Shamanka (4 page)

“Lola, we mustn't say a word to Aunt Candy – not yet.”

“Oo–oo.”

They're asleep when Aunt Candy comes rolling home. She is crashing about in the kitchen, looking in cupboards and drawers for Lola.

“I know you're here somewhere, smelly monkey! Are you in the fridge? No!”

She can't work out how something the size of an orang-utan could have escaped. The kitchen door is still locked. The window is still closed.

“Ah…” she slurs. “I know your li'l game!” She sticks her head up the chimney. “Mon–keeee! I know you're up there!”

Her glass of gin fills with soot. Oblivious, she takes a swig and stomps up to the attic, cursing. She rummages among the cinders in her cleavage for the key, kicks open the door and peers into the darkness.

“Spam? Are you there, Spam? It's Auntie Candy!”

No reply.

“If you don't come out this instant, I'll put you in an orphanage. I'll put you in a … zoo! No, I'll put you in a bucket and throw you down the toilet.”

Sam, as you know, is no longer there. Aunt Candy is too sozzled to work out how she got away, but she suspects that her scheming little niece and the ape are in cahoots – they must be separated. The orang-utan is a ginger menace.

It will have to go.

Palming is a technique for holding or concealing small objects in the hand. With practice, the hand containing the palmed object appears to be completely empty.

1. Hold the coin between the muscle which forms the base of thumb and fleshy area of palm beneath the little finger.

2. Use slight pressure to keep the coin in place.

3. From most angles the hand should appear relaxed and natural.

I
f you listen hard, you may hear a sound like a pig being slaughtered in Aunt Candy's bedroom. Do not fret; it's nothing so barbaric. It's just Aunt Candy snoring. She's fallen asleep in her day clothes again, poor old love.

She can't lie in a bed like a normal person. Being a contortionist, she finds it uncomfortable. All the bits that hold her together have lost their elastic, so she has to sleep folded up in a rum barrel, which amplifies every porky grunt and squeak.

In her youth, Candy was brown-eyed and slender with the silkiest, ice-blonde hair. She had a 23-inch waist and wonderful knees. Everywhere she went, she turned heads; now it's just stomachs.

There are photographs to prove she was beautiful once. Strangely, there are none of Christa. Sam has never seen a photo of her mother. Given that Christa and Candy were sisters, she used to hope her mum looked as lovely as Candy did before the drink destroyed her.

Apparently not. Aunt Candy always insists that Christa was so hideous she broke the camera lens. She claims that Christa was such an ugly baby the midwife slapped her mother. Sam doesn't believe it; every girl wishes her mother to be beautiful and she is no exception.

The snoring continues. While Aunt Candy is out for the count, Sam sits up in bed with Lola and studies the witch doctor's notebook by the dawn light. It's the first chance she's had to look at it properly. The bulb in her bedside lamp broke years ago. Aunt Candy is too mean to replace it so it's impossible for her to read after dark.

Unfortunately, even the brilliant sunrise fails to illuminate some of the words. The handwriting is faded in places and there are bookworm holes too. Among other things, she notices incomplete chants for luring goats into cooking pots, unfinished dance movements for raising storms and only half the ingredients needed to make a volcano erupt. Sam sighs.

“It's so frustrating, Lola. Say we wanted to make Mount Etna erupt? Well, we can't. It says here to grind the nose of a red kangaroo and mix it into a paste with Bogong moths baked in sand. Only I can't see how many moths we need. The writing's blurred and it's no good trying to guess. Too few moths and the volcano might not even come to the boil. Too many and the universe could explode.”

Fortunately the Dark Prince of Tabuh had attached several sheets of fresh paper at the end of the notebook complete with his own notes written clearly in biro. As well as jotting down the three questions his father had given him, there are ideas for new tricks, sketches for magic box designs and a few personal scribbles, including a heart doodled with the initial
C
.

If the
C
stood for Christa, he must have loved her mother once. But if he wasn't an Intrepid Explorer or the philandering Bingo Hall, why did he leave? Why would he abandon his motherless child? Did he really not want her, or was there some other mysterious reason that Aunt Candy had failed to mention? Sam is determined to find out.

She flicks through the book to see if she can discover the list of Very Important People the witch doctor wanted his son to visit. At first, she can't find it – it's hiding between the first page and the inside cover, which for some reason are stuck together.

Slowly, carefully, she prises them apart. She's almost done it when suddenly, Aunt Candy screams in her sleep and Sam tears the bottom of the page. The last name on the list is obliterated for ever.

Ah, well. Perhaps she was never meant to read it; all the others are intact. Each one has a map and a thumbnail portrait next to it. There's no room to show you here, which is a shame because the drawings are hilarious.

However, there's no reason why you can't see the list. It might not seem to be in any particular order – it's neither alphabetical nor geographical – but there's a
magic
order. The list is bewitched; the names shift positions when the book is closed. At certain times, certain names call attention to themselves, but only if they're read by the intended person.

Here they all are, except for the last name, which, as you know, was torn. Make of it what you will. The names will crop up again and again.

We will now leap forward a week. With the aid of the magician's notes Sam has built a false compartment into the orange crate she uses as a bedside cabinet. She's hidden the witch doctor's notebook and the goatskin pouch inside. Aunt Candy still hasn't forgiven her for escaping from the attic. She's thought of a devious way of getting rid of Lola while Sam's at school today.

School is not a happy place for Sam. She has no friends. It's not that the other children are deliberately cruel; they just think she's odd and leave her alone. They huddle in little gangs in the playground and play games she doesn't know the rules for. Or they talk about television programmes she knows nothing about. Aunt Candy has no TV. No radio. No computer.

Sam can never bring anyone home in case they tell the rest of the class about her drunken aunt and her poky bedroom. Then there's the problem of her clothes. Although Sam dresses in the correct school colours – red and grey – her uniform is by no means standard; it's made from chopped-down versions of Aunt Candy's old circus outfits. All the other girls wear plain red-wool blazers, but Sam's is made from silk and shot through with glitter. None of the teachers comment on her uniform, but the children do. Not to her face; they're afraid of her in the way that some of us are scared of spiders no matter how many times we're told they mean us no harm.

Sam isn't bothered about being friendless; she's used to it. She enjoys her lessons, but the subject she
really
likes to study is People. She watches them constantly and makes notes, such as these:

a) When people like something, their pupils dilate.

b) People often scratch themselves when they are lying.

c) Tugging the earlobes means people are nervous.

She has been observing body language since she was a baby. Aunt Candy hardly ever spoke to her, and when she did, she slurred. Lola can't talk human, so Sam learnt to read facial expressions instead, partly to make up for the lack of conversation, but also for self-defence.

If the muscles in Aunt Candy's jaw twitched, it meant she was about to scream. If the vein in her temple throbbed, it was a three-second warning that she was about to throw a vase at Sam's head. Being able to predict this gave her a chance to duck out of the way.

Sam can read people's emotions even if they try to disguise them. Body language always gives them away: a scratch of the head, a twitch, a slightly unnatural grin. She notices and can calculate their state of mind with frightening accuracy.

It's morning break now, and she's in the playground observing a group of children. Without hearing their conversation, she can tell they're concerned about something they've found under the rose bushes by the art block. They don't want to touch it; whatever it is must be dead. And it's a small creature because they're crouching over it. They look sorry for it, so it must be an animal that looks sweet in death, rather than a dried frog or a squashed rat. As they keep looking up at the window, she guesses it's a bird that crashed into the glass pane and broke its neck.

She's right. It's a sparrow. One of the smallest girls is stroking its head with a pencil. She doesn't like to touch it with her hands.

“Aw, poor little fing. Wot a shame. Wish I could bring it back to life.”

“Do you?” says Sam.

The girls turn and look up at her, not quite sure why she's there. They didn't hear her coming.

“Go away, you. It's our dead bird,” says Smallest Girl.

Sam kneels down and studies the bird.

“I could bring it back to life if you like.”

Smallest Girl stares at Sam and pulls a face.

“No, you can't. It's dead, look!” She prods it with her pencil again. “It's gone stiff.” She rolls the bird over in the dust, its eyes glazed, feet in the air.

“Yeah, it's stiff,” says her friend. “You can't bring it back to life, unless you're Jesus.”

“Or a magician,” says Smallest Girl.

Sam scoops the dead bird into her hands. It weighs almost nothing.

“Ugh, dead birds have fleas. My nan told me,” says the friend of Smallest. Sam smiles.

“I can make it come back to life.”

“You're lying,” say the girls in unison. “Liar, liar.”

They dance around her in a ring. Other children stop what they're doing and wander over; they want to know what Sam Khaan is lying about. She reckons she can bring that dead bird back to life? Yeah, right! Like to see her try. Go on, Khaan, prove it!

“All right, I will.” She puts the bird in her lunchbox.

“Ugh! She's gonna eat it!” interrupts Smallest.

Sam ignores her and tells everyone present to meet her under the birch tree after lunch. “I will make this dead sparrow fly.”

No one believes her but they all want to see her fail, so Smallest Girl, all her friends and all their friends spread the word: the weirdo in the funny uniform is going to perform a miracle. She'll probably just chuck the dead bird over the fence and say it flew, pretend it came alive. Yeah, that's what she'll do. Not like she's Jesus, is it? No.

By lunchtime, the whole of the lower school has heard about it. They are all meandering down to the birch tree at the bottom of the field, trying not to arouse suspicion among the staff on playground duty. “No, we're not up to nuffing, miss!” “We're not going anywhere, sir.” “Down to the birch tree? No, sir!”