Mountains of the Moon (40 page)

The hospital doesn’t know what is wrong with me either. In the bus park, in the exhaust fumes, I look for space spinning; bend to vomit between my own feet. The mob bends over with me, sees if my scattering on the ground has anything in it they can use.

They push me. They pull you. They’re all yelling
Kilimanjaro—Kilimanjaro—Kilimanjaro
.

Pain ruins one side of my face, the smell coming back up makes me— Hhuck! Kilimanjaro. I’m wracking on the current of some cold voltage. I raise my head to look at them. A trickle of sweat runs into one eye.

“Do I look like I could climb a mountain?” I stagger. “Do I? DO I?”

They’re deaf, fixed on my white skin, their voices on a tourist loop—Serengeti–Ngorangora Crater–Kilimanjaro–Zanzibar–Serengeti—

“Get off!” They’re pushing me, always pushing me.

Malawi, I’ve gleaned, is very relaxed. Thirty-six hours away on this bus.

“You’re crying.”

I shake my head. But a tear gets out and trickles down.

“What has happened?” Anton says. “What’s happened since last night?”

All of my breath is kicked.

“Has somebody come down the corridor?”

No.

“Michael, has Michael fetched you trouble?”

No.

“Do you know why you’re crying?”

Good question. I stop crying to think about it, don’t know. Makes me cry even more.

“Have I upset you?”

Idea upsets me worstist of all. I flaps my hands to keep it way.

“Christ, Mitten, you’re setting me off, whatever is it?”

My ribs is crying, my shoulders is shrugging.

“Tell me,” he says.

My face crumples into his sleeve and then he scoops me up, gets out his campanula hanky. I suck in the coldness of his hair, breathes hard on the lavender oil in it.

“Can you show me?” He smooths my nail edge with his thumb. I point to the book on the floor, cross the room where I slung it.

“Ah.” Anton sits us down and rocks me tight in his nest. “They killed Piggy, didn’t they?”

“I wants to be sixteen,” I says and cries for years.

Sun comes in through the bathroom door and drenches us on the bed. We don’t even need the sheet with the sun burning on our skins. We stretch out long so it can kiss us all over. First hot sun this year, dashed with happy rain. Spects there is a rainbow somewhere over the palice roof. Some rain has sprinkled in through the gaps and dotted the floorboards dark yellow. Normal we sleeps in the afternoons like twin babies breathing each other. Surprises me how lucky we is. This is the third summer coming. We just grow time the best we can. Now it’s the spring term I has to disappear in the day, sposed to be at school. Anton comes to me in the mornings and learns me everything, stead. At four o’clock after school we can go out and walk about in the grounds. We chin wags on the palice steps. On the weekends we scape and go to the beech woods and Virginia Water lakes. Sometimes I be Anton’s niece and go to Ward 14, has tea and cake with Lizzie and Leonard. Everyone knows us. After Anton has his ECT he always is a little bit shocked and they let me sit in his marigold room ready to say welcome back.

I get up and go to the bathroom. Eyes still red from crying. Glad to be in my place gain. I stand in the bathroom doorway looking at my beautiful room. The jasmines are starting to flower, climbing halfway up the ladders, they been all winter in the greenhouse. Wilf don’t mind me coming and going for pots and a bit of compost cos I helped him to level the floor and now we is making an orchid house. He thinks I’m Beryl’s daughter. Terrible. When it was agony cold at Christmas me and the Angel Michael bandoned the East Wing and moved into the boiler cupboard down on Level D. Was all right, warm. Beryl in the kitchen done us proud, reckons she can fatten me up. Don’t spect she can. Was OK in the cupboard cept Michael snores like one of them machines for cracking up concrete. But in the daytime me and Anton always came to my place and done lessons warm in bed. One time the wind brought beech leaves in on us. Another
time snow. We had so many blankets on us it was almost rude, we tended they was buffalo skins and sang home-home on the range. Last week we got smothered in blossoms. He makes me smile, so beautiful it is when he smiles, I keep on trying case I can get one. Sometimes we can’t tend, so we hold on to each other’s heads and take turns crying. All these years and we never arsts, where we come from or who we is.

I climb back on the bed and recover on Anton like a coat.

“You’re killing me,” he says into the pillow.

My lips is little for kisses. I tends they is sweet-pea seeds and sows a row long his rib. Then he slides me under his arm. His nose wants to play with mine.

“Feeling better now?” he says.

Don’t know. Still got tears lined up. He lies on his back to fly me on his knees in the sun that streams in through the bathroom door. So beautiful he is. Tear drops out of my eye and splats onto his cheek. I crashes softly into his chest, never knew nothing so hairy and warm. Then he rolls us over, recovering me, and his cold hair splashes over my cheek. He always holds my little finger and kisses the tiny nail.

“The question is: Are you going to continue with it?”

He means reading
Lord of the Flies
. Still there, on the floorboards cross the room where it dropped, feel sorry now for the crumpled pages.

“I wouldn’t have given it to you if I’d thought it would upset you so much.” His chin is on top of my head. “Will you continue with it, though?”

“Seems rude not to,” I say. “Was a shock. How bad I believed it. You said it was
fiction
, lies, but it int. It int.” Has to be careful cos I still got more tears lined up waiting.

Anton’s chin nuzzles my hair.

“Good,” he says. “That’s the point; stories tell lies in the service of truth.”

His thumb wants to feel my teef edges; I tends to bite it off and swallow it.

“I’ve bought another book for you to try,” he says. “It’s a story about a seagull.”

I push his thumb out with my tongue.

“Does the others kill it?” I says.

Makes us laugh. His lips know my wrists. I think about the seagull, though.

“What’s its name?”

“You’ll see,” he says. “How is your story coming along?”

“Don’t know what happens.” Massive yawn nearly swallows me.

“A job for the Imagination—
un devoir pour l’Imagination
.”

“That’s it.” I snuggle down. “Whisper me gain, in French.”

Anton is sleeping. Magnolias in the grounds below the winders is flowering, the smell comes through the gaps in the planks and the broken winders. Newborn wisteria is feeling about for something to get hold of; when it can’t find nothing it bends back on itself. Through the top morning glory winders can see the house martins keep coming and going with bits of straw for weaving. Proper basket cases. Sometimes think the angels on the ceiling can smell this new spring life and closes their eyes and smells and listens. So quiet, Anton breathing sides me. Angels on the ceiling mind me of Michael, blowing about in all directions. He’s back in his dormtree now, forty-four doors down the corridor. Anton is always scared case Michael gives me way, thinks he is a
liability
. I trust him though, I would with my life, and Anton says my instinct is probably much better than his. Sides, I int no good at early nights, and when Anton goes back to Ward 14, Michael comes to see me, always frightens me to death. We put blankets over the table and sit under it like a tent. Under there we can light a candle and the flame don’t shine on the dead wing winders. Needs to make some black curtains.

Poor Michael. Yesterday he done the newsagent’s in the village but the police just thought he had scaped and led him back through the palice gates. He don’t understand, the West Wing is so full of people now they has to serve lunch and dinner twice. Staffs say it’s hopeless, dangerously out of control. They can’t
section
anyone new, not til a few more kill themselves, sides, it int no good behaving like a psycopath here, where
it’s total normal. I told him he needs to go into Staines and put his foot through a winder there.

“The border?” I say to the conductor. We have just passed a branch road, clearly signposted; I don’t know why we haven’t turned down it.

“We will go first into the town and then some person can bring you back to the border,” he says, tying the end on something stitched up.

They send you in the wrong direction; run you around in circles, so that more people along the way can get a chance to fleece you. The border closes at six o’clock and now the bus has overshot it by twenty minutes and about five miles.

In town the man-animal mob is on me as I step off the bus. They make me mental. Demented. A big bull-necked man is shouldered up closest to me.

“How much to the border?” I ask him.

“Twenty dollars,” he says. “Come, come.”

These
int
poor people, they’re too strong for hungry people, too well watered and fed. They’re pushing me, they’re pushing me; they are always fucking pushing me.

“No,” I say, “I’m not going to give you twenty dollars. Tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to give you
fifty dollars
, that’s what I’m going to do, give you fifty dollars, no, fuck it,
one hundred dollars
. That’s what I’m going to give you,
one hundred dollars!
Jesus Christ what am I saying, what am I saying, what am I saying, let’s just call it five hundred, uh-huh,
five hundred dollars
, that’s what I’m going to give you, no, no, no, Jesus, not five, not five, not five, a grand, let’s call it a grand,
one thousand dollars
for you? My friends?”

Thwump! Pain nearly knocks me over. I can’t make anyone understand I went over to Zanzibar and picked up something like a brain tumor on the way.

“Five dollars,” the Bull says. “Five dollars, we go, come, come.”

Africa can make you ugly. It’s making me ugly. It’s making me really fucking ugly. I spit in the dust. Follow the Bull across to a blue pickup truck; topple my bag into the back. He leans over and opens the passenger door. Not so poor they can’t afford a tidy pickup, with gas in it.

“Five dollars,” I say.

“Five dollars,” he says.

We take off, throwing an orange blanket of dust behind us. His watch says five thirty.

“Will we make the border?”

“Yes, no problem,” he says.

A couple of buses and four-wheel drives are coming from the border but nothing else is going to it, just a few No Man’s people striding out to beat the darkness and cattle being herded home. It’s so wet hot, oppressive. Thwumping, thwumping Tanzania.

Malawi is, I’ve gleaned, very relaxed.

Very, very relaxed.

Malawi sounds friendly, like a sing-song. Bye-bye, Tanzania, you total fucking cunt. My nerves twitch with border anxiety. Just have to get through passport control and immigration this side, and that side. I gather my pajamas and all my sick wits about me. Put my penknife handy in my pocket. Have to get across No Man’s Land fast. Fast through the money changers.

Tanzanian shillings into Malawi kwacha. U.S. dollars into Malawi kwacha. Approximately? I sort out my passport and amounts of currency. Daylight is struggling with night clouds gathering over the border huts and barriers. I see No Man’s Town ahead of us, in No Man’s Land, between the two borderlines proper, kerosene lamps lined up both sides ready and waiting for darkness. The Bull’s fancy watch says five fifty. He swings the truck around on waste ground just before the barrier, parks facing back the way we came. I haven’t got a five-dollar note. Tanzania has demanded so much money from me; I’ve been totally deprived of giving anything. I hold a ten-dollar note toward him and waive the change with goodwill.

“What is this?” he says, overacting a script with no context.

“Ten dollars for the journey.” I urge it into his hand because he’s delaying me. The man in uniform is limbering up ready to lower the border barrier.

“But this journey is one hundred dollars,” he says.

We
int
in the mood.

“We agreed five dollars, you’ve got ten dollars.” I get out of the truck and slam the door.