Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (17 page)

Nobody stopped. Will sang louder,

“Father bought a donkey, Ayeh!

Donkey died, Father cried,

Inkie Pinkie Ponkie, Ayeh!”

Will saw a cluster of upside-down shoes stop in front of her, and heard the click of cameras, and quick laughing talk in a foreign language. Chinese, perhaps, she thought. Will sang louder. Squinting, upside down, she saw a handful of copper coins drop onto her scarf, and then foreign female laughter, and then a proper hailstorm of coins. Some of them, she thought, were those chunky little English pound coins.

“Thank you! Thank you, hey!” Upside down, Will
laughed with the triumph and kicked her legs in the air, until her sweater fell back over her eyes. She gurgled and panted and tried to breathe through the cloth, and then choked and toppled over sideways and leaped up, her heart turning victorious somersaults.

There was a scuffling sound as she stood up, and pounding feet. Will brushed her hair out of her eyes. Her scarf and money were gone.

The gang of boys was sprinting down the road toward the park gates.

It was hard; it was too hard not to cry. Will hurled herself after them, shaking and sobbing, and then tripping and grazing her good knee. They hadn't seen her coming; they were clustered under a tree, shoving and grabbing at the largest boy. He held both hands over his head, out of their reach.

“You've got it, haven't you?” said Will. She hadn't seen their faces back on the street. She couldn't be sure it was them. Will bit the inside of her cheeks. Nothing was certain in England. That was the problem. Everything was unfamiliar, even
boys
.

“You've got it.”

The largest boy had acne, and his lip curled up under his nose with distaste. “Wha'? Got wha'?”

“My scarf. It's
mine
. It's from my farm,
ja
. It was a present. You've got my scarf and my money.” She felt limp and helpless. “You
took
it.” Justice was only easy in books.
“Please.”
She didn't know what else to say.

“We done nuffin'. Scram.” The curled lip advanced on her. Will backed away a step.

“Yeah, scram.” The other boys stepped closer.

“I said
please
.”

The boys swore. “Beat it, yeah?” One picked up a stick and waved it at her, as though she were a dog.

“Get lost, all right?” The boys—six or seven of them, years older than her, at least two heads taller—cracked their knuckles. Will stared. Cracking your knuckles to fight. Surely only cretins did that. She stopped backing.

“I need it,
ja
.” She felt her knees and elbows lock themselves, ready. “This isn't a game. Please. Give it back.”

“Don't know what you're talking about.” They were laughing.

“Oh! No, wait, guys! I think I know what the little gypsy means.” The large boy—his neck was thicker than Will's waist, a buffalo of a boy, she thought—put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of pound coins. He wafted them under her nose. “Was this what you was talking about?”

“Yes!” Will held out her hand. “That's mine.”

“Mine now, though, isn't it? It's finders keepers, yeah. We're teaching you a lesson, yeah? Look after what you got.”

Will's body convulsed with anger and she grabbed at his arm. She never touched strangers. He felt clammy and cold. “
Please
,
ja
. Please.”

The wind was picking up again, and the boys were shouting over it, mimicking her voice, “Please! Yarr!
Pretty
please?”

Will tightened her grip on his wrist—
“Please!”
—and squeezed in earnest, vicious, trying to stop the blood.
“Please.”

“Get
off
me!” he said, and he drove his elbow hard into her chest.

Will was stunned for a second. The world darkened and buzzed. She swayed. Then every stored-up ounce of misery and fury, every locked-up scream since her father's death, exploded, fire-hot, inside her chest, and she threw herself at him, roaring and weeping rough sobs, hammering with her fists, her head, her knees. Some of the other boys made grabs at her, and the large boy bellowed and thrashed, backing away into two of his gang and collapsing into a kicking, spitting heap. “Get her
off
!
”

Will had never fought like this. Every unswung punch and unspat spit of the last two weeks boiled up inside her. She kicked one boy in the kneecap, and found the face of another under her right hand and wrenched upward into his nostrils with two fingers. He shrieked. The others stopped
laughing, froze, stared. The one who had had hold of her hair slowly unclenched his fist.

Will pushed him away and got up on shaky legs. “Give it to me. I need it.”

The largest boy stared. “God! You little
savage
!” He threw the money and scarf onto the grass. He tried to spit on them, but Will could see that his mouth was dry and he could only dribble. He edged away from her. His face was bleeding. “You
little
 . . .”

“Come on, Rob.”

“You little . . . savage. Are you crazy?” Still staring, still backing away, the boys swore at her, spat on the ground. Two kicked stones at her head. Will ducked the first one and caught the second in two fingers of her unsocked hand. It was instinctive. She couldn't think in a straight line, let alone see in one. She let the stone drop to the ground.

“Bloomin' heck!” The girl was obviously abnormal. She still hadn't blinked. The boys turned and ran.

“Sha,”
Will whispered. She dropped to the ground against the tree and hugged her chest, waiting for the shaking in her fingers to calm.
“Sha.”
Under her hands, her heart was rattling around like a cutlery drawer in an earthquake. She spoke to an imaginary Simon. “
Sha
, hey?” She hadn't known she could fight like that.

But she hadn't known she could lie, either. She hadn't known she could hate so many people. She was learning a lot of things. The wind blew her hair into her mouth, and she spat it out angrily.

With her good hand, Will counted out the money, making piles of the coins—pounds, fifties, twenties, tens. There was a mound of coppers. Together she had more than eight English pounds. That was a start. Not enough, though, for a bed in a hotel, because the girls at school said those cost hundreds, even thousands. That was another thing to hate about England. Will stuffed the coins deep into her pocket. Nothing was free here.

Perhaps she could sleep here, on the grass, she told herself. It was soft and smelled sweet. But she was muddy enough already, and the muddier you were, the more grown-ups stared. And, she thought, there was always the chance the boys would come back. She couldn't bear to be ambushed.

A flurry of wind and falling leaves made her look up. The tree she was leaning against was a great, generous spreading giant—like a baobab at home, but thinner, and with leaves—and the branches were thick. They would be protection from the wind, as well as concealment.

Will hauled herself to her feet. It was dusk already—daylight seemed an endangered species here—but not too
dark to see footholds in the bark. There was a place, maybe ten feet up, where two branches slotted into the trunk at right angles to it, like the slats in the seat of a chair. She settled herself astride them, with her back against the trunk. Experimentally, Will closed her eyes. The seat was as firm as a horse, and she'd often fallen asleep on Shumba's wide back, but if she fell off Shumba, it was only sixteen hands to the ground.

Will fumbled with her scarf, keeping one hand firmly on a branch level with her chin. By slow inchings, she found she could work the scarf once round the trunk, then loop it round her waist like a belt, twist it, and then once round the trunk again, and tie the ends tightly in a triple knot. The scarf was just long enough. She gave it a tug. It neither loosened nor tightened; that, her father used to say, was the sign of a good knot. Oddly, the thought of him hurt a little less than it had before, and instead of freezing her stomach, it warmed her cheeks. Experimentally, she leaned over the edge. The scarf stretched but held her weight.

Will tucked her chin between her knees for warmth and hid her eyes in the crook of her elbow. Tied tight to the trunk, breathing in bark and the deep rough air, Will fell asleep. Her dreams were of mango trees and sweet milk tarts.

W
ILL'S MUSCLES MUST HAVE WOKEN
before she did, because she came to consciousness with her arms and legs tense and braced against something cold and wet and rough. Her head felt heavy and sodden, full of uncooked dough. Birds were singing very close by—oddly close—right up against her face, it felt. Will opened her eyes. She was wedged in the branches of a tree. Sudden fear and dizziness and hunger swooped over her, and she was sick, over the edge of the branch, before she'd fully woken up.

Groggily, she wiped her mouth and spat. She must have slept longer than she'd planned, because the sun was rising and already there were people running through the park
dressed in odd plastic-looking clothing. It wasn't raining—for a miracle, Will thought, and smiled at the sky.

Will worked herself more securely astride her branch. The wind was blowing and making the branches shake, but if the tree worked in the same way as the ones at home, she was safe enough. She leaned against the trunk and steadied herself with her good hand; she kept the other free, to list her options on her fingers. Above anything else, she needed money. She had eight pounds and ninety-four pence. That wouldn't last long. For an airplane ticket, she'd need more than eight pounds. How did you get that sort of money? Will put up one finger. She could steal—from people or, better, from shops. She imagined she'd be good at it. But that wasn't courage. Stealing, her father had said, was for people with tin hearts and snotty souls. She could get a job, perhaps. Will added another finger. What job? There were no horses in London, so she couldn't be a horseboy. People didn't get paid for the things she was good at. She could run a mile without stopping, and shoot an air rifle, and put both ankles behind her neck, but she wasn't sure that made her very employable. Lastly—Will's hand made a fist, and she bit at the knuckle—she could beg.

Will knew about begging. Young girls with babies tied to their backs begged in the streets of Harare. Her father took
pockets of change when he went into town, and legs of ostrich and impala wrapped for them in greaseproof paper. On her shopping trip Cynthia Vincy had waved the girls away like they were mosquitoes.

Will bit down on her scarf to stop her teeth from chattering. Cynthia had told her (several times, had never stopped telling her, in fact) that an airplane ticket cost a thousand American dollars. That was five hundred English dollars (or,
no
, Will corrected herself—
pounds
). If she earned one dollar—one
pound
—a day, she could fly back in five hundred days. There were 365 days in a year. That meant a year and a half. If she earned
five
pounds a day, it would take (Will squinted up at the leaves and counted on her fingers) three months and a bit. Ten pounds a day would be two months. Twenty pounds a day would mean she'd have enough to go home in one month, maximum. A month was only thirty days. She whispered, “Courage, chook,” and her heart beat back at her confidently. She could do thirty days.

The tree top above her swooped and she caught hold of the trunk with her other hand and waited for the leaves to calm, wincing at the cuts under her bandage sock. Thirty days.
I can do that
, she told herself—live in this tree at night and beg every day, find matches for a fire (could you light a fire in a tree? she'd never heard of anyone doing it, but that
didn't mean it couldn't be done), and then when the time came, she wouldn't tell anyone. She'd just get on a plane, and then hitch from the airport to central Harare, and from there the bus to Mutare, and a day's run to Two Tree Hill Farm, and it didn't matter who owned the farm now, even if it was the Madisons, because Simon would still be there, and Tedias and Lazarus. She could build a hut, and hunt rock-rabbit, and make stew out of corn and cabbage leaves. Building the hut would take time, but she'd have time, with no school bells cutting up the days into miserable chunks, and at home there would be fruit to eat and sunshine and Kezia. Kez would be old enough to train properly. That would be worth begging for, she thought.

The tree shook again, and leaves dropped into her face and bark dust blew into her eyes. Will found she went on shaking after it had stilled; that meant she needed to eat soon. And it was getting light. She blew on her hands and dropped to the ground. Her boots squelched and her ankle jarred with every step, but she could walk—and run, she thought, if she needed to—and she was still free. So it was three parts excitement to one part fear.