Burning bright

nce down off the rock, I set the three little orang-utans down on the ground. With Oona there towering over them, they were reluctant to leave me at first, but then Charlie seemed to recognise the dark-haired orang-utan as one of her own. She needed no encouragement after that. Giving a wide berth to Oona, she scampered over to what must have seemed to her at long last to be a proper-looking mother. Tonk and Bart followed, and soon the mother orang-utan was being besieged by all three. She looked a little overwhelmed, as they clambered all over her, but perfectly happy. I noticed though that it was with Charlie that she was at her most attentive, most affectionate.

Oona’s trunk was the only part of her I could hug – I’d done it often enough before. I waited for the deep rumble of contentment that I remembered so well, and sure enough it came, vibrating all through her, and all through me too. It was so good to feel that wrinkled roughness again, to trace once again the patterns of the pinkish markings in her skin, to look up into her all-seeing eyes, to be wafted again by her great ears. She was still dusty from some recent mud bath, and a bit smelly too, but it was an old familiar smell, that I found as reassuring as the rest of her.

She was turning then, kneeling for me, her trunk curling around and lifting me up on to her neck. I was back where I loved to be, where I belonged. I caught a glimpse of Other One too, sitting high up above us in among the leaves, looking down on us all, satisfaction written all over his face, as if he had engineered this whole thing, had somehow brought us all together. I believed at that moment that he had, and I still believe it.

“Thank you, Other One,” I cried. “Thank you, Oona.” I was whooping and punching the air then, the sheer joy of the moment surging through me. “You see, Charlie, Bart, Tonk, I told you Oona would come looking for us. I knew she’d find us. I knew it.” But the little orang-utans were far too busy with their new-found mother, to be listening to me at all. They were all over her and all over each other too, squealing with excitement, jockeying for the best place to get the most attention. She was sharing it out as well as she could, but the longer I watched the more it became clear to me that little Charlie might well be her own baby, that she was without any question her favoured one. She was the only one she was allowing to try to suckle, her little fists clenched tight in her mother’s straggly brown hair.

Bart and Tonk were not rejected as such, not pushed away. They were allowed to cling on, but not to interfere with Charlie. As I looked on, I felt overwhelmed by a huge sense of relief. Not only was I safely back with Oona, but the three little orang-utans I had looked after all this time had survived their ordeal, and were at last reunited with one of their own kind.

I noticed then for the first time that there was a livid red scar across the mother orang-utan’s forehead, and that she often held her left arm up across her chest, supporting it if she could with her other hand, as if she was nursing a damaged shoulder. I was sure of it then. This had to be the mother I’d seen falling out of the fig tree that day, the one that had been lying there, dead as I had thought, with her baby still clutching her. And Charlie was that baby.

A bullet must have grazed the mother’s forehead. She’d fallen out of the fig tree, and had lain there unconscious on the ground, while the hunters grabbed Charlie and carried her off. I knew well enough by now just how tight Charlie would have clung to her, how they must have had to tear her off her mother. The whole picture of the brutality of the massacre flashed through my mind then, enraging me all over again. But not even that could take away how privileged I felt at that moment, to be there to witness the tenderness of their reunion.

There was enough fruit and water to be found for us all to be able to stay where we were by the rock for the rest of the day. Other One hung around, literally sometimes, and watched from afar as the little orang-utans gambolled about, swinging in among the trees, ambushing one another. I’d never seen them so relaxed and happy.

Sitting alone up on the rock, with Oona busy at her feeding and the orang-utans at play, I’ve got to admit that after a while I was beginning to feel ignored, abandoned even. It was as if they had forgotten all about me. So when I saw the mother climbing up the rock towards me, and bringing the little ones with her, I felt very grateful to her. She came to sit nearby, watching me, considering me. I sensed caution in her gaze, but approval too, almost as if the little ones had told her everything that had happened, about all we had been through together – which I knew was absurd, but I thought it anyway. And when after some time she reached out and touched my hand, I felt sure there was real affection in the gesture, and maybe even gratitude.

That evening the mother orang-utan climbed high into a tree, to make her sleeping nest, carrying all three of them. She went a great deal higher than I had ever managed. Again, I have to say I did feel excluded, which was ridiculous, I know, but it was why I left my rock, and went to lie down on the forest floor with Oona in the crook of her leg, braving the damp and the creepy-crawlies. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be close to her that night. I was missing my little family, and the intimacy of the sleeping nest.

But I had forgotten what good company Oona was, and what a good listener too. Never for one moment could I forget she was there. She was right beside me, the whole wonderful wrinkly, smelly, leathery bulk of her. I think I must have told her everything that night, all about Mister Anthony and Kaya and our escape from the cage, about the hunters and their dogs who came after us.

She kept touching me from time to time with the tip of her trunk, to reassure me perhaps; or maybe to reassure both of us, herself as well, that this had really happened, that we were together again, and not dreaming it. As I told her my story, leaning back against her side, hands behind my head, I could hear her stomach churning and gurgling and groaning. As I expected, of course, this familiar elephant melody would be accompanied by a formidable elephant fart whenever she felt like it, which was often. This was one of many reasons why I think I must have gone to sleep that night with a laugh in my heart and a big big smile on my face.

I was nudged awake next morning by Oona’s trunk. She wanted me to get up. The first thing I noticed was that the jungle was filled with mist. Everything was lost in it, except Oona and the looming shadow of the rock, and the forest floor. Oona was unsettled, troubled by something, tossing her head. She wanted to be on her way, and she was in a hurry too. It was then that I began to realise that there was something wrong about the mist, something strange and unnatural. It didn’t drift in among the high canopy of the jungle as I’d seen it so often before. Instead it hung low everywhere, clinging to the trees. It was swirling all about us, snaking its way through the forest. And it wasn’t white, but almost yellow. It smelled different too. Now I knew it for what it was. It wasn’t mist at all. It was smoke, drifting smoke. The jungle was on fire. The jungle was burning.

As I listened, I could hear, above me and around me, that all the invisible creatures of the forest were on the move. Whooping, cackling, cawing and screeching, they were fleeing for their lives. I could only hope that in among them somewhere were the mother orang-utan and the three little ones, and Other One.

I felt Oona’s trunk come around me, pulling me in. She was urging me to mount. I needed little encouragement. I climbed up on to her neck. She was on the move at once, striding out, almost on the run already. She lifted her trunk and trumpeted. Then she was charging through the trees in full flight. Because everything had happened so fast, I hadn’t been able to collect my thoughts. It was a while before I could, and when I did everything became horribly clear. I remembered then what Mister Anthony had told me, every chilling word: “I burn them down. I make a ruddy great bonfire of the forest.”

We were careering through the trees now. It was all I could do not to fall off. It was a while since I’d ridden Oona, and not since the day of the tsunami had she ever stampeded quite like this. It took me some time to find my balance again, my riding seat, but I rediscovered my old technique quickly enough. I gripped with my legs, dug my heels into her neck, and managed to ride the pitch and toss, clutching desperately on to any folds of skin my fingers could cling on to. But however fast Oona was running from it, the smoke seemed always to be there, all around us. In patches it was so dense now that I was forced to hold my breath until we were out of it, and that was terrifying, because once in the middle of a suffocating whiteout like this, I would wonder if we’d ever come out of it into clearer air beyond, whether I’d ever be able to take a breath again.

In the end, with less and less good air to breathe, I had to breathe in whatever there was, knowing even as I was doing it, that I had to be taking in as much smoke as air. I forced myself to make believe I was under water, not to breathe at all. But of course, I had to. So then I could only try not to breathe in deeply, not to gasp. But I couldn’t help myself. All I could do then was to try to control the coughing that was racking my whole body.

But the harder I tried to stop myself from coughing, the more I began to choke, and the giddier I was becoming. My whole head felt as if it was filling with smoke. I had my mouth closed. But somehow it seemed to be finding its way into me through my eyes, through my ears. I felt myself fainting, and for a few moments I tried to resist giving in to it. But there was nothing I could do about it. I fell heavily on to the forest floor – I remember that – and lay there for a few moments, gasping for breath. But on the ground I found there was at last some proper air to breathe. I looked up, and saw that Oona was coming back for me. Then she was trying to lift me, to get me to sit up.

With better air to breathe at last I recovered quickly. I had coughed and spluttered the smoke out of my lungs, and was thinking I was feeling just about strong enough now to climb back up on to Oona, when I felt myself being taken very firmly by the hand. I turned to see the mother orang-utan standing beside me, up on her two legs now, the three little ones clinging on to her. The strength in her grip was so powerful that, like it or not, I had to get to my feet and go with her, go wherever she wanted to take me, do whatever she wanted me to do. Her eyes were pleading with me, trying to make me understand. I knew she was telling me something. One look at her arm was enough to know what it was.

From the way she was holding it, I could tell it must be hurting her dreadfully. It was obvious to me then that she could not cope on her own any longer with all three of them, that she needed my help, that she was asking for it. When I reached out a hand, there was barely a moment’s hesitation before Bart grabbed it, and swung himself up on my shoulders, where he grasped my hair with his fists, and hung on, painfully. Tonk followed suit, without even being prompted, and nestled himself contentedly in the crook of my arm. Seemingly satisfied now, the mother orang-utan released my hand, and set off along the trail ahead of us walking three-legged, with Charlie’s arms wrapped round her, and looking back all the while at me over her mother’s shoulder.

I was unsure at first whether I should follow her or not. But when the orang-utan stopped and turned to look back at us, I was left in no doubt then she was waiting for us, that she meant us to follow her, and that she knew exactly where she was going. I had the distinct impression that she was taking charge. Oona seemed to sense it too for she began to move on along the trail following the orang-utan, and without stopping to offer me a ride either. I was a little disappointed at that, until I thought about it. I’d forgotten just how intelligent Oona was, how wise. It took me a while, but I soon understood that she must have known I was far better off where I was, down on the forest floor, out of the worst of the smoke.

Progress was slow now. We were having to travel at the leisurely pace of the mother orang-utan. And in places, where the trail was overgrown, or where it disappeared altogether, we were having to make our way through dense undergrowth. But at least, as we went, the air was becoming easier to breathe for all of us. Little Charlie was still suffering a bit. I could hear her struggling for breath sometimes, wheezing and coughing. We kept moving all through the heavy heat of the day. Then, towards evening a sudden breeze blew up, clearing the smoke at last.

When it came on to rain, when lightning crashed and thunder rolled and rattled over the jungle, it didn’t bother me in the slightest. Bart and Tonk were hating every moment of it, burrowing their heads into whatever crannies in me they could find, an armpit or a neck, but I knew that if this storm could only last long enough, then it would put out any fire Mister Anthony had started.

With the smoke gone, and weary of walking now, I begged a ride up on Oona. I had Bart and Tonk still attached, but as we rode, both of them seemed surprisingly unfazed either by Oona, or by their novel mode of transport. Ahead of us, the mother orang-utan plodded on with Charlie, showing no sign of slowing or stopping, even though the light was beginning to fail. There was an intrepid determination about her gait. Uphill, downhill, she just kept on going. I could see that she knew where she was going too. She wasn’t just wandering aimlessly through the jungle. There could be no doubt about it. This was a trail she knew well. She was our pathfinder, she was showing us the way. We would stop when she was good and ready to stop, and not before.

But then, high above us, I heard and saw that Other One was still with us. He wasn’t shadowing us though, he wasn’t simply accompanying us. He was going on ahead of us, swinging through the trees, in front of the mother orang-utan. It was he that was leading us on our way, not her. I’d got it wrong. She was following him, and we were following both of them. More and more I was coming to think of Other One now as our guardian orang-utan, our guardian angel, that maybe he had been all along, from the very start.

It was nearly dark when we emerged at last out of the forest, into a different world, it seemed to me, and a lighter world too. We were being led along a narrow track, that wound steeply ever upwards, a sheer cliff face to one side of us. The track was only just wide enough for Oona. She trod gingerly, as surefooted and as careful as ever, and I was thankful for that, because I could see there was a drop on the other side of the trail, hundreds of feet down to a river and to the canopy of the forest below. As I looked back I could see all across the distant horizon the glow of a great fire, still burning bright despite the storm, and above it a blackened, apocalyptic sky, flickering with forked lightning.

Oona had stopped in her tracks and I soon understood why. The mother orang-utan had vanished, disappeared with Charlie into the cliff face itself it seemed. But she reappeared some moments later. She was up on two legs now, and appeared to be waiting for us. As we approached her I could see that she was standing outside the mouth of a cave, and making it quite plain that this was to be our refuge for the night.

Oona wasn’t at all sure about this. She used her trunk as her antenna, satisfying herself that all was well before she ventured in. She took her time, and it was just as well. A sudden cloud of screeching bats came whirling out of the cave above our heads, a great roaring rush of them. This mass exodus seemed to go on and on. I was mightily relieved when it was over. Even after so long in the jungle, I still could never look at a bat without thinking of vampires. I knew they were only fruit bats, but they always alarmed me, particularly when they filled the air like this, in their thousands. Inside, the stench of the cave was so rank and foul that at first I could hardly bear to take a breath at all. But I got used to it.

The cave turned out to be a welcome resting place all the same, and not just for me either. I knew well enough that orang-utans loathed getting wet, and this at least would be dry. I liked dry too, even if the stench was foul. Oona seemed rather disappointed that there wasn’t food about, but that didn’t stop her searching. She found some in the end, as she always did. I could hear her exploring deep in the blackness of the cave. It sounded as if she was rubbing away with her trunk at the roof of the cave. Whatever it was she had discovered there – I thought it must be minerals or salt in the rock maybe – it kept her busy, and happy too. I could tell she was enjoying it, from the endless rumblings of satisfaction that echoed through the cave all night long.

I woke in the middle of the night to find Charlie crawling over me, her breath on my face, and the mother orang-utan sitting beside me holding my hand in hers. I thought then of Mum, of the night after we’d heard the news of Dad’s death, how she’d lain beside me on my bed, how she’d held my hand all night. It was the first time that I’d thought about that in a very long time. I lay awake for the rest of the night, remembering but not crying. I felt strangely unaffected by it. I was remembering it as if it had happened to someone else. It was during that night in the cave that I think I finally accepted that Mum was really gone, that I wouldn’t see her again, whether or not I ever got out of this jungle, whether or not I ever got back home. And there was something else too. It occured to me that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get back home at all.

At first light the mother orang-utan led the way out of the cave, down the treacherous track below the cliff, and then back down into the forest. For the first time now, I saw Other One down on the ground, walking on ahead of us all, way ahead – he liked to keep his distance wherever he was. He didn’t only know the way, he also seemed to know where all the ripe fruit grew as well. Within a couple of hours we were feasting on figs again, but there was only one tree of them. So between all of us we had very soon stripped it bare.

We were just about ready to move on when the mother orang-utan became suddenly agitated. She was swinging through the trees, calling out, searching frantically. I soon understood why. Charlie was nowhere to be seen. She wasn’t playing in among the lower branches with Bart and Tonk where I’d last seen her. I wasn’t too worried, not at first. Charlie was always wandering off from time to time – they all did. But once I’d thought about it, I realised that if her mother was alarmed, then she had good reason, and I should be worried too. So I was very relieved when, moments later, Charlie came scampering out of the undergrowth – until, that is, I saw that she was not alone.

Lumbering through the trees after her came a bear, not a bear like any other I had ever seen. It was small, and with a pale, pointed snout, but it was a bear nonetheless, and Charlie was running for her life. Only instinct could have made me do what I did. I ran at the bear waving my arms, shouting and screaming at the top of my voice. Taken by surprise, the bear stopped in his tracks and reared up on his hind legs, panting through his teeth. I could see his terrible claws, and the dark glint of anger in his eyes. For a few moments, moments that seemed like a lifetime, the two of us stood there confronting one another, as Charlie ran squealing into her mother’s arms. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. I wanted to turn and run. I didn’t stand there because I was brave. On the contrary. Sheer terror had simply rooted me to the spot. I couldn’t move. Then Oona was there beside me, tossing her head and trumpeting. The bear didn’t think twice then. He turned and ran off into the jungle.

After her trauma with the bear, Charlie stayed firmly attached to her mother for days. They turned out to be days of the worst heat and humidity I had ever known, sapping my strength, draining my energy. There was fruit enough, and some water from the leaves. But I longed for a stream to plunge into. I longed to be cool. It was late one afternoon that we emerged from the shadows of the forest, where at least we had been protected from the glare of the sun, on to the edge of a vast plantation of small palm trees, tens of thousands of them, millions of them maybe, that stretched away as far as the eye could see, rows and rows of them, with little but bare brown earth in between.

Gazing out over this strange new landscape from high up on Oona, it was as if we had arrived on another planet. Within an hour or so of being in this arid place, I was longing for the rainforest we had left behind us. With all its dangers and discomforts, it had been alive with scents and colours and sounds. But only palm trees grew here, in this new planet, nothing else. There was no bird song, no clamour and chatter of the jungle, no butterflies, no bees, none of the hum and hubbub of the world to which I had become so accustomed. In comparison to the jungle, this was, to me, a dead place.

But Other One and the mother orang-utan seemed to know their way even in this featureless plantation. With Charlie still clinging round her neck, the mother orang-utan followed along behind Other One, her pace as constant as his, both of them tireless in their determination to keep going. Oona would pause from time to time to feed from the young palm trees, tearing away the leaves to get at the soft hearts of them, which were clearly delicious to her. But if ever Oona stopped too long to feed, the mother orang-utan would soon turn and give us one of her meaningful looks, and pretty quickly Oona would move on again. With no tall trees to shelter us, the sun was cruelly hot. I asked Oona to let me down, and made my own makeshift sunhat, from a huge palm frond she’d torn off. It worked too. Holding it over my head did pain my arm a bit after a while, but at least it served to protect me, and Bart and Tonk too, from the worst of the sun.

It took us many long days and nights to cross the desert of palm trees. I came to hate this barren place with a passion, and not just because the travelling seemed endless and monotonous, not just because I was always hungry, always thirsty – all of us were, except Oona. That was bad enough. But it was worry that was getting to me, worry that if Mister Anthony’s hunters caught up with us now there would be nowhere for us to hide, nowhere for us to run to. The plantation seemed to go on for ever on all sides. I wondered if we would ever come out of it, and for the first time I began to question the wisdom of our guides, Other One and the mother orang-utan. They seemed to me to be leading us relentlessly on into nowhere.

But I should never have doubted them. I remember one morning noticing that the pace of our walk had quickened, that Oona was striding out purposefully again, not just strolling along as she had been. I was wondering why, when I looked out ahead of me from under my palm-frond hat and saw the great trees of the rainforest ahead of us in the distance. My heart rose. It seemed to me like I was coming home, and that’s what it felt like too when we got there. I loved being back in the shade of it, searching for its fruits again, hidden in the safety of it. But best of all, after we had been back in the jungle only a short while, we found ourselves coming out into a clearing, a clearing which turned out to be the banks of a river, where the water was wide, and softly flowing, and dancing in sunlight. I thought it was the most welcome sight I’d ever seen.

Other One led all the orang-utans down to the river’s edge. I imagined that like Oona he must have had crocodiles on his mind, because like her he was being very cautious. He took his time, looking up and down the river, before allowing them to drink their fill. Oona and I joined them, but of course, for the two of us, water wasn’t just for drinking, it was for washing in, and it was for messing around in. It was here that I lost my yellow T-shirt at last. I pulled it off before I dived in, and when I surfaced I saw Bart and Tonk playing at tug-of-war with it. I yelled at them, but it was no use. A few moments later it was in shreds. So now I would have to go naked, as they were, as every creature in the jungle was. It didn’t bother me one bit. In fact I wondered why on earth I had gone on wearing it all this time. Out of habit, I thought, out of nothing but habit.

As we cavorted in the river, the orang-utans on the shore looked on, as if we were both completely mad. We would have stayed there for ever if we’d had our way, but the mother orang-utan would have none of it. They were moving on already. She kept turning and giving us that same long and meaningful look. “Come along, children,” she was telling us, “come along.” I don’t know why, but I presumed we would be following the river bank, and so we did, for a while. But Other One kept stopping and looking out across the river, before moving on again hesitantly. He seemed suddenly unsure of himself, as if he’d lost his way, and was trying to find it again.

I noticed also that the mother orang-utan was doing much the same thing. She was gazing across into the forest on the far side of the river. Then, with Charlie hanging on to her good arm, she was pacing up and down the river bank. Like Other One she seemed to be searching for something. Maybe, I thought, they were still checking the river for crocodiles. Both of them looked uncertain as to what to do next, or where to go. And that wasn’t like them at all.

Other One stood upright for a few moments, looking upriver, downriver, the water lapping round his feet, the mother orang-utan right behind him. I didn’t anticipate at all what happened next. But Charlie had clearly sensed something I didn’t. She was clambering all over her mother, squealing in her anxiety. I could see she was longing to jump down and run away, but never quite found the courage to do it. Her mother’s arm came round her, and held her firmly.

Then, to my amazement, I realised that Other One and the mother orang-utan were picking the spot. They were going down into the river. They were going to swim, and not for fun, not to cool off, but to get to the other side. Until then I had never imagined that orang-utans could swim at all. The little ones had never shown any inclination to go anywhere near water, unless it was to drink, and even that took some persuasion. Other One was leading the way, and she was following. They were up to their necks in the river now, and swimming, Charlie clinging on, terrified. Oona looked as if she wanted to go too, so with Bart and Tonk hanging on to me and becoming ever more agitated, I shinned up her trunk and up on to her neck. Oona waited till we were settled, then made her way slowly down the bank and into the river. That was the moment, I remember, when I first began to feel strange. I thought it might be the water swirling all about us that was making my head spin.

I didn’t know what had come over me. All I knew was that I was feeling suddenly sick, and that the spinning in my head would not go away. I tried not to look down into the water, tried to forget my giddiness. I kept hoping it would pass. Oona was deep in the river now, first wading, and then swimming out into the flow. I dug in my heels and sat there on her neck, my feet in the water, then my legs too. I had Tonk and Bart both clutching me tight round my neck, clinging on by my hair and my ears, and squealing, reminding me all the time that I had to concentrate. Somehow, I had to hang on, to keep my balance.

Out in the middle of the river the flow was eddying, and much more turbulent than it had looked from the bank. The river was rushing past me, the current far too fast for me to be able to swim if I fell off, especially with two terrified orang-utans clinging to me, half throttling me now. But then I could tell Oona’s feet were on the river bottom and she was wading again. We were going to make it. Other One and the mother orang-utan were out of the water already, and standing there exhausted and dripping on the shore, Charlie still wailing in her mother’s arms. In no time we were across the river too, clambering out of the water, up the bank the other side and into the forest beyond.

Almost as soon as we were in among the trees, I began to feel ill again. I remember the branches high above us rustling and shaking, that there was a lot of crashing about. It was as I was looking up into the trees to see what was up there, that I realised I couldn’t see properly, that everything was blurred. I was finding it difficult to make any sense of what was going on around me. There were orang-utans up there, that much I knew by now, and not just one or two. There seemed to be dozens and dozens of them, and all swinging down into the lower branches to investigate us. But none of this seemed at all real to me. I felt I was drifting into a world of dreams. Yet at the same time I was sure I was still riding up on Oona, that Bart and Tonk were becoming more agitated than ever. They were choking me, and I was fighting for breath. I had a sudden pain in my temples, a throbbing that wouldn’t go away, and I wished it would. All the while I was aware that I was being carried on through the jungle, accompanied by this boisterous, noisy escort of orang-utans.

It must have been late afternoon when I was brought out of the forest into a broad sunlit clearing where the grass was cut short, just as it was back home, and where there was a group of well-tended, wooden houses, and a jetty and a river beyond. There were well-tended flower beds, and washing hanging from a line. Now I knew I was dreaming. Sitting on the top step of one of these wooden houses, the door open behind her, was a woman dressed all in white.

When she stood up I saw that she was wearing loose floppy trousers with a brightly coloured belt tied around her waist, all the colours of the rainbow. She had on a tatty-looking straw hat. She came walking down the steps, and out across the lawn towards us, her pace quickening. The mother orang-utan scuttled on ahead of us right up to her, and took her at once by the hand. Other One seemed to have disappeared. I thought all this was impossible and odd, too odd to be real. But then, if I was dreaming, why shouldn’t it be odd? Dreams were often odd.

“Mani?” said the woman, bending over the mother orang-utan so that their faces were almost touching. “It is you, Mani, isn’t it? You’ve come back again. And you’ve another little one with you, I see. Not a year old yet by the looks of her. Is it all right if I say hello?” She put her other hand out then to Charlie, who took her finger, put it to her lips and sniffed it. Then she was looking up at me. I wasn’t sure whether she was smiling at me or squinting into the sun.

“I think maybe you’ve got some explaining to do, Mani,” she went on. “You know I always love to see you, Mani. I’m not complaining, not one bit, of course I’m not. I know how you like to come back from time to time when you feel the need, like a lot of my old girls. And that’s fine by me. But would you mind telling me what on earth you’ve brought along with you this time? I mean, I’m sitting there on my porch, having a catnap in the evening sun, like I do. I open my eyes, and what do I see? My old Mani back again, and with a baby too. But this time she’s brought along an elephant, two more little orang-utans, and, if I’m not much mistaken, a boy – a wild-looking boy at that – and without so much as a stitch on him. I mean, would you believe it? You wouldn’t, would you?”

I could see she was smiling at me, and I felt at once that her smile wasn’t one of politeness. It was a smile of genuine warmth, almost as if she knew me, had been expecting me. I liked her at once. I hated polite smiles, because I knew they were always empty. And I liked her also, because she looked so like Mum, a little older perhaps, but she smiled like Mum. She spoke like her. She was her. She had to be her. She was alive! I had found her!

I wanted to ask her so many questions, about how she had escaped the tsunami, about how it was that she’d known the mother orang-utan by name, how come the two of them had greeted each other like old friends. But somehow I couldn’t speak the words. I couldn’t make them come, and I couldn’t work out why. And I wondered too why it was that when she was speaking I could only hear her as if she was speaking from somewhere far away. I could see her lips moving. I saw the concern on her face as she reached out her arms to me. I knew she was talking, but her voice seemed to be fading away all the time. The nausea was rising again in my stomach, and I felt a strange sense of detachment coming over me, as if I was leaving my body altogether. I longed only to fall asleep now. I tried all I could to resist, because I knew that if I gave in to it, I would be leaving Mum and Oona for ever, and I would be dead.

There was nothing I could do about it though. I was going to fall. My last thought was that Bart and Tonk must somehow have known it, because I could feel them hugging me even tighter, their fingernails digging into my skin so hard that it hurt. I heard myself crying out, and then I was falling into a whirlpool, a whirlpool of emptiness.