by John Marsden
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 dee
per. 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.
At last it was over. We gathered up the tools and dragged them to a little shed. Then we began the march back. I didn’t think I would make it. I fell over four times in the last kilometre, and each time Issa or Monique helped me up. I remembered how I used to be the strong one, and wondered if after a few weeks of this I’d be as tough as these women. I wondered if I’d ever get any strength from a diet of mouldy oranges and canned tomatoes. I remembered how I’d almost laughed when the officer said I had thirty years. I wasn’t laughing now. I didn’t see how I could survive six months of this, let alone another day.
We got back to the tent. I collapsed onto my bed, and I mean collapsed. But I did have enough energy to ask Monique: ‘Are there any showers?’
She and Issa both looked at me.
‘Didn’t you notice the smell when you moved in?’ Issa asked.
I blushed. ‘Well, yes, I guess ... but I don’t really notice it now.’
They laughed, but like all the laughter in Camp 23, it wasn’t very funny. Not a lot of sweetness in it.
‘That’s because you smell so bad yourself, with that mud. We’re all pretty rank.’ Issa was like that, direct and honest. She’d been studying architecture before she got arrested.
‘So aren’t there any showers?’
‘There are. If you want to use them.’
‘Why wouldn’t I want to use them? Are they cold? Right now I wouldn’t care if they were melted ice.’
‘We keep ourselves smelling bad,’ Issa said. ‘It’s the only contraceptive we’ve got.’
It took me a bit of time to work out what she was saying, then I started to figure it. ‘You mean ... the guards?’
‘You got it, baby,’ Monique said.
‘You deliberately make yourself smell bad?’
‘There are women here who rub cow shit over themselves,’ Issa said, staring straight at me, like she was daring me to say it was disgusting. Or maybe she was seeing how tough I was, whether I was going to be tough enough to survive Camp 23.
‘These guards are bad news,’ Monique said, joining in. Don’t ever get in a situation where you’re on your own, if you can help it. They’re dangerous.’
‘But most of the ones I’ve seen are women.’
‘Yeah. But there’re eleven males. And some of the female ones don’t mind helping them. You’re young and good-looking, and that’s a dangerous combination around here.’
I shivered, feeling again the stain of Colonel Long’s hand on my leg. That was another thing I hadn’t mentioned to Monique and Issa. I was glad, that I hadn’t. Compared to what had been happening in this camp, Colonel Long sounded pretty small-time.
I felt very shy with Monique and Issa. Apart from the ferals, and Ryan, who didn’t really count, I hadn’t been with any new people for a long time. I certainly hadn’t been with any girls near my age, except Fi.
They started telling me the facts of life in Camp 23. They could see I didn’t want to say much, so they did the talking. They explained the camp was for ‘recalcitrants’, which seemed to mean ‘hardliners’. I knew that by now most of the population on the outside were back in normal houses, even if they were small and crowded. They were doing all the boring and dirty jobs for their new bosses. So I’d already figured out that anyone in this camp was likely to be special in one way or another. When I’d arrived I thought they might be crims; like, bank robbers and rapists. But as I listened I realised that they all seemed to have done stuff like me, but in different ways.
I already knew Issa’s crime. Monique’s had been to crash a car when she was the driver for a general. The general got two broken legs, Monique got three broken ribs and a fifteen-year jail sentence. She was twenty, and had a baby boy who’d been killed in a New Zealand air raid. She cried in her sleep every night.
Monique had been a trainee journalist on a little country newspaper in Malton.
I’d been lucky in my tentmates. But in the middle of their conversation I fell into a sleep so heavy that they had to pull me off my bed onto the floor to wake me for tea. I don’t know why they bothered. The entire meal consisted of dry white bread with spots of mould all over it. Oh, and sorry, I forgot to mention the hot water with a few tea-leaves at the bottom of the cup.
Chapter Thirteen
The thing about Camp 23 that was different from any thing or any place else I’d been in my life was that here soldiers were vicious and cruel all the time, without any reason. Just for the hell of it. Sure, there was a group of boys at school who could be horrible to someone they didn’t like. But it was a quantum leap (whatever that means) to the guards of Camp 23. They bashed and battered people because ... well, that was it, there was no because. They just did it.
I saw terrible things. On my second day at the quarry, shovelling mud, a girl near me got mud pushed down her throat by a guard who decided he didn’t like her attitude. He made her swallow, I don’t know, about a litre of the stuff, until she lay on the ground spewing and choking. He walked away laughing.
I took my lead from the others, like the day before, and didn’t try to interfere. I asked Issa that night
: ‘Why doesn’t anyone do anything?’
‘Because we don’t want to get our arms broken.’
‘OK.’
Sometimes ‘OK’ is the only thing you can say.
‘You know that tall girl on crutches? Vanessa? The reason she’s on crutches is that she tried to stop them raping a friend of hers. So the guards broke her leg by holding her down with her head on one chair and her feet on another, and then jumping on her leg till the bone snapped.’
The next day, when a girl was pistol-whipped across the face until her mouth was a red hole in a bleeding mess of flesh I kept my head down. I felt sick, I felt sweat break out all over my body, I felt tears fill my eyes until they dropped one by one into the sticky black mud, but I kept my head down.
Issa and Monique kept me going. Nothing else could have. I was just about ready to give up, not once but a hundred times. While I was in 23 Issa and Monique were stronger than me. Indomitable.
It showed in a hundred ways. A hug when you’d just walked past something brutal and awful. A quick comment like, ‘Come on, Amber, don’t let them get to you’, when I was struggling to keep my wheelbarrow moving along the plank. A joke when you looked at your plate and saw the crap that the guards called food.
We didn’t have a lot of laughs though. There weren’t many merry moments. The only truly fun episode I saw was when a guard accidentally shot his foot off. A rabbit suddenly sprinted across the floor of the quarry where we were working, and the guard tried to get his pistol out of his holster so he could have some target practice. Unfortunately for him he was in such a hurry that the gun went off while he was still pulling it out. God he screamed. That was what we called entertainment in Camp 23: someone shooting himself.
For once, the bleakness I felt inside matched the bleakness around me. The pain I felt over the deaths of my friends got lost in a more general pain, the pain of being alive in this terrible wasteland, a desert of the human spirit.
