Fish (3 page)

The Guide was talking to me like I was a soldier now, and I was pleased, so I stood up straight as I could under my bag.

“Ready?” He turned to Mum and Dad, who were looking slightly surprised by all this. It is hard for anyone to outboss Mum and Dad. To be honest, they had been so busy, bossy and tired for so long, I think they
were rather pleased that the Guide was getting us all organized.

“Let's go, then,” he said.

He started walking along the path that led away from the back of the house toward the road, which Dad had explained wasn't like a proper road back in our own country because it was only made of earth and rocks.

The donkey, which had no ropes about its head so was in fact loose to wander anywhere, swung around expertly and started to follow the Guide. When it came alongside him it steadied and walked there calmly like a dog. Following behind, I noticed that not only did the Guide not walk behind the donkey, as the villagers normally did, but he didn't have a long stick with which to tap it.

I hoped it wouldn't keep stopping, or we would take a very long time on this trek. I hoped it wouldn't just trot off where it fancied, with all our belongings on board.

Mum must have been thinking the same thing. “Is this a very good donkey, then, that it walks with you like this?” she asked the Guide.

“All donkeys are good, in that they'll walk like this. If we come to a dangerous bit of ground, who would you trust to find the safest way to cross—a man, or a donkey?”

Mum was caught off guard a bit by this sudden question.

“Well, I wouldn't know—people have said animals are the best. Where I come from, there are bogs—like, deep mud that you'd never get out of—with grass growing on the top so that you can't tell they're there. Local people always trust the ponies to know. …”

“Exactly,” said the Guide, looking pleased, and leaving Mum looking even more confused.

He went on, “If I am tap, tap, tapping at this creature all the time, and beating her when she stops, and pulling her around by a rope, how is she to tell me when it is not safe to go in a certain direction?”

Dad was impressed. “That is good sense, if ever I
heard it. But tell me, won't she run off without a rope?”

“She might know where the path is safe, and where the grass is good, and a lot of other things. But she trusts me—she thinks I know more and will keep her safe. So why would she run away? Tell me, Tiger— would you run away from your parents here?”

I shook my head, looking wonderingly at him.

“No, of course not. That is good sense. It's the same for the donkey here. I feed her, I care for her, I have never let her down. Why would she not want to stay with me?”

And we all marched on over the rough earth, heads down, thinking. This was going to be a long journey, but with the Guide, I thought, it was going to be more interesting than I had expected.

There was a hissing.

I woke up from dreaming of snakes. It was dark. Blinking, and trying to remember where I was, I was pleased to find my blanket from my bed wrapped
around me. But I wasn't in my bed back at the house.

A very hard rock was sticking into my hip where I was lying, and I suddenly remembered. We were sleeping out in the open on the night of the first day of our trek to cross the border.

The uncomfortable rock had pushed the snake dream out of my mind. I wasn't frightened of snakes anyway, and it was way too cold for any to be out and about now. But the hissing was real.

My eyes fastened eagerly onto a glow of reddish light and followed it to the remains of the campfire. The Guide sat motionless in its glow, his khaki trousers and shirt lit almost orange against the black, starless sky. Then he reached out and pushed another few twigs into the middle of the fire and there was a crackle and a few blue flames suddenly flared orange. His shape shone white for a moment.

The hissing, I realized, was coming from Dad, still lying down, but propped up on his elbow with his back to me. He was whispering to the Guide across
the campfire, but he wasn't very good at it, I thought, if it was loud enough to wake me up.

“Are you sure?” hissed Dad, just a black shape with a cold white glow about the top edge. “I really didn't want to try and cross the mountains. I mean, with a woman and child. And we're not equipped …”

The Guide spoke softly.

“The rumors as we left were that they have closed the border. We will not be able to cross by the road at the checkpoints. I don't care if you have papers. The border guards have their orders. The camps are overflowing, conditions are terrible. They just cannot let in any more people. As for the woman and child, this is always what men say. Do they not shame us all with their strength in the end? Has your woman not done things you thought that even you could not do?”

And I remembered Mum working with everyone all day to help build the school hut, and then, just as everyone almost fell, rather than sat down, to eat that evening, rushing out to help a woman who was having a baby, which was stuck the wrong way up or
something, and then staying up all night with one of the woman's other babies, which was sick and crying.

And then there was the time when I was quite small and I was asleep and Dad was out, and the roof over my bed started to fall in and Mum reached up and grabbed the great big timber, and held it up, and she was trying to wake me to make me move out of the way, but she couldn't reach me with her foot to give me a good kick and
still
hold up the timber. She tried shouting and everything, but still I slept on. She had told me the story and teased me about it when I was older.

“Typical you! It was terrible getting you off to sleep, you never wanted to. But when I needed you to wake up, you wouldn't!” she'd laugh.

And Dad would say, “Oh, that kid was always clever. Why bother waking up when you seemed to be hanging on to that beam all right?” But you could see he couldn't really joke about it like Mum. He still had that worried look in his eyes when he thought about it.

He'd come back, he said, and found her standing
there like she'd been there forever (“It felt like it,” said Mum), still holding up the beam after nearly two hours, and he went to grab it from her and she just looked up and said wearily, “No, the child! Move the child. You won't hold it.”

He decided she was right about moving the child, though obviously wrong about him not being able to hold the beam, as my mum is very small and Dad is, like I said, pretty tall, if not very wide across.

So he picked me up and moved me into the other room (and I
still
didn't wake up) and put his hands under the beam so Mum could let go, and when she put her arms down, both of them went “Oww!” and “Agh!” Mum, because of the pain as her arms came back to life, and Dad, because he could hardly take the weight and he suddenly realized what she'd been holding up.

“And it wasn't
possible
that she could,” he would say, again and again.

When the men Mum had fetched had rushed in and propped up the beam with a big bit of wood (to
save the roof till it could be fixed properly the next day), Dad had let go and his legs went all shaky with the shock and he had to sit down and have a drink. Mum didn't make any fuss at all, but for the next few days she couldn't lift her arms at all or move her neck very well.

With his back to me, I could still see Dad drop his head a little and knew that he was remembering this story as well.

“You're right. I just feel guilty. We shouldn't have stayed this long. Just a day or two earlier …”

“We can try the road, and you can show the guards your papers,” said the Guide, comfortingly. “It's just we will have to walk further if it happens that we can't cross there. We can try. It is up to you. I am just here to show you the way.”

I sighed at the bit about walking further. I was sure I could do it—after all, I thought about the widows and old people who'd left the village pushing my blanket friends in rickety wooden wheelbarrows, and a woman expecting a baby who had waddled slowly but
determinedly behind them. But the fish? How long could it last in that little pot of water?

I turned over and looked at the cooking pot, sitting firmly on a flat rock where I'd put it when we'd stopped to camp. The lid was off, to let in the air. It was so cold tonight. I had all my clothes on, and my blankets. Did fish get cold too? Was the water frozen?

I used my elbows like a seal's flippers to drag myself over to the rock and looked into the pot. The water was just a pool of blackness. I couldn't see the fish.

“All right, Tiger?” called Dad softly, so as not to wake Mum. You could tell even in those three words that he was wondering how long I'd been awake and whether I'd overheard the conversation.

“The fish is fine,” said the Guide. “If you tip the pot a little toward the fire, you'll see.”

I did as he said, and the light suddenly flashed in a patch across the black surface of the water. Through it, I could see the fish. It wasn't moving around, just fanning its fins a little to keep its place. Now it just looked brown.

“Do fish sleep?” I asked the Guide.

“Of course they do, if people wouldn't keep disturbing them,” he said, and I could hear rather than see the smile. He pushed another few twigs on the fire and I wondered where they had come from. No one could get hold of firewood anymore. I decided I didn't care, I was just very, very grateful. It was so cold.

I put the pot down carefully again, so as not to disturb the poor sleeping fish, and scuttled backward under my blankets to keep warm.

“Everyone should try and sleep a little,” said the Guide, showing no signs of doing so himself. “We have a long way to go in the morning, and morning is not far away.”

Dad lay down again, slowly and reluctantly, and I put my whole head under my blankets to try and warm up. My eyes were wide open. I worried about the border crossing. I would never sleep, I thought.

I woke up to the sound of pots clanging and a smell of porridge. It actually smelt good, which told me I must be
very
hungry. I sat up and saw the grown-ups
splashing their faces with a little water from the rations and hoped they wouldn't notice if I didn't. No one said anything, and Mum passed me a hot drink and some porridge. No nagging about washing for a change—there were some good things about this trek anyway.

When I'd eaten, though, the Guide pushed a clean, wet rag into my hand.

“Just wipe around your eyes and mouth. Keep the sand off. And there are still flies in the day, even though it's getting colder.”

He was right, of course. But by the time he'd shown me how to use the campfire ash on my finger to clean my teeth, I was starting to miss our bathroom.

“Do you have any children?” I asked the Guide suddenly, realizing he always seemed to know what to do, and feeling rather sorry for his children if they had to do this every day.

Everything seemed to go quiet for a moment, and I sensed Mum and Dad freezing mid-packing.

“I had four. Two boys and two girls.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn't like the way he'd said “had.” Maybe they'd just grown up and moved away. Maybe then he
would
say, “I
had
four children.” But I wished I hadn't asked.

“I lost them, and my wife, and my cousin. A missile hit the house. There was nothing left.” He said this in a matter-of-fact way, as he tied another bag onto the donkey. I was relieved he didn't sound as if he was going to cry.

“But you—were you not in the house?” asked Mum.

“Yes, I was there. But I am still here. I do not ask why.”

“You were lucky,” said Dad, pulling his bag on his back.

“That is what people say,” said the Guide, without feeling, as he concentrated on a knot, and Dad gritted his teeth, and you could see he wished he hadn't said it.

Mum put her hand on the Guide's arm and looked into his eyes. “We are glad you are still here,” she said, very slowly and clearly, as if every word was very important. I can't explain it very well. It was like she was
saying something simple, but meant something— well, deeper.

The Guide stopped his strap-pulling and looked back into her eyes for a moment, with a searching look. Then he gave a small smile, and a contented nod, as if they'd understood and agreed.

Me and Dad just looked at each other, none the wiser. At least Mum seemed to have said the right thing.

Having packed all the stuff together again and rubbed out the campfire, we set off along the main road again. I took this to mean we'd decided to try the easiest route first.

The first day of walking hadn't been too bad at all. But one of the things that dragged you down was the landscape.

It was boring—just dirt, dead bushes and rocks, and the mountains, which didn't seem to get closer, blocking the view ahead. Even the sky seemed to be the same brown as everything else.

We passed piles of rubble and falling-down walls, which Dad explained were old farms, small villages even. You could still make out the edges of fields and tracks, he showed me, if you looked. And here, there had been grapevines in rows—an odd stump showed, blackened and blasted.

“I thought you said the war hadn't reached here yet,” I said.

“Just about everywhere in this country has been bombed and laid to waste already,” said the Guide,
“which is why the people were coming to our village. There was chaos here years ago—then a powerful country took charge, and in doing so, much damage was done. Then the next people took control—and they ruined anything that was left. Now they in turn are being forced out … so it goes on.”

Beyond thinking this seemed bad and unfair, which all the grown-ups knew already, I couldn't think of anything to say, and neither could anyone else—so I frowned and puzzled and put my head down and walked in silence, with the Guide's words left hanging.

Nothing seemed to change, so you didn't feel as if you were getting anywhere. There was just the odd dead animal, tatty skin stretched like a tent over bits of old bone, dried out so it wasn't even shocking or revolting anymore. But this day showed me that there could be worse things than “boring” to deal with.