Saving Abbie

by Allan Baillie

  ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Then you can stay there for ever.’ He paddled the canoe back to the wharf.

  Gistok looked across the river, saw Abbie and shook a branch. For several hours Abbie and Gistok dozed in their trees, but neither of them moved.

  In the afternoon Anne came to the wharf after a trek into the jungle, and paddled the canoe back over to Gistok. ‘Come on, Gistok, it’s a bad place on this side of the river. Come back!’

  Gistok thought about it for a while. Then she slithered down the tree and gripped the canoe with her two feet while she kept her hands locked on a thick branch.

  ‘Aw come on, Gistok, let’s go back home,’ pleaded Anne.

  But she did not move.

  Anne rocked the canoe, back-paddled furiously, even splashed Gistok with her paddle. But Gistok only dripped and licked the water on her face.

  The man who had tried to coach Gistok out of her tree earlier on dived in from the wharf and swam across the river again. He climbed aboard the canoe and tried to dislodge Gistok’s hands on the branch, and failed. He took a step back and clicked his fingers, grinning. ‘Hey, you want to dance? Let go the tree and we’ll dance.’ He swayed and sang to Gistok.

  Gistok lifted her upper lip in a long sneer.

  ‘You’re sinking us!’ Anne hissed.

  The man shrugged and stopped. ‘This isn’t working.’

  The second man swam across the river and swung himself aboard. Both men splashed Gistok but she only used her long tongue to lick the water on her face again.

  ‘Tickle her!’ Anne said. ‘Under the arms …’

  They tickled her under the arms, and the ribs, and behind the ears as Anne back-paddled, rocked the canoe and panted.

  Gistok opened her mouth and yawned.

  ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,’ Anne grunted, infuriated.

  ‘I think she likes it,’ said the second man.

  A third man walked on the wharf with some bananas. Anne shouted at him. ‘Hey, we need you!’

  He jumped into the river, swam the bananas across and passed them up to Anne. Anne looked up at the men in the canoe. ‘All right, beat it!’

  So the men looked at Gistok and then at each other, and jumped into the river.

  Gistok grinned down at them as they surfaced, while Anne moved halfway along the canoe and offered Gistok a single banana. ‘Isn’t that lovely, Gistok! Just smell it!’

  Abbie clicked her tongue in faint annoyance.

  ‘Maybe I should bite the banana,’ said the third man from the river. ‘To show her how good it is.’

  ‘Get away, she knows how good it is, don’t you, hey?’

  Gistok tried to pull the canoe towards her with her feet but it was pressed into the mud of the bank. She reluctantly took her right hand from the branch, which swayed over the canoe, and took the banana from Anne.

  ‘And there’s an even better one here,’ Anne waggled her hand. Banana by banana, they both moved slowly along the canoe until Anne held the last banana beyond Gistok’s wavering outstretched fingers.

  Gistok looked at the banana, then up at the berries at the top of the tree.

  Abbie waited. Those berries must be beautiful to taste. Even better than the milk in the yellow basin, even better than the jackfruit skin from Ki’s forbidden rubbish pile. They had to be. To get them Gistok had untied that knot, taken the rangers’ canoe, steered the canoe out of the wharf and away from safety into that constant tugging, swirling brown river. Into the open water. To the other side.

  Those berries must be sweet in Gistok’s mouth.

  Gistok looked down at Anne and her single banana. Then she looked across the river, to the wharf where she had sprawled in the sun, to the familiar drooping piece of jungle. She lifted the edge of her top lip for a moment, then rocked her head gently before finally tumbling into the canoe to take the banana from Anne.

  Abbie sagged a little, as if she was suddenly tired. She was still watching Gistok and the canoe when she heard a long, lonely cry from the heart of the jungle behind her. Like a wind through the leaves, or the beginning of an old tree falling.

  She turned in her high fork and stared at the still forest, with a strange tingling under her skin.

  You’ve heard that cry before. Don’t know what it is, don’t remember where. But it’s in your body. Not like Gadas’s shuddering engine, or the snuffling of the pigs before dawn, catching you in the throat. No, no, it’s all the hair rising together. Nothing like fear, and you don’t know what it is …

  Abbie looked back at Gistok lying there with her banana, at Anne paddling her gently across the river and at the three men swimming around the boat. Gistok was in charge again.

  Abbie stroked the wild hair on her arm for a moment, and pulled herself from the fork of the tree. Then she swung away from Gistok and her canoe, away from the wharf, past the buildings, past the large empty cage, over the bananas-and-milk stand …

  … and into the deep jungle.

  Ian settled the papier-mâché helmet on his head, grabbed the broom-handle spear and thumped through the painted castle.

  ‘Watch it!’ said a girl with a red paintbrush in her teeth. ‘I spend half my time fixing smears left by clumsy actors instead of working on the new scenery!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Ian muttered as a smile sneaked across his face.

  Actor, she said. Never mind that you are only a spearman with about two words to say. You’re an actor! Hey …

  He blinked at the girl: long brown hair, a spray of freckles, snub nose and glasses. ‘I know you. You’re the girl with the glittery butterfly glasses.’

  She frowned, took off her glasses, looked at them with their normal grey frames, and put them back on. She squinted up at Ian.

  ‘Well, you wore them once.’

  ‘Last year! For heaven’s sake …’ She frowned and poked the red paintbrush at him. ‘You were Jack the Giant Killer.’

  ‘Oh come on, Tash flattened me.’

  ‘I did think I’d have to get the nurse. You were a mad kid, but I bet Tash hasn’t worried you much since.’

  ‘Not much.’ Ian smiled at her and waved his broom. ‘Specially when I’ve got the spear.’

  ‘Maybe I need your spear for the smartass girls I have to put up with. They started to call me Tinkerbell because of those butterfly glasses and now they won’t stop.’

  Mr Luce the drama teacher nodded at Ian from the wings. ‘Anytime you want to jab someone, just yell,’ Ian said as he moved off.

  The girl stood up quickly, grabbed his spear and dabbed some red paint on the point. ‘You kill ’em.’

  Ian smiled. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Just one thing. That fight with Tash and his mob. I remember you said that it wasn’t as bad as a ship …’

  ‘It was a …’ Ian opened a hand awkwardly. ‘You had to be there.’ He lurched towards the stage.

  ‘Hey,’ the girl called softly. ‘Becky.’

  ‘Ah … Ian.’

  For a moment Abbie was in the sinking ship again. She was being tossed from side to side, she heard a constant crashing sound around her, and a shrieking wind combed her face.

  She flicked her eyes wide and saw branches clashing, leaves thrashing in the air. The day nest was being shaken apart and the tree – her tree – was whipping around like a bamboo shoot. Through the heaving leaves she could see mountains of black and purple cloud rolling across the sky.

  In fright, she grabbed branches with both hands and feet and watched her nest tumble from the canopy to the dark forest floor. Broken fragments were eddying like leaves in a stream.

  She hooted. Ian. Where’s Ian? The sea monster’s back again. He’s not here, is he? There’s nobody here but you.

  Nobody but a couple of birds complaining loudly and a lizard scuttling frantically down the trunk.

  A blaze of white shimmered from the storm-cloud, turning her arm skeletal for an instant. Then the wind changed, swept across the canopy, tossing the dark leaves over to their
light undersides, and she smelt moisture in the air.

  She moved into a thick fork and waited.

  A massive boom rolled over the jungle. It silenced the birds, even seemed to quieten the wind.

  Abbie blinked, then made a soft raspberry at the storm. Is that all? Hah! You knew the thunder was coming. You heard it before, even before the sinking ship, when the trees were thrashing like now. And it didn’t hurt. Not at all.

  Abbie clung to the bucking fork and watched the lightning show play across the dark sky. A few large drops of water tickled the leaves and she put out her long black tongue to catch one.

  Then the jungle disappeared. Trees near her quivered for a moment before a grey curtain swept over them. She had only enough time to make an unhappy hoot before she was drenched. It was as if the sea around the sinking ship had crashed over her once more.

  She opened her mouth and gasped for air! Her dusty ochre hair became a sullen coat of mud, streams running from the top of her head and down her body. She closed her eyes and shuffled under a spreading branch.

  The wind dropped to a breeze, then to a wash of air, but the rain kept on falling, heavy and vertical from a grey sky. She climbed down, looking for a lower tree, one with big leaves. She started to swing from branch to branch but her movement brought down a shower from the canopy. She climbed carefully and snorted.

  Just as slow as Ian.

  She pulled off a palm leaf, carried it to a low fork and held it like an umbrella. Then she looked up and blinked.

  Wait …

  She stared at her hand, holding the palm leaf. There was something. Something to remember. She studied the ridges of the leaf, the wind-frayed edges, and the water dripping from her wrist. You have done this before. A long time ago. With the monster in the sky, and the rain, and the leaf. And the smell …

  Abbie widened her eyes, staring again into the green pattern of the leaf.

  There is a picture, if you can stop it from washing away. A still face with dark, deep eyes looking at you with calm concern. Mist. You can almost smell her damp musk. Mist …

  Abbie cocked her head and lifted her upper lip.

  You have been with Mist, in the canopy, in nests, in the wet, many times. In the rain you would snap a fat leaf and pass it to her and Mist would ripple the small wrinkles under her eyes and take it from you with those strong certain hands.

  The rain began to drift away with the last grey clouds, and the sun suddenly blasted from a blue sky. She watched the mists rise slowly from the jungle, washing away the trunks of the trees and lifting the canopy into a low cloud. Ghostly fingers of white filtered past the branches, through the leaves, to touch her.

  She twitched her nose and closed her eyes.

  Mist …

  Ian hesitated outside the milkbar.

  ‘What’s up?’ Becky lifted an eyebrow. ‘Oh.’

  Tash – Thick Lip – was shambling along the footpath, but he was alone. ‘Hey, Monkey Breath!’

  ‘Hey yourself.’

  ‘You got a girl! Bloody amazing. Doesn’t she …’

  Ian’s hands became fists. He is going to make monkey cracks about Becky and you’ve got to hit him.

  ‘Ian …’ Becky warned.

  Tash shifted his eyes and became uncertain. ‘Ah, forget it.’ And he walked past. ‘Watch it.’

  Abbie was dozing in a fork when she heard an intense scrabbling at the bottom of her tree. She looked down and saw three pigs driving their snouts into the wet earth.

  She bared her teeth in a broad grin. Pigs are nothing. You’ve got Mist.

  Abbie shook her tree and a sudden shower fell on the pigs, but they hardly noticed. She snapped a short dead branch from the tree and threw it down at them.

  One of the pigs scrambled away as the branch thudded into the earth. The second pig glared at the branch then charged at it, squealing in rage. Then the first pig ran away and joined the other in trampling the branch. Only the third one looked up and saw Abbie. It squealed in anger, leaping up hopelessly towards her, as if it might fly. Another charged at the trunk, bounced off and charged again.

  Abbie’s grin faded. Once these pigs had filled her with total terror. But that was then.

  They were bigger then. Much bigger. But everything was bigger then. Abbie sucked her lip and remembered how it was. How she had been scampering over the twigs like a lizard around Mist. Until something small had snapped. In one moment she had gone from the soft green light of the canopy into the long shadows. She was clutching leaves, tearing them away, falling, falling, scraping past a lump of bark, skidding down the trunk, with a heavy thud into the damp earth.

  She was sucking air with her eyes closed. But there was an urgent scratching in the dark. Her eyes flicked open and a nightmare – a pig bristling with white hair, drooling from broken teeth, with button-eyes behind a long snout – was thundering across the carpet of brown leaves.

  Abbie shuddered and stared, as if her eyes caught the memory …

  She remembered pushing against the trunk, screaming. The pig’s stampeding feet were kicking sticks aside and the pink mouth widened.

  But Mist was there – a brown-red flash across the tree trunk, snatching her from under the pig’s snout, soaring into the safe leaves of the high canopy …

  Abbie sat on a low branch. She grabbed it with her feet and dropped upside down to grin above the three pigs. She clapped her hands.

  Hey, pigs, can you see? Don’t you see me now?

  The watching pig snorted and swayed its head. The others ran in circles.

  Abbie blew a long raspberry. See, Mist is around me. I am safe from anything. She dangled above the pigs for a moment, then swung up and away into the canopy.

  Ian was sucking his chocolate milkshake when he suddenly giggled.

  Becky looked up from her glass. ‘Tash?’

  ‘Not any more. I was thinking of Abbie. We used to drink milkshakes like this, together.’

  ‘The orangutan?’

  ‘Oh, yes … I didn’t mean you were like Abbie.’

  Becky waved the thought aside. ‘I have been called worse by the A Club. Really, they call themselves that. They’ve called me Tinkerbell and now the Bag Lady because I’m a mess.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘You’ve seen me painting!’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘Tash and the A Club, we have to put up with them. You’re sort of friends with Abbie. That must be a great feeling.’

  ‘Well … she doesn’t talk much.’

  Becky laughed. ‘Do you ever hear how Abbie is getting on?’

  Ian shook his head. ‘There’re no phones in the jungle. Maybe she’s living like a queen, but she’s got troubles far worse than Tash and the A Club. All the time. A lot of the time I wish I was there, in the jungle …’

  Abbie began to move through the trees, quivering the leaves, but not enough to shake the drops of rain onto her. Then a slight breeze brushed through the jungle, creating a short shower from the canopy. She accelerated in a futile effort to dodge the sun-gleamed drops but something was happening. She flared her nostrils, eyes darting around her, and opened her mouth wide as she sped through the canopy.

  Abbie was strong now. She stretched wide from tree to tree, almost flying like a monkey. Mist is flying with her too. Like a shadow. She watched the long tawny hair flowing from her arms and grunted. Better than a shadow. Mist is in those arms, you can smell the muskiness of Mist.

  But a man’s faint call stopped Abbie’s charge across the jungle and the memory of Mist suddenly faded. Abbie hung in between the trees and licked her lips.

  Milk. A man means a basin of milk. You have been eating in the jungle for a long time, with berries, leaves, bark, termites, fruit. Sometimes you had a fruit tree all to yourself for a day. But no milk. No rich, sweet milk.

  She began to swing towards the cry.

  It would be the men she saw with Anne in the stand at the clearing. It would be nice to see people, hear them talki
ng. But …

  Abbie frowned between the trees.

  The stand is where the sun reaches at mid-morning, but this call came from where the sun will set. And this wasn’t the time of day for bananas and milk.

  She slowed her movement but the cry came again, closer and louder.

  All right, don’t worry about it. You’ll see what it means soon enough. She moved easily through the canopy, until the cry was clear and close. ‘Come on, come on, bananas for you all!’

  Abbie blinked, and clutched at a trunk she was passing. She heard a hoarse voice with a faint quiver in the harsh boom. She’d heard that voice from the slow yellow boat, and from somewhere else. From some terrible time.

  The canopy rustled a few trees away and Abbie squinted into the turbulent leaves. Dafida? All the way from downriver, where the low buildings creaked all day, where Ian used to stay. Yes, Dafida, with the old sour face. Now it was even more sullen. And she had a bigger Einstein clinging to her. A lot bigger. Wouldn’t like to carry him now. Maybe that’s why Dafida is sour.

  Abbie shook a branch.

  Dafida looked across the sea of leaves. She recognised Abbie but hurried on.

  They must have been moved upriver from the old place, like Gistok, like you. Maybe everyone gets moved upriver.

  ‘Bananas! Lovely bananas …’ Abbie could see the man now, further away than Dafida, a long way down through the branches and the leaves. Small but dangerous, like a fire-ant.

  You know him and his slow boat with shuddering engine. Gadas. Warn Dafida? How?

  Gadas moved closer, carrying a few bananas and a stick.

  A stick that gleamed.

  Abbie slid around the trunk and shivered. You know that stick, too! Dafida should not go down there.

  Suddenly a branch dipped before Dafida and another orang was blocking her. Dafida showed her teeth and swung her shoulders about. The new orang didn’t move.