Though she is a girl as curious as the next she has learnt in her short life to have a proper caution. She is, after all, in charge of the goats, and the animals, twelve of them, spill around her as she squats on a convenient rock and looks at the figure sprawled across the path at the point where the path enters the forest. At this distance she cannot be sure if it’s a man or a woman but she’s certain it’s not a child and not anyone she knows.
She’s a blonde, gap-toothed girl with a band of freckles across her cheeks, a straw hat on her head, an oversized black T-shirt with a picture of Luke Skywalker on it. And though barely past her tenth birthday, she has already seen a good many dead things—dead goats, dead cattle, dead chickens, a dead turtle once. Not yet, not properly (because it doesn’t count when they’re under a sheet and you can’t see the face) a dead person.
The old billy, who has been cropping the dry brown heads of plants at the edge of the path, stops, wary for a moment, then picks his way past the open, outstretched hand, and the others follow him, one by one, into the shadow of the forest. The girl slides off her rock. She doesn’t want the animals to get too far ahead of her. There are things in the forest that will eat a goat and only a month ago she did lose one and did not dare (she who dares a great deal) go far from the track to search for it.
So who is this, who does not wake at the sound of goat bells? She can see it’s a woman now. Shorts and T-shirt, a green bag beside her. Her face burnt and bitten, sores on her lips. Her shoes red with dust.
‘Voce fica cansada?’ she says. She prods one of the woman’s legs with her stick and the woman makes a noise in her throat. It‘s a little funny to watch someone coming so sleepily up the long stairs of themselves, to see them squirm in the dust of the track as if they had, two minutes ago, been made out of that same dust.
The eyes open, brown like the brown hair.
‘Voce tem sede?’ The girl has a camouflage-green, military-style drinking bottle across her shoulders and she unslings it, unscrews the cap, squats and holds it to the woman’s lips. Most of the water slides down her cheek but then she’s suckling like a baby. When the girl decides she’s had enough she takes the bottle back, screws on the top. For a moment she’s distracted by the woman’s arm, the black writing there, then she remembers her manners and asks, ‘Qual If O Sell nome?’ She waits. For long seconds the woman says nothing, just looks at her with eyes that could swallow you whole. Eventually she pushes herself into a sitting position, looks about herself, looks at the sea, looks back at the forest. When she speaks the girl does not understand her then, suddenly, she does, and in her head the honeycomb of words is changed.
‘My name is Leah,’ she says, listening to herself, the charm of her own voice. ‘Please wait here. I must find my goats.’
* * *
With frequent stops, the girl and the woman make their way along the coast. The path leads them down to the edge of the sea and after that the only path is the girl’s own footprints and those of the goats. They cross a spur of headland, descend to a second beach, then up a shallow rise to where the sand gives way to ochre earth and a white church stands looking out to sea like an old white boat drawn up out of the surf. At the side of it is a second building, also white, with a row of small shuttered windows above three dark archways.
As they come closer, other children appear. Some are about the girl’s age, some much younger. They do not speak to Maud. They look at her with grave expressions, expressions of wonder. In whispers they ask Leah questions and several times Maud hears the girl speak her name, or a version of it—‘Moor . . . Moor’.
The walk from the edge of the forest has taken two hours, perhaps two and a half, and has cost Maud the last of her strength. She leans on Leah’s stick and waits for one of the children to bring an adult and for that adult to tell her where she can lie down. One of the children—a boy running furiously—has been sent as a messenger to the church but instead of an adult, two older children step from the door, an adolescent girl and boy, and for a while they simply look on as if they were expecting someone else. Then the girl strides forward, parts the circle of children and stands in front of Maud. She is, perhaps, thirteen, though at least as tall as Maud. Copper-coloured skin, her hair a slightly darker version of the same colour. The dress she is wearing, with its orange polka dots, has at one time belonged to somebody larger, heavier, and has, at the waist, been gathered into pleats and tightly belted.
‘Ola,’ says the girl.
‘I need to sit,’ says Maud, and does so, almost rumbling to the ground in the middle of the children, the goats.
The older girl speaks to Leah then kneels at Maud’s side. ‘You are American?’
Maud nods. American will do.
‘You are lost?’
She nods again. She has shut her eyes. When she opens them and looks up at the girl, the girl smiles. She is missing one of her front teeth but it doesn’t make her less beautiful. ‘I am Jessica,’ she says. ‘I will help you.’
Before Maud can answer, the girl has stood and begun issuing orders, scattering the younger children, one of whom returns a moment later with a plastic beaker of water and a slice of mango. Maud drinks some of the water but she cannot manage the fruit. They watch her, then one of them takes the cup from her and they raise her up—the older girl, Leah, and two other girls, twins surely, black girls with bright astonished faces. They prop her onto her feet. Maud reaches an arm around the older girl’s shoulders, and they set off, step by halting step, towards the nearest archway.
Inside the building they climb a flight of wooden stairs to a corridor or gallery where three unglazed windows, their shutters partly open, look from the back of the building, a view consumed by light. Opposite the windows are four or five doors and the older girl opens the first of them, the one nearest the top of the stairs. ‘This is my room,’ she says. ‘You can stay in here.’
It’s small and simple, a narrow bed along one wall, a table and chair under the window. The window, like those in the corridor, has green shutters but no glass.
Maud sits on the bed. Life is happening to her; she has no part to play, or her part is like that of the blind men, madmen and cripples in the Bible stories, people lowered from a roof or touched miraculously in passing.
A small boy comes in carrying, with great care, a bowl half full with water.
‘Thank you, Caleb,’ says the older girl, in English, perhaps for Maud’s benefit. The boy sets down the bowl, spilling some of the water onto the boards. He has a yellow, short-sleeved shirt on, red shorts down to his knees, bare feet. He looks as if he has some Indian blood in him.
‘It’s not polite to stare,’ says the girl, and though it’s hard to tell if the boy understands the words, he understands enough the tone of voice, the young schoolmistress—and he looks down, leaves the room.
‘You can go ahead and wash now,’ says the girl. ‘The children won’t come bothering. I’ll have Leah sit outside. When you need me you just send her to get me.’
Maud nods.
‘You got all you need?’ asks the girl.
When she has gone Maud sits there looking at the trembling in her legs, the thinness of her legs. She does not wash, she does not undress, does not take off her shoes. Eventually she lies down. She can smell the girl in the rough linen, can smell herself too, the bitterness of her skin, or a bitterness that rises from somewhere deeper. Outside, the children are calling to each other and the sounds are like the cries and whoops and chattering of the forest. She listens. Surely now some man or woman, some clear, rational voice, will speak over them and she will hear the heavy footfall on the stairs and she will ready herself to tell her story.
She listens. She waits.
* * *
Once she has fallen asleep she is like a child into whose room the parents can come and go without fear of waking her. Leah, the doorkeeper, in exchange for small gifts, admits, one at a time, her particular friends. All the friends are girls; certainly no boys will be allowed. So Jenna, a black girl, seven years old, stands at the end of the narrow bed imagining herself as a baby again. So Bethany, pale as Leah, daring to lean over Maud to examine her dirty face, her broken fingernails, the writing on her arm that seems almost readable but not quite. So Summer, eight, snub-nosed and frizzy-haired, not knowing if the woman is twenty-five or fifty-five, and wondering why she wears around her neck a piece of string with a child’s hair clip on it.
Jessica is also a visitor, and like the younger children she stands over the sleeping woman, but on her face the expression shifts between something like anxiery and something like relief, profound relief. In the evening she covers Maud with a blanket then holds out her hands, palms down above Maud’s sleeping head and speaks a dozen words, hushed and fervent.
Below, when the girl comes down, the children are waiting for her. They pester her with questions, hang from her hands, tug at the polka-dot dress. She shakes them off, gently, and crosses to the church, walks down the unlit length of it to the door beyond the altar.
She opens the door; the boy is in there. By the light of one of the wind-up lanterns he’s doing something with the boxes on the bench and she stands very still until he has finished. He has on a baggy checked shirt and a pair of jeans as tightly, as awkwardly belted as her dress. The room is whitewashed, a small window just above head height. There’s a desk with metal legs, a metal filing cabinet, a pair of tubular steel office chairs, a calendar for the year 2007 open at the month of December, a photograph of snow on the mountains.
‘She’s still sleeping,’ says Jessica. ‘Maybe she has a bad fever. Should we give her something?’
‘Give what?’
The girl shrugs. ‘An Advil?’
The boy laughs at her. ‘Did you look in her bag?’ he says.