Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn (36 page)

‘Do you know anything about your brothers and sisters?’ I asked when we separated. I was wiping my eyes.

‘More or less.
I know they’re OK. They’re in a refugee camp, a couple of hundred kilometres away. I’ve got to ring General Finley as soon as I can. He reckons he’ll have the full details by the time I call him.’

‘What about Gavin?’

‘He’s been with us. Didn’t you know? They took him to Stratton this morning to see if they could find his rellies.’

‘Oh thank God for that. Is he all right?’

‘Gavin?
He’s indestructible.’

‘So where have you guys been hanging out?’

He laughed. ‘How long have you got?’

I had plenty of time that day, but no-one else did. Three hours later Lee was whisked away in a car to get his brothers and sisters. It was three long days after that before the five of us actually got together. By then I think they were quite glad to get away from families that clung like scarves. For more than a year we’d dreamed of seeing our families again, but once we’d done it, well, three days was enough.

We met at Homer’s, down at the creek. It was nice there. I walked from our place; Kevin walked from his.
Fi
and Lee got a lift out with
Fi’s
mum, who had to inspect some new subdivisions. That was her excuse anyway. I think she could have inspected them anytime, but she took pity on us, and agreed to drive Lee and
Fi
.

It was funny. We were sort of awkward. An arranged meeting like this wasn’t the way we normally got together. We brought whatever food we could scrounge, but it was difficult with the rationing being so severe. All that time we’d spent during the war, having to live off the land; you’d think we’d be pretty good at scrounging food. But it was different now. Obviously we didn’t want to steal food off our friends and neighbours. I found some late blackberries and made a pie which went OK – the blackberries were all right, I mean you can’t really stuff up blackberries, but the pastry was kind of gluggy.

The highlight was some freeze-dried ice-cream that General Finley had sent from New Zealand, to Lee. It was in a pack called Astronaut Ice-cream, because it was supposed to be the same stuff the astronauts used on their space missions. The flavour, believe it or not, was Neapolitan. When you opened the pack – and that took about five minutes because it was sealed so tightly – you found these three separate packs, one pink, one white, one brown. They looked like pieces of chalk, and they sure were dry, about the driest substance I’ve ever picked up. I took a piece of the chocolate and put it in my mouth, while the others watched with interest. It was weird. It felt like fizzy stuff, like sherbet, until the moisture of my mouth gave it a bit more flavour. Then it tasted quite sweet and nice, but it didn’t taste like ice-cream.

On the pack they said it was ‘all natural’, but when I read the ingredients it had stuff like
monoglycerides
and
diglycerides
, potassium
sorbate
, ascorbic acid. They didn’t sound too natural to me.

After lunch I got up and wandered into the creek, up to my knees, then a bit further. Once I got used to the cold
I
dog-paddled down to a deep waterhole where Homer and I had often swum when we were little. Next thing Lee surfaced beside me, like a sly serpent from a burrow under the water.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

‘Asleep.’

He started undressing me, which wasn’t difficult, as I wasn’t wearing much. I watched my shorts float slowly away. I didn’t try to stop them. The water washed around my body like an endless loving caress. Like Lee’s tongue. I didn’t feel cold now. I didn’t feel passionate about Lee, like I had the other times, but my body was responding. God was it ever responding. When my undies drifted after the other bits of clothing I felt for the waistband of Lee’s shorts. They weren’t there. He was already naked. I slid up against him, and over him. I’ve never felt the pleasure more intensely. It was sweeter, stronger, sexier ... and then disappointing. Without a condom I couldn’t keep him in me; I had to let him go and make up for it in other ways.

Afterwards was such a joke, trying to get my clothes back. It took about twenty minutes of deep-diving to find my T-shirt. While we were making love I’d had no self-consciousness about being naked, but now, after we’d both relaxed, I was half and half – half-embarrassed, but half just laughing because it all seemed so dumb and silly and funny.

As we walked back through the shallow section of the creek Lee tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I ran on ahead. I didn’t know what I felt about him or us or what we’d just done. This wasn’t the time or the place. I’d have to think about it later. The war was over. I wasn’t sure what else was over.

When we got to the others they were still sprawled on the sand, asleep or barely awake. Lee and I were in an extremely relaxed mood, and we spread this among the others, with generous lashings of sand and cold water.

And then, when they were sitting up and swearing and laughing and chucking anything we could find at each other, then finally we talked.

‘So what the hell happened at the truck stop?’ I asked Homer. He was making himself comfortable against a tree trunk, three or four metres away from
Fi
.

‘What happened to you? We’d thought you’d been killed out in the bush somewhere. We’d given you up as a hopeless case.’

‘I grabbed a train.’

‘On that train line we found with Gavin?’

I nodded.

‘You actually jumped onto a train?’

I nodded again.

‘Ah. We never thought of that. That was about the only thing we never thought of.’

‘So, come on, tell me, what happened? Did you stay together? When did you get caught?’

‘Well we got away from the truck stop, thanks to you.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They followed you, when you yelled out,’
Fi
said. ‘That was wonderful, Ellie, that you did that.’

‘Yes,’ Kevin said. ‘We talked about that a few times after we were caught.’

I was blushing like a cherry.

‘I saw them chase you up the hill,’ Lee confirmed. ‘Nearly all of them went after you. We only had a couple left to worry about.’

‘But they followed us a long way,’
Fi
said. ‘It must have been two or three kilometres.’

Yeah, I think even Gavin was getting worried,’ Homer said.

‘So how did you get rid of them?’

Homer took over, in one of his favourite roles, the storyteller.

‘We were belting along, but the more tired we got, the more noise we made. So I thought, “We’ve got to get a bit more creative here”. I dropped back till I was next to Lee, and I said: “You want to hide, let them go past you?” He’s quite bright, Lee; I think he’ll do well for himself. The next minute he ducked behind a tree, without another word said. I was a bit worried that I hadn’t mentioned the second part of the plan, which was that he’d get them from behind. I thought he might just stay around the back of the tree for the rest of the war, but luckily he worked it out for himself.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked Lee, feeling the familiar stirring in my stomach as I spoke, wishing I didn’t have to ask, but knowing we were in this together. I couldn’t leave Lee to spend the rest of his life with the knowledge of another dirty job that he’d done on his own, and no-one to share that knowledge with.

‘Used a knife,’ he said looking away.

And that was all I could get out of him. I don’t imagine it helped him much in dealing with it.

Homer described how they kept running as best they could for most of the night. Eventually it was Gavin who couldn’t go on.

‘He was disgusted with himself,’
Fi
said. ‘But his little legs just wouldn’t work any more. We found a bit of a hollow, halfway up a hill behind some fallen trees. We had to carry him up there.’

‘When she says “we” she means “me”,’ Kevin explained.

‘I wouldn’t say anyone slept well,’ Homer continued. ‘We were too scared, and we even spent an occasional moment wondering what might have happened to you. Of course we didn’t even notice you were missing for a long time, but eventually someone pointed out that we were one short.’

‘Thanks.’ I chucked a handful of sand at him.

‘When it got light we crawled further into the bush, where it looked safer. Our big worry was dogs. We knew no-one could see us from the air, and ground troops would have taken a month to find us, but dogs would have smelt Kevin in thirty seconds flat. I could smell him myself, a couple of kilometres away. Luckily no-one turned up, and when it got dark we set off for Cavendish again via the place we’d stashed our packs.’

‘We were bloody hungry by the time we got there,’ Kevin contributed.

‘Yeah, I’ll say. Not for the first time in this war, but we were feeling the strain.
Especially without our trusty leader.
We snuck up on the packs slowly, but there was no sign of anyone around. We were rapt that your pack was missing, even if you did have the last bag of
licorice
allsorts. We were a bit confused though. We figured, “If she’d had time to get her pack, she must have been feeling pretty safe, she must have lost the soldiers. But why wouldn’t she hang around and wait for us?” So we hung around and waited for you, but after a while it became obvious that this was going to end up as one of those “Unsolved Mysteries” on TV.’

Homer left his tree and shuffled a bit closer to
Fi
, but she didn’t look at him.

‘We thought you might have grabbed your stuff because you’d seen a good target you could attack in a hurry,’ Lee said.

‘Actually when I think about it, someone did suggest you might have gone down to the train track,’ Homer said. ‘But there was no evidence you had. We didn’t know you’d gone off on a joy-ride, like it was Puffing Billy.’

‘I was sick of walking everywhere,’ I said.

‘Well, there seemed to be some problem with the train line, because although we hung there for a day and a half, we didn’t hear or see a single train go past. Eventually we hauled ass again, leaving a nice little love letter from Lee to you, that suggested a few meeting places in Cavendish, should we ever get there. I suppose the letter’s still sitting under the tree.’

‘I suppose it is.’

I shifted into a more comfortable position, and found another gumleaf to tear into tiny pieces. ‘What did you do then?’ I asked.

‘After we gave up on you?
We thought about detonating the train line, but it seemed a bit pointless with no traffic on it. It wasn’t a centre of gravity any more. I’m starting to form the impression that there may have been some damage done to it by an irresponsible young vandal, further up the line, but we didn’t know that at the time. So we just put our packs on our backs and started walking. We’ve walked a lot of kilometres in this war. I tell you, I don’t care what cars are going to cost now that the war’s over, I’m getting one, and once I’ve got it I’ll never walk anywhere again.’

‘They say there’ll be no new cars for sale for at least two years,’
Fi
said. She rolled over on the sand and lay on her back, a couple of metres away from Homer again now.

‘Well I’ll get a bike. Anyway, we walked all the way to Cavendish, El, and it took a while. But the good thing was
,
we could see the effect of blowing up the servo. They had ten times more security along the road. Guys riding shotgun on the trucks, tanks escorting all the
convoys,
patrols racing backwards and forwards. Guess Ryan was right when he said we could tie up a lot of troops.

‘So we kept away from that and got to Cavendish about nine o’clock one night. Poor old Gavin’s legs were dropping off again. He was losing interest in the war pretty fast.
Fi
and Kevin and Gavin holed up in a Scout Hall in the first suburb we came to – Rennie Park it’s called – and Lee and I went for a bit of an explore.

‘It’s such a boring flat ugly city, Cavendish. I don’t care if I never go there again. We found one good target, a power station, and a couple of other
possibles
– a hotel they’d turned into some kind of officers’ club, another servo, and a bank. So we headed on back and convinced the others that blowing up a power station would make General
Finley,
or Colonel Finley as we naively called him then, very happy indeed. It didn’t take long to talk them into it.’

‘What exactly do you mean by a power station?’ I asked.

‘Well I mightn’t have the right word. One of those big paddocks where they have massive power pylons, and the whole thing’s got a big fence around it.’

‘Oh OK. Good target all right.’

‘Reckon. The only problem was that as well as the fence, they had half-a-dozen soldiers guarding it.
Which at least showed how much they valued the place.
Convinced us all the more we should knock it off.’

‘Tough gig.’

‘Yeah.
Well we worked out the coolest plan. Lee still had his uniform from the servo, so we decided we’d borrow a truck and Lee would drive it up to the front gate. He’d stop the truck a bit short, get out and go towards the sentry, holding a bunch of forms in his hand, like he was there on some big-time official mission. And at that moment we’d blow the truck sky high.’

‘Oh yeah?
How’d you plan to do that?’

‘No problem,’ Kevin said. ‘Well, no major problem. As Lee got out he’d light a thirty-second fuse and start counting. He had to reach the sentry as he got to thirty. Then he’d dive off the bank as the truck exploded into smithereens, and we’d come over the slope beside the road, blasting away with every weapon we had. We’d have wiped them out before they’d stopped blinking.’

‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe you’re still alive to tell me about it.’

‘It was a great plan,’ Homer said firmly. ‘It would have worked.’ He wriggled closer to
Fi
and put a hand on hers, but she didn’t seem to notice.

‘Well, except every enemy soldier for ten
k’s
around would have come for us like bees at a honey-pot,’ she said.