Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (19 page)

Will's heart started pounding with terror. It was that word
again—“police.” The need to hide pressed down on Will's chest, and she looked unsteadily up and down the street. The houses loomed over her, all of them grayish yellow and too tightly packed together. (A lot like, Will thought, the captain's false teeth, which he'd turned orange and black with nicotine. She bit her tongue. She didn't want to think about the farm.)

In front of each house was a large green plastic garbage can of the perfect size to hide in. She lifted the lid of one; garbage stench belched out.

“Sha!”

Will backed away. She could still fit inside, on top of one of the bags. She tried to coax herself—soft-voiced like Lazarus to the horses—to climb on top of the black bags. Her legs didn't agree. They stayed where they were. Fine. If she couldn't hide, she'd have to make some kind of disguise. She could do nothing about the other things the article said she was: “olive skinned,” “small and slight for her age” (which was what the Leewood girls meant when they said “midget”), and “likely to be noticeably disheveled” (which meant, she guessed, “unwashed”). But there was one thing she could change, right now, something in her own power, and as Will thought of it, she felt hope rise in her chest. Her father would have said, “A nudge to the heart and a polish
to the soul,” and the captain would have spat, and nodded with closed eyes.

She dropped back down on her haunches against the bin, and sorted the pocketknife from the tangle in her pockets. Will gathered her hair in a bundle over her shoulder and hacked at it with the scissors part of the knife. The scissors were blunt from cutting the wire at the zoo; just a few solitary wisps of hair drifted onto the pavement. She pried out the knife instead with one bitten nail and sliced downward at the hair over her eyes, tugging it taut with her swollen hand and hacking with the other. It worked. Chunks of brown fell onto the pavement. She looked the other way. It was despicable to cry about hair.

When she'd got it to shoulder length all round, Will stopped and ran her fingers through it. It felt strangely light, and smooth. She wished she had a mirror. It still felt too long to be much of a disguise: she probably didn't look very different.

Will took up the knife again in tight knuckles. It was harder cutting close to the head; but she gritted her teeth and kept hacking until she thought it was like the boy at the zoo's—three inches all round, except over her left ear, where the knife had slipped and she was bald. She ran her fingers through it, tugged at it. Her neck felt oddly light. If she spat on her hands and used the spit as glue, she could make her
hair stand straight up, like the quills on a porcupine, or the hackles on a cat. Will grinned. She thought,
Wildcat hair
. The grass on the farm used to be longer than this.

Lights were starting to flicker on in some of the houses now. She sank back against the garbage bin. She thought,
What next?
Think, Will
. But for the moment she could only feel—feel mostly how strong the wind was growing, and how it seemed to be blowing through her skin and lining her bones with frost.

She could see halfway down the street a red box, like one of the toilet cubicles at school, but with windows and a door that reached all the way to the floor. One of the windows was broken, but the box might still be warmer than the sidewalk. Will bundled handfuls of her hair into her pockets and limped toward the red box.

Inside the box there was a smell of dying rodents, and urine, and—Will was amazed—there was a telephone. The telephone gave her an idea, though, and she searched through her pockets for the coins the tourists had given her. If she could work out how to call the number from the article, and if she disguised her voice, then she could say she had spotted herself, somewhere else. Throw them off the scent, she thought. Sweep away her tracks, like if you were hunting impala with a gun by the water hole.

Where could she have seen herself, though? She didn't know the names of any English towns, and she'd never thought to ask her father. There was so much she hadn't thought to ask, she thought angrily—about whether money was really important, and about how not to care about being hated, and how to live in the aching cold. Will spat, and coughed, then shook the thought away. Her father used to sing about it being a long way to Tipperary. But she didn't know if that was a place. It might, she thought, be a verb.

Will found a handful of cold coppers, but it didn't look like enough. They had given her more than that, she knew, and she dug through her pockets. She started to unpack her shorts properly—knife, bits of straw, a sheaf of paper. Will stared at the paper. In one corner it said,
Daniel James
. Underneath that, in between doodles of lions and superheroes, was scribbled
Exclusive Property of Daniel James, 117 Clement Avenue, London, England, The World. The Universe
. And underneath, in capitals,
KEEP OFF ON PAIN OF DEATH (Very Painful Death).

Will whispered, “
Unanki
. Excellent.” And there came stark realization: it was easier, in this world, not to be alone.

Will burst out of the red box—calling the number wasn't important now—and hopped and limped through the streets until she found a small shop with newspapers in
the window. It was grubby and cluttered, like the shops in Mutare; not at all like the great stone shops she'd passed that day, which were more like hospitals or churches. Nobody looked up as she went in. The fat man at the desk kept reading a paper.

She quickly found a yellow-and-red roly-poly cake and a plastic bottle of Coke. At home Coke came in glass bottles; Will marveled at the lightness of this one, and tossed it into the air. The man behind the cash desk called out, “Oi! You! You better be going to buy that, yeah?” and she jumped, and turned the same color as the Coke label, and ducked down the next aisle. There she was desperately tempted by the jar of crunchy peanut butter, but it was two dollars—
pounds
, she corrected herself, and whispered it out loud to make herself remember, “
Pounds
, hey”—and she needed the money for a map. At the counter she added the cheapest bar of chocolate and laid everything in a row.

“And I'd like a map,” she said. “Please,
ja
?”

The man said, “Ayterzed, yeah?”

Will blinked.

“You want an A-to-Z? Or one of the touristy ones?”

“I'm not a tourist. Just a paper map.”

“Right you are.”

“Also—”

“Yes?”

“Um . . . what street are we on?”

“What street?” He smiled. “Sure you're not a tourist?”

Will tried to smile back. “
Ja
. Sure.”

“This is Sunnyfield Road. Page forty-two on the map, if you want to know.”

Will nodded. Page forty-two. “That's everything, thank you.”

“Nine eighty-nine, then.”

Will looked at the coins in her hand. There wasn't enough for it all. She put back the cake, blushing hotly.

The man tapped his fingers impatiently. “You need a bag, son?”

“What? I mean,
yes
.” Son. She'd forgotten about the hair. Will tried to deepen her voice, to sound like a boy. “Yes. A large one, please.”

“You what?”

“Yes, please.” It came out halfway between a growl and a burp. She tried again.
“Yes.”
It was like an engine revving.

The man looked at her suspiciously and laid the change on the counter, ignoring her outstretched hand.

“You all right, lad?” He glanced toward the open paper on his chair, and back at Will. “Nothing on your mind?”

Will flushed again and shook her head.
Hush, chook,
she
thought. Silence now was her best defense. Silence, and speed. She ran with her bag down the steps and into the street.

It was dark outside, and lamplights were starting to prick the sky—like overweight fireflies, thought Will. She'd never seen so many houses crushed so closely together. She'd never seen a map of a city either, but she was quick and had a hawk's sense of direction—“My fierce little falcon,” her father used to say—and it wasn't difficult to work out a route. Will turned west and set off at a steady limp, holding the map in one tightly clenched fist.

T
HE HOUSE, WHEN SHE FOUND
it, was exactly like every other house she'd passed. There was a narrow road separating it from another row of houses, and those looked exactly like every other house she had passed too. Two hours of walking had given Will a very low opinion of English architecture.

It took her some time to find the right house. The numbering didn't go as she would have done it—one, two, three up one side and back down the other like a scale; instead it was odd on one side and even on the other, some with As and Bs tacked on at unexplained intervals. It was an ugly sort of way of labeling, Will thought. It was like the school: ordered insanity. She caught sight of her own scowl in a car
window and shivered. The cold was eating her heart.

She pressed one finger against the doorbell of number 117.

Nothing happened.

She pushed again, with all five fingers—and again, and knocked with both fists. A man and a woman walking arm in arm along the sidewalk stopped, murmured to each other, stared at her. Or was she just imagining it? Will tried to hide her face, but it was impossible now, with no hood and no hair. Increasingly desperate, Will tried the door. It was locked. Of course. England was a land of locks. She was just about to ring the bell for a seventh time when the door opened and Daniel stood in the doorway.

“Yes?”

“I—” To her fury she began to stutter and blush. “I—I was wondering,
ja
—”

He shielded his eyes from the yellow glare of the hallway light. “Bloomin' heck. It's you!”

He knew some impressive swear words, Will thought. He ran through them in a voice of awed surprise. “You! What do you want? Didn't you see that thing in the paper? I
knew
it was you! Lizzie didn't believe me. I knew it! There's police searching everywhere, you know.”

“I know. I want—” Will clenched both fists so tightly
that her nails bit through the paper of the map and broke the skin on her palms. “I need help.”

“What sort of help?” He didn't seem to guess how much it took to say it.

“Your help. I need somewhere to sleep,
ja
, and somewhere to think.”

“Oh.” He glanced backward into the hall. “Right. The thing is, though . . .”

“Please.”

“It's just, my nan would slaughter me. And my sister Lizzie's upstairs. She's got about three thousand friends up there. They'd call the police if they saw you.”

“Why? Why would they do that?”

“I dunno. There's a station down the road, and they fancy one of the sergeants.” And then, “What happened to your hair? Where's it gone?”

“In my pocket. With some chocolate I bought for you.” She felt for it. “They might be a bit mixed up.” Will decided not to tell him about the police, the running, the exhaustion. “It's easier to be invisible,
ja
, if you're a boy.”

Daniel nodded. He seemed to take it as a compliment to his sex. She said, “I made it like yours. A”—what was it called?—“a tribute. You were a major influence on my work.”

“Yeah? Really?” And he laughed, harder than she'd expected, spraying the doorstep with spit. He said, “Look. Have you been followed?” She shook her head. “Then I guess you'd better get inside. Nan's gone to the restaurant. We'll be safe for five minutes. She walks slow.”

Will followed him, past a bicycle and a backpack, past a pile of white shirts and a soccer ball, through a narrow door into a kitchen.

“Do you need food?” said Daniel. “Will? What sort of thing do you eat?” There was no answer. “Will?”

“What?” Will was entranced by the kitchen. “What? Oh, anything,
ja
.” She tore herself away from something that looked like an interesting torture instrument with fake-gold fake-handwriting up one side.
Supa-Wizz Electric Blender
. “Do you have biltong? Simon and me used to eat that when we were tired. It's just meat and salt.”

“No. We've got sausages in a tin.”

“Can I put them in your
Supa-Wizz Electric Blender
?”

“No.”

“Why not? What would happen?”

“My gran would notice. You don't cross my gran. She's fierce.”

“Oh,” she said. And then, “Those chairs . . . they look comfortable,
ja
?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“Could you sleep in them?”

He laughed. “Subtle.”

“What?”

“
You
couldn't. I'm sorry, yeah, honestly, but my gran would
definitely
notice. You don't really blend in to the furniture.”