Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (14 page)

I felt Gavin slowly relaxing, but we still didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then we eased ourselves up from our cramped positions.

‘Nice little surprise,’ Homer grunted. ‘You’re not safe anywhere these days.’

We faced towards the tracks and I’ll be damned if Gavin didn’t do it again.
Without even going down to the line.
A look of intense concentration came over his face, like a baby
pooing
its nappy. He held up one hand,
then
pointed towards the bend again, from where the little truck had come.
A moment later Homer and I heard it.
But Gavin had beaten us
by a good five or ten seconds
. I don’t know how. He must have felt the vibrations in the air. I can’t explain it any other way.

There was a slow chugging,
then
a big diesel locomotive came around the bend. Not just a locomotive either. It pulled a row of trucks and it was a long row.

We ducked down again, but this time I made sure I got a good view. I needed to see this. The noise got louder as the engine hauled its way past. It was a beautiful thing, a bit greasy and streaked, but so graceful, so powerful.
Then followed the carriages.
I started counting, like a kid at a level crossing.
‘Five, six, seven, eight.’
They were all crammed with soldiers.
‘Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.’
A couple of soldiers lay on the roof of each carriage, rifles ready, gazing around looking for people like us.
‘Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.’
Then the guards van, which seemed to be packed with more soldiers. Ryan had been right. Big stuff was happening. That train must have held a thousand soldiers. They were peering out of windows, standing in corridors. One was even perched on the couplings between two carriages taking a leak, a sight that had Gavin nudging me and giggling, and which I tried to ignore.

‘Wow,’ I said to Homer.

‘What a target,’ he said.

‘Let’s blow them up,’ said Gavin.

‘Do you reckon it’s going to Cavendish?’ I asked Homer.

‘Well, yeah, obviously, right now. But that doesn’t mean they’ll stay there.’

We went back to the other three, thinking hard all the way. If troops were being moved around the country in their thousands it was more evidence that some heavy action was going down. I didn’t know where the New Zealanders had launched their attack – Ryan wouldn’t tell us a syllable more than he had to – but wherever it was, they’d triggered a huge reaction. I hadn’t seen this much movement since taking the lid off a grain bin in the last mouse plague. The bin had rusted through at the bottom and the mice had taken full advantage.

Fi
and Lee and Kevin were stressing out big-time at us for being away so long. Kevin started it, which was just like his style. ‘Where the hell have you three been?’ It was like being nagged by your parents. ‘You’ve been hours. No-one had a clue where you were.’

All he needed to add was ‘Your mother and I have been worried sick about you’, and I would have felt right back at home.

But the other two were equally annoyed. ‘Honestly,’
Fi
said, ‘as if we weren’t stressed enough already. How were we supposed to guess where you were? For all we knew you could have been caught.’

The one I hated hearing it from most was Lee. I didn’t want Lee telling me I’d done something dumb. I wanted him telling me, ‘Good one, El, you’re a legend’. Instead he said: ‘We can’t afford this kind of goofing off. We’ve got to be disciplined twenty-four hours a day.’

That was a bit rich coming from him. But it was
true,
we had been away a long time. We hadn’t told them which direction we were going, which was slack.

They were so worked up about the attack on the truck stop that they were half off their heads. They would have been stressing about a broken shoelace, let alone us going missing for most of the afternoon. So we had to stand there feeling guilty while they got stuck into us.

Once they’d got that out of their systems we told them about the train line. They were interested, and even impressed, but they were so focused on the truck stop that they immediately forced us back to that. The best I could get was a lot of mumbles about how ‘We can have a look at it after this, if we get a chance’.

We went over the plan of attack again and again, working out all kinds of possibilities. If they did this, we’d do that; if this happened, we’d make that happen; if they went this way we’d go that way.

The trouble was we had too much detail, too many plans. We could have done with three weeks to memorise them, instead of a couple of hours.

The other trouble was that we didn’t give much thought to escape routes. The only plan Lee and Kevin and
Fi
had was to race back to our packs and get the hell out of the place. But we made them agree that after the petrol station we’d head to the railway, and use any remaining charges on the bridge and the tracks. It was another enemy centre of gravity.

As people started to get mentally tired the energy levels dropped.
Without much more talk they started drifting away to have a rest, or get something to eat.

Lee and I sat down and made some charges for the bridge. We were getting quite good at it. With each new one we took less time. By the end our hands smelt like old cheddar, and felt cheesy too. I don’t know what plastic explosive is made from – plastic, I guess – but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was from something they’d found in the basement of a Kraft factory.

We used most of Ryan’s precious explosives, but we had a good little arsenal, and I felt confident that we’d do some damage before the night was out.

I went for a walk to clear my brain. I had a headache from the tension of working on the charges. Kevin was doing lookout and at least this time I told him the general direction I was going. I mooched along feeling suddenly depressed. I hated the way these moods crept up on me with no warning. Of course it was no great surprise that I’d be depressed, when we were about to start a night of violence that might end in our deaths. It’d be a bit strange if I was feeling hysterically happy. But I don’t know if my feelings were really to do with what lay ahead. I wasn’t actually thinking about the servo or the train tracks. I was thinking about other stuff: the days before the war, where my parents were now and what they might be doing, the horrible awful empty way I missed Corrie and Robyn.

The last news I’d had of my parents was when Lee told me my father was still under guard in a pavilion at the
Wirrawee
Showground, and my mother was working as a servant in the Holloway area somewhere. That was such a long time ago. They could be anywhere now. And even if they were at
Wirrawee
and Holloway, I couldn’t be further away, fifty kilometres or more from Cavendish. It was in totally the wrong direction.

I was walking pretty slowly and I’d gone up the hill only a short way when I came across a sight that stopped me in my tracks. Funny, I don’t know why it took me so completely by surprise. After all, Homer and
Fi
had been interested in each other since the first day of this war, even a few days before that. They’d started quite passionately,
then
cooled off as we got more absorbed by the battle to stay alive and found ourselves with less time or energy for relationships.

But something had set it flaring again now. Flaring? They’d poured a tank of petrol on it then chucked in a detonator. It was bigger than the fire at
Wirrawee
Airfield.

They were sitting – half lying – on a soft green slope, kissing so hard they were in danger of reincarnating as leeches. They still had their clothes on, but it was kind of like they didn’t. Homer’s hands were all over
Fi
, and I could see the whites of her knuckles as she pulled him further and further into her. For a moment I was so fascinated I couldn’t turn away. Then I came to my senses and quickly went off to the left, down a steep gully. I was embarrassed it had taken me that long. I felt like a voyeur.

But embarrassment was only one of a whole lot of feelings squeezing my insides. I shouldn’t have been so disturbed but I was. I felt hot and giddy. I didn’t know which emotion to have, which one to let out first. I picked up a stick and started bashing the trees, not caring how much noise I made. My face burned. I just hoped I didn’t meet the others. I didn’t want them to see me like this; didn’t want to have to talk to Lee or anyone else.

I sat on a rock and stared dumbly at a big tree trunk that had grown through a hole in a rock overhang. Why was I feeling such a mess? Or to go back to basics, what was I feeling anyway? Come on,
Ellie,
get a grip, what the hell is this electric blender in your stomach, churning up your intestines? You haven’t actually been ruptured, so what is going on? Think about it. Work it out. List your emotions in order of importance from one to ten. Attach an extra sheet if insufficient paper is provided.

OK, there was jealousy.
No, not jealousy, envy.
Well, maybe halfway between the two. I was pretty sure I didn’t love Homer, not in that way, but I liked him in
truckfuls
. I certainly didn’t want to share him, not even with
Fi
. And to make things worse, I didn’t want to share
Fi
either.
Especially with a boy.
I liked the way it had always been: me getting involved big-time with Steve then Lee, plus a couple of other minor crushes along the way, and
Fi
liking boys from a distance. That way I could go and tell her all the stuff I was doing and she could tell me what I should do, and who she was rapt in, and we didn’t get in each other’s way. That suited me fine, and I didn’t want it to change.

Gradually I started to realise that envy accounted for most of what I was feeling. The rest of it was called loneliness. I was a bit obsessed with Lee, like
Fi
had said, but we still didn’t have the kind of relationship I wanted. There were great moments, moments of real friendship, moments of sex, moments of caring and looking out for each other. But it wasn’t on a full-time enough
basis
for me. We kissed occasionally, we held hands, we went for walks and talked about our lives, we’d even had sex the night before last, but we didn’t have the intensity of those days when we were hiding in Robyn’s music teacher’s house. So often I longed to be hugged by a guy, to feel strong bony arms holding me, to feel rough skin on my face, to smell that guy smell. At most of those times Lee was nowhere to be found, or he was in one of those moods when you knew it wasn’t a good idea to approach him.

Seeing Homer and
Fi
brought it home to me that I was missing something, something I never wanted to be without. I like guys and I like being around them. I feel more complete if I’m with someone. I wanted a relationship that was closer to a hundred per cent than forty per cent.

When they drag me off to the nursing home I’m going to demand a twin room, in the co-ed wing.

I didn’t bother to search for any other emotions; the ones I’d identified already were more than enough. I trudged back to the place where we’d dumped our stuff. Lee and Gavin were on sentry, watching the road. Kevin was asleep, snoring like a steamroller.

I told Lee and Gavin that I’d do sentry. It suited my mood. I still didn’t want to talk to anyone – especially Lee – but I didn’t want to sit around feeling sorry for myself. Watching the road took full concentration, because there was so much happening, and we were so dangerously close to it. If one soldier decided to walk up the hill to take a crap, we’d have to react fast, and withdraw silently towards the train tracks.

The trouble was that I couldn’t concentrate. I sat there wondering about Homer and
Fi
. Was this the first time? Had they been kissing like that for days or weeks or months? How come they hadn’t told me about it? Didn’t they trust me? Did
Fi
enjoy it? Would we still be friends? And the big
question, that I guess you always wonder
about until your friends tell you, how far had they gone?

All in all I wasn’t much good as a sentry.

The other thing distracting me, apart from my own stirred-up thoughts and feelings, was the occasional rumble in the direction of the coast. It kind of echoed Kevin’s snoring. Whatever was going on over there, it was big. Gradually a line of black seeped along the horizon, like God had taken a big
Texta
and tried to draw a straight line along the edge, only he was a bit old and doddery and the pen kept wobbling.

I just hoped the New Zealanders were blowing stuff up, and I hoped they were winning.

I was worried that the convoys would eventually stop using the
road, that
the enemy commanders would have moved all the soldiers they wanted, and our attack would come too late. And there were times when the road got very quiet. At one stage there was no movement for half an hour. But right on dusk another long line of trucks came past, this time with a couple of tanks. We hadn’t seen many tanks in this war. They looked like crocodiles, not in their shape, but in their tough hides and the slow nasty way they rolled along. Behind me, Lee, whom I hadn’t even heard approach, said: ‘I hope they don’t have some rule that the convoys after dark get tanks.’

I hadn’t thought of that. It gave me a shock.
Made my tummy rumble for about two minutes.

Fi
and Homer came back, walking way apart, as though they hardly knew each other. In my envy even that annoyed me. I felt they were pretending about their relationship, instead of talking to me about it, sharing it with me, like in the past. I was cranky and unpleasant to them both, and even to Lee. In fact the only ones I was nice to
were
Kevin, which must have surprised him, and Gavin.

Unlike other attacks we couldn’t wait till three or four
am
to make our move. Now that the big battles were on we couldn’t afford luxuries like that. We had to go as soon as it got dark. That doubled the danger: not just doubled it, trebled,
quadrupled,
whatever the next one is.
Quintupled.
But for all our good intentions it was nine o’clock before we started. It was probably dark enough before then, but we kept hesitating, putting it off,
imagining
we could still see a bit of light along the horizon. It reminded me of being with Iain and Ursula on Tailor’s Stitch, ages ago.