The Third Day, The Frost Read Online Free PDF Page B

which I
don’t.’
    ‘I used to think there were too many people
here before. Now look at it.’
    ‘Yeah, they’re packing them in. “Populate or
perish”, that was the motto in Grandma’s generation. These guys are
carrying it out for us.’
    ‘You and Lee are sure doing your best.’
    ‘What? What did you say?’ I started belting
him around the head with my gloved hands. ‘You take that back.’
    ‘Why, don’t tell me he’s still got some
condoms left?’
    ‘Homer!’ I hit him a few more times. When I’d
beaten him to a pulp, I said, ‘Anyway, I bet Fi’s just waiting for
you to ask her.’
    He looked embarrassed at that. ‘I don’t want
to get too serious,’ he mumbled.
    ‘Well, it’s either her or Robyn. You don’t
have a lot of choices.’
    ‘Robyn’s a bit of a suck, don’t you reckon?
She’s so perfect all the time. She reckons she’s so good.’
    ‘No, she doesn’t,’ I said loyally.
    ‘Ah well, I wouldn’t ever want to go with her.
She’d always be telling you what to do. She’d drive any bloke
crazy.’
    I was shocked at anyone criticising Robyn. She
was one of my role models – along with Marilyn Monroe and Emily
Dickinson. But Homer always had trouble getting on with
strong-minded people. Except me. No, even me sometimes.
    We could hear Robyn and Fi talking, back in
the hay, so I went and joined them.
    ‘This hay sticks into me so badly,’ Fi
complained. ‘In all those kids’ books people used to sleep in
haystacks and it sounded really comfortable. But there’s nothing
comfortable about it.’
    We had no need to move until eleven o’clock,
so I got back in my sleeping bag and talked to them for a while,
before dozing off into a light sleep. We’d been trying to make do
on two meals a day, to save supplies, and breakfast was the meal I
usually skipped. So there wasn’t much incentive to get out of the
sleeping bag again.
    With the rain still falling and the
temperature feeling close to zero we didn’t know if the prisoners
would be taken off to work. But sure enough, right on nine o’clock,
we saw a little bedraggled file of men slopping across the paddock,
followed by the guards in their ute. We let them go, glad that we
could at least stay dry. Being a prisoner looked worse than working
for my dad.
    As lunchtime approached my nerves got more and
more frayed. Kevin had the answers to a lot of questions that we
had been fretting on for a long time. If he could get away on his
own for a few minutes we would be able to have our first ever safe
conversation with someone who’d been in the Showground. I got so
excited I found myself chewing on a corner of my sleeping bag. Of
course we all hoped he’d be able to rejoin us, to bring our numbers
back up to six, but we knew there was some problem with escaping,
or he would have done it yesterday. That was one of the things we
wanted to ask about.
    We were in position above the piggery well
before noon. The ute was parked there, so we assumed they were all
inside, although it was twenty minutes before we saw any activity.
Then one of the prisoners came out and got a couple of paintbrushes
from the back of the ute. He gazed searchingly up the hill towards
us for a minute – they must have all known we’d be there – but we
didn’t dare show ourselves. He soon went back inside.
    The next one to appear was Kevin. He came
hurrying out holding a shovel over his left shoulder. He came
straight towards us, head down, like a man on a mission. As he got
closer I realised what the mission was. He had a roll of toilet
paper in his hand. I started laughing.
    When he was only a couple of metres away from
me I called out softly: ‘Not here you don’t.’ He grinned but he
didn’t slow down or raise his head until he was well inside the
belt of trees, out of sight of the piggery.
    Then Robyn, Homer and Fi had the chance that
Lee and I had had the day before. There was heaps of hugging. It
was only the fear of time that put a stop to