Saving Abbie

by Allan Baillie

  Abbie was flowing through the tall canopy when bright water winked at her through the leaves. She tilted a branch, caught a slender sapling and hung in the trees. She looked down and saw the sky.

  She saw bushes growing upside down from the roots, trees reaching down to a stork cruising across a cloud. She lifted her head to make sure that the real stork was flying over her head, then looked back at the image and found herself. The black river flowed from this water, but there was not a mark on the surface, not a ripple, not a tickle, not even a wisp of dragonflies.

  Abbie climbed out of the canopy, found a log alive with termites on the side of the water and squatted. Pebble climbed off her and capered loosely along the log. He looked at his reflection in the water, tilted his head and grinned at himself.

  Abbie poked a stick into a hole, pulled it out for a quick snack of termites, and watched Pebble.

  Crocodiles? Were there any in the water?

  She looked around, at the broad-leaved plants that were floating on the edge of the water. Vertical green swords were poking at the trees, and none of them had been flattened. She relaxed and went back to the termites.

  Pebble was blowing a flat raspberry at his reflection. He broke a small piece of bark from the log, held it high over the water and grinned. He dropped it onto his reflected nose and watched in fascination as his image shivered, broke apart and slowly came together again.

  Abbie sucked a tooth and looked up at the trees around her for a place to build a nest. There were some tall ironwoods on the other side of the water, but they were just that – on the other side of the water.

  A pity there was no Gistok with her canoe …

  She looked across the still water and sucked her tooth again.

  Now you know why that mad ape had to cross the river. Gistok kept seeing those trees drooping towards her every day from the other bank, waving untouched berries. She had to reach out and taste them.

  A long-legged insect walked on the tension of the water. Abbie watched it as it skittered towards the floating plants, vaguely wondering how that would taste.

  A dead tree jutted out from the other bank, almost underwater, but touching some of the floating plants from this bank. Abbie stared at it intently.

  Gistok had to untie those knots on that canoe, and steer it around the wharf and then push the canoe into the open river. Then she had to paddle with her hands into the current and somehow reach the other side. But all you have to do is take a couple of steps onto the floating plants, get onto the log and walk to the other side. That easy.

  Abbie wrinkled her nose. She clicked her tongue and Pebble leapt hurriedly at her. Then she climbed a tall tree near the water and built a night nest.

  Ian pressed his hand on his stomach as he watched his plane creeping towards the terminal.

  Becky looked at him sharply. ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Just nerves. This is my first solo flight.’ He smiled weakly.

  ‘Well, don’t let your parents see it.’

  ‘I know, I know. You think I’m mad, don’t you?’

  ‘Just because you’re flying out to find one particular orangutan in the biggest burning island in the world? Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s dumb. But I promised …’

  ‘To Abbie.’

  Ian shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t have. Everything comes from that sinking boat. On that ship there were only the three of us – me, Reene, and Abbie. I’m always in touch with Reene, but Abbie has disappeared. We have grown up and she has too. I just want to see how she is now, and to make sure she is all right … Do you understand?’

  Becky slowly smiled. ‘No. But that’s all right, I like it in you.’ She leaned over and kissed him. ‘You better say some goodbyes.’

  Ian moved towards Mum and Dad outside the lounge.

  ‘But …’ Becky hesitated. ‘As you say, Abbie has been growing in the five years since you’ve seen her. How will you know her when you see her?’

  Ian stared at Becky. ‘I don’t know.’

  Abbie peered down from her nest in the morning, staring at the still black water and the trees on the other side. She nibbled at leaves and scratched Pebble’s head for a while. Then she moved, almost reluctantly.

  She swung to the ground and looked around, as if there was a wild pig in the undergrowth, waiting for her. But there was nothing.

  She sniffed the air, and there was the bitter tang of burning. It was strong, but it could be coming from anywhere. It could be coming from a long way away.

  Abbie stepped onto the floating plant. Immediately it buckled and dipped into the water. She jumped to another plant, to another, to the half-sinking dead tree. She steadied and walked to the crumbling bank. There she climbed a tree and looked back to her old jungle as she nibbled a leaf from the new one.

  Okay, it doesn’t feel much different. Same smell, same taste. But it’s a new tree. It’s a new jungle. Maybe you can even find another smelly tree …

  Abbie turned from the water and swung slowly into the canopy, with wide-eyed Pebble on her side. Above her the sun was slowly dimming in a white sky.

  The American squinted past Ian and out the plane window. ‘Bloody awful, isn’t it?’

  Ian nodded. A flat sea of light brown smoke stretched to the horizon broken by a few knuckles of white cloud. He had seen it on the flight from Darwin to Jakarta and from Jakarta to here – approaching Borneo. ‘I just hope we can get down.’

  The near engine on the wing suddenly coughed and the plane shuddered. Ian and the American sat in silence, staring at the blur of the propeller, but the engine didn’t cough again.

  ‘I don’t want to get down that way,’ said the American finally.

  Ian tried to smile, but it was forced.

  ‘They reckon that two freighters hit out near Singapore because of the haze. And a plane … Hey, you worried?’

  ‘Oh no.’ But where are the parachutes?

  ‘The pilots on the Pangkalanbun run are pretty well okay.’

  The plane slipped into the brown fog, dimming the sun into a fried egg.

  ‘I’m not worried, really,’ Ian said. I’ve got other things to worry about…

  Abbie’s eyes were hurting. They had been hurting for three days, almost since she had crossed the water. Pebble clung to her and hooted softly in misery. Abbie peered into his eyes, where fine tracks of red wandered out from the pupils. She shook her head. Stupid to cross over. Very stupid.

  She had been trying to find her way back for a long while, but everything was changing. Mists were coiled around the trees, covering undergrowth and the ground …

  But it wasn’t a mist. A mist would settle on her hair in tiny glistening drops, cooling her body as it lifted towards the sun. This mist was dry, it stabbed at her eyes with a thousand tiny needles, and she could feel it scraping her throat when she breathed. It tasted like smoke, but it just didn’t look like smoke. It looked like sky.

  But not a trace of blue was left in this sky, not even a grey cloud. Nothing but a weak, smeared sun, like a jackfruit dropped from a tree.

  Abbie watched a white-brown finger drifting through the crown of a tall tree, as if the sky was reaching down into the jungle.

  It is everywhere!

  Ian walked slowly down the street in Kumai. Slowly, because he didn’t want to breathe the thick air. He couldn’t see through the haze to the end of the street – he could hardly see to the next block. The buildings were dim shadows with an occasional flickering neon sign. He could see the trucks wheezing their fumes into the air, but this time it didn’t make any difference. Many people were wearing surgeons’ masks but they were still coughing.

  ‘Hey!’ Yos was weaving through the crowd towards Ian, waving. He looked tired and there was a sprinkling of grey in his hair. ‘You are Ian? Ian Foster? Yes, yes. Your mother phoned me, to make sure I look after you.’

  ‘She would, wouldn’t she?’ Ian smiled as he shook Yos’s hand.

  Yos reached f
or the backpack Ian had hanging on his shoulder, hesitated and left it alone. ‘I am sorry to be late, but I had to get medicine for my children.’

  Ian followed Yos to his house. The tiles in the lounge were as spotless, as polished as they had been before, the wall ornaments still gleamed and the shelves were free of dust, but the haze of the street had come inside. The TV was a dull glowing blue lamp in the corner, washing the faces of the teenage girls. He could remember the first time he saw them, squatting together like a couple of porcelain dolls, but now they sprawled across the floor with their long legs casually crossed. They didn’t look up as Ian passed them, but he could see their red eyes and hear their wheezing.

  ‘Too sick for school,’ Yos murmured. He went through the kitchen to his wife, where she was washing clothes with a bucket of river water, and he gave her a package. She looked up with watery eyes and smiled at him but she sounded worse than her daughters. He patted her on the shoulder and led Ian to the old speedboat, the Dragonfly.

  Yos was quiet as he curled the Dragonfly past some blackened logs and old sailing ships and sped away from Kumai, until there was a touch of a sea breeze in the broad Kumai River. Then he tried to grin cheerfully at Ian, but it didn’t work. The old Dyak countryman looked like he was sizing up Ian’s head.

  ‘Um …’ Ian shifted uneasily.

  ‘This is better, yes? Maybe I should get my kids and the wife out here.’

  Ian nodded. The smoke haze was all around them – he could not see anything of Kumai now, no sign of the other side of the river and there was no sky. Ian felt he was in a brown cocoon in a small piece of sea, as remote as the middle of an ocean. But the air was a bit easier to breathe.

  ‘How bad is it?’

  Yos’s fake grin died, and he waved around him. ‘You can taste it, can’t you? The papers say Borneo is ablaze. They are burning my island.’ He struck his chest with his fist.

  Ian was quiet for a while, until Yos pulled a compass from his pocket to navigate through the haze. ‘I was hoping that the fire stories had been exaggerated,’ Ian said.

  ‘No. It’s worse.’ Yos slowed down as ghostly palms loomed from the haze. He found the entrance of the Sekonyer River almost immediately.

  Ian watched the crowded palms become straggly trees, and then high shouldering trees, true jungle, and he remembered how Abbie had sat up in interest when she’d seen those trees. ‘Um, have you seen Abbie?’

  ‘Abbie? Ah, is that the reason you’ve come back? To find one orang in Tanjung Puting?’

  Ian didn’t answer.

  Yos looked sideways at Ian’s face. ‘I know, I know. You’re like Harry. And Ki. Crazy people. I don’t see much of the orangs after they get off my boat. Best you see Ki or the Professor. They may have seen Abbie: I only see Gistok on the wharf of Pondok Tanggui.’

  Ian grinned. ‘Gistok? The one who wouldn’t make a nest? She’s still around?’ Then Abbie could be around as well…

  ‘Always. I think she’s waiting for Harry.’

  Ian remembered the American mechanic fiddling with Ki’s old generator, but it seemed so long ago. ‘He came back?’

  ‘Every year.’

  ‘Every year?’ Ian lowered his head in guilt.

  ‘Ah, I lie. He has not come this year. But you are here this year, hey?’

  ‘Probably he didn’t like the smoke.’

  Yos shook his head in annoyance. ‘He wasn’t here last year. I forget.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Maybe he is dead.’ Yos shrugged.

  Ian flinched. Just like that, he thought. You can’t see him, so he’s dead. Will it be that way with Abbie? If you can’t see her, then the fire …

  The haze thickened, forcing Yos to slow down even more. The trees were no more than shadows hanging over a dull brown porridge and something in the jungle was wailing in distress. The sounds of the river were muted – the motor bubbled like a coffee percolator and the sluicing bow-wave rippled.

  Ian coughed harshly and his eyes began to weep from the drifting specks of ash. He closed his eyes but the insides of his eyelids felt like sandpaper. He could not remember how it was to see a clear view and the luxurious taste of clean air.

  ‘How can anything live in this?’

  ‘Very, very hard.’ Yos squeezed Ian’s shoulder. ‘But we have one thing – the river. The Sekonyer keeps the fires out of Tanjung Puting. Your Abbie is still safe there.’

  After a while Ian glimpsed the landing of Tanjung Harapan. The big carved sign, the one that Gistok had sprawled across to welcome visitors the last time, was still there. But Gistok was gone, and the washing men. There was only one small boy playing with a few pebbles on the landing and behind him the old cluster of buildings looked deserted.

  ‘Something is wrong,’ Yos muttered as he nudged the Dragonfly towards the landing.

  The boy looked up from the pebbles.

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Gone,’ said the boy, throwing a pebble into the air and catching it with the back of his hand.

  ‘Gone where?’

  He pointed across the river. ‘Everybody. Almost. Even the village. Gone for the fire.’

  Yos sucked air through his teeth. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Near Rimba. Not there, in the jungle …’

  ‘Jungle. Jungle. Which side of the river?’

  ‘Side?’ The boy frowned and pointed down at his feet.

  Yos punched the boat’s wheel. ‘Do you want to get off, Ian? I’ve got to go. The fires have crossed over the Sekonyer into Tanjung Puting …’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Abbie swung through a few trees, trying to find a better piece of air, but it was all the same. She had slowed down a great deal in the canopy, as she could not see clearly to gauge the branches in front.

  There was a shiver and a thrashing of the trees ahead. She gripped a trunk and patted Pebble, to make sure that he was there, and tried to see into the confusion.

  A black monkey leapt out of the thick haze with its mouth wide open. Then a rush of others skittered over several branches. Something was shaking the undergrowth below.

  The first monkey, a long-nosed one, stopped for an instant near Abbie. Orang and monkey stood on the same branch and stared at each other. Abbie reached out from the trunk as if trying to ask a question. But the monkey jerked his eyes from Abbie and raced on.

  Then Abbie glimpsed a bright orange flicker through some distant undergrowth.

  Fire!

  Not the tame fire on the box used by Ian’s mum to cook food. No. This one was wild.

  Abbie pressed Pebble against her and turned to run. Three trees later she looked back and the flame had gone. She slowed down and stopped herself from trembling. She was much faster than the fire – if she didn’t fall to the ground because she’d grabbed a rotten branch in haste.

  Their eyes were hurting more now and she began to worry about where she could eventually stop and build a nest while the fire was in the jungle.

  Abbie suddenly heard crackling ahead of her.

  She hung between trees, listening. There was nothing to see through the fog. But the jungle was being destroyed, eaten away, ahead and behind her. She closed her eyes for a moment and swung to her right, between the two fires.

  She and Pebble were still shielded by the thick canopy and she tried to pretend that shield was invincible, that the fire would not reach up here in the green, and the green would go on for ever.

  But the undergrowth suddenly stopped. She was swinging through some old timber under a dull orange sun when a black tide crept under her. She looked down and saw that the bushes, the berries, the wandering leaves – all were gone, as if they had never been there. They had been replaced by a wash of black, covering fallen logs, every piece of ground, rising to the lower branches of the tall trees.

  Abbie slowed as she moved over the dead country and stopped again when she heard the sound of several machines roaring at each other ahead.

  But there was
no more terrifying crackling.

  Abbie moved carefully on.

  You heard machines like that when you were with Ian. They were nothing to be frightened about. Not as bad as those roaring motorbikes in that town just before she came back into the jungle.

  The canopy began to thin before her. And then, there was nothing.

  Abbie pulled herself into a fork, sat and tried to work it out.

  There were two trees up ahead and after those there was a space, like there would be above a river. But there was no river, just rolling black hills spiked with stumps. There were two large yellow machines pushing at the thin trees on the edge of the black desert and some men were carrying very small machines that roared louder than the yellow machines. While Abbie watched, a small man stepped up to a giant tree and his machine roared until the tree creaked and tilted. The man took his machine and ran away while the tree half-rolled and crashed.

  Another man pointed to Abbie’s tree, almost directly at her, and said something. The other man put his hand over his face, peered at the tree, then walked away.

  A few men were carrying burning timber towards a patch of green undergrowth to Abbie’s left. Pebble looked up at Abbie, opened his mouth and yawned. He let go her body and climbed a close branch.

  The men threw their burning torches into the undergrowth and stepped back. A bright orange flame erupted from the brush, searing tree trunks and leaping to high branches. Leaves on the branches curled and browned as twigs flared near them. The hair on Abbie’s arms lifted, as if she could feel the heat fifty metres away.

  Heavy white and brown smoke boiled from the flames, rearing into the dull canopy to dissipate amongst the leaves. Above the canopy the smoke was only a part of the haze in the sky.

  But someone coughed. Not near the fire, but in the black forest behind Abbie.

  Abbie turned and saw a man with a shining stick near her tree. A familiar man.

  The man wiped his forearm across his mouth and began to raise his shining stick.