by John Marsden
Chapter Twelve
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.
I got in without making a fuss. Apart from complaining about the handcuffs I hadn’t tried to speak to the guards. I couldn’t be bothered. Partly because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction, partly because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference. What would happen would happen. These guys wouldn’t have any say in whether I lived or died. Someone else would have made that decision; probably some faceless person who I’d never meet.
As if one pair of handcuffs wasn’t enough they put me in a seat halfway towards the back, and handcuffed me to the seat frames behind and in front. My left arm behind and my right arm in front. They sure weren’t taking any risks. They waved their rifles around and made it clear they’d be happy to shoot me if I tried to escape.
As if, when I was wearing three pairs of cuffs.
Then there was another of those endless meaningless infuriating delays that seem to happen so much more in wartime. It lasted about forty minutes and was broken in an unexpected way. The door into the van suddenly slid open and there was Colonel Long.
‘Ah, good,’ he said, smirking away like a pig who’d just been offered some Chocolate Bavarian. ‘There you are.’
He closed the door behind him and sat next to me for a confidential chat.
‘I have fixed everything,’ he said. ‘You see, I am still looking after you.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, swallowing about six different emotions all in one gulp.
‘You will see,’ he said. ‘I am sending you to a very good place. Not a bad place. As long as you keep sensible you will be all right.’
I nodded.
‘But you must be very careful,’ he said. ‘Say nothing to anyone. Not even your own people. Not even your friends. Your name Amber Faulding. You don’t know anything except train. That way, you will be fine and one day soon the war will end and you will be back with your family and you will remember Colonel Long and how good he was to you.’
Yes,’ I said, ‘thank you very much. Thank you for all you have done. I’ll definitely remember you after the war.’
He nodded, satisfied.
Then he put his hand on my leg, just above the knee.
I felt like I’d had a hot brand applied to my skin. I felt it burn through to the bone. I sat there in shock. I hadn’t realised what his sleazy looks really meant. I’d thought he was only interested in our conspiracy and when he sat close to me it was because we were partners in his plot to save his skin. Suddenly it seemed like there was a second agenda.
I must have been so red that I couldn’t imagine he would fancy me, unless he was into tomatoes. I’d just turned into Tomato Head. I didn’t know how to stop him. I was completely in his power. But when he moved his hand further up my leg, I couldn’t stand it any more. To distract him, I asked again, ‘Colonel Long, the people at the truck stop, they were only kids, like me, are you sure they were ...’
His eyes burned holes in me. ‘I told you,’ he hissed. ‘I told you already. Don’t talk about that place. They all dead. I told you that. You very naughty girl.’
‘OK, I’m sorry. I won’t ask again, I promise.’
He scowled at me again, threw open the door of the bus and got out.
I sank back into my seat, feeling as much relief as if I’d just escaped death.
The driver and the guards got in, and we went for a little scenic drive. I didn’t know this country at all, so I had no idea where we were going. We headed pretty much in a straight line for an hour and a half, roughly north-east. Then we turned west for about ten minutes, and that was it. We’d arrived.
I still felt so shaky after my chat with Colonel Long that I hardly took in the view from the bus window. But my first thought when we drove through the main set of gates, and I could see the whole place, was, ‘Heaps better than Stratton Prison’.
For one thing it was in the open. Fresh air. Light. Real weather. The things that you don’t even notice normally. The things you realise are the essence of life when you lose them. It all looked quite good, and I felt pleased to be out of the hospital. ‘Looks like I made a good call for once,’ I thought.
I still hadn’t learned not to judge from appearances.
It was a clever set-up. I never saw any other prison camps, so I don’t know what they were like, but Camp 23 was set in a quarry. And it was some quarry. You could lay out half-a-dozen football fields and still have room for a pony club. From top to bottom must have been a hundred metres, sheer cliffs all the way. I looked at them, wondering how it would be to climb them, at night for example, with the guards looking for you with rifles and spotlights. Thinking of my other climbs in this war, into the HollowayValley, and more recently, down steep rock in search of the missing feral kids, I shuddered and looked away. I’d have to be full-on desperate to go up that cliff.
The camp itself was rows of tents, with two wooden buildings in the middle and a couple more around the perimeter. Soon enough I found out what the wooden buildings were: offices for the staff, mostly, except the ones in the middle, which were dining halls for us, the prisoners. Two high-wire fences stretched around the whole place, with fifty metres between them and guard towers at each corner. The ground between the fences had been cleared and raked: like it had been designed as the no-go zone, a good place to hang out if you were tired of life.
The tents seemed to go forever, in their neat lines, stretching away to the other end of the quarry. They were grey, with flies tightly stretched, and taut white ropes to the pegs. It was all perfectly symmetrical. After the jungle I’d been living in for so long it was kind of comforting.
Of course what I most wanted to see, what mattered most to me, was who was living in those tents. If I had to be locked up, I wanted it to be with my own people. The worst thing about the ward was not the injuries and the injections and the pain. The worst thing was being alone. You can survive anything if you’re with friends. If the last year or so hadn’t taught me that, it hadn’t taught me anything.
Unfortunately I couldn’t see the prisoners. The smell of food made me think they might be eating but I didn’t get time to think about that. Instead I was un-cuffed from the bus seats.
I got up and stepped out, wanting to stretch my legs after the long trip, wanting to be free of the squashy little bus. But there was no time for that either. A guard from the camp, a man in an immaculate grey uniform, grabbed me by the left elbow and pulled me across in front of him, then, while I was still off-balance, pushed me hard towards the gate.
I went sprawling into the dust. I lay there, wanting to give up, feeling the dust on my lips, feeling my heart turn to dust. Suddenly I realised this place might be pretty bad news.
I heard a voice yell, ‘Leave her alone, you mongrel’. I looked up. A dozen or so prisoners, all men I think, had appeared, and were pressed against the inner fence, watching through the wire. At least my main question had just been answered. There was no doubt about the nationality of these people. It helped give me some strength
.
The guard grabbed me by my hair, at the back of my head, and lifted me by it. The prisoners were all yelling now, but I couldn’t make out the words through the pain that filled my head. The guard marched me along, into a small wooden building. As soon as we were in there he threw me against a wall and yelled: ‘Stand there! Stand up straight! You wait!’
Then he went into an office.
Nothing happened for a long time. I stood there, standing up as straight as I could, but leaning against the wall when I thought I could get away with it. Occasionally one of the guards kicked me in the shins to make me stand up again, but I was very tired and each time they pushed me off the wall I’d look for my chance to slump back against it. My main concern was to protect my wound, by keeping it away from the soldiers. I made sure they hit and kicked me on my good side.
I could still feel the place where Colonel Long had touched me, like a dark mark on my leg. I fantasised getting some soap and scrubbing it for an hour or two, to remove the shadow of his hand. But I had the feeling I wouldn’t be getting too many bubble baths in this place.
People came and went, most of them guards in ordinary grey uniforms, plus a few officers with red trimming on their jackets, and different shaped hats. Phones kept ringing but they didn’t get answered often. No-one seemed to be working too hard. One young guy sat at a desk typing some stuff into a computer, but he wasn’t breaking any speed records, and judging by the way he kept cursing and using the backspace key I don’t think he had much idea of what he was doing. I had a strong urge to go across there and take over, show him how to do it.
Some time in the middle of the afternoon, around three o’clock, a bloke came out of an office and gestured for me to go in.
I shuffled after him. It was hard to move with all the bruises I’d picked up that day. My leg and face were throbbing and I had a bad headache.
To my surprise the officer was quite polite. He asked about my bullet wound, but not about the other injuries. Maybe he didn’t want to know that soldiers in his army beat up on girls. He didn’t seem too interested in my answers anyway. I was in the middle of a long rambling description of the medical care in the hospital when he cut me off, and handed me a sheet of paper. It looked official but I couldn’t read it.
‘You don’t know our language?’
‘No.’
‘It is the result of your case. A military court met on the 28th and found you guilty of sabotage, terrorism and murder. You have been sentenced to thirty years imprisonment.’
There didn’t seem anything to say. I nearly laughed. If anything I felt relief, that apparently they weren’t going to kill me. Anyway, thirty years seemed such a ridiculous figure. How did they arrive at that? Why not say forty? Or fifty? They were all equally meaningless.
The officer, as if trying to read my mind, said, ‘You are very lucky to avoid the death sentence. You committed your crimes at the right time.’
When I looked puzzled he added: ‘It’s all politics. Death sentences are not regarded as good politics at this moment.’
I think he decided then that he’d said too much, because he stood up suddenly and went outside, where I could hear him talking to someone.
Two new guards came in, both women. They escorted me outside and marched me towards the first row of tents. No-one seemed to be around. We marched all the way along until we came to another barrier, which the guards unlocked, ushering me into a small compound at the north end of the camp. When I saw a few women in the distance I realised this must be the female section. It was the end of my journey. One of the soldiers unlocked my handcuffs. God that felt good. The skin was raw in a few spots, where they’d been rubbing. I shook my hands to get the blood moving, then held them under my armpits. The guards headed out through the gate, but already another pair, a man and a woman this time, were marching towards me, their eyes focused hard on me.
I waited nervously. My introduction to this place had been so bad I didn’t know what to expect. Ever since I’d been caught I felt I’d just been passed from one set of bullies to the next.
They pulled up in front of me, their boots raising a little cloud of dust. They were both overweight, both about thirty-five, both with soft baby faces. Before the dust settled the man started to shout at me. Or scream, I should say. He had a piercing voice. They would have heard him back in Stratton. I couldn’t work out for a minute what he was saying. I was too tired. I didn’t even realise it was in English. But eventually I understood it was the rules for the camp. Every time he yelled another one he came a bit nearer, until I felt really uncomfortable with his closeness.
‘You not be late for meals! You not be late for roll-calls! You not be late for jobs!’
I took a step back and straightaway he slapped me, making my face sting and my eyes water. From then on he slapped me with each new rule. ‘You be polite to soldiers.’ Slap. ‘You not go over red line.’ Slap. ‘You not talk on rollcalls.’ Slap. ‘You keep tent neat and tidy. You not be outside tent at night. You not make up lies about soldiers.’ Slap slap slap.
My face became numb, but I could feel my jaw hurting more and more, like he was pushing it out of shape. I didn’t dare back away again. I just had to wait till he’d finished.
He stopped as suddenly as he’d started. He yelled: ‘You stand there till I say,’ slapped me again, and the two of them marched away. I had thought he was giving me another rule, so it took me a moment to register that the speech was over. I waited, my face feeling swollen and sore, thinking, ‘I don’t know whether I can hack thirty years of this’.
I stood there for a while, I’m not sure how long, probably about an hour, then I started getting dizzy. It was weird. My stomach and chest seemed to have nothing in them but air, and my vision got really blurry. I thought I was swaying but maybe I was swaying quite a lot, because suddenly I did a Robyn, and fainted.
It’s a strange feeling, fainting. Not that you have any feeling while you’re doing it, of course. But when you wake up, you’re still far away, floating, like something’s gone wrong but you’re not sure what it is. At least that’s how it was for me. I’ve never fainted before so I can’t be sure if that’s the regular reaction. I woke up slowly, and knew I was lying on a bed but knew I shouldn’t be, at that time of day. I struggled to get up, but immediately a couple of people held me down, which just made me struggle all the more.
‘Let her go,’ someone said. It was a friendly voice, and I sat up, feeling stupid, trying to look around, to see where I was. I was in a tent. There were eight stretchers, four on each side, all neatly made up. I was sitting on the first one. They weren’t hospital stretchers, just old-fashioned camping ones, like my grandmother kept in her shed. There was no other furniture. In the grey-green light everything seemed old and quiet and calm, but then my aches and pains gradually returned, reminding me that they were still there, and I didn’t feel too calm after that.
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 c
old 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.
