Red Leaves

by Sita Brahmachari

  When Zak came back to the shelter Aisha kept her distance from him, but as the day went on she became a little more at ease around him. She showed him: where the stream was, the place where she prayed and the tree stump she used as a table. She told him too about the privacy tent she’d managed to construct. But everything was different now. She didn’t feel that she would be able to continue her prayer ritual as before. When he had taken all his clothes out of the rucksack and hung them on the trees Aisha understood that he meant to stay and that she would never be able to get back to the peaceful world that she had created here.

  Zak must have read the look of dismay on her face. ‘Do you mind if I stay till I get my things dried?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t own the place.’ Aisha shrugged.

  ‘Do you have matches?’

  Aisha nodded.

  ‘I was thinking of trying to light a fire, just a small one. To dry out my sleeping bag and clothes,’ Zak told her.

  ‘OK. I don’t think the smoke would be seen above all these trees,’ Aisha said, looking up through the thick protective canopy.

  They carried the sticks out together and piled them up. Zak took some dry leaves from inside the shelter and placed them between the slats of wood. He tried over and over again to get it lit but the damp seemed to have seeped into everything including the matches Aisha handed him, and the flame wouldn’t take.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Aisha mumbled, and went back inside.

  Zak felt that it did matter. If he could have just done this one thing he might at least feel as if he was contributing. He stood outside the shelter, not knowing whether he should follow Aisha.

  ‘Mind if I come in?’ he called to her.

  ‘OK,’ she called back.

  Aisha had taken herself up to the top bunk and Zak sat down on the bench near the door. He was restless and stood up again and went over to the wall where his eye was caught by what looked like a score-tally. As Zak read the names Albert and Eddie his head swirled in confusion. These people seemed oddly familiar to him.

  ‘Do you know anything about them?’ Zak asked Aisha, looking up at her.

  ‘I did have a strange dream . . .’

  ‘I feel like I’m still in a dream.’ Zak sighed heavily and his head spun with confusion as he pictured the golden names written on the leaves of Elder’s wreath. Who else had she written there?

  ‘Why don’t you try to retrace your steps?’ It was what the therapist had asked Aisha to try to do – unblock her memory.

  Zak studied the names in front of him and found himself telling Aisha about his journey through the wood the night before, and being led by a boy called Edwin wearing a soldier’s uniform. Zak touched the names on the wall and he had no idea why but he half expecting to feel a heartbeat. Eddie was the name written here but the soldier’s name had been Edwin. The names were so close. You’re just grasping at straws to try to make sense of things, Zak tried to put the names out of his mind. But a black-and-white image of a man and a boy kept stubbornly surfacing.

  ‘I think I might have brought a photo with me,’ Zak told Aisha as he rummaged in his rucksack, finding nothing. He caught the sceptical look on her face as he told her about the name he’d found in the plasterwork of his house. ‘I think the father was called Albert.’

  He was making no sense.

  For his part Zak felt gormless and in the way but, looking at these names on the wall, and seeing Aisha again made him sure that he had been drawn to this place for a reason. But why?

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Aisha asked. She had read the same line of poetry over and over and was no closer to taking in its meaning.

  ‘Time drops in decay,

  Like a candle burnt out’

  But at least burying her face in her book saved her from feeling self-conscious.

  ‘No thanks. I still feel sick, but I’ve got food. I must have packed expecting to be away for a while.’

  Aisha nodded and turned a page. It felt so odd to hear the boy’s voice in here. Zak got up and started pacing around. He picked up the branch of thick pine that Aisha had used as a broom and started absent-mindedly sweeping a few leaves out from under one of the concrete benches. Then he caught sight of something in the far corner. He bent down and seemed to collapse flat on his stomach.

  ‘Is this yours?’ Zak asked Aisha, who was already climbing down from the top bunk. She shook her head as he held a small green drawstring bag. He loosened the tie and took out a red rubber ball and a handful of dull silver objects with pointy ends and placed them on the bench. She sat down a little apart from Zak.

  ‘Jacks!’ Zak held the metal objects in his hand then let them fall. He bounced the ball and picked up two prongs that were close together then caught the ball in the same hand. He’d played it once on holiday with his dad and Lyndon.

  Aisha examined the names written on the wall again.

  ‘Want a go?’ Zak asked, passing the jacks and the ball to Aisha. He noticed that her hands were shaking. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I have never heard of this game before, but I dreamed of an old man –’ she looked up at the names on the wall – ‘called Albert, and a boy . . . Eddie . . . playing it like you did just now, throwing the ball up and gathering the . . .’

  ‘Jacks,’ Zak tossed four in the air and caught them.

  And that’s how Aisha and Zak broke the tension between them and began to talk. Not about each other, or why they had run away and found themselves in this place. Instead they spoke of Aisha’s dream about the wartime people whose names were written on the walls above their heads.

  ‘It was the kind of dream that haunted me, even in the day. Have you had dreams like that?’ Aisha asked.

  ‘I think so.’ A picture of himself sitting in a pile of rubble entered his mind. As Aisha spoke about her dream, gaps in Zak’s mind began to reconnect. Now he remembered more details: the gargoyle above his school entrance, fighting with a boy, sitting in a library and finding an air-raid shelter on an old map. He saw his own fingers tearing the map from a book. Now his hands were wrapping a piece of plasterwork in a towel and placing a black-and-white photo of a boy and a man in a rucksack.

  Zak’s skull felt as if it was held in a vice. Aisha’s dream and this game of jacks seemed somehow to connect them both to this place. But he was still not convinced that any of his thoughts were real. Was Aisha even here in the shelter with him? Or had he dreamed her up too? After all, when he’d seen her here he’d thought she was an angel.

  Zak grimaced as he felt the bump on his head – it was tender and swollen to the touch. Had the old woman attacked him and knocked him out to keep him in her den? Aisha walked over to her rucksack, took out two of Elder’s apples and offered one to Zak.

  ‘Elder, brought these for me. Do you want one?’

  ‘I’m not eating an apple off her.’ Zak shuddered. ‘She freaks me out. Do you know she’s got your name and mine written on her wreath made of leaves? What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Aisha replied.

  ‘So she’s been in here?’ Aisha nodded. Zak pictured Aisha’s name in golden letters. What could Elder want with their names?

  ‘I don’t think she means any harm, and she hasn’t bothered me, but she did tell me the apples were to share with the family.’ Aisha peered up at the names written on the concrete. ‘I think she meant them!’

  As Aisha watched Zak sleep, she realized that if his drowsiness continued she might have to find a way to get him out of the wood so he could get help. But he had seemed to grow clearer in the head as the day had gone on so maybe, if she could make him eat when he woke up, he would recover fully.

  Aisha climbed up to the top bunk, lay down and tried to read, glancing up to check on Zak every few minutes. He slept peacefully at first but soon began to toss and turn fitfully. Conker lifted her head and padded over to him. To Aisha’s amazement Zak stood up with his eyes open, patted the dog on the head and walked out of the shelter
in a daze. Aisha had never seen anyone sleepwalk before and there was something ghostly about it, as if a part of Zak had stepped out of his body and was roaming around without him. Conker looked at Aisha, as if to ask what was going on? Perhaps she sensed that the boy was still asleep, because the dog shadowed him as he climbed over the shelter and headed for the stream. The curious thing was that he was sure-footed, as if he knew exactly where he was going.

  Aisha followed him but kept her distance. Perhaps if I don’t wake him, I’ll find out what’s going on in his head. She listened as he called out repeatedly in his sleep. ‘Come home, please, Mum, please come home.’ He was close to the stream now and Aisha hurried to catch up in case he fell in, but before she could get to him he tripped and tumbled to the ground. Conker licked his face and Zak opened his eyes.

  ‘Are you awake now?’ Aisha asked gently, kneeling down by his side.

  Zak nodded.

  ‘You were talking in your sleep . . . about your mum. Has she gone somewhere?’

  ‘She’s on the move with children,’ Zak replied, as if what he said made perfect sense.

  ‘What children?’ Aisha prodded. Perhaps in this place between sleeping and waking he might be less guarded with her.

  Zak thought about it. ‘Refugees.’

  ‘Where is your mum?’ Aisha asked.

  He shrugged. She helped him up and they walked slowly back to the shelter and sat on the benches facing each other.

  ‘Maybe you don’t want to remember.’ Aisha sighed. ‘I felt like that for a long time.’

  ‘Why?’ Zak asked.

  Perhaps it was because they were sitting in the middle of a wood held in the quiet trust of the ancient trees; perhaps it was Zak’s blinkered vision of his own past, and the fact that he might not even be able to take in what she was saying, that made it easier for Aisha to speak to this boy who seemed hardly even to know himself or where he had come from. Aisha looked up at the names of the wartime family who had once sat on these benches, and she had the strangest sensation that she wasn’t just telling Zak. The shelter felt crowded with people urging her to speak. ‘I’ll sit with you.’ The girl’s voice from her dream echoed back at her. As she told her story she felt as if arms were reaching through the walls to comfort her. She hardly looked at Zak as she began to voice what she had always kept bottled up inside. She found herself telling the details of the horror that she had fled from, how her Aunt Lalu and family had been butchered, and how she had last seen her abo being arrested at a checkpoint – a gun in his back. She had never even spoken to Liliana, her friends or the therapist of the acrid smell that still came to her of burning flesh, or the pure evil in the eyes of the men who had attacked her village like a pack of wild rampaging animals.

  After she had finished speaking there was a heavy stillness in the shelter, as if it had become a court to hear and witness her account.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Zak whispered, but he knew how inadequate those words were and he wished he could find others to express how his heart went out to her. His head swam with all the horrors of what she had been through. His mum’s face entered his mind. He saw her, as if on a screen in front of him, and heard her voice: ‘This is why I go away Zak. Thousands of children are on the move, some of them wounded, all of them hungry . . .’

  ‘One day, I’m telling you, I’ll defend people who suffer what I’ve suffered,’ Aisha told Zak, clenching her jaw just as his mum did when she was determined to see something through; it was always a sign that there was no point in arguing. Zak believed Aisha. There is nothing unreal about this girl, he thought.

  ‘You’ve made me remember what she does – my mum, she’s a journalist,’ Zak said. ‘She reports on conflicts, in war zones, refugee camps. I think she’s been to Somalia.’

  ‘I would like to meet her.’ There was a light of hope in Aisha’s eyes. ‘Maybe she could help me find my abo!’

  ‘Maybe,’ Zak looked doubtful.

  Aisha waited for him to tell her more, and after a long pause he began to speak.

  ‘She’s missing too,’ Zak whispered.

  ‘Is that why you ran away?’

  ‘I think so.’ Zak still felt as if his own mind was cloaked in a fog that was only slowly clearing. Memories loomed out at him like stark branches piercing through the mist. Nothing adds up. I do have a memory of a girl in a blue headscarf dancing and happy and free, but that girl didn’t seem to be connected to the story that Aisha had just told him. Maybe he had made that girl up because he’d felt so miserable. Zak picked up the bag of jacks, tipped them out, and gathered them in time to catch the ball. Perhaps he had been meant to find this girl here. To understand that nothing was as it seemed. Aisha was not the perfect angel of happiness dancing through the sunbathed woods he had imagined her to be.

  Suddenly Conker lifted her head and listened for a second, then yelped and tore out of the shelter.

  ‘Conker!’ Aisha hollered after the dog who was barking wildly, her tail beating the ground. Aisha followed then ducked back into the entrance of the shelter but it was too late – the homeless girl had already seen her.

  Iona stared down at Aisha and the two girls’ eyes locked for a moment but then Iona looked away, distracted. She had stepped out of sight now, but not ear-shot. Was she talking to someone? Red began to trot back towards Aisha and she knelt down to stroke her.

  ‘Red! Get back here!’ the homeless girl ordered as she appeared again at the top of the slope but this time the dog did not move from Aisha’s side.

  ‘You stole my dog!’ Iona shouted at Aisha between clenched teeth.

  Aisha’s heart was beating fast, but she stood firm and shook her head slowly. ‘I didn’t know she was yours.’

  Iona looked as if she was ready to run at Aisha and bash her fists into her face.

  Zak stumbled out of the shelter, squinting into the light, taking in the girl with coiled hair. He placed his hands around his neck. Now he knew for sure where he’d seen that dog before.

  ‘Well, well, well, if it’s not Zak! What a cosy little scene! You look a bit worse for wear!’ Iona heard the snarl in her own voice as she stumbled and slid down the slope towards them, her finger jabbing the air.

  ‘He’s hurt,’ Aisha whispered, holding out her arm as a barrier, as if she thought Iona was about to attack them both.

  ‘What do I care?’ Iona hissed. ‘Ever go near my dog again, either of you, and I’ll kill you.’

  Zak stepped forward, but before he could intervene the dog was baring its teeth at . . . how strange that he could recall this girl’s name . . . Iona. She took a step backwards. She had never sensed a moment of aggression from Conker until now.

  ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have . . . Red hates fighting. Me too. It’s why I need her by my side. Keeps me in order.’ Iona sobbed as she clung on to her elbow and crumpled to the ground, defeated. The dog came to her side, nuzzled into her and whined.

  ‘Have you hurt yourself?’ Aisha asked, noticing the girl’s wince of pain as she clutched her arm.

  Iona shook her head. ‘Old wound,’ she said, turning away from Aisha, ‘flares up from time to time. Well, my Red. I thought I’d never find you.’ Iona sighed as she stroked the dog’s coat. Then her expression changed. ‘There are people looking for you two! All over the place. You’re in the papers.’ She pointed at Zak. ‘Especially you! It was on the news and everything. They think you might have been kidnapped!’ Iona looked him up and down sceptically. ‘Maybe I should trade you in myself!’ She laughed, rummaging in her bag and bringing out dog biscuits. She fed Conker from her hand and the dog ate greedily. ‘Don’t you pretend that they’ve starved you to death – you look healthy enough to me! Been spoiling you with treats, have they? Let’s get out of here, Red! Leave these two babes in the wood to their little game of hide-and-seek!’

  Zak felt himself able to breathe again as he watched Iona step away from them a few paces. But Red whined and circled Iona’s legs for a moment and then ran back and f
orth across the short distance between the two girls.

  ‘She had no name on her collar, so I called her Conker,’ Aisha explained. The dog lifted its head as if it recognized its new name.

  ‘She’s called Red!’ Iona yelled at her. At the sound of this name, the dog lifted its head again.

  ‘Looks like she answers to both,’ Zak intervened.

  ‘What are you now, the United Nations?’ Iona snapped. ‘She’s my dog, and you can’t take her away from me like this.’

  Aisha stepped forward and placed a hand on Iona’s arm but got a shove in the chest in return.

  ‘Take your hands off of me, and keep away from my dog too.’ Iona’s finger was jabbing the air again as Aisha fell backwards.

  Zak stepped forward to help, but the dog was already between the girls, viciously growling at Iona.

  ‘Look what you’ve done! Turned her against me,’ Iona said accusingly. Tears of anger stung her eyes as she slumped to the ground next to Aisha, defeated. Now the dog lay between the two girls and pawed Iona.

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll be gentle,’ Iona promised the dog. Aisha held a hand out to stroke it and as she did drew slightly closer to Iona, as if approaching a wild animal that might spring into attack-mode at any moment.

  ‘I didn’t steal her. She found me and just stayed by my side,’ Aisha whispered.

  ‘Aha! Sounds about right,’ Iona nodded. ‘Got a heart of gold, this dog.’ Iona pressed her face against the dog’s head then wrapped her arms around its neck and it snuggled in close to her. ‘Well, I’ll be needing her back now . . . looks as if you two have got each other at least. Come on, Red, it’s just you and me again, girl.’

  Iona stood up and started to walk away, calling for Red, but the dog whined in the entrance, refusing to follow.