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been here.”
    She raised her eyebrows in amusement. “I’m
looking forward to meeting up with you again when you’re your
normal self.”
    I didn’t respond, but pushed forward. Though
it seemed as if some women didn’t understand the concept of
‘stealth’, crashing through the bush as though we were on a hiking
jaunt, we made it to main road, skirting the lights of the
gates.
    I stopped and looked down that winding, dirt
road. And I smelled the wonderful, heady aroma of freedom.
     

Chapter 4
     
    The dirt road was much easier for us to
navigate and we were fortunate that the moon was bright, otherwise
we would have been walking in the dark. I wished for a torch or
some kind of lighting, but we’d fled with nothing except our house
keys.
    “Does anyone remember passing a service
station or cafe on the way in?” I asked hopefully.
    Nobody had. Like me, they’d been too nervous
or simmering with anger to notice anything peripheral on the drive
here. When he heard, Heller would probably gently scold me about
being so inattentive to my surroundings. He probably would have
noted every structure on the way. He was infuriating like that
sometimes.
    Gloria and I walked together at the head of
the group.
    “How did half-rations treat you?” I asked
her.
    She shot me a withering glance. “How do you
think?” She pulled the waist of her track pants out in front of her
to show me how much weight she’d lost. “I didn’t lose as much as
you though.”
    “Too much exercise and not enough food will
do that to a woman.” I began to reminisce. “Remember what it was
like to have dinner, a real dinner?”
    “Mmm, spaghetti. Plates and plates of
spaghetti. I’ve been dreaming about it.”
    “I’m going to shovel whatever I can find down
my throat when I get home.” Hopefully it wouldn’t be my pillow.
    “For how long do you think we’ll have to
walk?”
    “I have no idea. However long it takes to
find a phone.”
    “Are you sure these friends of yours will
come out to fetch us?”
    “Yep, absolutely positive.” Heller would tear
them a new one if they didn’t.
    We continued in silence, both of us too tired
to speak more. I trudged in a food-deprived state, robotically
placing one foot in front of the other, somehow staying upright.
After we’d walked about eight kilometres, some of the other women
openly began to complain – they were tired, they were hungry, they
were thirsty, even though I’d instructed everyone to bring a bottle
of water with them.
    Shut up! I screamed to myself, sick of
the moaning. They were getting on my fragile nerves. Nobody
deserved to complain more than Gloria and I, but we kept stoically
silent. The others should have taken a hint.
    “What if we never find a place with a
phone? Are we going to walk forever?” groaned one of them. Yvonne?
Helen? I couldn’t be bothered turning around to find out which.
    “Shut up, Yvonne,” snapped Gloria. “You
should be thanking Tilly for having the balls to organise this. If
you don’t like it, you’re free to turn around and go back.”
    “Don’t you talk to me like that, Gloria.”
    “I’ve had a gutful of listening to your
constant whining for the last two weeks. You have to be the most
self-centred person I’ve ever met.”
    “Well, you’re just . . . stupid.”
    “Oh, great comeback.”
    “Okay, ladies,” I stepped in, tired of having
to deal with these people. All I wanted to do was dump these people
and go home. “We have to stick together.” I stopped for a moment,
noticing something ahead. I turned to the rest. “Look!”
    In what I hoped was the first of many
tonight, by fortuitous chance, just when Gloria and Yvonne seemed
as if they might actually come to fisticuffs, we’d reached a
T-junction. It was the one where we’d all turned off the minor
bitumen road so long ago to reach the boot camp. The small
milestone lifted the mood a little.
    “It can’t be more than twenty kilometres to
the city from