Three Read online

  I waited for Holly to reply, but she did not. The phone’s screen had faded to black. Its battery was all-the-way dead.

  ‘Who Sunday talk?’ asked Three.

  ‘My girlfriend.’

  It was the first time ever that I had spoken it aloud: girlfriend.

  Even telling a monkey felt good.

  15

  It

  Because it was so tall, the ZantOil tower had looked nearer than it truly was. After walking the five or six city blocks that I had told Holly, we were still only about halfway there. But my foot was feeling better – the soreness was almost gone and I was barely limping. The ankle must have been twisted, not sprained. It was a relief. But I was dead of thirst and I ached all over from exhaustion.

  Piggybacking Three did not help. How much did it weigh? I lost count of the number of times I had to stop and put it down, to take a rest. Each time I lifted it up again was harder than the time before.

  Why bother, I asked myself, now that it does not have the bomb?

  It was a question that I could not answer.

  But I was grateful for one thing: now that I had left the backpack and its hidden transmitter behind, I no longer had to worry about Mustafa and AK-47 Man.

  I saw no people at all. Because of the curfew, the streets were totally quiet and totally empty. I knew about curfews. Baba had imposed them when rebels came across the border, or when the oil workers caused riots. They were necessary to keep the general population safe. But if you broke curfew – if you went outside between six in the evening and six in the morning – you could be arrested. You could even be shot.

  I hoped Holly would be careful.

  I had to be careful also – more careful than Holly. They would not shoot a white person, I thought. But it was different for me. All the soldiers were loyal to Mbuti now. They would have orders to search for the son of the dead president.

  And mightbe to shoot him on sight.

  Luck was with me – I did not see any soldiers. And no soldiers saw me. They must have been sleeping, or staying indoors like everyone else. The curfew was good luck. It made it easy for me, the person they were looking for, to sneak through the city unseen. But I kept to the backstreets, just in case.

  It took nearly an hour to reach the bus shelter. At first I did not see Holly. I was frightened. Not Holly, too! Then I looked behind the bus shelter and saw a small figure, dressed all in dark colours, huddled in the shadows against its back wall.

  ‘Holly?’ I whispered, ready to run if it was not her.

  ‘Sunny!’

  She rushed to hug me, but she stopped when she nearly bumped faces with Three.

  ‘Oh my God! What is that?’

  ‘A baboon,’ I said, secretly daring Three to correct me. ‘Don’t worry – it is tame.’

  Holly leaned closer. It was dark behind the bus shelter and I could only see the pale oval of her face inside the raised hood of her sweatshirt. If Three’s head had not been right next to mine, I might have had the courage to kiss her.

  ‘What’s with all the bandages?’ she asked.

  ‘Some wild baboons attacked it.’

  ‘Poor little guy!’

  I felt a bit jealous. What about poor me?

  ‘Did you bring the stuff I asked for?’

  ‘Yes, it’s all here.’ Holly dragged a large backpack out of the shadows where she had been sitting.

  ‘Is there water?’ I asked. ‘I am dead of thirst.’

  Holly laughed as she handed me a bottle of water. ‘You mean, dying of thirst – you aren’t dead yet, thank God!’

  Often Holly had helped me with my spoken English. It was how first we became friends. One day she came into our Social Studies class to give a talk about her country, and later I looked for her to ask the meaning of one American word she had said.

  ‘Dying of thirst,’ I said correctly. Then I raised the bottle and drank. Truly water had never tasted so good!

  Only when it was all gone did I remember Three.

  ‘Is there more water?’

  ‘That’s all I brought,’ Holly said. ‘Sorry, babe. But there will be lots more at Mom’s work.’

  Babe. I had only heard it in American movies, but I liked it better than baby – traditionally in my own country, boys come of age when they turn thirteen.

  ‘When will it be open?’ I asked.

  ‘When will what be open, babe?’

  ‘Where your mother works.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Holly said. ‘Everything is a bit crazy at the moment. But we are going there right now.’ She held up a set of keys and jangled them in the half-darkness. ‘Follow me – it’s just around the corner.’

  Mrs Parr worked for We Care, an international aid agency that gave food, blankets and used clothes from America to the poor people and the sick people of Zantuga. The warehouse was not ‘just around the corner’ like Holly had said – it took us mightbe twenty minutes to get there. I had to stop three times to put Three down and take a rest. When finally we arrived, Holly used the keys to open two large padlocks and raised a rattly metal shutter that guarded the door from thieves. There was another padlock on the door. Holly unlocked this padlock also and pushed open the door.

  ‘Do not turn on the light,’ she whispered when we went inside.

  She rolled the shutter down behind us and closed the door. Now it was very dark. There was just a tiny red light that blinked on and off. Holly lit up her phone to show a little keypad attached to the wall.

  ‘Burglar alarm,’ she whispered, tapping in some numbers that made the blinking light go green. ‘Now we’re safe.’

  Safe!

  For no reason that I could think of, my eyes became wet with tears.

  ‘Is there somewhere I can put Three?’

  ‘Three?’ asked Holly.

  ‘The monkey.’

  ‘We’ll go into the warehouse,’ she whispered. ‘It’s too dangerous here.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ I whispered. She had said we were safe.

  ‘There’s a window behind you. Someone could see in if I switch on the light.’

  I had not noticed the window. My eyes could just make out the faint glow of streetlights coming between the closed slats of a venetian blind. ‘Where is the warehouse?’

  ‘Follow me,’ said Holly.

  Using her phone to see, she led me around a cluttered desk and past some shadowy filing cabinets. She unlocked a door marked ‘Staff Only’ and I shuffled through with Three feeling very heavy on my back. After the door was closed, Holly clicked a switch and two lines of fluorescent lights shone down from high above. We were in a cavernous iron shed filled with many rows of shelves, each stacked high with labelled cardboard cartons: ‘Porridge’, ‘Baby Formula’, ‘Rice Pudding’, ‘Milo’ and many other things. But not all of it was food. There were toilet rolls, soap, toothpaste and bales of blankets tied together with twine. In the open space past the shelves, I saw a sewing machine on a table, next to some big canvas bins marked ‘Women’s Clothing’, ‘Men’s Clothing’, ‘Children’s Clothing’, ‘Baby Clothes’.

  Holly dumped her backpack on the concrete floor. Pushing back the hood of her dark blue sweatshirt, she shook loose her long straight hair. Then she turned towards me, smiling. ‘It’s not exactly five-star, Sunny, but at least there is – Oh my God!’

  She was staring, big-eyed, at my clothes. In the bright light of the warehouse, the bloodstains looked very bad.

  ‘It is not what it looks like,’ I said quickly. ‘The blood is not mi–’

  ‘Sunday!’ Three gasped in my ear. ‘Got to spew!’

  Aaaaee! I turned to Holly. ‘Is there a bathroom?’

  Her eyes had grown even larger than when she saw all the blood. ‘Did it . . . talk?’

  ‘Yes. Is there a bathroom?’

  She nodded. Her mouth was open wide like her eyes, but no words came out.

  ‘Well, where is it?’ I said. ‘Quick! It is going to sick up!’

  Holly pointed a
t a door over by the far wall.

  ‘Hurry!’ said Three.

  We only just made it in time. I left Three in there and shut the door for privacy.

  ‘What just happened?’ Holly said when I rejoined her out in the warehouse.

  ‘Three is not well.’

  ‘But did he . . .? I thought I heard . . .?’

  I shrugged. ‘Have you never met a talking monkey before?’

  ‘There is no such thing!’

  ‘You heard it.’

  ‘I only heard a couple of words.’ Holly frowned. ‘Or thought I did.’

  ‘It does seem a bit crazy at first,’ I admitted. ‘But you get used to it.’

  ‘Seriously? Can you get used to a talking monkey?’

  ‘I did.’

  Holly still looked stunned. ‘Where did you get him?’ she asked.

  I spent the next few minutes telling her everything that had happened to me since the thump I had heard during Second Lesson. (Nearly everything – I kept a couple of things secret.) Holly listened in silence, her lovely blue eyes fixed on mine. When I finished speaking, she hugged me, not even worried about getting blood on her clothes.

  ‘It is so, so awful about your parents. Poor baby!’

  For a long time I did nothing, just let her hold me. Baby. Truly I felt very close to crying like one.

  We heard the toilet flush and both turned our heads towards the bathroom door.

  ‘Why did you save him?’ Holly whispered. She kept calling Three he and him, as if it was human, not an animal.

  ‘I felt sorry for it.’

  ‘But he tried to kill you.’

  ‘General Mbuti and that whiteman, Mustafa, tried to kill me. Three did not know there was a bomb in its backpack.’

  ‘What did he say when you told him?’

  ‘I have not told it.’

  ‘You mean, Three still doesn’t know that he was a suicide bomber?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Why keep that from him?’

  One of the things I had not told Holly was how I had planned to use the brid to avenge my parents’ deaths. She might not understand.

  ‘So Three will not feel guilty,’ I lied.

  ‘You are such a sweet guy!’ Holly hugged me again, this time pressing the side of her head against my cheek. Her hair smelt like soap and flowers, and I was almost able to forget about all the bad things that had happened the previous day.

  More noises came from the bathroom – it sounded like water splashing.

  ‘What is he doing in there?’ Holly whispered.

  ‘Mightbe washing his hands,’ I whispered back.

  Holly began to giggle, then I giggled too. She still had her arms around me and our faces were almost touching. We smiled at each other.

  ‘You still owe me a birthday kiss,’ Holly’s lips said.

  We had only ever kissed that one time. I still felt a bit strange about it. Zantuga was not like America – it was not allowed even to hold the hand of a girl who was not your cousin or your sister.

  But a birthday kiss mightbe was allowed.

  All this time Holly’s arms had been around me. Now I put my own arms around her.

  And for the next thirty seconds or one minute, I truly did forget about yesterday.

  16

  Boys Cannot Sew

  Holly spread a new, creased blanket on the warehouse floor for Three to lie on. Then she asked me to remove its bandages. She went through a door just along from the bathroom, switching on a light in there. I saw a counter with taps and a small refrigerator, and guessed it was a kitchen. Holly came back carrying a first-aid kit and a bowl half-filled with water. She found a tiny bottle of antiseptic liquid and tipped some in the water. Wetting a ball of cotton wool, she then began cleaning Three’s wounds. She talked to it in a kind, gentle voice as she worked, asking many questions.

  ‘Why did those nasty baboons do this to you?’

  ‘Want kill Three.’

  ‘I can see that. But why?’

  ‘Think Three challenge Alpha.’

  ‘Alpha?’

  ‘Top male. All females and babies belong.’

  ‘Charming! I am glad I am not a baboon.’

  ‘Three glad, too.’

  ‘Well . . . thank you, I guess.’

  ‘Three doan mean Holly. Three glad Three not baboon.’

  ‘You aren’t a baboon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘Brid.’

  ‘So what is a brid?’

  ‘Papio cynocephalus sapiens.’

  ‘Woo! That’s quite a mouthful.’

  ‘Hard for brid say it.’

  ‘Hard for anyone to say. It sounds like Latin.’

  ‘What Latin?’

  ‘It’s a weird old language scientists use to classify things. My dad’s a scientist, he’d probably know. I think that last bit, sapiens, means you’re smart like humans. Sunday and I are homo sapiens.’

  ‘Bit same.’

  ‘Yes. Brids and humans must be related somehow. Maybe way back. Where did you come from, Three?’

  ‘Cage.’

  ‘Were you born in captivity?’

  ‘What mean that word?’

  ‘Were you born in a cage?’

  ‘Doan remember.’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘No parents.’

  ‘You don’t remember them? That’s pretty sad, baby. So who taught you to talk?’

  ‘Mustafa teach. Only Three, One and Four talk proper. Others make only baboon noise, not talk proper.’

  ‘How many of you are there?’

  ‘Once were six. But Mustafa take away Two and Five.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Doan know. Mustafa not say.’

  ‘So who is this Mustafa guy?’

  ‘Whiteman like Holly.’

  ‘Not too much like me, I hope.’ Holly shivered. ‘Can you open your other eye?’

  ‘Little bit.’

  ‘That’s good. Now hold still while I wash this dried blood out of your eyelashes.’

  ‘Stings.’

  ‘Sorry, baby. Almost finished. Hey, your eyes are blue like mine.’

  I listened to them chatting while I ate the food that Holly had brought along in her backpack. There was cheese, bread, three muesli bars, even part of a cooked chicken. I had not realised how hungry I was until most of the food was gone.

  Three was too sick to eat. It did not even want to drink. I thought it might have had a drink from the toilet (those noises we heard) but I did not tell Holly my suspicions. She sent me to the kitchen to get water.

  ‘You need to keep your fluid levels up, baby,’ she said, holding the mug I had brought to Three’s lips.

  I did not like it when she called Three baby. But I knew that was silly. Holly had asked me to give her a birthday kiss and she had kissed me back. It was our first proper kiss – the one at school was just lips – and I had not wanted it to stop.

  I felt a bit guilty afterwards. Holly had made a mistake. It was after midnight and no longer her birthday. But I had not told her.

  ‘Did you bring the sewing things?’ I asked now.

  ‘What sewing things?’ she said.

  The battery in Sergeant Aguda’s phone must have died before I asked for them earlier. Died like its owner, I thought with a little shiver.

  ‘In case Three needs stitches.’

  ‘What is stitches?’ asked Three.

  It was easy to forget that it could understand us. ‘Hold still,’ I said.

  There was only one bed sheet strip that I had not yet removed – the big one around the brid’s head. Carefully I began unwinding. Aaaaee! The X-shaped dressing on Three’s ear pulled off with the blood-soaked bandage and the bullet hole gaped open. That looked bad enough. But when I unwound the last bit of the bandage, exposing the big bite wound in Three’s scalp, Holly’s eyes went wide in horror.

  ‘Damn!’ she breathed.

 
‘What means damn?’ asked the brid.

  Holly looked at me with guilt in her eyes. She knew it was disrespectful in my country to swear. To Three she said, ‘It’s just something we say in the States. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Three, like a little child trying out a new word.

  Holly still had eye contact with me. Sorry, she said with her lips.

  I sent back a different message with my lips. It made her lips smile. I hoped Three’s good eye was not watching.

  I wished it was just Holly and me in the locked warehouse.

  She cleaned up the bullet hole and patched it with fresh plasters from the first-aid kit. Then she gently swabbed away most of the blood from around the big wound on Three’s head.

  ‘This will totally need stitches,’ she muttered.

  ‘What is stitches?’ the brid asked for a second time.

  Holly put on a big, bright smile. ‘Haven’t you ever had stitches, Three? They’ll leave a really cool scar!’

  She looked at me. ‘There are needles and thread on that table down the far end – see where the sewing machine is? Some of the volunteer women make alterations on the kids’ clothes.’

  While I went looking for a needle and thread, I heard Holly talking to the brid. ‘It won’t hurt much, baby. Sunday will be gentle.’

  Sunday will be gentle? I found a sewing basket containing the things she had asked for and brought it back to Holly.

  ‘Aren’t you going to do it?’ I whispered.

  ‘Do what?’ she asked.

  ‘Sew Three up.’

  ‘He’s your monkey.’

  ‘Three brid, not monkey,’ it said.

  I took no notice. I was talking to my girlfriend. ‘Boys can’t sew,’ I said.

  She gave me a strange look. ‘And what makes you think I can?’

  ‘Well . . . you are a girl.’

  ‘So?’

  Holly seemed angry. Mightbe she could not sew and was embarrassed to admit it. It would be like a boy in my country who could not play football. Poor Holly.

  ‘All right, I will do it,’ I said.

  ‘Go wash your hands first,’ said Holly. ‘Use lots of soap.’

  I had seen American girlfriends on TV and they were often bossy. Their American boyfriends were not offended. I tried to be like them. ‘Okay,’ I said.

  When I returned from the bathroom, Holly had threaded a length of white cotton through one of the sewing needles. This raised my hopes – maybe she could sew! – but then she handed me the threaded needle and my hopes went back down.