Call Down Thunder (16 page)

Then, as he watched her, she slipped back into the crowd, leaving the first child slinging all his patter at him. ‘Where you from, country? You got some place you gotta go? You lookin lost
as city chicken. You lost, country? I show you. I know the way round every place. You ask anyone. I know most thing ’bout any place.’

Reve tried to keep looking for Mi, but the boy was distracting him. ‘I don’t need nothing,’ he said, trying to push him to one side.

‘Don’t push, country. Don’t push me, ’less you want to fight,’ and he even put up his little fists bunching them up near his face. ‘I could be a fighter. I
could be Cashew Clay. You hear of him, country?’ and he darted in with one little fly punch. Even though Reve was worried about Mi, he couldn’t help smiling, but as he made to step
round this half-size street champion something collided into his back and threw him off step. At the same moment his mocking assailant skipped to one side and snatched his bundle from where it was
slung over his back, then slipped like a rat between a mountain of grain sacks and carts stacked up with onions and bright yellow peppers.

‘Hey!’

Reve dived after him but lost his footing and fell flat on his face. No one paid any notice, just kept stepping by and around him. He scrambled back to his feet and caught a glimpse of the
little girl-boy looking solemneyed at him, before disappearing again but in the opposite direction to the way the boy had taken. How could he be so stupid, and so clumsy?

And all their money! Everything gone and he hadn’t got down from the cab five minutes. How would they get to Moro or survive long enough to track their mother down? Mi was going to rage at
him . . .

He scrubbed his head, frantic; should he follow the boy, or go in the direction the girl went?

He started after the girl and then pulled himself up. It was a trick. She had reappeared so that he would do just that, follow her and then, no doubt, he would end up miles from the market and
completely lost. They wouldn’t want him chasing after them here, because this was their patch. This is where the fast-talking boy would be, already tucked in somewhere, checking what Reve had
wrapped in the bundle. Stick around long enough and he would see them both again, he was sure of it. Meanwhile he needed to find Mi.

Reve squeezed past the cart and the grain and, knowing there was no point in running, he walked as swiftly as he was able down an alley of stalls, sidestepping vendors, drunks and lounging young
men in jazzy shirts with hair oiled and spiky. He looked left and right, keeping his eyes skinned.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a brown ankle and a scuffed trainer sliding in under a stall, and quick as lightning, as if he were snatching a slippery jackfish out of the net, Reve grabbed
and pulled out a child who immediately yelled and cursed him so violently and loudly that the stallholders came to the child’s rescue and Reve had to back rapidly away.

The market was so big. It seemed to stretch on forever, and nothing was in straight lines. He tried to remember particular stalls, but they were all food or grain or coffee and there seemed to
be a million faces, dark and sweating, wide-eyed and dark-haired, shouting and jostling and he couldn’t even remember where Theon had pulled up the truck, and he couldn’t see the wall
with the picture of that beautiful woman on it.

Where was Mi?

He was feeling dizzy and it was so hot the air was thick in his lungs. There had to be a tap or fountain maybe or ice . . . He found a fish stall, and when the vendor was busy he scooped out a
palmful of ice and ran round a corner and then wiped it across his face and dabbed his neck, and slipped a smooth icy pebble into his mouth, closed his eyes and let it melt down his throat.

He took a deep breath and tried to think straight. You don’t just sit on a boat and expect something to happen; you look for the place where the fish run; you watch the sky and the way the
wind moves across the water; anything else is blind sailing, and a blind sailor only ends up one way: drowned. He looked around him. The only way to see anything in this place was to get up on
something and look down.

He found a flatbed truck whose driver was unloading sacks. He offered to help and the man, already drenched in sweat, let Reve climb up beside him. He worked there for twenty minutes, scanning
each quarter of where they were every time he straightened his back. The last sack was bundled down, and the man said, ‘You don’t work like a city boy that for sure. Here –’
he pushed a dollar into his hand – ‘Ask for Cedo any Friday and I’ll give you work. Wha’s your name?’

‘Reve . . .’

At that moment, he heard shouting, a high-pitched whistle, and then, about a hundred metres down to his right, he could see a surge of people and red, he was sure of it, a fuzz of red hair. He
leaped down and ran, ducking and weaving, until he got to where the commotion was. He burrowed through a wedge of backs and shoulders and there was Mi, head back, hair sticking right out like she
had an electric storm ripping up from her skull. Her eyes were rolled in that way that scared Reve because it meant she was having one bad juddering fit, and sure enough she was, trembling and her
arms stretched in front of her and all her fingers out tight.

The man in uniform, the one who had been blowing the whistle, was trying to take her arm and lead her out of the market, but she was rooted. He would have to carry her if he wanted to move her
any place.

‘Excuse me,’ Reve called. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He remembered Tomas saying anyone in a uniform, no matter how low down he was, liked to be called sir, and it didn’t
cost you anything to say the word. ‘She my sister. This happen to her times. I’ll take her, sir.’

The uniform looked down at him. ‘You prove it? You got papers?’

Papers? He didn’t have thing other than the dollar bill he’d just earned, and he wasn’t giving that away.

Someone in the crowd came to his rescue. ‘Wake up officer, can’t you see this boy just in from the country? What paper he goin to be carryin?’ The speaker was a large woman and
her large arms were folded imposingly across her large bosom.

‘I got my job here . . .’ the policeman tried to say but she just huffed at him.

‘Let the girl go, she sick; got a fit on her is all.’ The crowd murmured their agreement.

Reve came up close to Mi and touched her arm. It was rigid, all the muscles locked and trembling. He needed to get her out of the crowd and out of the sun. ‘My sister sick, sir, an’
she get like this sometime. I need to find her a quiet place. Please.’

The policeman scowled. ‘Well, your sister made me lose a thief. I had my hand almost round his neck but then she made all that yowlin and . . .’ He threw up his hand angrily.
‘Oh, take her out of here! Before I march her straight to the Castle.’

‘Why don’ you march you’self off cos you don’ do no good roun’ here!’ And the large lady swung herself slowly round and forged her way back through the
laughing, crowd, which then dispersed. The policeman turned on his heel and walked off.

Reve stroked Mi’s neck and talked to her. ‘You all right now, Mi. Nothin happen to bother you now. I got you . . .’

Gradually her arms relaxed and her breathing slowed and her eyes closed. She shuddered once and let Reve move her slowly through to the back of a stall where there was a little shade, and no
people milling around them, and there was a box he could sit her down on. ‘You all right now, Mi. What happen to make you like this? You give me enough fright to put me in my grave . .
.’

‘Gave me fright too,’ she said. ‘Felt myself stuck in that place where there nothing but voices screamin at me.’

This is how she had once described it to him: like being trapped in the middle of a storm of noise and shouting, sometimes voices, sometimes just noise. ‘What tip you this time?’

‘Him,’ she said.

Mi lunged forward, straight past Reve, so fast, like a snake strike, and had the small boy gripped by the arm.

‘That’s him! He the one who thief all my things!’ exclaimed Reve. ‘Took all the dollar we got!’

The boy was wriggling like a fish, but Mi had him fast, her mouth set tight and her jaw jutting with determination to keep a hold of him.

‘You let me go!’ The boy suddenly flopped to the ground, but Mi was ready and dropped down with him.

‘He thief from you . . . well, this one owe me favour,’ she said, dipping her head to one side and studying her catch. ‘That police was goin snatch him but I started shakin and
shoutin so this boy could skip free. Didn’ like that policeman pickin on a child . . .’

‘You put that judderin on! I thought you took bad.’

‘It turn real on me,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Got myself stuck.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘That happen sometimes.’ The boy had stopped wriggling and she let
him sit up. She still kept a hand on him though. ‘Maybe you come back to thank me,’ she said to the boy.

‘No,’ he said glumly. ‘She made me come back.’

‘Who she?’ asked Mi.

Reve saw her, the girl-boy with the shorn head and solemn eyes, peering at them from the corner of the stall.

Mi took her eyes off her catch for a moment to look around at the girl. ‘You always do what she tell you?’

‘Course not! You goin let me go?’ exclaimed the boy angrily.

Mi released him and he dusted himself down, fussy as a church lady.

‘You got my dollar and T-shirt and things?’

‘She put it safe.’

Reve looked at the girl and she silently held out his bundle. He took it from her and checked. All the money was there. ‘How old are you?’ She looked about the same as the boy. How
could children so young run free and not get lost in this place?

She shrugged.

‘Doesn’t she talk? Don’t you talk?’

‘When she want,’ said the boy carelessly. They were a team, that much was obvious.

‘What’s your name?’ said Mi.

‘Baz.’

‘I give her that name.’ The boy puffed himself up. ‘I can do that. Give name for anything. But I real best at other thing. I just about the quickest pair of hands you ever
seen.’ He flashed them under Mi’s nose, wriggling his fingers, so she almost smiled.

‘The uniform still caught you, eh? Even with your magic fingers,’ said Reve.

‘What you say, country boy? He only caught me cos o’ her.’ He nodded at Mi.

Mi looked surprised. ‘Me? How come I got anything to do with your catchin?’

‘Cos you look like someone.’ The boy shrugged. ‘Tha’s why I stop.’ He slapped his knee and turned to his partner, the little girl. ‘Never stop when you makin
a run, Baz, you remember that.’ Then he got to his feet and so did Mi.

‘I know that already,’ said Baz, and she went and stood beside the boy, and the two of them looked at Mi so steadily that Mi half turned her head away.

‘Stop your staring.’

‘Not just your hair,’ said the boy. ‘You got the face too.’

‘Got my own face,’ said Mi. ‘Don’t belong no one else.’

Baz tugged at Mi’s wrist. ‘Come with us – we got someone to show you.’

Mi’s eyes lit up with sudden interest.

‘No!’ said Reve.

‘Come,’ insisted Baz.

Mi frowned.

‘We agreed,’ Reve said. ‘We don’t wanna go wanderin’, Mi. We do that and we never find her. We got to follow what we agreed . . .’ He kept his voice low and
gentle. ‘I mind you all the time, Mi, you know that. Come on, we do it my way.’

Mi turned her face away from him.

‘I the one who seen the woman in the sea. She come to me . . .’

‘Where you got to go?’ said the boy suddenly. ‘I know every place. You wanna go somewhere, I take you there.’ He shrugged. ‘Only fair after what you done,’ he
said to Mi.

‘What’s your name?’ said Reve.

‘He’s Demi,’ said the girl. ‘That’s cos he’s half of nothing.’

The little puffed-up boy, Demi, made to kick her but she slipped easily out of range. ‘And you a monkey shadow,’ he said.

‘An’ if I’m the shadow, you the monkey.’

Baz’s face stayed solemn all the time, though Reve could see this was a game they played, the two of them, all the time, banter and tease. He couldn’t talk like that with Mi, she
would crack like a bowl, leave nothing but splinters digging in his hand. He almost envied these two children – half his age and yet he got the sense they knew exactly how to deal with the
life they’d been given. They didn’t seem worried, not by the people they thieved from or by the threat of the man in uniform; just water off a gull’s back.

‘We looking for a man who own a bar in Agua. You know Agua?’

Demi glanced at Baz. ‘Course we know that place. Who the man you got business with?’

‘Moro.’

‘Yeah,’ he said carelessly, ‘we know that man.’

Baz’s eyes seemed to have grown rounder as she stared at them. ‘Why you got to see him?’ she said.

‘Listen to her! She too full of question. You mind your business, Baz, you know that. Come on – we can take you to Agua. We don’t want to do nothing more here.’

Before anyone could disagree with him he set off. Baz skipped to catch up with him and Mi and Reve followed behind.

‘You really think this man will help?’ asked Mi.

‘Said he would. It goin give us a start, Mi, tha’s all. Point us to the policeman, Dolucca. Moro goin to know how to find that man. Then we find her.’ It sounded easy when he
said it like that.

‘Won’t it be fine when she see us and take us in, Reve?’

He hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘We goin to see the Night Man in the daytime. The world all upside down in the city,’ she said, and she took his hand – something she had never done before.

The two children were like fleas, hopping this way and that, skitting between cars, slipping through crowds, leading Reve and Mi away from the market area, down a rumbling
throughway steaming with trucks and buses and then on to quieter streets. All the time the girl, Baz, kept looking back at them, checking they were there. Sometimes, Reve noticed, she pulled at
Demi, making him slow down and wait for them.

At the corner of a street called Tombre the children shouted at them to run just as a dusty red tram came hissing down beside them. They did, but when Baz and Demi swung up on to the back rail
and hung there like a couple of spider monkeys, Reve and Mi fell back. They couldn’t do that. How could they, cars and motor scooters going this way and that? It was all too much. They slowed
to a walk, catching their breath, and decided all they could do was follow the street in the direction of the tram.