I had no idea of how much time had passed when I slowly began to rouse from my drug-induced slumber, but I was aware that everything felt strange. I started to tune in to faint noises around me, willing my ears to catch something that might reassure me. Where was I? What had happened?
I tried pulling my body out from its intense sleep, but my eyelids felt too heavy. I couldn’t muster the strength to open them to see, so I continued to listen and try to make sense of things, attempting to paint a picture in my mind.
Soon, I was able to identify the sounds of farm animals – I was sure I could hear hens. Pigs too, perhaps. Ducks. I could also hear another sound I thought I recognised. It was an engine. And soon after came the realisation that the noise of the engine was all around me and that I was jerking in time to its tune. The noise rose and fell and juddered, and I juddered with it. I was in a car! Or – no, that might be it! – a truck.
What was definite was that we were travelling over an uneven, rocky surface – a fact confirmed when I finally managed to find the strength to open my eyes. Bright daylight almost blinded me, and colours blurred into stripes as they rushed past me. I had no idea where I was, much less where I was being taken, but the vehicle I was in seemed to be travelling at great speed and I kept sliding around.
Next, I realised I wasn’t alone in the back of the truck. Though I couldn’t focus my vision on the other passengers around me, I could hear crying and whimpering and anguished sobs of ‘Let me go!’ There were other children in the truck – terrified children, just like me.
I don’t know if it was the fear, or just the effect of whatever they’d given me, but the voices and images then began to fade into a blur of sound and colour, and I drifted once again into unconsciousness.
*
When I woke next, once again I had no sense of how much time might have passed. I was focused on just one thing: the slap of irregular wet splashes to my face. The ground around me seemed to be shaking, and I realised I was being carried by an adult. My body was being thrown around in time with hurried footsteps, and I was facing the moving earth, my hair swinging over my eyes. I was getting tangled and slapped with leaves and twigs as I travelled. Thorns snagged my legs and feet, tearing my skin painfully.
I was being carried on the shoulder of a man who was running through dense forest, and, though I couldn’t see him, I was aware of another man running with us. I could hear snaps and crackles, and the thud of both sets of feet. But that was all – where had the other children gone? There seemed to be an increased urgency with every stride the men took and I wondered if they were running away from something, frightened, just like I was. An animal? A monster? I knew from stories that scary monsters lived in the forests. And the men’s breathing, which I could hear was heavy with panic and perhaps exhaustion, seemed to suggest we were being chased by something dangerous.
Every so often the man who carried me would lurch alarmingly, his knees buckling. I had no idea how far we’d run, or where we were running to, but I could sense we’d come far. The man was staggering, almost falling, and as I was too terrified to think beyond the instinct to cling on to him, I could only hope that soon we’d have outrun whatever it was that was after us.
Finally, he stopped, and my whole body jerked violently. I then felt myself being whirled around, as if the man was unsure in which direction to go next. But then we were moving again, plunging onwards into deeper and denser undergrowth, before stopping again, this time even more abruptly. I tightened my grip but, aware of the aggressive way he’d grabbed me, I let my hands go as he hauled me roughly off his shoulder and dumped me onto the ground.
Dazed, I tried to scramble up and see who it was that had carried me, but by the time I had pulled myself up onto all fours and turned around, all I could see were two pairs of long legs running away. One pair of brown legs and one pair of white legs, both of which were soon lost in the gloom. I tried shouting at them, screaming at them, begging them not to leave me. Even though instinct told me that these were not good men, I was much more frightened of being left in the jungle all alone. But just like in a dream, no sound seemed to come out of my mouth, and soon even their blurred outlines began to fade, melting away into the shadows of the trees and the bushes that were all I could see. I knelt there for a long time, hardly daring to move, just peering into the dark and willing them to return, or at least hoping to hear the cry of one of those other children. I felt helpless, abandoned and so frightened of being alone. Why didn’t they come back? Why had they run away from me? Where was my mummy? How was I going to get home?
The darkness deepened and now that the men had gone away the eerie night sounds of the jungle were terrifying. I had no idea where I was, why I was there or when someone would come back for me. I had nothing on but the cotton dress and knickers my mother had dressed me in that morning, and I felt the heat of the earth on which I lay seeping into me as I curled myself into the tightest ball I could.
The sense of desolation and loneliness was gut-wrenching and I ached with it. All I could hope was that if I closed my eyes it would all go away. If I squeezed them tightly enough, perhaps the dark wouldn’t be so scary, and soon – please let it be soon – my mummy would come and find me. Perhaps if I slept, when I next woke I would be safely home in bed and would realise all this had all been just a nightmare . . .
2
It was the heat of the sun that first woke me. Beneath my left cheek I could feel only a warm, pungent softness but against my right there was a sensation of great heat. It was a strong, searing heat, and as I opened my eyes the light was so blinding I immediately squeezed them shut again.
I rolled onto my back, still halfway between sleeping and consciousness, aware of a new assault now. This time it was on my ears, the air as full of sound as the light was full of sparkles. There were frightening screeches and strange whoops that I couldn’t identify.
As I carefully allowed my eyelids to part again, I found myself looking straight up into a big shard of blue. Bright, bright blue, surrounded on all sides by dappled darkness, and as I looked, trying to shade my eyes from the dazzle with my fingers, I gradually realised what it was that I was seeing. It was a patch of sky encircled within a ring of leafy treetops, so high above me that they were just a raggedy black blur.
At last it became clear where I was. In the jungle! The realisation shot through me, and with it came panic, as the memories of the last evening came rushing to greet me. I had been snatched from my home by men who had then dumped me here.
I brushed dark earth from my palms and pulled myself up to my knees. Then I scrambled to my feet and began searching for a way to escape. All I could think of was to find the men who left me. To catch up with them and beg them to take me home. I wanted my mummy. Where was she? Why hadn’t she come to find me?
I had no sense of how much time had passed since I’d been abandoned here by my kidnappers. I strained my ears, hoping to hear any sort of sound that would reassure me. The laughter of children, a shout of greeting, the clatter of a cart rolling by. I cried out for my mother, sobbing as I called for her and called for her. My throat rasped with lack of moisture, but at this point I had no thought of finding something to drink or eat. I just desperately wanted to find a way home, so I tried to thrash my way out of all the undergrowth and the tangled hairy vines that looped down from the tree trunks. The gnarled branches and boughs seemed to cut off every exit, and the leaves – leaves so big and so strange and so different from one another – seemed intent on enclosing me in this frightening green hell.
But where to go? There didn’t seem to be any kind of path and I didn’t recognise anything. I couldn’t make out where I’d come from.
As I spun around, every vista seemed the same as the one before it. Trees, trees and more trees, as far as the eye could see. Now and then, as I tripped and blundered my way over and under and around all the tangled obstacles, I would get a glimpse of something brighter beyond. A distant hill, perhaps? But all too soon the plaited walls of my green prison would close in again, and the further I travelled the more a trembling panic surged inside me. This was stupid! Why was I doing this? I should go back, shouldn’t