Fish Read online

  The fish's mouth! I put down the kitchen pot carefully, filled with nice, clean bottled water, keeping my eye on the muddy patch of water where the mouth had appeared.

  Gulp! There it was again. Desperately grabbing for air, the fish had come up to the surface at the edge. I had no net, but somehow felt I wouldn't need it. Granddad had told Dad stories about people who tickled trout. You could just pick them up, right out of the water, if you went about it the right way.

  Slow and gentle, that was it. I crouched down, very, very slowly, and slid my hands into the water without making a ripple. The water was almost mud, and it felt like putting your hands into cold soup.

  Suddenly, I touched the fish. It sank away a little, but then struggled up to the surface again. I saw the open mouth, the mud-covered shape of an eye, and then my hands were around it. Gently but firmly, so it wouldn't get away, I lifted it out of the mud with both hands. It felt and looked like a huge piece of melted, slippery chocolate, but was cold, so cold. It flipped only once, in a tired way, as if it didn't really care whether I had caught it or not.

  Oh, I couldn't wait to get it in that clean water. I felt I was suffocating too. As I lowered it into the pot—the fish seemed far too big, yet somehow it fitted with ease—I let out my breath and realized I'd been holding it for ages.

  “There!” I said, and ran my fingers along its back and sides under the water, to help clean it. It wriggled a bit more vigorously now, and the mud drifted down to the bottom of the pot, leaving its scales shining and bright.

  I picked up the pot, because I was aching with crouching down, and carried it away from the puddle and the mud. Once on the path, I held the pot up to the light so that I could see the fish better.

  TWO

  Really, it was only brown, with a silver white underneath, but as it turned and moved the brown changed into speckles and spots of gold and green and even blue and red.

  I carried the pot carefully up the path toward the house. It was hard not to spill the water, as the pot would swing and bump into my leg. I started to see Mum's point about the difficulties of carrying a fish all the way across the border.

  When I reached the house, a stranger—not an old man, but older than Dad—was there with a little grayish brown donkey. Mum and Dad were passing bags to the man, who was expertly strapping them onto the donkey's back.

  You might have said, “Surely that's too much for one little donkey to carry,” which is what I used to say when I first saw the donkeys working here. But I could see that our load was about a quarter of the size of those which these little creatures normally carried.

  Sometimes you would just see the huge bundles— firewood, or, recently, household belongings—coming down the street and only when they got close could you see the donkey's tiny legs and forehead and tail sticking out from underneath it all.

  The donkey stood there patiently, as they do, while the man hauled and pushed the load around, at one point giving the bag on one side a shove that I thought would roll the donkey over sideways, but it just staggered a little and found its balance again.

  The man turned and smiled at me when he saw me coming.

  “This is our guide, who is also kindly lending us his donkey,” said Dad, also adding the man's name, which I decided I would never be able to pronounce.

  “Don't worry about the donkey, little one,” the guide said unexpectedly, reading my thoughts. “She trusts me.”

  I wasn't too sure about the “little one” remark.

  “They call me Tiger,” I said, with my chin lifting a little.

  “Tiger,” he said, trying not to look surprised, “and why do they call such a little … why do they call you that?”

  “I wasn't very big, or very well, when I was born,” I said, “but Dad says I was a real fighter. Of course, I'm much bigger now. And strong as anyone.”

  The man had a way of seeming to look right into you, if you know what I mean—like your mother might do if you say you've tidied your room when you haven't. But his eyes were quite friendly, all the same.

  “But that is not your real name,” he said, with his eyebrows rising. “Your mother said you were called—”

  I hated my proper name.

  “You can call me Tiger,” I said quickly.

  “And you can call me Guide. It's easier than remembering my name,” he said graciously, turning away to put a last strap in place. Once again, he seemed to have read my thoughts.

  Mum and Dad smiled at each other after this exchange between us, and Mum passed my very small bag to me. Then she saw the pot.

  “Oh! I was going to say, put the bag on your back. But you—you did catch it?”

  The Guide turned.

  “What have you got there, little—er—Tiger?”

  I was suddenly rather shy about my fish. I kept the pot by my side for a moment and then thought it would be rude not to offer to show the Guide, and held it out toward him.

  “Oh no,” groaned Dad, “it's a fish. It's my fault. I said the water would be gone soon and the fish would die, and now, obviously, we have to save it.”

  “Why, yes, of course you do,” nodded the Guide seriously, looking into my pot and missing the expression on Dad's face, behind his shoulder.

  “That is a beautiful, bright specimen, Tiger. I don't know that I have seen one so colorful. A little on the small side, but that is to be expected.” The Guide sighed, looking around at the shabby house, the dirt track and the mud-brown, bare landscape.

  “It seemed bigger when I saw it at first,” I said, almost apologetically, “but I suppose at least it can fit in the pot.”

  “Hmm—the pot. So we need to get a lid for that, to stop the water spilling,” and he turned and directed these last words toward my mother, who, under the calm, inquiring eyes of the Guide, made no more fuss, but went into the kitchen and fetched a lid that would fit.

  “Will it be able to breathe like that?” I asked, as the Guide fished two elastic bands from somewhere deep within his pockets and put them around both pot and lid for extra safety.

  “It is not ideal, but then none of this is,” he said, casting a hand around to include the donkey, us and the whole area—and I understood him to mean this situation, his country's problems, and maybe Life, all with that one movement of his hand.

  “Every time we stop, you can take off the lid and let in a little fresh air. If we have enough water, you can give it some fresh every now and then. I think,” he added, taking the bound-up, lidded pot from me and tying it somehow to my bag behind my back, “I think that it will be just fine. Now, Tiger, I'll tie it like this” (here he made a noise through his teeth as he jerked something tight), “because you must have your hands free to walk where we are walking. Always remember that. What do you do when you start to fall—huh?”

  “I, um, go like this,” I said, and started to put my hands out.

  “That's right. You put out your hands to save yourself. You also need them to hold on tight to things sometimes, or to push them out of the way. So—we keep hands free, OK?”

  The Guide was talking to me like I was a soldier now, and I was pleased, so I stood up straight as I could under my bag.

  “Ready?” He turned to Mum and Dad, who were looking slightly surprised by all this. It is hard for anyone to outboss Mum and Dad. To be honest, they had been so busy, bossy and tired for so long, I think they were rather pleased that the Guide was getting us all organized.

  “Let's go, then,” he said.

  He started walking along the path that led away from the back of the house toward the road, which Dad had explained wasn't like a proper road back in our own country because it was only made of earth and rocks.

  The donkey, which had no ropes about its head so was in fact loose to wander anywhere, swung around expertly and started to follow the Guide. When it came alongside him it steadied and walked there calmly like a dog. Following behind, I noticed that not only did the Guide not walk behind the donkey, as the villagers
normally did, but he didn't have a long stick with which to tap it.

  I hoped it wouldn't keep stopping, or we would take a very long time on this trek. I hoped it wouldn't just trot off where it fancied, with all our belongings on board.

  Mum must have been thinking the same thing. “Is this a very good donkey, then, that it walks with you like this?” she asked the Guide.

  “All donkeys are good, in that they'll walk like this. If we come to a dangerous bit of ground, who would you trust to find the safest way to cross—a man, or a donkey?”

  Mum was caught off guard a bit by this sudden question.

  “Well, I wouldn't know—people have said animals are the best. Where I come from, there are bogs—like, deep mud that you'd never get out of—with grass growing on the top so that you can't tell they're there. Local people always trust the ponies to know. …”

  “Exactly,” said the Guide, looking pleased, and leaving Mum looking even more confused.

  He went on, “If I am tap, tap, tapping at this creature all the time, and beating her when she stops, and pulling her around by a rope, how is she to tell me when it is not safe to go in a certain direction?”

  Dad was impressed. “That is good sense, if ever I heard it. But tell me, won't she run off without a rope?”

  “She might know where the path is safe, and where the grass is good, and a lot of other things. But she trusts me—she thinks I know more and will keep her safe. So why would she run away? Tell me, Tiger— would you run away from your parents here?”

  I shook my head, looking wonderingly at him.

  “No, of course not. That is good sense. It's the same for the donkey here. I feed her, I care for her, I have never let her down. Why would she not want to stay with me?”

  And we all marched on over the rough earth, heads down, thinking. This was going to be a long journey, but with the Guide, I thought, it was going to be more interesting than I had expected.

  There was a hissing.

  I woke up from dreaming of snakes. It was dark. Blinking, and trying to remember where I was, I was pleased to find my blanket from my bed wrapped around me. But I wasn't in my bed back at the house.

  A very hard rock was sticking into my hip where I was lying, and I suddenly remembered. We were sleeping out in the open on the night of the first day of our trek to cross the border.

  The uncomfortable rock had pushed the snake dream out of my mind. I wasn't frightened of snakes anyway, and it was way too cold for any to be out and about now. But the hissing was real.

  My eyes fastened eagerly onto a glow of reddish light and followed it to the remains of the campfire. The Guide sat motionless in its glow, his khaki trousers and shirt lit almost orange against the black, starless sky. Then he reached out and pushed another few twigs into the middle of the fire and there was a crackle and a few blue flames suddenly flared orange. His shape shone white for a moment.

  The hissing, I realized, was coming from Dad, still lying down, but propped up on his elbow with his back to me. He was whispering to the Guide across the campfire, but he wasn't very good at it, I thought, if it was loud enough to wake me up.

  “Are you sure?” hissed Dad, just a black shape with a cold white glow about the top edge. “I really didn't want to try and cross the mountains. I mean, with a woman and child. And we're not equipped …”

  The Guide spoke softly.

  “The rumors as we left were that they have closed the border. We will not be able to cross by the road at the checkpoints. I don't care if you have papers. The border guards have their orders. The camps are overflowing, conditions are terrible. They just cannot let in any more people. As for the woman and child, this is always what men say. Do they not shame us all with their strength in the end? Has your woman not done things you thought that even you could not do?”

  And I remembered Mum working with everyone all day to help build the school hut, and then, just as everyone almost fell, rather than sat down, to eat that evening, rushing out to help a woman who was having a baby, which was stuck the wrong way up or something, and then staying up all night with one of the woman's other babies, which was sick and crying.

  And then there was the time when I was quite small and I was asleep and Dad was out, and the roof over my bed started to fall in and Mum reached up and grabbed the great big timber, and held it up, and she was trying to wake me to make me move out of the way, but she couldn't reach me with her foot to give me a good kick and still hold up the timber. She tried shouting and everything, but still I slept on. She had told me the story and teased me about it when I was older.

  “Typical you! It was terrible getting you off to sleep, you never wanted to. But when I needed you to wake up, you wouldn't!” she'd laugh.

  And Dad would say, “Oh, that kid was always clever. Why bother waking up when you seemed to be hanging on to that beam all right?” But you could see he couldn't really joke about it like Mum. He still had that worried look in his eyes when he thought about it.

  He'd come back, he said, and found her standing there like she'd been there forever (“It felt like it,” said Mum), still holding up the beam after nearly two hours, and he went to grab it from her and she just looked up and said wearily, “No, the child! Move the child. You won't hold it.”

  He decided she was right about moving the child, though obviously wrong about him not being able to hold the beam, as my mum is very small and Dad is, like I said, pretty tall, if not very wide across.

  So he picked me up and moved me into the other room (and I still didn't wake up) and put his hands under the beam so Mum could let go, and when she put her arms down, both of them went “Oww!” and “Agh!” Mum, because of the pain as her arms came back to life, and Dad, because he could hardly take the weight and he suddenly realized what she'd been holding up.

  “And it wasn't possible that she could,” he would say, again and again.

  When the men Mum had fetched had rushed in and propped up the beam with a big bit of wood (to save the roof till it could be fixed properly the next day), Dad had let go and his legs went all shaky with the shock and he had to sit down and have a drink. Mum didn't make any fuss at all, but for the next few days she couldn't lift her arms at all or move her neck very well.

  With his back to me, I could still see Dad drop his head a little and knew that he was remembering this story as well.

  “You're right. I just feel guilty. We shouldn't have stayed this long. Just a day or two earlier …”

  “We can try the road, and you can show the guards your papers,” said the Guide, comfortingly. “It's just we will have to walk further if it happens that we can't cross there. We can try. It is up to you. I am just here to show you the way.”

  I sighed at the bit about walking further. I was sure I could do it—after all, I thought about the widows and old people who'd left the village pushing my blanket friends in rickety wooden wheelbarrows, and a woman expecting a baby who had waddled slowly but determinedly behind them. But the fish? How long could it last in that little pot of water?

  I turned over and looked at the cooking pot, sitting firmly on a flat rock where I'd put it when we'd stopped to camp. The lid was off, to let in the air. It was so cold tonight. I had all my clothes on, and my blankets. Did fish get cold too? Was the water frozen?

  I used my elbows like a seal's flippers to drag myself over to the rock and looked into the pot. The water was just a pool of blackness. I couldn't see the fish.

  “All right, Tiger?” called Dad softly, so as not to wake Mum. You could tell even in those three words that he was wondering how long I'd been awake and whether I'd overheard the conversation.

  “The fish is fine,” said the Guide. “If you tip the pot a little toward the fire, you'll see.”

  I did as he said, and the light suddenly flashed in a patch across the black surface of the water. Through it, I could see the fish. It wasn't moving around, just fanning its fins a little to keep its place. Now it just looked brown
.

  “Do fish sleep?” I asked the Guide.

  “Of course they do, if people wouldn't keep disturbing them,” he said, and I could hear rather than see the smile. He pushed another few twigs on the fire and I wondered where they had come from. No one could get hold of firewood anymore. I decided I didn't care, I was just very, very grateful. It was so cold.

  I put the pot down carefully again, so as not to disturb the poor sleeping fish, and scuttled backward under my blankets to keep warm.

  “Everyone should try and sleep a little,” said the Guide, showing no signs of doing so himself. “We have a long way to go in the morning, and morning is not far away.”

  Dad lay down again, slowly and reluctantly, and I put my whole head under my blankets to try and warm up. My eyes were wide open. I worried about the border crossing. I would never sleep, I thought.

  I woke up to the sound of pots clanging and a smell of porridge. It actually smelt good, which told me I must be very hungry. I sat up and saw the grown-ups splashing their faces with a little water from the rations and hoped they wouldn't notice if I didn't. No one said anything, and Mum passed me a hot drink and some porridge. No nagging about washing for a change—there were some good things about this trek anyway.

  When I'd eaten, though, the Guide pushed a clean, wet rag into my hand.

  “Just wipe around your eyes and mouth. Keep the sand off. And there are still flies in the day, even though it's getting colder.”

  He was right, of course. But by the time he'd shown me how to use the campfire ash on my finger to clean my teeth, I was starting to miss our bathroom.

  “Do you have any children?” I asked the Guide suddenly, realizing he always seemed to know what to do, and feeling rather sorry for his children if they had to do this every day.

  Everything seemed to go quiet for a moment, and I sensed Mum and Dad freezing mid-packing.

  “I had four. Two boys and two girls.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn't like the way he'd said “had.” Maybe they'd just grown up and moved away. Maybe then he would say, “I had four children.” But I wished I hadn't asked.