Taylor Five by Ann Halam
Then she realized Donny wasn’t following her.
He was out of sight. She had to go back, and found him sitting on a rock before the boulders began, on a sandy beach in a curve of the stream.
“What’s the matter? Why have you stopped? Come on!”
“Could we have a short rest?” asked Donny piteously.
“A little bit further.” Soon it would be dusk, and then they’d have to stop. But they wouldn’t have done fifteen kilometers, and they had to do fifteen kilometers. “Another thousand steps. We’ll count them. They’ll soon go. Then we’ll have done thirteen kilometers. That’s nearly as good as fifteen.”
When Donny was a little boy and they were out on a trek in the forest, he’d get very tired. Dad used to sing nursery rhymes when he started to flag. Tay had never needed to be coaxed, no matter how hard or long the walk. She never ran out of energy.
“I’ll sing ‘Ten Green Bottles’—”
Donny looked at her in despair: and then, as if he couldn’t stop himself, he tumbled from his rock and lay on the ground, curled up in a ball. Uncle swung himself from the lowest branches of a tree and loped across the beach, knuckling the sand. He laid his long hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked up at Tay reproachfully.
“I know he’s tired,” said Tay. “But we’ve got to get on. Get up, Donny, please.”
Donny didn’t move. Tay heaved a sigh and came down to the beach beside them. “Please, please get up, Donny.” He didn’t stir. She felt his forehead and was shocked to find it was very hot, burning hot. He was shivering too—
“Oh no. He’s got a fever. Oh, Donny, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were sick.”
She gave him aspirin and a drink of water and coaxed him to suck two glucose tablets. When she rolled up his T-shirt to look at his back, only a tiny patch of blood had seeped through the dressing. She changed it anyway.
The wound looked no better and not much worse.
“Does it look bad?” Donny asked. “It hurts. Sort of inside.”
“It doesn’t look bad. Tell you what, we’ll spend the night here. We’ve done well. Let me put some insect repellent on you.” Mosquito bites didn’t usually bother the children. They had a regular vaccine injection that acted like repellent, but there was no point in taking chances. Feeling very guilty, she anointed Donny’s exposed skin and made him the best bed she could, with the rucksack for a pillow and the yellow blanket. She thought of making a fire: but they had seen enough of fire, and the night was warm enough. . . . She told him how brave he’d been, and how they’d have a slower day tomorrow, and soon, soon they would be safe. He didn’t seem interested. He curled up again, muttering that he couldn’t get comfortable.
Tay went to sit on a boulder at the water’s edge.
A new fear gripped her. Donny’s ill.
Uncle appeared, silently, and hunkered down beside her.
“D’you think it’s his hurt back?” she whispered. She knew she was talking to an animal: but she must talk to someone. “Where the bullet hit him?”
The ape grunted softly, as if in answer.
“If there’s a bullet I can’t reach it. It’s buried too deep. What’ll we do?”
Uncle said nothing, but his shaggy presence at her side was a great comfort. They sat together in silence until it was fully dark. Then Uncle went off into the trees, to sleep alone the way orangutans do. Tay lay beside Donny on the sand. In the middle of the night she woke. Donny was sitting up, the blanket fallen back and his arms wrapped round his knees. “Look!” he said. “Look at the green star flowers! They’re swimming across the night lake!”
The valley was very still and cool. In the clear darkness above the stream a ball of fireflies had gathered. There must have been a hundred of them, brilliant green like chips of emerald, spinning and whirling around each other, above their shimmering reflection.
“Isn’t it beautiful!” said Donny. He grasped Tay’s hand, smiling at her incredibly sweetly. His eyes in the firefly light were brimming with love and wonder. “Twice. Here and there. Like in heaven. You see them, don’t you, Tay?”
“I can see them.”
“They’re so beautiful. How unbelievably great to see that. Aren’t we lucky!”
His skin was burning hot. She talked to him, but he kept telling her about the fireflies being stars on the night lake, no matter what she said. She thought he wasn’t really awake. She wet her bandana in the stream and bathed his face and hands. She did that again and again, with lots of fresh cool water, until he was quiet; and he seemed to fall asleep again.
In the morning Donny said he was better, but the little wound on his back had gone puffy. Tay gave him more aspirin, and he ate a spoonful of rice pudding. Tay had no appetite. She finished the pears from the night before, but the pudding was like white slime. Uncle rejected it too, so they left the hardly touched tin behind, under a rock: and Tay felt very uneasy about the waste. What if they ran out of food? Then they’d have no energy for the trek at all. But if they could keep going, for just another fifteen kilometers, they’d reach the river crossing. She forgot that she’d been doubtful if anyone would help them at Aru Batur. Now it seemed like a haven that they must reach. There’d be people, there’d be some kind of medical help, a telephone that worked, maybe even a doctor. . . . Donny didn’t complain. He tried very hard to keep going. They walked slowly, and Tay sang to him, the old baby songs, and he liked that.
Uncle stayed closer today. He was never out of sight.
By noon they’d covered five kilometers. They stopped “for lunch,” but Donny couldn’t eat. Tay persuaded him to drink some water and gave him two more aspirin. Then she left him with Uncle and climbed up the side of the valley again. She was frightened of the rebels: but Donny needed medical attention. The climb was much further and steeper than it had been before because they’d been traveling downhill all the way, following the stream as it cut deeper and deeper into the valley. When she reached the top of the slope this time, she met an impenetrable wall of trees. They’d passed beyond the fire. It would be nearly impossible to force a way back to the road.
Donny probably couldn’t manage the climb anyway.
They hadn’t seen a human soul since they’d run away from the rebels. Very few people lived in the forests of eastern Kandah, except for those in the logging camps and the villages at old river trading posts like Aru Batur. Tay stared at the trees, feeling the vast, lonely emptiness around her. The rain forest had been her home; now it felt like another enemy.
She went back to Donny and told him they had to walk again.
By dusk they’d covered another three kilometers. Donny was being very brave, but she could tell he was in pain. He said he couldn’t get his breath. She coaxed him on, with her arm around him for the last part, until they reached another river beach, where he would have a smooth place to lie down. She bathed his face and hands, wiped him with insect repellent and made him as comfortable as she could. He drank some water, but he wouldn’t suck any glucose tablets. He said he couldn’t. He said his back was hurting, and his throat was hurting, and he couldn’t get comfortable. Tay changed the dressing again. The wound had a swollen, angry patch around it.
Yet it looked so small, and it was only bleeding a very little.
Before they left the refuge, Tay had put the first aid kit from the Land Rover into her rucksack. She’d used most of what was in her day-trip kit on Clint’s leg wound. The Land Rover kit was much more serious. It was designed to cope with total emergencies, when someone was badly hurt and there was no chance of getting to a doctor. She left Donny and carried the plastic box with her to the water’s edge, where there was more light. She emptied it: looking for anything that might help. At the bottom of the box there was a flat case. She opened it and looked at the contents. Morphine. A syringe and needles, in sterile packs. The powerful drug, in six small tubes. A leaflet of instructions.
Morphine is a very strong painkiller.
He would get a go
A shaggy rust-red ape hand was suddenly there, beside her own. It looked like the hand of an ogre in a fairy tale beside her own small smooth human hand. Uncle delicately picked up the syringe, in its packet.
“Hey. No! Put it down, Uncle. Put that down! Naughty!”
Uncle took no notice. He examined the wrapped syringe curiously, and then carefully replaced it in the case. He looked at Tay solemnly.
“You don’t think so?” said Tay. “You think I shouldn’t give him the morphine?”
Uncle said nothing, he was only an animal. But he looked at her very severely. Tay shut the case and put it away; and took out the aspirin bottle instead.
“I think you’re right. We’ll save that for the last resort. I’ll give him more aspirin.”
Uncle left them early that evening; and Tay missed him. She forced herself to eat a little and got Donny to drink some glucose and water (she’d thought of dissolving the tablets in water, which was easier for him). She didn’t sleep. She sat up all night, bathing his face and hands, and telling him stories, and reading to him from the copy of Shakespeare she’d picked up in the clearing. The sound of her voice seemed to quiet him, though she thought he didn’t understand much of what she said. She managed to get him to drink more glucose and water in the middle of the night.
If only there was a way she could give Donny some of her own strength.
But she couldn’t.
In the early morning Uncle reappeared with a handful of bitter-smelling leaves. He gave some to Tay and made her understand she was to chew them to a pulp while he did the same: and then they would give Donny this chewed pulp.
Something had happened to Tay when she and Uncle were looking at the morphine syringe together. This morning she could not think of him as an animal. An orangutan isn’t like a cat or a dog, or even a monkey . . . and Uncle wasn’t like other orangutans. He was like a person. A person like Tay, but older and wiser, who would help her. She would take his advice—
Donny protested feebly about the disgusting green leaf pulp.
Tay told him that orangutans doctor themselves with herbs and it would be all right, because the red apes were so like human beings, their medicine would be medicine for Donny. Uncle came from Sumatra, not from Borneo: but he and the other apes must have told each other things, secrets, wise things. . . . She didn’t know if she believed this reassurance herself. But she was desperate, and she truly didn’t think Uncle’s leaves would do any harm. Donny trusted her, and managed to swallow some of the goop. It had a good effect. His fever lessened, and he slept. But he obviously wasn’t going to be walking anywhere today. Or the next day . . .
Tay thought hard and made up her mind. They were only ten kilometers from Aru Batur, but Donny might never get there at this rate.
She would trust Uncle to look after her brother. She would go and fetch help.
She told them what she’d decided. Donny said yes, he would like Tay to fetch a doctor, because his throat hurt. She wasn’t sure he knew where he was. Maybe he thought he was at home, in the clearing, feeling poorly but safe in his bed.
Uncle didn’t say anything, of course: but Tay was sure he understood.
The first two kilometers were lumpy going. Then she reached a tended patch of taro root plants, and a footpath. She began to jog, and then to run, and the figures on the pedometer started flying. The heat of the day didn’t slow her. She didn’t feel it. She ran on and on. In another five kilometers the path became a wide track, and she reached a house: an old wooden house on stilts, standing in a garden of vegetables. There was no one in sight. She was frightened, thinking of rebel soldiers ready to jump out at her, but she was more frightened for Donny, so she went boldly into the garden, and up the steps, and called at the open door. Nobody answered. There were benches and a table in the room inside: colored mats on the floor, enamel bowls on the table, a dish of rice; a clock on the wall. But nobody was home.
She hurried around the back: nobody there.
She ran on, speeding up. Almost immediately she could smell smoke.
She passed more empty houses, and now she could see the smoke ahead of her, a cloud of it above the trees between her and the river. She had only been to Aru Batur once, on that overland trek to the coast, but she remembered it well. There was a little mosque, and a blue-painted Christian chapel. It was unusual to have a mosque and a chapel in the same village, but Aru Batur was like that. It was a mixed settlement, a trading post. She remembered how they’d all eaten fried rice with great big fat river prawns at a market stall, on banana leaf plates, and Donny had played with the stallholder’s children—
She kept running, through silent streets, past the mosque and the chapel, right down to the market on the waterfront.
All was still. The forest fire had not been through here, but another kind of fire was smoldering. There was a burned-out bus, oozing greasy smoke, standing in the market square. The stalls had been smashed, and there were heavy tracks everywhere, like the churned-up tracks in the refuge clearing. She could see no human bodies, but there was a trail of dead chickens, and a dead goat. The beaten earth was strewn with vegetables and fruit: and all kinds of market goods.
“Is there anybody here?” she called.
No answer.
“Help me!”
Her blood was drumming in her ears, the hot sun suddenly felt like a weight on her head. Everything she’d ever loved was falling away from her, falling into darkness in this hot sun, in this stillness.
“Help me!” she yelled again. “My brother’s dying!”
No one answered. She heard a burst of gunfire, somewhere close. Undeterred, she hurried around, searching for some kind of help. There must be a pharmacy of some kind that she could loot for medicines. But she couldn’t find it. The villagers had fled, everyone was gone, and she had to get back to Donny. She couldn’t leave him alone with Uncle any longer.
Somehow she’d have to get Donny here. They would find some medicines, she would break into one of the abandoned houses (Uncle would help, he was so strong); and they would put Donny to bed. If the rebels came back, too bad. It would be better to be kidnapped than to be on their own.
There was a rattling noise in the sky. She looked up and saw five big helicopters sailing over her like giant vampire bats.
“Help!” yelled Tay recklessly, waving her arms. “Help me!”
But they flew on and disappeared toward the south.
She jogged all the way back to the river beach, stopping only twice to drink some water. Donny was lying where she’d left him, with Uncle faithfully on guard. The ape had broken some green branches and woven them into a shelter, like the nests that orangutans make to sleep in, high up in the trees; except this nest was on the ground. Donny seemed a little better, lying there in the cool shade with his blanket under him and folded over him. He must have been sleeping. He was glad to see her, but he didn’t think she’d been gone very long. She told him she’d been to check out the river crossing, and it was safe, no rebels about; and they would go there when he felt better.
She bathed his face and hands, and helped him up to have a wee. He said he wasn’t hungry, but she gave him more aspirin, got him to drink glucose water and even persuaded him to eat a piece from a new tin of fruit. The wound on his back was the same as it had been, only darker. She put some more antibiotic powder on it, and a fresh dressing. Donny winced and whimpered, but he didn’t cry out.
Uncle and Tay stayed with him until he dozed off.
Then Tay looked at Uncle grimly, and they went off to sit by the water.
“The rebels have been in Aru Batur,” said Tay, her head in her hands, staring at the calm stream. “It was deserted. Either the people have all run away, or they’ve been kidnapped like everyone at the refuge. What are we going to do? He’s really sick, Uncle, and I can’t get help. Have you got any ideas, be
Uncle ducked his head and made a very gloomy long lip.
She was sure he understood every word.
“I think he’s got a bullet in his lung,” Tay blurted out, keeping her voice down so Donny couldn’t hear. She’d been thinking this for a while, but she hadn’t dared to say it, it was too awful. “Maybe not a bullet in his lung, but something like that. Something that our first aid isn’t helping at all. We can’t move him, and there’s no doctor we can fetch. But there is a chance, Uncle. The radiophone isn’t any use. I’ve been trying and trying, just in case, when Donny wasn’t looking, but it’s no good. . . . But the phone has a GPS locator beacon. I think it’s still working. It’s supposed to go on working for weeks. If anyone’s looking for us, they can find us. We don’t have to be on the East Road.”
Uncle looked puzzled.
“Clint said Pam would move heaven and earth. He said we would go along the road and meet her with Lifeforce people coming to save us. We can’t do that. We have to stay here and look after Donny and hope he gets better. But if we’re lucky, someone might find us here anyway. That’s what I’m saying.”
She knew that Uncle agreed.
She forced herself to eat the rest of the tin of fruit. She wished she had the big rucksack, and that it was full of sweets instead of sensible things like baked beans, tinned pilchards and high-energy trekking bars. She thought she could have persuaded Donny to eat a few sweets, and it would have been easier for her too. But there was no big rucksack, and not much food that Donny could eat at all. A couple of sensible tins. Biscuits, trekking bars and a good supply of glucose tablets. That was all.