Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (26 page)

There were three women watching me, one sitting on the next bed and the other two standing beside my stretcher.

They looked pretty grim. They made me nervous.

‘Welcome to Camp 23,’ one of them said.

I didn’t answer.

‘I’m Judy.’

I wasn’t sure if I had any broken teeth or not, but somehow I mumbled ‘I’m ... I’m, um, Amber’. Only at the last second did I remember my new name.

Judy nodded. I closed my eyes again. It hurt too much to have them open.

I became aware that there was a bad smell in the place. Like the chook shed at home when I hadn’t cleaned it out for ages and the hay was rank and mouldy and rotten. I felt my nose wrinkle but tried to ignore it. I could hear the women talking but I was too tired to make out the words. I got the general idea that they were trying to work out where to put me. I wanted to say, ‘I can’t move, I don’t want to move, I’m too tired’, but I was too tired to say it or anything else. Then they virtually rolled me off the bed.

I staggered back outside. It felt cold out there. They were prodding me along relentlessly. Even my own people didn’t seem to have any mercy. When they’d lined the fence before, and yelled out support, I’d hoped I was coming into a friendly, kind environment. This didn’t feel too friendly or kind.

They prodded me all the way to another tent that seemed the same as the one I’d left, even to the bad smell. I collapsed onto a bed and fell straight asleep without even getting under the rough grey blanket. I must have slept pretty heavily; when I woke up I had the pattern of the blanket embedded on the side of my face.

From the moment I woke I felt desperately scared and insecure. I didn’t know the rules for this place. I was in a limbo, and had no points of contact with anyone. The only thing I knew for sure was that this camp was ugly and violent and frightening. The stiffness and soreness of my face and body were evidence of that.

Two girls a bit older than me were already rolling out of their beds. They’d slept in their clothes, in the rough-and-ready kind of stuff that everyone here seemed to wear, like they’d raided the dump bin behind an op-shop.

‘You’d better hurry,’ one of them said. ‘You don’t want to be late for rollcall.’

The way she said it made rollcall sound a fraction worse than an iceberg warning on the
Titanic.

I sat upright then somehow got off the bed and made myself stand, ignoring the throbbing in my neck and jaw. The other two were already hurrying out of the tent, and I stumbled after them, catching up with the last girl as we passed the next tent. Ahead of us were a couple of dozen others, heading in the same direction.

‘I’m
Issa
,’ the girl said.

‘Hi, I’m Amber.’

It was too cold, and I was too tired to say any more. A few moments later we were on the parade ground.

The guards arrived. Even as they marched towards us I felt the tension rise. There wasn’t a single thing you could point to that showed it. No-one screamed or fainted or fell to their knees. No-one hugged the person next to them or begged for mercy. But I felt a fear that was different to anything I’d felt before. It was a fear like a breeze, chilling the whole place. It sure brought my skin out in prickles.

Yet nothing really happened. We had to stand in the places we were allocated, while they read out the names. They were organised enough to have my name already, and in alphabetical order. Maybe that guy had been smarter with the computer than I’d thought. We had to yell ‘Present’ in a loud voice, and then they counted us, to make sure we weren’t answering for each other. It should have been easy, but because there were people in the camp hospital, or missing for some other legit reason, like working in the camp kitchen, the numbers wouldn’t balance.

We stood there for three-quarters of an hour. In the cold light of dawn it wasn’t very funny, but at the same time I loved to see the sun rising. It looked like it was floating above a bank of clouds, sitting on them even: a huge red soft sun that looked like it might melt onto the clouds.

Then suddenly it was just a normal clear day, bright, and the sky was all blue.

I stood in line for breakfast with the two girls from my new tent,
Issa
and Monique. Feeling a stir of energy at the end of the queue I glanced around. The men were coming in, from their side of the camp. They crowded into the meal hut, outnumbering the women by at least five to one.

We got our food on battered stainless steel trays that were scratched and dented and warped. The food was complete crap. A mouldy orange, with white powder over half the peel and the inside soft and over-sweet, a bowl of water with some kind of weak beef flavouring in it, and a slice of toast that was soggy and unbuttered. I nearly threw up when I tried to eat the orange. I went to push it away, but
Issa
leaned over to me and said, ‘If you want to survive, eat everything. You’ll need all the strength you can get.’

So I made myself. I forced the orange down by tearing it into small segments. At least none of the stuff hurt my sore mouth.

Men and women weren’t allowed to sit in the same areas, but there was a boundary and you could talk across it if you had the energy.

I didn’t go near the men. I didn’t want to. I felt too sick and scared and tired and old. Hearing those male voices reminded me so fiercely of Homer and Lee and Kevin that I felt terrible physical pain, a sickness that twisted my gut.

I was relieved to get out of there, but less relieved when I found what the day had in store. I went to the dunny,
which
was foul, but no sooner was I out of there than
Issa
was hurrying towards me: ‘Quick, you can’t stay here. The work parade starts now.’

‘Work parade?’

But she was already trotting away, between the lines of tents. I followed her to the place where we’d had the rollcall before breakfast. After the little panic to get there we had an anticlimax, waiting for another three-quarters of an hour while orders were yelled and cancelled, lists were checked, long lines of men were marched away from their section to different locations, and we got colder and hungrier.

Issa
stood beside me, huddled into a holey old purple rollneck jumper, with big holes and lots of loose threads. It looked like the moths had held their annual convention in it, but it looked warm, and I envied her that. She said to me: ‘What’s happened to your leg?’

Even though I’d been asleep so much of the time I’d still done a bit of thinking. I didn’t like my conclusion, but I knew it was the right one. This was a huge camp; maybe a thousand prisoners. Anything I said was going to travel the length and breadth of the place.

‘I hitched a ride on a train,’ I said. ‘And just after I got off, the train derailed. So they thought I’d sabotaged it or something. They came chasing after me, and I decided it wasn’t too healthy, so I ran. And these soldiers started firing at me, and I copped a bullet in the leg.’

She nodded sympathetically. ‘I heard you’d been accused of wrecking a train. See,
there’s no secrets
in this place. You’re lucky though, a few months ago something like that would have put you in front of a firing squad.’

‘Why’s it changed?’

She looked at me in surprise. ‘Don’t you know? They’re getting nervous. Since D-Day they’ve been backing off a bit. They’re worried that if the Kiwis win, they’ll get busted for war crimes.’

I sat up. ‘So are we definitely winning? What’s been happening?’

‘God, where have you been?’

‘I’ve been living rough. I haven’t heard any news. I’ve been hanging out in the bush.’

‘So did you nick off from a secured area?
Or a work party?
Don’t they take reprisals if you do that?’

‘No, no,’ I said uncertainly. ‘We live way out, and they’re pretty slack out there. They left us alone. We could get away with just about anything.’

I figured
Issa
wouldn’t know any better. I hated lying to her, but it was a matter of life and death for me. If word got out that I’d been involved in stuff like bombing Cobbler’s Bay or wrecking
Wirrawee
airfield, I’d get the firing squad then, no worries, D-Day or no D-Day. In fact with what they’d do to me, I’d probably be begging for a firing squad before they’d finished.

To change the subject I started asking
Issa
about herself, and Monique. ‘I got twelve years,’ she said, ‘for sabotage.’

‘What kind of sabotage?’

‘They put me in a factory in Cavendish, making hydraulic hoses, for aircraft mainly. It was so boring, you’ve got no idea. A couple of us started organising everyone to sabotage them. Pricking little holes in them, deliberately making them a couple of centimetres short, that kind of thing. When they got onto it, they pulled some of the weaker girls in for questioning, and within half an hour they had my name and two others they reckoned were the ringleaders. The other two confessed, and got eight years, but like an idiot I denied the whole thing and got twelve.’

I thought, ‘There’s more than one way to fight.’ I asked her: ‘So is the war really going better?’

‘Well, you know how it is, one rumour after another, you wouldn’t know what’s happening. But they say there’s a chance now. And the Administration and the senior guards have changed their attitude. The others haven’t, but I guess if you’re a true sadist you don’t like to give it up.

‘Still,’ she sighed, ‘you can’t imagine how a little country like New Zealand could win a war. I don’t see how they can.’

‘If they get lots of help though ...’

‘Yes, they say Japan’s backing us. Never would have picked that, hey? According to Monique they don’t even have an army of their own. Well, who knows, we may get up yet. God I hope so. Can’t stand much more of these bastards.’

We were on the move at last, marching through the gates and out onto the road, away from the quarry. Well, everyone else marched. I limped. We went about three kilometres, to a smaller quarry. My leg was killing me by then.

We were put to work shovelling mud. This quarry hadn’t been used for a long time. I don’t know how deep the mud was in the middle, but at the edges, where we were working, it was up to my knees, awful black sticky stuff, that sucked you in like quicksand. Every time you took a wrong step you sank down into it, and if you weren’t careful you’d lose your boots trying to pull yourself out. By the fifth or sixth time I was utterly exhausted, and it was only eleven o’clock.

I swapped with
Issa
, wheeling the barrows instead of shovelling, but it wasn’t any easier. Gradually the mud dried on my legs till it caked like a plaster cast, and then fell off, leaving shells of mud along my tracks. But that was the least of my problems. I thought I was strong, and normally I would be, but now, still recovering from all that had happened, I had no strength at all. The vital thing, on each trip with the barrow, was to get it moving. The first part was the worst. As the weight of mud built up, its legs sank deeper and deeper. If I could pull it out of the mud and start it rolling, I had a chance to push it up onto the drier land. It was all to do with momentum. If I couldn’t keep it moving through the first fifty metres of muddy stuff I was in real trouble.

It wasn’t just the weight of the barrow and the sticking power of the mud. It was the guards standing around watching, laughing at your efforts,
then
bashing you every time the barrow tipped over. You had to get the barrow upright again before the guard came striding down, truncheon swinging, and you felt the heavy smack of it against your shoulder blades.

The other bad part was at the end of each trip, pushing the barrow along a plank onto a kind of loading dock,
then
tipping it into a truck. The plank looked easy from the bottom but once you got a few metres along it started to bend and sway like it would break at any moment.

My main motivation in keeping my balance on the plank, in not letting the barrow tip over, was seeing a middle-aged woman lose her barrow over the edge when she was halfway to the truck. A guard hit her across the mouth with the full force of his truncheon. She fell from the plank onto the barrow. She opened her mouth, in slow motion, and I saw a pool of blood run from it and then she spat out a sprinkle of teeth, like little diamonds. I wondered how bad things had been before D-Day, if things were so much better at Camp 23 now. Maybe this guard was just one of the sadists
Issa
had mentioned.

Lunch was as many cans of peeled tomatoes as you could eat. It was a strange meal. A four-wheel drive came down and dumped about fifty cases of the stuff, and a couple of can openers. Remembering what
Issa
said about eating everything, and figuring I needed the vitamin C, I ate as much as I could – three and a quarter cans – then brought half of it up ten minutes later.

The afternoon was a nightmare. I thought it would never end. I trudged in and out of the mud a hundred times, my legs aching, cramping, knotting, until I couldn’t lift them, and had to slide along like I was wearing skates. My back was so painful from the baton hits that I couldn’t lift my arms above shoulder level, which made it hard to shovel. To make things worse, they’d moved us to the western side of the quarry, and every time I pushed my barrow along the track I had to pass the body of a young woman who looked like she’d been there a week or more. She had obviously been a prisoner, but I didn’t like to ask anyone who she was or how she died, because I didn’t want to upset
Issa
and the others. But she lay there with her eye sockets empty and her skin blackened and peeling from the sun, and all the signs that rodents or birds or foxes had been doing what scavengers do. It didn’t help me keep the peeled tomatoes down.

What did help was the attitude of the other prisoners. They were gutsy. All morning they’d kept me going with encouragement, jokes, advice. As the day wore on and their energy levels dropped, they didn’t have so much to say, but every grin through cracked and bleeding lips was worth another half an hour to me.