Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (14 page)

“Dirty
midget
.”

They surrounded her in a ring.

Will said, “You wouldn't. You wouldn't dare.”

“Do you think we're afraid of you? Of a savage with scabby knees?”

“You won't dare. I'll bite.”

Samantha said, “Get in.” She splashed a handful of water at Will. “Come on, gypsy. In you get.”

There were too many of them. The room was too small to
dodge in. Louisa poked Will in the back. “Come on. Get in.”

Will whipped round and spat straight in Louisa's face, but the floor was slippery and she skidded and landed on her back. The girls pounced. Louisa and Vicky grabbed her arms, and Joanna and Bex dug their nails into her legs and they lifted her, fully clothed, into the bathtub. Will tried to bite and kick, but it was four against one, and her lungs weren't breathing properly in the icy water and she could only spit and gasp, “
Foul.
You're
foul
.”

“She still smells of dirt,” said Louisa.

Samantha pulled open a bottle of shampoo and emptied it over Will's hair and forehead. “There. Now she smells of coconut and vanilla.” She wiped her hands on her blazer and turned away. “Let's go.”

Will stopped fighting. She wiped the shampoo out of her eyes. She couldn't see for tears and soapsuds.

Samantha turned at the door. “And if you so much as think about telling on us, we'll put dog poo in your school bag, okay? Don't forget to empty the bath when you leave. It's in the rules.”

Will waited until their footsteps faded. Then she relocked the door and stripped off her soaking uniform. She'd brought her shorts, T-shirt, sweater, and boots to put on after her bath, along with her long woolen scarf to dry herself with.
She didn't have a towel. At home, she dried in the sun by the rock pool. Now she pulled her dry clothes on, coughing and shivering, and sat down to think.

She must have fallen asleep on the floor of the bathroom, because she awoke to hear the clocks striking across the school. Eleven strokes, and a first that must have woken her up—midnight. The school was silent. There were only the noises of rain and cold, and farther off the roar of the main road. She sniffed at her hair. Africa had gone from it.

She wrapped herself in her scarf and fumbled for the apples she had stored in the two big pockets of her shorts. She had taken a piece of cheese, too, from the dining hall, but it seemed to have sunk to the bottom of her shorts. Fighting, and crying, had left her famished. Will groped with her bitten nails, sorting through bits of leaf, the gloves from Lucian, her father's watch, Simon's wildcat, his flashlight, and the captain's pocketknife, all glutinously mixed up with chewing gum and pencil shavings and,
yes
, there it was, what felt like the cheese, warm and soft and a little sticky, but definitely edible.

“Ndatenda hangu,”
Will whispered,
“ja!”
And she felt her chest contract. There were still some good things in this world. Cheese was one of them.

Will pulled at the tangle from her pocket as carefully as her fingers would allow, but the cold air made her awkward,
and the captain's blade bit down into her hand. Will swore and snatched back her fingers, and the knife dropped onto a tile, cracking it down the middle.

The sound rang, agonizingly, down the corridor.

Will held her breath. Very distantly, a door opened and closed. A cold drench of dread swept over her. She could still get back to bed, she told herself. She was faster than any teacher. But her legs wouldn't move toward the door. Instead, holding the flashlight in her teeth, Will scrambled onto the windowsill. The window stuck. Will pushed with both hands; she shoved with her shoulders, her knees and feet and head. The window burst open. She hesitated, crouched on the sill. An excited gasping noise came from somewhere nearby. It took Will a few seconds to realize it was her own breath.

The bathrooms were on the first floor, but in the dark, it looked a long way down. The footsteps were approaching the door now. Will half-dropped and half-jumped into black air; her left foot caught on the sill, and she twisted blindly and landed with a muddy thud on her back.

Her foot was on fire. She curled into a ball, biting on her knuckles and forcing herself not to cry.

“Shut up,” she whispered. “At least you can feel it.” That meant her foot was still attached. Shakily, Will got up, pressing herself into the shadow of the wall. As far as she could see in
the moonlight she was still in a single piece; she'd lost some of the skin on her knuckles on the way down, her pocketknife cut was bleeding a little, and she'd bitten her tongue, but she was—astonishingly, gloriously—free. She was ready to shout and shriek and spin and give a wild horseboy whoop when Miss Blake's voice above her head said, “No one in here. Try the classrooms.”

“I have done, Angela.”

“Try again. I'll look in the arts room.”

Will waited until their noise settled back into silence. Then,
“Penga!”
breathed Will. “
Penga
. Have some
sense
, Will.” She could have ruined everything. She swore under her breath—she was so
stupid
—until tears began to prick at her throat and nose, and then she whispered, “Courage, hey. Truth,
ja
, and courage.”

She started at a halting run along the main road. A shooting star tore across the sky. Will gave a wordless cough of joy and sped up. The stars danced a war dance overhead. She fell over the sidewalk and then her own shoes. As she got up, she found to her surprise that she was shaking with cold and pain and nerves. She wrapped the scarf six times round her neck. She pulled her sweater up round her throat. Slowly, with more careful steps, Will walked onward into the night.

W
ILL STOOD ON ONE FOOT
on the pavement, covered in bright sunlight. She could see a gate, and people taking flimsy English money from behind glass screens, and more people than she'd ever seen before in her life. Cars—more cars than she'd known existed—drove dizzyingly by. Across the street, red buses disgorged crowds of men and women, dressed alike in black suits and expressionless faces.

She had walked for five or six hours, using the maps pasted to bus stops to guide her. All she wanted was to keep on in a straight line away from the school. She had lost herself and bumped into things in the dark, and had slept for an hour or so on the bench of a bus shelter, and then she had
found a file of schoolchildren heading excitedly—where? Somewhere that wasn't school, she could see from their faces. And she had followed six steps behind them. And now here she was, standing on one foot, in sharp winter sunlight, under a sign.

LONDON ZOO
.

Will was feeling decidedly better. In fact, she realized, quite hugely and wildly better—so much better she had to sing, very softly, behind her hair. She was also feeling achingly hungry. She had eaten the first apple at midnight, and the second at two in the morning, and the third and fourth together with the cheese as an inadequate breakfast when she'd woken up in the bus shelter. Smells of bacon sandwiches and hot chocolate were rising in puffs from inside the zoo walls. It was easy to slip into the stream of children and in through the gate, as easy as working Shumba in with the cattle. Easier, in fact, because she didn't have to lasso any of the children.

Will had never been in a zoo. She knew about them, though, in theory. The idea was a horrible one. There were bars everywhere. It was like Leewood all over again. But the animals, Will grudgingly admitted, looked glossy and properly fed. Which was more than Will was feeling. Her stomach nudged up against her skin again, declaring its emptiness.
She shook the feeling off and kept walking, photographing everything with her eyes. There were bushes—
I could hide in those
, she planned—and benches.
Those'll be useful later.
There was a pen of impala flinging their heads around in the sun. They looked happy, like she and Simon used to be in the early mornings, when the air smelled of bougainvillea and redbush tea. There were vast cages full of multicolored birds, all of them singing.

The zoo had got some things wrong, though, she thought. No monkey with self-respect would choose a metal climbing frame, and the baboons had the wrong color of bananas, firm and cartoon-yellow. At home the 'boons ate them black and spotted, or brown as second best. Once, back at home, a gang of adolescent baboons had snatched a stem of brown bananas, along with a lump of cheese the size of Will's foot and a jug of beer from the veranda table, and then had lurched drunkenly around the farmhouse for days, dodging Lazarus's broom and chittering.

Will spent a long time standing in front of the baboons, balling up handfuls of her hair and laughing giddily. When the wind grew too strong, Will worked her way back to the warthogs, which were under cover. She'd always loved warthogs; they were evidence, she reckoned, that the world wasn't always anxious and difficult. It had a sense of humor.
She stopped by their enclosure and grinned at their paintbrush tails, flicking to and fro like pendulums.

“Dad?” A plump little girl a few years younger than Will had stopped and was waving her hamburger at a cluster of them. “Why are they doing that, Dad? Why are their tails sticking up in the air? Is it like a signal?”

Will waited for the father to answer. He was harassed and tight-lipped and wrestling with a blanket and a toddler in a stroller. It looked like the toddler was winning.

He said, “
I
don't know, darling. Read the sign.”

Will grinned across the handle of the stroller. “It's so they can see each other in the long grass. At home,
ja
, we had a tame one. He used to do that all the time. He was called Flip.”

The father said, “At home? Where's that, then? Are you from Africa?”

“No!” And Will added, under her breath,
“Ach, booraguma!”
She was so
bad
at this. She had to learn to be always on guard. She shook her head. “No! No. No, I'm from here.”

“From the zoo?” The girl looked awed.

“No! No, from London,
ja
.”

“Oh. Me too,” said the girl. “Where in London do you live?”

“Just . . . London,
ja
. Near here.”

“You don't sound like you're from London,” she said. “You sound foreign.”

“
Ja
, well.” Will was sick of being told so. “You sound expensive.”

“Don't be rude, Jennie,” said the girl's father—though it was she, Will, who had been rude. Will knew it, and she frowned at him. Adults didn't understand justice.

Will's frowns were hard to ignore. The man bore it for a few seconds before he looked away. By unlucky chance, his eyes dropped to the space of wind-flayed leg between her shorts and her boots. He frowned. “Are you sure you're all right? What are your parents thinking, letting you out like that? Not lost, are you?”

“No.”
Will forced her face out of its scowl. “I'm with my dad,
ja
. Sir. He's . . .” The zoo was emptying. There were no unattached adults in sight. “He's gone to the toilet.”

“Oh, dear. Right.” The man looked helpless, and rather nervous about her—about her, and the warthogs, and, in fact, Will thought, about his own children. “I don't know. Should I be waiting with you until he comes back?”

“No, thank you,
ja
. I wouldn't like to be a trouble. I should go and look for him, actually. . . .” Will began to edge away, taking small silent steps.

The man reached out to grab her arm, saying, “No, wait a second,” but at that moment the toddler dropped something onto the asphalt and let out a bush-baby wail. The girl
wailed too. “
Dad!
Tell him off, Dad! That's the second hot dog he's dropped today. He's doing it on purpose!” She had a voice like a mosquito. The warthogs retreated, snorting.

“Don't cry, darling.” The father was red in the face and rather helpless. “Don't nag, Jennie. We'll buy you another hot dog; we'll buy you both another. Come on. Hold on to the buggy, Jen. Less of the animal impressions, Mikey.”

They hurried off. At the corner, the girl turned round and waved at Will. Will waved awkwardly back, with splayed fingers, and waited, aching with suspense, until she could no longer hear their footsteps. Then she snatched up the hot dog in its snowy white bun, just as a man in a zoo uniform appeared. His eyes were suspicious.

“I hope you're not planning to eat that, miss.”

Will said, “Planning to eat it?” She spoke stupidly, like a parrot. If people thought you were stupid, they left you alone.

“It's filthy. Not fit for the animals. Give it here, there's a good girl.”

“No! Thank you. I was just putting it in the bin,” said Will. She was getting the feel of how to lie. She added virtuously, “I didn't want people to slip on it.”