One of the trees giggled.
Max stepped out from behind a cedar at the edge of the clearing. ‘Boo!’ he said. He waggled his arms and legs and tongue at them. ‘I’ve been awake for hours! I’m bored.’
‘Max!’ Lila’s eyes were brick-hard and ferocious. ‘You vile little brat! If you ever do that again, I’ll tell Papa when we get home and he’ll beat you with his shoe.’
Max’s face fell. ‘He wouldn’t! He never hits me!’
‘He would if I told him what you did!’ She looked closer at him, her eyes narrowing. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Secret!’
‘And did you eat the pineapple?’
‘Secret,’ said Max. He wiped guiltily at his cheek.
‘Max!’ Lila balled her fists. ‘Max, if you ate all our food, I don’t care what Mama would say, I’ll smack you so hard –’
Max pressed his lips together and shook his head. ‘Pick me up, Lila,’ he said.
‘Tell us, Max! Where did you go?’
‘Up!’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘I’ll tell you if you pick me up!’ He began to shudder with huge, body-shaking sobs.
Lila gave a hiss of fury. She picked him up. The sobs ceased immediately.
‘You can’t get your own way just by crying!’ said Con, her face tight.
He smiled up at her. His face was clear of tears. ‘Yes I can,’ he said.
‘Now tell me,’ Lila took hold of Max’s chin, ‘where did you go? Where’s the pineapple? Did you steal it? Did you eat it all?’
‘No! I wanted to share some with the animal.’
‘Which animal?’
‘The monkey-thing.’
‘Where?’
‘By the lavo-trees,’ said Max. He was pouting. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. He was hungry. I was being kind.’
Lila dropped Max on the ground. He gave a wail, but saw her face and stopped.
‘Show me,’ said Lila. ‘Or I won’t believe you.’
An unexpected excitement gripped Fred. Lila began to run, the other three following, down the path they had hacked, towards the cluster of trees surrounding the trunk of the boys’ lavo-tree.
Max was tugged along by the hand, his legs pounding double time to keep up. ‘Slow down!’ he wailed. They passed the lavo-tree and moved out of the sunlight, into the thick-growing trees.
Suddenly Max stopped. ‘It’s there!’ He pointed up at a low-hanging branch. ‘See! I wasn’t lying!’
Above their heads rose a great flowering white tree. From one of the branches hung a small animal, unlike anything Fred had ever seen before. It was looking up with huge eyes at a vulture in the branches above its head.
On the ground below it were three chunks of pineapple, untouched. And some distance away two more vultures crouched over the corpse of a larger version of the same animal.
‘Get away!’ yelled Lila. She ran forward, kicking at the birds. ‘Get away from it!’
The two vultures on the ground took off, startled, but the vulture in the tree only ruffled its feathers. It was enormous, as broad as a Labrador around the middle, and its eyes watched the tiny animal hungrily.
The animal on the branch let out a mew like a cat. It was grey-brown with a cream face, a dog-like snout and immense black eyes. Its arms were long and chicken-bone thin, ending in curved claws. It was small enough to cup in your hands.
Lila ran to the base of the tree, gripped the lowest branch and scrabbled with her feet against the trunk. The vulture, feeling the tree shake, flapped its wings, cawed and disappeared. Lila hauled herself into the branches. Her knees were shaking. Her breath was unusually loud.
She sat on the branch where the animal was perched and began to scoot forward, both hands gripping tight. With quivering fingers, she unwound its legs from the branch and rewound them around her arm. The creature let out a mewling sound.
Lila began to edge backwards along the branch. Fred could hear her whispering prayers under her breath.
She stumbled as she landed on the ground and half fell, but made sure to keep the arm with the animal high above her head.
Max ran to her. ‘What is it? Let me see!’
‘It’s a sloth,’ said Lila. Her voice was hushed with awe. ‘A baby sloth.’
Fred stepped closer. It was one of the most extraordinary things he’d ever seen. It was very ugly and very beautiful, both at once. Its fur still had the fluffiness of babyhood.
‘Let’s make it play!’ said Max. He grabbed at Lila’s arm.
‘No!’ Lila seized his wrist, cradling the sloth against her chest. ‘Don’t! You’ll hurt it!’
The brother and sister glared at each other. ‘No I won’t! I’ll be soft.’
‘Maxie, you mustn’t. It’s terrified; it doesn’t have a mother to protect it. See, it’s shaking.’
‘But I love it!’ Max looked dangerously close to tears.
‘But it doesn’t need you to love it to death. It needs us to be slow,’ whispered Lila. ‘Come on, Maxie – let’s take it back to the camp. You can bring the pineapple.’
Back in the clearing Lila made a bed of soft grass for the sloth. She set it down on its stomach, where it lay quivering, and held out the pineapple to it.
‘I want to touch it!’ said Max.
‘No,’ said Lila as she sat down. ‘Let him catch his breath.’
The sloth shook. Lila shook. Every part of her radiated longing. It was probably best, Fred imagined, to leave people alone at such moments. People suddenly bludgeoned by passions were unpredictable. They might bite, or cry. He stepped backwards, giving her room.
The sloth moved, very slowly, out of its bed and towards Lila. It reached her shoe and crawled – so slowly Fred was sure he could hear its muscles stretching and retracting under its fur – into Lila’s lap. With a peculiar, jerky grace the sloth reached out and grasped the pineapple between its front claws.
Lila didn’t seem to be breathing. But it was as if a light came out of her; she seemed to glow out into the forest.
The sloth struggled to arrange the fruit so it could bite it, but Lila didn’t move. She sat, stock still, watching as it sprawled itself more comfortably across her lap. It moved like an unoiled rocking horse, Fred thought.
Lila looked up and saw them. ‘I’ve never seen one in real life,’ she whispered. ‘People always told me sloths are slow, and stupid. But I think they’re only slow the way a ballet is slow.’ Very, very softly, she laid a finger on the sloth’s chest. ‘I can feel his heart. It’s fast. It’s a different rhythm.’
The sloth finished chewing at the pineapple. It crawled up Lila’s arm and clung to her, up near her shoulder, resting its head just below her right ear. It made a little snorting noise and Lila’s hair ruffled.
‘He needs a name,’ said Con.
‘I’ve never named anything,’ said Lila, her neck twisted to look at the sloth. He was trying, very slowly, to eat her earlobe.
‘You don’t have pets?’ asked Fred. It seemed strange, for a person who was so clearly designed to live alongside living things.
‘I was never allowed one. I begged and begged, but Mama and Papa move a lot for their work, and they said it wouldn’t be fair.’ Lila looked hard at the sloth. She narrowed her eyes. Her lips formed a word.
‘What’s his name?’ asked Max. ‘You have to tell us! It can’t be a secret!’
‘Abacaxi,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Max authoritatively. ‘That’s good.’
‘Say it again?’ said Con.
‘Abacaxi. It’s Portuguese for pineapple,’ said Lila. ‘Baca, for short.’
Jungles, Fred found, were full of corners and crannies; they held secrets. But the secrets emerged in the most unexpected ways. They would never, he thought, have found the scrap of paper that changed everything if it hadn’t been for the joint efforts of the monkeys and the ants and the bees.
Max saw them first, later that afternoon. He’d been lying on his back, staring at the sky, while Lila
and Con and Fred sat by the fire and tried to make a plan.
The problem was, despite being told very firmly to stay put, Max kept trying to explore; and he was a small five-year-old in a very large jungle.
‘How sure are you that the raft will hold?’ Lila asked.
Fred considered. The raft was wide and strong, and the vines were wrapped so thickly to secure it that the raft was more green than brown; it looked like a rectangle of floating cricket pitch. But, he thought, the pilot had presumably been just as certain about the plane.
‘Medium sure.’ He saw Con’s face. ‘High-medium. And walking would take weeks,’ he said. ‘We know Manaus is on the Amazon – so if we sail down river we should reach it!’
Max approached and sat on Lila’s feet, tugging at her sock. ‘Lila!’ He dug a chunk of snot from his nose and wiped it on the grass.
‘Except we don’t know if Manaus is up river or down river from here,’ said Con. ‘So we have a fifty per cent chance of death.’
‘Lila!’ said Max. ‘Listen to me!’
‘But there’s a fifty per cent chance of life!’ said Fred. Con smirked, and he resisted the urge to flick Max’s snot at her.
‘Can you hear yourself?’ she said. ‘Do you know how insane that sounds?’
‘Lila!’ Max tugged harder at her sock. ‘Did you see! Did you see, how the monkeys fought the bees?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lila. Baca had taken up a position draped across one of her shoulders, back legs hooked under her armpit. He looked, Fred thought, like the epaulettes on his father’s old army uniform.
‘The monkeys won!’ said Max. ‘I followed them!’
‘Max! What are you talking about?’ Lila picked him up and held his face close to hers, blazingly angry. ‘I thought you were in the den! You know you’re not allowed to move! I told you! If I can’t trust you, I’m going to tie you to me.’
Max pouted. ‘I didn’t go far! I stayed away because I don’t like bees.’
‘Maxie, don’t lie – there are no bees,’ said Lila. ‘I’ve seen every flying thing – ants and beetles and mosquitos – but no bees.’
‘It was over there!’ said Max. He pointed to the other side of the clearing, among tall rubber trees. ‘In the high bits.’
Lila raised her eyebrows over Max’s head. ‘Was this a dream, Max, or in real life?’
‘Real life,’ said Max.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Real life!’ Max looked furious. ‘Real life! The monkeys washed their hands in the ants and then they fought the bees.’
‘I have no idea what you’re trying to describe,’ said Con, ‘but it sounds terrifying.’
Max got up, roared, and stamped, accidentally stepping on Con’s knuckles. Con gave a yell and slapped at his ankles. ‘That hurt!’ she said.
‘Don’t hit him!’ said Lila.
‘You’re not paying attention, any of you!’ said Max. ‘Listen!’
Fred looked at Max; the boy’s eyes were unhappy, and a little wild. ‘We are listening, Max,’ he said.
‘No! Come!’ Max took hold of Con’s hand and pulled her up and towards the trees, his small feet thumping determinedly into the earth.
Con looked surprised, but let herself be led, jogging beside him. She didn’t comment on the state of Max’s hand, which was sticky with unknown substances. Fred and Lila ran after them.
‘There!’ said Max. ‘They were there!’
He pointed up at an ant nest, a great bulbous structure built on the tree’s trunk, bulging out of it like a pot belly. There were no monkeys in sight.
‘They were here really soon ago!’ said Max. ‘They’ll come back.’
Sceptically, Fred sat down. Max sat on Lila’s legs. Baca clung to Lila’s shirt.
Sitting still and empty-handed was not, Fred found, an easy thing to do. The things he was trying so hard not to think about – his father’s face, his mother’s voice – came crowding in. And darker things – the picture of all four of them starving, unfound, in the green clearing – crept towards him.
He tried to whistle, but his head swam, and he succeeded only in making a peculiar piping noise.
‘Fred,’ whispered Lila. ‘You’ll scare the monkeys.’
And then, suddenly, the monkeys came. There were three of them, dark brown and strong-limbed and sweet-faced.
Fred watched in awe as they chased one another up and down the trees, chittering. They whirligigged around the trees, flicking their tails; and then the largest of the monkeys, a mother with a baby hanging from her neck, laid her paws on the ant nest. The ants swarmed over the monkey’s paws and up her arms, until her fur was black with them. Then, fast, before the ants could bite, the monkey rubbed her paws together.
Con touched Fred’s sleeve. ‘Is she killing the ants?’
Fred watched the monkey lower her nose to her paws and sniff deeply. ‘Is it like a perfume? Or a sort of drug?’ he said.
Suddenly all three monkeys, as if at a signal, turned and leapt away across the trees.
‘Let’s follow them!’ said Lila.
It isn’t easy to keep pace with monkeys if you don’t happen to be one yourself, and if you haven’t eaten properly for days. They were all four weak, and Lila’s hands were shaking. Con turned pale as they jogged after the monkeys’ disappearing backs.
The monkeys leapt into the branches of the great spreading rubber trees and halted.
‘Bees!’ said Max, in a self-satisfied voice. ‘I told you!’
Far above their heads, so far it was blurred with distance, was a beehive. It was enormous, encased in a grey layer of resin, and the buzzing was astonishingly loud. Honey ran down the side of the tree.
Lila’s eyes widened. She held Baca more tightly. ‘They don’t attack sloths, do they?’
As they watched, the mother monkey approached the hive, broke open the protective layer and plunged her paws into its depths. She broke off a piece of honeycomb and bit into it, dripping honey on her baby’s head. The bees swarmed furiously, but didn’t go close enough to sting.
Lila’s eyes were as wide as the sun. ‘I think the smell on her paws meant that the bees didn’t attack,’ she said. ‘It must be a repellent.’
‘Let’s try it!’ said Fred, already on his feet.
‘But what if it only works for monkeys?’ said Con.
‘Well, there’s only one way to find out.’ He thought of dinner, which would be pineapples, if there were any left, and cocoa grubs if there weren’t. ‘Wouldn’t you like some honey?’
‘Just think, for a minute, before you –’
But Fred was already running. He wound his way back to the ants’ nest, and waited, panting, for the others to catch up; then he laid his hands on its side. The ants swarmed on to his fingers and knuckles and wrists; it was like wearing a pair of black gloves.
‘They tickle,’ he said. The ants were so small it was like being covered in full stops.
‘Now you rub your hands!’ ordered Max. ‘Quick! Quickly, like the monkeys!’
A few of the ants swarmed up Fred’s arms all the way to his chin but they didn’t seem disposed to bite. He rubbed his hands together, feeling a little guilty, and then sniffed. The smell was so strong that he gagged.
‘You know when they put stuff on cuts at school?’ he said. ‘It’s like that.’
‘Disinfectant?’ said Lila.
He rubbed his hands over his face, as he’d seen the monkey do, and up his arms. He hesitated, and then gathered more ants and rubbed the smell on to his legs and ankles too, just in case.
Con pulled his hand down to her face so she could sniff. ‘It smells like ammonia!’ she said. ‘Like my aunt’s smelling salts!’
They ran back to the honey tree. Fred thought the others seemed to be giving him a wider berth than usual.
‘You smell like a bad idea,’ said Max. ‘Like medicine.’
At the foot of the tree, Fred looked up. The trunk was enormous and the bees a di
stant cloud.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to stop to think for just one single second? To at least make a plan?’ said Con.
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Fred. He’d always loved climbing trees, that feeling of navigating an unknown land upwards.
The others watched him: Lila with expectant eyes, Con with one eyebrow and her upper lip raised, Max with his finger in his nose.
He seized a low branch and heaved himself up. Max cheered. Fred’s legs scrabbled for purchase, and then found a knot in the bark and pushed upwards.
He felt immediately that this was different; this was nothing like climbing at home. His muscles were weak, and less at his command; his arms and legs had less pull and spring to them. It occurred to him with a jolt that he hadn’t checked to see if the tree’s wood was rotten. The tree creaked under him, loud as the hinge on a giant’s gate.
‘Damn,’ he whispered, very quietly.
He reached up for the next branch, and then the next, his shoes slipping and sliding on the smoothness of the bark.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ he heard Con say. ‘He’s going to get himself killed.’
‘He’ll be all right,’ said Lila. ‘Really.’
‘What if he’s not, though? It’ll be even harder stuck in this place with just three of us. Fred!’ she called. ‘Please, just come down!’
Fred ignored her. He swung higher and faster. He set both feet on a thick branch and looked above his head for a good handhold.
Suddenly, the branch under his feet snapped. His legs flailed in the air, kicking against the trunk of the tree, and he swung from his hands, feeling his fingers slip against the slick surface. He scrabbled with his right hand for another branch, his legs blindly seeking a foothold. His feet met solid wood again.
He tried to pull up to the next handhold, but his arms felt hollow, no more use than wool or straw. He stood on a knot in the trunk, clutching at the branch above his head, frozen. He tried not to think of what his father’s face would look like if he heard that his son had died climbing a tree.
‘Look at him!’ said Con below. ‘He’s stuck.’
The Explorer Page 6