Free Heliopolis by James Scudamore Page B

there in its place, which I had not. But for a glance at me Melissa didn’t seem interested in the differences between us, so I followed her lead and concentrated on the game instead. We staked our claim on the land. We found berries that Melissa claimed were edible and which I well knew were not, so we only pretended to eat them. We laid branches over the hollow in the ground, and called it our ‘base.’
    ‘Let’s be the first Indians. We’re Adam and Eve, and this is our new world,’ said Melissa, her eyes glaring starkly from her blackened face.
    ‘OK,’ I said.
    She gestured at the slingshot hanging from my arm. The river roared somewhere behind her. ‘Now you have to kill something for us to eat.’
    ‘What shall I kill?’
    ‘Anything. That bird.’ She pointed at a green parakeet twittering in a tree.
    I took aim, and let fly. The bird’s calls stopped abruptly. I saw a flurry and a flash of leaves, and thought it had flown away, but then came a thud as it hit the ground.
    ‘Good,’ said Melissa. She leapt over to pick up the body. ‘It isn’t quite dead, so it can be our prisoner. Put it in the hole.’
    I jumped into the rising orange water to lay down our victim. Slimy, pungent mud slid between my bare toes. I breathed in the smells of rain and steaming earth, enjoying inhabiting this version of myself—a boy who killed things in the jungle, and defended his friend from harm.
    ‘Now you get in the hole too,’ said Melissa.
    ‘Why me?’
    ‘Because you’re my prisoner as well.’
    It didn’t occur to me to do anything other than go along with the game, so I crept into the hollow in the ground, and let her cover it with leafy branches. Crouching in the puddle inside, I started to get cold, and shouted to Melissa, asking how long I was supposed to stay down there. Abruptly, she burst through the roof of leaves over my head, and landed beside me.
    She stared at me in the dripping gloom. ‘Now you have to lie on me.’
    I did as requested. Her skin felt warm against mine. She lay rigid, her arms at her sides.
    ‘You have to move back and forward.’
    ‘This is stupid,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t do it like this.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘I’ve seen how animals do it.’
    And suddenly she was screaming, and I felt it too. Fire ants were sweeping over our bodies in a red wave of pain. They had been living in the base of the fallen tree, and without the protection of the trunk the rain was drowning them in their nest.
    ‘We should get in the river,’ I said, my skin alive with them. I got to my feet and ripped away the covering branches.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is natural. We have to leave them. Sit down.’
    The jags of pain in my limbs, my fingers, on my genitals, merged into an allover heat. I remember crying, but thinking that there was no way I could jump into the river if Melissa did not. I remember finding the red of the bites shocking against her pig-pink complexion, and thinking that the colour was somehow more at home on my skin, because it was darker.
    As the afternoon progressed and the killing began in earnest, I felt that we were taking our revenge with the slingshot for what the ants had done to us. Somehow, the pain made me shoot better, and with every bird I brought down, the bites seemed to glow brighter on my body. I began to appreciate the link between the wounds that nature had inflicted on me, and the revenge I was exacting on it in return. Everything we saw was condemned by Melissa and fired at by me: two thrushes, a kingfisher and a rat. We even took aim at an infant monkey unlucky enough to come into view. Melissa had a sweet little potbelly at this time. I can see her now, coated in mud, stomach out, jumping around in the undergrowth, pointing her finger at the unfortunate creature I was to kill next.
    Silvio, the only person not occupied by the
feijoada
, had set out when the rain started to come down hard. By the time he tracked us down, our naked