by Matt Haig
But, of course, even as the questions came out of her mouth, she was sensing the answer.
Her dad rubbed his tired eyes. ‘You might need to sit down.’
Evie plonked herself on one of the broken sofas.
He was speaking calmly now, as if he was talking about something he’d forgotten to get in the supermarket. ‘You weren’t born in England, Evie. You were born in the city of Tena in Ecuador. In the Amazon rainforest. You moved here when you were three years old. I told you your old life was one big dream. That it never happened. And, eventually, you forgot about where you were when you were three.’
Evie felt her breathing go funny.
‘Is . . . is this a joke?’
But her dad’s face had never looked more serious. ‘You were called Isabella Eva. Isabella was my mother’s name. She died when I was a boy, still at school in Madrid.’
This was getting weirder and weirder.
‘Madrid?’
‘I was born in Spain. My mother was English and my father was Spanish.’
‘Dad, do you speak Spanish?’
‘Yeah. It is my first language, but we often spoke English at home when I was little. I am bilingual. My original job was a translator. And I stayed being a translator when I moved to Ecuador. That is how I met your mum. She was already over there, trying to save the rainforest. Trying to save the animals.’
Evie looked at her dad as if a stranger had taken over his body.
‘Eva was your middle name. Mum always called you Evie, so that was your new name when we moved here. And Trench. Trench was our new surname. And I changed my first name from Santiago to Leo.’
Evie stared at her dad in total disbelief. It felt so strange. As if she wasn’t real. ‘You changed our names! I don’t understand.’
Evie’s voice was getting cross and now her dad had a tear in his eye. ‘I’m sorry, Evie. I had to do it. I had to do it for you. I had to do it for your mother. I had made her a promise. To keep you safe. We had to start again. New names. New country. New everything.’
Evie couldn’t believe it. ‘Am I Evie or am I Isabella?’
‘You are Evie. You are Evie Trench. It’s just . . . You didn’t start off that way.’
Evie had ten thousand questions, but they all came down to one. She peered into her father’s eyes. ‘Why?’
‘Your mum was a very special woman,’ he said. ‘Even more special than I have told you. She was like you. A good human to her very bones. She wanted to save the rainforest – the Amazon rainforest – from being destroyed. And that is why she went to South America. Not for a month, like I told you. She lived there for eleven years. Including the three years you were there too. Mostly in the city. But sometimes in a hut right in the jungle.’
Evie thought again of her dream. The snake and the frog. It now seemed that it wasn’t a dream at all.
‘Are you okay?’ her dad said. ‘Shall I keep going? Shall I tell you everything?’
Evie nodded in a daze. She couldn’t believe there was still more to find out. She stared down at the birth certificate in her trembling hands.
‘Your mum had the Talent, Evie. Animal telepathy. Just like you, and she was hearing all the animals. The animals told her terrible stories about the humans who were destroying their land. And she helped them. She told the animals what was happening and where to hide. She was a hero to the people who wanted to save the rainforest. But other people didn’t like her.
The business people. The loggers. The cow farmers. And one man in particular really didn’t like her.’
Evie was wondering – dreading – what was going to come next. She felt every inch of her skin wake up, the hairs standing on end, as if her whole body was listening.
‘You see,’ her dad continued. ‘She could get inside the mind of any animal. The most weird and wonderful animals you ever saw. Macaws, squirrel monkeys, sloths, jaguars . . . Creatures that seemed like they were from another world. But she wasn’t the only one out there with the Talent. There was someone else. Someone even more powerful than your mum.’
‘Mortimer,’ whispered Evie.
Her dad nodded. ‘That’s right. Mortimer J Mortimer. The worst man ever to have lived.’
Mortimer J Mortimer
ortimer J Mortimer,’ said Evie’s dad, ‘was – and is – the most terrifying human monster.’
Evie hugged her knees into her chest, frightened. ‘Who is he?’
Evie’s dad clicked on his phone and showed Evie a picture of a man in a jungle. A man with a black moustache and a snake around his neck and a devilish smile. He had his arms folded and some kind of tattoo on his right hand.
‘He is a robber and a killer,’ Evie’s dad explained. ‘He uses his powers for evil. Powers so strong he doesn’t just communicate with animals; he can actually take over their minds. He can control them. And that’s what he did. Sometimes he would simply take an exotic animal and sell it. Or he’d take over the mind of a monkey and get the monkey into tents or huts in the jungle to steal whatever was there. He once used an anaconda snake to help him rob people on a jungle cruise. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Sometimes Mortimer J Mortimer would get paid by companies clearing the forest for farmland to “silence” the people trying to save the forest. They didn’t know about the Talent. They just knew he could make problems, and people, disappear. He kept a matchbox full of bullet ants – as you probably know, the deadliest ants in the world – and would tell them to bite whoever was getting in the way of business.’
Evie gulped. It felt as if she was listening to a horror story. But a real life one.
‘He was looking for people to join him. Especially those who had the Talent. So they could use their powers together to take over the world.’
Evie’s head ached from how weird this all was.
‘He wanted Mum?’ Evie asked.
Her dad nodded, and scratched his beard nervously. ‘People like your mum. People like . . . you.’
He told Evie how Mortimer had found out from a scarlet macaw about the rumours that there was a woman somewhere else in the jungle – far away – who could communicate with animals. And how Mortimer had travelled thousands of miles down the Amazon river, from Brazil to Ecuador, to find her. To ask her to join him. He promised Evie’s mum money. Lots of money. More money than she could ever have dreamed of.
Of course, Evie’s mum said no.
‘He noticed something. He was weakening around her. He thought she was weakening his powers, just by being alive. By having a Talent that she used for good. That’s what he said to her. That’s what she told me on that last night . . .’ A tear slipped down Evie’s dad’s cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
‘The next day he took control of a Brazilian wandering spider and . . .’ He sniffed and looked into space. ‘I tried everything to save her, but we were too far from a hospital. And your mum knew you were in danger too. I don’t know if the animals had told her, but she said he would be after you if he ever found out you had the Talent. So that is why we disappeared. After your mum died from the spider’s venom we came to England, to be near Granny Flora, and asked her to move too, just to be safe.’
Evie closed her eyes, as if the dark would help her understand all this. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I’ll show you,’ her dad said.
He stood up, went over to the same rusty filing cabinet where he’d got the birth certificate from and found some old newspaper cuttings from local newspapers.
Evie flicked through them, looking at the headlines and the photos next to them.
MAN, 29, DIES FROM SHARK BITE IN QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
WOMAN KILLED BY SWARM OF BEES
TEENAGER EATEN BY PIRANHAS
‘And do you know what all those people had in common?’
Evie shrugged. ‘Bad luck?’ she asked hopefully.
Her dad sighed. ‘Unfortunately not. They all had the Talent. Every one of them.’
He showe
d her more newspaper clippings. She saw that the photo of the man who was killed by a shark had been in the paper a month before under the headline ‘LOCAL MAN CLAIMS HE CAN TALK TO ANIMALS’. And the same with the woman. (‘THE WOMAN WHO UNDERSTANDS WHAT BEES ARE SAYING’.) And the teenager. (‘I CAN TALK TO MY DOG AND HE TELLS ME HE LIKES LISTENING TO BEYONCÉ’.)
Evie’s dad was now pacing in circles around a chair with a broken arm rest. ‘Evie, this is why I had to make sure Mrs Baxter wasn’t going to publicise what happened with the rabbit! This is why you have to keep it secret! Mortimer uses animals to kill everyone with the Talent. This is why you must never act on it again. Do you understand?’ Her dad’s face suddenly softened, as if a storm cloud had passed by and the sun had come out.
‘I understand. I won’t any more,’ Evie said sadly. ‘From now on. I’ll ignore all the thoughts of animals.’
And she meant that promise. She really did.
One year later . . .
The New Reality
t was breakfast time. Evie’s dad put on some music while making himself peanut butter on toast. Evie’s dad lived on peanut butter. Peanut butter on toast for breakfast. Peanut butter sandwich for lunch. Evie was pretty sure he would have even had peanut butter for dinner if he could have got away with it.
‘I’ve switched brands,’ he told her. ‘This is called Sun Crunch Peanut Butter. No palm oil! For the orangutans. And no plastic. For the fish.’
‘Yay!’ said Evie. ‘The fish and the orangutans are very grateful, I imagine.’
The music was an old Spanish song called ‘Esta Tarde Vi Llover’. It meant something like ‘This Afternoon I Watched the Rain’. It was a very old-fashioned song, apparently one Evie’s dad had listened to as a child in Madrid, and Evie liked it. She understood some of the words because her dad was now teaching her Spanish.
Talking in Spanish was nowhere near as good as talking to animals, but at least Evie and her dad were getting on a bit better. And Spanish was quite cool. She liked that if you asked a question in Spanish, it started with an upside down question mark. So if you wanted to say ‘What does that mean?’ in Spanish, it was ‘¿Qué significa eso?’
Her dad had seemed a bit happier since he had told Evie the truth. A bit lighter. He was also looking healthier. Evie had insisted he drive less and ride a bike instead, after lecturing him on carbon emissions and polluted air. (‘You sound just like your mum,’ he told her. ‘She would be so proud of you.’) But there were still worries. She could feel them when she passed him sometimes. It was like walking through a cloud.
So she tried to make him feel less worried.
Evie kept hearing the thoughts of animals. Of course she still heard animals. When she walked past a dog or a cat she would often pick up their thoughts. But she had learned to ignore them.
She still cared for animals. She still worried about endangered animals. She still read about animals. She still loved animals. And, like her mum had been, she was dedicated to saving wildlife and the environment.
She told anyone who would listen about how the Amazon rainforest was the ‘lungs of the earth’ because it provided a fifth of the world’s oxygen and it shouldn’t be destroyed. And about the importance of having super-short showers. And how mountain gorillas had been saved from the brink of extinction by conservationists. Or about how melting Arctic sea ice meant that polar bears were in great danger. Or how sea turtles had far more girl babies than boy babies now because of rising temperatures.
But she stayed away from direct contact with animals.
For instance, she had left seeds out on her windowsill that morning for Beak but, as she did nowadays, had quickly ran out of the bedroom so that Beak wouldn’t try to talk to her.
And slowly, sadly, she had noticed that she was starting to walk past many animals without reading their minds at all. Granny Flora had said the more you act on the Talent, the stronger it becomes. Well, the opposite was also true. The less you acted on it, the weaker it became. Maybe in a few years’ time it would be gone forever.
Which meant she would be safe from Mortimer J Mortimer.
Evie was destined for a very safe and very boring life.
She tried to imagine what life had been like when she was a girl called Isabella living in Ecuador. In the rainforest.
But it was hard.
After all, Lofting was very different to a rainforest.
Sure, there was rain. But the dribbly kind, not the intense jungle kind.
Lofting was cold. And there weren’t that many trees. And instead of huts there were houses made of orange bricks. And the sky was grey. And there was a big church that was also grey that had a steeple like a witch’s hat. And there were no spider monkeys or glass frogs or jaguars or parrots or piranhas.
She told no one the truth about where she was born, or her original name. The past was so far away it might as well not have existed.
But she did keep having that same dream. The whole year that had passed since the rabbit incident had been one of weird sleep. In fact, now she was at her new school – ‘big school’, as Granny Flora called it – she’d been having the dream a lot more. The one about the tree snake and the poison dart frog. And, over her morning toast and peanut butter, she said to her dad: ‘I had that dream again. The one where I could mind-read a tree snake and I saved it from a poisonous frog. I could communicate with it telepathically and it felt very, very real. I think it might have happened.’
Her dad stopped looking at his phone and sipped his coffee and said, ‘Well, that sounds like a very interesting dream.’
Evie stared at him. ‘But that’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t feel like just a dream. It feels like a memory that happens in a dream. It feels like something that happened.’
Her dad was shaking his head. ‘The thing is, Evie . . . It’s not impossible. But it might be better to think of it just as another dream. It is best for you to not get your dreams and memories confused. The past is the past. You are Evie. You are not Isabella. I am Leo. I am not Santiago. Let’s forget about the Talent. Let’s forget about the Amazon. This is the present. This is real. This life here. In Lofting. Let’s just focus on that.’
He glugged down the last of his coffee.
And Evie got ready for another day at Lofting High.
Ramesh
n her way to her new school Evie passed a stern-looking man in a green wax jacket walking a springer spaniel. The springer spaniel – like all springer spaniels – was totally weird and very friendly. It began to sniff and pant and wag enthusiastically in Evie’s direction.
‘Hello. Hello. How are you? I am happy. Life is good. Like me. Like me. Do you like me?’ were the thoughts speeding around the dog’s brain. ‘You smell of clean. Clean and coconut. I don’t even know what a coconut is, but you smell of it.’
The dog’s owner yanked back hard on the lead.
‘Agh! I wish he knew how much that hurt.’
Evie looked at the man. A man with a long, hard solemn face. ‘Excuse me, but—’
She was on the verge of telling him.
It took Evie every ounce of strength she had in her not to tell the man that the dog didn’t like it. And she hated herself for not doing so. But she had promised her dad and Granny Flora, and she knew she had to keep a low profile. The Talent had to stay hidden.
So she just patted the dog’s head and carried on walking to school.
Evie hadn’t spoken properly with Leonora for a year now, ever since the argument about the Maltese terrier, even though they had both moved up to Lofting High School together. Leonora was the most popular girl in school, even among the older kids, who sometimes asked for her autograph, and she ignored Evie entirely, except for the odd whisper or giggle about her with her new gang of girls, who all looked like replicas of Leonora.
Evie, on the other hand, didn’t have many friends at all.
She had become so scared about sharing secrets that she tended to shut up around people. The only p
erson at school she liked talking to was called Ramesh, a boy with long, shiny black hair and a deep voice for an eleven-year-old. He was into guitar music and retro video games and scary animals. His mum was in charge of Lofting Zoo.
They were in a maths class together working on something called Pythagoras’ theorem. It was to do with triangles. The only bit Evie had liked was at the start, when Mrs Azikiwe had told them that Pythagoras was an Ancient Greek genius philosopher and maths whizz, who believed animals had souls and was a vegetarian before it was trendy.
But then the lesson grew boring.
Even Mrs Azikiwe seemed bored. ‘So,’ she said, sleepily, ‘Pythagoras discovered that the square of the hypotenuse – the side opposite the right angle – is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides. So, you can use it to calculate the length of any of the sides on a right-angled triangle or the distance between two points . . . On your worksheets, look at question six and see if you can discover the length of the side marked “a”.’ Then Mrs Azikiwe plonked herself on her chair and rubbed her forehead and gazed up at the ceiling.
‘Hypotenuse is a good word,’ Ramesh whispered, staring blankly at the worksheet. ‘Hy-pot-e-nuse.’
‘Sounds like a newspaper for hippos . . .’ said Evie.
Ramesh smiled. ‘I like that.’
A couple of minutes went by, as they tried to work out the length of side ‘a’ on their worksheet.
Mrs Azikiwe was now asleep in her chair.
Ramesh had a sad look about him, Evie noted. He smiled a lot, but there was a sadness to him. She wanted to know what made him sad, but you can’t just ask new friends about stuff like that. So she asked him about the zoo.
Evie thought in an ideal world all animals would be free. But she knew Lofting Zoo was one of the better ones. It looked after species that were nearly extinct.
‘What’s your favourite animal?’ Evie asked him, in a whisper. ‘In the zoo?’
‘Well, I like the meerkats. They’re cool. But I like saltwater crocodiles. And we don’t have them. They’re the most dangerous animal in the world.’