Through the Tiger's Eye (9 page)
‘Here we go again,’ thought Lucy, as she began to shiver and felt the tug of the Tiger-cat’s mind-rope.
She’s inside the jungle jail, behind the gates! Kids are marching right past her, as if she doesn’t exist. Some of them are so little! They should be in kindergarten . . . They look so scared and unhappy. The smallest, a tiny girl with dirty, tangled curls matted into dreadlocks, is turning, looking directly into Lucy’s eyes as though she alone can see her. She’s wrapped in an old sack, like a Roman toga. It’s the little girl from Lucy’s first dream, the one taken away from her mum when the smiling soldier’s men stormed the park.
Lucy blinked and found herself back in the miners’ cubby, gazing at the Tiger-cat, which started washing itself as if nothing had happened. She looked at Rahel and Toro.
‘OK, if you have to, then I’ll come too.’
‘Fank you,’ said Toro.
‘What day is it?’ said Rahel.
‘Saturday.’
‘Then we go tonight.’
‘Good!’ said Ricardo, ‘Grandma should have my Ninja pants ready by then.’
Grandma did have his Ninja pants ready by then; and Lucy’s; and her own. She’d gone a bit wild and made a pair of pink ones for herself: bright pink. Ricardo’s and Lucy’s were jungle green and they said they liked them so much they wanted to wear them to bed. Grandma said OK – ‘just this once’.
‘We’ll cook dinner, Grandma,’ said Lucy.
‘
You
can!’ complained Ricardo, and then he looked thoughtful and agreed. Grandma was happy.
‘That would be lovely, kids. I did get rather carried away on those pants. All those pockets! Think what you could keep in them! Clothes pegs, tissues, packets of biscuits for bingo . . .’
She kept chattering while Lucy chopped up spuds. It was ages before Grandma noticed how huge the pile was.
‘Stop! You must have chopped up five kilos. Who wants to eat baked spuds on a hot night like this? And your mum isn’t even home for dinner . . . oh, that reminds me. Your mum had to fly to Sydney. A little girl is sick and they needed a nurse to look after her in the plane. She’ll stay the night up there. Lucy, do stop! We’ll never eat them.’
‘Mum always does this many baked potatoes,’ Lucy said airily. ‘Then we eat them in the morning and for lunch the next day.’ But she stopped chopping and slid her mountain of potatoes into the big old oven.
Ricardo was checking out the freezer. He spirited twenty-four cheese and spinach pies into the oven while Grandma was still going on about the potatoes and hospitals and the dangers of flying in small aeroplanes.
Then she said something Lucy wanted to hear.
‘By the way, I’ve got that brass-cleaner you wanted Lucy, love. You just wipe it on and rub it off with a soft cloth. What are you trying to clean?’
‘Just something I found in the garden.’
Grandma raised her eyebrows, holding the can out of reach.
Lucy thought quickly. She didn’t quite know why, but she wanted to keep the plaque to herself.
‘Look at the time, Grandma,
Brain Bank
is starting. The antenna’s in the lounge room. Do you want me to set up the telly?’
Grandma dropped the can, and was out of the kitchen before Lucy had even finished the sentence.
Lucy and Ricardo were always trying to get Grandma to enter
Brain Bank
, because she rattled out the right answers like a machine-gun before the real contestants even opened their mouths. But she always laughed and said she wasn’t going to make a fool of herself in front of Australia. The kids didn’t see how Grandma making them lots of money or winning a car and a holiday was making a fool of herself, but she wouldn’t be persuaded. She just sat there every night winning wads of virtual money, virtual vacations to tropical islands and virtual vehicles.
Very frustrating!
Lucy wandered into the back yard with the brass-cleaner and began rubbing at the plaque. A word emerged, letter by letter. ‘T…E…L…
TELARES!
She had never seen the word written down, but recognised it immediately. It was where Rahel and Toro came from.
‘I don’t get it,’ she thought. This was crazy, and not even proper crazy – it all felt real and unreal at the same time. It felt like a weird daydream, but there was the plaque, solid and real in her hands, and today she had seen real soldiers and heard real guns and seen kids who were really frightened.
She didn’t want to think about tonight. She wanted to jump into bed with T-Tongue and go to sleep. She was scared, so scared she felt sick.
Lucy heard a rumbling purr, and felt soft fur against her legs. She met the Tiger-cat’s golden eyes. Instantly, she knew what the creature was thinking. She didn’t get any pictures this time, just a strong sense of anticipation and excitement . . . and something else? Hunger? Gazing into the animal’s eyes, Lucy felt her own pulse quicken. In a split second, she was eager for action. And in a weird way it made her feel peaceful.
Lucy hurried back into the kitchen. Ricardo was filling his backpack with everything he could get his hands on: peanuts, sultanas, dried apples. If he had any fear about tonight, he wasn’t showing it. His hair was spiked up again and he looked like a crazy little soldier himself, in his new Ninja pants and black T-shirt; a commander in an army of lunatic midgets. He was singing a little song while he packed.
‘I am the Ninja of the peanuts . . . Oh, peanuts are my friends . . . The peanuts think I’m great . . . They jump into my bag . . . I’m going to take them for a walk . . . The peanuts are my friends . . . They say eat me, eat me, eat me . . .’
Lucy
knew
she had not been like that when she was six years old, not even once; but if it made him happy . . .
‘OK, Ninja,’ she said, ‘just remember you have to clean up after dinner so we can get all the leftovers without Grandma noticing’.
Grandma got the shock of her life when Ricardo jumped up after dinner to wash the dishes and Lucy began putting the food away. Grandma started yawning and said she wanted an early night. Good idea. Lucy started yawning too.
‘Looks like we all need to turn in,’ Grandma said.
Normally Lucy would have ranted that Mum always let them stay up late, but not tonight. Grandma got another shock when Ricardo agreed meekly to a bath. She went off to run it, which gave the kids just enough time to smuggle the leftover baked spuds and pies into their backpacks.
Lucy still had that strange peaceful feeling she had soaked up from the Tiger-cat, even though they were probably about to get shot or be human-burgers for a tiger or sausage rolls for a giant python. She still didn’t understand anything and it still felt crazy but suddenly it was also simple: if Rahel was going to risk rescuing that little girl and the other kids, then Lucy had to help. That was certain, even if she didn’t have a clue how.
It was comforting to do something she did understand. Something easy, like stuff her bag with food no one was ever going to eat because they would all be dead soon.
Crazy
. The peaceful feeling evaporated. Why was she going to get out of bed in the middle of the night? Come to think of it, why was she letting Ricardo come?
Because he would tell if she didn’t
. He might tell anyway, but he would definitely tell if she went without him. Well, that was easy, she wouldn’t go either. She’d just stay in bed.
Then the image of the little girl wrapped in that horrible sack flashed into Lucy’s mind and she remembered her nightmare. What had the mother said? ‘My little girl is yours now, you must look after her until you find . . .’ Until Lucy found what? And why Lucy?
As if to answer her, suddenly, like a PowerPoint show, Lucy saw all the faces of the little kids from the jungle jail. When she thought about the looks on their faces she felt . . . what was the right word? Urgent. That was it. She was needed urgently. This was an emergency. If she didn’t help them, no one would! And she couldn’t tell anyone, not even Grandma. She’d never believe it. How could she? Lucy was having trouble believing it herself. It was way too weird for grown-ups. And she’d said she would help. It was up to her and Ricardo and a weirdo feral cat – armed with a whole lot of baked potatoes.
Later, in bed, Lucy tried to think it through, make a plan, but she had to admit in the end she had no idea what they were going to do. Ricardo wasn’t much help. He just lay there and sang his peanut song over and over again. Lucy checked her watch one more time. She had to stay awake until Grandma went to sleep. When she heard the snoring, she would wake up Ricardo and they would sneak out. After that . . . maybe the Tiger-cat or Rahel would think of something. Because all Lucy could think of was peanuts.
‘
Lucy! Wake up!
’
Lucy gazed blankly at the spiky-haired Ninja by her bed, Rahel’s face still swimming before her eyes.
‘Get up! We’re late!’ urged Ricardo.
Lucy looked at her watch: 2 a.m. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. How could she have slept through Grandma’s snores? Now Rahel would think she’d chickened out. They only had a few hours before sunrise. She jumped out of bed and grabbed her torch. Then she got a good look at Ricardo. He had his Ninja pants on, and what looked suspiciously like a plastic sword stuck into the pouch Grandma had made. A scarf was tied around his forehead. He looked like a dork.
Lucy bent to pick up T-Tongue, and paused. The rug had changed again. The snake coiled between the tiger’s front paws had distinct diamond patterns, pale yellow on grey scales. Her eyes followed the pattern, from the head resting between the tiger’s paws, to the tip of the tail, much too far away in the other corner of the rug.
‘Come on,’ hissed Ricardo. Lucy tore her eyes away and padded after him, with T-Tongue in her arms.
They opened the creaky back door. Grandma stopped snoring. They froze. After a long pause she started again, and they crept outside. Lucy glanced up and saw the full moon marching towards the western cliffs. It gave the back yard an eerie glow, but petered out when the path met thicker rainforest. Then the Tiger-cat materialised in the torchlight, to lead them up the path to the stairs. It faced them at the top, eyes fierce and tail whipping and made a strange, throaty sound, halfway between an ordinary miaow and a growl, eyes blazing red in the torchlight.
‘Sorry we’re late,’ gulped Ricardo.
Lucy shone the torch into the pit and caught her breath as, once again, the Tiger-cat sprang straight at the wall, its body forming a perfect arc in the torchlight. Just when Lucy was sure the Tiger-cat would smash against solid earth, the clay wall dissolved before her eyes and the Tiger-cat landed gracefully in the yawning mouth of the tunnel and turned to look at her, tail lashing. T-Tongue made an urgent growly whimper. Lucy put him down and he launched himself into the pit without hesitating, his lead sailing out behind him. Lucy and Ricardo flew down the rope and then stumbled to keep up, as T-Tongue disappeared with the Tiger-cat into the mountain.
Lucy wished she had cats’ eyes and could throw the torch away. It seemed to take forever to reach the door. Lucy gave a warning knock this time and Rahel wrenched it open.
‘We believed you were not coming!’
Lucy felt terrible.
‘Sorry. We slept in. We brought you some food.’
‘We will eat as we walk,’ said Rahel, taking a baked spud in one hand and a pie in the other.
Her face was a mask. Lucy couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She didn’t look scared. She looked as if she did this all the time. Toro was up and ready for action too, looking much better than he had this morning. His limp wasn’t so bad. He checked out Ricardo’s sword and the two boys grinned at each other. Obviously they didn’t have a clue what they were in for.
‘We can’t take these guys with us,’ said Lucy. ‘What if something happens to them?’
Rahel’s expression didn’t change.
‘Toro is required because he is small,’ she said simply.
Lucy thought that was a great reason to leave him behind, but Rahel marched out the door after the Tiger-cat, already darting up the tunnel with T-Tongue in pursuit. Ricardo and Toro ran after her and Lucy found herself stumbling in the rear. It wasn’t a position she was used to. She caught up, shouldered past the mini-Ninjas, and asked, ‘What are we going to do when we get there?’