Red Leaves

by Sita Brahmachari

  ‘Fasting can make you feel humble . . . appreciate every morsel that passes your lips . . . stops you becoming greedy.’ Muna’s mother had told her that, but during Ramadan Aisha had not had the chance to test it out. It was true that every piece of food that she now placed in her mouth she appreciated in a way she had never done before. She took a slice of bread, and dropped some on the ground for the dog. It sniffed at the morsel as if it wasn’t sure, but as Aisha ate, it copied her. What do dogs normally eat? Meat, she supposed. It would probably go hunting for food if it was hungry. As she ate, Aisha watched the morning light ripple over the bark of trees, its intensity turning the trunk from the colour of golden sands, to desert orange, to copper red. Maybe fasting had sharpened her senses, but there was no doubt that this morning she felt a closeness to the earth of Somalia. Last night, for the very first time, she’d dreamed of moments in her past that had not been anything to do with war or fighting. Running through her village, splashing in the river, her aunt singing her lullabies, playing with her cousins and sharing a meal together. In her dream all these tiny normal moments had been bathed in the warm light of home, and when she’d woken she had felt a different kind of longing, to close her eyes and sleep again – to go back to that time before the fighting had scarred her memory of her homeland. She couldn’t explain to herself exactly how it was, but she did feel closer, now that she was alone in this wood, to her abo and her aunt and to the spirit of her hoyo she had never known.

  It was dead quiet inside . . . What was this place? The air was filled with a thick white mist. Zak stared up through the cloud to a ceiling that seemed almost entirely made of cobwebs. Thousands of specks of woodland had caught in the fine threads, as if the web was sieving the air, capturing the tiniest of nature’s particles and insects. Zak watched the roof-web sway as an army of insects crawled across it. Through the web he could just make out that the roof beyond was made of slatted branches over which was lain something that looked like a green tarpaulin.

  Zak let his head roll from one side to the other. If he didn’t try to lift it, he could look around. The room was large enough to stand up in. Its sides were made of sticks and twigs that supported a tarpaulin layer just like the roof. The place was a cross between a yurt and an enormous ancient den. Toadstools, with their smooth white surfaces and dark textured underbellies, grew between the stick-slats meshed together by a layer of moss . . . resembling green velvet wallpaper. Against this surface a wall of sticks had been neatly stacked, reaching halfway up to the ceiling. The doorway was child height and seemed to be covered by a collection of evergreen pine branches, through which a fine mist was swirling its way inside. Zak felt underneath his body and found that he was lying on a thick bed of dry leaves. He scrunched a handful between his fingers and let them drop back to earth, wondering, as he became hypnotized by the floating journeys of tiny white feathers, if he was still dreaming.

  He squinted around the rest of the den. To his right a long branch protruded from the side wall with piles of clothing draped over it. To his left there was an old-fashioned metal pram. Strewn around the mossy walls were jam jars, pans, an old kettle, bowls, cups, cartons and a stack of frayed wicker baskets. Zak’s eyes were drawn towards a broken porcelain head, the kind that might have been moulded by a potter, broken in the heat of a kiln and rejected. Plants had begun to grow from every orifice of the smashed skull cavity. Zak felt a sharp, piercing pain shoot through his own head and turned away, placing his fingertips on his forehead to find a raw gash of flesh.

  He closed his eyes and opened them again. Perhaps he’d had a fall and was just imagining this place. Walk through what’s happened in your mind. Try to remember how you got here.

  Running, I was running through the mud, and children were fleeing and I was following Edwin the soldier and a girl with a blue headscarf. Cat’s eyes shining, something coiled around my neck, something tight . . .

  There was no order to the thoughts and images that seeped through the fog of Zak’s mind. He began to splutter and cough as the damp air settled in his lungs.

  ‘Earthstars come shooting down, falling into Elder’s nest. The children are hungry and hurt, must care for them. Warm red leaves for a bed, misty day for a misty head. A little elderberry tincture will make that cough better, clear the throat, and if it won’t . . . you can sick it up,’ The old woman droned on.

  Now Zak had a vague memory of shaking hands with her, and of breadcrumbs dropping on his head. He must be imagining all of this. Was she some kind of witch who had lured him into her lair? As she approached him he turned away. The air was stale and thick with the musty stench of her, mixed with a sickening sweet smell of yeasty fruit and mulching plants.

  ‘Now, Zak, take some of this, it’ll make you well again. I made it myself.’

  Zak? Is that my name? It sounded strange in his own ears. The old woman stood up and rummaged among the pots for a spoon. It was then that he noticed a rucksack leaning against the buckled wheel of a pram. Is that my bag? It looks newer and cleaner than everything in here. But he had no memory of it except a vague inkling that he had run away from something or someone. How long had he lain here unconscious? The woman mixed the thick black liquid in the jam jar she held and, painfully slowly, she knelt down and settled on the leaves. Zak’s head throbbed worse when she attempted to raise it up. He was desperately trying to follow the dim paths of his own thoughts, when the woman thrust the spoon into his mouth. At first he resisted, pressing his lips closed, but she forced the spoon past them and tipped his chin backwards so that he had no choice but to either swallow the vile liquid or choke. At first he gagged at the bitter taste and then he submitted, helpless, as she ladled spoonful after spoonful into his mouth. My name is Zak – that’s what she called me. If this is poison, at least I know my own name before I die. My name is Zak, my name is Zak, my name is . . .

  She set the jar of liquid down and took a glass pot of something from her pocket and started to smear it across Zak’s forehead. His mind grew heavy and he felt a bony arm wrap around his shoulder and ease him back on to the bed of leaves.

  ‘Now, now, no need for you to worry. Seasons changing, heavy mists will settle so you think they’ll never clear, but then, my dear, the sun will always find its way through the Elder thicket.’

  Zak moaned as he listened to the old woman’s ranting and felt her smoothing his tangle of hair with her hand. I have to find a way out of here. But back to what? He searched his mind for where he had come from, but the only image that surfaced was of rubble falling on his head. He had the feeling that he had been sitting in a trench with a soldier. Have I been caught up in some kind of war?

  ‘Now, my Crystal, your turn to take some calming medicine. Lime leaves for you. One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me. Settle down, my darlings, and I’ll tell you the tale of the ancients. Elder doesn’t give up without a fight. Break my branches and they’ll grow again; fell me and I’ll chase the sun in another direction. Wild hair, wild branches, clawing their way towards the sun. No one listens to me, but if they did they would know that Elder was the best of earth-mothers, the luckiest of trees to seed as long as you don’t mess with her, don’t dig her up whatever you do.’

  Zak followed a trail of tiny white feathers that drifted through his mind and felt himself wafting to the ground. Then a cloth was placed on his forehead . . . So cooling . . .

  ‘Elder for beginnings and Elder for endings. Elder is fire, Elder is passion. When the wild wind takes me across the threshold I can tell you all the tales that your mother and grandmother and old mother earth told. I can root things out, teach you what to keep and what to throw away, I can draw the spirits up through the earth. Don’t you worry, Zak! I’ll write your name and keep you close.’

  The old woman took a pile of leaves and began to scatter them over Zak’s body.

  Aisha lay awake listening to the mice and rats scurry around the shelter collecting crumbs until the dog growled and barked sending
them scampering away. Alert to the sound of the rodents returning, Aisha made a rule for herself that from now on she would only eat outside.

  Although she hated the sound and sight of the rats, it was the huge spiders that really made her skin crawl; the scrabble of their stick legs set her heart beating in panic mode.

  In the morning she found a tree stump close to the stream and made that into her table, to keep her food separate from the shelter and the little area she had marked out for prayer. She rationed her supplies carefully, sharing half with the dog. Some days the animal seemed hungry, on others it hardly ate at all. Perhaps it wasn’t used to the kind of food on offer. Still, it looked healthy enough, Aisha thought, as she patted the animal’s stomach, noticing for the first time that it was a ‘she’.

  As each day passed, Aisha dreaded the onset of darkness a little less. She lay on the lower rung of the bunk bed listening to the hollow night sounds of the wood and was amazed to find that they did not upset her as much as she’d imagined. She felt it was because the dog was by her side, acting as her eyes and her ears. The trust Aisha was beginning to place in the animal allowed her to block out the night-time sounds of the wood, close her eyes when darkness fell and drift into sleep.

  The rummaging in the undergrowth, squirrels scrambling up trees, the haunting call of the owl that lived somewhere close by and the morning knocking of the woodpecker had become the rhythm of her night and morning.

  Aisha’s first few days had been completely taken up by caring for her most basic needs. She had made a ritual of sweeping and washing out the shelter, and she and the dog had come to an arrangement about what Aisha had termed ‘our private business’ – as if the dog could understand!

  She had constructed a three-pronged tepee structure out of long branches secured at the top with stripped ivy vine. She’d pierced a hole in the middle of one of the scratchy moth-eaten blankets that had been left on the bunk beds in the shelter. Where the sticks met at the top she pulled the coarse woollen cloth over and tied it on with more vine. With the three pronged sticks splayed open the blanket stretched out and covered the length and width of the simple frame from top to bottom, providing a tent-like screen. When collapsed, Aisha could carry it around under one arm. She could go the toilet, bathe in the stream or wash her hair without feeling that the curious eyes of the animals were watching her – and if Elder should come back she would at least be covered and out of sight. It made Aisha smile that the dog always sat at a respectful distance, its back turned away from the tepee, as if, while guarding her, it did not want to invade Aisha’s privacy. Once there had been a sudden scurrying noise nearby and the dog had set up a piercing insistent bark. Aisha had quickly hushed her, afraid that if the animal was heard then she too would be discovered.

  Aisha thought back to her first night when she’d been frozen with fear. She had surprised herself that she could manage so well on her own. Strangely, the fasting seemed to have put paid to her constant feeling of hunger. It was as if her mind had taken over and showed her stomach how strong she was. Aisha’s hand rested on her waist. Unlike the dog, she had definitely lost weight. She bent down to pat the animal and as she did her head spun slightly and she lurched forward as the wood reeled in a red rush around her. The dog leaned into her side and whined, sensing that she felt unwell.

  ‘It’s OK. I’ll be OK in a minute,’ Aisha reassured her.

  After a while of sitting still, Aisha’s light-headedness began to pass. I’m going to have to stop fasting and eat, she told herself, or I’ll risk passing out on my own in the middle of this wood.

  ‘Zak Johnson, the twelve-year-old son of an eminent historian father and a war-correspondent mother, went missing from his home in London three days ago. Police are making extensive investigations into the reasons behind this disappearance. Members of the public are requested to report any sightings of the boy . . .’ A photograph of Zak popped up on the screen.

  Liliana jumped up off the sofa and leaned in closer to the TV. This was the boy she had seen just a few days ago, the one she’d given the leaflets to . . . the one who lived up the road. What was going on? She watched the interviewer talk to Zak’s father, who was appealing for his son’s safety. How was it that two children could go missing from the same street and one of them attracted national news coverage while the search for the other seemed already to have spluttered to a standstill? Liliana stared at the TV screen. Now the news switched to images of children caught in the Syrian conflict. She held her hand over her mouth as the camera panned over a sea of orphaned children. How could this one boy’s life be so important and yet all these children’s lives be worth so little?

  It was not in Liliana’s nature to be bitter, but at this moment she felt that she, like these children, was powerless. She switched off the TV, made herself a cup of tea and sat down at her table where Aisha’s story book still lay open. The blank pages stared at her accusingly. Her hands began to shake as she touched the paper. Would Aisha’s accusatory letter be the last entry?

  In the week since Aisha had been missing, time seemed to have slowed for Liliana, however much her own children rallied around her she could not take her mind off her missing foster daughter. She picked up the local paper. On the front page was a photo of the homeless girl she’d seen sitting outside Kalsis Woodland Store. The girl was holding up a sketch of a dog.

  Red dog missing. Big Issue seller broken-hearted. Reward offered by Mr and Mrs Kalsi

  the headline read. Tears rolled down Liliana’s face as she hunted around for the previous week’s paper and the photo of Aisha they had featured on page thirteen, Liliana’s least favourite number. She had tried not to let such superstitious notions enter her head, but still there was no news. She’d phoned the paper every day, struggling to persuade them to update the story, to keep the search for Aisha alive, but this was the best that they had offered. Now seeing this photo of a missing dog pasted over the front page made Liliana’s blood boil. She wiped away her tears roughly and felt the outrage burn her insides.

  Come on, Liliana. Where’s that fight of yours? She spurred herself on. She had fought hard as a single mother, and as a foster-carer for children who had nothing. She had always done what she could for those who came into her orbit. Perhaps she could do nothing for those orphan children on the news, but she would fight for her Aisha. I will not stop until Aisha’s face is on the television screen next to that boy’s. What makes them so different? She’s as wanted as him. We are neighbours after all.

  It was on the third day that Aisha had first spotted the pair of tiny birds climbing up and down the pine tree opposite the shelter. What had caught her eye was the streak of blue that spanned their heads and neck.

  She’d watched them for hours as they searched for insects in the tree hollows. They were such pretty, plump little birds. It looked as if their eyes were edged with a long sweep of black liner. For the first time this morning they had not flown away when she came out of the shelter and Aisha had watched them hopping down the pine’s trunk head first like tiny blue-backed acrobats, calling out to each other in their high-pitched little voices. She knew it was ridiculous, but the birds seemed so comfortable in her presence now that it felt as if they had befriended her along with the dog.

  Aisha picked up the pile of conkers that she’d taken to collecting – one for each day she’d been in the wood. She shined them up, and counted them out again. Was it really possible that she had been here for seven nights already? Now that she had got to grips with the routine of living here, the tiny blue-backed birds, the rich colours of autumn and the companionship of the dog were starting to make her feel protected by the wood.

  These animals had come to her side and seemed to want to stay. She felt around the dog’s neck, but there was no collar. It seemed right, now that they had befriended each other, to give it a name.

  ‘You’re the same colour as this, so I’ll call you “Conker”,’ Aisha announced, throwing one up the hill for the dog
to retrieve. It returned and dropped it at her feet. Aisha had come to love the way the red dog leaned into her. She bent down and smoothed her hand over its dome-shaped head and her silken floppy ears. She was surprised to discover that the salmon-pink insides were as soft as velvet.

  Aisha found herself hugging the dog, its tail batting hard against the earth as she did so. This is a very simple relationship: I trust you, you trust me. I love you, you love me. I lean on you, you lean on me. How clear did it sound? But she had trusted and loved her foster-mother, and yet Liliana had been willing to let her go. She had trusted her abo too, when he’d told her that one day they would be reunited, and still, after all this time, he had not come to find her.

  Aisha placed her head next to Conker’s, and whispered into the dog’s ear. I lean on you, you lean on me.

  Liliana took a deep breath and prepared herself to meet Zak’s mother and father. It had only taken the few steps up the road for her to lose the resentment she’d felt towards the boy and his family when she’d watched the news. As she walked along Linden Road she remembered Zak’s gentle face, his concern over the homeless woman in the wood, and how he’d handed out leaflets of Aisha which she’d seen posted up at the Kalsis’ and all over the area. This isn’t about how influential his parents are compared to me, or politics or power for goodness sake. It’s about two vulnerable young people missing from the same street. She knew only too well that Zak’s parents, like her, would be in hell every second of the day and night that their child was not at home. So Liliana took a deep breath, steadied herself, rang the bell and then stepped back as she heard someone running headlong towards the door.