Paradise [Draft 1]

Chapter 4: Numbers (5557)

Chapter 4: Numbers (5557)

Helen nodded at the Red Cross agent, a tough looking man with an eye-patch. Either a soldier or a swashbuckling pirate in a former life, she had no idea.

'Thanks, Ned,' she muttered as she handed the phone back to him, hoped down out of his truck and shuffled back to her dormitory, following a line of grey-clad women who were coming back from their evening meal.

It would be an hour before lights out, the women were expected to patch up their clothes in that time or perform other mundane tasks. Some had jobs to do outside the dorm. It was a wooden structure, a hot sweaty box that didn't get much air. It was cooler up here on the hillsides than down in the jungle, but not by much.

Helen lay down on her bed, the lower bunk of a crude wooden bunkbed and stared up at the half-rotten beams and tatty mattress above. She was beyond self-pity now, two months in the gulag had scorched away all her protective layers of bluster and self-delusion.

More women filed in, mainly black skinned, locals from the Delta. They sat together, fanning themselves with bits of cardboard, talking and laughing, a sound like exotic birds. The locals were the kindest of all the slaves, but Helen found them difficult to talk to, her skin colour marked her out. To them she was "one of dem left-over women", a displaced person, not worth getting to know as she'd soon be dead of a splinter virus, worked to death or burnt. They were the originals, the first women on the farm, from a congregation of Methodists that had been rounded up by the Committee. Since then, others like Helen had arrived. There were stories about a men's camp not so far away, but only stories.

Her bunkmate, a large Delta woman with her hair tied up in a plastic bag, ignoring Helen completely, heaved herself up onto the top bunk, sending down a small shower of dust that landed on Helen's face. She took off her round glasses, and after rubbing her eyes for a bit, cleaned the lenses on her sleeve.

A big black hand loomed down from the top bunk, tough and gnarled like a bear paw. It waved for attention then pointed at a folded magazine lying on top of a basket beside the bed. Helen picked it up and passed it up to the hand.

"There you go Melissa,' she squeaked. There was a grunt from above.

Ten minutes before lights out a group of women came in, recently fed and washed, workers from the backdam, returned after a week of brashing and undergrowth clearance in the Brown Ebony and Ironwood forests. A thin young woman, very dark skinned and with a shaved head had been using one of the women's bunks. She was new and would not have known she had been sleeping in another woman's bed that last three nights. The backdam women were the toughest of the slaves in the entire farm and despite the young woman's apologies they began to kick her about.

Helen sat up on her bunk and watched on. She knew not to get involved but the young slave was so pathetic in appearance, in a ragged and dirty smock, with not even a pair of sandals for her feet.

The backdam slaves pushed and pulled her around until the smock was ripped off her body entirely, revealing her thin, breastless and naked body. The backdam women laughed all the harder as she tried to cover herself again.

'What you trying to hide there, missy?' they hollered. 'You as flat as a saucer.'

Then they saw a witch's mark on her body, a pale mole on her left hip and the pushes and kicks became more violent.

'Obeah! You a witch!' they cried. 'Church slave! Dey burn you witch!'

This was finally too much for Helen. She was timid and half broken by her time in the camp, but before the reditus, her and Gary had run a hostel in Australia for eight years. She was used to bossing people around and settling disputes in dormitories, and now all that muscle memory kicked in, catapulting her across the room in the young girl's defence even before she had time to think of what exactly it what it was she was going to do when she got there.