Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (24 page)

Not all my feelings were as selfish as my first ones. But there were certain things that were particularly bad. One was the thought of the pain of dying. I hoped, oh how I hoped, it hadn’t been too bad. That it was quick, sudden,
instant
. Having felt the agony of the bullet in my leg, and everything afterwards, I didn’t want my friends to have gone through anything remotely like that. Because if it had been that bad for me, when I was only injured, how much more must it hurt when you’re killed, when you’re being killed, when you’re dying.

Another was the frustration, that the world could be deprived of
Fi
and Kevin and Lee and Homer. All that personality, resourcefulness, courage and sense of humour: all snuffed out with a few bullets. The world would never know the music Lee’s fingers made as they danced with the keyboard, the beauty of
Fi’s
butterfly mind, the strength of Homer’s honesty, Kevin’s rough-and-ready rural style. I wanted to be their ambassador, to travel the world telling everyone what it had lost, but I knew it was too big a job for me, or anyone else. No-one would ever know.

Of course this must have been the way the enemy felt when we killed their soldiers: that sense of unique talented individuals vaporised in an instant, but not knowing them personally I couldn’t feel the way for them that I felt for our group. You can’t understand anything unless you personalise it. You can’t love or appreciate or mourn for anything unless you personalise it.

I sure personalised
Fi
and Kevin and Lee and Homer. They were the beats of my heart, the skin of my body, the breath that entered my mouth and nostrils. They were the beautiful friends who had taught me that love was the life-force.

No-one noticed that I didn’t have a top sheet any more. That night as the long hours of night started to send me over the edge I tried to tear up my other sheet. But I didn’t have the energy for it. Instead I began to count. Through the darkest time I kept going: three thousand eight hundred and thirty-one, three thousand eight hundred and thirty-two, three thousand eight hundred and thirty-
three ...

I know it doesn’t make any sense, but somehow I felt it stopped me from losing my mind completely. I got up to eight thousand four hundred.

It wasn’t until the morning that I realised Colonel Long hadn’t mentioned Gavin. I did sit up a little when I thought of that; feeling the first sensation of pleasure or excitement that I’d had since being caught. Surely he hadn’t got away again! Impossible!

But if anyone could do it, it was Gavin.

There were many times in the days that followed when I saved myself from total despair by thinking of Gavin maybe still alive, still out there somewhere.

Generally though despair seemed to be the only feeling I had.

One thing that upset me too was that I might one day have to face all those parents and tell them that their sons and daughters were dead.
And the siblings as well.
I didn’t think I could cope with that job.

I stopped thinking about my own future, my own survival. Not because I was being heroic, ‘putting myself last’, but because I just didn’t think about it. Certainly, and illogically, there were moments when I still thought I’d survive. I must have done, to imagine facing all the different parents after the war. But most of the time, if I gave it any thought, I just assumed something would go wrong, Colonel Long’s protection would fail, I’d go through a trial sooner or later, and then they’d take me out and shoot me. Especially if they managed to link me to any other attacks. Like Colonel Long hinted, if they knew about those I’d get a one-way ticket to the morgue.

I felt like a dead person already. Everything that happened, everything I saw, was through
a greyness
, like I had died and gone to some limbo place, somewhere so like death it might as well have been death.

I didn’t try to walk again. I just lay there.

It was three or four days before a nurse got me moving. She pushed me out of bed like I was a rag doll and stood me up. She was a lightly built, delicate-looking girl, not much older than me, but she was strong. And after lying on the bed for so long I had no strength. For the first time in the hospital I cried as she pushed me around the ward. Even my crying sounded like a dead person: I could hear it as though it were someone else, a thin wailing, empty and hungry.
If not like a corpse then like a baby.

Over the days that followed I started to become more aware of my surroundings again, like I was being forced back into life.

Gradually the pace in the hospital was picking up. For a while the change was subtle,
then
it accelerated. The doctors and nurses got busier and busier, patients admitted one day were gone the next, my doctor looked harassed and had less time to look at my charts. There were more emergencies. I was woken in the middle of the night by trucks in the courtyard, people rushing past the door of our ward, voices yelling in agitated tones. If I hadn’t known already that it was related to the war I could have worked it out by the way I was treated the next morning. And it didn’t happen just once or twice. It soon became a regular event. Suddenly I was copping
bucketloads
of open anger and hatred. A nurse changing my dressing ripped it off as roughly as she could. My fellow patients shouted abuse at me, especially when a nurse was treating me. Their tone was like: ‘Don’t waste time on her. Why should you help one of them?’ For prisoners, these women were pretty patriotic. Or maybe they were just naturally feral.

I don’t think there’d been any battles in the suburbs of Cavendish since I’d been in hospital, because I hadn’t heard any planes or explosions. But at last the night came when I was woken by the familiar low growl of bombers overhead. They made a sound like a long loud tummy rumble. As they got closer the windows shook, rattling the glass so loudly I hoped the bars would fall out. No such luck. The planes kept going and after a few minutes I heard the bombs start to fall.
Only two or three kilometres away.
‘Crump, crump, crump.’

Outside our room the hospital still seemed to be asleep. At no stage did I hear the slightest noise from the corridor, and certainly no-one came to check our health. Inside the ward it was a little different though. I felt like I was in a zombie nightmare. Women screamed and cried, sobbing like they were at a funeral already. Someone turned a
bedlight
on and someone else screamed at her to turn it off. Someone went to draw the curtains closed but the others wanted them open. A couple of women – the only two who could walk – staggered to the door and tried to open it. But it seemed we’d been locked in. The women pounded on the door, yelling for help. No-one came.

I lay in my bed, very quietly, nervous about the air-raid but more nervous about the people in the ward. I felt I was in a lot more danger from them. On the one hand I was proud of the New Zealand Air Force, if that’s who it was, and pleased that they must be doing well. On the other hand it seemed unfair that I might get a bomb dropped on me by my own side. I guess if you’re blown up, it feels the same whether you’re blown up by your friends or your enemies.

The raid lasted nearly twenty minutes,
then
it was over as suddenly as it began. The silence filled the night sky. I could see half-a-dozen stars through the hospital window. The women stopped screaming, but there was still a fair bit of sobbing and crying. I just kept as quiet as a guineapig. I definitely didn’t want to attract attention.

Half an hour later the staff returned. I don’t know where they had gone, but obviously they’d put their own safety well above ours. I was a bit shocked by that. I thought nurses were meant to be more concerned about their patients.

I was glad to see them, because things in the ward were getting ugly. One woman had made a speech to the others, and I seemed to be the main subject of the speech. She stood at the foot of my bed, facing the rest of the room and addressed them in a throaty voice, waving at me every now and then. The light of the night sky shone through the window, right on her face, making her look like a witch. I just lay there, not that I had any choice, and stared at her, determined not to show any weakness. I tried to work out ways to defend myself. If I’d had a bedpan I’d have thrown it at her. I was sorry I didn’t have one; preferably a full one. I didn’t want to look away, because she might think I was scared, so I had to try to remember what weapons were within reach of my bed. I had my own box of tissues now but somehow I didn’t think tissues would be good for much. For a few days I’d had a desk-lamp, but it had walked. I knew there was a little kidney-shaped stainless steel dish that the nurses dropped dressings and stuff in. If I hit her with that it’d probably be better than using my bare fists, but not much better. For the first time I realised that there was a deliberate policy of not leaving stuff in the ward that could be used as a weapon.
Of course.
They’d be crazy otherwise, but it hadn’t crossed my mind before, when I’d been so sick.

The woman wound up to the big climax. No doubt she listed every atrocity committed during the entire war. At the same time she gave me the hate stare, her whole face shining with rage, like a big old full moon. She got so excited that she suddenly grabbed the end of the bed, the rails, and shook them, like a monkey rattling the cage at the zoo.

It was the final straw for me. I pulled myself up by the grab bar above my head and let rip. Wow did I let go. I gave her the works. I made my voice as deep and loud as possible, because I thought that would sound tougher, and I told her everything I didn’t like about her, her friends, her country and the invasion. I knew she was strong, but I knew I had to be stronger. If I couldn’t stare her down I was in big trouble. So I went on and on, feeling my throat get sorer, hearing my voice get hoarser, but knowing that she couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Every so often I stared around the room at the other women, knowing some of them wouldn’t see me very well in the dark, but knowing they would feel my gaze directed at them, and hear my voice coming full-blast in their direction. When I ran out of all the things I wanted to say about the war I shifted to a few older subjects that could get me fired up, like the continuous assessment policy at school, and the lack of any entertainment for people my age in
Wirrawee
, and the way boys’ sport in our school attracted so much more attention and funding than girls’. I was kind of gambling on these people not having a huge understanding of English, and gambling that the way I was yelling would stop them making out the words anyway.

The trouble was
,
I didn’t know where I could go after this. Like, when I got to the end of the speech, what would I do?

In the middle of my telling them how I was fed up with the way the school bus driver wouldn’t wait for you even if he could see your car coming down the driveway, the door burst open. A senior nurse, one I’d only seen occasionally, stomped in, shouted at me to shut up, charged across to the window and drew the curtains closed.

I sank back onto the pillows. I wonder if she knew how pleased I was to see her. My energy levels had been non-existent since the news about Homer and Lee and Kevin and
Fi
. My big speech was the most exercise I’d had.
A new kind of physiotherapy.
Funny, it was almost like it had brought me back to life.

But from then on I felt seriously threatened in the ward. I didn’t even feel safe going to sleep at nights, never knowing if I was going to be attacked. The big woman showed no signs of being discharged, so I started putting pressure on the doctor to kick me out. I didn’t know where I’d be going but I figured it couldn’t be any worse.

The doctor didn’t take a lot of persuading. I think they realised the tension in the ward had become a bit over the top. When I asked him outright if I could go he just shrugged, but twelve and a half hours later I got my marching orders.

They didn’t give me a lot of time to pack, but that was OK, seeing I didn’t have anything to pack. What I did need was time to get used to the fact that my life was about to change dramatically again. Even that weird ward had become kind of comfortable. Taking another plunge into the unknown wasn’t necessarily what I wanted. They gave me a pair of khaki trousers and a lighter khaki shirt, and I was allowed to draw the curtains around the bed for a minute to get changed, but a minute was all I got. It wasn’t enough of course: I was quite worried at how stiff and sore I felt, and how much time it took to do simple things like getting dressed, but it seemed like I’d unmade my bed and I’d have to leave it.

The next minute I was limping out, still doing up buttons, while the other women lay in their beds watching.
Not surprisingly I didn’t get any smiles, any waves, any calls of good luck. I was glad to be going. Since my last visit from Colonel Long I’d felt I was in a morgue, not a hospital. Maybe if I knew what I’d let myself in for I wouldn’t have been in such a hurry.

My escort was pretty full-on. I kept forgetting what a dangerous terrorist I was. Lucky they didn’t know the full story. But even in the middle of the war they found four soldiers to guard me, plus I got handcuffs on my wrists, which was embarrassing. I thought stuff like that only happened on TV.

In spite of the handcuffs I managed to wave goodbye to a couple of the nicer nurses, and one of them waved back. I hope she didn’t get in trouble for it, but it made me feel a million times better. I just wished there was some way of telling her what it meant to me.

The handcuffs quickly became uncomfortable but when I complained to the guards they ignored me. The trouble was the cuffs were put on too tight, and they cut into the bone, and squeezed my skin. But no-one seemed too interested in doing anything about it.

Instead of a prison van I got a minibus, one of those Toyota things that take about twelve or fifteen people. On the door was the logo of the West Cavendish Cricket Club, so I guess that’s where they’d flogged it.