"The Red"

There was a bird that could walk on water. Kàkà had seen it with her own eyes, a small brown one no bigger than her fist, running flat across the top of the river like its feet had never once been told the rule about sinking, and she had been trying for three days to tell Snail about it, except Snail did not talk and so the telling went the one way, which was fine, that was fine, Kàkà had words to spare and Snail had none at all, and down in the hole you shared what you had---the candle, the fish-smell, the one blanket that still smelled of somebody gone---so she gave him the words and he gave her the listening, and that was a fair trade. Better than most.

The hole was the cellar under Safiya's hut. Packed mud, a roof you could touch sitting down, one candle, and a pipe in the corner that whistled when the wind came in off the water. Kàkà had named the pipe Whistler the first night, because a something with a name was a thing you could talk to, and you could not be properly alone in a room you were talking to. She named everything. Her mother had told her once that her mouth was a gift and a gift was a thing for using, or she had said something close to it---the words had gone soft now, the way the whole of her mother had gone soft, down to a warmth and a smell and no face left to put them on.

The boy she had named Snail. Because he was small and slow and shut up tight inside himself and would not come out for anyone, not yet. He drew in the dirt floor with a bit of stick. Birds, mostly. Circles that turned into birds. She let him draw. She did the talking.

He had a birthday. She had not made it up---she could have, she had made up worse---but this one was true. Safiya had said it herself, weeks back, sorting the new ones, her hand going over the boy's head the way her hand went over all of them: this small one, he is seven in the dry-month. And Kàkà had kept the days after that, scratching them onto the wall with the burnt end of a stick, losing the count twice and starting it again, until the scratches said the dry-month had come and the dry-month was now and the day was today.

So it was today.

Snail was seven today and did not know it and could not be told, and you could not be seven in a hole in the ground with nothing to show for it. That was not a birthday. That was only another day with a number nobody said out loud.

The other one in the cellar was the angry girl. Kàkà had named her Fire, because she was hot the whole way through and she bit---she had bitten Kàkà on the arm once, hard enough to bring up blood, and Kàkà had not even been doing anything, or not much. Fire sat against the far wall with her knees pulled up and her shoes on. Fire always had her shoes on. She slept in them, the laces double-knotted, the way you keep your shoes when you are not finished running, and she had run three times and been caught three times, and she was waiting, Kàkà thought, for the fourth.

Safiya gave them soap, grey and hard and smelling of nothing at all, and Kàkà washed her hands with it every day, and every day the other smell came up under the nothing---the metal smell, the oil smell, the one that lived in the cracks of her fingers now. She had stopped scrubbing for it. Scrubbing only kept it under her nose longer, and kept her longer too in the place the smell came from, and she did not go to that place if she could help it.

So she talked. She was up to the good part of the water-bird, the part where she had really seen it, the feet going so fast they had no time to learn they stood on a river, and Snail had stopped his drawing to look at her, almost smiling, almost---when Fire moved.

Fire moved fast. She came up off the wall and swung her hand at the candle---a moth, maybe, or maybe nothing at all, and the dark jumped and dropped back down, and Kàkà's hand was already at her side, flat to her hip, the fingers closing on the strap that wasn't there, the weight that should have hung there, the short one they had cut down to fit her.

There was nothing there. There had been nothing there a long time.

She put the hand back in her lap. She kept talking. The feet, she said, go so fast the water never gets the chance.

Nobody said anything. Fire had gone still and was watching her, gone flat in the face the way you go when you catch your own thing being done by somebody else, and then it came off her, and she looked away, and that was that.

Snail was still looking at her. Almost-smiling. Seven years old today, with nothing.

So Kàkà decided. She would get him something. It would not be fish---you did not give fish for a birthday, fish was every day, fish was the very opposite of a birthday. Something good. Something for keeping.

Up top there was a market. Safiya talked about it sometimes, the stalls out on the boards by the dock, the traders coming through with things from inland, and Kàkà had never once seen it, because the children did not go up in the day---that was the first rule and the heaviest one, the Vanguard came through and a face they didn't know was a face they kept. But Safiya was at the racks with the morning's catch and would not be back before dark, and a market was right there over their heads, full of things, and it was Snail's birthday.

"I'm going up," Kàkà said.

Fire looked at her like she was simple. "You're stupid."

"You said that already. This morning."

"Because it's still true. They'll see you."

"They won't see me." Kàkà was small and she was quick and she knew how to go through a place without the place ever knowing, and she did not let herself look at how she knew. "It's Snail's birthday. You can help, or you can sit there being a fire nobody lit."

Fire turned her face to the wall.

Kàkà went out the way they had come in---down into the cold black water under the back of the hut, mud in her mouth, and up the other side into the grey.

⁂

Kulún in the daylight was smaller than the Kulún she had built in her head. Everything in it stood on legs over the water, the huts and the walkways both, the planks gone grey and gone soft, the whole village leaning together like it was tired, and the smoke off the fish-racks lay so thick on it that the light had no edges and the shadows had no edges and you could not have said for certain where one hut ended and the next began. It smelled of fish---the way the cellar smelled of fish, only more so---and under the fish the slow sweet brown smell of the swamp rotting itself down.

The market was ten stalls at the wide place in the boards, and everything on them was the colour of the smoke. Dried fish lying on dried fish. Yams. Oil in bottles the companies had thrown away. Cloth that had been other people's cloth first.

And at the end of it, near the dock, one stall that did not belong with the rest.

It was a trader's stall, for the ones passing through. It had things on it with colour in them. Sweets twisted up in shiny paper. Little mirrors. Combs. Beads sewn onto a card. And cloth that wasn't anybody's yet---new cloth, a strip of it hung up to show---and it was red. Not the brown-red of the mud, or the rust-red of the oil drums. Red like a thing that had never once been in the basin. Red like the inside of a something.

Kàkà's eyes went to it and would not come off.

The man behind the stall was old and fat and chewing on something, watching the boards the way a dog watches a yard it owns. Kàkà knew the kind. The kind that shouts.

She had no money. She had never in her whole life had money. But she had been hungry, and she had been other somethings she did not name, and you learned to take.

She did not go at it straight. She drifted along the stalls the way you drift when you are not headed anywhere, looking at the yams, looking at the fish, watching the man without ever putting her eyes on him, and she waited. A woman came up to argue the price of the oil. The man's eyes went to the woman, his hands went to the bottles, and Kàkà was already going past. Her hand came up and took the red cloth off its hook and it was inside her dress against her stomach before her hand had finished telling her it had moved.

She walked. You walk. Walking is how you get away. Running is how they remember which way to look. Somebody had taught her that, once, and she did not think about who, because the who was in the same place the oil-smell came from, and she was not going there today.

She was ten steps off when the man's voice came up out of the market behind her, big and carrying everywhere at once, "Thief---THIEF---that girl---"

Then feet on the boards behind her.

She did not turn to count them. Turning is time you have given away. She went, low and fast, off the wide boards and onto a thin plank running between two huts, and the plank was loose and kicked under her foot and she did not slow for it, and where the huts at the end leaned their legs together there was a black place under the walkway, a drain, a gap, a nothing---and she folded herself into it head-first.

The wood took the skin off her back going in. Her dress hooked a nail and tore. She dragged her knees up into the wet dark after her, and it stank of rot and of something that had died down there and stayed, and the gap was so tight she could not pull a whole breath into her chest. The red cloth was a small hard knot against her belly.

A man came to the mouth of it. He got down on the boards. She could see the round of his head against the grey. He put his arm in.

His fingers closed on her foot.

She made no sound. She drew the foot up out of his hand. He shoved his shoulder at the gap and the gap would not have it. He was too big. They were always too big. That was the one good thing about them, the only good thing---that they had grown and she had not.

"Little rat," he said, and he said it almost gently. "I can sit here all day."

She did not answer. She pushed herself further back, into the part of the dark his arm could not reach, and she waited. She could wait. She had waited in worse holes than this one, with far worse than a fat man coming.

He waited a while. She did not mark how long.

Then a whistle came from off the dock and somebody called the man by his name, and he spat into the black water under the boards and took his shape away, and the grey came back into the mouth of the gap.

She stayed where she was a good while after. Her hands were not steady. She did not look at them. She got the cloth out and turned it over and it was whole, only damp, and the red was still red.

Then she went home the long way, through the water and the mud and up into the candle, the way the river-rats do.

⁂

Fire was where Kàkà had left her, shoes on, knees up, and she looked at Kàkà coming in---the mud, the torn dress, the hands---and for once in her life she did not say a word.

Snail was over his birds in the dirt. He looked up.

Kàkà took the cloth out from against her stomach. It was creased and a little wet and it was the brightest thing in all the world. She held it out to him in both hands.

"It's your birthday," she said. "You're seven. I marked it, I marked every single one. This is yours. It's not for anything---you can't eat it, you can't wear it, it won't keep the cold off you. It doesn't do one single something. It's just red. There's no red anywhere down here."

Snail looked at the red a long, long time. Then he reached out, slow, the way he reached for everything, and he took it, and he held it in both his hands like it would come apart if he breathed the wrong way.

He smiled.

It wasn't the almost-smile from the morning. It was the whole of it, the missing teeth and all, his whole face coming open.

Kàkà sat down next to him on the dirt. She had about a hundred things she could have said and she said none of them, which was not like her, which she knew was not like her, and she let it be not like her and kept her mouth shut and just sat. Across the cellar Fire was looking at the red too. She didn't ask for it. She looked at it the way you look at a thing you have already decided not to want.

Then the hatch came up and Safiya came down through it, heavy and slow, and she stopped with her feet still on the ladder, because she had it already, off the air---the river, the mud, the dead-hole stink, all of it on Kàkà.

She looked at Kàkà. "What did you do."

It wasn't a question and Kàkà didn't answer it like one.

"I went up," she said. "To the market. For Snail." She left the rest. The rest was in the tear and the mud and the red in Snail's two hands, and Safiya could read all of it; Safiya could read a child the way other people read the weather coming.

Safiya's hand came up.

Kàkà didn't move. You don't move from a hand coming up---moving only makes it worse, you take it where it lands and you don't give it the running. She had been hit plenty. She knew the wait of it, the shape.

The hand stopped. It hung there a moment in the candlelight, big and hard and shaking just a little, and then it came down without ever once landing, and Safiya let her breath go out of her, the whole of it, slow, until it seemed there was nothing left inside her to come out.

"You were seen," she said, and it wasn't really to Kàkà. "Today. And tonight you go on the water." She dragged the hand that had not hit anyone down over her own face. "Seen the same day."

"Nobody came after me," Kàkà said. "I made sure of it. I went back through the water. I checked."

"You checked." There was no heat left in it now. Only the tiredness, which was the worse thing to hear.

And here was the something Kàkà saw: Safiya, standing there saying her tired words, not knowing she did it at all, put her hand down onto Snail's head and then onto Kàkà's, light, hardly any weight to it, one and then the other, and her lips were moving while she did it. Counting. Kàkà watched her count the two of them with her hand, and her mouth did not stop at two but went on---a three with no child under it, a four---the numbers going on past the place where the children were, and then stopping. And Safiya took her hand back and did not know she had put it out.

Safiya straightened. "Tonight," she said. "You and the small one. After dark."

Kàkà sat up. "The both of us?"

"You and Snail."

"And Fire?"

Safiya did not look at Fire when she answered. "Fire is not ready."

Over against the wall Fire's two hands went down to her own laces, to the double knots in the shoes she never once took off, the shoes for the running she kept on getting caught at, and she gripped them and she looked at the floor and she did not say one word.

Fire always had a word. Not this time.

Safiya told them how it would be. A boat would come, after full dark. A man rowing it. They would lie down flat in the bottom of it under a cloth, and they would not move, and they would not make one sound, not the whole way.

"What's his name?" Kàkà said.

Safiya hesitated.

"They call him the Ferryman. Some call him the Ghost."

"Is he a ghost true-true?"

"He is the man who takes the living out. That is all of him you need."

"But his name. His real one."

Safiya looked at her a moment. "I don't know. But we would call him the Ferryman. Alright, Kàkà?"

"Ferryman." Kàkà said it once, to feel the shape it made in her mouth. It was a good shape, a heavy one. "Is he kind?"

Safiya was quiet for a breath. "He doesn't have to be kind," she said. "He has to get you there with nobody seeing. That is a better thing than kind."

Kàkà thought about that and did not understand it.

After dark, Safiya took them up. She had scrubbed Kàkà down with cold water and a rag so the mud was gone, even if the tear in the dress stayed, and Kàkà held Snail's hand the whole way, and Snail held the red cloth, and he would not put it down---not for the ladder, not for the water, not for anything in the world.

The boat sat at the dock, low and dark, and there was no man in it yet. But beside it, tied off under a tarpaulin at the far corner of the dock, an old skiff sat low in the water. Safiya led them to it and laid them down in the bottom and made them lie flat and drew the tarpaulin back over the top of them, and it was heavy and it smelled of fish and old oil and the dark under it was the whole dark, no candle in it anywhere.

"Don't move," Safiya said through the tarp. "Don't talk. Don't breathe loud enough that I can hear it. Can you do that for me."

"Yes," Kàkà said. And then, smaller---because the tarp and the dark made the hard thing easier to ask--- "Are we going to see you again?"

Safiya did not answer straight off. The water moved against the side of the skiff.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know that, child."

Then her weight went up off the skiff, and her feet went away down the dock, slow, the boards giving under her one and then the next, and then they did not give anymore, and there was nothing.

Kàkà lay in the dark with Snail's hand in her hand and the fish-smell close, and she listened.

A board on the dock took a weight it had not been taking before.

Somebody was coming.

She did not know what kind of man. She knew his name was Ferryman. She knew they called him the Ghost. She breathed through her mouth, soft and slow, the way you breathe when your own breath is the something that can give you up, and she held on to the boy's hand, and she did not move.