The Third Day, The Frost (6 page)

Eleven o’clock came and went. We walked on.
Hours later I looked at my watch. It was 11.12. I could have cried
with disappointment. I felt so cheated. Eventually midnight passed
and we staggered into the next day. ‘That was three hours of my
life just gone,’ I thought. ‘Three hours I’ll never have again. I’m
three hours closer to my death, and all I did in those three hours
was walk.’

I knew my steps were getting shorter and I
knew it would be to my advantage to take longer steps. If I could
cover an extra twenty centimetres with each step I’d be less tired.
I knew that. But I couldn’t do it. Instead of my steps getting
longer, they got shorter still. Light rain started falling and at
first I welcomed it, because it felt refreshing. But then my
clothes got damp and sticky and heavy. I got too cold; the first
trickle of cold water down my neck was horrible, as though an icy
snail was slipping down my bare skin where I couldn’t reach it. I
think I started crying with exhaustion but I couldn’t tell because
of the raindrops. I did hear Fi sobbing behind me and I ignored her
because I needed all my energy for myself. I didn’t dare spend it
on anyone else.

As one o’clock approached I kept gazing
greedily at my watch. It was just luminous enough to give a
reading. I thought that if I could make it to one o’clock something
special might happen. Nothing did.

My boots started squelching as the
waterproofing began to fail. I tried singing ‘Ten thousand green
bottles’ in my head but got bored with it. At some point Robyn
tried to get everyone singing: she did a solo of ‘Are You Lonesome
Tonight’, which was too depressing, then a solo of ‘Smoke Curls up
Around the Old Gum Tree Trunk’, then she started ‘Not for the First
Time’, then she gave up. We stopped not long after that so Fi could
go to the dunny, then I realised I had the toilet paper and I
didn’t know where in my pack it was. It seemed to take half an hour
to find; I dug deeper and deeper in the pack, getting everything
messed up, letting the rain get in, before finally realising it was
in a side pocket. Misery soaked through me and I threw back my head
and howled. No one seemed interested; no one seemed to care. ‘Can’t
we camp here somewhere?’ Kevin whined, peering around him in the
darkness.

‘No way,’ Homer said. ‘We’re still in wide
open country. We’ve got to press on.’

There was a grim silence. When Fi came back we
picked up our packs and got going again.

The further we went the colder I got. I lost
feeling in my feet. All I knew was that they were terribly heavy
and seemed to take more and more effort to pick up and carry
forward. My head ached and my nose was running continuously.
Sniffing didn’t stop it and the snot got mixed up with the rain
running down my face. My legs were numb, too. I didn’t have the
energy to lift my arm to look at my watch and it probably wouldn’t
have been readable anyway. The further we went, the more trouble I
had keeping a straight line. I was vaguely aware that I was
wandering all the time but didn’t seem able to do much about it. I
had no idea who was leading but assumed it was Homer, who had a
compass. For once – for one of the very few times in my life – I
couldn’t match it with him.

When we stopped I was too tired to feel any
relief, too tired to feel anything. I stood there waiting to be
told what to do. For all I knew or cared we might have run into a
patrol. After a few minutes Homer came out of the darkness and
reached for my hand. I gave him the wet cold heavy thing. It must
have been like picking up a dead fish. ‘Come on, Ellie, old mate,’
he said wearily. I let myself be led like a helpless child. We
walked for about five minutes to a building. I realised suddenly
that it was a wheat silo, one of the big concrete ones. I didn’t
care what it was, but I remember thinking that it was a good choice
of shelter, because colonists wouldn’t be interested in it until
harvest time, in mid-summer.

Chapter
Seven

One trouble with the war was that we had no
medicines. We’d had the basic odds and ends but we’d used them up
pretty quickly. Now we were down to half a packet of Bandaids and a
bottle of Alka Seltzer. And after that terrible trudge across the
plains we were tired, depressed, and wet to the skin; hair soaked
and boots full of water.

We were cases straight out of the medical
textbook, in perfect shape to get sick. We got sick.

Robyn, Kevin, Fi and I all went down without a
murmur. That only left Homer and Lee, and they weren’t too good
themselves. We started off with colds, sneezing and dripping, then
we got coughs, then we got in serious trouble. We didn’t have a
thermometer but it didn’t matter. You don’t always need a smoke
alarm to know your house is on fire. One look at the two red spots
in Fi’s white cheeks was enough. We burned, we shook, we panted, we
tossed and turned. I hallucinated so strongly that they had to tie
me down. I thought I was the Great Pruner or something; I knew that
I held a giant pair of clippers and my job was to go from poplar
tree to poplar tree, cutting them into shape. Each tree was OK near
the ground; it was the high bits that were the problem. I
constantly had to stand on tiptoes, or even to jump with arms
outstretched to grab the branches with the shears and haul them
down. More and more I realised that the bits to be trimmed were
like people; some were beautifully sculptured human forms. It was
not very pleasant cutting them in half but I knew it was my duty so
I forced myself. Then they would distract me by turning into real
people, and I would watch them for a while, before going back to
the trees.

It was during the times that I was being the
Great Pruner that Homer and Lee had the most trouble with me. They
said it was like watching a sort of mad aerobics, with me leaping
up and down, grabbing at nothing then struggling and whimpering
when they tried to wrestle me back to bed. They had so little
energy themselves that they had to go find some rope to tie me
up.

‘I’ll bet that was your idea,’ I said to
Homer.

‘I didn’t enjoy it, you know.’

‘Sure, sure.’

I have to admit, the two boys were great
nurses. I’d wake, burning with fever, and they’d be there within a
minute, whether it was three o’clock in the morning or three
o’clock in the afternoon. Not that I had any idea of time.

Maybe antibiotics would have cleaned us all up
in twenty-four hours: probably. But we didn’t have them and so we
suffered and our bodies had to do the healing themselves, with a
little help from the two boys. They wiped us down with cool damp
towels, made us drink, and even eat, a couple of times, kept warm
clothes on us, talked to us, soothed our fevered brows.

One day I woke feeling weak as a paper tissue
but perfectly clear-headed. I knew it was early in the morning, and
I had a vague memory of a moment during the night when I’d felt the
fight go out of my body. It had been followed by a kind of sweet
peacefulness and, after it, I’d slept soundly and warmly. Homer
came in holding a billy and a water bottle and I looked at him
lazily.

‘What’s it like outside?’

‘Oh, you’re back in the land of the living,
are you?’

‘Mmm. I don’t feel too bad.’

‘Good.’

‘How’re the others?’

‘Fi’s been on the up and up since yesterday.
She’s out the back having breakfast with Lee. Robyn and Kevin are
still just as crook.’

I glanced across to their beds. They certainly
didn’t look well. Both were asleep, but Kevin was mumbling and
moving around and Robyn looked horribly white.

‘God, did I look like that?’

‘Worse.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Four days.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘I swear! Lee and I have had about an hour’s
sleep in the last four days.’

I was silent, for once. I was deeply impressed
by the fact that my life could lose four days without my having any
awareness of it. Maybe this was a preview of death: continuous
visions and dreams and vague glimpses of reality. Only with death
you never wake up; you keep having the weird images forever. I
thought a lot about death and what it might be like, of course; I
still do.

When I tried to get up I realised it was not
such a good idea. My limbs had no strength and my mind had no
strength to force my limbs to obey. That was unusual for me but I
was too tired to care. I went back to sleep.

Next time I woke it was the next day. I was
even more astonished by that; in fact, it took Homer and Fi half an
hour to convince me. I’d had enough of bed: besides, I was busting
for a leak and was enormously hungry. I staggered outside and
relieved myself, then got some biscuits and, for the first time in
nearly a week, started taking an interest in my surroundings.

We were close to the coast now; I could smell
it. I guessed that by the route we’d taken we were probably about
twenty k’s from Cobbler’s Bay. Some time we’d have to start
thinking seriously about Cobbler’s Bay again. The thought almost
gave me an immediate relapse into fever. We were still in quite
clear country but nothing like the plains we’d crossed five nights
before. The grass was wirier and the trees had a windswept desolate
look. There were no dwellings in sight but a line of trees fifty
metres away indicated a road. The rain had gone but it was a cold
day with a fresh wind; a few clouds scudded across the sky like
they were in a hurry to get somewhere.

I went back into the silo and helped Lee do a
bit of housework; well, silowork really. ‘Where’s the water
supply?’ I asked him, picking up an armful of empty water
bottles.

‘I’ll show you.’

He looked tired and nervous; no wonder, with
the work Homer and he had done.

We went across to the road and walked for a
few hundred metres. I felt strange walking along so openly, in
broad daylight.

‘Don’t any cars come along here?’

‘Four in five days. And there’s plenty of
cover. You can hear them coming.’

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked, but I didn’t
care very much. I was too tired, too feeble and perhaps still too
sick about what had happened back at the well.

‘OK. Just totally stuffed by nursing you
guys.’

‘Have a sleep when we get back. Fi and I can
take over and give you a break.’

‘Yeah, thanks, I think I will.’

I realised quite suddenly, with a sense of
shock, that my relationship with Lee was over. I felt nothing for
him any more. He seemed like a stranger and this seemed like the
kind of polite conversation you have with strangers. Although I
didn’t admit it to myself then, I think, looking back, that part of
the reason was the killing of the soldier when we rescued Kevin. It
wasn’t the first time we’d killed, of course; it wasn’t the first
time Lee had killed in cold blood; but this time it had been too
horrible, too disgusting. I didn’t want to touch Lee; didn’t
especially want to talk to him, even. I felt sick every time his
long fingers touched me.

It’s unfair, I know that. It’s like making Lee
do our dirty work and then blaming him when he does it. But fair
and unfair is for the mind; emotions don’t know anything about fair
and unfair.

We filled the bottles at a wide shallow river,
squatting in the gravel and watching the little gurgles as the
water rushed in. It was cold though, and the bottles were cold in
our hands when we carried them back.

By that evening, Kevin was through the worst
of it and Robyn was sensible enough to understand what was going
on. The silo smelt terrible, with the stench of us humans having
filled it for nearly a week. There were three concrete silos in a
row and two steel ones. I checked out the other two concrete ones,
thinking we could maybe move into one of them for some fresh air,
but they both had a strong smell of chemicals. Probably pesticides.
The steel ones had the nice smell of dry grain but they would have
been uncomfortable to live in.

I went back to our silo. The first room wasn’t
too bad. The manager must have used it as his office, where he
could peer down through the wire grille into the deep hole and
watch the grain slowly filling it. There was a filing cabinet, and
a desk and chair where Homer and Lee had spent a lot of time
playing cards. There was another room where we sickies had slept,
and some little concrete cells, like a medieval convent.

I sat at the desk and played patience for a
while.

With Kevin getting better we finally got to
have the big conversation that we’d all wanted to have. It was the
next day, after breakfast, in the office. Robyn moved her sleeping
bag in and lay in it, watching and listening, the rest of us
sitting quite comfortably around the walls, drinking cold Milo as a
special treat. Homer had the chair.

‘So, Kevvy, tell us a story,’ Homer said,
starting the ball rolling.

‘Tell me a story,’ I sang, and Robyn and Fi
immediately joined in.

‘Where do you want me to start?’ Kevin
asked.

‘At the beginning,’ we chorused.

After horrible times, killing times, we often
seemed to regress like this. At that moment I’d say we were about
seven years old. Kevin’s story forced us to grow up again fast,
though. It wasn’t a very funny story but it was the first detailed
description we’d had of life on the inside.

‘OK, I’ll go right back, then. After Corrie
and I left you guys at Elbe’s place – my God, it feels like years
ago. That night: it all changed after that night. One bullet, it
changed everything.’

He looked down into his cup without drinking
from it.

‘We got to the hospital about two in the
morning. I drove so slowly. I was scared she’d die in the back
seat, and I kept looking over my shoulder to see how she was doing.
She looked worse and worse; you could see the colour going out of
her. But every time I sped up she’d groan, these horrible deep
groans like I’ve never heard before. It was bloody awful.

‘By the time we got there I wasn’t even
thinking about the war and the soldiers. It sounds dumb but it’s
true. I’d half forgotten there was a war on. All I could think
about was getting Corrie to hospital and getting her treated. I
drove up to that main entrance with the lights on full beam, the
hazards on, and the horn blasting. So they knew I was coming. And
arriving like that, I guess they knew I wasn’t a threat. They all
came bustling out: a nurse and a doctor and a bloke with a trolley
– and a couple of soldiers. When I saw them I remembered there was
a war on, all right.

‘At first it wasn’t too bad. The soldiers knew
there were still a few people around the district who hadn’t been
rounded up, so they weren’t too surprised to see me. And the
hospital staff were our mob, prisoners, so they were cool. The
problems started when the soldiers found out Corrie had a bullet
wound. The hospital staff tried to keep it secret. They pretended
she’d fallen off a cliff, but the trouble was that one of the
soldiers knew English and hadn’t told anyone he did. I mean, he
deliberately pretended he didn’t know it, so he could spy on
people. They talked quite openly in front of him, and that’s how we
got found out.’

Kevin paused for a moment. He lifted his eyes
from his Milo and gazed up at the funnel of the elevator shaft.

‘Well, it was on for young and old then.
Corrie was a “bad girl, bad girl,” and right away they tried to
frame us for blowing up the bridge. The two soldiers had me in a
corner, on the floor, and they were bashing me in the back with the
butts of their rifles. Going right for the kidneys, and finding
them too, no worries. I was pissing blood for a fortnight. Every
time I went to the dunny I remembered those guys. Then they brought
three sentries in from the bridge – the ones who’d had the best
view of you guys – and they were meant to identify us. The only
thing that saved us then was that they were so positive it wasn’t
us. Bloody lucky they were honest. That stopped the soldiers
kicking me for a minute.

‘They still weren’t happy, though. They were
telling the doctor that Corrie had to go straight to the
Showground; she had to stop treating her. They were really worked
up. “No more, no more,” they kept screaming. They were waving their
rifles around, and trying to wheel the trolley outside. That bloody
doctor but, she’s a legend. She just said no; like, “Don’t even
ask, don’t waste my time, stop bothering me.” I don’t think they
knew quite what to do about her. There was a full-on tug of war
going on over Corrie, and Corrie lying there unconscious in the
middle of it. Sort of funny if you’d been in the mood for
jokes.’

‘Was her name Dr Crassini?’ I asked.

Kevin nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s right, that’s
her.’

‘Figures.’ I’d seen Dr Crassini handling my
father. She was pretty awesome. Young, but strong.

‘Next thing,’ Kevin continued, ‘two more
soldiers came in. The two blokes who’d been there all along had
turned their attention back to me, seeing they weren’t getting
anywhere with the doc. They had me on the floor again and were
putting the boot in. The nurse was screaming at them, in between
working on Corrie, and I was starting to black out. I was scared
they were going to kill me. I’d told them the truth, how she was
shot when we were trying to get my uncle’s ferrets, but I wasn’t
convincing them. I had blood all over me and I knew my nose was
broken. Every time I breathed I just seemed to breathe blood. I
thought I might drown in it. I really thought I was on the way
out.’

I glanced around me. There were four pale
faces, all intent on Kevin’s story. Kevin was looking down at his
mug again. I don’t know whether he realised the effect he was
having.