Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms

by Katherine Rundell

  The monkey chattered, agreed. She rubbed its fur between her fingers. It was so smooth, it felt wet. “What do you think, hey? Ja? Shall I take you with me?” It would be so good to have a friend again. She couldn’t have one at the school, because at school, all the good bits of her—the tree-climbing-sunlit-jumping-catapulting parts—were useless. They thought she was boring. “They hate me.” But taking the monkey would be impossible. One girl—especially a small one, a midget savage, they said—could, she hoped, hide fairly easily. One girl and a hungry monkey, less so.

  She untwined his arms from around her neck. He re-twined them. Will kissed the monkey’s eyes and nose; then she pulled the lace out of one boot and tied his back paw to the far wall. It wouldn’t hold for more than five minutes, but it might be enough to stop him from following her. Will would need her toes to climb, so she tied her boots to her belt loop with the remaining shoelace.

  Will turned to the wire and gave it a tug. The morning was still quite dark. She should be able to get out the way she’d come if she went right now, before the zoo opened, right this minute, though it wouldn’t be as easy. Her ankle had begun to swell, and her arms ached. And oh, it was so hard to force her bruised fingers to grab and pull and lift. She’d never felt so stiff, or so tired.

  To distract herself from the terror of falling, Will tried to make plans. Planning whilst hanging upside down by your fingers and toes from a wire cage is difficult, but not impossible. The first problem was where she should run to. In the center of London there would be parks, she knew from the girls at school, and museums where you could sit for free. Above all, there would be rich people. Will squeezed herself through the hole in the roof, moaning with the effort. If you needed meat, you went to watering holes or the grasslands, where animals congregated. So if you needed money, you went where the rich people came in herds. And that was London.

  Will dropped to the ground in front of the barrier, trying and failing to land silently.

  The little monkey chittered. Will thought it might, if she squinted her ears, have sounded like “Courage!”

  HALFWAY ALONG THE FIRST ROAD she walked down, Will found an abandoned sleeping bag and half a can of something. She sniffed it. It was some kind of beer. She hadn’t had a drink since the water from the taps in the zoo toilets yesterday. She sipped it, and then spat it out immediately. It tasted like pond water. Will tipped it down the drain and wiped her mouth on her hair. She’d rather be thirsty than drink that, she thought.

  Two hours later, helplessly lost, Will was starting to regret her decision. Her throat was aching and rough, and she felt her stomach gurgling more urgently. The beer, though, had given her an idea. If people threw away cans of drink, what else would the world have left out for her? At the next garbage can she came across, Will stopped and checked over her shoulder. Nobody was watching her.

  The garbage can was full of cigarette butts and plastic bags, mostly, but beneath them was a potato chip bag, salt and vinegar, with broken pieces of chips in the bottom corners. Will fished the bag out—it looked fairly clean—and was just running her finger around the inside and luxuriously licking off the fragments when a round-faced boy grabbed at his father and cried, “Dad! Dad! Look! That girl’s eating rubbish!”

  Will froze with her tongue still poking out. The boy’s father made a grab at her. She tugged and squirmed, gasping, “Let me go,” and buried her teeth in his hand. He was shouting, “Come back! I’m trying to help!” But Will, shivering with horror, tore through a group of gaping tourists and fled. She didn’t stop until she had counted to three hundred, long after footsteps had ceased to pursue her.

  The hunger was growing more painful. Will swung her arms to propel herself onward. The second good garbage can she found was ten minutes on, down an alley as narrow as a bush path from home, flanked by sky-high buildings and deserted except for a man sleeping in a doorway. It smelled of urine, and she recognized the pungent, rank bitterness of rats.

  Will pushed her hair behind her ears. She squared her shoulders; she whispered a prayer. She crossed her fingers—and then uncrossed them, because she couldn’t rummage using only her thumbs. The garbage can was spilling over with tin cans and scraps of cigarettes. Her hand closed on something promising and hard—the last bit of a chocolate bar. Someone must have been on a diet, she thought. She’d never heard of diets until she came to England. She ate the chocolate, telling herself firmly it was no different from stealing sugar from the kitchens, or fruit from the compost bin, which she’d done almost every day at the farm. If she was caught, her father swiped at her legs with his stick and laughed. Will shivered again, this time not with cold.

  Will forced herself to concentrate. She reckoned she had to eat properly, immediately, or faint into that yellow puddle at her feet. She picked out the crusts of a sandwich. The teeth marks were still on them. They weren’t moldy, but memories of the girls at school—what they’d say—cut at her heart. Filthy savage, she thought. And, Dirty little animal.

  Footsteps approached. Instinctively, Will dropped down behind the bin. Don’t shiver, she told herself. Don’t move. Try to imitate a sidewalk. She heard the thump of something heavy against the sides of the garbage can, and footsteps receding.

  Will crouched on the pavement long after they’d passed. Her legs ached too much to stand, and her veins were full of icy water. She thought, Come on, chook. Her father would have said that—and, Courage, hey. Will pulled herself up using the rim of the bin and lifted out a Styrofoam carton with careful hands. Inside it was a mountain of french fries, lagooned in a sort of red sauce, barely touched and still hot.

  Dizzy with her luck—and with hunger too, probably—Will threw back the crusts and tucked up her knees on a doorstep to eat her prize. The rain began to fall in muddy curtains, soaking her hair, but the warmth from the fries was like a kiss. Potatoes, Will reckoned, solved a lot of problems.

  • • •

  When Will rounded a corner just as evening fell and saw a sign to the park, the surge of joy was so great, she had to stop and clutch at her stomach. It was stronger even than the day she’d first ridden Shumba. It was like a blast of warmth to her toes, like new courage. The big clever busy city continued to sweep past her, roaring and spluttering and frowning and pushing. But, Will reminded herself, she was clever too.

  The road to the park gates (HYDE PARK, a sign said, and she saw that as a good omen—hide was exactly what she needed to do now; hide, plan, run, in that order) was long. Will tried to keep herself to a slow jog, with a hop in it every other step to protect her ankle.

  The air was less sharp and cold than yesterday, but windier, which Will liked. The wind was turning umbrellas inside out and blowing her hair wildly across her face, and was loud enough to drown the music of a man playing a violin in the street, until she was almost standing on him. She was enchanted—not just by the music, which was dragonfly-quick, but by the people who dropped coins into his hat. Will retreated to a safe distance and crouched to watch. At home, nobody danced or sang for money. They did it because there was too much happiness in their chests, or because they were angry, or bored. It was like breathing. It had never occurred to her that dancing and singing could be sold. But it looked a glorious idea.

  She thought, If I had a hat . . . But possibly winter clothes in general would work? Will smoothed out her scarf on the pavement and stood behind it. She needed a sign, really, and she should put money in the scarf, to show people what she wanted them to do, but she had no money. She found a bottle cap instead, and a round thin pebble, and a ring-pull from a beer can.

  Will squatted against a lamppost to tie her trailing shoelace, checked left and right for police, and kicked her legs up into a handstand. It wasn’t easy. At home she was always barefoot, but now her heavy boots wobbled in the air. They made gravity harder to measure. She could usually hold the handstand for four or five minutes, but her jersey was slipping down over her eyes so that her stomach was bare to the wind, and she
couldn’t see if people were stopping to look. She didn’t hear the chink of money.

  Will twisted upright. Nothing, not half a dollar. (No, she corrected herself—pound.) She tucked her sweater into her shorts and spat on her hands. She had no elastic for her hair, but there were a couple of well-shaped twigs nearby. She held the handstand for longer this time; maybe two minutes, she thought, before an upside-down voice said, “My dear! You’re creating an obstruction.”

  Will struggled upright. A crowd of boys was watching her, blocking the path of a wrinkled woman with a shopping bag on wheels.

  Will blushed. She whispered, “Sorry! Sorry, ja,” and pressed herself against the wall, smiling her polite-to-visitors smile. The boys retreated a few steps and jeered. Will ignored them; they were hyenas, she thought. Hyenas were the one animal Will didn’t like. They smelled disgusting, she thought, like wet straw and old meat. She clarified out loud: “Hyenas. Not those boys.” But the boys smelled too, of old cigarette smoke and greasy armpits.

  Will looked away from them, fixing her eyes on the sky instead. She tipped backward into a bridge shape, and walked to and fro like a crab behind her scarf. The concrete was icy, and she could see, upside down, that her fingers were turning blue. Nobody put money in her scarf. Apparently, handstands and bridges did not impress English people.

  Will got up again. Shivering in the drizzle, she did two messy backflips, but she had never tried on a sidewalk, and her wrists smarted sharply, and on the third she landed with one palm in broken glass. A fat woman stared and made as if to stop; Will bit down on her sleeve, determined not to cry out.

  “What are you doing?” Will whispered to herself. The wind drowned her voice, which meant she was safe to say it out loud. “Be careful. Have some sense, Will Silver. England is the land of common sense, hey.” A hospital would send her straight back to Leewood, and Will felt her skin tighten with the horror of the thought. Will resolutely picked out the few shards and wrapped her hand in her sock (she’d lost both gloves somewhere between yesterday and today), and stood on her hands.

  Upside down and in the wind, Will sang.

  She sang “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” the South African anthem, which her father had taught her as soon as she could talk, because it was so beautiful and sounded, he said, like impala drinking at a water hole, and then the English national anthem, though she wasn’t quite sure of the words after the first line and had to la-la the last bits. An upside-down woman glared at her, with frown marks like a railway line, and Will stopped. It might, for all she knew, be heresy. She remembered, suddenly, the songs she and Simon had sung at night by the fires.

  “Inkie Pinkie Ponkie, Ayeh!” Will called into the wind.

  Nobody stopped. Will sang louder,

  “Father bought a donkey, Ayeh!

  Donkey died, Father cried,

  Inkie Pinkie Ponkie, Ayeh!”

  Will saw a cluster of upside-down shoes stop in front of her, and heard the click of cameras, and quick laughing talk in a foreign language. Chinese, perhaps, she thought. Will sang louder. Squinting, upside down, she saw a handful of copper coins drop onto her scarf, and then foreign female laughter, and then a proper hailstorm of coins. Some of them, she thought, were those chunky little English pound coins.

  “Thank you! Thank you, hey!” Upside down, Will laughed with the triumph and kicked her legs in the air, until her sweater fell back over her eyes. She gurgled and panted and tried to breathe through the cloth, and then choked and toppled over sideways and leaped up, her heart turning victorious somersaults.

  There was a scuffling sound as she stood up, and pounding feet. Will brushed her hair out of her eyes. Her scarf and money were gone.

  The gang of boys was sprinting down the road toward the park gates.

  It was hard; it was too hard not to cry. Will hurled herself after them, shaking and sobbing, and then tripping and grazing her good knee. They hadn’t seen her coming; they were clustered under a tree, shoving and grabbing at the largest boy. He held both hands over his head, out of their reach.

  “You’ve got it, haven’t you?” said Will. She hadn’t seen their faces back on the street. She couldn’t be sure it was them. Will bit the inside of her cheeks. Nothing was certain in England. That was the problem. Everything was unfamiliar, even boys.

  “You’ve got it.”

  The largest boy had acne, and his lip curled up under his nose with distaste. “Wha’? Got wha’?”

  “My scarf. It’s mine. It’s from my farm, ja. It was a present. You’ve got my scarf and my money.” She felt limp and helpless. “You took it.” Justice was only easy in books. “Please.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “We done nuffin’. Scram.” The curled lip advanced on her. Will backed away a step.

  “Yeah, scram.” The other boys stepped closer.

  “I said please.”

  The boys swore. “Beat it, yeah?” One picked up a stick and waved it at her, as though she were a dog.

  “Get lost, all right?” The boys—six or seven of them, years older than her, at least two heads taller—cracked their knuckles. Will stared. Cracking your knuckles to fight. Surely only cretins did that. She stopped backing.

  “I need it, ja.” She felt her knees and elbows lock themselves, ready. “This isn’t a game. Please. Give it back.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” They were laughing.

  “Oh! No, wait, guys! I think I know what the little gypsy means.” The large boy—his neck was thicker than Will’s waist, a buffalo of a boy, she thought—put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of pound coins. He wafted them under her nose. “Was this what you was talking about?”

  “Yes!” Will held out her hand. “That’s mine.”

  “Mine now, though, isn’t it? It’s finders keepers, yeah. We’re teaching you a lesson, yeah? Look after what you got.”

  Will’s body convulsed with anger and she grabbed at his arm. She never touched strangers. He felt clammy and cold. “Please, ja. Please.”

  The wind was picking up again, and the boys were shouting over it, mimicking her voice, “Please! Yarr! Pretty please?”

  Will tightened her grip on his wrist—“Please!”—and squeezed in earnest, vicious, trying to stop the blood. “Please.”

  “Get off me!” he said, and he drove his elbow hard into her chest.

  Will was stunned for a second. The world darkened and buzzed. She swayed. Then every stored-up ounce of misery and fury, every locked-up scream since her father’s death, exploded, fire-hot, inside her chest, and she threw herself at him, roaring and weeping rough sobs, hammering with her fists, her head, her knees. Some of the other boys made grabs at her, and the large boy bellowed and thrashed, backing away into two of his gang and collapsing into a kicking, spitting heap. “Get her off!”

  Will had never fought like this. Every unswung punch and unspat spit of the last two weeks boiled up inside her. She kicked one boy in the kneecap, and found the face of another under her right hand and wrenched upward into his nostrils with two fingers. He shrieked. The others stopped laughing, froze, stared. The one who had had hold of her hair slowly unclenched his fist.

  Will pushed him away and got up on shaky legs. “Give it to me. I need it.”

  The largest boy stared. “God! You little savage!” He threw the money and scarf onto the grass. He tried to spit on them, but Will could see that his mouth was dry and he could only dribble. He edged away from her. His face was bleeding. “You little . . .”

  “Come on, Rob.”

  “You little . . . savage. Are you crazy?” Still staring, still backing away, the boys swore at her, spat on the ground. Two kicked stones at her head. Will ducked the first one and caught the second in two fingers of her unsocked hand. It was instinctive. She couldn’t think in a straight line, let alone see in one. She let the stone drop to the ground.

  “Bloomin’ heck!” The girl was obviously abnormal. She still hadn’t blinked. T
he boys turned and ran.

  “Sha,” Will whispered. She dropped to the ground against the tree and hugged her chest, waiting for the shaking in her fingers to calm. “Sha.” Under her hands, her heart was rattling around like a cutlery drawer in an earthquake. She spoke to an imaginary Simon. “Sha, hey?” She hadn’t known she could fight like that.

  But she hadn’t known she could lie, either. She hadn’t known she could hate so many people. She was learning a lot of things. The wind blew her hair into her mouth, and she spat it out angrily.

  With her good hand, Will counted out the money, making piles of the coins—pounds, fifties, twenties, tens. There was a mound of coppers. Together she had more than eight English pounds. That was a start. Not enough, though, for a bed in a hotel, because the girls at school said those cost hundreds, even thousands. That was another thing to hate about England. Will stuffed the coins deep into her pocket. Nothing was free here.

  Perhaps she could sleep here, on the grass, she told herself. It was soft and smelled sweet. But she was muddy enough already, and the muddier you were, the more grown-ups stared. And, she thought, there was always the chance the boys would come back. She couldn’t bear to be ambushed.

  A flurry of wind and falling leaves made her look up. The tree she was leaning against was a great, generous spreading giant—like a baobab at home, but thinner, and with leaves—and the branches were thick. They would be protection from the wind, as well as concealment.

  Will hauled herself to her feet. It was dusk already—daylight seemed an endangered species here—but not too dark to see footholds in the bark. There was a place, maybe ten feet up, where two branches slotted into the trunk at right angles to it, like the slats in the seat of a chair. She settled herself astride them, with her back against the trunk. Experimentally, Will closed her eyes. The seat was as firm as a horse, and she’d often fallen asleep on Shumba’s wide back, but if she fell off Shumba, it was only sixteen hands to the ground.