Locust Girl: A Lovesong Read online

  The orange box was light on Beenabe’s palm but singing weighty words: ‘No one should look. No one should walk beyond the horizon.’ She knew that the note was heaviest in the word No. What ear could mistake such a warning, but she had grown too curious for her own sake. Her eyes ached at night, then her chest. Because after that furtive climb to the forbidden peak, under her lids she kept seeing those new colours from afar: black and white. They seeped into her heart and she dreamt of walking to the edge of her village. But she always came back in the morning, for where else could she go?

  She was hot now, the sun baking what was not covered by her wrap the colour of dung. All the women wore the same colour and secretly hated it. Beenabe was sixteen, the eldest of three girls, and she hated it most. Dung! The other women whispered about how long ago before she was born, there were other shades so bright, they hurt the eyes in a wonderful way. Blue birds against the yellow sun. Red buds on green cactus. Before the ochre rain.

  Amid the miles of burning brown Beenabe adjusted her wrap so it covered her head, which felt like it would burst under the heat. How would it be to have blue hair and red cheeks and green lips? She only knew red when she pricked herself and the sky could never be blue again after the ochre rain. And she did not know green of course, nor had she known hair.

  Her sisters said she was vain. Often they caught her admiring her reflection in the monthly barrel of water. The truth was she was scolding herself for being so drab. So she took to the habit of holding the orange box close to her face to brighten it and her family forgave her vanity. Of course she’s listening to The Songs all the time.

  She had slipped the box into her pocket with two fistfuls of barley before she left. To go walking, she told her sisters who both frowned and said, ‘But you have to get back before the sun sets, to cook dinner.’

  ‘It’s your turn to cook dinner, I cook it every day,’ Beenabe protested.

  ‘But the orange box sings that the eldest girl should cook dinner.’

  Beenabe stroked the box in her pocket and smirked. ‘You heard it wrong. What do you know about The Songs? I listen to them every day.’

  ‘We’ll tell on you to father and mother,’ the younger girls chorused.

  ‘And where are they?’

  ‘Queuing for rations, where else.’

  Beenabe refused to queue and her parents always wrung their hands, exasperated with her arrogance. But Beenabe simply walked away from all censure. Surely there’s something more to life than queuing for the benevolence of the Five Kingdoms. She hated waiting. She wanted to take charge of her own hunger. So she walked when her parents were away. They tolerated her truancy but only because of her nose for food. She had a way of scavenging for odd bits and pieces for the stomach, something to make the barley taste more than barley, something strange and sometimes quite special. Beenabe was bravely enterprising. She walked, she gathered, and returned with gifts. Maybe today she could walk further. Stray a bit. Find new colours, new tastes, who knows.

  If the feet itch for distance

  Does the head know?

  If the eyes spy colour

  Do the legs go — weak?

  The black grew blacker, the white whiter. Beenabe told me that before she knew their names, these colours had already seeped into her eyes, her heart, her head. All hurt but her heart hurt more, as if a hand were squeezing it at each step. What desert is this? Is this desert? She stopped chewing the barley grain then she stopped her feet. Or her feet stopped her, her feet were afraid. But Beenabe had always been too curious for her own sake. Four hundred paces more and she would know. She had learned how to measure distance with her paces.

  It was a colour darker than the night, even the darkest night. Then a splash here and there of something light. It was actually white. A whiteness not flat like the black but shaping themselves in her eyes as she drew closer. The hand tightened around her heart and her head throbbed. The sun leapt around what looked like white sticks and balls, hundreds of them, some piled together like kindling, but mostly laid out in smaller numbers as if someone had sorted them into sets. And in the foreground, matching the length of the horizon, was a line of them, the balls with holes and the sticks linked in rhythmic patterns.

  Fifty paces, twenty paces, and still Beenabe refused to believe what she saw. Pictures from her wanderings came and went in her head: the remains of a jaw of some creature, the burnished bones of a rodent, once perhaps a boy who had wandered too far from home, and it made her weep. Now she felt faint, her knees giving way, her mouth opening and closing, but she had lost her voice. This can’t be, this can’t be.

  Black earth and white bones! As far as the eyes can see, as far as a lifetime of paces. Paces beyond her counting.

  How the sun leapt on the skulls staring at the girl who had forgotten how to shut her mouth.

  She had fallen on something sharp, but she did not even notice that her hands and knees were bleeding. She was held by the gaze of a skull leaning against half a rib, mouth opened just so. Beenabe thought it was asking her a question. She stared back for a long time.

  ‘No one should look

  No one should walk beyond the horizon’

  Beenabe jumped up at hearing the song from her pocket. She remembered the orange box and suddenly felt the urge to run. The notes were scolding her. She tried to muffle the box with her fist, but of course it must run its ten-minute course. She held it in a panic, wondering if anyone else was hearing this, then remembered she was the only one here, alive that is. The box kept up its song. She held it out to the skull as if to explain and say ‘sorry.’ Only then did she notice her bleeding hands.

  My blood is brighter than the orange box, she thought as the skull looked on. She noticed too her bleeding knees and the drops of red on the black earth where she finally discovered the culprit. A half-buried barbed wire running for miles, alongside the line of skulls and bones. She understood. They were about to cross, to walk to the horizon and beyond.

  By the time Beenabe had accepted the reality of her discovery, she was calmer. She squatted a few paces from where she bled, face turned away from the plains of black and white. The sight squeezed her heart too much, she couldn’t breathe. She turned towards where she had walked from. Home.

  Since she left two days ago, the horizon had bothered her immensely, far more than her thirst. That edge, that long line, which she wanted to cross, was always beyond home, wasn’t it? The sun always sank into that line, but now it seemed to be sinking into where she came from. Could home be the horizon then? How come? Or did she really understand where the horizon was? Was it beyond her or behind her?

  Maybe the Minister of Mouths was lying. Maybe he himself had never walked away from home. How could he? He was trapped in the orange box.

  Maybe the Honourable Head had thought out this trick, knowing there could be strays like her.

  Maybe she was too thirsty, her eyes had begun to lie to her. Beyond the horizon, there were only skulls and bones?

  Or maybe she was lost. She had stopped counting her paces yesterday. Her paces were too many and beyond the numbers that she could count in her head and no one could help her. She had never felt so alone in all of her sixteen years. So alone among the skulls and bones of five hundred families, but she did not know this yet. Not until I told her of my dream.

  Dream me hundreds of skulls and bones

  Beyond your horizon

  Eyes staring just so, mouths opened just so

  Beyond your ken

  It was the whirring that woke her. It was midnight, but how could she know this? This was a place with no stars or moon. She had never seen night this desolate and inhospitable.

  She groped for the orange box in her pocket. It was not throbbing. The whirring was from somewhere else. Or someone else? She grew both hopeful and afraid and did not like the feeling, so she clamped her ears with her hands and curled into an even tighter ball. It was not only too dark but also too cold. It was the darkest night that s
he’d ever seen. As if one could even see in this dark. She wondered about the empty sky. What place is this? What place has no stars or moon? Will she ever get home again to a lit sky, to a hut of clay or hot barley soup, to her sisters’ warmth on their shared bed, even to her parents’ scolding? Better than this, better than this.

  The whirring grew louder, boring into her ear, urging her to her feet. It spurred her to action and forced the course of her limbs. She stood up, urged to face again the plains of black and white where the whirring was coming from, urged to cross beyond the spot where she bled, to wade through the skulls and bones. Only balls and sticks, she told herself so she could push on with the next step, her bare feet feeling hardness, sharpness, brittleness, the rolling or crunching, the crashing or crackle of kindling. Yes, think kindling, only kindling, like what she had scavenged from ruins whenever she strayed from home.

  The whirring was like a singing now. It had highs and lows, and meandered through a scale. After a while it grew melodic, small notes in a wordless ditty. It afflicted not only her legs but also her arms as she tumbled and sank into piles of kindling and dug herself out again, so she could keep going. Her arms ached as the song pulled at them when she crashed into the deepest pile of all. Her arms urged her to dig up a clearing where the song was loudest. Her fingers were afflicted too, even her nails. They throbbed with a strange, delicious ache as the notes seeped into them while she dug on. In the morning maybe she would see song under her nails, like brown dirt when she scavenged for food underground.

  Then she hit something softer, like sand but not dry like the desert she knew. The song stopped in her ears but its rhythm remained in her hands, making them tremble. She grabbed at a piece of kindling, yes, it’s just kindling, she convinced herself, and began digging more furiously. She had to keep digging till the morning.

  The sky was growing light when the whirring began again but faintly and in short bursts. Then she heard the short bursts echoed by another sound. Like someone digging from below but upwards. She stopped digging. The other digging stopped too. She laid her ear close to the earth and felt the strangest sensation. As if another ear had just been placed beneath hers. As if two ears were now listening to each other. She listened to the other’s listening. Then the digging underneath began again. What is it? Beenabe felt a mixture of hope and fear. Something or someone else is here, alive like her. But soon the fear ate up the hope. She stopped digging altogether and stood up. She could see how deeply she had dug herself in. She felt the hole closing in on her. She could hear her heart pounding louder than the digging below.

  Up there it was growing light and down here was all shadow. She stretched towards the circle of sky. Up there was safe. Maybe.

  Underneath her feet Beenabe felt a frantic knocking and thrusting, as if this something down there knew she was about to abandon it. She tried to shut her ears. She began to clamber out of the hole, scolding herself for her foolish curiosity. Which was what got you into this hole, stupid girl, which was what led you astray. She fell back several times before she finally got out, her soles still tingling with the desperate rhythm underground.

  Her eyes scanned the growing light. Where she came from was now almost visible or so she thought: home. She will go home. There are no gifts for scavengers beyond the edge. She knew that now. She leapt across the hole, eyes only on home, the new horizon.

  That was how I first saw her. A flash of feet in midair.

  Help. My first attempted word. I felt my lips crack apart, felt my breath on the H, and tried again. ‘H-he— ’ I heard the running footsteps stop, I sensed their uncertainty. I tried again. ‘Hel— ’ The footsteps rushed away, I heard crackling and crashing, as if someone had fallen over a pile of something. Then rolling and cries of alarm and more crashing, and something hurtling towards me and balls and sticks pouring down with the screaming and I wanted to scream with it but my throat was just finding itself and all I could say was a feeble, ‘Help … plea—’

  I could not finish. The rain of things, whatever they were, and this screaming had knocked the wind out of me.

  Finally the raining stopped but the scream kept on. It was a girl, a screaming girl buried in balls and sticks with me. Screaming and eyes almost popping in terror at me. At me? She was pointing at my forehead which had begun to whirr, then she was crying, ‘Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.’

  I had to make sure I was not dreaming any more. Slowly I remembered how to peel my arms off me, I heard me crackle with the movement. An agonising recall of muscles and bones as I freed me from my own tight embrace to reach out and touch her cheek.

  My inquiring touch. That set her off again. She set me off again. She screamed, my forehead whirred. By the time we stopped, the sky was lighter.

  We were buried waist-deep in a deeper hole and facing each other, and long after we were silent, we were still too afraid to blink.

  To stare is bad manners. Where did I hear that before? I tried to remember, so I said it, though it took me a long time to form the words.

  ‘T-to — ssss-stare — is b-bad — bad.’

  The girl was relieved to hear something close to her own tongue. Later she would tell me that all she heard at first was mumbling or growling, that she thought I was a wild animal with a light-dark face.

  And a locust on the forehead.

  ‘What are you?’ she asked, shuddering.

  Silence.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Silence. Because I could not remember.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘N-n—namm— ’ I faltered on the word.

  ‘Yes, name.’

  I did not know what she meant.

  ‘Name. Beenabe. That’s my name,’ she said pounding her chest, then, ‘And you?’

  ‘B-bee—na—be.’

  ‘No, no. I’m Beenabe.’

  ‘B-bee—Beena—be.’

  ‘Yes, me Beenabe.’

  ‘M-me—Bee—na—Bee-na-be.’ I kept repeating and she kept protesting. She had grown braver with this altercation, which went on for the whole day with bouts of silence when she closed her eyes to shut out my face.

  Finally she said, ‘You don’t know, do you — you don’t have a name,’ and she thought some more. ‘How can anyone not have a name?’

  I shook my head, trying to dislodge the fog. It was hard to explain about the fog of waking up after ten years and I did not even know yet that it was ten years.

  ‘I will call you Beena then. Beena after me. Because I found you.’

  The sun was setting when we had our first proper conversation. I thought my saviour Beenabe was giving me lessons in speech.

  ‘F-found you,’ I aped the movement of her lips.

  ‘No, I found you,’ she protested, impatient now. ‘I found Beena.’

  ‘F-found,’ I tried again and tapped her cheek. ‘Found Beena.’

  This time, she did not scream. ‘Yes,’ she said and almost smiled, ‘I found Beena.’

  I stretched my lips like her.

  Much later I would tell her, that’s how to scare fear away when faced with a stranger. With talk. When we find words to exchange, our hearts will not pound too much.

  In the hole I was too engrossed with finding my voice, I barely realised I could not move from waist down. Or maybe because I had forgotten how to move and what I could recall were the muscles of my face. As for Beenabe, she was only too relieved to find me human and alive, so she forgot about our being buried but only for a while.

  ‘No one should look

  No one should walk beyond the horizon’

  I heard it, didn’t I? Beenabe was singing, but her lips weren’t moving? No they were saying something else — ‘The orange box, the orange box!’ — then she was digging furiously. ‘Dig, Beena, find it — it’s a square box bright as fire and it sings, it fits in the palm of the hand, can you see it, go on, dig, we have to dig it out, we have to dig us out, we have to get out of here, we have to get out!’ she kept on, her
voice breaking into a sob. She had broken the law, she had looked beyond the horizon and found a graveyard and she might be buried in it forever as punishment.

  I was perplexed at this burst of fear but soon I stopped listening to her. I was looking around, needing to touch, to know things. But again my arms had wrapped around myself and it was agony to unwrap them, to hold for the first time the sticks and balls while the song kept up its warning against the horizon. I could not heed Beenabe’s urging. I could not understand why my eyes felt watery and burning, why I hurt from chest to throat. I was looking at each stick closely, examining each ball, peering through its two holes and the third gaping one, wondering if the song was coming from in there. Then for the first time, I saw it, I knew it.

  ‘H-head — ’

  ‘Shut up, Beena!’

  ‘Head, head, head,’ I tested the word over and over again, and Beenabe screamed in protest. ‘Head, head, head’ rolled on my tongue that itched to ask questions. Questions I didn’t even know and wouldn’t know until later. All I knew was the head was not singing and pressed against me, its mouth was hard and cold, and Beenabe was struggling to prise it from my grasp but I couldn’t give it up. It was listening to my heart, I was listening to its lack of song. How could she take this shared listening away from us? Thus we struggled and the locust on my brow began to sing.

  ‘The edge is a line, oh how lovely

  It will stretch your eye

  The edge is a line, oh how sharp

  It will cut your feet’

  So it came to pass that she escaped from the hole but without the orange box. I couldn’t understand why anyone would weep over a box. She did not even look at me still trapped down there. My saviour had forgotten me, and she’d probably leave me. I could see a hint of her toes above, I could hear her anguish. This did not bother me as much as the object of her despair. An orange box? Something was terribly wrong and I was trying to remember why. I shut my eyes, imagining the box in my head but its colour was wrong, wrong.