‘To come to Abudai we must walk in the direction of Mecca, towards the setting sun,’ I say to Ad-am. ‘Have you seen how the tall tower turns golden when the sun sinks towards the sea?’
I guess he’s asking me what to do now. Why do I have to be the one with all the answers? I turn to get away from that dumb-animal look, and just about go nose to nose with a real animal nibbling on one of the thorny trees nearby. It snickers and trots towards us. It’s a goat. A black-and-brown goat. And it looks as friendly as anything.
‘Hey, what do you want, girl?’ I ask, as I put my hand out. It stops and suddenly looks shy.
‘Don’t go away.’ I just want to pat her. I miss Tara, and my mum says I’m good with animals. Sometimes I think, instead of being a pilot, I might study to be a vet like my uncle, then I could own a dairy farm like Barby’s as well.
‘Come on, girl.’ I coax the goat towards me. Of course, she probably hopes I’ve got some food in my hand. Goats are greedy. When we go camping, sometimes a whole herd of them will come right up to the tents because they think they can get food from us, but Tara always barks and frightens them away. She doesn’t like goats.
The goat sniffs my hand and then, slowly, I put my other hand out to rub behind its ears like I do to Tara.
Just then I realise Walid’s sneaking up with the rope he was tied up with. He looks like he’s up to no good.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I yell at him, and startle the goat. It tosses its head and goes into reverse.
‘Allah! You fool!’
Walid screeches one of his dumb prayers as he leaps at the goat likes he’s in a rodeo and drags it down, holding it by the neck. Then he looks up at me and grins like he’s done something fantastic. The goat is bleating its head off.
‘Why …’ I start, as I see the poor thing lying there bleating and kicking the ground. Then I realise something. I was calling it ‘girl’. I was right. It’s a she goat. We can milk it. I even know how to do it, because Barby taught me how to milk cows. A goat can’t be that different. But what can I use to put the milk into? I think about the empty bottles in my bag. I can cut the top off them. It’s, like, Improvising. When I went to Scouts they used to say that although you should always be prepared there will be times when you’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere and you will have to Improvise. I used to think it meant improve yourself, but now I know it means to make something up out of other things.
‘Hang on to her, Walid,’ I say, as I tip the bag upside down to get the empty bottles at the bottom. I take my knife out of my pocket and pull out the biggest blade.
This is good. Ad-am understands. He has his knife.
But why does he cut the top off this bottle?
‘I will hold the goat while you slit the throat, and then after letting all the blood run out we can make a fire and roast and eat this flesh.
‘La! No! What is this you are doing?’
I’m squeezing and sliding my fingers, using just the right pressure, so the milk squirts out properly. I manage to get half a bottle.
‘Here.’ I hold it out to Walid. I figure he deserves the first sip, seeing he was the one who caught the goat.
He spits. He’s a good spitter. Better even than Jason who’s the best in the Sea Ks.
‘Milk is food for babies.’
If only I had that blade of Ad-am’s, I would soon kill this goat and we would have good food for our journey.
‘Okay, if you don’t want it, I’ll drink it.’ The milk is warm and slightly sour and salty, but incredibly refreshing.
I feel good that I could milk the goat like I was an expert, and it makes me remember a corny joke: What is an expert? A drip under pressure. I laugh. I must be feeling better about everything. We can keep the goat with us so we’ll always have something to drink.
‘I’ll call you, Marge,’ I say, as I scratch her forehead. It’s after Marge Simpson from ‘The Simpsons’. That’s my favourite show.
Marge is quite cute really (I mean the goat). She’s got big brown eyes and long eyelashes. She snickers just like Marge laughs.
‘We’ll tie her up to the tree,’ I say to Walid.
‘You must hobble her feet to stop her roaming,’ I am saying, but Ad-am does not understand.
Walid still seems miffed about something as he points to her hooves. Does he think she’s going to kick me or something?
‘She didn’t even try to kick while I was milking her so I’m sure she won’t now,’ I say to him, but he doesn’t understand me. He shrugs and walks away.
I stay and stroke Marge for a while as I watch her munch happily on some low-hanging leaves.
This one is such a fool to play with the goat. Like a soft girl he is. I feel like giving him a good kicking. Instead, I kick at the ground and I am sorry, for my foot is hitting a heavy tin that has rolled from Ad-am’s bag. I sit and hold my foot, which is sore, and I feel even more angry with this foolish boy – he is bigger than me, but he knows no more than a baby.
But what is this tin? I look at it closely, and I am seeing a picture of a dog. Allah! It is true as Old Goat says. The Infidels are unclean. They eat not only the meat of pigs, but also of dogs.
‘Unclean!’
I look up when I hear Walid screech. He’s holding a tin of dog food. He’s probably trying to steal something out of my bag.
‘I’ll take that, thank you,’ I say and snatch it off him. The thought that we’re going to have to eat Tara’s food is enough to make me want to throw up, but I’ve got to be practical. There’s not likely to be much else along the way. I ate all the cheese slices yesterday. And I remember that book I read, about those kids who were in a plane crash in the Andes. They had to eat dead bodies. Chum doesn’t sound too bad really.
I put the tin of dog food back in the bag.
‘We need to get started soon,’ I say, as I sling the backpack over my shoulder. It scrapes against my tight, sunburned skin and makes me wince. I’ll be lucky not to come out in blisters. I don’t care what Walid wants to do, but I’m not crazy enough to risk walking in that heat again especially now I haven’t got any sunscreen left. We’ll travel by night and sleep during the day.
I’ve got it all worked out. It’s like one of those maths exercises. If you took sixty minutes to reach B from A, travelling at 120 kilometres per hour, how many kilometres do you need to travel on foot in a day to get from B back to A? I don’t know how fast walking speed is, but if we travel about 40 kilometres each night, we could get back in about three nights walking.
Of course, we’ve got to get across the desert, but except for the bit with all the orange sand dunes it’s mostly rocks and scrubby trees. I reckon we can do it. I’ve rollerbladed 20 kilometres in a fun run and that wasn’t hard. It only took a couple of hours. All we have to do is double that and we can definitely do it in three days. We’ll have one tin of dog food per day and, of course, the goat’s milk to drink.
I’m starting to feel like a real explorer.
‘We must be moving on, for the journey to Abudai is far,’ I say to Ad-am.
‘Now the sun’s gone, we can go, too,’ I tell Walid. The sky’s sort of a silvery-grey, but it’ll be dark soon. When night comes, it comes quickly in this part of the world. My mum’s always complaining that we don’t get any long twilights like at home. Here, after the sun goes down, within about five or ten minutes, it’s completely dark.
And it’s so quiet out here it’s spooky. Except for a cricket starting up, there’s no other noise. In town, you can always hear the airconditioning systems kick in or the hum of cars in the background, especially where we live by the main highway. And in our compound you can hear what’s going on next door through the walls.
You’re never alone there. And even though Mum doesn’t really like compound life, she’s happy that even when Dad’s away flying, there’s always someone around if you need help or company.
All of a sudden, I feel pleased I’m not stuck out here on my own. Even if Walid is a half-wit who can’t speak English and Marge is only a goat, at least they’re here. It’s like now there are others to share this situation with the whole thing has become more like an adventure than a disaster.
I can’t help grinning to myself when I think about what the Hartlisses would have said to each other when they realised I wasn’t with Jason’s family, that I wasn’t in any of the cars. Even better – what are they going to tell Mum and Dad? They’ll be feeling pretty stupid, I bet. That definitely cheers me up. And when I turn up safe and sound everyone will be so pleased to see me, they won’t even tell me off.
And I’m not even too worried about what’ll happen with the war when we get back. Mr Hartliss reckoned that the Americans would be there before you could blink because they won’t want the Mafi controlling the oil wells. When the Yanks arrive with their F-18s and B-52s and cruise missiles, the Mafi won’t know what hit them. It’ll probably be all over by the time we get back there.
But if we want to get back at all, we’d better get this expedition moving. I look up at the sky. Explorers always use the stars.
‘Holy Hell! Where did they all come from?’ There are suddenly millions up there, and I can’t pick out any stars I know at all. I feel myself starting to panic and I try to remember everything I learned at Scouts. But I didn’t go for long because it was down at Ras-al-Haq, which is about an hour’s drive from Abudai, and Mum got sick of driving me there every week.
The only thing I can remember is that the north star is the one to follow, for some reason. But I don’t have a clue why or which one is the north star. How can I tell which direction is north?
Everything’s getting blacker. The valley feels like it’s closing in around us. We have to get going. We have to walk at least 40 kilometres tonight. But which way? I can hardly even see a metre in front of me.
‘Which bloody way do we have to go?’ I know Walid can’t understand a word I say, but I shout at him all the same.
I’m starting to get angry. Even if he could understand me, he probably wouldn’t make a decision anyway. Mr Hartliss says these people can’t make decisions. Not even to save their own lives. He says they reckon it’s all in Allah’s hands and everything in life only happens because Allah wills it.
‘What am I going to do? I’m stuck here in the middle of the mountains with a sneaky little idiot who expects me to know everything and do everything. Why?’ I yell at Walid.
He cringes away.
Allah! This one is going mad with the darkness. Maybe now I should be running fast away, for in his craziness he may try to kill me. But without the goat and Ad-am’s knife to kill it, I will surely die. What to do?
‘It’s not fair!’ I scream. ‘It’s not fair.’ And I can’t help it. This terrible panicky feeling wells up inside me and I begin to sob in a dry retching sort of way. Why did this have to happen to me? Then, just as I think things can’t get any worse, they do.