Shamanka (27 page)

“Where
were
you, Kitty? We looked everywhere!”

Kitty shrugs as if she has no idea what she's talking about. “You can't have looked very hard. Maybe you need your eyes testing.”

“I do not! My eyesight's fine – and so is Lola's sense of smell.”

“Oh … am I smelly?”

To be fair they could all do with a bath, but they'll have to wait until they get to Mexico. They must hurry – their flight from Egypt is in less than an hour.

Boarding the plane to Mexico isn't easy. Paying for the tickets with euros is no problem, but trying to get an orang-utan through customs is never simple. Kitty insists on going through passport control first, because she doesn't want Sam to see her without her mask. She has to lift it up to prove she's the person on her passport photo and, as she does so, Sam watches the customs officer's expression to see if he recoils at her melted features.

I have to tell you he does not. He raises his eyebrows slightly then waves her on. Maybe he's being polite. Maybe he's seen worse. But Sam thinks it's odd that he doesn't react more strongly.

Something else also crosses her mind. She'd given Kitty a bottle of holy water, hadn't she? She wonders if Kitty has dabbed some on her skin and there has been a miracle; but she dismisses the idea. If Kitty's burns were healed, why would she keep the mask on?

Sam has no problem getting through the barrier. She's stolen a passport from a dark-haired girl in the waiting lounge who looks a little like her, and just as the control officer is about to check it, Lola causes a distraction.

Lola is sitting in an airport wheelchair dressed in her burka. All you can see are her soft brown eyes through the slit in the veil – at least, that
was
all you could see; now she's decided to scratch her ear with her foot, revealing a pair of bloomers and extremely hairy legs.

My dear old grandma on my mother's side is fairly flexible but even
she
can't do that – she hasn't got the hips for it. She also has hairy legs and after too many sherries, she'll show her bloomers, and good luck to her. The point I'm trying to make is this: what is considered ladylike in ape society – scratching your bottom, waving your legs in the air and blowing raspberries – is sadly not acceptable in ours. Through no fault of her own, Lola is about to blow her disguise.

If Sam hadn't grabbed hold of her ankles and hastily covered them with the burka, they would have been in big trouble. If she hadn't snapped, “Grandma, put your legs down! Just because you used to be a contortionist, there's no need to show off!” they would not have been allowed to board flight 333 to Mexico.

But they have boarded; they are already up in the air. It's the first time Sam has been on a plane, but the sensation is familiar. She has flown in her dreams – at least, she dreamt that she was passing through clouds, but it was so fast, she hardly seemed to be moving at all. It felt as if she was hovering, yet she couldn't have been because the scenery below kept changing.

Kitty hasn't been on a plane for years and she's extremely nervous. Every time they hit turbulence, she screams, “I'm falling! Help, I'm on fire! There are flans everywhere!”

This has a bad effect on the other passengers. Those who hear Kitty mention the word “flan” start hassling the steward, demanding to know why nobody had served
them
a meal yet. Those with nervous dispositions have fixated on the dreaded words “falling” and “fire” and are peering anxiously out of the windows to see if the engines are alight. Sam tries to draw Kitty into conversation to take her mind off things.

“Kitty, how did you manage to persuade the policeman to release me from the prison cell?”

“Falling! I'm on fire! Extinguish the flans!”

“You're
not
on fire. It's a flashback. Here – blow into this paper bag.”

It's not a magic trick, but it prevents panic attacks a lot better than pulling rabbits out of hats. Kitty soon recovers enough to answer Sam's question.

“I told them the dinkey wasn't dud in the first place.”

Between you and me, the donkey had been dead; the poor beast had no pulse. Sam knew it, but didn't mention it to Kitty in case it sounded like showing off. I'm not sure it was a miracle though. People are brought back to life every day if a first-aider can remember how to kick-start their heart. What works for us might also work for donkeys.

Back to Kitty. She'd managed to persuade the chief of police that Sam wasn't a witch but the daughter of a magician called John Tabuh. Luck would have it that the chief knew the Dark Prince personally. He'd shaken Kitty warmly by the hand and said, “Ah, I remember John!” He'd been most impressed with him and so had his wife (she had a soft spot for men with thick, glossy hair – a pity, considering her husband was as bald as a baby).

At the time, John had needed money to fly to Mexico. In order to raise sufficient funds, he'd performed the most incredible illusions at the Policeman's Ball. On the chief's recommendation, he received several other major bookings including the palace, where he performed the vanishing elephant trick for the king of Egypt and rapidly became the talk of Cairo.

For once, he hadn't managed to upset anybody, because he avoided asking awkward questions and simply sought to dazzle, which might be a lesson to us all. It seems he was reluctant to leave. But Christa was expecting their baby and his father was expecting some answers, so he had to move on.

Kitty's disappearance at the shrine of Bastet remains a mystery however; she claims she was there all along. This is possible, I suppose. How many times have we hunted for a missing sock in a certain drawer and
known
it wasn't there, only to find it the next day in the same drawer we'd looked in fifty times? Missing Sock Syndrome is a more logical answer than Kitty shape-shifting into a cat, but logic is a strange animal; I wouldn't trust it altogether.

The captain has just announced that the plane is due to land. If you look out of the window, you will see Mexico down below. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentleman.

Arriba!

The masked magician tells the audience it is possible to step right through a sheet of paper. How?

THE SECRET

Copy this template onto a piece of A3 paper and snip through the lines. Stretch it out and you will have a huge hole to step through.

M
exico. We're heading for Janitzio where we must find a man called Father Bayu.

He is blistering the page at the top of the witch doctor's list, but Sam doesn't know what skills he has or whether he is friend or foe.

A fiesta is taking place. The plaza in Quiroga is selling sugar skulls. The bakers are baking
pan de muerto
in the shape of bones. There are toy skeletons for sale everywhere.

“Hey, señoritas! You wanna buy
calaveras
?”

The floor is strewn with millions of marigolds. Where people have walked, the petals have been pressed into the ground like marmalade shreds; their bittersweet tang is impossible to escape. The stalls are hung with
papel picado
– intricately cut tissue-paper banners depicting skeletons dancing and celebrating. A woman shakes a bag at Sam and offers her a piece of dough in the shape of a dog.

“
El día de los muertos!
” beams the woman. “We are remembering the
angelitos
– the children who have died. Once a year they come back to visit us, so we throw them a party. Won't it be lovely to have them home? I have been baking dough dogs all night.”

“Why dogs?”

“I tell you. The dog, he ferries the souls of the departed across the river to heaven.”

It seems that in Mexico, death is nothing to cry about. Nor is it ugly or grim. Look at the children's faces as they stuff candy skulls into their mouths and play with their bony puppets – they're as happy and excited as we are when it snows at Christmas.

“Why be sad?” laughs the woman. “Birth leads to life, life leads to death. Death is not the end of the story. It is a fresh start – my father, the tailor, is making suits in heaven and the quality and cut are much better than anything he made in this life.”

Sam is tempted to ask, “How do you know your father's heavenly suits are superior?” but it would be disrespectful of her faith. It would be like asking the Pope, “Yes, but how do you know that Jesus is the son of God?”

Whether the dough lady's beliefs are right or not, the idea that we carry on merrily after death and are welcome to come back and visit our relatives is a happy thought – at least it is if you like your relatives. Sam doesn't relish the idea of visiting Aunt Candy ever again. As we speak, she's having a fist fight with a tattooed barmaid in the roughest pub in Kilburn. If there's a heaven, I wonder if there's someone there to serve gin – and if so, is it free?

Sam, Kitty and Lola are in a party mood now; who'd have thought death could be so exhilarating? Let them celebrate with the Mexicans – let them eat, drink and dance until the moon comes up, and then we will join them in the launch boat and speed across Lake Patzcuaro to the beautiful island of Janitzio.

The sky is frosted with stars. You can see little white houses with bright red roofs. People are carrying candles and copal incense. A path of luminous, curling petals winds its way to the cemetery. Out on the lake, fishermen perform an ancient ritual with their butterfly nets in the mist.

Just as the ceremony is about to end, there's a fierce downpour; the Mexicans call it
aguacero
. Esperanza – the woman who baked the dough dogs – holds her umbrella over Sam and Kitty, but it offers little protection from the driving rain; they're soaked.

Lola doesn't mind, her fur is waterproof. But the water is pouring off the brim of Sam's hat like a fountain. Marigold petals cling to the hem of Kitty's robe and form an orange tide line. Esperanza takes Sam's arm. “Come. Come to my home and we dry off.”

She breaks into a feminine trot in her red dancing shoes. They follow her past the cemetery and down the hill to a house that gleams wetly like a freshly iced wedding cake. Esperanza shakes the umbrella, pushes the door open with her wide hips and ushers them inside. “Please, dry by the fire. Go and sit with my family.”

But she has no family; at least, none that is alive. Just a homemade altar – an
ofrenda
– decked with candles, garlands and photographs. At the centre is a picture of Esperanza's elderly mother and her father, the tailor. He has his arm around his wife.

“Ah, that is Maricella and Enzo,” smiles Esperanza. “Eighty years old and still madly in love. Even more so now they're dead.”

She speaks to their photo. “Mama … Papa? This is my friends, Sam, Kitty and Lola from England.”

She adds in a stage whisper: “My mother, she love to meet new people. It make her feel young, you know? My father, he not so fussed. He a very quiet man. He only have eyes for Maricella.”

She clip-clops into the kitchen and returns with hot soup and red rice on a brightly-painted, papier-mache tray. There is dark café de olla to drink. Lola dries Sam's hair with a towel then helps herself to a bowl of mixed nuts.

“Who is in the other photograph?” muses Sam.

There's another frame on the table with spaces for three portraits, half hidden behind an overblown rose. Esperanza picks it up. “This is the magician's eldest daughter and her two sisters. The twins, they are so cheeky! They die before they is born, so I guess they never have time to learn no manners…”

Sam's blood runs cold. “
The magician's eldest daughter?
May I see?”

Esperanza sits next to Sam and shows her the photo. “There she is, darling, in the middle. Her parents wanted her to be with her sisters.”

Sure enough, there's a photo of Sam as a baby, waving her silver rattle. Her mouth goes dry.