There were ways to get through rest day. Sleeping was one. You could do food prep or laundry or cleaning for extra points. Now that the rain had set in, they always needed people on sandbagging, or hosing out the sleepboxes after a gut bug went through. Or you could do the activities. Most of these were in the rec tent in Central compound where the food shed was, too. Rest days were staggered but there were usually thirty or forty people off at the same time, plus the under-twelves. Apart from Family compound, Central was the one place women and men were allowed in the same fenced areas. Sometimes a woman from Charlie got the same rest day as her brother or son or partner, or a man she’d been talking to through the fence. There were male and female Essos in Central, too, monitoring things. Management had zero tolerance for any behaviour that might lead to unnecessary medical procedures.
There was a choir, a dance group, talks, storytelling for the kids. Things that didn’t use a lot of materials. Sometimes they organised crafts – colouring in, or weaving with strips of packaging. Management supplied pens and scrap paper. No scissors. If you didn’t want to join in, you could watch. Li watched everything except the dogs. The dogs got fed every couple of days, mostly rabbits. Sometimes trappers came to the fence to trade, or security would do a run. At feeding time the dogs ripped each other apart over the carcasses and people bet points for gum, or cigarettes. The dogs reminded Li of every mongrel in every town she’d ever passed through, just hungrier.
There were thirteen books in the rec tent. Most of them were torn picture books, the rest were romances and Serkel catalogues. Li sat at the table and read them all. Sometimes Management gave access to the runway and supplied a football. Some of the Essos played too. She would have joined in if she had two good legs. There was one man who moved like Frank, the same head-up alertness and sudden bursts of speed. Frank could take the ball off another player and score before they knew it was gone. He’d been vice-president of the Nerredin football club and he never gave up on the Mynas making it to Regionals. They went to home games together, kicked a footy with Carl and Angie, but Li didn’t have a team – not the Mynas or anyone else. Frank said it was because she’d moved around too much, never got loyal, but it was more than that. She didn’t understand why you’d let yourself care so much about something you had no control over.
She liked the talks best. The speaker and topic were set in advance and written on a sign outside the tent. Folding chairs were provided. People talked about anything, about what they knew. Pig hunting, jewellery making, genealogy, astronomy, the Hadith, container farming, old movie stars. Sometimes there were questions or arguments but mostly people were happy to just listen. Sometimes people talked about politics, or Weather, or Wars, or life inside the XB. You could do that as long as you didn’t cause a disturbance, but Li felt that these weren’t really the things people wanted to hear about. She thought they wanted something close to what she did – stories that took her outside the fence, that filled her head without touching her. Essos came on their breaks, and some of the supervisors did too. Li went to all of them. She’d never been so hungry to hear other people talk.
One rest day she was in the rec tent with Camila and Trish and a handful of other people waiting. The talk was supposed to be about dog breeding, but the speaker hadn’t turned up. A coughing sickness was working through the camp and a lot of people were too sick to leave the sleepboxes or nervous about contagion. The people who were there sat apart from each other, and some of them wore rags over their mouths and noses. The ones she recognised looked different, vulnerable, with their heads all freshly shaved from the last lice outbreak. Li knew they would wait the full hour, just in case.
Then she turned around and saw that Angie had come in. She was sitting near the back with her hands folded in her lap, looking down. The stubble on her head was fully grey. Li had never seen her in the rec tent, had only seen her once since the food queue – through a fence on the way back from Medical. Her heart beat faster. She didn’t know if Angie had seen her yet, if she would have recognised her from behind with her own head shaved. She wanted to tell her she was sorry. Tell her something. Thought about going back and sitting beside her but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to speak, or say it right.
A man along the row from her coughed into his arm and people stirred and sighed and someone got up and left. Li was gripped with a fear that Angie would leave too, and so before that could happen she got up herself, not making eye contact with Camila or Trish, and walked to the front. She faced them, and the seven other people and the empty seats and Angie, and she didn’t know what she was going to say, but then Angie looked up, and she did.
She said, I’m Li. I’m going to talk about dryland farming in West.
A few noises of surprise, relief, Camila’s startled attention, people getting comfortable.
Angie saw her now. She was watching Li like something wild that had got out. Li remembered the speech Frank made for Angie’s thirtieth, how he’d told the story about her chasing him
