12.
Emily decided that she needed some time to herself. A lot had happened in the few short weeks since she had arrived on Camillo and she needed time to take stock. She was still all emotional about her funeral and kept bursting into tears. At night she cuddled up with her pillow and cried.
God was a bit of a worry! The anode that most of the human population was looking up to for spiritual guidance was the son of a baby munching monster and named after the family pet. He’d fallen out with his wife and children and was living on a bleak asteroid, high on ozone, Earth’s ozone, searching for the answer. The answer to what he didn’t know.
If I’m going to be his apprentice, I had better learn quick before Suez Dog loses it altogether.
Emily enjoyed talking philosophy with Zeus. It was one of those things that had always interested her. To escape from the bullies in the playground she used to hide in the school library reading about all sorts of things. ‘Dweeb, dweeb, dweeb, Emily is a dweeb,’ teased the girls when they caught her with her nose stuck in a book about great thinkers. She could see that it would come useful now.
She found it fascinating that different people saw the world in totally different ways. She’d always been quite happy with the way she saw the world, but suddenly arriving on an asteroid and meeting God had moved the boundaries a little; it required a shift in thinking.
Emily dug flower beds around the house and planted anemones, daisies and sunflowers in the rich red soil. Hanging a window box outside the kitchen window, she put in thyme, basil, parsley and rosemary, then lazed in the sun and read Jacqueline Wilson and made her eyes go spotty looking at the sunset.
The top of the bluff was her favourite spot. She walked through the sugar cane, past the clanging sheep, through the tropical orchard and up the steep, winding track between the boulders to get there.
Sitting on the edge, she fought the urge to jump, to jump just for the hell of it. It was an awful long way down and she’d hurt herself for sure. She threw stones at the seagulls. They were much too good at flying for her to hit them and squawked angrily and dodged out the way, then chased the pebbles trying to catch them before they splashed into the sea far below.
She watched the clouds. There were three of them. It was a little hard to tell because sometimes they were around the other side of the asteroid but she was sure that there were three. Normally they were puffy little cumulus, other times they billowed up to become angry thunderheads. Sometimes they joined up and stretched from horizon to horizon in a sheet of grey or hung about in the treetops being fog patches.
She looked across the sea to its curved horizon and wondered what was on the other side. Of course, she’d seen it from the moon but that was not the same as actually going there. ‘I’ll go exploring tomorrow,’ she said to herself, and slipped back to the cottage, singing as she went.
In the morning Emily sat on the sofa and sketched the view along the beach, the beautiful curve of golden sand backed by palms and cane fields that stretched to the rocks in the distance where the stream ran out. She wondered if it would always be like this.
Stripping off, Emily dived into the sea, staying under as long as she could; luxuriating in the cool aqua-blue water. It was such a wonderfully calm and refreshing colour that she decided to paint her bathroom the same shade of blue, light at the top, dark at the bottom so she could lie in the bath and pretend to be a flounder. Coming to the surface, Emily took a deep breath and swam back along the bottom to the beach, chasing a school of little fish in front of her.
She stretched out on the soft sand and soaked up the warm sunshine. Her skin used to burn piggy-pink but had now tanned to a lovely golden brown. Once dry, she pulled on her belly dancing outfit and headed off exploring.
Negrita chased along with her, playful as ever, running ahead then lying in wait and tackling her around the ankles as she skipped past.
‘Oh stop that, it hurts!’ scolded Emily and launched a kick at the cagoon.
Negrita jumped up and grabbed Emily’s foot, drawing blood with her sharp claws.
‘Ouch!’ said Emily, trying to shake her off. ‘You need a playmate.’
Emily jumped up on a large bleached tree trunk and tippy-toed her way along, reaching the far end without falling off. She fished Enzo out of her pocket and opened the cage. He shuffled out gingerly, then rose up and hovered in front of her, jittering from side to side. Then he was off, chasing along the tree trunk with Negrita hot on his tail, bounding after him, trying to trap him in her claws. In the heat of the moment he forgot to look where he was going.
Boof!
The log disappeared, sucked in by the black hole. Negrita and Emily tumbled onto the soft sand.
‘Careful!’ said Emily. ‘I suppose you’re not used to having stuff around. Do be careful!’
Enzo seemed a little surprised, keeping his distance and hovering at head height.
They carried on along the beach, Negrita leaving a patchwork of paw prints as her and Enzo chased each other tirelessly. Emily gasped as Negrita jumped up high and with a twisting turn, grabbed Enzo and tumbled back to the sand with him in her claws. She expected another boof, but Enzo kept control of his gravity and wrestled around on the ground with the snarling, fire breathing cagoon. He lifted Negrita up in the air and shook until she let go and tumbled back onto the sand, then they were off again, Negrita bounding along the beach in hot pursuit of the small black ball.
When she reached the stream, Emily waded across, then went back to help the cagoon who was meowing pitifully on the shore. Negrita grudgingly let Emily pick her up and carry her across, jumping free too soon and landing with a splash and a snarl in the shallows.
Emily had a long drink of the delicious velvet water then headed up stream. Reaching the citrus grove, she sat on a rock and plucked an orange from an overhanging branch. As she ate it, sweet juice ran down and dripped off her chin, making circles in the water. ‘I know what we’ll do,’ she said. ‘Let’s see where the stream comes from.’
They continued upstream, sometimes walking on the grassy banks, sometimes jumping from rock to rock or splashing through the shallows, startling spotty trout and sending them zigzagging away looking for hide-y-holes.
Negrita bravely pounced on one, and after a fight, wrestled it onto the bank. Wet, she was all skin and bone and looked like a drowned rat. Leaving Negrita to her catch, Emily carried on; singing happily as she passed through the forest then out into the meadow where she’d arrived, torn and bloody, just three weeks before. Beer-bottle green grasshoppers jumped around her ankles and skylarks sung high above, almost too high to see. Pushing through the long grass and wildflowers, Emily followed the stream’s meandering path up to where it emerged from a rocky gorge.
They must have walked a fair way around the asteroid as the sun had gone back down and it was nearly dark. Emily sat on a cool rock being serenaded by the dawn chorus and waited for the sun to come up again. She caught a blur out of the corner of her eye and felt a nudge on her cheek as Enzo caught up. A moment later Negrita was beside her. Emily went to give her a stroke expecting her to arch her back like a normal cat, but Negrita was no ordinary cat.
Snarl, scratch, hiss, spit!
Blood dripped from Emily’s fingers.
Ouch!
Will I ever learn!
Once the sun was up again, She picked her way up through the gorge, holding her diary above her head as she swam across the pools, then clambering up over large granite boulders, sparkling silver and black in the sunlight. Climbing around a waterfall she emerged from the gorge into a hanging valley. Up here the stream was just a small brook babbling its way from pool to pool. Small blue ducks play in eddies and dived deep into the pools, chasing bugs and small fish.
Emily picked a posy of white daisies and tied them up with a blade of grass. She held them up high and peered into the indigo sky, ‘These are for you Zula, I miss you.’ She blew him a kiss and threw the flowers into the air.
/> Blut!
They were gone, sucked in by Enzo.
‘Gravity!’ growled Emily.
From the valley, the mountain rose up steeply, the creek tumbling down its rocky slope. It gurgled and splashed its way over slippery dark green and black boulders and Emily had to pull herself up using the gnarled roots of the beech and cedar trees. The ground was covered with a soft, spongy carpet of green moss. A glint of gold caught her eye and she scooped down and fished a gold nugget out of a pool. She tucked it in with her diary and carried on upwards.
Two hours later she arrived puffing and panting at a spring surrounded by ferns. The water surged and bubbled like a big spa pool. It was a beautiful spot with the effervescent water, dark green boulders and stunted, twisted trees looking eerie in the damp mist.
‘Eureka,’ she said. ‘I’ve found the source. I name you the Orinoco River.’
She munched on some tasty, wild strawberries, washed them down with a velvet drink from the pool and then wondered what to do.
‘What the hell,’ she said to Enzo. ‘We’ve come this far, let’s go to the top.’
Emerging out of the misty forest, she pushed her way through clumps of tussock grass then over shattered rock. Sharp stones cut at her bare feet and she shivered as she scampered across patches of snow, leaving little red footprints. Then finally, Emily was at the top.
‘I name you, Mt Everest. No, no, not Everest. I name you Mt Ijju,’ she said, touching the necklace of tiny glass beads and silver coins given by her friend from the desert; Ijju, with her beautiful dark skin, braided hair and shy smile.
She felt a sudden pang of jealousy.
I bet she’s with Zula. That’s why I never look at the desert, because I don’t want to see them together.
Through a gap in the clouds, Emily caught a glimpse of the sea far below. The cloud closed back in again, cold and damp then a gust of wind cleared the sky giving her a spectacular view. From where she stood there was a sheer cliff down to the sea thousands of feet below. Eagles soared in the rising air, the feathers on their wingtips feeling the currents and steering them this way and that. Looking back the way she’d come, Emily could see Negrita playing in the grassy meadow below, further down she caught splashes of silver where the Orinoco tumbled down the rocks to where it entered the gorge and vanished over the curve of her little world.
She wondered how big Camillo was, how many square miles. If it was twenty kilometres across, that’s twenty times five eights to get miles, so twenty times five divided by eight equals one hundred divided by eight is twelve and a bit. So to get the area it must be twelve and a bit times pi.
Is that it?
Struggling to remember the formula, all Emily could think of was pi, steak and kidney pie, steaming hot with lashings of gravy, which was getting her no closer to the answer.
So twelve and a bit times three and a bit, that’s forty and a bit.