The Third Day, The Frost (22 page)

Chapter
Twenty-six

When they came for me an hour after breakfast
I had no idea what to expect. Desperate for any change to my
routine, I followed them eagerly. The shock of fresh air on my face
was so strong that I felt like a corpse coming out of a grave. The
air was viciously cold – it was a freezing day – but I could have
kissed it as it bit at my face.

The route they took me along was what I was
used to: straight along the covered walkway to the building where
Major Harvey had questioned me for so long. I lingered as long as I
could on the walk but the guards had no interest in the bracing
air: to them it was just a nasty winter day, I guess. They hurried
me into the building and down the corridor to the same office, and
there he was again, the same dark face and dark eyes. He seemed
more jumpy, more nervous, his eyes not settling on me when he
spoke, but looking away all the time, to places around the room. I
thought he’d lost weight, too.

‘Ah, Ellie,’ he said. ‘This won’t take long.
Just a small duty I want you to perform. Take a look at this,
please. In fact you can read it to me.’

He handed me a sheet of paper with a couple of
typed paragraphs on it. I took it and began to read it out loud: ‘I
am making this statement voluntarily to apologise for my actions in
recent months. I have been involved in terrorist activity which has
led to a great deal of property damage and caused injury and death
to many innocent people. In acting in this irresponsible way I have
insulted those who are helping to rebuild my country and who I now
realise are creating a new and better society for us all.

‘Unfortunately some misguided people in other
countries are still engaging in attacks on us. I must ask them to
desist. They are causing a great deal of unnecessary suffering.
They are committing war crimes in violation of international law.
It is time for everyone to work together in our new society for the
betterment of all people. I ask for the support of all people in
achieving this.’

I threw the paper back on the desk. ‘What a
load of crap,’ I said.

The Major picked it up. He didn’t look
bothered. ‘Now come with me,’ he said. We went further down the
corridor, and he ushered me into a small room at the end. There was
a stool, an umbrella, a couple of lights on stands, and a big
television camera operated by a woman wearing headphones. The
umbrella was like a big parasol. It was on a stand and seemed to
have something to do with the lighting.

‘Sit down,’ Harvey said.

I hesitated, then obeyed. He handed me the
sheet of paper again and I took it.

‘Now, just read it again, for the benefit of
your New Zealand friends,’ he said. ‘Look up at the camera from
time to time. No funny business, thank you, and no silly facial
expressions like some of your immature young friends attempted. It
just means we have to start again, and waste more of our time.’

I was ecstatic to hear him mention the others.
It was the first news I’d heard of them in more than a week. I’d
asked the guards every day but no one would answer. It was
obviously a taboo subject. I didn’t know if I should read the
statement or not, but the others had made it easier for me; sort of
taken the decision out of my hands. Of course, Major Harvey could
have been tricking me, but I didn’t think so. He must have been a
great actor if he was. The way he mentioned them came out so
naturally.

I still wasn’t keen to read it, but I sat
there on the hard cane chair thinking about my choices. If I didn’t
read it, what would happen? I guessed they’d use tougher, rougher
treatment on me. I didn’t think I could stick that. I was having
enough trouble coping with things as they were. I couldn’t have
borne it if they’d got worse. So if I did read it, what would
happen? I’d feel ashamed; that’d be one thing. But forget about me:
what damage might it do? Well, none really. It’d be so obvious to
everyone that it was a fake. I couldn’t imagine that people in New
Zealand, or anywhere else, would take one look at this and think,
‘Oh well, we’d better stop helping them because they’re obviously
happy with the new arrangements.’

Major Harvey was getting impatient. I said to
him – mainly to make myself feel better about the decision I’d
already made – ‘What’ll happen to me if I don’t read it?’

With no emotion at all he answered: ‘Don’t
make things any worse for yourself, Ellie.’

The woman nestled in behind her camera and I
heard it whirr into life. Major Harvey switched on the lights. The
room instantly became extremely bright and extremely hot. I held
the sheet up and read it quickly, without expression. At the end I
thought Major Harvey would tell me to do it again – I knew I’d
sounded like a robot – and he did stand there silently for a minute
after I’d finished. But then he switched off the lights and went to
the door and called the guards.

When they came, I followed them back out
towards the exit. Major Harvey, who was ahead of me, turned into
his office without so much as a backwards glance, but I couldn’t
bear to let him go without trying to find out something, anything,
about my future. I figured he was the most likely one to know, and
I figured I would rather know than not know. So I stopped and asked
him.

‘Major Harvey, can you tell me what’s going to
happen to me?’

He was moving around the desk towards his
chair but he stopped dead when he heard my voice. There was a long
silence, a terrible silence. My heart started pounding fiercely,
and I broke out sweating, wishing now that I’d never asked the
question. Without looking around he said, ‘You have to accept the
consequences of your actions, Ellie.’

It was not only the words; it was the way he’d
said them. I knew now. My legs were so weak they wouldn’t move. It
was like the bones had been taken out of them. A guard nudged me
from behind and I staggered forwards. This time I didn’t even see
the sky. My head was down, my legs were dragging, I felt like I was
going to be ill, like I had some serious illness creeping up on
me.

But I knew the name of that serious illness.
It was called death.

Back in the cell I fell on my bed and lay
there. For the first time I didn’t show any interest in lunch when
the lady brought it. Inside me, I was hoping that she’d notice how
upset I was, and that she’d come over to the bed and give me a
cuddle and ask what was wrong, and comfort me. Just like my mum.
But she didn’t. She put the tray down and left the cell. I cried
bitterly when I heard the door slam. ‘I’m too young,’ I kept
thinking, ‘I’m too young.’

It seemed so unfair that by a fluke I’d
escaped being captured when the invasion came and so I’d been
forced into a certain course of action, and because of that I was
now going to die. Why couldn’t I have been captured at the start,
like everyone else? Why did I have to be the unlucky one?

I conveniently ignored the fact that one of
the soldiers we’d killed didn’t seem any older than me.

I lay there for about two hours, I’d guess. If
I’d had a way of killing myself I probably would have done it then.
The fact that I didn’t has taught me something very important about
life: that you never know what the next minute might bring. If you
kill yourself, it might be seconds before something wonderful
happens. What that afternoon brought mightn’t seem so wonderful to
others, but to me, at that moment, it was.

The door was unlocked and I heard the voice of
the officer who’d brought me the toothbrush and paper. She said:
‘Exercise now. You come.’

I thought it might be a trick, and that this
might be the execution I was now certain was coming, but I got up
anyway and went listlessly out into the corridor.

We took the same route as usual: down the
corridor enclosed by wire, past the dull green lawns and the tennis
courts. But as we came to a gate leading into a small section of
the grassed yards I saw a group of people standing together
talking. I would have known those people from a kilometre away let
alone from thirty metres. I let out a great gasp of pure joy, then
quickly tried to bite it back, in case the guards changed their
minds. But I’d made enough noise. The little group broke up, as
they turned to see who was screeching at them. I saw with relief
that all five of them were there. The guard started unlocking the
gate as Fi called out: ‘Ellie! Oh Ellie!’

As soon as I got inside they threw themselves
on me. It was like a football ruck, like a soccer player had scored
a winning goal, like tag team wrestling. For a moment I had to
struggle for air. We hugged until we bruised.

It was a wonderful reunion.

And after the hugging came the questions. They
flew backwards and forwards so fast that every answer was cut off
within a few words.

‘Which cell are you in?’

‘In that block over ...’

‘Have you seen Major Harvey?’

‘Yes, that bastard! He asked ...’

‘What do you think’ll happen to us?’

‘I don’t know. Major Harvey ...’

‘Have you guys been seeing each other every
day?’

‘Are you OK? Did they beat you up or
anything?’

‘Be careful what you say. We don’t know if
they ...’

‘Did you have to do that confession
thing?’

‘They’re so horrible. They make us ...’

It took a while but eventually I got a sense
of what was going on. Homer and I were the only ones left in E
Block. The other four were in a totally different situation. They’d
been transferred to a block with a lot of other prisoners, some
like us who were ‘war criminals’ and some who’d been in there for
ages, from before the invasion, for crimes committed in peacetime.
At meals they ate together in a big room and, at other times, they
could talk to prisoners through the doors of their cells. Most
amazingly of all, Robyn and Fi shared a cell. I was jealous of them
for that and it made me more fearful of what might happen to me.
Homer and I had definitely been singled out as the ringleaders.

But I forced away all the dark thoughts, all
the fear. I was determined just to enjoy the company of my friends.
It was such a relief, such a release, to be with them again. And I
didn’t know how many more chances like this there’d be.

We talked flat out. I had a funny desperate
yearning to play basketball, wanting some activity. The cage we
were in was about the size of a basketball court; I suppose that’s
what made me think of it. In the end I grabbed Homer’s shoe and ran
to the fence, making him chase me. At once guards up on the wall
aimed their shotguns at us. ‘Look out,’ Fi called. ‘Stop. They
think you’re doing something.’ But I ignored her. I was determined
not to be too frightened of these thugs. And, although they kept
watching us closely as we ran around, they didn’t take any
action.

After we’d been there about an hour the guards
who were supervising through the wire from the corridor unlocked
the gate again. They beckoned to me first. I’d been the last to
come, now I was the first to go. But as they led me away I saw them
signalling to Homer, so I guessed exercise time was over for all of
us.

I called out to them all: ‘Bye! See you!’,
but, as I said ‘See you’, I wondered if I ever would, ever again.
The great dark weight of depression and fear was hovering over me
once more, but hovering a little higher, and perhaps not quite so
heavily.

Chapter
Twenty-seven

As it happened I saw the others the next day,
and the day after that, and the day after that. Regular afternoon
exercise became a part of my routine: the most precious, exciting,
anticipated moments in my life. The worst thing was that Homer and
I only got an hour each, which apparently went with the deal when
you were in maximum security. The others got two hours.

Maybe the guards couldn’t afford the manpower:
when Homer and I were out there they had three guards assigned to
watch us. The others only got one between the four of them. I think
Lee felt a bit insulted by that.

For three weeks our lives remained locked into
this pattern. Very little out of the ordinary happened. I saw Major
Harvey a couple of times from a distance, when we were in the
exercise yard, but he took no notice of us. The only exciting
things were air raids: there were two during the three weeks and
even in my soundproofed cell I could hear the wail of the sirens. I
pressed my call button during the first one but got no answer.
Later when the guards brought my food, I asked them what the noise
was, and they said, ‘Planes in sky drop bombs, very bad.’ The other
five, when I met them next day on the grass, confirmed that there
had been air raids.

‘All the guards ran off,’ Fi said. ‘I think
they’ve got a shelter somewhere. Not much help to us though, when
we’re locked in our cells. Even when there are no guards we can’t
escape. Makes you wonder why they bother to have them at all.’

Both the raids were at night; we figured it’d
be too dangerous for them to come in daylight.

It started raining a lot and for our exercise
hour we were put in a gym more and more often. I didn’t like it
nearly as much. I needed fresh air so badly. We were all looking
terrible, but Homer – and me, I suspect – looked the worst. You
couldn’t exactly call Homer pale, because his skin was naturally
dark, but it did get an unhealthy tinge to it, almost green. And he
was so thin. Well, so was I, We were skeletal. We looked like
Aurora at school when she had anorexia. The others were getting
better food and they started smuggling bits out to us but it was
difficult: we were watched so carefully.

Yet the passing of time calmed us down a bit.
I guess you can’t live at full-on intensity for ever. Lying on the
bed of my cell in the dark, trembling, waiting for soldiers to come
in and shoot me – you just can’t keep doing that. There’s something
in the human spirit that won’t let you live that way. Gradually,
you start forgetting about your death sentence and thinking about
more normal things instead. Not all the time, of course, but enough
times to keep you existing. You sleep occasionally, and you don’t
always dream of death. You get a bit numb.

Well, that’s the way it was for me anyway.

The day it changed was a day that changed me
for ever. Of course we’re changed by everything that happens to us.
Of course I’d been changed dramatically by the invasion and
everything that had happened since. But that morning, the morning
when I finally had to confront what I’d been avoiding for so long,
changed me like nothing else had – or ever will again, I guess.
They came for me at about eleven o’clock. I remember every detail
of the first few minutes. The way the officer flicked her hand to
gesture me out into the corridor. The way the door squeaked
slightly as it swung heavily open: that little cry from the hinge
that I’d never heard before. The faces of the guards: the women and
men I’d gotten to know so well by sight but who now, this morning,
wouldn’t look at me. The long slow walk to a building near the jail
entrance, one I hadn’t been to yet. The soft throbbing of thunder
in the distance. The sweaty palm-print left by the guard as she
pushed the door of the building open. I knew when I saw that
palmprint that I was walking towards something terrible. From that
moment on I hardly remember anything.

They took me into some sort of large room, all
lined with light brown panelling. It looked very formal. There were
people sitting at a table, about five of them I drink, and I think
all of them were men. I was in there three or four minutes. No one
looked at me. The bloke in the middle read a whole lot of stuff,
very fast, in his own language, while a bloke standing behind him
translated into English. It was about how I’d destroyed property,
committed acts of terrorism, murdered people; how I’d been found
guilty of the above charges, and sentenced to death. Sentence to be
carried out Monday the 16th, at 7 am. That is all. Do you have
anything to say? No? Take her away. Bring in the next prisoner. The
next prisoner was Homer, though I didn’t know that until he told me
himself, in the exercise yard six days later. He’d seen me coming
out of the room but I’d walked right past him without noticing him.
He said he’d known then, as soon as he’d seen me.

I remember saying only one thing to the
guards, and that was to ask them what day it was. They said Friday
the 6th, so I knew I had only ten days to go.

It was the same afternoon that the daylight
raids started.

I was lying on my bed, knees up to my chest,
hands between my legs, rocking myself, trying to think of one thing
at a time. But I couldn’t. Thoughts were screaming into my head at
such speed that it was like a demolition derby in there: the
thoughts kept crashing into each other and spinning off into the
darkness. I couldn’t even slow them down, let alone stop them. I
thought my head would burst into flames.

When I heard the dull thundering booms they
seemed like the background to the chaos inside me. I hardly noticed
them at first. It took a while to realise they were coming from
somewhere outside. Just as I realised that, the walls gave a little
tremble and a tiny white powder fell from the ceiling. Then I knew:
it was an air-raid, an afternoon air raid, and close too if it
could rattle the walls in my cell.

I wasn’t scared, just fascinated to see what
would happen. I got off my bed and stood by the door, waiting and
listening. The booms kept going for a few minutes, then suddenly
the lights went out. That was scary, but exciting too. I started
wondering what would happen if the roof fell in on me. What would
my body look like, buried under fifty tonnes of steel and concrete?
I was feeling claustrophobic, but still not desperately frightened,
more tantalised by the knowledge that something out of the ordinary
was happening, and there was no telling what it might lead to.

In fact it led to nothing. The booming noises
lasted another ten minutes, then stopped, suddenly and completely.
Hours later the lights came back on; two guards came in and
inspected my cell, and I was left to guess what might have happened
outside.

The next two days there were more raids, one
in the morning and one in the late afternoon. Again and again the
building shook. Several times I cowered in the corner of the cell.
Each time the white dust floated down, till the floor looked like
light snow had been falling. By the end of the third raid I found
long thin cracks in the wall.

On neither day was I allowed into the exercise
yard. I started to fear that I’d never see my friends again, never
have a chance to say goodbye. Three more awful days passed,
suffocating, excruciating days, when as far as I could tell there
were no air raids, though the guards were very jumpy. But on
Thursday, just four days before the sentences were to be carried
out, I heard them unlocking my door. It was the time when we
normally had exercise, and now they took me out as though nothing
had happened. I guess someone in authority had decided the air
raids were finished. But I was shocked at the damage that had been
done while I was locked in my square little white coffin. Every
second window in the jail was broken. There was rubbish all over
the place – I mean big rubbish, serious rubbish: sheets of
galvanised iron, slabs of brickwork, big tree branches. The eastern
wall had partially collapsed: about fifty metres of it was more
like rubble than a wall. But already they’d put up a huge wire
fence to cover the damage. I couldn’t see any way of escaping
through that.

A couple of minutes later I was in the gym.
Conditions were different now. The guards watched us more closely.
Homer and I were not allowed any physical contact, with each other
or with the other four. We were assigned three different zones in
the basketball court and we had to talk to each other from our own
zones. I had the keyhole at the southern end.

We each told our news. Homer and I had both
been given death sentences, both for Monday. The others got prison
terms: thirty years for Lee, twenty-five for Robyn and Kevin, and
twenty-two for Fi. I don’t know how they’d arrived at the different
numbers.

We had a ghastly conversation. No one could
think of anything to say. We sat there like we were at a funeral
already. Occasionally someone would say something in a hoarse
whisper, but usually no one would answer, so the conversations
never got far.

It was almost a relief to go back to my
cell.

Friday the weather was better and we had an
hour outside, but again we weren’t allowed near each other.
Saturday we were back in the gym. It was another terrible hour. Fi
was hysterical the whole time. The rest of us seemed like zombies,
barely functioning at all.

Saturday night was the worst time, I think.
I’d written letters to a few people, cramming as much as I could on
the few sheets of paper I was allowed, even writing down the sides
of the pages. When I asked for more paper I was refused. There
seemed nothing else to do. All I could think of was that tomorrow
would be my last full day of life. I lay on the bed, trying to find
some strength to cope, to get me through the next thirty-five
hours. I lay there with my mind running amuck, on the brink of
madness. And somehow, gradually, early Sunday morning, I became
calm. I can’t think of any other word for it. I was thinking about
the beach poem again, and I started to feel that I was being looked
after, that everything was OK. It was strange: if there was ever a
time in my life when I had the right to feel alone this was it. But
I lost that sense of loneliness. I felt like there was a force in
the room with me, not a person, but I had a sense that there was
another world, another dimension, and it would be looking after me.
I’m not talking about some place I’d be going to; it wasn’t like
that. It was like, ‘This isn’t the only world, this is just one
aspect of the whole thing, don’t imagine this is all there is.’

That’s about all I can say really; I can’t
give it a name or paint a picture. It existed in a different form
to the things we give names to, or try to illustrate. But I do know
that I reached some sort of acceptance of what was to happen.

I had been dreading the last exercise hour,
the last meeting with my friends. But I was quite settled as I
moved slowly along the walkway. It was very overcast and must have
been raining heavily during the morning: there was so much water on
the ground. Most of the debris from the bombs had been cleaned up.
I was hardly aware of the guards; they were the weekend shift, who
seemed sloppier, more amateurish, than the highly drilled and
professional ones I had during the week. But they still had the
weapons and they still kept them pointed at me, so it didn’t really
matter if they weren’t so neat and polished. I remembered how I’d
thought I would throw myself at their guns rather than die tamely,
but I knew now that I would never have the strength to rush at
death quite as recklessly as that.

We got to the gym and I was ushered in. The
others were already there, standing around waiting for me, looking
like actors in a weird play.

The security system in the gym was different
from the exercise yard, of course. My team of three guards always
stayed, whether we were inside or out. But in the gym one of
Homer’s squad always stayed as well, to make up the numbers, to
compensate for the fact that we couldn’t be seen by the sentries on
the outside wall. They spread themselves around the space, one at
each wall, and sat there watching us, rifles at the ready. From the
moment we’d arrived in the prison they’d never stopped treating us
like violent and dangerous people.

I don’t know how many other prisoners there
were in the place. I’d seen a couple from a distance, and our four
in minimum security said there were dozens in their section, but
that was all I knew. Lee had found out that the whitegoods factory
in Stratton, quite close to the jail, was working non-stop
producing aircraft parts, and that work parties from the jail were
going there nearly every day. So maybe that’s why I never saw
anyone.

Stratton had been a big industrial centre for
a long time. Being near a harbour, being close to the Marran
coalfields, having a big rail yard, meant that even when the rest
of the country went into recession the factories of Stratton still
worked hard.

So, that was why the city had been bombed
heavily. And when days and nights of heavy bombing didn’t get the
results they wanted, they came back.

They came back on that Sunday afternoon.

When the sirens went off, our guards jumped to
their feet and started shouting to each other and gesticulating
wildly. It was the first time I’d heard the sirens outside my cell,
and I couldn’t believe how loud they were. For a moment I was
frightened, but suddenly I realised that it hardly made any
difference if a bomb dropped on me. And I did feel a sudden kick of
hope in my chest. I suppose anything outside the normal routine,
the routine that was dragging me towards death, was cause for
hope.

Then a bomb fell quite close to the prison.
There was a tremendous blast, and the whole building shook. A dozen
more windows lost their glass: I saw the sheets fall and smash on
the floor but I didn’t hear them. My ears were numbed by the
explosion. The guards didn’t hesitate: they raced for the door. One
of them yelled something at us, probably ‘Stay there,’ or ‘Get
down,’ but I couldn’t hear him. It mightn’t have been in English.
But even with the guards gone our situation hadn’t improved. There
were still bars on the windows and the guards had enough sense to
lock the big gym door as they fled for their shelters.