Call Down Thunder (25 page)

Two days and two nights in this city and it felt like a lifetime.

‘We goin to have to walk, Mi. We can’t risk taking the tram.’

‘I can walk any place,’ she said. ‘You know which is the way out of here?’

‘See the lines, the wires.’ He pointed to the tram wires. ‘All we got to do is follow the lines and they take us to where we want to go.’

That’s what they did.

They walked through the night, trailing the tram line, checking each stop for their number, nine, having to backtrack a couple of times when they took the wrong track out of a junction.

The rain eased after a little while, but they were so wet it hardly made any difference. It was a long, hard night. The air was clammy and warm. Mi’s hair was flattened and plastered down
around her face; her fancy dress clung to her and made a slapping sound against her legs as they walked. They slogged through puddles and running drains but they kept pushing on, and all the time
they were careful, stepping quickly back off the road and out of sight each time they heard a motor coming their way.

Black rain. Splintered diamonds suddenly glittering in the darkness when cars passed or when they skirted the street lamps.

Ghosts, thought Reve as he stumbled along, silent ghosts, heads bowed, lining the road away into the distance, showing them the way home.

Around four o’clock, a couple of hours before dawn, there were suddenly more cars and trucks and then the trams started running again and early workers were hurrying
along the pavements; they felt less visible.

They cut away from the main street looking for a place to rest, somewhere they wouldn’t attract notice. They were in an old part of the city now, where the houses were tall and skinny,
with rusting balconies and peeling shutters and trees throwing down shade. Then they came across a little church on its own like an island guarded by iron railings. It was perfect.

They climbed the locked gate and found themselves a corner out of sight. Mi laid herself down on top of a stone with letters carved in it, laid down flat on her back with her legs straight, arms
by her side, palms turned up.

‘They dead people under that?’ asked Reve.

‘They just resting,’ she said, ‘like me.’ She didn’t open her eyes. ‘I can almost hear them breathin.’

‘No, you can’t. The dead don’t breathe; any fool know that.’

She ignored him.

He was so tired that everything ached, even his eyes. He sat down but pulled his feet up so they were well away from the stone Mi was lying on; he didn’t want any part of himself touching
something that belonged to the dead. The sun warmed his face and he could feel his T-shirt already beginning to dry. He closed his eyes but he didn’t sleep, too many things flitting across
the inside of his eyelids.

Around noon a man in a funny square-shaped black hat and buttoned up in a black coat came and shouted at them. ‘You do your business some place else!’ He was so
angry his eyes were bulging and there were little bits of spit on his mouth.

‘Don’t think he like that fancy dress they put you in at Moro’s,’ said Reve as they moved on.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t care what he think. Priests. Only good at shouting at poor people.’

‘How you know that?’

‘People tell me thing,’ she said, ‘when they come to my meetings. They tell me I got more right words coming out of me than any priest they ever heard.’

They headed up to the main road and bought bread, sausage and a big bottle of water. Reve also bought a man’s shirt for Mi to wear, knotting it at the waist so that it
covered up the outfit Moro’s girl had squeezed her into. She looked a bit strange, but Reve reckoned that now the city was up and busy no one was going to notice them, tell them apart from
any other children out on the street, so long as Mi covered up her hair. He found a cap on a street stall, and Mi, after a bit of a struggle, piled her hair into it, leaving a tangled-up ponytail
sticking out of the back.

No police were going to be stopping trams now, so they used up the last of their money to buy a ticket to the end of the line.

They were getting near to the last stop, just about where streets gave way to stores that weren’t anything more than shacks with awnings pulled out over their fronts, shading cheap goods.
Reve was looking at Mi.

‘You look different,’ he said.

‘Course I look different. This what they wear in the city. Don’t you got eyes?’

‘I don’t mean that cap,’ he said, wondering what it was that seemed changed. She had her head half turned away from him, gazing out of the window, the sunlight flickering
across her face just the way light flickers through clear water, down on to rock and sand and shifting weed.

‘Maybe you lookin more old.’

‘Old? You sayin I getting wrinkled up like a witch woman?’

He smiled. ‘People pay you good money if they think you got witch power.’

‘Don’t need witch power; got my own.’ A moment later she said, ‘You think I lookin old?’ She turned away, looking out of the window again. ‘Don’t feel
so old. How old you think our mother was when she give birth to me?’

He thought of Fay in her smoky den, red hair, pale face, the black cigar. It was hard to imagine her as she might have been fifteen years younger, but she could have been about the same age Mi
was now. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why you worryin?’

She didn’t answer.

He closed his eyes, but now, having conjured up an image of Fay as a young mother, his mind wouldn’t let go of the idea and one picture tumbled into another: Fay holding a baby, Fay with
Mi at her knees, Fay with a smile like Mi’s, but smiling not at her children but at a man in a uniform . . . that policeman, that Captain. Was that man really his birth father? The thought
was sickly, like a stain.

Reve opened his eyes and stared out of the window. People going about their business, ordinary people, ordinary people with families. How many of them, he thought bitterly, walked away from
their children? If a mother doesn’t want her child, then the child doesn’t owe that mother anything. Not one thing.

He put his hand on Mi’s arm. She turned her head and smiled and then looked away again.

They got out at the end of the line and then argued as to what they should do.

Not having any money to pay for a bus ride down along the coast, their only choices were walking or hitching a ride. ‘I ain’t walkin any more,’ Mi said flatly. ‘Anyhow,
die of hunger before we get halfway to anywhere. And I’m not hitching a ride with nobody.’

‘Well, what idea you got? If we don’t catch a ride, we got to go back into the city and wait five more days till Theon come back. You wanna do that?’

‘Steal,’ she said, as if it was the obvious thing to do. ‘That Demi make a living out of it, picking pockets. Can’t be so hard.’

‘Steal! What you thinkin’? That one way to get snap up by police. You wait here.’

He left her sitting by the roadside while he went into the stores along the road asking if there were any jobs he could do, earn himself and her a bus ride back home. But they were hard-faced
the people who lived on the edge of the city and didn’t have any interest in helping out a boy who talked with a country voice and who’d spent the last couple of days and nights out on
the streets and was all grimed up and sour.

Then with a squeal and a cloud of dust and diesel, the bus came. They tried talking the driver into letting them ride for free but that didn’t get them anywhere and when it pulled away,
churning up more dust, Mi shouted and threw down her cap, releasing her wild halo of hair. She was so angry she started to shake, and before Reve could step in and calm her down she had the
juddering so bad that people from around the stalls started to gather round. Just idle curiosity, but then somehow Mi wasn’t quite so lost in her juddering as Reve had thought; she started
waving her hands and drawing up that rough voice that came from somewhere down in her belly, and she was pronouncing this and pronouncing that and her eyes were rolling and she was running on the
spot, her skinny knees pumping up and down, and she was jerking her head this way and that, her eyes rolled up in that way Reve hated.

People clapped in time to her calling out. ‘She got the spirit! She got the spirit in her,’ they said. One woman threw her a question about the little store she had right there, and
Mi’s other voice told the woman to move her store back from the road cos a storm was coming that would tear up the road and if she didn’t move she’d get torn up along with
everything else. Then someone said, ‘How this girl know they goin be widenin this road? How she know that?’

Suddenly there were more questions and more questions until Mi began to stagger and Reve stepped in and held her up and told people to back off as he pushed through them till he could find a
place to set her down.

‘Tell them the spirits leavin me,’ whispered Mi, barely moving her lips and speaking so quiet that no one could hear her.

He tried not to act surprised. ‘You called down a storm again,’ he murmured.

‘Just a small one.’

He tried not to smile and laid her down beside a stall selling clay pots, plastic bowls and tins of white beans; three years older than him, but she still weighed hardly anything at all. There
were people pressing around, but he told them that those spirits were all gone away now and she needed sleep. They could see she was all worn down and with a fair bit of muttering and nodding they
backed off. He wondered what spirits had been visiting her this time, coming just when she needed them, and keeping better time than the bus service too.

Some of the people threw down coins as they were leaving, and Reve quickly scooped them up. One old man stopped by and said he had only heard that voice coming out of the dancing girl, heard it
one time before when he was a young man, living down on the coast. He pulled a ten-dollar bill from his pocket and ceremoniously handed it to Reve. ‘You give it her when she come out of
wherever that spirit taken her, and you tell her to remember Joseph when she do her pray-dancing again. You tell her that.’ Reve promised he would and the man went away, leaving Reve counting
up the money in his hand.

That ten plus the small coins people had thrown down was enough for the fare, and for some food too. They were almost home.

Reve used some of the money to buy two raffia mats and they bedded down beside one of the stalls near the road and then waited the best part of the next day for the bus that
would take them down the highway to home. When it hauled up it had Paraloca written on its destination plate, and that made Reve think of LoJo’s father, Pelo.

He could tell Mi’s mind was on something else. She didn’t respond at first when he wanted to talk about Pelo, and then, after a moment, said, ‘Everyone got their chances.
Tha’s what happen. Happen to him, happen to our mother. Happen to us too, and we got to be ready when it come.’ She sounded different, thoughtful.

She was frowning. He could see she was not really thinking about Pelo at all. She kept looking at a neatlooking boy with pointy sideburns who was sitting across the aisle talking into his
cellphone. He was about her age and he wondered whether she had taken a sudden fancy to him, in the way she’d sometimes take a sudden fancy to a pretty shell or a piece of coloured glass on
the beach.

He looked out of the window and watched the road streaming by. Poor, quiet Pelo. The way Reve remembered it, Pelo had had little choice; it was like something put a twist in his life, pulled him
away from his family and stood him in the door of the Slow Bar. That was it. Except at the end. He’d made a choice then. Pelo was a hero. That’s what he would tell Ciele.

It was a long journey, the bus stopping here and there, men smelling of salt and cigars shuffling up and down the aisle, women with baskets and cotton-wrapped parcels of food.
He fell asleep and dreamed of Calde, broad as a mountain and holding a long knife in his hand, looming up over the village, one foot on the harbour wall and the other on the burying hill, and in
his dream Reve saw Sultan dancing about the strand, hackles up, barking at the giant and darting at his feet as if to bite them. He woke up anxious, his heart beating and sweat running down his
back.

Mi’s seat beside him was empty, and the bus was just pulling away from a stop on the highway.

He panicked, sure she was gone, had suddenly changed her mind about coming back. It was his fault: the burning car – he should never have told her about that. Hevez. Calde. Everyone hating
her or fearing her. Poor Mi! He scrambled out into the aisle. ‘Hey!’ he yelled at the driver. ‘Stop the bus!’

The driver slammed on the brakes, and Reve staggered, gripping the back of a seat to steady himself. Heads turned . . . and there she was, just two rows down the bus, talking to the boy with the
cellphone.

‘Mi!’

‘Hey,’ the driver shouted at him, ‘you want to get off this bus or what you want to do?’

Reve muttered an apology, while Mi turned and gave him a puzzled look. ‘What you playin at, Reve? Go back to your seat. I don’t need no protecting, you hear.’

An older woman sitting across the aisle from Mi cackled and looked at Reve and shook her head.

‘You the man in the family?’ she said. ‘How ’bout you come protecting me and I give you sweet cake!’

Some people around laughed and he felt embarrassed and stupid and cross. He went quickly back to his seat. They didn’t know Mi, didn’t know how she could get in trouble.

‘Who was that?’ he asked when she came back to her seat.

‘Just a boy. He done me favour, that’s all.’

‘What favour?’

She shrugged and looked out of the window. ‘Why you care so much ’bout everything?’ she said after a moment. ‘You all the time running this way and that: Tomas, Arella,
Theon –’ she pulled a face – ‘an’ me too, eh. But you don’ see what maybe comin roun’ the corner.’

‘An’ you do?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, how ’bout tellin me then.’

‘You think everythin’ go an’ fall easy when we get back? You think Uncle Theon know all the answer.’