by Chloe Daykin
‘You’re the one that’ll get her there.’ Matias pokes my elbow.
‘Where?’ I ask like I don’t know. My heart sinks.
‘JVF offices. Iquitos.’ He taps between my eyebrows. ‘You’ve got the heart for it. After—’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I know,’ I say. After what happened. He doesn’t need to say it.
‘Maya, you’ve got the fire for it.’ He winks at me.
Maya looks at him sideways. ‘What were you going to do if I didn’t fall out of the tree? Kidnap me?’
Matias shrugs. ‘Yeah, maybe. But the tree was kinda handy.’
‘Thanks.’ She rolls her eyes.
‘Look, people have died. People get shot. Peope get burned alive. We do this for them. We do it because we have to.’
Matias puts a finger on the top of our heads.
‘So are you in?’
Raul
Maya sleeps on the table. Matias gets his hammock and I have to sleep on the floor.
Sleep? No way I’m getting to sleep.
That’s the problem with a one-room house. No place to talk about problems and everything’s public. You want to talk about something, you go into the trees. I remember my parents doing it. Coming back with tight faces or smiles depending how it went.
I lie there and listen to their breath getting deeper. Slower. Hear them drifting off.
It’s funny how you can feel someone’s asleep, like they’re disconnected. Or not.
I remember how I used to feel it with my brothers. Like their radio frequency stopped. It’s like awake energy has a fizzle. We sense more than we know. The jungle’s all about sense. You need to sense ’cos everything’s so in-your-face you can’t see.
The past tiptoes in and sits next to me and won’t go away. A shadow like a monkey that sits and watches.
Since Alessa died it comes and I can’t shake it. I never know when though. Sometimes it stares at me when I’m having fun. When I laugh. Like it’s saying I shouldn’t. Like it’s saying I’m not sorry enough. It comes when I’m alone. That’s the worst. That’s when I run to Papi Rosales.
Maybe it’s the past and maybe it’s guilt. I know guilt though. Guilt’s like a bag you carry that you can’t put down. Like it’s stuck to you and you can’t shake it off. Sometimes it’s lighter and you almost forget it’s there. But it always is. Sometimes it’s like rocks and makes you think you can’t breathe.
Right now my chest feels heavy.
I creep my body up on to my feet, tiptoe out the door and jump off the veranda. Me and my house need to meet. There’s too much unsaid between us.
The rain’s stopped and has made clouds that are rising into the trees, lit by the moon.
I walk over slowly. Past the bit where our mamis used to hang out, the bit where we lit fires at night and took turns telling stories that used to scare the pants off me. And look at what used to be home.
My breath is shallow. My stomach’s tight.
The light is grey and hazy.
It looks wrong seeing our place wrapped up in forest, like the vines are trying to cover up we ever existed. Or maybe they’re just holding it steady for us. Hoping we’ll come back one day.
I stand outside.
It’s like a cowboy stand-off. Like the house is saying, ‘You coming in or what?’ Like neither of us wants to make the first move.
I hold my elbows though it’s not cold. It’s never cold here. It’s the only place I feel warm.
I walk over to the steps. A bird screams out. I jump but keep going.
Our house looks like Matias’s. Steps up the back with a veranda we used to jump off out the front. ’Cept the vines are so thick it’s like the jungle’s eating it. No way I can climb up without machete-ing it all down and cutting my way in.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, though the words just hang about in the air like clouds. Meaning nothing.
‘I am,’ I say.
I put my hand on the wood. And it’s like a vibe flows up my hand into my body.
I pull my hand away and run back to the house and curl up on the floor like I never went anywhere.
Maya
I blink away my dreams, full of running and trees, and rub my eyes in the light.
Raul is over on one side of the hut. Asleep. Matias is nowhere, but I hear him clunking about outside.
I realise I’m starving. A trumpeter bird flies into the hut and screeches at me. It’s white fluffy back feathers and bendy legs flutter as its screeching sound goes up and down.
Noise is the thing I first noticed when we landed in Lima two weeks ago. It never stops.
Music pouring out of car windows, playing on street corners. Policemen’s whistles and batons on plastic shields, car horns all through the night. And birds. Dipping up and down, looping songs of birds on the other side of the world.
You hear the birds in the city, but you don’t see them there.
You do here.
The bird hops along the floor looking at me. Its head cocked to one side. Steven runs in with a grub hanging out of his mouth and it flies away. He eats the grub and juice squirts out on to the scorch line the light-ball creature burned on the wood yesterday.
‘That’s gross,’ I say. But he doesn’t seem to care or notice. I climb down. And notice my ankle feels a bit better. Better enough to take my weight anyway. I trace the line on the floor and crawl outside. Steven follows and looks over my shoulder.
‘What was that?’ I whisper and point at the line.
Steven shrieks and runs off, and Matias climbs up with a cup of coca tea and puts it next to my head.
I cover the line with my hand. ‘So what’s next for the guardians of the forest?’ I sip the tea. It tastes like leaf mould and bark but it’s hot.
Matias turns from looking out at the forest. ‘Breakfast,’ he says but doesn’t smile. ‘Then we finish the canoe.’
Raul
I wake up to the hum of the jungle. My head busy with questions my dreams threw up. I go out and find Matias and Maya on the deck. Matias grins, then jumps over the edge and disappears. He comes back with pitahaya fruit and starts throwing them to us. We have to catch them without dropping or busting our hands. Pitahaya are like fruit hand grenades. Yellow and bobbly. He throws one at Maya’s head.
She catches it. ‘Ow.’
‘If you pull your shirt over your hands it doesn’t hurt as much,’ I say and catch three.
We sit and scoop out the sweet watery insides from the knobbly yellow skin with spoons.
Maya looks down at the mass of white with black specks. ‘Do you eat the pips?’
‘Yup,’ I nod and slice open two more. I’ve got used to hot sweet quinoa milk and quinoa porridge in the town. Quinoa everything. No quinoa in the jungle. The jungle fruits up bananas and roots and grubs and fish.
We feast on stripped-back fresh bananas, then take turns to wash the night sweat off in Matias’s shower. It’s a home-made rain catcher with water butt. The sun heats the water. The butt catches the rain. A metal pipe sprinkles it over your head. It has no roof. When it rains you just stand in the cubicle and take the water fresh from the sky.
Me and Matias stand under the veranda while Maya takes hers.
‘How do we even know we can we trust her?’ I whisper. If her dad’s helping JVF, who knows what she really thinks? It’s risky.
Matias stamps his feet at an approaching boa. The snake sniffs the air with its tongue, turns its head and slithers away. ‘The forest likes her. I trust the forest,’ he says, and goes into the woods to get plants to heal Maya’s ankle.
*
We sit together on the veranda. It feels embarrassing. I don’t know anything about Maya except her dad is helping the people I hate most in the world.
It makes her quite difficult to like.
Maya’s hair’s still wet from the shower and drips on the wood. The water evaporates.
‘We came here for my dad’s research,’ she tells me, like she’s answering the questions I w
ant to ask but don’t. ‘Well, I thought we did. He’s a scientist.’ Her hair hangs over her face and she crosses her arms. I see a big blue bruise on her elbow. ‘He studies light.’
We look up at the light. Thick and green and coming down in tunnels where the leaves part and sway in the wind.
She doesn’t look at me.
‘Where’s your mum?’
‘She disappeared when I was three. Don’t ask.’
I don’t.
I wonder how it feels to be that alone. Yeah, we moved and at first I didn’t know anyone, but I always had my parents and my brothers. Even though they’re so annoying sometimes I sit on their heads. Dad would walk in and say, ‘What’s going on here?’ and I would say, ‘I’m sitting on their heads.’ They’d laugh under my butt and he’d scratch his and walk out.
‘Where’s yours?’ she says.
‘My mami?’
She nods.
‘Back home.’
‘You live near here?’
‘Not any more.’ I shake my head. I don’t say that in my heart I’ve always lived here. In my heart I’ve never left.
‘My dad’s usually nice,’ she says and grips her hand into fists. ‘Kind of. Well, he was. He is. I’m sure he is. He’s just …’
‘What?’
‘Got lost,’ she says and scrapes bits of wood up with her fingernails. ‘I didn’t know about any of this.’
She sets her eyebrows and looks like she’s trying not to cry. If it was me I’d want to hit something. If it was me I’d hate him. Emotions are complicated.
‘I’m not sad, I’m angry, by the way,’ she says and bunches up her toes. ‘Being angry makes me want to cry.’
I won’t know what to do if she cries. If she was my sister I’d hug her. But she isn’t my sister. ‘Look! A squirrel monkey!’ I say and point into a tree.
It jumps off a branch and throws a stick at us.
‘That means it likes you,’ I say.
She smiles.
The trees ripple with its brothers and sisters. Hundreds of yellow-grey monkeys with pink fluffy ears and big eyes. They screech and swing their way away.
I want to ask her about her, about why she glows. I guess she doesn’t know though, if she doesn’t know she does it. How can you be magic and not know?
‘What’s that?’ I point at a scorch line that leads into the house.
‘Nothing.’ She turns away and bum-shuffles inside. ‘You like chocolate?’ she yells.
‘Sure, who doesn’t?’ I yell back, and she crawls out with a bright orange packet. Sugar’s my thing. White chocolate, cola, alfajores; butter cookies sandwiched with caramel.
‘Peace offering.’ She holds up the very melted squishy bar. ‘But I think all the pieces might have melted,’ she says, and passes over chocolate heaven.
Maya
Peace offering. How bad is that line? I groan inside. He must hate me. My dad’s helping the people who strip and kill the forest. I’d hate me.
Raul doesn’t groan. He grins and takes the bar. ‘Peace offering for what?’ He throws a banana to a monkey looking down on us, with thick springy hair like it’s wrapped in woolly foam. It catches it with a foot and swings away into the canopy. ‘It isn’t your fault.’
I shrug. At least chocolate’s a start.
He holds the bar. It droops. ‘I think snapping it in half would be overly optimistic.’
Raul peels the wrapper open so it doesn’t spill and eats it.
I look away and wait for my half.
Two blue macaws fly over our heads.
He passes the bar over and I eat the leftover hot salty chocolate deliciousness. It tastes of home. My stomach churns with pleasure. I eat it slowly and let the sugar sting my tongue. I leave a centimetre in the middle. ‘Do you mind spit?’
‘Not much.’
‘Then you can have the middle,’ I say and pass it back.
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘I think.’
‘How come you two speak so much English,’ I say and watch our legs swing over the edge of the veranda. I look at his hairy brown ones. Mine’re like milk bottles with red bites.
‘My mum taught me,’ he says and a sadness creeps over his face. Like I get to see inside him for a second. ‘She taught the kids in our village. She said it’d come in useful. If we want to earn money.’
‘Do you?’
‘Everyone wants money.’ He wipes the chocolate off his nose. ‘Kind of.’
I look at his clothes and his pack with next to nothing in it. He doesn’t really look like someone who wants money. Who’s into stuff. The way he sits here in the jungle. Like he belongs. Like having nothing makes him happy.
‘All the Spanish I know is, “Cheese” and “thank you”. Pretty much.’
He smiles. ‘Shouldn’t it be “please” and “thank you”?’
I smile back.
Steven jumps up on to the decking and makes the chocolate wrapper into a hat. I feel a warm happy sugar glow come up from my stomach.
And the light ball pops out from behind Raul and drifts over to me.
Raul
A round ball of heat, like a pom-pom with eyes, scoots over the floor and hides behind Maya.
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing.’
I lean over to see.
She leans back to hide it.
‘Ow.’ She flinches.
We both smell smoke. ‘I think your shirt’s on fire.’
She wafts it away. ‘I think your fly’s undone.’
I look down.
Matias jumps up on to the veranda, ‘What’s cooking?’
‘Nothing.’ We freeze.
I put the fire in Maya’s shirt out and the smoke disappears. So does the creature. I look behind Maya at a tennis-ball-shaped hole in the floor.
She raises her eyebrows at me and shrugs, and mouths, I have no idea, as our eyes meet.
I cock my head and shake it, like, Let’s not tell Matias. It’s nice to have our own secrets.
I turn to Matias. ‘Did you get the plants?’
‘Yeah,’ he says and stares at us. ‘You OK?’
‘Sure.’ Maya nods.
‘Yep.’ I kick the lantern from last night over the hole.
Stephen chatters and runs off with the wrapper into the cupboard, and we go inside to watch Matias make the plants into a healing paste.
Matias makes the paste and paints it on Maya’s ankle and wraps it up.
‘Now we work on the canoe,’ Matias says, and passes her the paddle to use as a crutch to hold herself up. She hobbles down the steps and round to the front of the house.
‘It’s all in the wood.’ Matias strokes the trunk he’s carved out. He’s done a good job. It’s beautiful. I don’t tell him though. His head’s big enough. ‘This’ll last for twenty years,’ he says and hands us two pots of dark green waterproofing and brushes made of wood and hair bristles. He squats to sand the final curve.
‘Don’t overlap it too much or spread it so thick it goes clumpy.’ He frowns and picks a bit off I’ve just done.
‘Don’t you trust us?’ Maya dabs at the wood.
‘Matias doesn’t trust anyone but the trees.’ I squat and paint a long stroke under the bow.
‘Not just trust, respect.’ Matias goes back to sanding. ‘I don’t trust the trees, I respect them.’
Me and Maya work on waterproofing. It takes ages ’cos Matias checks on us every five seconds, flicking between us and the cookout. Smells of roasting meat drift over. It smells so good it makes me dribble. Wood smoke from the fire soaks into our hair and clothes.
We stop for lunch. The meat is crispy and delicious. Skin crackled, inside so juicy it runs down my arms. I rip mouthfuls off the bone with spoons of rice. My stomach growls with pleasure. I try not to think about Narizo my pet capybara.
It’s dark when we finish. We rub our eyes. Everything aches from squatting.
Matias lights the kerosene lamps and brings one down and holds it over th
e canoe.
We squint as the light floods over us.
Matias strokes the top and squats to check the shape of the canoe. ‘When JVF came to our village it was like vultures walked in.’ He looks at Maya. ‘They had the smell of death about them. Heavy. Like dark clouds with AK47s.’
We freeze. And rise. Matias’s story pulls us up.
‘Kids screamed and ran away, or hid behind their mothers, who took them in the house and peered out through the windows. It was the first time most of us had seen guns. Or outsiders. They wanted to speak to my father.’
I see it when he tells it. Try to block it out but I can’t.
‘When he came it turned out what they really wanted was for us to work for them for shiny junk they pulled out of their bags and tried to impress us with, like we were birds collecting flowers for their nest. Like we could be won over that easy.
‘When it didn’t work they tried money.
‘Dad said, “Why do we need money when we live with such riches,” and pointed round us, and they peppered the canopy with bullets and everything screeched and flew and ran.
‘They got workers in from outside instead.’ Matias moves his hands like a bird flying in. ‘Ferried them in on motorised boats with chainsaws that ripped into the wood and whined. Wheels of metal teeth screaming like we could hear the trees crying as they fell.’
I wonder what they remember of it. I wonder what memories of this are stored in the trees, why didn’t the spirits come?
‘We tried to keep on living amongst it. Nothing we could do. Till it happened.’
Matias walks round the edges of the canoe, stroking the top of the wood. He looks right at me. I look away. Guilt sits in my belly like gold bars.
‘My father was crushed by aguano, caoba.’ He runs his fingers over the wood. ‘Mahogany,’ he says. ‘Tons and tons of mahogany.’
I look at Maya. ‘Log slide.’
She nods.
‘My father paid for their greed. My father was a sacrifice for the pain of the trees. A life for a life. Taken to Pachamama. Straight. Crushed so far into the mud they never found his body.’