LITMIR.BIZ

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before their journey had even begun.

      “What’s his name?”

      “Rahl.”

      “With skin as pink as a pig’s, I suppose.” The man looked at Ash, sceptical. “Do you know where he lives?”

      “I have his address.”

      Silence filtered through the sounds of birds. The surrounding trees waited. Beyond the breeze that moved the tops of them, the river rushed. The man looked at his boots, and back at Ash. “Do what you must. I can’t stop you. I can’t feed you either.” He took the small green book that contained the summary of Yanela’s life – her birth date, her number, her photograph. All that was left of her.

      “Thank you, sir.” Still Ash didn’t move. Behind the man, in the house, a dog barked. Zuko took a step back.

      “I need to let them out now,” the man said. “So, if that will be all . . .”

      “We don’t have any money,” Ash said.

      The priest looked down as he put his free hand into his pocket. His mouth turned too, as though he’d swallowed something distasteful. He pulled out a roughened note, leaned forward and handed it to Ash. “That’s it,” he said. “I can’t give you any more.” His eyes skipped to the side. “I don’t have it.”

      Ash pocketed the money with the hand that wasn’t holding Zuko’s. His brother waited, strangely quiet, watching the ground. The priest retreated into the house. In the tree that overhung the roof with way­ward branches, a lone monkey sat and picked at a flea on its belly with one black hand.

      13.

      Zuko watched himself coming apart under the pine trees. It couldn’t be helped, but still he worried. It wasn’t, any more, that his mother no longer held his skin together in her tight embraces, or that she rotted away from him now, deep in the ground, in a hole his own brother had dug. A new line had crept between Ash’s eyebrows that threatened permanence. Ash now carried with him a cloud of silence, of separate­ness, that wrapped him up and kept him apart. When Ash was there, he seemed not there, at the same time. When Zuko made sounds or tried to speak, Ash seemed not to notice. Ash seemed something like his own shadow, or even himself. He existed, and did not exist, at the same moment.

      It was Zuko’s own body that wouldn’t do what he wanted it to: carry eggs from the chicken run whole and complete, crack them into a bowl and heat them in a pan over the gas and then put them on a plate for Ash to eat. Instead his body rebelled against his mind, or his mind played tricks on what his body wanted. When his body wanted to help, his mind forgot. It became distracted, and allowed his eyes to play with light, to seek the gaps in the leaves and branches until hours had gone by. Until the trees had faded back, and the negative spaces became what was real. Now that there were no more Cheerios, his anxiety deepened for the changes to come.

      It was the circles and the guilt, the light and his immovable body. It was the way his body played tricks on his mind. When his mind and his thoughts were focused and exact with intention and understanding, his body disobeyed. When he wanted his legs to move, his arms took over, waving in the air as though walking the other way around. When he wanted to take the broom and sweep with it, to tidy the mess and dirt in the kitchen that Ash seemed to ignore, he found the broom and he held it, but his arms couldn’t find any sweeping motion in their memory. He could stand for hours, until Ash came in and told him to put the broom down.

      He imagined himself as a spirit. If he gave up his own body, as his mother had done, Ash might bury him in the ground too. He’d have nothing but air to float on. There’d be no demand for sound when words no longer mattered. His body would hover, breathless. He’d find the quiet, and it would stay with him. He might look down instead of up, or across at others, and it might not matter any more that he couldn’t move to the places his mind wanted him to go to, or make the sounds that came so easily to other people. He floated out to the back of the house as if he had no legs. He swallowed air particles, as though they were Cheerios, the only nourishment he would one day need. His mother used to tell him to keep his mouth closed, that he looked like a fish, gasping for air, with his mouth open. But that was when she was still on the ground, and not floating out there somewhere, a spirit on the wind as he himself longed to be.

      A sound outside came softly, like brushes on a piece of tin. He ran from the house and lifted his eyes. The raindrops cooled his eyeballs before he blinked. It was a game he played with himself, that he might catch the raindrops before they reached the ground. Slowly, he gathered them into the fibres of his shirt. The water and fabric merged into one. They stuck to his skin but he kept his eyes open, as though within them he held the sky’s tears. He blinked rapidly, into the light.

      14.

      Ash awoke an hour before dawn. He stared into darkness before he sat up. Through the window the growing light turned the sky from pitch to gentle grey, the trees stamped black against it.

      He pushed back the covers and stepped over Zuko’s mattress on the floor. Zuko snored, and turned over. Ash pulled on a pair of jeans and thick socks and the boots his mother had bought him for Christmas with the money the stranger had sent. Sturdy and brown, with the leather laced up in crisscross rows. Ash grew strong in them. As though his footsteps mattered.

      In the kitchen he lit a candle and heated water for tea in a pot on the stove. While he waited for it to boil, he sat in the doorway and watched the sky turn green.

      When he’d had his tea, he took the last flour from the cupboard and an egg he’d saved from the chickens. He made a rough dough with the sugar that was left in the tin, and shaped it into small rounds. He fried these in a pan in oil over an open flame.

      When he’d got Zuko up and dressed, he realised the child had no shoes to speak of. His mother had bought him Christmas shoes also, but with no regular school and no need to walk any distances, Zuko’s feet had grown longer and wider and now he no longer fitted into them. “Damn,” Ash said.

      “Da . . .” his brother replied.

      Ash looked at him sharply, and saw the gleam in Zuko’s eyes. “You’re only eight,” Ash told him. “Don’t start on the bad language.”

      “Da . . .” Zuko said again.

      Ash took a small green bag from his mother’s room and packed a piece of still-wrapped soap, a clean pair of underwear for each of them and a jersey for Zuko, though the child seldom seemed to feel the cold. In the kitchen he took a bowl from the cupboard, scooped in the small dough circles fried to a crunch, and added the last milk from the carton. “Here,” he said, placing a spoon in Zuko’s hand. “They’re not Cheerios, but they’re circles and they crunch. Eat. You’ll need the strength.” He brought the old biscuit tin off the shelf and opened it. Inside was a clear plastic packet filled with notes. Without counting the money, he pushed the packet into the pocket of his jeans, along with the box of matches that sat beside the tin.

      While his brother ate, Ash packed the rest of the fried dough circles in a plastic margarine tub. He took the last stale half-loaf of bread, already tinged with white mould turning green at the edges, and pushed these into the bag. He fetched an old plastic bottle from the floor beneath the wash basin and filled it with water from the tap. Then he went out into the yard to the chicken coop, and caught three birds in turn. Resisting the urge to hold them, to feel their soft feathers against his face, he wrung each of their necks and placed the bodies into a plastic bag. Back in the house he pushed them into the green bag, on top of the small items of clothing, the bread and the water.

      In his mother’s room the sweet, decaying scent of death remained. Her boots waited, open and expectant, on the stone floor. The table held a pile of papers, weighted down with a painted stone. Ash had decorated it for her in years much younger, when she’d had enough money for a tin of paint for the outside of the house. He’d taken a stick and found this stone, dipped the stick into the paint and created a pattern for her. She’d kept it always, this gift from her oldest son. She’d displayed it on the old table her grandfather had made. Now Ash rifled

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