THE ESCAPE
We only stop when someone needs the toilet. I feel sick from the sadness and the swaying of the cart, so I have to concentrate very hard on shrinking the sickness inside me, as I have done to the tears. Nobody is talking. I try to catch the eye of Tekla, the girl sitting in front of me, but she has her arms crossed and her face is set hard in a frown. Kidlat falls asleep on my lap and I focus on being very still for him, which is easy after all my practice waiting for butterflies.
Mr Zamora folds his insect legs up in front of him, his arms a protective cage around the glass case, and puts his white straw hat over his face. Soon he is snoring loudly and there is nothing to do but watch the passing trees.
The track we are following is well worn, but I don’t know who by. I have never talked to anyone who has left our town or come from this side of the island. The forest is a thick mat of bamboo and tree ferns. Whenever Mr Zamora snores especially loudly, it sends green birds fleeing the trees. Their calls sound like cats fighting.
The path splits and the one we take gets narrower and narrower, and soon leaves are brushing our heads. Everywhere I look, gumamela flowers dot the forest, and I remember Nanay’s story about the house in the valley, the boy she was taken from. My ama. Maybe he will be sent to her now that all the Touched are coming to Culion. Maybe he and Nanay will find each other again. This is the happiest thought I’ve had all day.
We pass an untended grove of mangoes and the too-sweet smell makes my mouth water. The grove has obviously been abandoned a long time. The trees have grown tangled together, and the boughs hang heavy with fruit. Datu leans out as we pass and snatches one. I laugh with the others as the skin splits in his hand, but when he turns it over the pulp is black and teeming with flies and we all stop laughing as he throws it from the cart. He sits with his dirty hand outstretched, watching it carefully as if it might try to leap on to his face.
We are almost out of the mango grove when Tekla points and screams.
‘Snake! Snake!’
I spin around, heart thumping. It is only a jade vine strangling a branch, but the horses startle at her cry and send the cart swerving. I cling on as the driver pulls them to a halt and hear a crash at the front of the cart.
The glass case has smashed to shards in the dust. And beside it the two brown boxes have tipped over, their air-holed lids askew. Mr Zamora snatches at the nearest one, but only knocks the lid clean off.
And suddenly, the air is full of wings.
A patch of butterflies wafts upwards, purple and yellow and green and gleaming, shimmering like a thrown scarf. My mouth hangs open, dust tickling my throat, more dust coating my tongue as Mr Zamora kicks the road in temper.
‘Stop them!’ he bellows, his thin throat ballooning like a bullfrog. But no one is paying attention to him. All we can see are the butterflies, and all I can think of is Nanay. There are maybe two dozen of them, twisting towards the mango grove as if they are one body, or a flame, or ash from a flame. And like ash, they scatter as a long, thin hand snatches at them.
‘No!’ I shout as one, large-bodied and purple-winged, is knocked from its current of air, its colours suddenly snuffed out in the dark cage of Mr Zamora’s hand. The rest snap away like a tail. I try to follow their trail but it is like the stars all over again. The shadows shift and change their moorings, impossible to catch.
It is as if someone has let a clock tick again. We all slump as the butterflies disappear, and Mr Zamora brings his hand up to his eye and squints inside. He sighs heavily and clenches it into a fist. I hear a faint, brittle sound, like the shell of a nut cracking. He takes a deep breath before he speaks, his voice low and dangerous.
‘I damaged the wing,’ he says to no one in particular, brushing the fragmented body on to the ground. ‘No use to anyone.’
He rounds suddenly on us. ‘Who was it who screamed?’ No one looks at the girl who cried ‘snake’. I focus on a point just beyond his left ear.
‘Whoever it was, you lost me thirty of my finest specimens. If any of you make so much as a squeak from now on, I will make you walk the rest of the way.’
He stares us all out for a few more moments, then bends, pulling a clean kerchief from his pocket. He uses it to carefully sift through the broken glass, and picks up three sticks, the chrysalises dangling. He rests them across his long forearms, and climbs back up beside the driver. We move on.
After a couple of hours of silence, the trees start pressing close to the cart. The driver has to stop a few times to hack at the foliage with a machete.
‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ says Mr Zamora. ‘I was assured the path had been prepared.’
The driver shrugs. ‘I have never come this way before. They’re sending a workforce next week to broaden it.’
The sun is sinking and the forest seems even more impenetrable than before. The rainy season is coming, and the trees seem to have spread themselves out very wide in readiness to catch the water.
A feeling rises, like a hook behind my navel. Mr Zamora and the driver aren’t looking. If I could somehow tell the others to be silent, then maybe I could slip away. Maybe some of them would come with me.
But then the hook loosens and all the sensible thoughts come rushing in. It would not take them long to catch me up. And even if I got back to Nanay, she would only get in trouble and I would be sent back. Nothing would change.
The driver is climbing back up and clicking his tongue, and we are pushing on through the forest.
We do not stop again until the trees thin and suddenly end. Ahead the sea is flat as a puddle, the same purple-bruised grey as the dusk sky. We have travelled a whole day away from Culion Town. Nanay will be making dinner, or else sitting on our front step with a cup of cooling tea. Perhaps Bondoc and Capuno are with her. I see her as clearly as if I were there too. I close my eyes for a moment. I must keep this picture safe.
The beach here is made of uneven stone slabs that turn to drums beneath the horses’ hooves. A harbour, hastily built. It curves like a necklace laid out at the edge of the forest, jewel-bright lamps lit at unsteady intervals. Unfinished though it is, it feels far too grand to be sitting here in the middle of nowhere. Mr Zamora must have ordered the Sano port to be one of the first things built. The stars are sifted through thin clouds, and the moon is just gathering strength. And sitting in the water is a boat, bigger than the one that brought the Touched.
‘A ship!’ says one of the boys excitedly, but it is not at all how I thought a ship would be. There are no sails, no rope ladders or masts. Just a metal column belching smoke and a grey, smooth hull, thin and pointed. It is as miserable as the reason it is here, a storm cloud offering no hope of the relief of rain.
There are men here, with closed grey faces. They shoulder Mr Zamora’s luggage and he buzzes around them, saying, ‘Be careful, be careful!’ as they carry the boxes of butterflies into the darkness of the ship.
We wait on the cart in huddled silence until we are unloaded much like the luggage, without speaking or smiles. Mr Zamora unfurls a piece of paper and reads out one name at a time, to check we are all here. The little boy Kidlat puts his hand up at his name and I have to answer for him.
We cross the narrow plank and Kidlat holds my hand to steady himself as the boat rocks. We are led into a low-ceilinged cabin, where we are seated on benches along the walls. Everything is metal and bolted to the floor. The smell is metallic too, and heady. It sends queasiness spreading through my stomach.
Mr Zamora does not follow us. He walks past the cabin along the narrow deck to the front of the boat. He keeps his face pointed forward, even when the vessel begins to move, so smoothly it takes me a moment to realize we are going, actually going.
Everyone floods to press their hands against the large back window, to watch the hilly, jagged outline of Culion drop back to lie low on the horizon. Even the boys, who care so much about seeming tough, cry when we lose the necklace lights of the harbour to the dark distance of night.
‘Settle down, children,’ says one of the men, not unkindly. ‘It’s a couple of hours to Coron, I’d get some sleep.’
Eventually the others drift away from the window and try to make themselves comfortable on the hard floor. I stay, face turned back, as if Mr Zamora and I are two opposite points on a clock face, or compass, both pushing towards and away from something.