Call Down Thunder Read online

  ‘Mi!’

  He ran up from the shore, pushing himself to go fast through the soft dry sand.

  He heard Sultan barking and then he heard Mi scream, shrill and angry, ‘You come another step I tear a hole in you!’ She never yelled at Sultan. It was the boys.

  Reve tore past her crazy little sand garden of fishbone, stick and sea-washed glass bottles and there they were on the far side of the car. Mi down on her knees, her face twisted up with rage, spitting curses at them, her red hair like a storm cloud round her head, the sleeve half torn off her shirt, a little trickle of blood on her shin. It looked like she’d fallen or been thrown, but she had a broken bottle in her hand, and whether it was the cursing or the sight of that sharp glass, the three boys facing her were keeping their distance.

  Hevez with his slick-back hair and neat city jeans was half a pace in front of the other two, a stumpy little knife in one hand.

  Reve stopped beside Mi and touched her shoulder. ‘What you been doin, Hevez? Why don’ you back off before someone get killed here? You hear me!’

  Hevez glanced at Reve but gave absolutely no reaction to what he had said. All his attention was on Mi. ‘Say all you want, witch-girl,’ he said, his voice trying to sneer but trembling a little with nerves and excitement. There was nothing bold or brave about Hevez. Then he held out his left hand and Reve saw he had a whole twist of Mi’s hair in his fist. ‘We goin see if this is real or if you go putting paint in it, make yourself a Babbylong whore like my uncle call you.’

  Sali, the youngest of the three, sniggered. With his narrow, sloping shoulders and the fluffy shadow of a moustache on his upper lip, Sali wasn’t a threat to anyone; he was a sheep, nothing on his own. Ramon, the other one, was a different matter; he was grit-hard and sour, like he had a grudge against the world. He was always ready for a fight. He lived up by the highway, no parents, but he had a younger brother that he looked out for.

  Reve didn’t care about either of them. It was Hevez he wanted to break. He felt the blood pounding in his head.

  ‘Your uncle Calde . . .’ said Mi, her voice oddly matterof- fact now, as if she had drained out her pool of curses, ‘your uncle goin pick up the phone one time, you hearin me, an’ he goin hear death talking to him. An’ on that day . . . You,’ she said slowly and deliberately, ‘Goin. Be. Nothin. Nothin. Nothin . . .’ Her voice turning harsh and strange as she kept chanting the one word over and over again.

  That really spooked Hevez, spooked them all, but it was Hevez who shouted and swore and tried to drown out what she was saying. But he couldn’t. He shook his knife at her, threatened to cut off the rest of her hair, and when she still didn’t stop he took a step forward.

  Tomas always said to pick your time; if you got to fight, make it one-on-one and watch for the snake who carries a blade, but Reve wasn’t thinking about Tomas. He threw himself head first at Hevez and hit him hard in the chest, sent him tumbling sideways. Hevez hit the ground with a thud and a startled shriek. Reve was right on top of him, grabbing at his arm, trying to get at his knife hand, and everyone was shouting and yelling. It sounded more like a riot than a scuffle.

  Hevez was howling so loudly Reve thought he’d fallen on the blade, and Mi was shrieking but it seemed to be at Reve, not at Hevez, telling him to get out of there, which didn’t make any sense; and Sultan was dancing about in a barking frenzy.

  Reve twisted sideways, his elbow against Hevez’s chin, and managed to grip his wrist. One of the boys darted in and aimed a savage kick, which caught Reve in the ribs and made him gasp. Then Ramon had him round his neck. Reve smelt the sharp tang of the other boy’s sweat and felt the air pinched out of his throat before he was yanked backwards and found himself winded, half blinded by sun and grits of sand and with Sultan’s stickyhot, fish-breath on his face.

  He pushed Sultan away and struggled to his feet. There was blood on his hands and for a second he thought he had got cut, but then he saw, as Sali and Ramon were helping Hevez up, that Hevez had dropped the knife and was clutching his left arm. His fingers were red and blood was dropping on to the sand. He grimaced and with a whimper pulled a long nail from his arm. That must have been what he fell on, thought Reve. Unlucky for him – apart from the bits of stone and glass with which she decorated her sand garden, Mi kept her place clear of all rubbish.

  ‘You come by here another time,’ hissed Mi, still kneeling, still with the jagged bottle neck in her hand, ‘and you find you get something come tearing at you worse than that old cut.’

  Hevez was breathing hard, his nose pinched and his face tight with rage and embarrassment. ‘You got more trouble comin than you dream of,’ he said. ‘An’ I got this! Yeah! See it! I got your hair, you witch.’ Ramon and Sali were on either side of him, helping him to his feet, and then the three of them started to back away.

  ‘People goin hear what you done, Hevez,’ said Reve. ‘They not goin to care too much who your uncle; they goin burn you down for this.’

  ‘Burn,’ he sneered. ‘I show you burn. You nothin but Tomas run-aroun’, and she the Babbylong whore.’ He shrugged himself away from his friends, all his attention back on Mi. ‘An’ you,’ he said to her, ‘you so good telling what goin happen, maybe you see the fool who goin to marry you! You see that man? Cos no one else do! No one in their good mind goin to come near you and your stupid car and your stones!’ He kicked at the sand so that it sprayed back at them. Then Ramon put his arm around Hevez’s shoulder and said something in his ear and the two of them laughed, and Sali laughed too. And they sauntered off like they had been in some gunfight, all swagger and loud voices.

  CHAPTER THREE

  They watched them go, not speaking. Reve’s rib hurt but it was Mi he was concerned about. She’d dropped the bottle neck and was hugging herself with her left arm; her right hand was threading through her hair, trying to find where he had hacked off a clump. ‘A’most down to my head,’ she said more to herself than to Reve. She bit her lip and Reve saw a tear roll down her cheek. She smudged it away with her forearm and sniffed crossly.

  ‘He was the one who got hurt,’ said Reve, thinking to comfort her. ‘A nail! How come you got one nail in the sand there and he the fool go fallin on it?’

  She took a deep breath and then stood up. ‘Sewn it with nail and glass,’ she said. ‘Don’t you go steppin on it, Reve. Them flower are for that boy and his friends. I knowed they’d come botherin . . .’

  ‘I did step on it, Mi. Nothin happen to me.’

  She shrugged, no longer interested. ‘You just lucky, Reve; nothin touch you.’

  He followed her around to the front of the rusty old Beetle, wondering if she really had done what she had said and made some sort of a trap in the sand. It was just as possible that she only thought she had, or had started and then got bored and given up. It was hard to tell with Mi. One thing for sure though, Hevez was hurting; that old nail could make him sick if he didn’t go and clean it quick, not that Reve cared what happened to him.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll come botherin’ you again, Mi.’ He said it, but he didn’t really believe it. He wanted to comfort her but he didn’t know how. A fright like she’d had could have pushed her over the edge, started up her juddering and eye rolling, the fits that took her right out of this world, that left her sick, bruised, dizzy and sometimes with her tongue bleeding. ‘Reckon you taught them a lesson.’

  Mi didn’t respond. She wiped her hands on her faded blue skirt and then knelt down and began to tend her garden. She shifted a blood-coloured stone one way, then her hand, which he saw was trembling slightly, hesitated over a delicate, eggshell-thin bird’s skull, but almost instantly snatched it back as if the fragile skull might have burned her. Then she carefully put a shell on top of a half-buried plastic Coke bottle, dusted her hands and wiped her eyes again.

  He squatted down beside her. He ought to go, but he didn’t want to leave her. And he wanted to tell her about the woman he’d seen down in the water. He chewed his lip
. Maybe tomorrow, he thought.

  ‘Go on then,’ said Mi.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ask that question you got.’

  ‘How you know I got question?’

  She moved a stick, laid another on top of it to make a cross. ‘Cos you carry one big askin face, tha’s why.’

  So he told her as accurately as he could what it was that he had seen: a young woman, with floating red hair, down near the ocean floor, maybe six or seven metres down. The water had been clear and clean, like the glass in a rich man’s car, and it had been like that, like looking through a window, except she’d been way below him, the light shining on her, her hair red, like the red you get when a fire is dying low.

  ‘She look a bit like you,’ he said simply when he had finished telling her everything, how he had dived down and there’d been nothing there. ‘And she look living not drowned. She look pretty. And she look sad. Made me hurry back and find you.’

  Mi pulled a face when he said that, but she didn’t look at him, kept shifting things one way or another, concentrating on her little garden.

  ‘Six, seven metre down and she don’t look drowned? You goin tell me she swim up and start talkin to you? What you playin at, Reve?’

  ‘Just tellin you what I seen. You think it got meaning? Like things you see sometime. Things you say you hear. You think it like that?’

  She turned and looked sharply at him when he said this. ‘You not the same as me, Reve. You don’t got thing happening inside you all the time.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, trying to calm her. ‘I know all this you’re sayin but I just had to tell you what I seen. Tha’s all, Mi.’

  ‘Maybe you tellin’ me stories, Reve. Maybe you think you got dreamin power, Reve. Maybe you come in my business—’

  ‘Mi, you just buzzin!’ He laughed but uncertainly, worried that her mind was racing away with itself and she would get wound up and start juddering.

  She sat back and hugged her knees. She looked miserable. She often looked distracted, or wild, or cross but not this, not like someone was grinding his heel down on her spirit. ‘I believe you dream this woman,’ she said.

  ‘I don’ know. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe you dream it for me,’ she said slowly.

  He didn’t follow that so he said nothing, sat watching her move her little bits of plastic and stone about.

  ‘Who you think look like me?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘No one. No one in this place.’

  ‘Think.’

  He shook his head. ‘You different from most everybody I ever seen.’

  ‘Except the woman who birthed me.’ She straightened up and looked at him.

  ‘She dead.’

  ‘You said she didn’t look dead.’

  ‘I said the woman I seen didn’t look drowned. Not the same thing, Mi.’

  She gripped his wrist. ‘You the one came to tell me these things,’ she said. ‘Now, I’m tellin you, Reve, I see the meanin. Tha’s what I do. An’ I see this. She alive and she callin me . . .’ Her mood had completely changed. There was something almost desperate in her expression and in her voice too. Sunlight and storm, she could slip from one to the other in a heartbeart.

  ‘She? Alive? Our mother? No, Mi, listen. You the one dreamin now.’ He stroked her forearm. She was still gripping his wrist tightly. ‘She gone a long time, Mi. Eight years. The police took her away. We know this. She get swallow up in the Castle. Uncle Theon told us all this. Told us no one come out of that prison once they go in. She’s dead to us. Hey, if some miracle happen an’ she’s living free, why she don’ come knocking on our door before this time? I don’t even know how she look any more, Mi. You didn’t see what I seen; you don’t know how she look.’

  ‘You tol’ me. It’s her! Who else? She somewhere and I got to go find her.’ She shook his wrist. ‘This is what it all mean.’

  He’d never had the same dreams about their mother that Mi had; she talked about her sometimes, tried to make Reve remember her, but she was never more than hazy when he tried calling her up: a smile, a smoky laughing voice, but what he remembered most was her absence. When they buried their father she wasn’t there. She was a gone-away mother, that’s all she was; and now to leave Tomas, leave his fishing, his uncle Theon, leave LoJo, leave Sultan? Leave his whole life behind him and just up and go? The thought startled him.

  ‘Maybe she goin to come find us,’ he said. ‘If she need us, she know where we are.’

  ‘No!’ She let go of his wrist. ‘You don’ understand.’ She snatched up a Coke bottle half filled with sand and started poking little stones into it. Sultan lifted his head and growled.

  ‘Maybe I don’t, Mi.’ He paused, waiting for an explanation. But she stayed silent, lips pursed, busy with her stones and the bottle. ‘So, how ’bout you tellin me all these thing you so sure of,’ he said at length. ‘Sometimes talkin to you like teasin a crab from its shell.’

  It was as if she didn’t hear him. ‘There’s storm comin here. I feel it. Too much comin in aroun’ me. Too much. I feel it comin.’

  Reve glanced up at the sky over the ocean: blue and clear not a whisper of cloud; and the sea was calm, nudging gently against the beach. The fishing fleet were on their way back. All was as it should be, but not for Mi. ‘You tired bein on your own, Mi? You got more trouble from Hevez than I seen today? Somethin happenin you not told me about?’

  He reached out to take her arm but just as he did so, she started to tremble, gently at first and then more violently, shaking jerkily, her eyes rolled so far back all you could see was the yellowy whites. She gasped. ‘They comin! They comin like a storm. Bringin money and sickness.’ She gasped again, gulping air into her lungs. ‘I hearin thunder . . .’ Her voice was horrible, old and raspy, like an old woman’s all of a sudden. She’d done something like this at a meeting once. It had scared him then; scared him now. He didn’t know if it was her sickness or some spirit tearing to get out of her.

  Sultan lifted his head and howled once and then edged close to Reve. Reve touched his nose and the dog quietened. Reve put his arm tightly round Mi’s shoulder and gradually the trembling died away. Her head tilted over, rested on his shoulder. ‘You all right now,’ he said softly. ‘It’s gone now.’

  After a second she looked up at him, no expression on her face. Her forehead gleamed with sweat. ‘Got to leave,’ she said. ‘Got to leave this place here.’

  He stepped over to the back of the VW and took out the water bottle she kept there and handed it to her. She drank greedily and spat the last mouthful on to the sand.

  ‘You never talk ’bout leavin Rinconda before, Mi. You sure ’bout leavin? We got a life here. Maybe Tomas, the Boxer or Uncle Theon stop Hevez bothering, or maybe you talk to Ciele.’ LoJo’s mother always had time for Mi.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t like Tomas come near me,’ she said.

  Tomas and Mi, the two most important people in his life, and there was never an easy word between them.

  Then she puffed out her cheeks and exhaled slowly. ‘Don’t think I want anyone near me, Reve. Too much people askin and wantin me to tell them what goin happen in their lives, when they goin catch fish, pay their bills, have their babies and I don’ know what to tell them, ’cept sometimes a shouting voice come burnin up inside me, and it make me sick.’

  ‘Like now?’

  She nodded. ‘But when I find her, Reve, everythin be different then.’ She bowed her head. ‘I got thing I got to know, and only she can tell me. I’m grown, Reve. I got woman-time comin on me. Maybe different for you. Tomas tell you all you need.’ She looked at him. ‘I swear that woman you dream mean only one thing. It mean she ready for me to come looking for her; and this the right time cos I got to leave this place.’

  ‘All right.’ He stood up. ‘But don’ you go leaving me. Hey. We talk ’bout this. You don’ know where she is, or if she’s living.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘OK. OK. But you got any
idea where you start lookin? Even if she livin, she could be anywhere.’ She frowned and he let that thought sink in. He knew what it was with her, she thought she could just get up and go and that would be the end of it. Tomas always said wishing never made a thing happen.

  ‘You lookin to stop me goin?’

  ‘No, Mi. That’s not it . . . but I don’t want you goin off some place an’ you get lost, an’ I don’t know where you gone. Let me do some thinkin, Mi. Let me figure out a plan. I can do that.’ He hesitated and then made up his mind. ‘An’ if you go anywhere, you let me come with you.’

  ‘All right.’ She wiped her wrist across her forehead and rolled her head round, easing tension from her neck, then looked at her hands, stretching her fingers out. ‘Look how they tremblin, Reve. Always a sign when they go tremblin.’

  ‘You think we got a storm comin? You think maybe I gotta haul the skiff up high?’

  ‘I say that?’ She looked at her trembling fingers again, her expression puzzled. ‘I feel something like storm in my bones.’ Then she clenched her hands into tight fists. ‘What else did I say?’

  ‘“They comin,” you said. You said you could hear thunder.’ He gave a smile. ‘It don’t sound too good.’

  ‘How long since the Night Men come in the village?’

  He pulled a face. ‘Maybe six months.’

  ‘You stay quiet these nights, Reve. Tuck you head down.’ She turned back to her garden and started moving the different pieces around again.

  ‘See you tomorrow.’ She didn’t answer. This was just the way she was: half tell you something, leave you wondering. She could drive you crazy, drive him crazy anyhow.

  He whistled up Sultan and headed off down the beach. He hoped his jackfish hadn’t spoilt. Tomas hated it when a fisherman wasted his catch. That would be storm enough to deal with.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Reve walked quickly to the skiff, but before lifting out the red fish box he stood for a moment looking out to sea.