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.