The Secret Path by Karen Swan

Author:Karen Swan [Swan, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Sixteen

She felt a tickle, light as a hair, over the back of her hand. A breeze had found her and fluttered over her skin. She gave a soft moan, feeling herself slowly rise up from the depths of sleep. She felt heavy, heavier than she had ever been, like an anchor listing on the seabed. Vaguely, behind closed eyelids, she detected skeins of light. The tickle came again, crossing to her wrist, getting closer to her f—

She jumped up with a gasp, her eyes focusing just in time to see a beetle the size of a plum skittering across the floor. It was a dazzling electric blue, actually beautiful. Just not to inhale.

‘Jesus!’ she hissed, sitting back on her heels on the mattress and trying to bring her heart rate back down. She sat there, inert, her head hanging, for several moments. She had a vague sense of despair in her bones but she couldn’t put a shape to it, couldn’t quite cast off the confusion of sleep until she looked at the rudimentary bed she had been lying on and remembered where she was – and why.

Oh God. She rubbed her hands down her face. That boy, that poor child. How long had she slept for? How many hours had he been lying in suffering, while she’d slept soundly here? She remembered her failure to do anything about it. Her losses were coming thick and fast at the moment.

With a sigh, she looked around her more keenly. The room, no bigger than a few square metres, was softly lit, daybreak tumbling through numerous wooden splits so that the room felt covered in golden splinters. There was a small hatch in one wall and she got up to open it.

She peered out – and instinctively smiled. The greenery was dense and lush, massive banana tree leaves splaying like parasols; a line of washing strung up between two trunks and hung with dull-coloured sheets. She saw a couple of small pigs truffling along the ground. Smoke was twisting from the top of one of the huts. It was an extraordinary scene, so completely tropical and different in every way to the rooftops-and-terraces vista from her Pimlico flat. Back home, nature was something to clip, tame and suppress into submission with perfectly clipped box balls, artful sprays of lavender and erect tulips. Here, everything ran riot, sprang up, toppled over, spread out, fought like toddlers, for air, rain, light . . .

She heard chickens pecking somewhere just out of sight from here and thought how much it sounded like waking up in an aviary, to the sound of wing flaps and trills and squawks.

Steadily, she felt nature acting as a balm to her frazzled nerves, the bright light of day dousing the emotional passions of last night. This was not her tragedy; it wasn’t, and she had to maintain her boundaries. She could try to help her friend, yes, but if he would not be helped . . . What was it Rory had said? You can’t save everyone.

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