Red Leaves

by Sita Brahmachari

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to say. They screamed so loud, I think my eardrum is burst.’

  ‘Stop talking about eardrums at a time like this . . .’

  Mr Kalsi held up his hand to stop his wife saying another word while he spoke into his mobile.

  ‘Yes, Home Wood Drive, by Kalsis Woodland Store. Homeless lady . . . Elder . . . I don’t know details exactly . . . No you won’t get an ambulance in there . . . and the missing children. Yes, yes, of course, police too.’

  Now Zak and Aisha had taken hold of Mrs Kalsi’s arm and were pulling her towards the wood despite her resistance.

  ‘No, I can’t. Liliana and Shalini are coming here now to find you. They’ll never forgive me if I let you go again.’

  Mr Kalsi took his wife by the shoulders and spoke in a calm, clear voice.

  ‘No questions now. Just go. I’ll stay here and wait for others. We know where you are. Take your phone. Go and find Elder – sounds like she needs you, Mala.’

  She nodded to her husband, took a deep breath and followed Aisha and Zak into the wood.

  Mrs Kalsi asked an endless stream of questions as they followed the paths that led to the conservation zone – questions to which they mostly answered, ‘We’re fine.’ It seemed to take forever even to reach the closed-off area because every few minutes they had to stop for Mrs Kalsi to catch her breath. By the time they crossed the stream and approached Elder’s den she was so out of breath that she could hardly speak a word.

  ‘You have been . . . staying here . . . with Elder?’ she managed to ask between gasps.

  ‘Not really,’ Aisha replied.

  ‘This can’t be where she lives.’ Mrs Kalsi groaned and her hands began to shake as she bent down and pulled aside the wooden door that Iona must have replaced to shelter from the wind.

  The girl was lying on what was left of the bed of leaves beside Elder, holding her hand. Red’s head rested on Iona’s stomach while her puppies were busy suckling. Mrs Kalsi clasped her chest tight as she attempted to take in the scene before her.

  ‘Iona?’ she whispered.

  The girl lifted her head at the sound of Mrs Kalsi’s voice. Her eyes were bloodshot, as if she’d been crying for a long time.

  ‘It’s too late,’ she whispered, gently releasing Elder’s hand from her grip. ‘She’s gone.’

  Mrs Kalsi sat for a while with Elder’s head in her lap. ‘I should have thought to bring a brush,’ she said quietly, as she patiently untangled leaves and smoothed her fingers through Elder’s hair, ‘I came to you, Elder. Home visit. One last appointment,’ she whispered.

  Iona took charge of the arrangements, as if Elder had been a relative and she knew her needs better than anyone. Zak found the stretcher leaning against the side of the den, the same one that Elder had used to drag him into the wood. Iona took a blanket and lay it over the wooden structure. With great care Zak placed his hands under Elder’s back and lifted her lifeless body on to the stretcher. She was no weight at all. Then Aisha lay Red’s three squirming puppies wrapped in another blanket at the end of the stretcher and Iona helped Red to climb on beside them. The dog and her puppies together were almost as heavy as Elder.

  It was a noisy dawn, as if the birds, sheltering from the wind, had been holding back their pent-up song and now began blasting the world with their chorus.

  Elder’s hessian pouch fell over the side of the stretcher as they carried her, slowly releasing a trail of breadcrumbs. Aisha turned and watched the birds fly in. The first to arrive were the two blue-backed birds, their delicate wings fluttering a farewell; then came the robins, sparrows and chaffinches, the screeching crows in their black dinner jackets and finally the pigeons with their titanium collars, pecking behind the stretcher like an unruly gathering of mourners.

  The day was growing brighter and chill grey clouds scudded across the sky washing the morning with a silvery glow. The motley procession slowly bore Elder’s body towards the gathering crowd of press, police, ambulances friends and family waiting on the pavement. Flashlights bombarded them as they left the wood. Mrs Kalsi was first to greet the deafening blare of the road, the blinding swirling lights, the sirens and all the questions.

  Zak spotted Lucas first, then Lyndon and Shalini. He held his breath. You promised me, Edwin. We had a deal. Somebody turned him by the shoulders and he felt his mum’s arms envelop him, grab a fistful of his tangled hair and pull him close. A strangled wail released from his mum’s body that sounded like an animal’s call. ‘My Zak, my Zak,’ she cried. Then he felt his whole family surround him in a tight embrace.

  Shalini hung back a little and waited. Zak stretched out his arms and she too joined them in holding him close.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered to her.

  Liliana was sitting in a police car with her daughter when Aisha walked out of the wood. She got out and staggered against the bonnet of the car, then opened her arms and Aisha walked into them. Liliana held her so tightly that the force of her emotion almost took the breath from Aisha’s lungs.

  A photographer pushed his way through the police barrier, came right up to Liliana and captured their embrace. The flash went off in their faces, but neither of them cared.

  ‘Will you take Red and her puppies, just for a while?’ Iona asked Mrs Kalsi, and she felt, under the circumstances, that she could hardly refuse.

  ‘Sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ Mrs Kalsi asked Iona, but the girl shook her head as she watched Zak and Aisha being swept into the arms of their loved ones, and a sharp stab of sadness pierced her heart. For a while, in the wood, she had felt as if the three of them had become their own little family. Now it seemed that Zak and Aisha would go back to their old lives and she would be on her own once more. Maybe I’m meant to replace Elder in the wood, she thought to herself as she sat in the ambulance and studied the old woman’s lifeless face that now seemed to wear all the scars of her hard life.

  Of course, everybody wanted to know the strange story of what had happened to the missing children.

  The press were hungry for each of their experiences, but were disappointed with the reports that they gave. Had the homeless old woman trapped them there? Did they believe she was a witch and why did they think she had kept them a secret? How had they survived? What did the three of them have in common? Had they made some sort of pact to stay together? Why had they chosen to stay in the air-raid shelter? What was the story behind the war memorial? Who would look after the puppies?

  And as with all stories, Aisha, Iona and Zak each had their different ways of explaining events. Photographs of their emotional reunion on the street made it into all the major newspapers, along with one of Elder and the puppies on the stretcher. It seemed as if the news of their return had captured everybody’s imagination. A picture of Aisha and Liliana embracing appeared everywhere for weeks afterwards. There was a lot of interest in Liliana’s plan to officially adopt Aisha too. It sparked all sorts of debates about the pros and cons of adopting a child from a different culture and religion than your own, at Liliana’s age as well.

  Zak, Aisha and Iona were asked many times to speak of what had really happened to them in the wood. But in the telling each of them kept a little piece of their experience back. Without discussing it, none of them said a word about the amber eggs that had been Elder’s parting gift – their inheritance.

  ‘The truth is, I was only there because I was looking for my dog.’ That was Iona’s reply, but nobody was that interested in her story because she was not one of the officially missing children. As she herself said, no one had been looking for her or waiting at the gates of Home Wood to welcome her into their arms.

  Zak was certain that there was no logical way to explain how he had been led by a soldier called Edwin to the air-raid shelter and then the war memorial, to follow the trail that now made him feel as if he was part of the bricks and mortar of his new house. So he simply said that he had run away as a kind of protest and come across the othe
rs by chance.

  Now that Zak’s belongings from the old house were unpacked, his mum was home for a while at least and Lyndon had come back to see him, it was starting to feel more like home. Zak often looked at the picture of Edwin and Albert he’d framed and placed on his desk and wondered whether they had been sending him some kind of message from beyond the grave. He had got his mum to agree that Albert’s name in the plasterwork should be placed above the front door, so that every time he walked through it he thought of the wartime family and thanked them for helping him to make this place into a home. The only way he could explain to himself what had happened was that for a time a little crack had opened from the past and let him in.

  Aisha told the reporters that she had run away because she was afraid of having to start again. She said she had made some unexpected friends in the wood, including a wise old woman who had looked after them all. Aisha felt for her mother’s beads of jet. Thanks to Elder she knew that the spark of life burned on, that her father, her mother, her aunt and her home were still alive within her, no matter where she lived. And she had asked her social worker if she could meet the girl who would have been her sister if she’d been adopted. Her name was Ayan. Though the family had decided to adopt a baby in the end, Ayan and Aisha struck up a friendship of their own.

  It seemed that Elder and her white poppies had bought them all a kind of peace . . . all except for Iona.

  Of the three of them, Iona found it the hardest to leave the wood and in fact, after Elder’s simple funeral, she’d left Red and her puppies with Mrs Kalsi and wandered off again.

  ‘This is my bad karma, for telling a lie,’ Mrs Kalsi tutted to herself as she set up a dog duvet by the radiator in the shop. ‘At least that girl could have stayed and helped look after her own dog and puppies!’ she complained, but as she sat with Red and her pups watching their little exchanges of affection and annoyance, Mrs Kalsi couldn’t help but fall in love with them.

  ‘Just one, Ashok. Others we will find homes for . . . I have already thought up a name for this one! What do you think of Henna?’

  Mr Kalsi smiled but shook his head. ‘No, no, no, we can’t take in any more strays!’

  Iona was gone for two days. Aisha and Zak found her in the end. They felt guilty crossing over into the conservation zone because they had promised they would never enter it again until the fencing came down in ten years’ time.

  ‘We’ll be twenty three when this bit of the wood’s opened up again! We should come back here together then and see the memorial and the shelter,’ Zak said, as they traced their way back through the wood.

  ‘Let’s make a promise to do that, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing,’ Aisha suggested. She bent her head as Zak lifted up a low-lying branch for her to step underneath. It was impossible to imagine themselves that far into the future but it was also impossible to imagine a time when they would not know each other.

  ‘Iona?’

  ‘Iona?’

  Zak and Aisha both called her name as they descended the familiar steep slope, and sure enough she appeared at the entrance to the air-raid shelter. Her face looked pinched and cold, and there were dark rings under her eyes. She smiled as if she’d been half expecting them, and they went inside. The back wall was now covered in chalk drawings of an island: sea, waves and rocks, and huge-winged seabirds flew around its surfaces. In one corner there was a tiny cottage and a little girl holding a woman’s hand. In the girl’s other hand she held an amber egg, and just appearing out of the top of the egg was a delicate pale green butterfly with yellow-tipped wings.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’ Aisha asked.

  ‘Her name was Lucy,’ Iona said. ‘All this is Iona, I told you . . . the island I come from. I changed my name when I ran away.’

  ‘Lucy?’ Aisha said the name slowly. ‘It sounds sweet and young.’

  ‘Well, I was once, believe it or not!’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Zak asked Iona.

  ‘Not sure. I might go back up to the island for a bit,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know what Iona means?’ Zak asked her.

  She shrugged. ‘No idea.’

  ‘Blessed,’ Zak told her.

  ‘Not up till now!’ She laughed grimly. ‘These last few days in the wood, sometimes I’ve caught this little wisp of red between the trees, heard a chanting and followed it. I suppose it’s just wishful thinking. I can’t stay here forever, that’s for sure . . . sometimes I think I’m losing my mind. I keep having this dream about that Eddie you kept going on about, Zak.’ Iona reached into her pocket and took out the little purse of jacks. ‘I’ve had the same dream every night I’ve been in here. This Eddie turns up, sits on that bench over there and goes on and on about you being the keeper of the jacks.’ She handed the pouch over. ‘Perhaps he’ll get off my case now,’ she laughed.

  Zak smiled at Aisha as if to say, ‘I told you so!’ She shook her head in disbelief, stood up and felt over the letters of Eddie’s name on the wall.

  ‘I have something I made for us all out there,’ Iona led the way climbing up over the shelter to the place where a tree had fallen over the stream. ‘I thought I might as well make use of it. I’ve turned it into a seat. Maybe we can come here one day and sit together with our feet in the stream!’ Iona smiled at Zak as he read the crude lettering she’d carved on the back of the woodland bench . . . he could almost hear Elder speak the words, ‘Look for my light.’

  It felt wrong sitting by the fire with Iona, now that they knew that tonight they would be safely home. They had been equals for a while when they had all sheltered here together, but now Iona was ‘the homeless girl’ again. There was so much that they could have spoken about and yet it was awkward between them. No songs were sung. They could not persuade her to come back with them, even when they told her that the Kalsis had invited her to stay for as long as she wanted.

  When they left, Iona called after them, ‘Thanks for coming to look for me!’

  As they walked back out of the wood it felt to Aisha and Zak as if they were leaving a member of their own family out in the cold.

  Mr and Mrs Kalsi paid for Iona’s travel back to her island. Mrs Kalsi offered to go with her, but Iona insisted that she had to make this particular trip on her own. She went straight to the cottage she had lived in when she had been the little girl Lucy, before the Ogre had entered her life. It was empty and derelict and everything seemed to have shrunk. For so long the place had been a giant in her imagination, but now she was standing here on the soft island sands, it seemed like a modest, delicate jewel.

  Despite the cold, Iona stripped off and ran into the sea, as she had done so many times when she was still Lucy. She felt as if she was shedding all the grime of her street life as the ice-cold water seeped into her pores. When she stepped out of the waves she realized that the island had not shrunk at all; it was just that she had grown.

  She had intended to spend one or two nights there, but she found that she had no wish to stay for longer; to swim and feel free as she had in her childhood – and to know that she could again – was all that she had needed.

  She waited at the little port for the ferry, watching the light dance on the water. ‘Thank you, Elder,’ she whispered to the breeze. The whole trip had lasted only a day, and yet it had taken her years to pluck up the courage to return.

  ‘That’s never little Lucy!’ The ferry woman was staring at her now. ‘I remember you when you were so high!’

  Iona felt a sudden rush of warmth. She did not recognize this woman, but that didn’t matter, because she was remembered, and it gave her a feeling that all the bits of her life were not carved up into little compartments that didn’t join together. For the first time since she’d left the island she felt found. She reached around her neck for the cross her mum had given her and the leather tie she’d strung Elder’s amber bead on and examined the delicate wings of the butterfly within.

  Mr and Mrs Kalsi were delighted to receive Ion
a’s call to say that she would be back earlier than expected. When she arrived they were dancing around their shop fighting over who should give her the good news. Mrs Kalsi won!

  ‘I am delighted to inform you that your daughter’s beautiful portrait of her dog Red has been accepted into the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition!’

  ‘Daughter?!’ Iona laughed.

  ‘Only a little untruth. You are living here after all, and who else but a mother would take in a girl, her dog and her puppies?’

  There was an article about Iona in the Big Issue, and the front cover was a portrait of Elder that Iona had painted especially. At the bottom she had written: ‘Homeless but not invisible’.

  Aisha and Zak watched Iona’s transformation day by day as Mrs Kalsi painstakingly combed out her matted dreads to unveil beautiful silken locks. She was putting on weight and her eyes and skin were bright with health and hope.

  In return for living in the flat above the shop, Iona began working evenings for Mrs Kalsi, even after a long day at art college. In the daytime Mr Kalsi placed a copy of the Big Issue by his till and whatever small item he sold he couldn’t help himself from telling Iona’s story to his customers. He always ended with the same flourish. ‘For Iona we think this is not a happy ending but a happy beginning.’

  Aisha found it. Well, strictly speaking, her puppy Conker found it. Aisha was walking through the churchyard when Conker, who was now six months old, started sniffing around a newish-looking gravestone, so Aisha stopped to read and her mouth fell open in shock.

  ‘Eddie Lowie.’

  This was the name of the little boy ‘Eddie’ on the shelter wall. The boy they had dreamed about – the original owner of the game of jacks!

  Aisha read the gravestones of people she knew: Maisy Lowie, Peggy Lowie, Albert Bainbridge . . . all here under this earth.