by John Marsden
When he came in the next time I tried to get a line on why he was being so helpful, and, more importantly, what more I could get out of him.
So I said: ‘Thanks for saving my life out in the bush that day.’
It was the first time I’d been lucid enough to have a proper conversation with him.
‘That right,’ he said. ‘I saved your life. You are the enemy to my people. What you did was very bad. All the same, I saved your life.’
‘Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much.’
He gave a brief grin. He was sweating a lot, as though this conversation was important, but at the same time it was making him extremely nervous. I was about to find out why.
He glanced around, then sat in the chair beside my bed, moving it a little closer. ‘I have saved your life,’ he said. ‘Is very hard work. Even now, is very hard work. A lot of people say, “Why is she in one of our hospitals? Why do we not just shoot her?’”
I said carefully: ‘I guess I owe you.’
Seemed like he was pleased to hear that. He gave an eager little nod, and moved his chair even closer.
‘For me, I am realist. I love my country, yes, of course, but also I have myself to think of, I have a family, I have a wife, two children, also mother and father, all depend on me.’
I nodded, trying to look understanding and sympathetic.
‘This war soon be over. Soon be finished. United Nations, be here soon.’
I felt a gleam of excitement come into my eyes, and tried to hide it. It was the first good news I’d had since coming into hospital.
‘Lots of bad things happen during war,’ the man said, giving me a sudden sharp glance. I realised we were getting to the point now.
‘Lots of bad things. In war, sometimes things happen, everything quick quick, bang-bang. No time to think.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ I said.
‘After war, sometimes reporters come, judges come. Inquiries, commissions, trials. Things get, how you say, raked up?’
‘I guess so. Like Nuremberg.’
‘Yes. That not good.’
His face shone with sweat and his English was starting to break down under the pressure.
‘I been very good to you. Saved your life. You say that to me. I save your life. That true, no?’
‘It’s definitely true.’
‘Good. Good. After war, you say that too? Anyone ask you, Colonel Long very good to you, save your life.’
At last I could see what this was all about. At last it made sense. ‘You crafty bugger,’ I thought. Choosing my words carefully I said: ‘After the war it’ll give me heaps of pleasure to tell everyone you saved my life, you were very good to me, you should get maximum praise for treating me so well.’
Colonel Long leaned back in the chair. He took a neatly folded tissue from his pocket and wiped his face. He obviously felt he’d done a good day’s work. I had to admire his cunning. Maybe he’d been looking for someone like me for a long time, or maybe he just thought of it on the spur on the moment when he saw the soldiers beating me up, but either way he was satisfied that he’d bought himself an insurance policy.
I was his protection if and when a war crimes tribunal got to work. For the moment at least I didn’t want to know whether he’d actually committed war crimes. Obviously he had something pretty heavy on his conscience, but I’d worry about that later. If I survived that long.
What I did want was to use him now, to get information about my friends. So I said: ‘The night you caught me, was there anyone else caught that night?’
He didn’t like the question. He scowled and looked away. ‘You don’t want to be asking about those people,’ he said. ‘They very bad people. Anyone think you know those people, I can’t save you. They do very bad things, at gas station.’
I understood what he meant. Somehow he’d managed to separate me from the attack on the truck stop. As far as the authorities were concerned, I was only wanted for one offence, blowing up the train. If they knew any more it would get too heavy for Colonel Long to protect me. Even as I lay there working this out, the Colonel whispered in my ear: ‘Amber Faulding, I don’t think that is your real name. I think I maybe know your real name, but I not going to say it here. But you be very careful. If you who I think you are, no-one can save you, I cannot save you, no-one can save you.’
I felt the blood drain away from my face. There was a long silence. Without looking at him, staring straight at the ceiling, I forced myself to ask again: ‘But just between us, were there other people caught that night? Quite a long way from the train wreck? Like, at that gas station you mentioned?’
‘They all dead,’ he hissed. ‘All killed at gas station. Four teenagers, all dead. Don’t ask about them ever any more.’
‘All dead?’ I repeated stupidly.
‘All killed. I see their bodies. They all killed. No more about that. No more never.’
By the time I could bring myself to look at him again he wasn’t there. He had left the room.
I wriggled down under the sheet and lay there shaking, out of control. It was all too much, too devastating. I remembered Mrs Slater when her garden was destroyed by bushfires, the garden that she’d built from nothing, the garden she’d spent fifteen years developing. When it happened, she told my mum that it was too big to take in. ‘If I’d lost just the rhodies, or just the hydrangeas,’ she said, ‘if I’d lost just the David Austins.’
I sort of felt like that now. I was a desert inside, a garden that was black and burnt and desolate. I felt I had no blood. A kind of numbness crept through me. My fingers were playing with a tear in the sheet, a small slit. Without even knowing what I was doing I tore it a little further. It felt kind of satisfying to do that, so I tore it some more. Then I tore it back the other way. Slowly I began to tear the sheet to shreds. It wasn’t too difficult, because it was an old sheet, and fairly thin. I don’t know how long I lay there doing that. The night duty nurses never seemed to come near us if they could help it, and I guess this night they could help it, because I didn’t notice—or I don’t remember—anyone coming in.
Methodically, carefully, inch by inch, hour after hour, I tore that sheet into tiny pieces.
By the time the first grey light of dawn soaked into the room the sheet was like shredded coconut. I lay in a mess of cotton and all that was left was a piece the size of a handkerchief.
Outside the ward I heard the bustle of the day shift arriving, the night shift passing on their messages and saying goodbye. Calmly I reached for the bin beside the foot of my bed and scraped the million or so fragments into it. I lay back not caring whether anyone noticed that I was now one sheet short.
No-one did. The day continued. I gazed at the ceiling, making my mind numb, carefully anaesthetising every feeling that threatened to interrupt, turning myself into a robot.
But it didn’t work. I could control my mind for a few hours, but after a while the thoughts and feelings came creeping back like ashamed dogs, heads down, tails tucked under them, as if to say, ‘We know we shouldn’t have killed that wallaby but we couldn’t help ourselves’.
I felt the grief crawl from my limbs into my stomach and up through my chest into my head. It was like a cold fluid gradually creeping through me. I was drowning from the inside out. The worst thing seemed to be the knowledge that my friends had deserted me. They had gone off together, leaving me all alone. They must have known I couldn’t cope with that. They must have known how I’d feel. How could they do that, without including me? It was the cruellest thing they had ever done, the cruellest thing that had ever happened.
The odds had been too heavily against us that night. We had disobeyed the Pimlott Principles. We’d gone for a target that was too big, a target that wasn’t achievable. The way those soldiers had searched, the sheer number of them: it would have been a miracle if any of us got away. The train provided me with a miracle, and I’d still been caught. In the middle of my central nervous system, I’d known they co
uldn’t have escaped.
By night-time I felt that my brain was being eaten away by these terrible thoughts. I lay there quietly, aware of the damage being done inside me, but powerless to do anything about it. The cold fluid in there was acid.
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 w
itch. 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.
