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Excerpts from Ellie's journal
1: Arrival and confusion; she discusses the people she met in the infirmary, how none of this makes any sense, how she felt awful. How she accidentally called Bea 'Mum' and it makes her miss her mum even more. Makes some significant allusions to an airport and some explosions, wonders how her friends Homer, Fi, Lee and Kevin are doing and if they're dead.
2: Leaves stuff out in the hallway, talks about how much she hates the sight of things that are in her room. Collections of a few memories, like her mother making the quilt on her bed. Her teddy bear Alvin, which is about palm-size and unscorched; mentions of Alvin being taken away from her in the last prison she was in.
Oct. 17, 2013 - after leaving her stuff out in the hallway.
-
And then he came.
There was a knock on my door, and a few people had already stopped by. I wasn’t much in the mood to chat, so I just said, “You can just take it, you don’t have to ask.”
Instead, he came in. Give him a little credit, he at least asked before he trampled on inside. “May I come in?”
“Sure. Fine.”
I should’ve said no, then. All he did was annoy me the first time, though, and I didn’t realize.
“What are you going to do with what goes unclaimed?” he asked, hands in his pockets. The door shut behind him.
“Do you have rubbish collection?” I asked. They have to, right? I don’t really know how boats work, but if they’re at sea for months and months, they need somewhere to put their rubbish.
“Can’t say I’ve seen it,” he said. “You could always try throwing it over the side, I suppose.”
That sounded good to me. Throw it over the side, get rid of it. It would be like some cosmic clearing of my life. I hated the sight of all that stuff. It was mine once, but long since taken away – and who even needed that many tops? I learned to live with a lot less, and I wasn’t going to let some Admiral distract me with all the little luxuries I’d left behind.
“Then I will,” I confirmed.
“Why the purging?” he asked.
“It’s junk.” That was all I wanted to tell him. It’s worthless. It doesn’t matter to me. (Even though it did, just not in a good way.) I don’t want to look at it every day.
“Well, I’d say so,” he said, mildly. “But I thought most girls liked having clothes to choose from.”
This made me mad. I glared at him, thinking how dare he say something like that, to me! Did people on the Barge think this way, that girls could be won over with clothes and trinkets? “That’s sexist,” I snapped.
“Is it?” His voice was bland, and I thought seriously about strangling him for a moment.
“Yes.” My voice was dripping with sarcasm. “You can tell by the part where you said girls like clothes.” OK, it’s not so witty, but I wasn’t in a good state.
“Hm. You may be right.”
And then, with his tone, I thought maybe he just said that to provoke me. And I fell for it, just like an idiot. I crossed my arms, and was about to speak when he continued.
“I like clothes, too. I wouldn’t throw any of mine out for anyone to take.”
“Someone already took all of these,” I shot back. “It’s not a big loss.” It was more than I really meant to say to him, but it was at least true.
“Before the Barge, you mean,” he said. “Who?”
I’m sorry about what happened then. I am. I think I was so desperate for someone to listen that I just wanted to talk. I shouldn’t have.
“Does it matter who?” I asked. “It’s all gone. This is just fake. You can’t give back an imitation of all of it and say it’s OK. It’s not.”
“If it’s an imitation, then what’s the point of any of this?”
“I don’t want to live in it.”
He considers me, for a moment. “Have a warden yet?”
This bizarre system that they have, here. Wardens and inmates. I don’t deserve to be here, and I certainly didn’t want someone telling me what to do. “No. Don’t want one.”
“You don’t get much choice.” Which made me bristle even more. “At least they could get you a different room. Somewhere you’re more comfortable.”
I think he was really trying to help, but he was just a little too arrogant to make me comfortable with it. It was like he knew everything, and I knew nothing, and he was giving me a gift just by being there. I started to hate him a little, then. So I lashed out: “What do you care? Even the Americans helped us more than you lot.”
“Helped in what, exactly?”
A surge of anger. “The war. You know, sending planes and stuff.”
“Which war?”
Which meant that it didn’t happen, in his world. I will never accept that it happened and people didn’t know – that my country’s invasion just passed by, in history, vanishing like a stone swallowed up by mud.
“When we got invaded,” I explained, impatiently. “You know? Australia besieged. ‘Correcting resource imbalances within the region’, or something like that.” That was what that general had said, when we caught him on the radio. “New Zealand was the only one who really stood by us. The Kiwis are – they’re good.” They deserved better than me, that’s for sure. Turns out they should have taken Homer and Lee into town with them, not me. Not unreliable, scared Ellie. I thought I was really brave before that.
“What year was it when you came here?” he asks.
Would it be better, knowing that he just came from earlier on? Maybe he was from the same world, just it hadn’t happened yet.
No, I decided. He didn’t know it happened. The rest didn’t matter. “What does it matter? You don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“All right,” he admitted. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I know an invasion of Australia wouldn’t be tolerated.”
And I exploded a bit, then.
“I’ve had enough of politicians condemning it on the news and then not sending any help. Because it’s expensive, because they claim it’s a clean invasion without torture or executions – they even let the Red Cross in to take a look at things, that means it’s OK, right?” My hands were in fists, and my eyes were on an old doll of mine. Her name was Veronica, I think. Some pre-named doll that came with a little bottle and a hairbrush, or something. A Christmas present. Right then, her eyes just stared and stared, endless pits. This really fake dark blue. I hated that doll, in that instant, and I was thinking about what to do to her. All the things I wanted to do to Bond a second earlier. “America sent planes. And they sheltered our stupid leaders who let this happen in the first place, and then ran away when it did.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I jumped up and grabbed the doll and threw it against the wall. “So I won’t be locked up!” And I smashed a little windup toy, too, stomped on it. “With all the things,” and this time it was a little toy truck, something that neighbors gave my parents when they didn’t know yet if I was a boy or a girl, “that were stolen from me!” There was a snow globe from Sydney too, I think, because at the end there was glass all over the floor. I don’t remember much what I was thinking at the time. It was just a whole lot of images coming at me, in my head. The ripped half-face of the doll. The wheel from the truck spinning and settling on the floor. The soapy water from inside the snow globe, spreading thickly and slowly. I don’t think I was looking at him.
After about a year, he asked, “How long have you been fighting them?”
I realized then that I was shaking. I was suddenly cold, chill struck to the bone. I couldn’t hold my hands steady. I stomped another piece of glass, I think, and then I was gone, like a leaf falling from a tree. I grabbed at the quilt, my mum’s quilt, and hugged it close, and more or less fell back against the wall. “A long time,” I said. It got hard to keep track of the months, out in the bush. We stopped bothering after a while. “Six or seven months, and then the Kiwis rescued us, and then – then we went back.” My voice cracked. I didn’t know I was still mad about that. “They asked us. It’s more than a year, by now.”
“How many of you?”
My eyes filled with tears. I could force them back, but only by focusing just on the words that I was saying. Not on what they meant. “There were – eight of us. Last I knew, we were five.” Four, without her. Three, if Kevin’s mental collapse meant that he was gone for good. Fi, Homer, Lee. She left them alone by dying. Maybe they died too, and she’ll never see them again.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
My knuckles went white fisted in the quilt.
“Why did you go back?”
There was only one possible answer. “It’s my home.”
“You’re not ready to give it up.”
“And no Admiral will make me.” This is how I have to be, now. I have to be hard. I can’t yield for anything, not a weird Admiral, not a big blue-headed alien, no one.
“Doubt that’s the point. Look,” he said, “I came here as an inmate. Thought this whole bloody thing was a set up. Then I thought my warden would have to convince me to quit my job, live a peaceful life. He didn’t. Dobt yours is going to ask you to stop fighting.”
“My friends aren’t here. I’m not where I want to be. So I don’t really care what a warden wants me to do.”
He sounded a little exasperated – or maybe it was my imagination. “How do you think you’re going to get back to where you want to be?”
“You think I’m going to do what he wants just because he’s got me trapped?” As if.
“I think you’re angry enough to block yourself off from viable options.”
This got me madder than anything else, so far, but I just didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. “You’re not my shrink. Or my mum.” I kind of wished one or the other was there. If my mum was close by, I’d wrap myself up in her arms and never come out.
“No, I’m just a pain in your ass until you’re ready to stop throwing tantrums.”
I was done. “Leave me alone.”
He stood up, and went for the door. Finally. “I went to war,” he said. “And there was a time when I hated everyone who wasn’t there, too.” And then he was gone.
Was he right? I thought about it. I couldn’t think of anything else. Did I hate everyone who wasn’t there? I didn’t think so. I just hated everyone here. This stupid ship that can give me a dunny to myself but can’t show me my friends. I unreasonably love the people who were there. My friends became my people. I depend on them. I don’t want to be without. Not ever.
When he left, I wanted to kill him. Wring his stupid neck. It goes to show how bad this war has made me. How violent. All I could do for a long time was sit there and think about all the ways he could die. Drowning, shots, hanging. Burning, choking. A knife, like Lee killed that soldier.
It might have been hours. I just know that eventually I got up and cleaned up the water from the globe and the glass and the broken toys. I put it all in an old shirt, wrapped it up, and went up to toss it over the side.
I went back down and I slept for hours, curled up around the blanket.
-
3: Flood.
Nov. 2, 2013 - Written after posting apologizing for the flood, regarding what happened during the flood.
I can't explain what happened next.
They called it a flood, here, like the ship was sailing on the ocean and it started taking on water. Instead, it changed things. There were little signs of something going wrong, in the days going up to it. The ice skating rink disappeared. Some clothes came out of the wash covered in blood, before they ever went in the machine. The library started going weird, some kind of temporal anomaly, I think. And there were voices on the network from people who weren't there. I remember all of these things. And then there's just a big blank.
And in that blank is something weird.
The flood changed everything. Suddenly, the whole Barge was different. All of the people were different. Even my memories were different. I can't say when it changed exactly, because the instant it changed I thought it had always been that way.
That other Barge was terrible. Instead of the way it is now, it was supposed to corrupt people. All of the worst were wardens, and you had to get just as bad, just as cruel to become one of them. The enemy did a lot in the war, but I'm not sure it ever got as bad as this.
I know I just started writing about it, but I'm not sure if I want to continue. I've been sitting here in my room for the last few minutes totally still, half-remembering and hating every second. Maybe it would help, to get some of the memories out. Maybe it would just hurt to dredge them up. Floods didn't really happen, so maybe I'll just forget. Maybe it'll slip out of my brain like a load of slippery sludge.
I don't think so, somehow.
OK. I won't be specific. I'll split the difference. And if I want to write about it later, then I can.
There was torture. A lot of it. And there wasn't any reason for it. It was like a whole shipful of Major Harveys, bullies who were just interested in their own power. And some of them had superpowers too, fast and strong enough to make you do what they wanted no matter what.
I spoke out the first day I was there. I got whipped. I don't mean I got smacked around, I mean whipped, with a real whip. I cried for hours afterward, these sobs that couldn't even summon tears. I was all out of tears, but I just couldn't make myself breathe right. It hurt so much I thought I was going to die.
I tried to shut up after that, I was so scared, but I couldn't. Sometimes it's like my mouth does things all on its own, talking like some kind of movie hero even when I feel all shriveled up inside like a dead leaf.
I got tortured.
That sounds ridiculous, like a story, some kind of action hero. Well, it wasn't like that. If I was an action hero, then I'd have stayed silent and brave the whole time. I think I spilled everything that ever happened to me. Every thought. I begged, and I cried.
No. I don't want to write about it anymore.
There were some better spots. Like Bea, Beatrice, she acted like my mum. She took care of me when I was recovering. She was really sharp, wanted to defend me. But I don't like having someone else be responsible for me. I decided to take action into my own hands.
3: cont'd: Ellie describes how she sets the kitchen on fire, how scared she was, how she thought that it was the only option to get out of there. She describes Riddick's rescue and then going to Bea for shelter, and hiding for the rest of the flood.
4: Ellie talks about going on the breakfast shift, and talks for a while about the sort of food she used to eat before the war. There may be a tangent on the virtues of lamb and a mention of how the kitchen should get some farm animals. She could take care of them!! She likes Riddick, Peter Parker gave her this journal and she is grateful. She talks about being lonely and missing her friends, and feeling angry all the time when she's not feeling empty and useless.
2: Leaves stuff out in the hallway, talks about how much she hates the sight of things that are in her room. Collections of a few memories, like her mother making the quilt on her bed. Her teddy bear Alvin, which is about palm-size and unscorched; mentions of Alvin being taken away from her in the last prison she was in.
Oct. 17, 2013 - after leaving her stuff out in the hallway.
-
And then he came.
There was a knock on my door, and a few people had already stopped by. I wasn’t much in the mood to chat, so I just said, “You can just take it, you don’t have to ask.”
Instead, he came in. Give him a little credit, he at least asked before he trampled on inside. “May I come in?”
“Sure. Fine.”
I should’ve said no, then. All he did was annoy me the first time, though, and I didn’t realize.
“What are you going to do with what goes unclaimed?” he asked, hands in his pockets. The door shut behind him.
“Do you have rubbish collection?” I asked. They have to, right? I don’t really know how boats work, but if they’re at sea for months and months, they need somewhere to put their rubbish.
“Can’t say I’ve seen it,” he said. “You could always try throwing it over the side, I suppose.”
That sounded good to me. Throw it over the side, get rid of it. It would be like some cosmic clearing of my life. I hated the sight of all that stuff. It was mine once, but long since taken away – and who even needed that many tops? I learned to live with a lot less, and I wasn’t going to let some Admiral distract me with all the little luxuries I’d left behind.
“Then I will,” I confirmed.
“Why the purging?” he asked.
“It’s junk.” That was all I wanted to tell him. It’s worthless. It doesn’t matter to me. (Even though it did, just not in a good way.) I don’t want to look at it every day.
“Well, I’d say so,” he said, mildly. “But I thought most girls liked having clothes to choose from.”
This made me mad. I glared at him, thinking how dare he say something like that, to me! Did people on the Barge think this way, that girls could be won over with clothes and trinkets? “That’s sexist,” I snapped.
“Is it?” His voice was bland, and I thought seriously about strangling him for a moment.
“Yes.” My voice was dripping with sarcasm. “You can tell by the part where you said girls like clothes.” OK, it’s not so witty, but I wasn’t in a good state.
“Hm. You may be right.”
And then, with his tone, I thought maybe he just said that to provoke me. And I fell for it, just like an idiot. I crossed my arms, and was about to speak when he continued.
“I like clothes, too. I wouldn’t throw any of mine out for anyone to take.”
“Someone already took all of these,” I shot back. “It’s not a big loss.” It was more than I really meant to say to him, but it was at least true.
“Before the Barge, you mean,” he said. “Who?”
I’m sorry about what happened then. I am. I think I was so desperate for someone to listen that I just wanted to talk. I shouldn’t have.
“Does it matter who?” I asked. “It’s all gone. This is just fake. You can’t give back an imitation of all of it and say it’s OK. It’s not.”
“If it’s an imitation, then what’s the point of any of this?”
“I don’t want to live in it.”
He considers me, for a moment. “Have a warden yet?”
This bizarre system that they have, here. Wardens and inmates. I don’t deserve to be here, and I certainly didn’t want someone telling me what to do. “No. Don’t want one.”
“You don’t get much choice.” Which made me bristle even more. “At least they could get you a different room. Somewhere you’re more comfortable.”
I think he was really trying to help, but he was just a little too arrogant to make me comfortable with it. It was like he knew everything, and I knew nothing, and he was giving me a gift just by being there. I started to hate him a little, then. So I lashed out: “What do you care? Even the Americans helped us more than you lot.”
“Helped in what, exactly?”
A surge of anger. “The war. You know, sending planes and stuff.”
“Which war?”
Which meant that it didn’t happen, in his world. I will never accept that it happened and people didn’t know – that my country’s invasion just passed by, in history, vanishing like a stone swallowed up by mud.
“When we got invaded,” I explained, impatiently. “You know? Australia besieged. ‘Correcting resource imbalances within the region’, or something like that.” That was what that general had said, when we caught him on the radio. “New Zealand was the only one who really stood by us. The Kiwis are – they’re good.” They deserved better than me, that’s for sure. Turns out they should have taken Homer and Lee into town with them, not me. Not unreliable, scared Ellie. I thought I was really brave before that.
“What year was it when you came here?” he asks.
Would it be better, knowing that he just came from earlier on? Maybe he was from the same world, just it hadn’t happened yet.
No, I decided. He didn’t know it happened. The rest didn’t matter. “What does it matter? You don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“All right,” he admitted. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I know an invasion of Australia wouldn’t be tolerated.”
And I exploded a bit, then.
“I’ve had enough of politicians condemning it on the news and then not sending any help. Because it’s expensive, because they claim it’s a clean invasion without torture or executions – they even let the Red Cross in to take a look at things, that means it’s OK, right?” My hands were in fists, and my eyes were on an old doll of mine. Her name was Veronica, I think. Some pre-named doll that came with a little bottle and a hairbrush, or something. A Christmas present. Right then, her eyes just stared and stared, endless pits. This really fake dark blue. I hated that doll, in that instant, and I was thinking about what to do to her. All the things I wanted to do to Bond a second earlier. “America sent planes. And they sheltered our stupid leaders who let this happen in the first place, and then ran away when it did.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I jumped up and grabbed the doll and threw it against the wall. “So I won’t be locked up!” And I smashed a little windup toy, too, stomped on it. “With all the things,” and this time it was a little toy truck, something that neighbors gave my parents when they didn’t know yet if I was a boy or a girl, “that were stolen from me!” There was a snow globe from Sydney too, I think, because at the end there was glass all over the floor. I don’t remember much what I was thinking at the time. It was just a whole lot of images coming at me, in my head. The ripped half-face of the doll. The wheel from the truck spinning and settling on the floor. The soapy water from inside the snow globe, spreading thickly and slowly. I don’t think I was looking at him.
After about a year, he asked, “How long have you been fighting them?”
I realized then that I was shaking. I was suddenly cold, chill struck to the bone. I couldn’t hold my hands steady. I stomped another piece of glass, I think, and then I was gone, like a leaf falling from a tree. I grabbed at the quilt, my mum’s quilt, and hugged it close, and more or less fell back against the wall. “A long time,” I said. It got hard to keep track of the months, out in the bush. We stopped bothering after a while. “Six or seven months, and then the Kiwis rescued us, and then – then we went back.” My voice cracked. I didn’t know I was still mad about that. “They asked us. It’s more than a year, by now.”
“How many of you?”
My eyes filled with tears. I could force them back, but only by focusing just on the words that I was saying. Not on what they meant. “There were – eight of us. Last I knew, we were five.” Four, without her. Three, if Kevin’s mental collapse meant that he was gone for good. Fi, Homer, Lee. She left them alone by dying. Maybe they died too, and she’ll never see them again.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
My knuckles went white fisted in the quilt.
“Why did you go back?”
There was only one possible answer. “It’s my home.”
“You’re not ready to give it up.”
“And no Admiral will make me.” This is how I have to be, now. I have to be hard. I can’t yield for anything, not a weird Admiral, not a big blue-headed alien, no one.
“Doubt that’s the point. Look,” he said, “I came here as an inmate. Thought this whole bloody thing was a set up. Then I thought my warden would have to convince me to quit my job, live a peaceful life. He didn’t. Dobt yours is going to ask you to stop fighting.”
“My friends aren’t here. I’m not where I want to be. So I don’t really care what a warden wants me to do.”
He sounded a little exasperated – or maybe it was my imagination. “How do you think you’re going to get back to where you want to be?”
“You think I’m going to do what he wants just because he’s got me trapped?” As if.
“I think you’re angry enough to block yourself off from viable options.”
This got me madder than anything else, so far, but I just didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. “You’re not my shrink. Or my mum.” I kind of wished one or the other was there. If my mum was close by, I’d wrap myself up in her arms and never come out.
“No, I’m just a pain in your ass until you’re ready to stop throwing tantrums.”
I was done. “Leave me alone.”
He stood up, and went for the door. Finally. “I went to war,” he said. “And there was a time when I hated everyone who wasn’t there, too.” And then he was gone.
Was he right? I thought about it. I couldn’t think of anything else. Did I hate everyone who wasn’t there? I didn’t think so. I just hated everyone here. This stupid ship that can give me a dunny to myself but can’t show me my friends. I unreasonably love the people who were there. My friends became my people. I depend on them. I don’t want to be without. Not ever.
When he left, I wanted to kill him. Wring his stupid neck. It goes to show how bad this war has made me. How violent. All I could do for a long time was sit there and think about all the ways he could die. Drowning, shots, hanging. Burning, choking. A knife, like Lee killed that soldier.
It might have been hours. I just know that eventually I got up and cleaned up the water from the globe and the glass and the broken toys. I put it all in an old shirt, wrapped it up, and went up to toss it over the side.
I went back down and I slept for hours, curled up around the blanket.
-
3: Flood.
Nov. 2, 2013 - Written after posting apologizing for the flood, regarding what happened during the flood.
I can't explain what happened next.
They called it a flood, here, like the ship was sailing on the ocean and it started taking on water. Instead, it changed things. There were little signs of something going wrong, in the days going up to it. The ice skating rink disappeared. Some clothes came out of the wash covered in blood, before they ever went in the machine. The library started going weird, some kind of temporal anomaly, I think. And there were voices on the network from people who weren't there. I remember all of these things. And then there's just a big blank.
And in that blank is something weird.
The flood changed everything. Suddenly, the whole Barge was different. All of the people were different. Even my memories were different. I can't say when it changed exactly, because the instant it changed I thought it had always been that way.
That other Barge was terrible. Instead of the way it is now, it was supposed to corrupt people. All of the worst were wardens, and you had to get just as bad, just as cruel to become one of them. The enemy did a lot in the war, but I'm not sure it ever got as bad as this.
I know I just started writing about it, but I'm not sure if I want to continue. I've been sitting here in my room for the last few minutes totally still, half-remembering and hating every second. Maybe it would help, to get some of the memories out. Maybe it would just hurt to dredge them up. Floods didn't really happen, so maybe I'll just forget. Maybe it'll slip out of my brain like a load of slippery sludge.
I don't think so, somehow.
OK. I won't be specific. I'll split the difference. And if I want to write about it later, then I can.
There was torture. A lot of it. And there wasn't any reason for it. It was like a whole shipful of Major Harveys, bullies who were just interested in their own power. And some of them had superpowers too, fast and strong enough to make you do what they wanted no matter what.
I spoke out the first day I was there. I got whipped. I don't mean I got smacked around, I mean whipped, with a real whip. I cried for hours afterward, these sobs that couldn't even summon tears. I was all out of tears, but I just couldn't make myself breathe right. It hurt so much I thought I was going to die.
I tried to shut up after that, I was so scared, but I couldn't. Sometimes it's like my mouth does things all on its own, talking like some kind of movie hero even when I feel all shriveled up inside like a dead leaf.
I got tortured.
That sounds ridiculous, like a story, some kind of action hero. Well, it wasn't like that. If I was an action hero, then I'd have stayed silent and brave the whole time. I think I spilled everything that ever happened to me. Every thought. I begged, and I cried.
No. I don't want to write about it anymore.
There were some better spots. Like Bea, Beatrice, she acted like my mum. She took care of me when I was recovering. She was really sharp, wanted to defend me. But I don't like having someone else be responsible for me. I decided to take action into my own hands.
3: cont'd: Ellie describes how she sets the kitchen on fire, how scared she was, how she thought that it was the only option to get out of there. She describes Riddick's rescue and then going to Bea for shelter, and hiding for the rest of the flood.
4: Ellie talks about going on the breakfast shift, and talks for a while about the sort of food she used to eat before the war. There may be a tangent on the virtues of lamb and a mention of how the kitchen should get some farm animals. She could take care of them!! She likes Riddick, Peter Parker gave her this journal and she is grateful. She talks about being lonely and missing her friends, and feeling angry all the time when she's not feeling empty and useless.