The Crossing, page 22
She has gone no more than five hundred yards when she is seized with stomach cramps and squats at the side of the track gasping and emptying herself, then goes on for a while in a waking nightmare in which the car, riding its heavy suspension, is coming down the track behind her, coming very slowly yet closing on her all the time. But the mood, the fear, ebbs away, and something else begins, some fresh effect of exhaustion, of the black fruit perhaps, and she walks as if gliding, without effort, without pain. ‘I can’t stop!’ she cries, her voice, her English words, more exotic in this place than any green bird. At times she is almost running, her feet pressing lightly on the deep litter of the track, a woman right at the edge of flight. Everything that she is travels with her. There is no long scarf of memory, no extraneous thought. She walks, she runs, her hair in damp whorls plastered to the skin of her face and neck. Her heart is a wingbeat, her mouth dry as a stone. And like this she dances out of the forest to find the world has stumbled into night, that there are stars at the level of her feet, a horizon of some pale violet colour, and the sea, slack, tipped with starlight, the smell of it like something poured out of her own veins, like sucked brass.
Ten steps to the left would take her into the air. She stands there a minute, her breath frayed almost to nothing, to rags and threads, bare threads. Then she lies down exactly where she is, curls up on the path listening to the deep reflection of the sea while above her the Milky Way glitters in a blue smoke and lines of light streak for a second and burn to nothing.
2
Though she is a girl as curious as the next she has learnt in her short life to have a proper caution. She is, after all, in charge of the goats, and the animals, twelve of them, spill around her as she squats on a convenient rock and looks at the figure sprawled across the path at the point where the path enters the forest. At this distance she cannot be sure if it’s a man or a woman but she’s certain it’s not a child and not anyone she knows.
She’s a blonde, gap-toothed girl with a band of freckles across her cheeks, a straw hat on her head, an oversized black T-shirt with a picture of Luke Skywalker on it. And though barely past her tenth birthday, she has already seen a good many dead things—dead goats, dead cattle, dead chickens, a dead turtle once. Not yet, not properly (because it doesn’t count when they’re under a sheet and you can’t see the face) a dead person.
The old billy, who has been cropping the dry brown heads of plants at the edge of the path, stops, wary for a moment, then picks his way past the open, outstretched hand, and the others follow him, one by one, into the shadow of the forest. The girl slides off her rock. She doesn’t want the animals to get too far ahead of her. There are things in the forest that will eat a goat and only a month ago she did lose one and did not dare (she who dares a great deal) go far from the track to search for it.
So who is this, who does not wake at the sound of goat bells? She can see it’s a woman now. Shorts and T-shirt, a green bag beside her. Her face burnt and bitten, sores on her lips. Her shoes red with dust.
‘Voce fica cansada?’ she says. She prods one of the woman’s legs with her stick and the woman makes a noise in her throat. It‘s a little funny to watch someone coming so sleepily up the long stairs of themselves, to see them squirm in the dust of the track as if they had, two minutes ago, been made out of that same dust.
The eyes open, brown like the brown hair.
‘Voce tem sede?’ The girl has a camouflage-green, military-style drinking bottle across her shoulders and she unslings it, unscrews the cap, squats and holds it to the woman’s lips. Most of the water slides down her cheek but then she’s suckling like a baby. When the girl decides she’s had enough she takes the bottle back, screws on the top. For a moment she’s distracted by the woman’s arm, the black writing there, then she remembers her manners and asks, ‘Qual If O Sell nome?’ She waits. For long seconds the woman says nothing, just looks at her with eyes that could swallow you whole. Eventually she pushes herself into a sitting position, looks about herself, looks at the sea, looks back at the forest. When she speaks the girl does not understand her then, suddenly, she does, and in her head the honeycomb of words is changed.
‘My name is Leah,’ she says, listening to herself, the charm of her own voice. ‘Please wait here. I must find my goats.’
* * *
With frequent stops, the girl and the woman make their way along the coast. The path leads them down to the edge of the sea and after that the only path is the girl’s own footprints and those of the goats. They cross a spur of headland, descend to a second beach, then up a shallow rise to where the sand gives way to ochre earth and a white church stands looking out to sea like an old white boat drawn up out of the surf. At the side of it is a second building, also white, with a row of small shuttered windows above three dark archways.
As they come closer, other children appear. Some are about the girl’s age, some much younger. They do not speak to Maud. They look at her with grave expressions, expressions of wonder. In whispers they ask Leah questions and several times Maud hears the girl speak her name, or a version of it—‘Moor . . . Moor’.
The walk from the edge of the forest has taken two hours, perhaps two and a half, and has cost Maud the last of her strength. She leans on Leah’s stick and waits for one of the children to bring an adult and for that adult to tell her where she can lie down. One of the children—a boy running furiously—has been sent as a messenger to the church but instead of an adult, two older children step from the door, an adolescent girl and boy, and for a while they simply look on as if they were expecting someone else. Then the girl strides forward, parts the circle of children and stands in front of Maud. She is, perhaps, thirteen, though at least as tall as Maud. Copper-coloured skin, her hair a slightly darker version of the same colour. The dress she is wearing, with its orange polka dots, has at one time belonged to somebody larger, heavier, and has, at the waist, been gathered into pleats and tightly belted.
‘Ola,’ says the girl.
‘I need to sit,’ says Maud, and does so, almost rumbling to the ground in the middle of the children, the goats.
The older girl speaks to Leah then kneels at Maud’s side. ‘You are American?’
Maud nods. American will do.
‘You are lost?’
She nods again. She has shut her eyes. When she opens them and looks up at the girl, the girl smiles. She is missing one of her front teeth but it doesn’t make her less beautiful. ‘I am Jessica,’ she says. ‘I will help you.’
Before Maud can answer, the girl has stood and begun issuing orders, scattering the younger children, one of whom returns a moment later with a plastic beaker of water and a slice of mango. Maud drinks some of the water but she cannot manage the fruit. They watch her, then one of them takes the cup from her and they raise her up—the older girl, Leah, and two other girls, twins surely, black girls with bright astonished faces. They prop her onto her feet. Maud reaches an arm around the older girl’s shoulders, and they set off, step by halting step, towards the nearest archway.
Inside the building they climb a flight of wooden stairs to a corridor or gallery where three unglazed windows, their shutters partly open, look from the back of the building, a view consumed by light. Opposite the windows are four or five doors and the older girl opens the first of them, the one nearest the top of the stairs. ‘This is my room,’ she says. ‘You can stay in here.’
It’s small and simple, a narrow bed along one wall, a table and chair under the window. The window, like those in the corridor, has green shutters but no glass.
Maud sits on the bed. Life is happening to her; she has no part to play, or her part is like that of the blind men, madmen and cripples in the Bible stories, people lowered from a roof or touched miraculously in passing.
A small boy comes in carrying, with great care, a bowl half full with water.
‘Thank you, Caleb,’ says the older girl, in English, perhaps for Maud’s benefit. The boy sets down the bowl, spilling some of the water onto the boards. He has a yellow, short-sleeved shirt on, red shorts down to his knees, bare feet. He looks as if he has some Indian blood in him.
‘It’s not polite to stare,’ says the girl, and though it’s hard to tell if the boy understands the words, he understands enough the tone of voice, the young schoolmistress—and he looks down, leaves the room.
‘You can go ahead and wash now,’ says the girl. ‘The children won’t come bothering. I’ll have Leah sit outside. When you need me you just send her to get me.’
Maud nods.
‘You got all you need?’ asks the girl.
When she has gone Maud sits there looking at the trembling in her legs, the thinness of her legs. She does not wash, she does not undress, does not take off her shoes. Eventually she lies down. She can smell the girl in the rough linen, can smell herself too, the bitterness of her skin, or a bitterness that rises from somewhere deeper. Outside, the children are calling to each other and the sounds are like the cries and whoops and chattering of the forest. She listens. Surely now some man or woman, some clear, rational voice, will speak over them and she will hear the heavy footfall on the stairs and she will ready herself to tell her story.
She listens. She waits.
* * *
Once she has fallen asleep she is like a child into whose room the parents can come and go without fear of waking her. Leah, the doorkeeper, in exchange for small gifts, admits, one at a time, her particular friends. All the friends are girls; certainly no boys will be allowed. So Jenna, a black girl, seven years old, stands at the end of the narrow bed imagining herself as a baby again. So Bethany, pale as Leah, daring to lean over Maud to examine her dirty face, her broken fingernails, the writing on her arm that seems almost readable but not quite. So Summer, eight, snub-nosed and frizzy-haired, not knowing if the woman is twenty-five or fifty-five, and wondering why she wears around her neck a piece of string with a child’s hair clip on it.
Jessica is also a visitor, and like the younger children she stands over the sleeping woman, but on her face the expression shifts between something like anxiery and something like relief, profound relief. In the evening she covers Maud with a blanket then holds out her hands, palms down above Maud’s sleeping head and speaks a dozen words, hushed and fervent.
Below, when the girl comes down, the children are waiting for her. They pester her with questions, hang from her hands, tug at the polka-dot dress. She shakes them off, gently, and crosses to the church, walks down the unlit length of it to the door beyond the altar.
She opens the door; the boy is in there. By the light of one of the wind-up lanterns he’s doing something with the boxes on the bench and she stands very still until he has finished. He has on a baggy checked shirt and a pair of jeans as tightly, as awkwardly belted as her dress. The room is whitewashed, a small window just above head height. There’s a desk with metal legs, a metal filing cabinet, a pair of tubular steel office chairs, a calendar for the year 2007 open at the month of December, a photograph of snow on the mountains.
‘She’s still sleeping,’ says Jessica. ‘Maybe she has a bad fever. Should we give her something?’
‘Give what?’
The girl shrugs. ‘An Advil?’
The boy laughs at her. ‘Did you look in her bag?’ he says.
3
Through the middle watches of the night, delirium flourishes. Old Rawlins is a regular visitor, slumped at the end of the bed like the night itself, a man lit only by stars but unmistakeable. He seems pleased to see her, though also distracted by what he calls tactics. His chest bubbles. He addresses her as Minnehaha, as he used to in the Nissen hut in the car park of the boys’ school where they trained. He laughs to himself. Did I ever tell you about my dog? he asks. My dog, Lady? One, he says—sitting up in his tracksuit and coughing his way towards song—one is the loneliest number.
At another time she can hear her parents outside the door, a sharp to and fro of anxious whispers, and even, seeping from somewhere, the warm plasticky whiff of the laminating machine.
Other voices, speaking to her or about her. Bella saying, Anything at all. You need only ask. The woman from Human Resources saying, That would involve childcare for a very young baby.
The last voice is the man from the cutter in Falmouth, or that man transfigured to a grey-bearded Captain Slocum leaning over the stern rail of Spray and demanding, with terrible urgency, where she is headed. She does not have the breath to call back an answer . . .
She sleeps for a while but it’s still dark when she wakes again. There’s a blanket over her and she pushes it down to her waist. Her T-shirt is stuck to the skin between her breasts, her hair is damp on her forehead. She feels nauseous but does not think she will actually be sick. For long minutes the only thing that ties her to any sort of reality is the whine of a mosquito somewhere by the window. Then something joins it (as if out of the hollow wire of the insect’s throat), a noise that makes her remember lying in bed as a girl in Swindon, those nights they were firing on the ranges, the rumble of artillery, bombs too, a drumroll that stood outside all other sounds—the night bus, a neighbour’s television—not because it was loud when it reached her but because of what it was where it started out, a force that opened up the sides of hills. And here? Here perhaps it was thunder or some trick of the sea. She holds her breath, tilts her head, listening until it’s impossible to know if she is still hearing it or if the sound now plays only inside her own head.
The next time she wakes, a bar of sunlight is simmering on the wall opposite the window. She sits up, spends half a minute wondering why she is not on the boat, and with a grunt of effort swings her legs out of the bed.
The wash bowl the boy brought in—yesterday? Two days ago?—is still beside the bed. She cups her hands to drink from it, then strips and crouches by the side of it to wash herself. As she can see no towel she dries herself with her T-shirt. The rash on her leg from the centipede has blistered—four, five little sacs of fluid. The backs of both ankles are blistered raw. There are numerous fine cuts on her arms and legs and hands, though none look to be infected. She is, she considers, in better shape than she might have feared, though her ribs—as they remind her when she stands—can still stop her dead, make her gasp.
Draped at the end of the bed is a pile of clothes. She does not think they were there when she lay down. She picks through them. A nylon dress that she is neither tall enough nor wide enough to wear. A nylon slip, a white nylon blouse, a pair of tan slacks with a waistband that would circle two of her. The only wearable item is a shirt of heavy, faded blue cotton—a man’s shirt, surely, and perhaps brought in by mistake, part of an armful carried from a wardrobe, some deep drawer. When she puts it on it hangs to just above her knees, but with the sleeves rolled up it’s comfortable and cool.
She leaves the room (her feet are bare) and in the passageway pushes back the shutters of the window opposite the bedroom door. The view is over the building’s landward side, and to the right, some hundred yards away, is a piece of walled-in ground, half an acre perhaps. Over the top of the wall she can make out tilled beds, low trees, trellises strung with climbing plants. Also the heads of three or four children, one of them with a pitchfork taller than he is, much taller, another with the blade of a machete resting on her shoulder like a broadsword. Beyond the garden is the shallow dome of a water cistern, and at the side of that, a line of palms, their trunks shaped by the onshore wind.
Leaning a little and looking the other way, she can see a single-storey building of mud and sticks, a clutch of hens investigating the dust around an open door, a young girl squatting in the building’s shade, apparently in conversation with the cockerel. There’s a flagpole where no flag is flying, some pieces of a dismantled tractor, and a track of red earth like the one she walked on that first night, heading in an almost perfectly straight line towards low, round-topped hills. There are no houses in the distance, no telegraph poles. Nothing like that.
She comes down the stairs and arrives in a large open room cross-lit by the light coming in through the arches, brighter on one side than the other. At the far end there’s a long table and against the wall, rows of shelves where plates and cups give off the dull gleam of themselves. An animal she mistakes at first for a cat is scavenging on the floor—the packed earth—between the chairs. Noticing Maud, it trots to her on quick small feet, tail erect, and she can see it’s some other kind of animal, the size of a cat, but looking more like a monkey or even a small, fur-covered pig.
She walks out through one of the archways and shades her eyes to look at the sea. There’s a little boat coming in—blunt prow, dirty-white lateen sail. She’s seen pictures of this kind of boat before, knows it as a craft peculiar to these coasts—a jangada. As it reaches the surf the lone sailor slips into the water and leads the boat like a horse, pulling it up onto the sand. She can see who it is now—the older boy who watched her from outside the church when she arrived. From a box on the deck (it’s as much a raft as a boat) he lifts two large fish the colour of red coral. He whistles and she wonders for a moment if he’s whistling to her but then a child comes sprinting past her, a boy who can be no more than five, his feet kicking up the sand in little spurts as he runs. He takes the fish, holds them with his hands through the gills. They look too heavy for him but he manages them, just, a grimace of concentration on his face. As he passes Maud he squints up at her then disappears with the fish along a path of sunlight between the church and the building with the arches.
