She sensed the coming of the dawn as soon as she stepped out from the back of the beach house into the open area that Mrs Kabba called the kitchen. Crossing it, she heard ,or thought she heard, birds moving about among the trees. But when she was among the trees herself the dawn seemed a long way off. She could see little and she could hear nothing other than the noise she herself made moving through the forest.She got off the path, as she had been instructed, but did not go very far before she stopped. It was not purely disobedience. She had a truly terrible need to empty her bladder and she knew that, if she did not stop to squat then it would empty itself anyway. But she was appalled at the noise she made peeing and the smell that was there afterwards in the close forest air. She pulled on her fatigue pants straightway afterwards, all the time reasoning that peeing now, getting into her trousers now, would only speed her journey when she chose to move again. Yet after she had fastened the waistband button and zipped the fly and, squatting again, had cinched the bottoms of the legs tight around her ankles, she did not move on. She stood there listening to what noises there were outside her head and the voices that clamoured within.She was very frightened. She had the bitter taste of fear on the back of her tongue. She was shaking again. She was sweating but, as before, felt a terrible coldness all over her body. An ache in her gut, just started, told her she might have to squat again very soon but then an absolutely clear voice spoke through all of the others and said she should wait, if waiting was a possibility. Oh, it was, another voice told her, as a third mocked the whole as nothing but nonsense. So many voices, so much for them to say, so many things for them to tell her. But one voice, pitched lower than the rest and softly insistent, set up its short refrain. All because of you, this voice said. All because of you.She kept it to that. She would not let it progress. She refused to enter into an argument with it. She kept back the long list of justifications for what she had done that could be summed up with an equal brevity: only doing her job. It failed to convince, perhaps because it sounded too much like the other incantatory excuses that had rolled from off the tongues of the guilty throughout the century’s bloody years. But she could no more shut it up than she could remember the line of poetry that would at least have asked an honest question about what part, if any, she had played in the sudden and awful turn in the war that had brought it to this remote and lonely place.At the same time, she was praying. She had not prayed since - the last time she had prayed. Her prayer was the little refrain she had always used when she was frightened and she had been frightened so often when she was a girl. She had lain awake in the darkness on so many nights certain that there were bogeymen about or worse, the Nine O'clock Horses.Who had told her about the Nine O'clock Horses? She did not know, or could not remember if she had ever known. She was not even certain what they were. Yet they frightened her. The mere idea of them frightened her. And so she would pull the covers as far over her head as they would go and she would keep her eyes shut and she would say the magic words, say them over and over again.She remembered, equally surprised, the old rhymes that had frightened her, barking dogs that warned of beggars, "some in rags and some in tags and one in a velvet gown".Standing still, the girl listened to all her voices, waited for something to happen, although she did not know what, and, to her shame the moment she realized it, never once wondered about Mrs Kabba in any kindly way, what she was doing, what she intended to do if -. Before she could add to the 'if' there was the clear sound of an outboard motor starting up: one, two, three snarls and then the quiet was ripped from the young day. She turned and went deeper into the forest, moving as fast as the branches and her own shaking legs would let her.She was not Alice now. She was not Dorothy. She wished she were. She wished she could just click her heels together and say the lovely phrase but she could not. As she could not summon the imperiousness of the blonde-haired child that had reduced her own surrounding horrors to nothing more than a pack of cards she sent flying through the air like so many inconsequential butterflies.Farzaneh was not blonde and, this side of a bottle of bleach, never would be. She was, and the thought smacked across her with much the same smarting force as a tree branch had just done, Snow White. She laughed because she remembered the name not in English but Japanese: Shiroyuki Hime. In Tokyo Disneyland there was a ride called, she thought, "Snow White's Desperate Journey." Hoosh's kids had made her take them on it again and again and again. And watch the video. And watch the Hello, Kitty version on video as well.But this was different. This was the latest release and the plot had changed. It was now the Wicked Queen that had sent her into the forest not the hunter. The hunter, and he had friends in this version, wanted to cut her heart out. The hunter and his pals, if they came into the forest after her, if they caught her, bloody well might cut her heart out. Only, not before they had done a lot of other things to her first.In spite of her best efforts not to, Farzaneh fetched up against the compound wall of the house that Hassan Bangura-Saeed had built for Mrs Kabba and, in spite of what she had been told, squatted down with her back to it. Just to get her breath, she told herself. Just to get her bearings. She had been on the move for what seemed a long time; pushing on slowly through the trees so as not to make so much noise, but moving nevertheless. She had stopped once to ease the aching in the pit of her stomach and then been forced to do so again after only a few paces more. She had thought it must be what Mrs Kabba had warned her against: the skitters. She had begun to sob then and throw the old questions up towards the sky she could no longer see. Why this? Why now? Why me?But it was not anything she had eaten, only the terror that possessed her. The cramping in her stomach went on but she had had no need to stop again. Hunkered down, her back against the wall, she stayed in the place she had been told to avoid trying to understand what had happened.Only three people knew that she and Mrs Kabba had come out to the Point: Father Conteh and Mrs Kabba’s servants. Father Conteh was probably dead. The stewards, the old man and his grandson, were either still in the house on Kissy Street or else, according to Mrs Kabba, gone to their own village. So who had come and why they had come were questions the girl could find no answers for. Put it down to rotten luck then, she thought.There were other questions to deal with, not the least of which was what made Mrs Kabba think she could deal with the intruders. Farzaneh’s first thought had been that she meant to hide somewhere out behind the house, which was why she had offered to help her up, help her negotiate her way out into the old kitchen area on her swollen legs. Then, when she was in the forest, the voices going ten to the dozen inside her head, it occurred to the girl that Mrs Kabba would not hide. She remembered the way in which she had said she would never leave Africa, “not now”.If she would not leave, she would not hide. She would wait for whoever had come and send them packing because of who she was. And, Farzaneh thought, perhaps she would. Everything else, every other query she had raised, was a question she could not answer. She began to sing to herself, softly, under her breath: another gem from her brother’s record collection. Eddie Cochran? Maybe. She couldn’t be sure. There was just the one line she knew anyway, something about questions that neither she nor Eddie, if it was Eddie, could answer, and then the bit that had always made her laugh, the uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. uh-huh.She actually started giggling but a burst of gunfire from the beach put an end to that. Bullets from the discharge snapped through the foliage, sliced off leaves, smacked into tree-trunks. Cement chips and dust flew out of the wall some way to her left and it took several long seconds before she realized why but when she did, she threw herself flat on the ground and, when the firing stopped, began to crawl away from where the bullets had hit, following the wall to its end and turning the corner. She had assumed that she already was on the side of the house farthest from the sea. Now she intended to make sure of that before moving away, back into the forest, along as vertical an axis from that side of the compound as she could manage. She was perhaps three metres in among the trees again when she heard Mrs Kabba, it could only be Mrs Kabba, screaming.To be continued ...
