Fish (2 page)

“Why is everyone going? Where are they going?” I asked.

“They have heard that the war is coming here. And there is no food left here anyway. They are trying to cross the border into the next country.”

“Then they will be all right?” I asked. “Why don't we do that?”

“The next country is being kind and letting them in, but they need to find somewhere proper to live. They've made a refugee camp, but it's just tents and huts. There is still not enough food, water and medicine for everyone,
although the charities are sending it as fast as they can. Our people back at home have been telling us to leave for some time. We could go back there. But we wanted to stay and help for as long as there were people here that needed help,” Mum explained. She looked worried, as always, but now as she looked across at Dad, there was something else in her eyes.

“Why are you looking like I do when I'm fibbing?” I said suspiciously.

Mum looked surprised and then she laughed and took my face in her hands.

“Oh, I'm telling you the truth. It's just, it's all right for me and Dad to risk staying on. And we want to do the right thing by all our neighbors here. They can't just pack it in and go home—this
is
their home. But we have to think about you, too. And staying here is not good for you. It's difficult. We hoped things would get better. We thought we could stick it out. But now it's not
if
we leave, it's when.”

I didn't really follow all this, but I think it dawned on me later, when I was trudging back up the path to
tell Dad about the fish, that Mum had said “when we leave,” and that meant, the world was not going to be like this forever and ever, and things would be better soon—at least, for us.

When I got to the house door, Dad was stuffing things into bags. A big pot of porridge—lots of it, I noticed glumly—was boiling on the side.

“Oh, there you are! Exciting news,” he said, trying to put on a pleased face over his worried one. “We're setting off back home. We've had absolutely last orders to get out. The war is coming here and anyway, the last people have left—there's no one here for us to help anymore. Don't worry, we'll have plenty of time before the soldiers start moving.”

I wondered why he was hurrying with his packing so much, if there wasn't any danger, but I didn't say anything, just stood there with the mud on me sliding slightly toward the ground. He looked up from pushing a battered saucepan into a duffel bag and took another look at me.

“Oh, for Heaven's sake, look at you. Still, you may
as well use up all the water now for washing. I've packed what we'll need. There's no time to dry those clothes, that's all. Look, just leave them here. You just need clean ones on and some warm ones in your bag for the nights.”

“Where's Mum?”

“She's on her way from the school hut. I've told her the news. I cooked up the last of the food so we start with full stomachs.”

“Are we going on the airplane, like we came?” I asked excitedly.

“Um, no, apparently nothing's flying now,” said Dad vaguely. “We are going to the border to meet the other staff and they'll fly us from that country.”

“Is it far?” I asked.

“Well, quite a trek, I'm afraid. You're a good walker. You'll have to help me and your mum, I'll bet.”

I hurried off to try and wash off the mud and find some clean clothes. I felt quite excited—I didn't like the sound of the walk, but at least it was a change. Then I remembered the fish—and I hadn't told Dad.

When I went back into the kitchen, Mum had turned up and was picking up things and trying to squeeze them into bags Dad had already packed.

“Leave it all, we have to carry everything on one donkey and our backs. Sit down and eat now,” he said, very sternly for Dad, so that she stopped and looked at him.

I thought they were going to have one of their rows, because you can't tell Mum what to do, but to my surprise she said, “You're right,” in a tired way and sat down and picked up her spoon. Dad made a face at me as if to say, “That's the first and last time she'll ever say that!” and I smiled at both of them.

In all the worry and the crossness and the hurry, there was suddenly a very quiet moment. We all sat and ate our porridge, and it was a very solemn and serious meal. When I had eaten enough—or rather, as much as I could stand—I said, “I saw a fish today.”

Dad looked up, puzzled. “Where?”

“In that pond puddle thing,” I said.

“Must have been a reflection in the water, or a bit of stick floating,” he said, clearing away the plates.

“No, I mean, it jumped. Out of the water. It was all bright colors—or that might have been the rainbow it made when the water flew off it. And then it splashed back in again and I couldn't get close enough to see where it had gone.”

“Well, it must have been a fish then,” said Mum, who always believed me. “Nothing else could have looked like that. I wonder how on earth it got in there? Washed out of a river with the rain?” she asked, looking at Dad.

“I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. “Shame. The water's drying up so fast.”

“Then the fish will die,” I said.

“All the animals here have died—and lots of the people. One fish is just one fish, after all,” said Dad, as if that made it all right.

“There is water over the border, isn't there, where we're going?” I asked Mum.

“Ye-e-s,” she answered doubtfully, looking at me sideways.

“We are going over the border. I could take the fish
over the border with us,” I said. “When we find water, I could leave it there.”

“We have enough to carry. How are you going to carry a fish?” She looked at me, amused.

“More importantly, how are you going to catch it, you silly fool?” muttered Dad as he tied up the last bag.

“If I can catch it, I can take it,” I said, looking for a bucket or something to put it in.

“I never said that. Honestly …,” said Dad.

Mum handed me a small cooking pot with a handle. “Here you go. Somehow don't get muddy. Be quick.”

“I don't think it will fit in there. It was much, much bigger—really,” I added as they looked at each other.

“You will make a brilliant fisherman,” said Dad.

“You have the right attitude already. Hurry now—and if you get muddy, you'll have to
stay
muddy. There are no more clean clothes. You'll have to walk to the border muddy, sleep muddy and …”

I left them pulling the bags around to the doorway
to pack on the one remaining donkey, which a guide was bringing. Earlier, I had found it impossible to get to the water's edge. Why did I think I could catch this fish now?

Sure enough, another patch of mud in the ring around the edge of the puddle seemed to have dried up. In fact, now I looked into the water, I saw it was hardly water at all—it was almost liquid mud itself.

I poked with my stick gently, trying not to slip. For a moment, I saw nothing. Then, with another stir of the stick, a strange little black shape opened up in the thick muddy water right near my feet. A hole—it opened and shut again, like an eye blinking.

The fish's mouth! I put down the kitchen pot carefully, filled with nice, clean bottled water, keeping my eye on the muddy patch of water where the mouth had appeared.

Gulp! There it was again. Desperately grabbing for air, the fish had come up to the surface at the edge. I had no net, but somehow felt I wouldn't need it. Granddad had told Dad stories about people who
tickled trout. You could just pick them up, right out of the water, if you went about it the right way.

Slow and gentle, that was it. I crouched down, very, very slowly, and slid my hands into the water without making a ripple. The water was almost mud, and it felt like putting your hands into cold soup.

Suddenly, I touched the fish. It sank away a little, but then struggled up to the surface again. I saw the open mouth, the mud-covered shape of an eye, and then my hands were around it. Gently but firmly, so it wouldn't get away, I lifted it out of the mud with both hands. It felt and looked like a huge piece of melted, slippery chocolate, but was cold, so cold. It flipped only once, in a tired way, as if it didn't really care whether I had caught it or not.

Oh, I couldn't wait to get it in that clean water. I felt I was suffocating too. As I lowered it into the pot—the fish seemed far too big, yet somehow it fitted with ease—I let out my breath and realized I'd been holding it for ages.

“There!” I said, and ran my fingers along its back
and sides under the water, to help clean it. It wriggled a bit more vigorously now, and the mud drifted down to the bottom of the pot, leaving its scales shining and bright.

I picked up the pot, because I was aching with crouching down, and carried it away from the puddle and the mud. Once on the path, I held the pot up to the light so that I could see the fish better.

Really, it was only brown, with a silver white underneath, but as it turned and moved the brown changed into speckles and spots of gold and green and even blue and red.

I carried the pot carefully up the path toward the house. It was hard not to spill the water, as the pot would swing and bump into my leg. I started to see Mum's point about the difficulties of carrying a fish all the way across the border.

When I reached the house, a stranger—not an old man, but older than Dad—was there with a little grayish brown donkey. Mum and Dad were passing bags to the man, who was expertly strapping them onto the donkey's back.

You might have said, “Surely that's too much for one little donkey to carry,” which is what I used to say when I first saw the donkeys working here. But I could
see that our load was about a quarter of the size of those which these little creatures normally carried.

Sometimes you would just see the huge bundles— firewood, or, recently, household belongings—coming down the street and only when they got close could you see the donkey's tiny legs and forehead and tail sticking out from underneath it all.

The donkey stood there patiently, as they do, while the man hauled and pushed the load around, at one point giving the bag on one side a shove that I thought would roll the donkey over sideways, but it just staggered a little and found its balance again.

The man turned and smiled at me when he saw me coming.

“This is our guide, who is also kindly lending us his donkey,” said Dad, also adding the man's name, which I decided I would never be able to pronounce.

“Don't worry about the donkey, little one,” the guide said unexpectedly, reading my thoughts. “She trusts me.”

I wasn't too sure about the “little one” remark.

“They call me Tiger,” I said, with my chin lifting a little.

“Tiger,” he said, trying not to look surprised, “and why do they call such a little … why do they call you that?”

“I wasn't very big, or very well, when I was born,” I said, “but Dad says I was a real fighter. Of course, I'm much bigger now. And strong as anyone.”

The man had a way of seeming to look right into you, if you know what I mean—like your mother might do if you say you've tidied your room when you haven't. But his eyes were quite friendly, all the same.

“But that is not your real name,” he said, with his eyebrows rising. “Your mother said you were called—”

I hated my proper name.

“You can call me Tiger,” I said quickly.

“And you can call me Guide. It's easier than remembering my name,” he said graciously, turning away to put a last strap in place. Once again, he seemed to have read my thoughts.

Mum and Dad smiled at each other after this
exchange between us, and Mum passed my very small bag to me. Then she saw the pot.

“Oh! I was going to say, put the bag on your back. But you—you
did
catch it?”

The Guide turned.

“What have you got there, little—er—Tiger?”

I was suddenly rather shy about my fish. I kept the pot by my side for a moment and then thought it would be rude not to offer to show the Guide, and held it out toward him.

“Oh no,” groaned Dad, “it's a fish. It's my fault. I said the water would be gone soon and the fish would die, and now,
obviously,
we have to save it.”

“Why, yes, of course you do,” nodded the Guide seriously, looking into my pot and missing the expression on Dad's face, behind his shoulder.

“That is a beautiful, bright specimen, Tiger. I don't know that I have seen one so colorful. A little on the small side, but that is to be expected.” The Guide sighed, looking around at the shabby house, the dirt track and the mud-brown, bare landscape.

“It seemed bigger when I saw it at first,” I said, almost apologetically, “but I suppose at least it can fit in the pot.”

“Hmm—the pot. So we need to get a lid for that, to stop the water spilling,” and he turned and directed these last words toward my mother, who, under the calm, inquiring eyes of the Guide, made no more fuss, but went into the kitchen and fetched a lid that would fit.

“Will it be able to breathe like that?” I asked, as the Guide fished two elastic bands from somewhere deep within his pockets and put them around both pot and lid for extra safety.

“It is not ideal, but then none of this is,” he said, casting a hand around to include the donkey, us and the whole area—and I understood him to mean this situation, his country's problems, and maybe Life, all with that one movement of his hand.

“Every time we stop, you can take off the lid and let in a little fresh air. If we have enough water, you can give it some fresh every now and then. I think,” he
added, taking the bound-up, lidded pot from me and tying it somehow to my bag behind my back, “I think that it will be just fine. Now, Tiger, I'll tie it like this” (here he made a noise through his teeth as he jerked something tight), “because you must have your hands free to walk where we are walking. Always remember that. What do you do when you start to fall—huh?”

“I, um, go like this,” I said, and started to put my hands out.

“That's right. You put out your hands to save yourself. You also need them to hold on tight to things sometimes, or to push them out of the way. So—we keep hands free, OK?”