A Sister’s Gift (2 page)

‘A flock of red balloons?’ I finish, relieved at the interruption. ‘They must have just let them off. They were selling them at the castle; wish balloons, for charity.’

Which is when I met that guy, Duncan. And he made me feel so off-balance that I had to nip back to Florence Cottage to get some Rescue Remedy before I came back to the office after lunch. And while I was home, that’s when I picked up Dr Shandaree’s letter and
that’s
why I forgot all about the chief engineer at Crossings Constructions…

‘They’re all flying together, look at that.’ Ben’s face softens. He’s an old guy with a thin, stern face. I’ve barely ever seen him smile but he’s enchanted now. We stand and watch for a few moments as the metallic balloons huddle together and shiver, a scarlet cloud, a swaggering cloak of shining festival red, almost totally obscuring our view from the window of the opposite bank.

A crowd gathers along the Esplanade to watch them now. A cheer goes up. We can hear laughing and clapping, a frisson of delight as a line of schoolchildren stop to point, and for a moment even the honking drivers on the bridge give it a rest.

‘Wish balloons,’ Ben marvels. ‘Well,
I
wish this whole worry over our ancient bridge would get sorted. And cheaply,’ he adds for good measure.

‘You didn’t buy a balloon,’ I remind him. ‘So it probably won’t count.’

I want Ben to go now. I push my chair in under my desk as a sign that I mean to get on. I want to see what’s in that letter.
I have to know
. Are my eggs still in good working order, and are Richard and I going to be asked to travel over to India for the making of our baby?

‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve got hold of the guy you want.’ I leaf purposefully among the papers on my desk and Ben finally takes the hint.

‘OK. ASAP, Hollie.’ Ben shakes himself out of his reverie and scuttles back down the stairs. The people who had gathered for a moment along the river are beginning to disperse, too.

I ease out the letter from its hiding place, leaving the leaflet behind. I unfold it, fingers trembling so much I can barely hold it. Will I be going to India or not? I drag out my chair and sit down on it again with a bump.

So that’s it then? I bite my lip and a small, unhappy tear drips down onto the letterhead. I take out a tissue from my bag. I should
have known it. My head is suddenly pounding with a tension that has been building up for weeks.

I have to stop this, that is all. I have to stop it, now. All this dreaming and longing for a child of my own. I’ve spun too many daydreams out of it, that’s the problem. I’ve made the expectation grow so big, there
is
nothing else that I want…

I need to think about…other things. Work. That’s it. I pull a pale blue folder towards me. It’s labelled ‘Charity Applications – Ongoing’ but my heart just sinks. Usually I love my job. Why is it that just now everything seems like such an onerous task?

I open up the letter again. My eyes skim over the words, skip through to the bottom which I didn’t bother reading earlier. There Dr Shandaree has added in a handwritten scrawl at the bottom:

I ditch the tissue and wipe my eyes with the back of my hand to read it better.

A willing close relative, she says? A sister, does she mean, or a cousin?

I… have one relative who would be genetically similar enough to me, I suppose. But Scarlett is not close. Currently, she is foraging for orchid seeds somewhere in the deepest jungles of Brazil. And I do not imagine in a month of Sundays that she would ever be
willing
.

Another cheer goes up now and one last red balloon is on its way, floating across the skyline. It’s higher than the others were at this stage. I catch the weak September sunlight glinting off its shiny surface, the long string wriggling downwards, the little envelope containing the secret wish fluttering happily in the breeze.

And there is Duncan, standing by the line of parked cars along the opposite pavement, catching my eye.
I made a wish
. He points at the balloon and gestures to himself. I want to turn away, to get away from the sight of him, but I can’t. He’s mouthing my sister’s name, and holding up his little finger and thumb in a ‘phone me’ gesture.

I shove Dr Shandaree’s letter into my handbag, possibilities and thoughts tumbling through my head.

Scarlett. My sister. He wants her.

And I don’t exactly know where she is but right now, I want her, too.

Up, up and away flies the shining balloon. Over the Old Rochester Bridge it goes and the industrial estate by Strood Esplanade is left behind in a breath. A child at the top of Rochester Castle cries out, pointing upwards, but too late because the balloon is already on its way.

For a moment, following the trajectory of the river, it sails over Command House. And then, where the water swirls in thick grey waves round the steep bend in the bank it bears north-northeast and up past the imposing main gates of Chatham Dockyard, past Chatham Pontoon. For a heartbeat, the sun glints off its metallic red surface giving a stiff salute to the proud naval history of the town. The flags on HMS
Ocelot
and HMS
Cavalier
shiver and flutter their own salute in return but the balloon isn’t hanging about. The higher up it goes, the smaller the lands spread out below are getting; cosy Frindsbury to the west, sprawling Gillingham to the northeast with the white dots of so many rooftops all in a cluster, opening out at the edges to the faded grassy greens of the farmers’ fields beyond. And then, gathering speed over the grey-green river, the red balloon passes the ordered rows of houses at Wainscott to the east, the stark grey spectre of Upnor Castle to the left, the glint of a thousand panes of glass on St Mary’s island to the right.

How far can it go, how high can it go? The river widens out. The air gets colder as the land drops away and still the blue sky
winks, beckoning it on further. The long white string twirls and flutters beneath it. The message sealed inside the envelope, addressed to Scarlett L. Hudson, is still intact.

And it’s on its way.

Shit
. What was that?

Did José hear it? I just heard a low growl but I can’t see anything.

I move my head backwards a fraction and my young guide’s still close enough for me to see the whites of his eyes in among the shady foliage high above me. He blows a shock of black, ruler-straight hair away from his face but he doesn’t move a muscle.

Quietly, as still as he is, I breathe in long and slow through my nostrils. What is it? Will I pick up the acrid scent of a big cat nearby? Is that what he was trying to warn me about? I’ve been out here eighteen months and I’ve only been really close to one once before. They stay away from people for the most part. And they move so silently you never hear them. If you see them, it’s just for an instant, a dark shadow you could have imagined. Out here, the Yanomami say, you need to develop another way of knowing when danger’s near; you have to develop a sixth sense.

Fuck
. I glance down at my row of collecting pots. I can’t afford to lose these seeds now. I need to hand these samples in as part of my Klausmann Award submission. I wish I could just push the sticky hair away from my face. What should I do now – try and save the seeds, or should I be more worried about saving my own skin?

To add to it, that tantalising itch that’s developing on my left arm…Ugh, that’s got to be some nasty bug that’s just crawled in under my sleeve. I should be used to it by now but I still hate ’em. They’ll eat you alive if they get half a chance…

Mind you, I shiver – so might a jaguar if its belly was empty and it came across me and José up here in the cloud forest. I’m definitely not imagining it. There’s that low growling noise again, just like I heard before…

I pull in a breath, fighting the urge to breathe harder and faster as my heart begins to race. José did warn that they sometimes hang out in the remote areas, that we’d have to be careful, but I wasn’t really worried. All the way up here I was on the lookout, kinda hoping if I’m honest that we’d see something special ’cos none of the other graduates have, even the more adventurous of the blokes. I wanted to be the first, make it a victory for the girls. I’d have enjoyed seeing the look on Emoto’s face.

Now I’m not so sure.

I blink as a fat drop of condensation plops down from the canopy and into my eyes. Visibility in here is pretty much zero, except for wherever you happen to be shining your torch at any given moment. And, man, now I can’t stop shivering.

It’s the cold, I tell myself. We left the paved road behind hours ago, walking in the darkness of the misty forest for the best part of the day to get to this spot and – bizarrely – it’s freezing because the jungle in here above the hills of São Paulo is so incredibly thick that no sunlight can penetrate. Even though it’s got to be 45 degrees out. How weird is that? As silently as I can, I switch my torch off. It makes a quiet ‘click’ and then I’m in total darkness. Fool, I think immediately, the beast will probably smell its way to you if it wants you for dinner, it doesn’t need to see you…

Where’s José gone now? I’m only twenty-four…too young to…

I try and catch sight of him again as the breeze moves through
the shimmering foliage higher up. The trees at this altitude are shorter and thicker-stemmed than the ones lower down and at last I catch sight of him again. He’s barely moved a muscle; he’s so still, he could be a mushroom growing out of the pale twisted bark.

What is that stench? It is so black and bloody and rank you could just retch. It’s an animal smell obviously, but where is it coming from? I see José’s hand moving now. It’s reaching very slowly towards his belt where he keeps his arrows, the ones he keeps tipped with curare and venom from the tiny poisonous frogs. What can he see that I can’t?

José looks down at me. His brown eyes seem to flash out a smile of reassurance. He isn’t afraid. He looks away again. I do not move and he lifts the tip of the blowpipe to his mouth and aims…

Over a day’s hike from here the brown water of the Amazon trundles along, widening out a little way down. I think of the old canoe tethered to the battered vellozia tree by the bank. That canoe could take me home. Man, even though this is the adventure I was dreaming of, I’d love to take that ride home right now. I’d do anything to be back there.

The needle-thin arrow is in position in the blowpipe now. I can see José, shifting his body, ever so gently repositioning himself to take the shot. He’s only going to get one chance to get this right, the thought flashes through my mind, he won’t get another shot. And he’s just twelve years old…

The roar from the creature’s throat when it takes the hit turns my legs to water, reverberates in my stomach. It’s coming from directly above me. It is somewhere up there among the branches and I can hear it now, a mixture of anguish and fury so primal I just know that if I’m in its path when it comes down I’m going to get torn limb from limb. And now there’s the sound of branches breaking as it cracks every single bough on the way down, falling heavily. I see it for a split second only. It is a huge creature, black
coloured, its bristly fur sticking up in tufts over its head and on its back – an old dominant male howler monkey. And a wounded one at that. I catch a glimpse of the blood spurting darkly from a fresh wound to its neck.

Instinctively, I put my hands over my head as it crashes down right onto my seed pots and lies still, just a few feet away.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I cover my face, waiting for the monkey to spring up and attack but it just stays where it is. José shins down the banyan tree, his eyes still wide but shining now. He shoves the beast with his foot. Surprisingly strong, he manages to roll it over. I switch my torch back on. I can just spy the tip of the deadly arrow sticking out of its neck.

José gives out a whoop of triumph and I just let my backside slump down against the springy green forest floor in relief.

My pots, I’m thinking. I’m still alive but that
creature
has smashed all my sample pots to smithereens. All the seeds and spores will have been trampled and sucked into the boggy humus beneath the trees. I should be grateful, I know. A moment ago I was worried about not making it out of here intact but, hell, I worked
so
hard to get them.

Emoto’s the better ethnobotanist, I can’t deny it, but ever since Eve took us aside at the beginning of the year and said she’d put us
both
forward for the Klausmann Award for Services to Plant Sciences, I’ve allowed myself to dream. I’ve never won anything in my life before. To achieve an award would be so exciting. Especially this award. It’d be a recognition of everything that’s come to mean so much to me. The Amazon is my life now. To get recognition of that fact would be so wonderful…

Now José is trampling all over everything, too. He’s bending over the old male, his knife out of his belt, hacking away, sawing intently and after a while he stands up straight and comes over and plants his prize carefully at my feet. I look down at the half-curled bloodied monkey hand.

‘I’m not going to pick that up, José,’ I croak, and he laughs at me, the delighted giggle of a triumphant child.

‘You take it,’ he insists in his own language. ‘Monkey paw mean you will always come back home to us, yes?’

‘I’m not going anywhere, José.’

He grunts in reply, and I watch him scamper back to the prize, his short brown limbs clambering all over it to get better purchase. For a good few minutes, sitting among the succulent dark-green bromeliads, I can’t bring myself to even move.