Fire Girl, Forest Boy

by Chloe Daykin

  We stand there for a minute. Like the silence can soak the pain up.

  I tell the end. This is my story too. ‘JVF overcut and overpiled the wood.’ I make my hands into fists. ‘It rained and the wood slid. The workers didn’t know what they were doing. Not properly. These guys were cheap and they didn’t care. Everyone in the village was freaked out. It was a sign and everyone moved. We had to go.’

  ‘Had to?’ Matias cocks his head.

  ‘Yeah.’ I fold my arms. ‘Had to.’ This row’s gone on since we went. I thought he was over it. If he stayed, everyone should’ve stayed. Yeah right. Everyone was terrified.

  ‘Everything happens for a reason, right?’ Matias says and beckons us over to the house and we follow. ‘I like to think his soul’s recycled.’ He touches the tips of a young tree growing next to the upright of the balcony. ‘I planted this when he went.’

  The soil round Matias’s papi’s plant is so neatly tended and weeded, nothing else could grow there.

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Maya says.

  ‘Me too.’ Matias strokes a leaf.

  We stand there looking at the tree.

  In the pool of light, insects flood around us. Shadows swoop on to the lamp.

  From behind something cracks. My belly jumps. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What?’ Maya turns and out of the dark reaches an arm. An arm that turns into a man.

  She screams.

  Matias yells.

  I back off back to the house and fall.

  And a woman steps out into the light and gets Maya in a headlock.

  Maya

  I feel Rosa’s arms round my throat and try to pull free.

  Matias spins and grabs Charles. I see his face in the light. Frog eyes. I twist round and see hers behind me. Same as I first saw round the lodge fire.

  She pulls backwards and I bite her and run to the canoe. Raul’s already there and grabs the other paddle out and whirls it round his head.

  I pick my paddle-crutch up and smack it into Rosa’s face when she comes for me and push the handle into her stomach.

  Charles punches Matias who falls over the back of the canoe. I hear it crack as he lands.

  Rosa’s pulling herself up. Raul is taking on Charles and dancing out of his way.

  ‘Leave the boy, get the girl,’ he yells, and Rosa runs at me. I dodge and she slips in the mud.

  Charles wraps both his arms round my waist.

  I scream and kick backwards with my good leg, but he doesn’t let go.

  Out of the trees screams Steven, who drops on to Charles’s head. His little fists pummelling his eyes. ‘Eeeeeeeeeeee.’ He lets go.

  Matias stands and grabs Rosa, twists her arm up her back.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Raul takes my hand.

  ‘What about the canoe?’

  ‘We can’t run with a canoe.’

  ‘We can’t leave without it.’

  Charles detaches Steven like a hat.

  Rosa elbows Matias in the stomach and Matias turns and snuffs the lamp out so everyone is left in darkness. ‘Go!’ he yells.

  And me and Raul hobble-run into the jungle. Hidden. Till the torches come.

  I pull him off the trail and we squat in the mud. The pain’s so bad I think I’m going to be sick. ‘I can’t run any more,’ I whisper.

  Torch beams cut through the trees and bounce off pairs of eyes. We duck out of the way of the light arms reaching though everything to snatch us.

  ‘Shut your eyes,’ I say.

  Too late.

  Their torches flash over our heads and the light catches Raul.

  ‘Over here!’ Rosa yells and runs, knees up, into the green and thorns like she’s going for a medal.

  I think of the trees. I think of Matias’s dad.

  And I am angry. I stand.

  Raul gets up and pulls me. ‘Run!’

  I ball my hands into fists. The wind blows my hair. I don’t run.

  I stay.

  Rosa dives for my ankles.

  And out of the ground come balls of light, multiplying and rising like fireflies. Like rain the wrong way up. Rosa burns her arm on one and pulls back. The balls glow yellow in the dark, making a line between us. A hum rises up from them as they rise. They start to shake and eyes pop on to their vibrating burning bodies.

  I grip my fists.

  The balls squeeze and shudder and explode into a line of fire.

  Raul

  The fire spreads like a snake that separates the ground between us like an earthquake, and roars up into the sky in a tower of flames. It makes a wall between us and them, reaching from one side of the trail to the other, higher than their heads.

  The man and woman shrink back and put their forearms in front of their faces. The light twists itself through the woods. A monkey screeches across the path.

  The jungle shimmers. But the trees don’t burn. Nothing does.

  The man and woman charge at the wall, but scream and pull back. The fire holds them. Whichever way they turn. Whichever way they try to run.

  We stand there watching. The fire doesn’t come forward. Or back. It just dances.

  Up and up.

  ‘You know the way to the jetty?’ Maya says.

  I nod. ‘Yeah. I think so.’

  ‘What about Matias?’

  ‘He told us to go.’ I wipe the sweat off my face. ‘If he wants to hide he’ll hide so no one ever finds him. If he wants to come he’ll find us.’

  Maya tries to walk on her ankle and hops and squeaks.

  I put her arm round my neck and my arm round her waist and feel awkward. ‘OK?’

  ‘OK.’ She nods and looks awkward too.

  ‘OK.’ I twist away from the flames. Maya doesn’t and we nearly fall over.

  ‘Sorry.’ She twists back and we use our arms to rebalance and blink away the brightness and head off into the dark. Hobbling like kids in a three-legged race. We don’t look back.

  Down the trail. Through the mud. Down the river steps and into a canoe.

  A motorised canoe.

  Waiting at the bottom.

  Maya

  I lift myself in.

  ‘Whose boat is this?’ Raul hops into the back.

  ‘Theirs,’ I say. I remember it from the jetty.

  Raul smiles and pulls the engine chord and out of the undergrowth comes a screech and an ‘eeeeee’ that knocks me into a seat.

  ‘We can’t take Steven!’ Raul yells. The boat races down the river in the dark.

  ‘What d’you want me to do. Chuck him back?’ Steven wraps his arms round my chest and closes his eyes. ‘We can’t not take him.’ The air blasts over my face and mixes with the sweat.

  A boat sails up towards us, lights on its outside.

  Voices inside.

  It keeps coming.

  ‘Watch out!’ I yell and put a hand over Steven’s head.

  Raul yells something in Spanish and we twist off round the side of it at the last second. The family cruise past and yell and wave their arms at us.

  We buzz down the river. Branches overhanging on each side. Water bouncing over rocks in the middle. We stick to the edge. ‘Aren’t there any lights on this?’ I search my fingers over the wood.

  Raul scratches his neck and looks around and the boat veers.

  ‘Watch the tree!’

  He veers back on track and clicks a switch. The lights glow in lines up the sides and out the front. An anaconda’s eyes glint in the light and it slides off the tree into the water. Steven hides under my knees.

  I pull my boots off and hold my ankle like a broken bird.

  ‘How did you do the fire?’ Raul shouts above the engine. ‘It was amazing.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ I fold my arms and lean my head against the side of the boat and feel the hole in the back of my T-shirt where the light creature burnt it on the veranda. ‘I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me.’

  Raul

  I drive straight
by the harbour at Iquitos.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be stopping?’ Maya points at the jetty as we drift by.

  ‘We need to keep you hidden.’ I look back at her. She looks like a moon. A very thoughtful moon. ‘You’re kind of distinctive. If the canoe was meant to be coming back here, they might have people waiting for you, right?’

  ‘Right,’ she says and starts searching under the seats. Steven runs back and forth chattering. I think it’s his first trip in a canoe.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘We have no clothes, food, water or money,’ she says. ‘So pretty much any of that.’

  I switch the lights off and we pull into a bay I used to come to with Dad. We used to come fishing for yellow piranhas, and he taught me how to cook seafood soup with hot pepper. It was our place.

  I step into the river and pull the canoe half on to the bank. Half hidden from the water by a fallen trunk. You can’t get here on land.

  I hop back in and check my legs for leeches. They’re clean, which is great as I don’t fancy lighting a fire to get them off.

  ‘Bingo,’ Maya says and lifts two rucksacks out of the lifebelt storage compartment. She pulls them open.

  We look through the rucksacks in the moonlight.

  Rain poncho. Anti-mosquito spray. Jungle shirt. Two plastic passes.

  Maya shines the torch from their pack on the passes. I hold them up and squint. The faces from the jungle look back at us

  Maya tilts them so the light bounces off. ‘Rosa Chavez and Charles Hinterguard.’ She points to the logo at the bottom. ‘JVF. Matias was right,’ she says. ‘You think he’s OK?’ The boat bobs and the water laps against the sides.

  ‘Matias is a panther. When he wants to he just disappears.’

  Maya reads the back: ‘Plaza Napo 258.’ We stare at the address. ‘I guess that’s where we go tomorrow, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I say, but my gut says, NO WAY.

  Companies guard their offices with guns here. Even the banks do it. Guys in suits stand outside in shades with truncheons, cuffs and rifles. So big you see them from far away. So big no one messes.

  Maya finds a wallet and flips it open. There’s no cash. Just a photo of Rosa with her arms round two kids. Hugging them in tight. We stare at them. They grin back at us.

  ‘You think she’s doing this to make money for them?’

  ‘I guess.’ Maya shoves the photo back in the bag.

  The thought makes me feel a bit sick. I don’t want things to be complicated. I touch Aiko’s parcel in my pocket. Life’s easier when there’s good guys and bad guys, right?

  ‘We’ll have to spend the night in here,’ I say.

  ‘Sure.’ Maya shines the torch on the bank and we lay branches and leaves that I slice down from the trees with my knife over the boat.

  She pulls back when she sees the size of the blade. ‘You keep that in your shorts?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say and hit Steven with a leaf ’cos he keeps chucking the roof in the river.

  The moon looks down at us.

  ‘Now we sleep, right?’ she says.

  ‘Right,’ I say, and we climb back into the boat, with the wood digging into our butts, and try to get comfortable under the banana leaves. It’s like trying to sleep on a piano.

  Around us the river is alive with frogs chirping.

  The boat rocks gently like something nudged it. Something BIG.

  Maya sits up. ‘Do caiman eat people?’

  ‘Not really.’ I stick a rucksack under my head. ‘Anacondas do. But you have to be in the water to get got by one.’ A dragonfly lands on my arm and I brush it off. ‘The worst is candiru fish. If you pee in the water they swim up it and into your …’ I wiggle my finger. ‘You know?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Can’t you just pull it out?’

  ‘No. It has barbs and gets stuck. They have to put a tube in so you wee into a plastic bag.’

  ‘And it just lives in there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Forever?’

  ‘Uh-huh. They call it the vampire fish.’

  ‘It must be pretty teeny,’ she says and I laugh. ‘I heard there’s a frog that if you lick it, it’s hallucinogenic.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s lots of those. And don’t go in the river when you’ve got your period.’ I make my hand into a mouth. ‘The piranhas will smell you out.’

  ‘Right. I hadn’t even been thinking about that. I hope I don’t get mine before I get home.’

  I try to imagine her home. How it must feel to be a million miles away.

  We lie there in silence for a bit.

  ‘I don’t get where the light balls came from or why they started the fire,’ Maya mumbles.

  ‘They kinda came from you,’ I say.

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘OK.’

  Neither of us says anything. Steven snores.

  ‘You don’t think it’s weird?’ she says.

  ‘No.’

  I don’t tell her she glows when she’s knocked out. Which is pretty weird. Pretty brilliant weird.

  I think about Papi Rosales. Magic happens, he says. Magic is all around us.

  I think about the firewall.

  The fire was Maya.

  It was.

  The light balls came ’cos she called them.

  She just doesn’t know it.

  Yet.

  Raul

  We buzz upriver. Back to Iquitos. Bellies full of berries we found this morning, and nerves.

  I switch the engine off to kill the noise and drift into a bay before the harbour. No way we’re going there in daylight if we can’t go at night. We’ll take the back way in.

  I hop out and tie the boat up, and Maya takes the tags out and rereads the address. ‘Plaza Napo 258. You know where that is?’

  ‘Kind of.’ I don’t tell her about the guards and their guns. I guess she’ll see that for herself soon enough. I wish Matias had told us more of the plan.

  Maya steps out of the boat and I cut a trail, avoiding any spiders that fall. BUMF, one lands by my feet in a ball like a fist, then spreads its legs and scarpers. I scram and Maya laughs. I look at her and she stops.

  We step out of the trees and look back at the harbour. Rusty double-decker river cruisers bob by a jetty that runs up into town to tin shacks and houses with reed roofs and yellow crumbling walls.

  It’s busy in the morning. People are hanging out and selling stuff. One guy with a rack of sunglasses, one guy with a load of Ekeko dolls; good-luck charms you stuff with cash and sweets. You can only give them to someone else. Buying good luck for yourself isn’t allowed. I wish we had one.

  I stare at Maya. She’s like a piece of Lego in a bird’s nest. Different. ‘Everyone’s going to see you here. You need a disguise.’

  She pulls my hat off my head and shoves her hair under. ‘Hey,’ I yell.

  ‘It works,’ she whispers and pulls the brim down.

  I guess it does. No one else round here has hair like fire.

  We walk up the footbridge into town. I carry Steven who wriggles – it’s like walking through a sea of sharks with a piece of steak. You never really notice how you blend in till you don’t. Heads turn and stare at us. Two street dogs come and sniff our legs. Maya tries to pet one and I kick them away. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘They’re just dogs.’ She stands up and the hat falls off and her hair falls out.

  ‘No one pets wild dogs. People’ll notice,’ I say. And I notice the shadow of a guy behind us walking two paces back. Always two paces back.

  I slow up.

  He slows.

  And Maya pushes me behind the fish shack and gets out my knife.

  Maya

  Raul looks round the corner at the building I’ve been watching too. The one the follower’s hiding behind.

  We look at each other.

  ‘You seen him?’ I whisper.

  He nods.

  ‘You think we should cut my hair off?’ I hold up the knife.
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  ‘If someone’s seen you, they’ve seen you.’ I take the knife back. ‘I don’t think losing your hair’ll make any difference.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You think we can lose him?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You need to give me your shirt,’ I say. ‘We need to swap. Then he might think you’re me.’

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ He stares at me. At my jungle-explorer beige.

  ‘Mine’s not girly. It’s just smart. Way too smart. No one here dresses like this. If he tries to grab you I can run.’

  ‘What about me?’ Raul frowns.

  ‘You can run fast. You can run faster.’

  ‘You can make the fireballs.’

  I kick his shin. ‘No, I can’t.’

  We sneak round the corner and hide behind some bins in the woods, next to the riverbank. Steven sniffs around for food.

  We crouch either side of a bin and stick our arms out and swap on three. Like rock, paper, scissors. One, two, three. Change.

  I pull it over my head and officially smell like Raul.

  It’s weird.

  ‘You wear name labels?’ He laughs and pulls out the label.

  I hate them. It makes me feel like I’m five. ‘My Dad likes labels,’ I say and go red. Last summer he got a plastic sticker machine and stuck labels all over everything in the house.

  DRAWER

  KNIVES

  FORKS

  I made one that said DAD and stuck it on his head and then he stopped. I think he got the message.

  We stand up. Raul looks weird.

  ‘Your name’s Anderson, right?’ We dust off our shorts.

  ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘What’s your dad’s name?’

  ‘Handi.’

  He looks at me like I’m a ghost. ‘We’re not going to JVF,’ he says. ‘We’re going to the El Dorado Hotel, Plaza de Aramas.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s where your dad is.’

  The shadow guy leans round the corner.

  I grab Raul’s hand and run.

  Raul