Tidetown (18 page)

It is so cold and wet. The day after the night of the battle is turning into night again. Darkness seeps into the forest, closing all the gaps between the trees. Below, in a clearing, I can just make out the contours of a dilapidated building. A refuge against the close of day. I slide down the hillside, losing my step, crashing through the undergrowth to where the ground levels out. In the half-light I can see that the building is little more than three walls, rafters barely holding up the remains of a roof, with tiles dangling precariously at all angles. The floor is a mixture of broken and crumbled bricks, grass and dirt. Stepping across the doorless threshold I notice a pile of blankets in one of the corners. I prod the pile with my foot and jump aside as it moves. A startled head appears, wide-eyed and frightened. The head belongs to a young brown-skinned boy. Surprised as I am, I raise my hands to show him I mean him no harm. He jumps to his feet and backs up against the wall.

‘Hello,' I say, arms still raised. ‘I'm Oscar. My name is Oscar. I'll not hurt you.'

He looks confused, as if my words make no sense, but I smile and stand still. Suddenly, he doesn't look so alarmed.

‘I'm on my own,' I say slowly, softly. ‘You'll come to no harm.'

He must be about twelve years old, but it's hard to tell as he has the haggard face of an old man and the smooth skin and bony body of a small boy.

It's then, in the fading light, I notice he has something cupped in his hands, clasped close to his body. The boy realises what I've seen and squats down on his haunches turning away from me.

‘Show me,' I say, gesturing with my outstretched fingers. He shakes his head violently. What is it that troubles him so? Is this the last thing he has of his own? Then I remember the piece of bread I have in my pocket.

‘Here, I have some bread,' I say handing it to him. He hesitates, unsure, what with his hands being full. It's then I see the tiny nose and whiskers that have forced themselves between his finger and thumb, clearly attracted by the smell of the bread. I break off a few crumbs. The nose twitches and a little mouth opens up and greedily, hungrily, accepts the gift of food.

‘A mouse,' I say smiling, ‘you have a little mouse.'

‘A mouse,' says the boy. ‘Yes, a mouse,' he repeats, stroking the tiny head.

‘You understand me?' I ask surprised.

‘I do now that you have given some bread to my mouse,' he says stroking the small animal.

In the distance comes the booming sound of cannon shot. We look at each other, and hardly without realising what we do, move closer together.

Next morning it all seems different. The sky has a milky quality. The few remaining leaves on the trees shimmer red and orange hues in the breeze. Turning my head to reacquaint myself with these new surroundings, I come face to whisker with the tiny animal who sniffs at my cheek. Does he remember me from the bread of the night before? Over by the wall my young new friend is still fast asleep. I sit up slowly, stretching the stiffness from my back, slightly dizzy from the pain in my head. The mouse sits up, but seems unconcerned. I feel around in my trouser pocket to find a few remaining crumbs. The mouse sniffs at my fingers and then climbs onto my palm: a giant dining table. He moves from one breadcrumb to the next, nibbling each between his front paws, savouring every morsel.

‘I think he likes you,' says the boy, resting on his elbow, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

‘He certainly likes the bread,' I say, the pin prints of the mouse's claws tickling my hand.

I can feel the boy weighing me up, gaining a sense of me by the way I treat his pet, by the way the mouse responds to me.

‘Where did you find him?'

‘He found me,' says the boy. ‘I woke up the first morning I was here, just like you did today, and there he was, sniffing at my nose.'

‘Has he got a name?'

‘Mouse.'

‘I like that. “Mouse”. Mouse is a good name for a mouse.'

Mouse looks up at me as if he knows who he is.

‘And have you got a name?' I ask, looking straight into the dark brown eyes of the boy.

‘Pangi,' he says. ‘After my grandfather, who died in the last war. The big one.'

Then he goes quiet. He lets the mouse climb onto his open hand and then brings it up to his face so it's close to his cheek. Maybe his grandfather is close by, too.

Pangi's layer upon layer of clothes are not much more than rags held together by string. His toes poke through holes in shoes where socks have long since disappeared. His brown skin is dappled with dirt, his black hair bedraggled and knotted. The mouse is cupped in his hand. He kisses it on the head and strokes its back.

‘Pangi and his Mouse,' he whispers.

‘And your family, Pangi?' I ask.

‘Just Mouse.'

Anything might have happened. I know. There's no need to ask. He will tell if he has a mind to. When the time is right. For now, just ‘Mouse' says plenty.

‘And your family, are they here?' he asks without looking up.

My first thought is of Aimu; then of snippets of a past that seem to be of another life, of another person.

‘A long way away,' I say, ‘and far off.'

Pangi sits on the floor, Mouse crawling along his thigh as if on the ridge of a mountain range.

Pangi's family lived in the hills. He came as a great shock to his mother, who thought her child-bearing years were over, and an even greater shock to his father, who thought he had fed all the mouths God had allotted to him. When he was born, Pangi thought he was a monkey. All his siblings had long left home and Pangi's family and companions were the small macaques that his father bred and trained for sale in the market on the quayside at Cote D'Alkott. On a chart on the wall of their tiny shack, Pangi's father scribbled the dates of when he expected ships to dock. What with storms, mutinies, shipwrecks and changes of course, it was hard to be sure when any ship would make land, but he used the dates as goals for training up his monkeys. Of one thing he was sure: sailors were his best customers, and he wanted his monkeys to be ready to entertain and entice.

Once Pangi was no longer a toddler he came to realise, imperceptibly, that he was not a monkey after all, but a small boy. From then on he joined in and helped his father show the monkeys how to perform tricks. Some wore hats and danced, others rode tiny rickety bicycles that Pangi's father fashioned from all manner of odds and ends he found in the laneways and ditches. On market day, especially when a ship or galleon had newly docked, Pangi and his father would load up the handcart with cages of monkeys and push their wares down the hill to the town. The track was windy and bumpy and the monkeys would hang tightly to the bars of their cages, shrieking with fear. Halfway down they would stop to rest at a bend in the road that revealed the harbour and the sweep of the ocean. Pangi and his father would sit down to take in the view and to drink the cordial Pangi's mother had made from lemons she gathered in the orchards, and to eat the bread she had baked that morning. As they took their rest Pangi's father would tell his youngest child the stories he had told all the others. The one Pangi loved most was about the time his father had been left on the hillside to look after the sheep.

‘I was a young boy, about your age,' recounted Pangi's father, lovingly putting an arm around his son's shoulder. ‘My father told me I was old enough to do a man's job. And I smiled. I was happy he thought of me as a man. I was proud. “Yes, I am”, I said. “I am old enough”. I looked him in the eye, my father, your grandfather, who you never met, though you would have loved him, and he would have loved you. Well, he said that I would be given the job of watching over the sheep at night as there were wolves on the hilltop and they liked the taste of sheep. He gave me a horn that I was to blow if there was any sign of wolves. That first night he showed me to the top of the hill, lit a huge fire and stacked a pile of logs for me to burn. “Just blow the horn”, he said, “and I will come”. But as the night drew on I became afraid, not of the dark, nor of the wolves, but of the snakes I knew lived on the hill. Big, black, poisonous snakes. I imagined I could see them slithering in the grass. I stayed close to the fire, but I was too fearful to reach out for a log in case of the snakes. So the fire went out and then I got really scared and ran back down the hill to the farmhouse and slept the rest of the night in the barn.

In the morning my father stood over me in a rage. “What happened?” he asked. “Why are you here?” I told him all about the snakes. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up the hill. The sheep were happily nibbling grass, but that didn't seem to satisfy my father. “This”, he said “is a snake hole”, pointing to an ominous dark gash in the ground. He pushed in his stick and brought out one of the black snakes that haunted my dreams. It twirled around the wooden staff, biting away for dear life, its fangs lashing into the soft wood. Then my father picked up a rock and crushed its head with one blow. The snake went limp and slithered to the ground. And then it happened.' (‘What?' Pangi would always say, no matter how many times he heard the story, ‘what happened next?'). ‘Then your grandfather picked up the dead snake and beat me around the head. “This is a lesson in fear”, he said as he lashed me with the dead reptile. And Pangi,' his father would say at this point, ‘my lesson to you is that whatever else I may have done, to teach you about life, to punish or chastise you, I've never hit you around the head with a dead snake.' And then they would laugh and Pangi's father would always ruffle his hair and they would stand, assured of their love for each other, and head off down the hill to see how many monkeys they would sell to the sailors fresh ashore.

Then some years later, the terrible day came when the sultan's soldiers arrived at their village and burnt down the houses and took men, women and children into slavery. Pangi had been sent to his uncle's village to help dig a well. When he returned home, all was ashes and cinders. He stood in shock for a day, sifting through the debris for any vestige of his life. Retracing his steps back to his uncle's village he was greeted by the same scene of carnage and devastation. Numbed by what he had witnessed, he just carried on walking, mile after mile, day after day.

Next day it is quiet. No cannon shot. No smell of war in the air.

‘I think the soldiers have moved on, Pangi.'

He looks up. Lonely, lost, sitting cross-legged, Mouse moseying around in his lap.

‘I'm going to head to the coast to find a ship. You want to come with me?'

Pangi thinks, looking around at the broken walls, the rubble on the ground, the sky through the roof.

‘Nothing here … for me,' he says. ‘Can Mouse come?'

‘Mouse is part of the team!' I say, beckoning him to stand up, pretending to parry with an imaginary sword. ‘Pangi, Mouse and Oscar. And Stigir.'

‘Stigir?' asks Pangi.

‘The fourth Musketeer! He's my little blue dog who waits for me in the port.'