Life Goes On by Tayell, Frank (large ebook reader txt) 📗

been a storage locker. I’ve been given a one-bunk cabin in which the table and a cabinet were removed, and an extra bunk installed. That’s been given to Teegan Toppley.

“It’s smaller than a cell,” Toppley said, on seeing it, “but I appreciate having a view.”

“A bed is all I need,” I said.

“There are clean clothes in the locker, ma’am,” the sailor detailed to show us to our quarters said. Her name’s Sullivan, and her primary duty has something to do with the helicopter. I think she was the sailor operating the machine gun during the battle at the bridge. “If you bag what you’re wearing, I’ll take it to the laundry.”

“There’s a laundry?” I asked.

“Of course,” Sullivan said, just about managing to conceal a smirk.

“Far better than a cell,” Toppley said.

“A cell?” Sullivan said.

“Ah, young lady, I am the most notorious criminal in Australia.”

“You are?” Sullivan asked.

“She’s winding you up,” I said. “Sullivan, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am. Able Rate, ma’am.”

“Do you possess a first name to go along with your rank?” Toppley asked.

“Pippa, ma’am.”

“I’m no one’s ma’am,” Toppley said. “Call me Teegan.”

“Teegan Toppley?” Sullivan asked, realisation slowly dawning.

“Ah, so my reputation has ventured across the Tasman Sea,” Toppley said. “Why don’t you show me where this mystical laundry is, and I shall tell you the story of my life, including those details the papers weren’t gracious enough to print.”

If she’d asked, I’d have told Toppley to shelve her past because you can never overtake your reputation, but it was absolutely too late. After she’d gone, I barely managed to get my boots off before I fell asleep.

I’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of clean clothes. Back in Canberra, the hotel had its own laundry, but I rarely had the time to use it. Ms Hoa Nguyen, the elderly public servant who’d adopted Anna as her personal project, was insistent that a politician should look the part, and so found clothes for Anna. I stole a few of them, and took others from the airport or wherever, and whenever, I could. Dirties were dumped.

I didn’t even have to do the laundry here. Toppley did. She’s making herself useful. Making friends. If I get clean clothes out of it, who am I to argue?

So what else can I say about the ship? A laundry. Showers. Soap. Clean clothes. Food! Room service, in fact, brought to the cabin by Toppley and waiting for me when I woke. Sandwiches made with actual bread. Some of the instant tea, kept cold in a flask. I’d have preferred hot coffee, but only out of habit. In the day since we left Inhambane, I’ve eaten. I’ve slept. I’ve spoken briefly with the captain, and a little longer with my team. Mostly, I’ve slept, barely disturbed by Toppley’s snores.

Cape Town is two thousand kilometres from Inhambane by air, two and a half thousand by road, and at least two thousand seven hundred for the ship, depending on how close we stay to the coast. The ship can make twenty-seven knots, but is most efficient at seventeen knots, or thirty kilometres an hour. We can travel at night, while Laila won’t. She’ll be delayed by obstacles in the road, and by the undead. We’ll be slowed by tides and currents. Assuming one balances the other, we’ll reach Cape Town around the same time. For us, it’s the second full day aboard the ship, the third day of sailing, with around seventy-two hours to go.

19th March

Chapter 14 - Daily Exercise

With there being a limit to how much time anyone can spend in bed, even me, when Toppley got up to help with the sailors’ chores, I finally dragged myself up. A long shower later, and I went hunting for the mess.

I’ve become lost in the never-never more times than I’d like Mick to know about, but you don’t find many mazes in the outback. The heat, the thirst, the dry wind, and, of course, the spiders: it would take a particularly sick mind to add high walls and dead-ends to the experience. But Korea has, or had, the largest maze in the world, a visit to which was on my kick-list. Can’t see I’ll ever get to visit now. But I now know where maze builders learn their craft: designing the interior of ships.

I kept walking in what I was sure was the direction of daylight, and ended up back at my cabin, where I found Toppley, reading.

“Weren’t you helping in the laundry?” I asked.

“Sadly, my reputation arrived before me,” she said, raising her eyes from the page. “I hoped I could pre-emptively explain my past actions, but too many of these sailors worked anti-piracy routes in the Pacific.”

“They were hunting you?” I asked.

“None are that old,” she said with a weary sigh. “I do suddenly feel so old. It’s inescapable, surrounded by so much youth, not to imagine how I might have lived a different life, and be looking forward to a different future. One with a little house near the sea, waiting for my grandchildren to visit.”

“You’re not that old,” I said. “But I’d be lying if I said I don’t have those same glimpses of an alternate future. They’re a burden, a nightmare in their own way. Yet we are where we are. We are who we had to become in order to survive. You were framed, weren’t you? And the cops were after you? If you’d not run, you’d have been caught, and without any chance of singing a few years off your sentence.”

“Ah, no. Today’s particular dollop of regret was served by wondering if I could have enlisted as an alternative to jail-time, before remembering the ADF didn’t allow women to serve in combat back then.”

“Then take solace in not being so old that military service was still being offered as an alternative to