In World City (5 page)

Dion ignored the voice, walking fast, the vegetation seeming to open up before him as he moved. After a while, the course he was taking curved around to follow the contours of the lower slopes of the mountain, then it broke away along a kind of saddle in the land and he found himself moving beyond the orbit of Morne Diablotin into old, overgrown plantation country. He began to go more slowly, not because of any physical difficulty; rather he felt that a greater sensitivity was now needed. He was getting near to where he wanted to be.

His sense of expectation began to build into a feeling of imminent revelation. He saw ahead of him a tumble of rocks. The voice in his head told him there was no running water, but again Dion took no notice. He came round the corner of the rocks fully expecting to be confronted by the scene of his vision – Dion's Place. But what he saw bore no resemblance to the scene he had been vouchsafed. Instead, he saw, propping herself against a rock, the most beautiful girl he had ever set eyes on.

*

Dion had been moving silently, in strict accord with his grandmother's teachings, and he had been ready for anything that might come into view. Even so, he experienced a momentary paralysis of confusion before he managed to drop back behind the rock he had just rounded. His first impulse had been to run up to the girl and say hello. Normally he might have done that. But this was not normal. He had been looking for his place. For some hours, he had been in the odd state of detached concentration his grandmother had taught him, and he had been convinced he was about to find his place.

Instead of his place, there was this most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Dion moved his head out from behind the rock, with the slowness and deliberation of a growing plant. The girl hadn't moved, hadn't shown any sign of having noticed him. Dion examined her closely. The thought at the front of his mind was not ‘who', but ‘what' is this? In the eerie world of shifting identities his grandmother had schooled him in, where a rock could be a close friend, an insect the agent of devils too horrible to contemplate, or a breath of wind the whispering of the mightiest spirit on earth, a beautiful girl encountered under highly unexpected circumstances had to be considered carefully.

She was about his age and height – comparatively tall – hair dark, red-brown, cropped but still with a wave and curls at the ends that looked natural. She was white-skinned, untanned and, therefore, unlikely to be an islander, if human she indeed was. She wore loose, cotton trousers, the colour of light canvas, and a fully-cut, long-sleeved shirt in a similar colour. The shirt hung loose down over the top of her trousers. Her shoes were of a slightly darker earth colour, with thick soles.

‘Too sensible to be a vision,' Dion heard his grandmother's voice say. Dion smiled; his grandmother was right. The girl's skin looked as if it had been hardly touched by the sun, and she was dressed to cover herself to a maximum. He thought she could have used a hat though. But no – a hat would have obscured the full, white brow that her hair seemed to draw back from of its own volition. And a hat would have shaded the wide, serious eyes, and the perfect oval of her face. Dion stared at that face, afraid the intensity of his gaze might reveal his presence, yet unable to look away. What so compelled him was not so much her beauty – he could see beautiful appearances whenever he turned on the television – rather it was her profound inwardness of expression. Instead of radiating out, seeking the regard of others and their approval or admiration, this girl's expression was settled about some entirely internal focus. It reminded Dion of his grandmother in moments of repose when he thought she didn't know he was looking at her.

There was a more superficial aspect to the girl's expression though. A sense of unease and disturbance, which suddenly became an impulsive movement that carried her away from the rock she was leaning against and off through a narrow gap in the vegetation surrounding them. Dion followed.

It didn't take him long to recognise she was lost. She kept heading for what looked like gaps between the trees. But he could see they were just random variations in the spacing of the trunks rather than entries onto the kind of long-running tracks that animals might use. Several times Dion had to back up swiftly and silently as the girl hit a wall of branches and turned to retrace her steps. He could see her getting hotter, more frustrated, more frightened. He decided it was time to let her know he was there. He did this by walking in the opposite direction to her, whistling, making as much noise as he could with his feet. He heard her call out, “Hello?”

He called back, “Hi,” and turned to walk towards her.

She was standing in a natural clearing, tensed as if ready to run if she saw anything she didn't like. Her face was shiny and there were strands of hair whipped across her face, stuck together by the sweat. Her barely-concealed desperation made her look even more beautiful. He watched her take him in and saw her relax. A boy, he thought to himself, that's me – just an island boy. “Who are you?” he asked.

She didn't answer, looking at him as if she wasn't used to having to answer for herself. “My name's Dion,” he tried.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, in a way that made Dion feel his story had better be good.

“Uh, I was just looking for something.”

“What?”

Dion was about to tell her, in an obedient way, like his schoolteachers would have liked, but he just managed to catch himself.

“You're lost,” he said, slightly defiant.

“What if I am?” she replied, still as if it was Dion who should be answerable to her.

Dion was settling back into himself though. He desperately wanted just to talk to her, but there was going to be some work to do first. He looked around as if he had all the time in the world – which in a sense he had – and, seeing a clear area at the base of a tree trunk, he sat down and leaned himself against it. “What if you are?” he mused to himself, “What if you are?” He looked up directly at her. “Because if you are, you better be getting worried. It's end of the day coming and you don't want to be stuck out here at night.”

In fact, the forest after dark was Dion's favourite place. His grandmother had taken him out overnight a few times. She had shown him how to move without being able to see and how to be fearless. ‘All you got to know, Dion, is what's making them sounds you hear. You get to know those sounds then you better able to hear the sounds you don't know what is. You know? – The important sounds.' Dion had never heard an important sound, but he had heard sounds that would have paralysed him with terror had his grandmother not casually said what night bird or small hunting animal it was. ‘This forest safe as houses in the middle of the night, if you want it to be, Dion,' his grandmother had said to him. Dion came to feel its safety and used that security to spin tales that made his friends' hair stand on end. He thought he'd try one on this beautiful girl. He said, “It gets dark out here – dark ‘n dark – and there's things come out in the dark. You know there's someone goes missing most weeks and is never heard of again. Mostly, they're people who get stuck out here after dark.”

Dion looked at the girl. She was listening to him. He changed his mind. He didn't want to scare her, like he enjoyed scaring his friends. He just wanted to talk. So he said, “Anyway, I'll make sure you get back to where you want to be. I know this place. But you got to tell me your name. I told you mine. Now, you tell me yours.”

“Miranda,” she replied – readily enough, he thought.

“Okay, Miranda, now where you from? You got to tell me that, else I won't know where to take you.”

“I don't really know what place I'm staying in. I haven't been out much.”

Dion noted with some pleasure that now it was this Miranda who felt she had to give an account of herself.

“So what does it look like, this place you're staying in? Smart, I guess. You're not in that fancy hotel up from Massacre, are you?”

She shook her head, “No, it's a house on its own. It's quite big for here. It's got a fence round it.”

Several items of information fell into place in Dion's mind. “Hey, I know who you are,” he announced, delighted. “I bet you're Mr Whitlam's daughter. That right?”

She'd not been out much. A big house with a fence round it, close enough for her to get lost from. Dion might not know much about what his father's business was, but he knew its geography and had made it his business to find out where this Whitlam who was causing so much upheaval in his life was staying. Dion had been past the entry gates on his bicycle.

Seeing her nod, he went on enthusiastically, “My dad works for your dad. Maybe you met him? Mr Lefevre's his name.” He saw the look of recognition. This was good. This was something they could talk about. “My dad's taking us to Europe because of what he's done for your dad here. How long you staying, then, Miranda? Come on, let's get moving. You've come some way. You tell me about it while we walk.”

As he led her into seemingly impenetrable banks of vegetation and then through the free space that would open up between the trunks, she told him about the house she had lived in before her father had moved to the island, and what it had been like moving, and what their new house was like inside, and what she did with herself all day. Dion was especially interested in the amount of time she spent looking into computer screens and tried to quiz her on everything she could access. But he could feel her withdrawing as he probed deeper. In fact, he could feel her withdrawing from him with every question he asked. She was ready enough to give a straight, factual account, but there was something held back in her, something tied off. When he talked to people he expected to be either talked back to or told to shut up. But this was different; this wasn't one thing or the other.

They scrambled through the undergrowth for about thirty minutes, panting, talking, Dion making most of the running. He found himself getting increasingly frustrated. For all her beauty, this girl was damn hard work. Dion took a leftward tangent away from the path he knew to be the fastest way back to Whitlam's place. They still had time and there was a place he wanted to show her that could maybe get her out of herself.

“Is that water I can hear?” she said, in the first spontaneous sign of interest she had ventured.

Dion was encouraged. “Sure it's water. You thirsty? It's good water – straight from the top of the mountain.” He quickened the pace slightly as he pushed a way for them through the undergrowth. The sound of running water grew louder and, instead of the accustomed unbroken wall of green, lighter patches could be seen between the branches ahead of them.

“There, look,” Dion announced. “Cool enough for you?”

Miranda was already pushing ahead of him, clambering over the low rocks that flanked the pool the mountain torrent poured into. She knelt down and, with cupped hands, took great splashing mouthfuls of the cold, clear water. Dion came up beside her and took a few gulps himself. Then he lay flat on his stomach and, elbowing his way out over the water, he let his whole head drop beneath its surface. He held his breath as long as he could, then levered himself up, shaking his head vigorously.

“You're making me wet,” Miranda laughed, holding a hand up to stop the drops flying in her face.

“Best way to cool down,” Dion said, “Get your head under. All the heat goes out through the top of your head.”

He nodded towards the water encouragingly, but Miranda looked awkward and a little nervous. Dion realised it took a certain amount of strength and skill to be able to do what he had just done. “‘Fraid of falling in?” he questioned. “Don't worry, I'll hold onto your feet.”

Miranda laughed. “No it's not that. I just don't like the thought of putting my head under the water.”

“Well, go for a swim then. I've swum here plenty of times. You got to jump in all in one go. Takes your breath away at first, but after that it's great. I won't look if you want to take your clothes off. Seriously, I won't. I want you to enjoy this place. It's my best.”

Miranda rose slowly to her feet and looked around, as if she hadn't heard him. Using her hands to steady herself, she climbed a little further down the slope, where the stream poured out from the pool and over rocks into a series of channels and small cataracts. Dion clambered quickly after and came up beside her. Miranda was kneeling on a flat rock, staring into the clear, glassy surface of the water.

“Wait, I'll show you something,” Dion said and ducked into the undergrowth. He cast around in the foliage for what he wanted: a long-stemmed plant with a little tassel of leaves on the end. Finding it just where he expected, he snapped off a stem and rejoined Miranda.

“Look. Watch the end of it,” he said, dipping the tassel into the water. He lowered the feathery end of the stem carefully to just in front of a small cleft in the rock and held it there, letting the current agitate the leaves. There was a sudden flurry of silt from the rock crevice as a good-sized crayfish shot out and gripped the tassel. In almost the same movement, Dion lifted the stem and held the crayfish up in the air. It wriggled furiously but refused to let go.

Miranda giggled in nervous excitement. “What a funny animal. I'm glad I didn't go for a swim with all those around. They might have nipped me.”

“It's a crayfish,” Dion said. “They don't live up in the pool there. They just go where the water's running fast, like here. They're great to eat, fresh cooked, like crab. We'll put this one back though. Maybe it'll get bigger still and I'll eat it next time.” He noted carefully the crack in the rocks it had come out from.

“Are you sure there aren't any up in the pool?”

“Dead sure. You want to swim? You do, don't you. You look hot as hell. Come on, I'll go behind that rock there and you tell me when I can come out. I'll just have a sleep or something.”