Free Heliopolis by James Scudamore Page A

was now starting to recover her energy, came sprinting out of the house and wrapped herself around her mother’s leg, hotly pursued by me and the ice cube I was intent on putting down her back.
    ‘Leave me alone!’ shouted Rebecca. ‘What’s got into you?’
    Melissa squealed. ‘Ludo has an ice cube!’
    ‘Snap out of it, will you? I’m meeting some very important people today—people who are going to help save a lot of children who are much less lucky than the two of you. Kids who have the kind of lives you can’t imagine.’
    Melissa was struggling not to cry.
    ‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘I know you had a horrible time, but you’re OK now, aren’t you?’
    Melissa nodded, still fighting tears.
    ‘And you have to remember that what happened to you is nothing compared to what some of my kids at the orphanage go through, or the ones that live on the street.’
    ‘I know that, Mamãe.’
    ‘You’re incredibly lucky. Don’t ever forget that.’
    ‘I won’t.’
    Rebecca heard a car arriving, checked her hair in the patio doors and walked into the house.
    I had been watching the exchange silently from the doorway, and now, wordlessly, I approached Melissa, whose eyes blazed with powerful, childish indignation.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said, dropping the ice cube and wiping my hand on my shirt.
    ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
    ‘What shall we do now?’
    ‘I don’t want to be here,’ she said. ‘Let’s take off.’
    ‘What about the
feijoada
?’
    I had been enjoying the buildup, watching my mother soak the beans and the salt cuts, helping to stoke the fire all afternoon, getting high in the kitchen on the smells of flesh marinating in lime juice and garlic and on the sight of Silvio arriving with bags of bright pink noses and strings of freshly stuffed sausages.
    ‘They’ll be sitting there for hours. And my mother is in a terrible mood. We should escape. Bring your slingshot.’
    The meal was served under the eaves of the pool house so everyone could watch the storm as it came up the valley, and the main course was just arriving as we escaped. Roars of approval went up as each new delicacy emerged. Melissa and I were forgotten. Leaving the laughter of the lunch table behind us, we crept into the forest, fine rain soaking our faces. The darkening skies and dense greenery sapped the light. The rush of the river was only a distant backdrop, and all the noise that mattered seemed to be right beside us: the calm beat of raindrops hitting foliage, the shuffle and scamper of forest creatures. Enraptured by the hot, wet atmosphere, we walked in silence, failing to notice how steadily the rain was intensifying.
    We came upon a recently fallen tree not far from the outhouse that contained the back-up electricity generator. Its roots had left a deep red hollow in the earth, already slick with mud.
    ‘Let’s live wild for the day,’ said Melissa.
    ‘What’s “living wild”?’
    ‘Living off the land. Killing our food,’ she said.
    This was out of character. It wasn’t all that long since the sight of a dead animal had been enough to upset her for days. But something in the intimacy of the steady, warm rain and the dark-green canopy overhead was conducive to strange behaviour. We could do anything here, and the world would never know.
    Soon, the rain was coming down so hard that water gushed down the hill, making a cataract out of the path.
    ‘We can’t get back up,’ said Melissa. ‘So we’ll have to stay.’
    We took off our clothes and hid them behind a rock. Then we covered ourselves in mud and leaves, and daubed on to our bodies what we decided were the markings of Tupi Indians, comparing how they looked on the different shades of our skin.
    Apart from my mother’s, which I had never scrutinised closely, Melissa’s was the only naked female body I’d seen. There was nothing more or less than I had imagined; a crucial component was missing, which I had expected, and an abrupt vertical fold was