by Chloe Daykin
If I need to rely on strangers I’m grateful I found one. Though really he found me. I wiggle my toes and appreciate the bandage and that I’m not lying with my head stuck in a tree root. ‘Sorry I bit you.’
‘It’s OK, I’m used to biters,’ he says, and lifts a tarantula off a shelf and puts it out the door. It scuttles off after a bird.
‘Why’d you rescue me?’
‘You looked like a dead sloth.’ He hangs his arms down like one and laughs. ‘I don’t leave things to die.’ He shrugs. ‘Unless they want it.’
‘You don’t know anything about what I want.’
He pulls up on to the bench. His legs hang down.
‘I know lots about you,’ he says. ‘You are Maya Anderson. Daughter of Handi Anderson, the Light Man. You like PG Tips tea and cheese.
‘And I know the people who are hunting you.
‘I’m hunting them myself.’
Raul
The van rolls around the streets and I bounce in the back with the cardboard boxes. I stick my legs out to the sides to stop me sliding too far. I try and guess what’s in the parcel and feel it like a New Year present. ’Cept they’re obvious. Everyone here gives each other yellow pants at New Year. It doesn’t feel like pants.
We stop and the driver opens the door. I take his hand and hop out, and give him the parcel. He winks and nods, and wheels them all away like patients into a hospital. I watch it go inside with the others and disappear into the crowd.
The plaza is full of people. I push past women with orchids higher than their heads strapped to their backs, kids selling llama pencils, a blind man making music with seashells.
I drink more Inca Kola and buy two empanadas from a street seller on the corner, then walk down through the town to the harbour. I need a boat to get to Matias. There’s no other way of getting in jungle that deep.
I ask three guys with canoes if they’re going upriver. They shake their heads.
I walk along and see a banana boat. Low in the water, piles of green bananas loaded in mountains.
‘You going upriver?’
The driver folds his arms and nods.
‘How much?’
‘Fifty sols.’ He chews a coca leaf and squints in the sun.
‘Fifteen.’
‘Thirty.’
‘Twenty.’
‘OK.’ He rocks his head from side to side. I hand him the cash, get in and sit at the back. If there’s spiders coming out of those bananas I don’t want them on me. My brother once put a spider down my shirt when I was eight. Now I hate spiders.
The man starts the engine and we speed along the river.
I wonder why Matias hasn’t rung. I can’t do this without him.
I think about Omar talking to the jungle and I make wishes to it, under the sound of the engine.
And get out my phone.
And ring.
AGAIN.
Maya
Matias’s blue shorts light up as his phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out and starts speaking in Spanish.
I don’t know Spanish. Not much anyway beyond:
cheese – queso.
and thank you – gracias.
He puts the phone back in his pocket and hands me a banana.
‘If you’re hungry, eat this,’ he says, and walks out. ‘Keep your head down and out of the ficus trees and don’t even think about touching my books,’ he yells over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be back.’ He jumps off the veranda and vanishes.
Steven follows.
‘Hey!’ I sit up and eat the banana. And shuffle myself over to the edge of the table and grab two more out of the wooden bowl on the bench and eat those too. I’m starving.
Steven runs in and grabs one and runs off again.
I pull myself over the edge of the table and lower my body down on to the floor with my arms. I put my bad foot on the floor and wish I hadn’t. Pain shoots up my leg and nearly makes me sick all the bananas out.
I shuffle and hop along on my good foot over to the workbench and the books.
I pick up a book.
In the corner a radio crackles into life and I jump like I just set off a trap. Is Matias going to come flying in? No. He doesn’t.
Music fills the hut and late afternoon sunbeams bounce off the roof. The sun’s hit the solar panel on the radio and set it off.
I open the book. It’s filled with pencil drawings. And Spanish writing. It doesn’t say ‘cheese’ or ‘thank you’.
I flip through and run my fingers over the diagrams of trees. Intricate drawings. Done with love. And meticulous attention.
I try to sound out the names of the trees.
Wimba. So tall it goes off the page. So wide the monkey he’s drawn next to it looks like a flea.
Lupuna. With roots like snakes.
Árbol estrangulador. The strangler fig. With branches like arms that grow out of another tree’s trunk
OK, so Matias likes trees. That’s kinda nice.
I turn the pages and smile till I see one about me.
‘Maya Anderson.’
Steven runs over, grabs the notebook out of my hands and screeches into the corner.
‘You’d look if it was you!’ I yell at him. ‘If he knew stuff about your life, you’d want to know why!’
We stare at each other. I go to grab the book back. Steven barks – back off – like a little dog.
And out of nowhere a light ball pops out of my rucksack by the door and scurries along the floor. It’s round and glowing. And leaving a scorch mark trail on the wood. Me and Steven stare at it. Steven’s fur prickles and his hackles go up. It grows a bit like a plump baby rabbit that shines and is see through. Smoke drifts up behind it and heat shimmers round it like a halo. Two eyes pop out and look back at me, shy and a bit embarrassed. Then it jumps off the edge of the veranda and disappears.
Raul
The banana boat drops me at the jetty cut into the mud. The driver spits out the coca leaf and nods. We shake hands.
I climb out on to the wooden steps cut into the earth. The boat pulls away and I remember the day we left. Boatloads of us up and down in one canoe. Arms full of what we had, which wasn’t much. Mainly each other.
I remember all of us standing on the shore. Everyone was stiff. And fear hung off us. Jaguars could smell it for miles. We waited for our turn. No other choice. Having to leave and wanting to stay. Torn away from home like babies off their mothers’ bellies.
’Cept we weren’t screeching.
Hardly anyone said anything. We were stepping out into something new. Scattering out like it would never be the same again.
It wasn’t.
A capybara slides into the water with a bird on its head. I’ve missed their big wide noses, little ears and beady eyes. I’ve missed stroking their fluffy heads. I used to have a pet one called Narizo – that means nose – as it kept twitching it. It hung around outside our house every morning and I fed it and it let me tickle its whiskers. I watch this one swim away.
I wonder what to say to Matias. I wonder what he looks like now.
If he’ll notice my moustache fluff.
I breathe in the green heat that’s so alive it feels like it might start growing things inside my townyboy lungs, and head off up the steps.
Matias should be waiting at the top.
He isn’t.
Maya
I lean over the balcony and look for the light-ball creature. And see nothing.
The jungle keeps on buzzing.
And squawking.
And screeching.
Nothing moves. ’Cept Steven. Who chucks the book under the cupboard and runs over to me. Strange things happen in the jungle. Maybe I am cursed?
I think Steven’s going to bite me, but he rubs his head into my arm.
‘Don’t ask me what that was,’ I say, and stare at the scorch trail on the floor. ‘I have no idea.’
Steven’s nose is warm and soft, and I like the feeling of his breathing against my
skin. His head burrows deeper into my elbow.
‘I wish you were my cat,’ I say and stroke his head. ‘No offence.’
Steven chunters and chitters.
Back home Socks always makes everything OK. Socks makes everything feel better. Sometimes the world has a way of making you feel very alone. When Dad works. When he shuts me out. When no one’s around. But I never feel like that with Socks. When my nose is pressed into his fur.
I think about Matias spying on us.
On me.
Why?
If Steven trusts him, I trust him. Don’t I?
Do you really trust a person who even notices you like cheese?
I scratch between Steven’s ears and he closes his eyes and chatters. Then runs off inside and hides under the cupboard. I pull myself along on my butt and lie on my side, sticking my hand under, grabbing the book he dropped there. He starts to screech.
‘It’s about me, right?’ I say. ‘I’m only looking at stuff about me.’
Steven turns away and hunches.
I sit up and flip through to my section. It’s the last bit in the book. So new the ink’s smudged like it never properly dried before he shut it. I wonder if that’s what he was doing under the table.
Maya Anderson. It says a load of stuff I don’t understand. I turn the page to a picture of me. In the tree. Light balls falling out of the sky. I see me hanging next to the sloth. The sloth looks great. My hair hangs wild and free. The lines are beautiful.
I freak out and slam the book shut.
He was there?
Where was he? Hiding in a bush and waiting for me to fall out?
Where is he now?
Steven snatches the book back. I let it go and crawl out of the hut and on to the veranda.
I look out on to a ghost town. Wooden houses, overgrown and abandoned, standing with their doors and windows open like mouths gaping. Vines grow thick over the windows, clinging to their stilt legs. Empty. They’re all empty.
Some of the roof timbers are missing, but what they’re really missing is people.
I look down and see a firepit and a half-built canoe resting on wooden supports. A garden cleared out of the forest. Plants carefully tended. Rows of things growing, sprouting out of the thick red earth. It seems weird next to all the emptiness. Life and order. Emptiness and chaos. Like this house is keeping something going that died ages ago.
The trees are silent and full of eyes and wings.
I have to get out of here.
‘What’s the best way out of this place?’ I say, and Steven hops up and chucks himself off the balcony. The last thing I see of him is his tail.
‘Eeeeeeeeeeee,’ he squeals. And thuds into the mud.
I shuffle to the edge and look over.
Two bright blue butterflies the size of handprints take off from the handrail.
On one side of the veranda there’s a rope hanging. I could slide down it on one leg and find a stick for a crutch at the bottom.
I look at the scorch mark the fireball creature made in the leaves.
I look around. It’s nowhere to be seen.
A mantis stares at me.
‘What?’ I say. ‘Did you see it too?’
It scuttles off. I don’t know what reply I expect from a mantis.
I pull myself up and grab my boots off the bench. I stick them over my feet and push-slide myself backwards over to the rope. It’s a long drop down.
My legs hang over the edge. I reach out, grab it with both hands and slide.
OW!
Raul
I sit and wait. The hours click round on Rick’s watch.
The banana boat heads back to town. Empty.
‘Where is he?’ I say to the trees. Nothing answers.
The trees probably know though. The day we left, Matias disappeared into them and refused to come out.
His family went crazy. Screaming, crying, cajoling him.
Then they left. They had to. The pickup was waiting for them at the other end, like for all of us. Our first time in any kind of car. We sat in the back with our feet bouncing, squashed together like sticks in a bundle. Our soles tingling with their first taste of tarmac.
Matias’s family found work in Belen. The floating city in Iquitos. Matias’s uncle, Carlos, sorted it the way he sorted most things. He was our contact with the outside world. In the forest when we needed stuff we couldn’t make, he brought it. That’s how it worked.
Carlos and his mum came back to look for him and found Matias in the house refusing to leave.
‘It is as it is,’ his mum said.
They decided to check in on him at weekends and he became the eyes and ears of the forest. I used to worry about him on his own. But he started hanging out at the jungle lodge most nights. Then him and Uncle Carlos joined the EIA – an underground environmental alliance – working in secret, desperate for revenge. He changed after that. After he found something to channel his anger into. And he hasn’t been alone since then. He’s just been desperate to drag me into it. Which he hasn’t. Till now.
Till he texted to say if I didn’t come I’d regret it for the rest of my life. He’s always been overdramatic.
But my heart knows it’s true. Once some things are changed they can’t go back to the way they were. Ever.
*
I eat the empanadas and lie on the wood and my brain pulls me into a thick heavy sleep.
When I wake up it’s dark. And raining.
Maya
The forest floor is alive with crawling things. I watch millipedes longer than my arms rippling along, and fasten down my sleeves. I butt-shuffle myself over to the canoe and pull up to standing. I brush ants and beetles and a curious spider off my trousers, then reach into the bottom of the boat and lift the paddle out and put it under my armpit.
Now I have a crutch. Perfect.
I follow Matias’s footprints into the jungle.
It starts to rain. Not perfect.
Big fat drops patter down from the tallest trees, getting sucked up into roots. The leaves reach out like tongues desperate to be the one to catch it first.
Every so often I whisper ‘Matias’ into the trees, just in case he’s there. I feel a bit ridiculous.
The ground gets slippy. The tracks melt into the mud and disappear. Great.
A soggy-looking Steven trots along next to me with sad eyes. His fur prickles.
‘I’m not going back,’ I say. ‘I’m not.’
He puts his head down and looks away.
The trail ahead leads off in three different directions. I have no idea which way to go.
OK.
It’s OK.
It’s OK that my leg is burning and making me feel sick.
It’s OK I don’t have food.
I can survive on bananas. If the monkeys can find them, I can.
I wipe the water trails off my face. So what if I don’t have water. I can cup my hands and catch it.
I’m not thirsty. I won’t be thirsty for hours.
Yeah, it’s getting dark. That’s fine. Who doesn’t like dark.
Everything is great. Right.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and feel like collapsing on the floor and crying ’cos the pain’s so bad. I want to go back to our lodge. I want to find our guide. And get help.
’Cept I can’t, can I? That’s the first place the kidnappers will look. That’s the first place they’ll be waiting for me. And then what?
Out of the dark a ping-pong ball of light shoots out and darts behind a tree.
I look at Steven. ‘You see that?’
He looks up at me with big eyes.
‘Hello!’ I whisper and flick my head round the tree. The light ball shoots round the other side and tucks itself under a leaf. It thinks it’s hiding but it leaves a trail of light like a sparkler. Plus the leaf is smoking.
‘I can see you, you know.’ I lift the leaf and try to touch it.
Two eyes pop on to its face and it hisses a
t me like a cross owl.
‘Ow!’ I pull back.
It floats closer and looks sorry.
Steven runs off squealing.
And out of the dark something charges at me and knocks me into a tree.
Raul
Me and Matias became brothers when my sister, Alessa, died. Blood brothers. We cut our thumbs and put them together and made a pact. You don’t break trust like that. I grip Aiko’s parcel in my pocket. He should be here to meet me.
But he isn’t.
I need to find him. Before it gets dark.
Not this kind of dark – hazy and shadow-shifty. The proper ‘can’t see your hand in front of your face’ kind.
I wipe the rain off my face and kick off my shoes. Jungle people don’t wear shoes. Shoes don’t have nerve endings – they’re like going around in blindfolds. I put them in my pack, put my pack on my back and head off into the jungle.
It’s been two years, but I still know the way. Once the jungle’s in you, it doesn’t leave you. Right?
I name the trees as I walk. Kinda like seeing old friends. ‘Hey,’ I say to them. The raindrops fall hard and drip softly. I hear them all around like someone throwing rice on a tin roof. It makes me smile. I round the bend and meet a bunch of tapirs who grunt at me with their long soft snouts and run off to sit in mud.
I think about Papi Rosales’s stories. The Yanapuma, the devil’s puma, and Chullachaki, guardian spirit of the forest who can take any form and appear anywhere. The forest spirits float round my brain like they’re close, sensing I’m here and pulling in. The dark presses up against my face. I squint and my walk turns into a run.
The forest closes up around the trail like a black wax seal. It’s too dark to even see where I’ve come from.
My heart speeds.
I run faster.
Hard buzzing balls of insects fly at my face, green thorns reach for my arms.