Taylor Five
Authors: Ann Halam
Contents
For Catherine Sinclair-Jones
m
um and Dad couldn’t come to the airport to meet Donny, but that was okay: he would understand. Lucia Fernandez the graduate student came with Tay instead. They were in luck on Airport Road and got through the police checkpoints with no delay, which meant they had ages to wait before the plane from Singapore arrived. Lucia found someone to talk to. Tay walked around, looking at the familiar souvenir shops, sniffing the spicy-food scents from the cafeteria bar—a thin girl with golden-brown hair, wearing a blue cotton dress, a Yankees baseball cap and desert boots. She felt nervous. This was the first time she’d been in a public place since the story broke. No one was supposed to know who she was, but she almost expected a horde of journalists to leap out, waving cameras and microphones. Thankfully, no one paid any attention. Here in the sleepy quiet of a tiny tropical airport, no one knew or cared that Taylor Walker was one of the five teenagers whose existence had just been announced, who were the most astonishing people on the planet.
Donny and Tay had lived in Kandah State, a small independent country on the north coast of the giant island of Borneo, since Donny was five and Tay was seven. Their parents were the wardens of an orangutan refuge, out in the wilds of one of the last great rain forests. Ben and Mary Walker both worked for an international company called Lifeforce, which financed the refuge. To some people it would have seemed a hard and lonely life for the two English children, but they loved it. The forest was such a fantastic place to live. It had been a cruel blow when their parents had decided Donny had to go to school in Singapore, but it was fine now. They just looked forward through each term to having a brilliant time together in the holidays.
Would things be different this summer?
Tay visited the cheap stalls, with the stacks of ugly imitation Dyak carvings that never seemed to get sold; and the instant tailoring shop, where the Chinese tailor women whizzed the cloth through their sewing machines at incredible speed. Donny won’t be different, she kept telling herself. He won’t care. But she had butterflies in her stomach.
There was a sarong that she would
really
have liked to buy for Mum, in Mrs. Su’s Genuine Dyak Crafts Centre. It was heavy and handwoven, with swirls and thorny curves in gold thread, on shades of dark red silk. Tay’s mum hardly ever got a chance to wear anything but jungle kit, but she loved beautiful clothes. Mrs. Su, the Chinese lady who owned the shop, came over as Tay stroked the shimmering folds, with a smile that showed all the gold in her teeth. She took the sarong and deftly unfolded it.
“Ve’y nice? Eh?”
“It’s
lovely,
” sighed Tay.
“You old customer, young lady. I make you a special price. Not New York price, not airport price. Nah real price.”
Tay knew that even the “real price” of the best handwoven gold-thread work was way beyond her means. “I can’t afford it, Mrs. Su. I’ve only got six hundred dollars left in my bank account, and I owe most of it to my dad.”
Six hundred Kandah dollars meant about fifty English pounds. “Ha,” said Mrs. Su, and shook her head. “Okay, you tell your daddy, huh? Mrs. Su got the best silk work, special price. You here to meet your brother, home from school, eh?”
Tay grinned. “Yes.” Most of the foreigners who lived in Kandah were oilies, oil rig people, or chippies, which meant they worked for the logging companies; and they didn’t stay long. The Walkers had been at the refuge for seven years. Mrs. Su knew Donny and Tay well. Whenever they came to the airport they came into her shop, to talk to her: and she gave them strange, hard Chinese candies.
The old lady folded up the sarong. “Why
you
never go to school, Tay, you so grown up now? Don’t want an education?”
“I’m getting an education,” said Tay. “I work at home, that’s all.”
“Huh. A smart girl like you: ought to be in school. Got to learn to compete, make your way, be tough. Some things you can’t learn from books.”
That will never be me, thought Tay. I will never be like other girls, going to school, hanging out, being normal. I’ll always be different, always hoping people don’t find out the truth—
“What wrong?” said the old lady, peering at Tay. Mrs. Su didn’t miss much. “You don’t take offense at old Mrs. Su? You got a pain?”
“No, Mrs. Su,” said Tay. “I’m just worried about something.”
Mrs. Su sighed and nodded as she put the sarong back on the display shelf.
“Ah, understand. Your mother and father worried, everyone worried, even children now. Hard times for me too. No one buying. Hard times for everyone.”
Tay went out of the shop, but not before Mrs. Su had insisted she take a handful of brightly wrapped sweets from the jar by the cash register. The afternoon plane from Singapore had arrived, and the passengers were streaming into the arrivals hall. For a moment Tay felt a weird jolt of fear. Something had gone wrong, because she couldn’t see Donny. . . . But no, she was being stupid. There he was, talking to some people he must have met on the plane. He saw her, and his whole face lit up.
“Hey! There’s my sister!”
He came bouncing out of the crowd and leapt up to her, grinning from ear to ear, a twelve-year-old boy with blue eyes and black hair and the personality of a crazy puppy. They hugged and backed off so that they could look at each other.
“I’m taller than you!” he crowed. “I
knew
I’d be taller than you, these holidays.”
“Nearly,” said Tay, measuring, and finding her nose still about half a centimeter higher. “Nearly as tall, and twice as daft.” They gripped hands, did the special Tay and Donny twist of their locked fists, broke the grip and knocked knuckles. It was a ritual they had invented years ago, which always had to be used at important moments.
“How’s Harimau?” asked Donny as they made for the one and only baggage carousel.
Harimau was a young ape who’d reached the stage where he was partly fending for himself. He’d been ill. The reason Mum wasn’t at the airport was that she’d had to go to Halfway Camp, where the adolescent apes had a feeding station, to check on him and see if he needed to be brought in for treatment. Dad wasn’t here because with Mum out in the forest he couldn’t leave the refuge HQ. One of the wardens had to be on site at all times, especially the way things were with the political situation at the moment.
“Mum thinks Harimau’s bug isn’t serious. Oh, and we’re going to Halfway Camp next week, we’ll stay there for a couple of nights, so you’ll probably see Harimau—”
They waited for Donny’s bags: Donny and Tay exchanging a babble of news, as if they hadn’t spoken to each other in years. Lucia came to find them and complained that they jabbered like monkeys. Scatterbrains! If she hadn’t been there they would have let Donny’s things go rolling away to the Lost Airport Luggage Dimension, never to be heard of again. . . . Not that it would have made much difference. No matter how people hassled him, he never packed properly. He always ended up back here with a fistful of odd socks and nothing else. They collected the bags, including the refuge mail drop, and set off happily for home.
Everything went fine until the outskirts of Kandah city center, where they wanted to turn right and head into the interior. There they found that the forest road had been closed while they were at the airport. Another terrorist incident. The police were at the junction, telling people they had to go through the city center and be searched. With many groans and grumbles the traffic complied, but of course the city center was gridlocked. The Land Rover crawled: and finally the queue stopped moving entirely. Lucia went to investigate, leaving the children in the Land Rover. Long minutes passed.
At last Lucia came back, hot and gloomy.
“They would let us through, but they can’t,” she said. “It’ll be an hour, minimum. Probably two.”
“But
why
?” demanded Tay. “What’s happened? Why was the road closed?”
Lucia shrugged. “It’s the rebels,” she said, as if that answered everything.
Tay groaned. “Do we have to stay in the Land Rover? I’ve got my phone.”
“No,” said Lucia. “You can go through town on your own. Call me in a while and see how things are going. Or I’ll call you, and we can meet in the ferryboat car park.”
The children walked down to the river, past the eye-watering stink of the midden by the fruit and vegetable market, and across the elegant old footbridge into the modern part of the city. “Is it going to be like this the whole time?” asked Donny, looking worried. Like a puppy, he was easily smacked down: but thankfully he bounced back just as easily. “No one told me Kandah had gone all horrible. Why, didn’t anyone say?”
“I suppose we’re used to it. You get used to it. Anyway, it hasn’t been
bad
. This holdup is the worst thing that’s happened. Everything’s fine at home.”
They both knew what the problem was . . . more or less. Most of Borneo was part of either Malaysia or Indonesia: Kandah State was squashed between these two great nations. The Sultan of Kandah wanted to stay independent; the rebels wanted to change things. Some of them wanted Kandah to join Indonesia, some wanted to join Malaysia. Some of them were Communists and wanted Kandah to be Communist. They fought with each other, and they fought with the government. Terrifying forest fires were started. Remote little towns and villages were ransacked, like frontier towns in the Wild West being overrun by outlaws. The situation had been going on for years. Usually it all happened in the wild, deep interior, and the people of Kandah City Region only heard about it on the news. Occasionally the action would move nearer, and then there would be delays, searches, roads closed and police checkpoints.
Tay could remember one time, soon after the Walkers had come to Kandah, when Donny was only five, when they’d been stranded at the refuge for weeks, living on tinned food: with no deliveries, and soldiers in trucks driving around on the forest tracks. But even then, nothing terrible had happened.
“Things will calm down again. They always do. Mum and Dad aren’t worried.”
“Oh no!” exclaimed Donny, stopping in shock, halfway over the bridge. “I forgot to go and see Mrs. Su! And there’s police everywhere, so we can’t go back!”
“Calm down. I just
told
you, it’s nothing serious. You can see her next time anyone has to meet a plane. Anyway, I went to see her for you. Look, I got some candy.”
They walked on: doggedly sucking bitter-as-vinegar candied plums. Neither of them liked the taste, but Mrs. Su’s candy was a tradition. It was part of Donny’s homecoming.
Now the modern glass-and-concrete towers of the city center sprang up on either side, and the afternoon felt even hotter. They passed the Mercedes showroom, where they stopped to drool over the beautiful, fantastically expensive cars; and the department stores where fashionable clothes filled the plateglass windows in tempting array. Tay told Donny about the gold-thread sarong at Mrs. Su’s. It was Mum’s birthday very soon, and Donny confessed he hadn’t bought her a present. He’d brought home something that he’d made in art class, which he hoped she’d like instead: a calendar and letter holder made out of bamboo and papier-mâché, but he was afraid it might have suffered, traveling in his luggage.
“It’s in the shape of a tree frog. I think it’s quite good. . . . I hope it’s not broken.”
Knowing Donny’s methods of packing, Tay feared the worst.
“Haven’t you any cash left at all? You had plenty of pocket money.”
“It sort of went,” said Donny sadly. “I don’t know how, but it’s all gone.”
“Okay, look. You can come in with me. I’ve mail-ordered something really good. You can share it with me and pay me back.”
“How much?”
“It’s costing me four-fifty, which is most of my bank account until next month. Say you put in one hundred? I’ll show you what it is, in the catalog on the Net, when we get home. It’s an excellent present, trust me.”
Donny grinned, delighted to have a reason to cheer up.
“Done! And I honestly will pay you back.”
“You bet you will, bro.”
There was no sign of the Land Rover in the ferry car park. Tay called Lucia and was told the queue was moving, but
pelan-pelan
. Which means
slowly
, but also means
so relax
—a favorite local expression. The Kandahnese never got stressed over things (unless you counted the rebels, who seemed to stress enough for everyone).
“They’d better hurry up,” said Donny, grinning. “Or we’ll be driving in the dark.”
“
Pelan-pelan
,” said Tay. “You’re not in Singapore anymore, kid. This is Kandah, remember? The pace is slow, even in terrorist emergencies.”
Really, the children loved driving in the dark. It was the adults who could never see the romance of forging through the forest by night.
“Maybe we’ll meet a giant monitor lizard,” suggested Donny hopefully. “Like the one that attacked Dad, that night in the old Land Rover, when we got a flat tire?”
“He was changing the wheel,” agreed Tay—it was a family legend—“at midnight, and a huge monitor lizard burst out of the bushes and
ran over him
.”