Tomorrow When The War Began (14 page)

I shed the sleeping bag and walked down to the
creek. Robyn was there, washing her hair. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hi.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Good.’

‘Hungry?’

‘Yes, I am a bit.’

‘I’m not surprised. You haven’t had anything
since teatime the day before yesterday.’

‘Oh. Haven’t I?’

‘Come on. I’ll fix you something. You like
eggs?’ I had cold boiled eggs – we couldn’t have a fire during the
day – with biscuits and jam, and a bowl of muesli with powdered
milk. I don’t know if it was the cockatoos or Robyn or the muesli,
but by the time I’d finished breakfast I felt I could maybe start
to cope again.

Chapter
Thirteen

One of the small rituals that developed each
day was Corrie’s Testing the Trannie. This was a solemn ceremony
that took place whenever Corrie got the urge. She’d get up, look at
the tent, give a little murmur like ‘I think I might give the
trannie another burl’, and walk over to the tent. A moment later
she’d emerge with the precious object in her hands and go to the
highest point in the clearing and, holding the transistor to her
ear, carefully turn the dial She wouldn’t let anyone else touch it,
because it was her father’s radio and no one but her could possibly
be trusted with it. It was the only thing of his that she had.
Although we laughed at her a little there was always some tension
when she did it, but days passed with no result and Corrie reported
that the batteries were gradually getting flatter.

One evening I happened to be sitting near her
when she went through another fruitless search of the dial. As
usual there was nothing but static. She turned it off with a sigh.
We were chatting about nothing in particular, when she casually
said, ‘What are all these other things for?’

‘What other things?’

‘All these other settings.’

‘How do you mean?’

She embarked on a long explanation about how
the few times her father had lent her the radio he’d said that her
stations would be on PO or FM.

‘PO and FM? What are you talking about? Let’s
have a look.’

She handed it over a little reluctantly. I
realised from the writing on it that it was a French one. I started
translating for her. ‘“Recepteur Mondial a dix bandes”, that’s
“world reception to ten bands”. FM’s FM, obviously. PO’s probably
AM. “OC Etendue”, well, “etendue”, that’s extended or expanded or
something.’ The implications of all this slowly began to dawn on
me. ‘This is no ordinary transistor, Corrie. This is a short
wave.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘It means you can pick up stations from all
around the world. Corrie, do you mean you’ve only been trying the
local stations?’

‘Well, yes, PO and FM. That’s what Dad told
me. I didn’t know about all that other stuff, and I didn’t want to
flatten the batteries, mucking around with it. They’re nearly dead
now, and we don’t have any more.’

I felt wildly excited and called to the
others, ‘Come here you guys, quick!’

They came quickly, drawn by the urgency in my
voice.

‘Corrie’s radio can pick up short wave but she
didn’t realise it. You want to listen in? The batteries have nearly
had it, but you never know your luck.’ I selected ‘OC Etendue 1’
and handed the little black transistor back to Corrie. ‘Give it the
gun, Corrie. Just spin the dial the same way you did before.’

We crowded round as Corrie, tongue sticking
out of the side of her mouth, slowly began to rotate the knob. And
a moment later we heard the first rational adult voice most of us
had heard in a long time. It was a female, speaking very fast among
the static, but in a language we didn’t understand.

‘Keep going,’ Homer breathed.

We heard some exotic music, an American voice
saying ‘You welcome Him into your heart and only then can you know
perfect love’, two more foreign language stations – ‘That’s
Taiwanese,’ said Fi, surprisingly, of one of them – then, as the
radio started to die, a faint voice speaking in English. It was a
male voice, and all we could hear was this:

‘... warned America not to get involved. The
General said that America would find herself in the longest,
costliest and bloodiest war in her history if she tried to
intervene. He said his forces have occupied several major coastal
cities. Much of the inland has been taken already, and losses have
been below expectations. Many civilian and military prisoners have
been captured and are being held in humanitarian conditions. Red
Cross teams will be permitted to inspect them when the situation
stabilises.

‘The General repeated his claim that the
invasion was aimed at “reducing imbalances within the region”. As
international outrage continues to mount, FCA reports sporadic
fighting in many country areas and at least two major land battles
...’

And that was about it. The voice faded
quickly. We heard a few scattered words, ‘United Nations’, ‘New
Zealand’, ‘twenty to twenty-five aircraft’, then it was gone. We
looked at each other.

‘Let’s everyone get pens and paper and write
down what we think we heard,’ Homer said calmly. ‘Then we can
compare notes.’

We met again ten minutes later. It was amazing
how different the versions were, but we agreed on the important
details. What we could infer was as important as what the man had
said. ‘For one thing,’ said Homer, sitting back on his heels, ‘we
can tell it’s not World War Three. Not yet, anyway. It sounds like
it’s just us.’

‘The part about the prisoners was good,’
Corrie said. Everyone nodded. It sounded genuine somehow. It had
helped all of us, a little, though awful fears still kept leaping
up and attacking our minds.

‘He’s trying to remind the Americans of
Vietnam,’ Fi said. ‘It’s meant to have been their national
nightmare or something.’

‘Bigger nightmare for the Vietnamese,’ Chris
commented.

I glanced at Lee, whose face was
impassive.

‘The Americans don’t like getting involved
with other countries.’ I remembered something we’d done in
Twentieth Century History. ‘Woodrow Wilson and isolationism, isn’t
that one of the topics we’re meant to be preparing, over the
holidays?’

‘Mmm, remind me to do some work on it
tonight.’ That was Kevin.

‘“International outrage” sounds promising,’
Robyn said.

‘That’s probably our biggest hope. But I can’t
imagine too many other countries rushing in to spill their blood
for us,’ I said.

‘But don’t we have treaties and stuff?’ Kevin
asked. ‘I thought the politicians were meant to organise all this.
Otherwise, why’ve we been paying their salaries all these
years?’

No one knew what to answer. Maybe they were
thinking the same thing I was, that we should have taken an
interest in all these things a long time ago, before it was too
late.

‘What does it mean “reducing imbalances within
the region”?’ Kevin asked.

‘I guess he’s talking about sharing things
more equally,’ Robyn said. ‘We’ve got all this land and all these
resources, and yet there’s countries a crow’s spit away that have
people packed in like battery hens. You can’t blame them for
resenting it, and we haven’t done much to reduce any imbalances,
just sat on our fat backsides, enjoyed our money and felt
smug.’

‘Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,’
Kevin said uncomfortably.

‘And now they’ve taken the cookie and crumbled
it in a whole new way,’ Robyn said. ‘In fact it looks like they’re
taking the whole packet.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ Kevin said. ‘You
sound like you don’t mind. You think it’s fair enough, do you? Let
them walk in and take everything they want, everything our parents
have worked for. Help yourself guys, don’t mind us. Is that what
you get out of the Bible? Do unto others, or whatever it is? Remind
me not to go to your church.’

‘Not much chance of that,’ Corrie said,
smiling and putting her hand on Kevin’s knee, trying to calm him
down. But Robyn wasn’t put off.

‘Of course I mind,’ Robyn said. ‘If I was a
saint maybe I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not a saint so I mind rather a
lot. And its not as though they’re acting in a very religious way.
I don’t know any religion that tells people to go in and steal and
kill to get what they want. I can understand why they’re doing it
but understanding isn’t the same as supporting. But if you’d lived
your whole life in a slum, starving, unemployed, always ill, and
you saw the people across the road sunbaking and eating ice cream
every day, then after a while you’d convince yourself that taking
their wealth and sharing it around your neighbours isn’t such a
terrible thing to do. A few people would suffer, but a lot of
people would be better off.’

‘It’s just not right,’ said Kevin
stubbornly.

‘Maybe not. But neither’s your way of looking
at it. There doesn’t have to be a right side and a wrong side. Both
sides can be right, or both sides can be wrong. I think both
countries are in the wrong this time.’

‘So does that mean you’re not going to fight
them?’ Kevin asked, still looking for a fight himself.

Robyn sighed. ‘I don’t know. I already have,
haven’t I? I was right there with Ellie when we smashed our way
through Wirrawee. I guess I’ll keep fighting them, for the sake of
my family. But after the war, if there is such a time as after the
war, I’ll work damn hard to change things. I don’t care if I spend
the rest of my life doing it.’

‘You were the one who thought we were taking
too big a risk going to look for Robyn and Lee,’ I said to Kevin.
‘You didn’t seem so fired up then.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t mean that,’
was all he would say.

Homer spoke up. ‘Maybe it’s time to decide
what we’re all going to do. We’ve had a chance to rest up, get our
breath back, think about things. Now we should decide if we’re
going to stay here in hiding till the war sorts itself out, or if
we should get out there and do something about it.’ He paused, and
when no one spoke he continued. ‘I know we’re meant to be
schoolkids, too young to do much more than clean a whiteboard for a
teacher, but some of those soldiers I saw the other night weren’t
any older than us.’

‘I saw two who looked a lot younger than us,’
said Robyn.

Homer nodded. No one else spoke. The tension
was heavy, like a humid night. Here in this secret basin we’d been
insulated for a little while from the fear and sweat and bleeding
of the outside world. People were keeping each other prisoner,
hurting each other, killing each other, but we’d retreated to the
paradise of Hell.

It was a bit irrelevant to what Homer was
saying, but I spoke anyway. ‘I can understand why the Hermit chose
to live down here, away from it all.’

‘Away from the human race,’ Chris
murmured.

‘It’s our own families,’ said Corrie. ‘That’s
what everyone’s worried about, isn’t it? I guess I’d fight for my
country but I’m going mad wondering what’s happened to my family.
We don’t know if they’re alive or dead. We’re thinking and hoping
that they’re at the Showground, and we’re thinking and hoping that
they’re being well treated, but we don’t know any of that. We’ve
only got Mr Clement’s word to go on.’

‘Seeing Mr Coles at the Showground helped,’ I
said. ‘He looked healthy. He didn’t look too terrified or injured.
That made a big difference to me.’

Fi spoke up. ‘I think we should try to find
out more about the Showground. If we know that everyone’s there,
that they’re unhurt, that they’re being fed properly and all that
sort of thing, it’d make such a difference.’ Homer was about to
interrupt but she went on. ‘I’ve been thinking about what Robyn and
Kevin were arguing about. If I could get my family and friends
back, healthy, I’d let these people have the stupid houses and cars
and things. I’d go and live with my parents in a cardboard box at
the tip and be happy.’

I tried to imagine Fi, with her beautiful skin
and soft polished voice, living at the tip.

‘It sounds like we should try to find out more
about the Showground then,’ Homer said. ‘But it won’t be easy.’ He
added modestly, ‘Do you realise that every group that’s gone into
town has been spotted, except Fi and me?’

‘Were you striped?’ I asked, and got the groan
I deserved.

Lee was lying on my left, against a rock that
was still warm. It seemed to be his turn to speak. ‘I don’t think
they’ll be into tortures and mass executions. The world’s changing,
and any country that does that stuff knows there’s going to be a
stink about it. I mean, I know it still happens, but not as much as
it used to. Nowadays they seem to do things unobtrusively, over a
long period of time. These guys are obviously trigger-happy, but
there’s a big difference between shooting in hot blood and shooting
in cold blood. We know that they’re firing off endless bullets in
hot blood – they’re wild that way, and I’ve got the hole in my leg
to prove it. But that’s sort of normal in a war, and a lot of it’s
self-defence. It doesn’t mean they’re into concentration camps. The
two things don’t automatically go together.’

‘I hate them,’ said Kevin. ‘I don’t know why
you’re all being so understanding. I just hate them and I want to
kill them all and if I had a nuclear bomb I’d drop it right down
their throats.’

He was really upset, and he’d stopped the
conversation as though he had nuked it. But after a few moments of
awkward silence Homer started in again.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘do we want to check out the
Showground more thoroughly? Can we do it with the stealth and
finesse that Fi and I showed, or are we going to march in like a
heavy metal band at a bowling club?’

‘We could tunnel in,’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, or pole-vault over the fence. Anyone
got a serious suggestion? And how badly do we want to do it
anyway?’

‘Badly,’ I said.

‘I won’t pretend the thought doesn’t scare the
skin off me,’ Corrie said softly. ‘But it’s what we have to do.
We’ll never sleep again at nights if we don’t.’

‘We’ll never sleep again at nights if we’re
dead.’ Chris said ‘Look, with my parents overseas, I’m not quite as
involved as you guys. But I’ll have a go, I suppose.’

‘I know what our parents would say,’ Fi said.
‘They’d say that the most important thing to them is our safety.
They wouldn’t want us dead in exchange for them living. In a way
we’re what gives their lives their meaning. But we can’t be bound
by that. We have to do what’s right for us. We have to find
meanings for our own lives, and this might be one of the ways we do
it. I’m with Corrie; scared out of my skin, but I’ll do it because
I can’t imagine the rest of my life if I don’t.’