawn soaked into the room the sheet was like shredded coconut. I lay in a mess of cotton and all that was left was a piece the size of a handkerchief.

Outside the ward I heard the bustle of the day shift arriving, the night shift passing on their messages and saying goodbye. Calmly I reached for the bin beside the foot of my bed and scraped the million or so fragments into it. I lay back not caring whether anyone noticed that I was now one sheet short.

No-one did. The day continued. I gazed at the ceiling, making my mind numb, carefully anaesthetising every feeling that threatened to interrupt,
turning
myself into a robot.

But it didn’t work. I could control my mind for a few hours, but after a while the thoughts and feelings came creeping back like ashamed dogs, heads down, tails tucked under them, as if to say, ‘We know we shouldn’t have killed that wallaby but we couldn’t help ourselves’.

I felt the grief crawl from my limbs into my stomach and up through my chest into my head. It was like a cold fluid gradually creeping through me. I was drowning from the inside out. The worst thing seemed to be the knowledge that my friends had deserted me. They had gone off together, leaving me all alone. They must have known I couldn’t cope with that. They must have known how I’d feel. How could they do that, without including me? It was the cruellest thing they had ever done, the cruellest thing that had ever happened.

The odds had been too heavily against us that night. We had disobeyed the
Pimlott
Principles. We’d gone for a target that was too big, a target that wasn’t achievable. The way those soldiers had searched, the sheer number of them: it would have been a miracle if any of us got away. The train provided me with a miracle, and I’d still been caught. In the middle of my central nervous system, I’d known they couldn’t have escaped.

By night-time I felt that my brain was being eaten away by these terrible thoughts. I lay there quietly, aware of the damage being done inside me, but powerless to do anything about it. The cold fluid in there was acid.