Tomorrow 3 - The Third Day, The Frost

by John Marsden

  ‘Do you know the name of the container ship you sank?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know its nationality?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know what its cargo was?’

  ‘No. Just empty containers we think.’

  ‘Is there any chance of you going back in there to have a look at a few things for me? If I give you a list of questions, things we need investigated?’

  My blood boiled. ‘No! No way! We’re not heavily into suicide. Over.’

  ‘All right, I quite understand. You’ve obviously done very well, and I congratulate you. Keep up the good work. Now, hang on a moment and I’ll put you back to Laurie. Over.’

  ‘Wait!’ I yelled. ‘Wait!’ I tried to find the words. ‘What are you going to ... I mean, can’t you get us out of here?’

  ‘Regrettably, no. We just don’t have the resources. We’re at full stretch as it is, as I’m sure you’d appre­ciate. You sound as though you’re looking after your­selves very well, though. I’m sure things’ll change in a few months, but until then we can’t help you. Keep in touch with Laurie, and anything else you can do to help the war effort will be much appreciated, believe me.’

  I didn’t say any more, and in a moment Laurie came back on and wound up the conversation. He said he’d keep listening at 8 pm, their time, every night, in case we needed to get in touch. And that was all anyone could do for us. We were on our own again. We’d had our hopes raised so much for that short time, then, just as suddenly, nothing.

  There was silence in the room. No one seemed able to speak. We were all too depressed. I was way overdue for some sentry duty; so was Homer, but he looked too devastated to think about it. I went out to take over from Robyn, not because I’m a martyr but because I wanted to be on my own for a while, and going on sentry was as good a way as any to do it.

  I found a possie on the top of a wrecked pantech that I reached by climbing a tree and dropping onto it. The light branches of the tree draped over the pan-tech and hid me well enough. The van looked like it had rolled: not only was it bent and crushed all along the passenger side but also the roof was creased and crumpled. Grass was growing in the roof; a little dirt was lodged there, probably from when it had rolled, and weeds were growing happily from it. I wasn’t in a good position to alert the others if enemy troops suddenly appeared, but I thought I’d worry about that if and when it happened. I sat there hugging my knees, wondering what we should do next. Maybe hijack a jet and fly to New Zealand. I gazed at my arms and hands. They looked pretty rough. There were scratches and scars everywhere. The knuckles on my left hand were swollen from where I’d been bashed into the rocks by the tidal wave at Cobbler’s Bay. I tried to work out how long ago that was, but had to give up. It felt like weeks, but I knew it wasn’t. Probably only a few days.

  There was a scar on the right thumb that went way back to the time we’d got Lee out of Wirrawee, using a front-end loading truck. On the inside of the right arm was a long scar that I’d picked up blunder­ing through the bush, the night of the Harvey’s Heroes’ massacre. I don’t know how I hurt my arm; I was too upset at the time to notice. Just a stick, I guess.

  On the tip of my left elbow was a mosquito bite, on the back of the hand a bruise that I’d picked up when I’d tripped in the dark. My fingernails were a manicurist’s nightmare, ripped, bitten, cut, torn. There wasn’t one that was undamaged. I seemed to bleed easily around the fingernails these days. Maybe lack of vitamins, I don’t know. I’ve never been much into skin care, but I’d had the usual collection of moisturisers and creams and lotions and I used them on special occasions, like going to socials. I didn’t use them much on school days. I never had time anyway: I was too busy in the mornings. But what I would have done now for my little line-up of jars and tubes! I’d love to have rubbed the soft white fragrant cream slowly into my skin, making it supple and smooth, bringing it back to life. Such a little luxury, but I longed for it.

  Somehow Lee tracked me to the pantech. I don’t know how. He must have had the nose of a border collie. But he saw me there and started climbing the tree to come up with me. He didn’t say anything, just climbed slowly to the truck roof, then crawled along the deformed metal.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Looks like we’re not going to New Zealand, hey.’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘I was hoping so much ...’

  ‘I didn’t know if it’d be good or bad. I never thought they’d pick us up anyway, and I don’t know about walking out on my family.’

  ‘Yeah, that was what I was worried about. But there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do for them. Not yet.’

  ‘You don’t like me any more, do you?’

  He’d caught me by surprise. I knew it was coming, but not like that.

  ‘Yes, of course I like you.’

  ‘But not the way it was.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno. It just happened.’

  ‘What, you mean that one minute you liked me and a millisecond later you didn’t?’

  ‘More or less, yeah.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very likely.’

  ‘I don’t care what it sounds like, that’s the way it was.’

  ‘Did Fi say anything against me?’

  ‘Fi? No, why would she?’

  ‘I don’t know, but you’re always talking to her and you take so much notice of what she says.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, but she didn’t say any­thing to put me off you. She’s not a backstabber, not like me.’ I grinned, but Lee wasn’t into laughs today.

  ‘Is it something I said?’

  ‘No, no, really. Nothing dramatic happened, I swear. Maybe we’d just seen enough of each other for a while. I mean, God, we’re only young, we’re not meant to be getting married, you know. At our age we’re meant to have lots of romances.’

  ‘My father was seventeen when he was married.’

  ‘Well, whoopiedoo, I’m very happy for him, but I’ve got no plans yet, believe me.’

  ‘Are you having it off with Homer?’

  I lifted my arm fast, to hit him, then changed my mind. But I don’t know how I didn’t push him straight off the roof. He had such a hide, saying that. I know he was only saying it because he was upset, but that didn’t make it all right. What a dickhead. It made me really pleased that I’d dropped him, because at that moment I didn’t care if I never saw him again, and I had no interest in continuing the conversation. So we sat there in silence for a couple of minutes.

  He knew he’d gone too far – I mean, you didn’t have to be a Nobel Prize winner to work that out.

  I could feel him getting ready to apologise. There wasn’t much else he could do. But I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. He could stew for a while yet, as far as I was concerned. Eventually though, after he’d cleared his throat a couple of times, he managed to struggle through it, taking about five minutes.

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said at last, ‘don’t worry about it. But honestly, Lee, nothing special’s happened. I just want some time and some space. Let’s not make a whole big issue of it, please. We’ve got on pretty well so far – we haven’t had too many fights. But I’ve got the feeling that our toughest times are still ahead. I think we’re in for a really rough stretch now, because there’s no obvious path for us to take, and I think it could get seriously depressing. So we’ve got to keep cheerful and not get too hung up about stuff like this.’

  He didn’t answer and the two of us kept sitting there for a long time, until it started raining.

  ‘Come on,’ I said at last, ‘let’s get down. I’ll have to find somewhere else to watch for the bad guys.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Late in the afternoon we had a meeting in a parked car where I’d sat for hours. It was an old white Rover 2000 with leather seats, in quite good condition. I don’t think it had been in an acci
dent; it probably just died of old age, but I figured I might as well be comfortable, so that’s why I chose it. Plus it was one of the few cars that still had its windscreen. There were a couple of leaks from rust spots in the roof but I sat far enough away from them and stared out through the scratched and dirty windscreen at the grey road beyond.

  The others had been back in the middle of the car yard, lounging around doing nothing much. Most of them seemed asleep when I went to check on them. I rigged up a long cord with a can of pebbles on the end of it, so that if any soldiers appeared I could yank on the cord, making a noise which would alert the others. And at 3.30 I got to use it. A couple of trucks appeared on the road, going much slower than the other traffic which had sped past from time to time. I pulled the can over straight away. By now I knew the look of a patrol when I saw one. Then I slithered out of the Rover and did a stomach crawl back to the gang. We made a quick decision – there was no time for any other kind – they would hide in the pit and I would go up the tree above the pantech and watch from there.

  So I shinned up the wet trunk, trying not to hug it too tightly, to keep as dry as I could. Then I huddled in among the dripping leaves and watched the patrol. They turned straight into the gates of the yard then stopped, and eight soldiers, six of them women, got out. The encouraging thing was that there was no sense of purpose about the trucks or the people. They didn’t look like highly trained commandos launching a search and destroy mission. They looked like a bunch of part-time soldiers who’d been dragged out into the rain to do a job that they didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for. There was an officer with them, and she yelled and pointed for a few minutes, and then they split up into pairs and went off in different directions.

  It was all a bit casual. They poked around and under cars, and looked in most of them. But that was the extent of it. One of them went to the back door of the house, which he probably thought was the front door, and broke the pane of glass in it. I heard the tinkle of it falling. He peered through it, but came back almost straight away wrinkling his face and say­ing something to his partner. I could guess what it was: this place stinks. It did too; I didn’t blame him.

  Within half an hour they were gone. I waited ten minutes, then went and got the others out of their hole. No one was too excited. We’d seen it all before. It was another escape, not a particularly close one, but of course it could easily have been different. It would only have taken one curious soldier to notice the galvanised iron over the pit and call the others, and that would have been the end of us. One day it would happen. One day we would be caught. Seemed like it wasn’t going to be this time.

  I went back to the Rover to continue my watch, and it was there that the others came, half an hour before sunset. Robyn sat in the front seat beside me, with Fi on her lap, and the boys squashed into the back. It was so crowded that they had to leave the back doors open to fit themselves in. Kevin sat right under a leak and got dripped on every few seconds.

  The most unexpected thing about our meeting was that it was Fi who took charge. Everyone else seemed too tired and depressed. Homer looked terri­ble, like he’d been to a B & S and was the last one left at the Recovery. Lee was sunk in his own private thoughts. Kevin looked so jumpy; he kept blinking all the time, as though he had dust in his eyes. Robyn was OK, I think, but quiet, but Fi seemed strong and determined, like she could be sometimes.

  ‘Seeing nobody else seems to have any ideas,’ she said in a firm voice, ‘I’m going to say what I think.’

  ‘Onya, Fi, go for it,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think we have to take care of ourselves for a while. The best thing would be a three-week holiday on the Barrier Reef, all expenses paid and a thousand dollars spending money. I don’t think we’re going to get that, though. But even in World War Two the pilots only had to fly a certain number of missions, and then they’d be rested. Battle fatigue I think it was called. Well, we’ve got our own battle fatigue, and we need to take a rest. If we try and do any more for a while we’ll just wreck our­selves. The last few weeks we’ve been going steadily crazy, and part of going crazy is that you don’t notice you’re going crazy. Whether we do it for our own sakes or whether we do it because it’ll make us better fighters doesn’t matter; the fact is we have to look after ourselves.’

  ‘So do you think we should have a holiday?’ Homer asked.

  I was so relieved that Homer was showing some life again that I could have cried. I think the thing that mattered most was that Fi was giving us permission to take a break. There were no adults to say such things to us, and we’d stopped saying them to ourselves. We’d got ourselves into a state of mind where we couldn’t think clearly; we were just driving onwards until, like overworked engines, we broke down. As Fi talked I realised that it was OK to take a break, that we didn’t have to win the war all by ourselves.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fi firmly.

  ‘I don’t want to go back to Hell,’ Robyn said.

  ‘Likewise,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s so long since I’ve been there.’

  ‘I was thinking of the Isthmus,’ Fi said.

  ‘Yeah!’ Lee suddenly said. We got such a shock at the way he blurted it out that we got the giggles. I could see Lee in the cracked rear-vision mirror; he looked a bit sheepish, but he was grinning.

  ‘You like the idea, huh?’ Homer said to him.

  ‘Well, I like the Isthmus,’ Lee said.

  The Isthmus is a long neck of land that connects the town of Ferris with Blue Rocks National Park. It’s actually called Webster’s Isthmus, but no one ever uses its full name.

  There’s no access to the National Park by car; you have the choice of foot or boat, because there’s no road across the Isthmus. That made it ideal for us, of course. The park is beautiful, but it’s the Isthmus itself that’s extra beautiful. I’d been there once with Fi’s family, staying at a cabin that some friends of theirs owned. I didn’t know Lee had been there at all.

  ‘When did you go there?’ I asked his reflection in the mirror.

  ‘With the scouts,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a scout.’

  ‘Well I was. For more than a year. There’s a scout camp about a k from Ferris, and we spent five days there one Easter. It was great. They made us hike our little butts off, but I enjoyed it. What a place.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I agreed, remembering that wild rocky landscape, and the water exploding against the cliffs. ‘We’d be safe there for a while. I think the colonists’ll be too busy colonising to go bushwalking.’

  ‘It means staying away from Wirrawee quite a bit longer,’ Robyn said hesitantly. ‘I feel guilty when we’re not near our families, even if we can’t do any­thing to help them.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fi. ‘We all feel that. But honestly, what can we do for them? We all know the answer: nothing. We’ve got to think of this as a holiday. Let’s say we’ll go there for two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks we’ll go back to Wirrawee and check out the situation. We’ve got enough food, easily, with the cans we scored here, but too much to carry. We’ll have to take the Jackaroo. I think it’s worth the risk. If we go in the middle of the night, drive slowly, don’t use lights, we should be safe. Surely they’ll be think­ing that we’re out of the district by now. All the search parties’ll be coming back to Cobbler’s saying they found nothing, and I guess their bosses’ll never know what sloppy searching they do.’

  ‘Hope they never find out,’ Robyn said, with feeling.

  There was no real opposition to Fi’s idea. The only problem was the timing. No one felt comfortable about leaving straight away. It was still too soon after the attack. We decided we would wait four days, and see whether they had stopped combing the district by then. It would be boring, but boredom was better than death, any day.

  So we fiddled around, doing nothing. I spent the time sitting and thinking, looking out across the pad­docks. I’m embarrassed to say
that I went back to thumb-sucking in a big way, till the thumb on my left hand looked soft and white and wet. But at least it was clean.

  We looked in the house for books, but only found two, apart from technical manuals. I thought it was amazing; a house with just two books. One of them was How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the other was Gone With The Wind. No one wanted the first one but Fi and Robyn argued over Gone With The Wind. In the end, they compromised. Fi’s the faster reader, so she started it, then as she finished each page, she tore it out and gave it to Robyn. It was a good system.

  Homer and Kevin started mucking round with the Jackaroo engine, trying different parts that they sal­vaged from the wrecked cars. They claimed they were making it faster, quieter, cleaner, smoother. By the time they finished, I was just grateful it was running at all.

  Lee disappeared for hours on end. I mean many hours, like eight or ten. I think he just roamed across the countryside, going wherever his mood took him. He was so restless. I wondered if he was turning into a wild animal, a lone wolf maybe.

  It was four o’clock on the third day when our plans changed. I was on the top of the pantech, suck­ing my thumb, watching Lee come back across the paddock. He was sticking close to the treeline, slip­ping quickly from tree to tree, a shadow among many shadows. When he was climbing the fence into the wrecker’s yard, I went down to meet him.

  ‘Get everyone,’ he said as soon as he saw me. ‘Tell them to meet at the Jackaroo.’

  I took one look at his face and ran to find the others. In just a couple of minutes we were gathered there, facing Lee. He said one word, and that was enough.

  ‘Dogs,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Fi, but the rest of us knew.

  ‘They’ve got a pack of dogs,’ Lee said. ‘Two alsa­tians and a couple of beagles. They’ve knocked off for today but I reckon they’ll be back tomorrow. And they’re not mucking around. They know what they’re doing.’