‘We ought to push on,’ said Fred, peering at his map. ‘I think we’re only a few days’ walk from Shinbwiyang. It’s meant to be one of the biggest villages, there might be a doctor there.’
‘My son is too sick to travel,’ said Sameer anxiously. ‘We cannot move him.’
Fred folded up the map and put it away, catching Kate’s eye as he did so. He beckoned, and she followed him a little way out of the camp.
‘What should we do?’ she said.
‘The boy needs medicine,’ said Fred, looking back at the shelter. ‘If they won’t bring him I think I’d better try to get to Shinbwiyang, bring back some quinine or whatever they have.’
Kate stared at him. ‘Leave us, you mean? You can’t go off alone!’
‘I’m not worried about being alone,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Will you be all right, though? You and Myia will have to look after the others.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I wish there was another way, though.’ She imagined nights in the forest without Fred’s comforting presence, knowing that she would jump at every crack of a twig.
‘It’s got to be done.’ He observed her intently for a moment. ‘You look as though you might have a slight fever, too.’
She touched her forehead and felt it hot under her hand. Her skin was damp with sweat and she realised that she had been exhausted for days, even more so than usual.
He patted her shoulder and, without thinking, she reached up to take his hand in hers.
‘You’ll take care of them. You’re stronger than you think.’ He looked up at the sky, which was darkening. ‘I’ll leave first thing in the morning.’
*
Kate sat up late with Myia, talking quietly and watching over little Satish while his parents took turns trying to get some sleep. Eventually Nabanita gave up the attempt and took over, holding his clammy hand as he slept fitfully.
Kate curled up nearby, but she felt as though a weight was pressing down on her chest, making her breathing shallow. Sleep seemed impossible. She was afraid of what would happen when Fred left; afraid that the fragile normality they had constructed would shatter. She recalled the way she had touched his hand earlier and her cheeks flushed in the darkness. It was odd, this closeness she felt to him, and she had no wish to examine it too closely, but she was afraid that once he vanished into the jungle he would never return.
Eventually she slept and dreamed of fire raining down on London. She saw Parliament ablaze, black smoke coating the city, and a woman in a yellow dress running frantically. She saw that it was her sister Laura and that she was carrying a baby. Smoke rose from the buildings all around. There were dozens of people looking through the wreckage and they were all searching for someone, but a voice said firmly, ‘He is gone.’
Kate awoke from her short sleep as it was getting light. All was silent, and then came the gasping, heaving sound of crying just a few yards from her head. Sitting up blearily, she saw Nabanita crouched over, her arms clasped around her son’s body, pressing it to her breast and shaking with sobs.
*
It seemed to Kate later that that moment had been a turning point; the point at which her old life had ended and the new one had begun. She had seen death before, but now it was everywhere. In the Hukawng Valley anyone could get sick and die, and no one would come to save them.
Fred abandoned his plan to leave for Shinbwiyang and she felt shamefully relieved. Late in the afternoon, he knelt down beside the grieving parents. ‘Tomorrow we must continue our journey. I know this isn’t easy.’
‘What about Satish?’ asked Nabanita, looking at him with swollen eyes. ‘We can’t just leave him!’
‘We must bury him,’ said Fred sombrely.
‘That is not our way,’ said Sameer as he cradled his son’s body.
Fred knelt beside him and laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘I’m afraid cremation will be impossible – the wood is too wet and the rain keeps falling.’
He and Christopher helped Sameer to dig a shallow grave at the edge of the clearing, using sticks and cooking implements and finally their hands, as Mrs Bryant stitched a shroud from a bedsheet, her swollen hands clumsy. Shreya sat beside her, silently passing her pins and scissors.
‘What are Indian funerals usually like?’ asked Christopher, when Sameer and Nabanita had retreated to the shelter to prepare Satish’s body, their weeping audible.
‘Sameer’s family are Hindus, but it varies between religions,’ said Fred. ‘I went to a Hindu funeral in Varanasi. It was rather wonderful, actually. The father of a man from my regiment. They burned him for hours and then took the ashes down to the Ganges and flung them in as the sun began to set.’
*
It was almost dark by the time the funeral began. They held what candles and torches they could muster, and stood in a ring around the grave as the body was lowered in.
Nabanita began to sing a Hindu song, unfamiliar to Kate, but she thought it very beautiful in its melancholy. It made her think of the funeral that Fred had described, and she pictured the crowds of mourners in white, the embers burning low, and the elation as the loved one was cast into the sacred Ganges, blood-red under a setting sun. She remembered her father’s burial, and the numbness that had overcome her, standing in the cold churchyard, gripping her mother’s hand as the vicar droned on. This seemed far more real, and more final.
It was the strangest funeral that Kate had ever been to, and the saddest, she thought, as she watched the grave being filled in and all that was left of little Satish disappeared under the black earth.
31
The Hukawng Valley, June 1942
After the funeral they travelled west for several days. They came to a river, where the remains of a log bridge perched uselessly on each side as the water rushed past, muddy and laden with sticks and leaves. The river was wide and the whole main section of the bridge was gone.
‘Must have come down in a storm,’ said Fred, surveying the torrent. The banks were high and the trees went almost to the edge. Peering down, Kate could see that the river was deep here, and that the cliff was too steep to get down to it safely.
‘How are we to get across?’ said Nabanita, gripping Shreya’s hand tightly. There were dark circles under her eyes and she walked as if she was in a dream. Her jewelled sandals had come almost to pieces and the frayed hem of her sari was stained black by mud.
‘We could build a new bridge,’ said Christopher, but Fred shook his head.
‘It’s too big a job. These bridges are usually built with the help of elephants.’
‘If only we had an elephant,’ said Shreya.
Mrs Bryant was leaning heavily on Christopher’s arm and he helped her to sit down on a fallen tree. She winced, and Kate saw how swollen her ankles were.
‘We’ll carry you over, if necessary,’ said Christopher, patting his mother’s shoulder.
‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
‘I mean it!’
‘I’ll get across the same way as everyone else. Walking, I expect.’
‘I’m going to look for a crossing,’ said Fred, heaving his bag onto the floor.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Christopher quickly, and they scrambled off along the bank.
Kate laid her head back against a tree and closed her eyes. Fever had been threatening for days, but she had pushed through it, reluctant to slow or worry the others when there were much weaker members of the party. Fred, she knew, could see through her bravado.
‘Which river is this?’ she heard Mrs Bryant ask.
‘I think it’s the Chindwin,’ said Myia, who was pacing on the bank. ‘It starts in the mountains somewhere near here. Or perhaps this feeds into the Chindwin.’
The roar of the water was so deafening that Kate could hardly hear herself think, and it was almost a relief. With her eyes closed the rest of her senses seemed heightened, and focusing on the noise of the river she began to identify the different sounds that made it up: the trick
ling over rocks near the bank, the splashing of waves at a sharp bend, the shifting of pebbles, and under it all, the low murmur of the current in the depths.
‘Mama?’
Kate’s eyes flew open. Nabanita was standing on the broken section of bridge that projected over the river. She had taken off her shoes but her knapsack was on her back. She was very close to the edge, staring down at the rushing water below.
‘Come down, Nabanita,’ said Sameer sharply. ‘You’re scaring Shreya.’
She looked back at him, as though waking suddenly, and stared at him and their daughter.
‘Please come down,’ he said, and now he sounded more gentle. He pushed Shreya wordlessly towards Mrs Bryant, who took her into her arms and stroked her hair, holding her hand tightly. They watched as he scrambled up and Kate could hear him talking quietly to Nabanita.
For a moment she was quite sure that Nabanita was about to jump into the river and was frozen, knowing that there was nothing to be done. She looked so hopeless, standing there in her filthy sari, the golden chains around her ankles caked in mud. The misery emanating from her was almost visible and Kate imagined a great black cloud of grief that would smother them all.
Then it was over and Sameer was helping Nabanita down, both of them trembling, and Christopher appeared, running, to let them know that he and Fred had found a crossing a short distance away, a ferry run by a group of Kachin boatmen, who took the group across in twos and threes on a sturdy raft, their bare feet deft on the knotted wood. Kate fumbled in her bag for coins and watched Sameer holding tightly to Nabanita and Shreya as they were taken across.
They climbed off into the shallows, holding hands unsteadily. Nabanita staggered out of the water and sat down on a rock, her tears mingling with spray from the river as they ran down her cheeks.
*
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ said Kate the next day, looking at Fred as they walked side by side.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if I believe in classical ghosts, white misty figures in castles and all that. But I saw things during the war that made me think there was something else. Why do you ask?’
‘I was thinking of the green ghosts that the Burmese talk about. Restless spirits.’
‘You sound sceptical.’
She thought of the human remains they had seen littering the route. The dead were with them, sure enough, but it was impossible to connect the physical remnants with whatever else might be left behind.
But perhaps she did know about ghosts. After all, hadn’t she felt her father’s presence on the farm until she moved away? Those early mornings, watching the sun come up over the meadows, mist billowing, when she had been sure he was standing just out of sight under the eaves of the barn, keeping an eye on her. In Burma he might have been a green ghost.
‘Ghosts mean different things to different people,’ said Fred, as though she had spoken aloud. ‘I think the dead stay with us – to remind us.’
‘Remind us of what?’
‘Not to waste it.’
I wish I knew how, thought Kate, looking down at the thick mulch of leaves beneath her feet. I have spent so long grieving that I barely remember what it was I wanted to do with my life. Is there still time to salvage it, to make something worthwhile?
‘Who are your ghosts?’ she asked. It was an intimate question, she knew, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
‘My brother died on the Lusitania,’ said Fred. ‘You won’t remember it, of course, you’re too young. I forget how much time has passed.’
‘During the last war, wasn’t it? I was just a baby,’ said Kate.
Fred nodded, frowning slightly. ‘Graham was on the crew, working in the engine room. He’d been in trouble with the law, petty stuff really, but our parents thought he’d be safer at sea, find some discipline.’
There was a chattering in the trees as some unseen animal leapt from branch to branch, shaking down a heavy patter of raindrops. Kate peered into the foliage for a moment, but whatever it was had already moved on.
‘I wouldn’t have known what happened to him, except that a friend of his who’d survived came to find me in Liverpool later that year when we were both home on leave. Tom, his name was. He told me about the torpedo and the sinking, about the mad panic that spread through the decks when they realised the Germans had got them. It all happened so fast – they were only a few miles off the Irish coast.’
‘What happened to Graham?’
‘As the ship was going down, people were fighting to get on the lifeboats. Graham spent the last minutes of his life helping people into the boats – frightened women, screaming children. This fellow Tom was with him, but he said he’d have bolted for a place himself long before without Graham’s example. The two of them, and doubtless many others, stayed on board until all the lifeboats were full. Hundreds more were trapped below deck.’
‘And what happened then?’ asked Kate, not sure if she wanted to hear the rest.
‘They jumped overboard – the ship was sinking fast beneath them and they had to swim hard so they weren’t sucked down. They got separated in the crush, and by the time Tom was rescued by a ship from Cork, my brother must have been long dead.’
Fred glanced back at the rest of the party, who were some way off. ‘Tom survived by using the bodies of the dead as a raft. He was shaking and crying as he told me all this, although of course I didn’t blame him. We all do what we must to survive. They’d died as they hit the water, most of them, and the others froze to death pretty quickly. He hauled himself up onto the bodies and kept mostly above water.’
Kate felt a chill even in the sticky afternoon heat. Through a gap in the trees she could see a mountain range in the distance, just visible under a bank of heavy clouds. They were capped with snow and spears of sunlight fell from the unseen sun, making the white tips gleam.
‘He had hypothermia and when he got to Dublin he was a wreck. Once he came out of hospital he went home for a bit, but he was called up not long after, poor lad.’
‘It was good of him to find you.’
‘He wanted me to know how Graham had behaved when the ship was sinking. He guessed, rightly, that it would help the family to know that his last actions had been selfless and kind.’
He stared absently at the dripping jungle that flanked them on all sides. ‘That was Graham all over, of course. He was always kind. He made some mistakes, but when it came to the crunch I imagine he knew he was going to die and used his time wisely. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say. I think – or hope – that there’s always time for redemption. Graham is with me whenever I start to worry about doing the right thing, hovering somewhere nearby.’
It was a startling thought and Kate considered the idea. Was her father with her? She wanted to believe that something, anything, remained. Fred must have been only a young man when his brother died. He had carried Graham with him for nearly thirty years.
‘I hope it gave your parents some comfort to know what he did at the end.’
‘I think it did,’ said Fred, ‘although my mother was never quite the same. She didn’t want me coming out here, thought she’d never see me again. Rightly, as it turned out. They’re both long gone now.’
‘What became of Tom?’ asked Kate.
‘The war,’ said Fred, heaving a sigh. ‘Killed at Ypres in 1917, I gathered.’
‘My friend Edwin,’ said Kate, hearing her voice tremble, ‘this chap I met in Rangoon. He had done something that he was terribly ashamed of – his wife died, you see, and he wasn’t there. He seemed lost, didn’t know what he wanted, but I suppose that was it: he was looking for redemption, too. A chance to forgive himself.’
‘He’ll get it,’ said Fred, sounding certain. ‘He might not know it, but he will. We’re not defined by our mistakes. It’s what we do next that matters.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘You’ve spoken of him before,’ said Fred quietly, with a half smile. �
��He sounds like a good friend.’
She sensed the question behind the words. ‘More like a brother, really,’ she said. ‘I worry about him.’
‘He’ll be well out of Mandalay by now,’ said Fred. ‘It sounds as though the city has been completely overrun.’
‘I hope he’s safe.’
‘There are other routes than this one. If he’s lucky he may have fallen in with the army as they retreat west. Or perhaps through the Taungup Pass – it may still be possible to get to Chittagong.’
‘What stories we shall all have to tell when we get to India,’ said Kate. She saw Fred glance at her. ‘What? You don’t think we’ll get there?’
‘We’ll get there,’ said Fred steadily.
‘What, then?’
He shrugged. ‘I admire your optimism.’ He shifted the heavy load and she heard his back click as he stretched it. ‘You’re a good sort of companion for this journey, Kate.’
‘I was just thinking the same.’ She watched him as he turned back to wait for the rest of the group. The rain began again, gentle at first, but soon heavy raindrops were bouncing off leaves all around. Looking back towards the mountains, she saw that the clouds had descended and the snowy peaks were out of sight.
32
The Hukawng Valley, June 1942
The road towards Shinbwiyang was ankle-deep in mud and progress was slow as they trudged along it the following morning, shoulders hunched in the pouring rain. Often, now, they saw among the trees the remains of travellers who had not survived the journey – decaying bodies, half-covered by leaves, and sometimes bones that had been picked clean.
After lunch the rain stopped abruptly and the jungle began to steam. Finding a decent campsite in the early afternoon, with a tumbledown hut left by other travellers, they decided to camp early and take advantage of the sun’s brief rays.
‘We’d best get as many clothes laid out as possible,’ said Fred, flinging down his knapsack. ‘This could be the last sun for days.’
The Long Journey Home Page 14
