Saving Abbie

by Allan Baillie

  Gadas.

  First Ian heard the fire, an urgent crackling that came through the haze, followed by a sudden snap and a heavy crash. Then there was another sound. A frightening sound, a shuddering hiss, as if something immense was sucking all the air from the jungle. The haze became a billowing pall of smoke rising from the trees.

  Yos scratched his cheek as he turned the boat round a bend. It seemed as though every boat on the river was jamming against each other and the muddy bank. The long, slow boats, the klotoks, were tied to trunks and bushes, with planks running from the top deck to the jungle. Speedboats were attached to the klotoks, like a litter of kittens. There was almost no room left on the river to pass.

  Several girls and middle-aged women were working a water-bucket chain up the bank to supply panting men coming out of the undergrowth. The tourist Rimba Lodge was further along but it looked deserted, apart from two men on the wharf loading a canoe.

  Ian took the Dragonfly’s rope from Yos, stepped onto a klotok and tied it to a post. They hurried together over the klotok and into the jungle where an old woman grinned toothlessly at them as she gave each of them a damp hessian bag.

  Yos saw Ian’s expression. ‘That’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘Hell.’

  They hurried to the fire.

  To Ian the rest of the day was a blur. Bushes flared, scorching his skin and shrivelling the hair on his arms. He battered the flames down, he wheezed for air and the flames rose again. He was working with some sweating Americans, then with a single Canadian woman who hit the flames as if they were someone she hated. Then he fought with a cluster of men and women from the village, and with a skinny woman called Anne and a couple of rangers from Pondok Tanggui. Yes, she had seen Abbie but that was a long time ago …

  Someone threw a bucket of water and Ian took a couple of steps into the blackened jungle, but a burning branch crashed in front of him and he had to retreat. A pig charged through the firefighters, bellowing, with its hide smoking, and splashed into the river. Two boys dropped their charred cluster of leaves and chased the pig.

  There were times when he wished Mum had put her foot down – really down – and stopped him from going into this burning island. But it wouldn’t have worked and she knew that. He looked adult, he sounded a little bit adult, so he had to do things for himself.

  Like this? Ian stopped for a moment and wheezed, the closest he could come to a laugh. It seemed that he had stopped many times, but not enough. He had to stop when his lungs were gasping for air and he wished for a breeze to clear just a little of the smoke. But of course a breeze would make the fire erupt and spread. It was bad enough with the fire just sucking the still air. He stopped with gratitude when the water bottles came around.

  Suddenly someone gave him a tin bowl with fried rice and he was pushed away from the fire. ‘Later, later.’

  He sat down on a smouldering log and stared at the bowl, too tired to eat it and too tired to want to.

  ‘I think we’re beating it,’ said an ash-streaked man beside him.

  ‘You reckon?’ Ian looked around, then focussed through the muck on the man’s face. ‘Hey, Ki?’

  Ki turned and slowly registered. ‘Ian. You made it. Bad time.’ He had a few lines on his face that Ian didn’t remember and he was very tired.

  Ian watched the crown of a tall tree burn in the twilight and was surprised that the day was finishing.

  ‘We’ve been lucky.’ Ki sounded as if he was trying to persuade himself. ‘Until now Tanjung Puting was missing the fires, not like the other orang areas. Fires everywhere.’

  ‘You said we’re beating it here …’

  A fresh breeze stroked Ian’s face. The burning crown flared into a high torch, spraying sparks over the jungle.

  ‘If we stop that.’

  A chainsaw snarled in the curling smoke.

  ‘Someone is listening to me.’ Ki sagged on the log with dead eyes.

  ‘Have you seen Abbie?’

  ‘Abbie? No …’ Ki staggered to his feet. ‘There’s an orang on that tree!’

  He shambled a few steps and then ran, shouting.

  The tree creaked, twisted and crashed down, the blazing crown etching an arc in the coming night.

  Abbie looked down at Gadas and blinked.

  Gadas was putting the stick against his shoulder, lowering his head so his eye was almost touching the stick. He was closing the other eye, staring at her along the stick …

  There was something … You were clinging to Mist, massive, indestructible Mist on a rich green tree under a bright blue sky. You can almost taste that new berry she gave you, sweet as milk. But there was a man – this man – at the foot of their tree. With a shining stick.

  Abbie made a quick kiss-squeak and reached out for Pebble. Pebble stopped investigating a lizard and touched Abbie’s hand.

  A deafening roar exploded in the shell of Abbie’s head.

  Abbie was falling from Pebble and she could not stop it. Pebble was groping in the air towards her but her hands wouldn’t do what she was telling them. Her arms and legs were swimming loosely through the leaves as she and Pebble whirled about each other. Falling so far but never touching …

  Ki dragged his feet very slowly from the flickering shadows, holding his arms together over his belly as if he had been hit. His neck seemed to be thicker on one side. Then Ian saw the eyes of a baby orang nestling on Ki’s chest.

  Ian stood unsteadily.

  ‘She’s dead.’ Ki’s voice was slightly quivering.

  Ian lurched forward and saw the frightened infant orang clinging to Ki’s chest and his neck. Dead?

  ‘She knew. She knew.’ Ki shook his head.

  Ian moved his hand towards the baby but held it back. The infant’s hair was singed on the arms and it was covered in ash, but the eyes shied away.

  ‘It was like she was waiting for me. She came out of the bushes before me, burned all over her body – I don’t know how she managed to keep this little guy protected – and she looked at me. She knew.’

  Ian swallowed. A very small voice was echoing in his head: Please don’t make it Abbie.

  ‘It wasn’t the fall. It was the fire. She was sick before. She’d got better but maybe she hadn’t got up to speed by the time the fire came here. And she never had the full speed with that one arm.’

  ‘One arm …’

  Ki was crushing a white fist away from the infant. ‘It took a while, but finally Gadas killed Cas as certain as I stand here. I wish, I wish …’

  Ian looked at him in the eyes. ‘I am sorry.’ Because he had nothing else to say.

  Ki flung his fist into an open hand, throwing the anger away. ‘I have to take the little guy downriver, to Tanjung Harapan. I have to find Yos.’

  Ian found Yos leaning on a scarred tree and they walked through the blackened skeletal jungle to the river. Just before Ki stepped into Yos’s boat, he looked at Ian’s face. ‘She … Cas … put her baby on the ground in front of me. And then she went away and died.’

  Ian watched the boat slide into the dark river. He thought about Cas, about lost Abbie, then he returned to the burning jungle.

  Abbie drifted from a deep darkness into a wall of pain, a pain so solid she kept her eyes shut and tried to pull herself back into the dark. But the pain increased and the wall began to fragment, to slide into her back, her left arm, right shoulder, right foot and the side of her head. The head was the worst, with a dull pounding in her skull that regularly set off a sharp jab behind her ear.

  Pebble.

  Abbie opened her eyes, but the darkness was still around her.

  Pebble!

  Abbie jerked her feet under her, staggered up and fell sideways. Her right foot had sent a searing jolt up her leg and her ribs felt like swords in her lungs. She hunched her shoulders in defeat, shuddered with each drawn-out breath and held her head with both hands as if it was cracking apart. When she took her hands away there was dark crumbling grit on her fingers. She
licked the fingers and tasted dried blood.

  But the pain had receded a little and she raised her head again to look around. The darkness was still there, but with shadows and grey shapes. It was night. She had been lying there for several hours.

  Pebble …

  Abbie hooted softly, skating over the hurt of her ribs, and listened.

  Nothing, no chattering monkeys, no late bird call, no scuttling lizards in this dead jungle.

  She rolled over slowly and stood on one foot and two hands, trailing her injured foot. She was in some sort of chasm, and she could just see the trail in the ash where she had rolled and fallen on the side. She climbed clumsily, painfully out of the chasm and wheezed on the edge for a while.

  Before her the black forest floor sloped acutely up with smudges in the ash where her limp body had rolled and skidded towards the chasm. She hooted again as she recovered her breath but she kept it down. There was danger in this black jungle now.

  She climbed the slope like a tortoise, with the sides of her hands and her hooked feet. The injured foot could carry a little weight if she didn’t rely on it. She stopped when she saw the opening fog and a dent in the earth. She looked up, at the broken branches, the snapped twigs and the dangling leaves.

  Abbie hooted loudly and desperately as she turned around. She saw an unburnt branch lying on the ground near the tree with its leaves crushed. She moved across and pushed at the branch uncertainly. In the moonlight she saw a few hairs sticking to a leaf, picked up the leaf and sniffed it.

  Pebble and blood.

  Abbie stared at the leaf and remembered …

  Clutching at Mist’s body, falling, falling through leaves, crackling branches. Her mother’s arms waving limply in the rushing air, and her mouth sighing. The falling took a very long time. Until a bush flared out and Mist was tipped onto her feet.

  For a moment Abbie, little Abbie, thought Mist was about to leap onto another branch. But she only tilted forward and collapsed like a rotten tree.

  And the man came. Gadas.

  He ripped her from Mist’s body and thrust her into a hessian bag. But she could see through the coarse weave. She saw Gadas standing over her mother’s body with a machete, striking down again and again. He picked up another hessian bag and put Mist’s curling hands and feet into the bag. He picked up Mist’s head and grinned. Then he dropped it into the bag …

  Abbie held in her hand a leaf with a touch of blood on it, and a few hairs of her son.

  She threw back her head and screamed.

  The echo came back to her, twisting through the stark black forest, and she stopped with a shudder and a dull whimper. She climbed a tree awkwardly, carrying the precious leaf. She pulled herself up into the canopy, where the motionless foliage covered her. She sat on a branch and stroked the hairs in her hand. They were all she had left of Pebble.

  But …

  Abbie closed her eyes and rocked in the fork.

  You can remember the time after Mist’s fall. Not a good memory, but it was there. You were bounced in that hessian bag on Gadas’s back, crying, choking and then too exhausted, too hurt, to make any sound at all. Gadas carried you out of the jungle, past trees chopped down, to the river.

  That was where Pebble was.

  Abbie lifted her head and sniffed into the night. She tasted the acrid fog, smelled the charcoal, the burned leaves, but still she could scent the distant muddy water. She lowered herself out of the canopy so she could see the ground and moved towards the river, her body shuddering as she swung from branch to branch.

  She was skirting the black desert now, seeing small bonfires scattered on the bald hills. The air was so thick that distant fires looked like lamps. She coughed as she moved between the trees, stabbing herself in the ribs.

  She reached the river before she saw it. The fog simply spread from beside her to cover the dip of the river. She could hear the murmur of men talking and muffled a cough in her throat.

  Three trees away a group of men gathered around some dying coals and a kettle. Gadas stepped into the glow and poured some steaming tea into a mug.

  There was no sign of Pebble.

  Abbie formed her lips into a trumpet to hoot for him, then she clamped her lips together and smothered the sound in her mouth. Any sound she made for him would be heard by Gadas. She moved closer, very slowly and carefully.

  She climbed across to the tree nearer to the men, saw the oily surface of the river behind them and a boat tied to some floating logs. She coughed.

  ‘What’s that?’ Gadas looked into the thick air.

  ‘Nothing.’ A man near him spat into the coals, then he snorted at Gadas. ‘Hey, maybe it’s orangs, hey? Ghosts after yer.’

  ‘You’re stupider than the red apes.’

  The man shrugged. ‘Yeah, you’d know about that.’

  Gadas sipped at his tea for a long moment, then he threw the tea into the coals, causing an explosion of steam and ash.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘I’m wasting my time with you petrol heads. I’m going.’ Gadas turned his back to the men and walked towards the boat.

  ‘Now? In the middle of the night? You mad.’

  Gadas threw his hand up. ‘I know this river. I can take that boat from end to end. Blind.’

  ‘Yeah, you’d have to be. What, you scared white that the rangers going to catch you?’

  Gadas ignored the man and swung aboard the boat.

  Abbie knew that scarred yellow boat. The small cabin was shoved to the bow by a long flat deck covered by a confusion of drums, boxes, coils of rope and some crates covered by dark green canvas.

  She could remember when the yellow boat shuddered past her, when she was on Yos’s boat. And Ki was hissing with anger. But there was another time, too. When the fumes of the engine and the smell of the rotting wood were as close as her own sweat.

  Gadas ducked to the bottom of his cabin and the boat coughed and shuddered as black smoke belched from a low pipe.

  Abbie looked at the men around the coals, at the yellow machine in the shadows. And still there was no sign of Pebble.

  The boat moved from the bank, pulling at the heavy rope connected to the logs. The rope lifted from the water and became taut, shivering spray over the river’s surface. The engine lowered its loose muttering and began to growl, like a dog on a tether. The black water at the stern of the boat churned and bubbled and for a time nothing happened.

  Then the first log moved in the water, lifting a very slight ripple on its edges. And then the second log, and the third, until the wooden surface of the water was moving. Very slowly Gadas’s boat passed Abbie on its way down the smouldering river.

  Abbie stared again at Gadas in the moon-washed haze, in rising desperation. The man was standing in his cabin, with his head sticking above the roof. There was nothing on the bow ahead of him but a short length of rope and a warped grapnel. Through the glassless window she could see that there was only Gadas in his tiny cabin. Behind the cabin there was the deck leading to the post carrying the towing rope and on the deck were several drums, a mess of rope, an open box of tools, a rusty stove, and something like a crate covered by green canvas. And that was it.

  Except … the canvas moved at one corner.

  Abbie watched the canvas as she moved away from the men on the bank.

  She could remember now the time when she had been on that boat. She had been thrust into a cage on the deck on a hot day. Next to the cage was the stained bag containing what was left of her mother. She called softly to her, reached between the bars and touched the bag. The sun climbed into the clear blue sky as the boat crept down the river. Gadas gave her a taste of water late in the afternoon, when she could hardly swallow it.

  Now Pebble was on that boat. There was a cage under the canvas cover on the deck, and Pebble was in it.

  Abbie wanted to throw her hands over her eyes and wail. But that meant Pebble would be gone and there would be nothing she could do about it. So she clamped her teeth t
ogether and followed the boat, staying in the trees but keeping very close to the river.

  You have to get to the boat, but how? Gadas was there, a sneeze away from the cage. He terrified her when she was in his cage, far worse than the wild pig, even worse than the sinking ship, and nothing had changed.

  But the loggers forced her to act. Ahead the trees had been cleared, leaving barren earth and a few piles of smouldering branches. There she would leave the trees and move into the open. The boat was very slow but on the ground she was slow, too. And in the open men were faster. She could be caught, or killed …

  But then Abbie saw a low branch hanging over the river.

  Last chance.

  She swung over to the tree and moved carefully along the branch. Her foot throbbed hotly and she felt her broken ribs give way a little as her body snagged on the gnarled knots of the tree. She stopped, shivering as the branch creaked. Then she looked down, her heart pounding. Gadas and his boat were gone, turning a bend in the treeless desert, but the floating logs were still moving beneath her.

  You could drop onto the logs.

  Abbie grabbed the branch and toppled easily, swinging in the air between the tree and the floating logs.

  But she didn’t drop. Never. She swung, climbed, hung, rocked, swayed but never dropped. That was just too much like falling. She wasn’t a monkey, not a light fast animal with a gripping tail. She was big and heavy and she moved from branch to branch. That is how things are.

  Now she would have to let go of everything. Plummet like a falling stone, with nothing to grab, no way to control her movement, like when her first nest tipped her from a tree. And the logs? What are they going to do when you hit them? Are they going to roll, flip, rear up and throw you into the river? Are there any crocodiles here?

  The last logs were passing under Abbie. In a moment there would not be anything below her but dull muddy water.

  Then she remembered there was a time before. Not dropping, but leaping into space with the sinking ship rolling away from her. That was far worse than this. Except that was then, a long time ago. This is now.