Red Leaves

by Sita Brahmachari

  Her flak jacket had been lying on the bed and he’d found himself picking it up and trying it on. It was surprisingly heavy.

  ‘I could do with one of these,’ he said, and his mum looked at him strangely, then sat down and patted the bed for him to come over and talk.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked gently, but he just shrugged and walked out of the room.

  I don’t really know what I meant by it, except that I feel as if I could do with some protection.

  As Zak approached the front door of the new house, he found that two large planks of wood had been laid over the garden path. It was like crossing a drawbridge, not to a castle, but to a building yard. When he’d finally balanced his way to the door he stopped and looked up through the fluorescent yellow scaffolding. A tall builder wearing a khaki-green cap was shouting up to another man with arms that looked as if they were made of steel. They shouted back and forth as they set up a pulley with a bright blue bucket attached to one end. Zak wondered what language they were speaking. Bulgarian or Polish maybe? As he stared up, the man with the cap caught Zak’s eye and shouted, ‘Hi!’ Zak waved up to them. Before he could slot his key in the lock, the door swung open. Shalini must have been watching out for him, waiting. Zak looked past her into the hallway. There was rubble and dust everywhere, making his eyes sting. The insistent shrill of drilling sent a shooting pain deep into his ears.

  ‘There you are, Zak.’ Shalini had the quietest voice of anyone he knew, but it was high and sharp and it carried above the din of the drill. Zak noticed that her long black hair was speckled with flecks of grey dirt. She was drying her hands on a tea towel that she’d tucked into the waist of her sari. Despite all the rubble, she still wore her traditional clothes; the sari-skirt trailed slightly so that it and her sandalled feet were coated in grey powder-dust. Poor Shalini having to live all day amongst this. Zak was glad he had not hurried back to this building site. He had the urge to tell her all about the wood and meeting Elder and Aisha, just as he’d told her about his day ever since he was little, but nothing was the same as before. Now that Lyndon’s gone, who’s to say that Shalini won’t leave too? Maybe she’ll go back home to Anil? I wouldn’t blame her if she did. It can’t be much fun for her, being away from her own son, looking after me and living in this wreck.

  ‘I have spoken to your history tutor, Zak. This is no respectful manner to behave in your school.’ Shalini squeezed her delicate hands together till her knuckles turned white.

  A shower of dust poured from the ceiling and landed on Zak’s head.

  ‘Oh baba! This filthy dirt is not good for my asthma!’ Shalini attempted to brush the dust from Zak’s hair, but ended up spluttering and coughing her way to the kitchen for water. ‘I’ll bring food to your room, nah?’ She managed to call back to him. ‘Don’t get used to this, but for now it’s more comfortable up there, until the kitchen is prepared.’

  ‘Would you like me to sit with you?’ Shalini asked as she brought in a tray with one of her sambal coconut curries and a plate of sliced fruit.

  Zak shook his head.

  ‘OK, but Lucas will be Skyping soon.’ Shalini patted Zak on the shoulder. ‘You understand I had to tell him, don’t you?’

  Zak nodded. It wasn’t her fault. Mostly he felt sorry for Shalini, especially when she’d just Skyped Anil. She always put on a brave face, but afterwards Zak often picked up signs that she’d been crying. Sometimes the world feels so mixed up, with my mum and dad so far away, and Shalini here leaving her son to look after me. His own mum always said that Skyping made her feel closer to him, like she wasn’t missing out but there had been no Skypes on this trip. Why? He loved to see her face as she was talking, to see into her world and for her to see into his. But afterwards it was almost worse than never having spoken. What gets me is the way I’m lulled into feeling that we’re in the same room. But then there’s always a moment when it hits me that there’s a screen and a whole world of distance between us.

  A memory of the homeless woman, Elder, holding on to Zak’s hand in the wood flashed through his mind. Now he understood her look at the welcome surprise of human contact. That’s all that I want to be able to do – to reach out and hug my mum or dad. It’s not asking that much, is it? But these were not things that he could tell anyone without sounding like a wimp. At least he knew that his dad was safe. But he needed to speak to his mum right now, to call out, ‘Mum,’ and for her to appear at his door, but that was as likely to happen as magic. Zak picked up his fork and mushed the curry around his plate. The hunger he’d felt earlier had vanished, replaced by a vague scent of sickness, and his throat felt dry, as if the dust in the house was settling on his insides.

  Shalini tapped gently on the door.

  ‘It’s your father calling.’ She carried in the laptop and turned the screen around so that his dad’s unsmiling face came into view. Shalini picked up the tray of food, tutted at how little he’d eaten and quietly closed the door behind her.

  ‘Well, son? What are you playing at?’

  ‘Well, Lucas, I’m not playing at anything!’ Zak knew how much his dad hated it when he called him by his first name.

  ‘Don’t you use that tone with me.’

  Zak stayed silent while he watched his dad’s mouth rant on and on about how if he earned himself a bad reputation among his teachers it would be ‘near impossible to shake off’. One of the things that annoyed Zak most about his dad these days was how he kept repeating the same thing over and over, as if using slightly different words was a way of hammering some sense into him. Finally he changed tack slightly. ‘You make sure you go and see that Mr Slater tomorrow morning and offer him a sincere apology. Have you any idea how embarrassing it is for me to hear from your history teacher that you said those words?’ Zak noticed that even in the few weeks he’d been working in New York his dad’s accent had grown stronger and just that seemed to accentuate the distance between them. His dad hadn’t been able to stand the uncertainty of his mum being away for long stretches either, so he’d got out for good, moved to another city, another continent even! He was free to move out, to take on whatever accent he felt like. So why am I the only one who doesn’t get to choose? Zak wanted to scream as his father droned on.

  ‘I’m not in one of your lectures!’ Zak interrupted.

  Lucas leaned closer to the screen and for the first time in his life Zak registered something like dislike in his father’s eyes.

  ‘Do you know how hard your mum and I . . .’ Lucas stumbled over these familiar words, as if he doubted that he had the right to talk about the two of them as if they were still a neat little family unit. They both kept reassuring him that the divorce did not mean anything would change between them as parents, but as his dad revised his sentence, Zak knew that Lucas didn’t believe it himself. ‘We’ve worked so hard to send you to a great school?’

  ‘I didn’t ask to go there,’ Zak spat back.

  His dad sighed deeply. ‘Do you have to be so obvious? You’re doing this to humiliate me. Isn’t that right? Well, I have news for you – you’re kicking out at the wrong person—’

  That was it. Zak exploded, just as he had at Spite’s insult that morning, but this time not with his fists. Instead, he aimed his sharpened words back at his dad, like poisoned arrows.

  ‘Who else am I supposed to kick out at? Mum? She’s not even contactable. And Lyndon never answers my calls. Maybe you’d prefer it if I took it out on Shalini or one of the builders?’ He grabbed hold of the laptop and stomped down the stairs with it. ‘Want to have a little tour around my lovely new home?’ Zak scanned the screen across the room for his dad’s benefit. ‘I’m living on a building site, get it?’

  A look of pain lodged in his dad’s eyes. It felt good to lash out at him – why shouldn’t he taste a bit of the fallout for himself?

  ‘OK, son. I know this has all been difficult for you—’

  ‘Really? You think so?’ Zak said with a sneer, then pressed th
e red button to make his dad go away.

  Shalini stood by the stairs shaking her head. ‘This is not respectful Zak. Your father loves you. Please call him back,’ she urged.

  Zak marched past her up the stairs, his footsteps echoing on the bare floorboards.

  ‘If he calls, I’m not here,’ he shouted, slamming his bedroom door behind him. Shalini followed him up and stood outside his room for a moment then quietly opened his door, slid the lap-top inside and retreated. Zak grabbed his gloves and started pummelling away at his punchbag till he’d worked up such a sweat that he collapsed on his bed, exhausted.

  By the time Shalini came in to say goodnight Zak had already showered and was lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, listening to the news. Sometimes just the sound of his mum’s distinctive Scottish accent was enough to soothe him. It didn’t matter what horrendous disaster she was reporting on, all he could focus on was the fact that she was still breathing. The best was when she was ‘live’, because ‘live’ meant that she was alive at that second, no matter how crackly and jumpy the satellite connection, and as he listened to her talk he felt as if he could breathe again.

  Shalini came in quietly, picked up the lap-top, carried it over to Zak’s desk and sat on the bed by his side.

  ‘Thousands of children are on the move, some of them wounded, all of them hungry. The trauma they’ve suffered is plain to see in their eyes, but the will to survive is strong and so they make their way to the overcrowded refugee camps in the hope that tomorrow might bring them some semblance of safety. The scale of this humanitarian disaster is unprecedented. The question on everyone’s lips here is what is the answer to such suffering and what more can and should the international community be doing? This is Jessica Johnson, reporting from . . .

  The newsreader’s voice jumped in to fill the silence. ‘Apologies, we seem to have lost the satellite connection there . . .’

  The damned-up tears that contained all the tension of the day overflowed and trickled down the side of Zak’s face and into his ears and hair. He made no attempt to wipe them away. Shalini’s eyes clouded over too. She could never see him upset without feeling a swell of emotion in her own chest. She held out her arms and hugged him to her.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be home soon,’ she whispered as she patted Zak on the shoulder, switched off the radio and headed towards the door. ‘She may call you in the morning, if they’ve got that satellite signal back up.’

  ‘She might and she might not!’

  Shalini paused at the door. ‘You understand why your ma has to go away. It’s important work she’s doing. You should be proud of her.’

  ‘What about you then? Why are you so far away from Anil? Looking after me . . . you don’t have to be here!’

  Zak registered the look of hurt in Shalini’s eyes, and immediately regretted his sharp tone.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ Now I’m doing what I told Dad I would never do . . . lashing out at Shalini just because she’s here. Why can’t I just keep my mouth shut?

  ‘You should understand, Zak, our situations are not equal.’ Shalini’s voice had become harsh and formal, as if he was a stranger to her. ‘This is a fact of life. I am sending money to educate Anil, to change things for him, for us. What can I say?’ She shrugged. ‘We all do the best with what we are born into. Your mother is rich enough to sit at home doing beauty treatments, but instead she is trying to make the world a better place.’

  ‘I just don’t get it. Why does there have to be all this fighting?’ Zak sighed.

  Shalini shook her head. ‘In my country too, there is always unrest. As if nature didn’t cause enough havoc. Everywhere in the world fighting is for the same reasons. Politics, land, power mostly, greed, using religion as excuse many times.’

  ‘That’s why I hate religion.’ Zak clenched his fists.

  ‘No. It is not gods who cause war. Without my religion, my life would be less. Always, the way I see it, ordinary people, no matter what belief, just want to live in peace.’ Shalini shook the ends of her sari, sending up a cloud of fine powder and the image of the blue-scarfed Aisha crept once more into Zak’s mind. He supposed that she covered her hair for religious reasons, like the Sikh man, Mr Kalsi, from the shop. Just as he thought this, Shalini came over to him and smoothed her hand over his hair.

  ‘I don’t know! You’re starting to look like a wild boy with this long hair!’ She laughed, cupping his chin in her hands.

  Zak attempted to smile back.

  ‘Acha! That’s better! I will do puja for you. Anyway, it’s nearly Diwali. Fireworks always cheer us up! Tomorrow will be a better day.’

  Thousands of children are on the move, some of them wounded, all of them hungry . . . Thousands of children are on the move, some of them wounded, all of them hungry . . .

  Zak counted the herds, not of sheep, but of marching children. This is what happened when he listened to his mum’s news reports at night. He found himself taking the little that she said and filling in the rest with his imagination. Now he scanned the faces he’d conjured from her words: a boy carried his baby sister, a pregnant woman hauled a woven blanket bag on her back and a toddler on her swollen belly. A skeleton-thin woman, placing one foot in front of the other like a robot, trailed three small children, all wide-eyed with hunger. Then through the dust haze he spotted a familiar face.

  Aisha turned to him in her blue scarf and smiled as she walked onward, head held high. The woman holding the toddler stumbled. Aisha bent down, picked the child up and carried her on her hip. Zak followed Aisha’s path through the endless stream of children. A bright red flash moved among them and he heard a girl calling out. She turned and her dreadlocks spun and coiled around his neck. Her cat-like grey eyes glinted in the sunshine. ‘I’m hungry too,’ she whispered as her braids tightened around his neck. Zak looked down and saw his own dusty Converse. He grasped at his neck, pulling and pulling until he was finally free of the girl’s matted hair.

  ‘That’s right. You run away,’ the snake-coil girl called after him. He watched his feet move over the rough terrain, picking a way between the dry rubble that littered the earth, his breath laboured, sweat coating his forehead. Now a voice somewhere nearby bleated, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum.’ He swung round to see who was calling out, but the procession of children were all silent now. Then the crowd stepped aside and pointed to a woman wearing khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. ‘Mum, Mum, Mum!’ His own voice sounded distant to him. The woman turned and stared. Her face was ancient, cracked and wizened. It was the old homeless woman who offered him her hand . . .

  Zak felt a thud and a dull ache spread across the back of his skull, then hands underneath his body, gathering him up, lifting him.

  ‘Shh, shh, just a dream,’ Shalini whispered, lifting his head on to her knee. They were sitting by a pile of rubble in what had been, until yesterday, the kitchen. Shalini struggled to pull Zak to standing, then walked him slowly back up the stairs. ‘You were sleepwalking again, calling out for your ma.’

  ‘It wasn’t Mum . . . it was that homeless woman,’ Zak mumbled through his sleep-haze, allowing Shalini to guide him to his room and his bed.

  ‘What homeless woman?’

  ‘I was just dreaming, like you said.’ Zak pinched his own arm. Get a hold of yourself. The last thing you need right now is a lecture about walking through the woods. He scrambled back through his mind, desperately trying to remember the dream. How did I get myself down stairs without falling? What was I doing sitting among that rubble? Every time that he sleepwalked it left him feeling as if he was standing on a cliff edge.

  ‘Why don’t we unpack some of your things tomorrow?’ Shalini suggested through a weary yawn as she followed his gaze around the room. ‘Try to sleep now.’ She turned in the doorway and looked at Zak as he settled himself under his duvet.

  ‘You know, there’s nothing to be ashamed of, missing the people you love. I still long to see my family, even after all these years of working away from ho
me.’

  She turned the handle of the door quietly behind her. ‘Now sleep well, my boy,’ she whispered. Zak couldn’t help but wonder if she really meant those words for him.

  Aisha stared at herself in the mirror and brushed her wavy black hair until it shone. She swished it this way and that. Only a few days ago, picnicking in the wood, she’d wanted to dance to the sway of the branches. Not anymore. She felt like a sapling tree that had been uprooted from its soil and replanted in a very different climate. It had struggled at first, but then it had taken off, growing courageously. Now, just as it was starting to thrive, Liliana of all people had come along and cut it down.