Lenny - Laura McVeigh - E-Book

Lenny E-Book

Laura McVeigh

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Beschreibung

In the Ubari Sand Sea in 2011, during the First Libyan Civil War, a mysterious pilot falls from the sky – a sky devil – and is forever changed by the little boy who rescues him. One year later, in the town of Roseville, Louisiana, in the aftermath of economic crisis and corporate environmental damage, 10-year-old Lenny Lockhart is losing the people and things dearest to him. His only friends now are his plucky, elderly neighbour, Miss Julie, and the town's lonely librarian, Lucy Albert. Homeless and neglected, Lenny heads deep into the dark and unpredictable bayou, determined to conquer the sinkhole that is threatening to swallow his town. As time seems to be simultaneously slowing down and running out, is it really Lenny who needs saving, or the broken adults in his life? As these two timelines converge, Lenny tells a deeply affecting story of family and love, the ways we can be kind, and the power of one boy's imagination to heal and survive.

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LENNY

First published in 2022 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Laura McVeigh, 2022

The right of Laura McVeigh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-824-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-825-8

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

Also by Laura McVeighUnder the Almond Tree (2017)

To Howard and RileyThe stars in my night skyWith love

‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

Contents

Chapter One Ubari Sand Sea, Libya, 2011

Chapter Two False River, Louisiana, 2012

Chapter Three Ubari Sand Sea, Libya, 2011

Chapter Four Roseville, Louisiana, 2012

Chapter Five Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Six Roseville, 2012

Chapter Seven Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Eight Roseville, 2012

Chapter Nine Roseville, 2012

Chapter Ten Ubari Sand Sea, Libya, 2011

Chapter Eleven Roseville, 2012

Chapter Twelve Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Thirteen Roseville, 2012

Chapter Fourteen Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Fifteen Roseville, 2012

Chapter Sixteen Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Seventeen Roseville, 2012

Chapter Eighteen Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Nineteen False River, 2012

Chapter Twenty Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Twenty-One Roseville, 2012

Chapter Twenty-Two Roseville, 2012

Chapter Twenty-Three Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Twenty-Four Roseville, 2012

Chapter Twenty-Five Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Twenty-Six Roseville, 2012

Chapter Twenty-Seven Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Twenty-Eight Roseville, 2012

Chapter Twenty-Nine Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Thirty Roseville, 2012

Chapter Thirty-One Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Thirty-Two Roseville, 2012

Chapter Thirty-Three Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Thirty-Four Roseville, 2012

Chapter Thirty-Five Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Thirty-Six Roseville, 2012

Chapter Thirty-Seven Ubari Sand Sea, 2011

Chapter Thirty-Eight Roseville, 2012

Chapter Thirty-Nine Libya, 2011

Chapter Forty Roseville, 2012

Chapter Forty-One Texas, 2011

Chapter Forty-Two Roseville, 2012

Chapter Forty-Three False River, 2012

Chapter Forty-Four Roseville, 2012

Chapter Forty-Five Bayou, 2012

Chapter Forty-Six Bayou, 2012

Chapter Forty-Seven Bayou, 2012

Chapter Forty-Eight Bayou, 2012

Chapter Forty-Nine Bayou, 2012

Chapter Fifty Bayou, 2012

Chapter Fifty-One The Sinkhole, 2012

Chapter Fifty-Two Bayou, 2012

Chapter Fifty-Three Bayou, 2012

Chapter Fifty-Four The Sinkhole, 2012

Chapter Fifty-Five Bayou

Chapter Fifty-Six Roseville

Chapter Fifty-Seven Bayou

Chapter Fifty-Eight The Sinkhole

Chapter Fifty-Nine Roseville

Chapter Sixty Korea, 1953

Chapter Sixty-One Roseville

Chapter Sixty-Two Roseville

Chapter Sixty-Three Roseville

Chapter Sixty-Four Ubari Sand Sea

Chapter Sixty-Five  

Acknowledgements

Readers’ Guide

Chapter One

Ubari Sand Sea, Libya, 2011

In the middle of the desert, the boy sat on his young camel, al mataya, and looked across the dunes, north to where Ghadamis lay, east across the Ubari Sand Sea, south to the Acacus mountains, but he could see only the haze of the day bubbling on the horizon, heat melting the edges of land and sky.

At first, Izil heard nothing beyond the snort of the beast and a dry, clicking sound from its throat, and the suck of the sand as the animal stepped along the ridge.

When it came, the sound carried high – a whine, insistent and far off, then louder, closer. He looked up and saw the fighter jet as it passed overhead, a dark-grey shadow against the haze of the skies. The jet shot out of view, smaller, higher once more, the sound dwindling. The boy waited. He waited for the sound of dropping bombs, in the distance, with an echo that would shake the valley. He waited for more planes in the sky, but they did not come. His camel, tired of waiting, pulled his head to the side and walked on, following an invisible path back toward the tents.

The boy wondered what it would be like, to pilot such a plane, to fly at speed and altitude, to hold the fortunes of whole villages and valleys under the pressure of your thumb, tensed on a control stick. Out here in the Ubari desert, they had no television, but once when he had travelled with his father to Ghat for a cousin’s wedding, he had sat in a row with all the children, while the adults ate and danced and celebrated, and he had sucked on sweet dates while watching Top Gun on a large screen. He, along with all the boys, apart from one, had fallen in love with Kelly McGillis. The refusenik was his cousin Hassan, who loved Goose, though he told no one of his feelings, only repeating, ‘I feel the need … the need for speed’, over and over, falling about, laughing. His uncle, Ahmed, had beaten Hassan, and offered Izil a job selling mats to tourists in Ghat, if he wanted to stay on in the town, leave behind the desert life as they had chosen to do, but his father would not accept, and they had travelled back to Ubari. He had been sick on reaching his mother, the sugar heavy in his belly, the memory of the movie fresh in his mind.

The noise began again, the low far-off hum, the growl of approach, and for a moment the boy grew fearful. He was alone. The tents were at least an hour away. He feared for his family, even though the planes were meant to protect – that is what they said on the radio. Sky devils, his father called them, spitting in the sand.

The boy felt the inescapability of it all – he could not hide, could not run. He would not be able to warn them. So instead he just watched, looking up, his hand over his eyes, the pale cotton of the cloth cheche he wore loosely on his head flapping in the light breeze, as it wrapped around his cheeks and over his nose, leaving only his eyes exposed to the wind and light.

The plane flew high above him. For a moment, it paused in the air, then a sound of stuttering and the jet plane began to spiral downward as if it had forgotten how to fly. As it hurtled towards the dunes the boy saw the pilot eject, dangling for a moment in the sky, then dropping, his canopy opening late, the bulk of it dragging him along the dunes.

Further away, the jet plane burst into flames, sending up smoke signals far into the valley.

Izil had watched the man fall from the sky. Others would look for him – the boy was sure of that – but he had never seen one of these sky devils up close and he would not be robbed of the opportunity. So Izil, even though closer now to home, turned and set out for the ridge where the parachute billowed.

The pilot lay twisted in the desert dunes, his body torqued, his breathing faint – lips crusted in sand. Behind him, in the distance, smoked the wreckage of the jet. The man’s arms and shoulder blades were pulled back at a sharp angle, weighted by the billowing of the parachute.

He had not had enough time to control his landing, and instead had hit the dunes, dragged along by the heavy rig until it had dropped to the sand, air filling the canopy late, and he had become tangled in it as he tumbled to earth.

The man’s head throbbed with pain. His nostrils filled with the acrid smell of burning oil. The earth was still spinning. He remembered ejecting from the Viper, the spring-back of the cord, then free-falling as the desert grew closer too quickly, yanking at the cord, once, twice until it released and the air caught it and he righted, too late, dragging along the top of the dunes at an angle, a reluctant puppet caught up in his own strings. Not a textbook landing, granted, but a landing nonetheless.

He moved slowly, wriggling fingers and toes, bending his knees, checking for signs of damage. He would have liked to have sunk down into the sand, to become one with the earth. But the earth did not want him and so he lay there, the sun burning the back of his head, the parachute canopy rising and falling, sighing in the breeze.

The man waited for death. It did not come. Instead, after a long while, he felt the shadow of what he assumed was the enemy. The sky darkened over his head and looking up through one eye he saw the knobbly knees of the camel, smelt its dung drop to the earth beside him, and sitting on top, a barefoot figure, a small boy dressed in dusty indigo trousers and a faded red long-sleeved California Dreamin’ T-shirt, an amulet, made of yellow desert glass, tied around his neck, his mother had told him to protect him from djinns, a pale cheche worn around his head, only the eyes uncovered, watching the man who found he could not speak, his throat parched and his tongue swollen, full of sand and silt.

The boy looked down at him as he lay there – this broken sky king.

Once it became clear that the man posed little immediate threat, Izil decided what must happen next.

Chapter Two

False River, Louisiana, 2012

Lenny slid out of the bald cypress tree, dropping the large cardboard box that swung off the end of his sneakers into the dust below him. Hunkering down beside it, he turned the old Plaquemine orange box over, opening it up, clambering in – ready for flight. His arms were held tense out in front of him as he buried down, his father Jim’s pilot cap slipping down low over his eyes as he rocked from side to side.

‘Va-vrooooooom, neaaaaaaaoww …’

He tipped a little to the left, steering at a sharp angle.

‘Du-du-du-du-du-du-du.’

He machine-gunned right, one hand pulling back the controls as his plane shot up into the blue cloudless sky, evading the enemy.

‘Ha! You’ll never catch me.’

He was the King of the Sky.

Lenny was free, travelling at the speed of light, gone now from the bayou, looking down on the winding silver ribbons and the smiling oxbow gleam of False River, before veering away towards the woodlands further upriver, earth once thick with trees, now yellow and scorched at the edges, dying. A gift to the land, some said, from the chemical companies.

Circling back in the other direction, Lenny flew over the twisting branches and early morning mists of the swampland, swiftly and at altitude, eager to be far from where trapped souls lay in wait, mournful and forgotten. He squeezed the agate stone he held in his fist. His mama Mari-Rose had given it to him – a gris-gris to keep him safe (it’ll protect you Lenny – I can’t do no more for you, I just can’t …).

As the sunshine soaked into the morning, he flew over the oak forests to the north, then the marshlands and wetlands that edged the land, circled over the sinkhole as it bubbled in the bayou below, until finally turning back once more he followed the river home – the water a sludgy silver-grey catching in the sunlight – leading him back to Roseville. He imagined he was flying over sand dunes, cutting through a blue cloudless sky. He saw the shadows below.

‘Come in, major.’

He held his hand to his mouth, radio control aloft.

‘Do you read me?’

Silence crackled down the receiver.

‘Looks like it’s just you and me then.’ Lenny scrunched up in the box that carried the faint scent of sunshine and oranges, leant further forward, the cap slipping down a little, his eyes narrowed, scanning below for the enemy combatants he knew were waiting for him.

He breathed deep and let the air press down on his chest and ribs. It was a late autumn morning, unexpectedly cold and damp, with the trees glowing – russets, golden, reds and greens, and the sky, blue and unbroken. Lenny rubbed his fists on his frayed jeans and his T-shirt worn thin; light summer clothes, which made him shiver in the dappled shade. He tilted Jim’s cap back from his forehead so that he could see out. His fingers were still stiff from the damp night before and he pulled the cuffs of the denim jacket down low over his hands as best he could for warmth.

‘You’ll not get away … I see you. I see you down there.’

His shout carried on the breeze down to the river’s edge and the grass banks below, causing an egret to startle and take flight.

Lenny locked on to the enemy. He punched the air in joy as he pressed down hard with his thumb on the trigger, releasing the missile that followed through the air, down, down, down, locked on the target, imagining the hangars of the chemical companies below, and then a moment later, smoke and white phosphorus flared up from the earth below. Fire-and-forget. That’s what Jim had called it: fire-and-forget.

Lenny pulled the fighter jet sharply to the left, veering away from the plumes of smoke, looking back over his shoulder to make sure the job was done.

‘Major, sir, can you read me?’

Lenny made a sssssssssh sound, his tongue clicking as he spoke once more into the radio.

‘Coming home, sir. Lockhart is coming home.’

To anyone else passing by False River, and looking down towards the last row of stilted houses that ran down one edge of Roseville, each with their own rickety wooden jetty stepping out into the water, if they happened to spot him there, hidden under the sweep of the willow, by the bald cypress trees that edged the riverbanks, they would have seen a little olive-skinned boy of maybe nine, possibly ten years old, wearing a US Air Force pilot’s cap set atop of a mess of white-blond curls (¡Qué chica eres! Arturo had told him once, pulling at his hair), peeking out from inside a large cardboard box stamped Product of Plaquemines Parish on the side.

And if they didn’t see Lenny, they would most likely hear him, for he was full of laughter.

Some children, they just shine, don’t they? No matter what.

It didn’t seem to bother Lenny that he was out by the river on his own, though, on account of it being a Tuesday morning he really ought to have been at school. They would be wondering where he’d got to – right about now. Lenny gave it a moment’s thought. He used to like Miss Avery’s class. Now just even thinking about it made the red devil rise in him. Then he thought of his daddy, the sad-eyed look he had given Lenny that morning.

If you missed the bus, it was a walk of almost an hour, bit less if you went by the riverside and were happy to cross at the Point and didn’t mind getting a bit wet, the old swing rope bridge dipping down further each year into the brackish water as it did. He could do that. He considered his options, rubbing the strap of his watch – a frayed strap on a watch that his mother had given him one Christmas.

‘So as you can tell what time it is,’ she said, smiling at him, helping him loop it around his skinny wrist, the strap hanging loose, not tight to the skin. He had felt it was a momentous gift. He waited for her to teach him how it worked, but she never did.

He’d held on to it all the same, and he’d asked Miss Julie who lived next door if she could help him understand how it worked. Julie Betterdine Valéry was as old as the ancient bald cypress trees.

‘Miss Julie’s like 150 years old,’ said Arturo (Lenny’s best friend and one-time neighbour three doors along). ‘And she stinks of pee.’

Arturo wrinkled up his nose and passed on calling with Miss Julie, but Lenny liked her. She would always lean over the fence, calling out in her rattlesnake voice, ‘Bonjour Léonard, and how are you today?’ when he was out playing next to his mama who knelt in the garden, secateurs in hand, cutting back her own blooms – big blowsy pink and red roses, with a scent and colours to compete with the beautiful white magnolias that threatened to overtake Miss Julie’s back yard.

The old lady suffered with arthritis in her bones – early in the day being her worst time. Then, shuffling, all bent over, it could take her half the morning to get from her porch steps down to the fence, so Lenny would be patient and keep an eye on her progress as she worked her way across, slow and careful not to trip.

‘Falling’s easy,’ she’d say, ‘it’s the getting up that’s so damn hard.’

But she didn’t like charity, not even the good-mannered sort, and so Lenny would just wait it out until she was there, leaning on the fence, and he’d bring her a cold lemonade from the ice-box if Mari-Rose didn’t notice (she was not the sociable type of mother and you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her secateurs, just in case). Besides, she didn’t like Miss Julie much, calling her ‘a world-class meddler’ and rolling her eyes from the kitchen window as Lenny would recite chapter and verse to old Julie Valéry on how school was going, what the state of the world was, or discuss the latest advances in space travel, or how his dad might be home by Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or maybe summer, and telling her how his mama would cry at night – but that was a secret. Lenny would keep one eye on Mari-Rose in the kitchen, the other on Miss Julie whose breathing was raspy, and whose hands, with their blue veiny rivers and their splattered sunspots, would rest gently on Lenny’s hand as she’d say, ‘Merci Léonard – most refreshing, indeed.’

She’d tip her head to the side a little, and Lenny would feel a warm, happy feeling in the pit of his belly.

He didn’t have any actual grandparents of his own on account of Jim’s father having died years before and Jim’s mother being lost to painkillers in the Californian sunshine some years after, and his mama never spoke of her parents – like she’d come into the world without and it was better not to ask. Lenny liked to imagine Miss Julie was family, and if you saw them sitting together on the steps, their hair touching, smiles wide open to the world, the same lilt to their voices, you’d believe it was true. So, Lenny chose to ignore Arturo, who jeered at him for wasting time sucking up to ‘that crazy old witch’.

Arturo was oftentimes of the same school of kindness as Mari-Rose. His dad was an alcoholic who beat his mother, so all Arturo knew of human kindness started from there. Lenny always felt this about him. Even on the day that Arturo beat him black and blue and kicked him in the gut, leaving him lying in the wet grass by the lake, saying, ‘Just in case you thought we were still friends,’ before turning on his heel, with Lenny wondering, What the heck was that for? But he didn’t bear a grudge. Lenny reckoned life had made Arturo all kinds of messed up and God had made Lenny kind and forgiving like that. It was all a matter of luck.

‘You need to wear it the other way around.’

Miss Julie had taken the watch off his wrist and put it back on carefully, tightening it for him.

‘See sha, this here’s the long hand – that counts minutes. The short one, that’s for the hour. Let’s start with that, see how you get on.’

And she would test him, with both of them sitting in the sun on their respective back-yard steps, shouting out across the fence. Miss Julie’s voice, crackling, ‘Léonard, what time is it now?’

Lenny would scrunch up his nose and squint at the lines on the watch face, and give it his best shot, then she’d get him to describe what he saw, and five minutes later she’d ask him again, and again until they tired of shouting at one another over the fence, and so that – over that particular summer when he was almost seven – was how Lenny learnt how to tell the time, while Mari-Rose spent her time indoors on the telephone to the bank, her voice raised, telling them that next month would be time enough to pay.

Time enough. Lenny often thought of his mother saying that, even though the bank didn’t call any more.

Now Lenny was almost ten, and the watch didn’t work properly. The glass had cracked on the day Arturo beat him up. Miss Julie had given him tape to hold it all together – as a temporary measure – and he’d gotten used to the new arrangement.

Lenny felt his stomach rumble. It was long gone midday and he was still sitting in the damp orange box, which now was a rocket ready for take-off, due for a voyage to Mars. He had been training for this mission for years.

It’s not easy to become an astronaut. Not just anyone can do it. For a start, you need to be super-fit.

Lenny worked out every morning in the park – just like he’d watched his daddy do – swinging across the bars, doing press-ups in the dirt, running around the curve of the lake, once, twice, doing star jumps and then raising his knees high, running hard on the spot before collapsing down onto the soft embrace of the grass. Lenny remembered the way Jim would wink at him afterwards, to show he was okay, that he was strong and fine, even though Lenny could make out the thud of his heart through his vest. That was long ago, before Jim had left to ‘go fly planes, help some folk needing help’, but Lenny still remembered and now he trained too – vital for a future astronaut or a fighter pilot. Jim had warned him, ‘G-force messes with your body Lenny, you’ve got to be ready for it.’

Then apart from the physical training, you needed to obviously know a lot about space and the universe. For this element of his preparation, Lenny spent many hours hunched over the table in the corner of Roseville Library – a little library full in the main of chunky romance novels, a small selection of dictionaries, some shelves of fiction, kids’ books, cookery books, a big true-crime section (for everyone loves others’ misfortune), and a smaller section still with atlases and an encyclopaedia and a book about space that was like the Bible if you were training to be an astronaut. He supplemented this intensive learning with watching endless reruns of Star Wars and Star Trek over at Arturo’s house (that was before the great ‘falling out’ – as Miss Julie sadly termed it). So, all in all, Lenny felt pretty much prepared for space travel.

‘Ten, nine, eight,’ he intoned, frowning, his hands cupping his mouth, rubbing them together for warmth as the breeze off the water came sharper now, the sun slanting lower in the sky.

Lenny looked down at his imagined space suit. Whenever he put it on, he felt like he was protected a bit, or cut off a bit (which was almost the same thing), from the world. It got in the way, though, sometimes. Like if he needed to take a leak – that was hard in space.

Boy, do we take gravity for granted, he thought. Lenny was all about the detail. You get the detail right and then things just fall into place and look after themselves, that’s what he felt.

‘Seven, six, five …’

Going to space was pretty complicated really because Lenny had to switch between being in the control tower – the controller was a man he imagined of say thirty-five years old, with a long, foxy face and orange eyebrows – and being Lenny Lockhart, astronaut and space explorer, although that part was easier because he was just playing himself. Some days, though, he played that different ways – like some days he would be really courageous, a no-fear kind of a guy, with some swagger and bounce in his space suit. Other days he would be more mysterious, a kind of sadness behind the glass of his helmet, like he was leaving behind loved ones who would miss him, and he knew this, but we needed someone to go, and Lenny was our guy. Right?

‘Four, three, two …’

‘Léonard sha, you want some lunch? Jambalaya?’

Miss Julie was standing near the bottom of her garden, by the gap in the fence at the back under the magnolias, peering through.

‘Food’s getting lonely on the stove. I’ve made far too much again.’

She sighed.

‘Be a good boy, help me out?’

Lenny thought about it for a moment: the hot chicken slipping down his throat, the smell of the meat, peppers, tomatoes and the dollop of gravy she would add in. Space would have to wait.

He clambered out of the box and brought it along with him, flinging it over the fence onto the grass as he slipped through the gap down onto the lawn beside her.

‘Well, seeing as you need my help, Miss Julie, I suppose it’s okay. But I’ll cut the lawn for you this week, tidy it up?’ He offered this gesture in return.

She nodded, her lips pursed in pain in a solid line, the lipstick bleeding deep pink into the creases around her mouth. She had once been a great beauty, second-place runner-up in the Queen of False River beauty pageant one year (could have got first place but she wouldn’t let the judge feel her up and so she slipped in the rankings – woman has to have some self-respect, she told herself afterwards and she knew she’d been prettier than second place, though of course beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and true beauty, well that’s something you can only see with the heart, and that judge was plain short-sighted). Miss Julie knew all this. She’d lived a long time and knew many things by now, so she was pleased Lenny offered to help – though the lawn was starting to look a little bald given how frequently he would mow it. Still, what did grass matter in the greater scheme of things?

Lenny helped her make her way back inside. It took them a good long while for her hips had seized up with all the standing around, but that gave them time to gently navigate around the red-ant trail that criss-crossed east on the garden path, and allowed time to listen to the tapping of a woodpecker that liked to perch on the oak tree by the side of the house, and would keep Miss Julie company often.

‘That’s Frederik,’ she said to Lenny, in a bit of a rasping whisper like it was a secret that she had actual names for birds and frogs and things.

‘I know, Miss Julie. You told me before. He’s a red-bellied woodpecker. That right?’

‘Good work Léonard,’ she said, ‘fine memory for the detail, that’s a real gift, hold on to that now!’

Inside her house in the winter months was cool and damp, when the impossible heat of the summer had ebbed away. Miss Julie didn’t believe in indoor heating. No call for it, climate being what it was most of the year. Then there was the cost of having it, and really if you put on an extra cardigan and thick winter socks on those odd cold days and nights when the damp would sink into your bones, you might not look so stylish, but you didn’t shiver so much and wasn’t that the point really. Miss Julie felt strangely content that she didn’t hand over more money for things when it wasn’t entirely necessary to do so. Instead, she had a glass jar with a metal screw-top lid on the kitchen countertop and she’d save her spare bills in there, gathering them up for rainy days.

‘No point in trusting the bank to mind it for me,’ she’d say, ‘bunch of crooks these days. Why, I’d just be giving it away and it doing no good in the world.’

Lenny’s eyes landed on the dusty glass jar. There was a lot of money in it now – mainly bills, a few coins at the very bottom. He imagined all the things he could buy with a treasure hoard like that. What riches.

The kitchen was warmer than the rest of the house, the stove having been on to slow-cook the jambalaya. Lenny set up the table the way Miss Julie had shown him. Many years ago, she’d worked in a grand hotel over in New Orleans and they had been very particular about the placement of cutlery and the polish to every glass. Miss Julie passed on these preferences to Lenny and he was respectful of the old lady’s wishes. Besides, sitting down to eat a meal was such a novelty these days that he liked to take his time over it, liked to make the table pretty too, and he’d wash his hands in the small outhouse to the side of the kitchen, using plenty of hot water and the bar of lavender soap she left out for him, along with a small, fluffy towel that had Clean hands, closer to God stitched on the side of it. Then, once cleaned up properly (sometimes even wetting behind his ears and giving his face a splash) he would slide onto the seat opposite her and help serve up lunch.

‘This here is my own recipe, hope you like it.’

She spooned brown gravy onto his empty plate, then scooped out the jambalaya, heaping it up on the boy’s plate.

‘Can’t beat home cooking with mystery ingredients,’ she smiled.

Lenny laughed. Miss Julie wasn’t big on following the rules.

‘I added in … can you guess what?’

Lenny breathed in the warm smell of the dish, letting the hot, sweet juices marinate in his senses.

‘Sugar and cinnamon?’

‘That’s right, and a slug of brandy.’

She giggled, her hand over her lips.

‘Don’t worry, the alcohol will have burnt off.’

In fact, the pot had dried out quite a bit, as they had taken a long time to make their way indoors, but Lenny just turned over the burnt rice, covering it in the gravy and crunched through, making appreciative num num sounds as he chewed, savouring the warmth and taste of the food. He no longer shivered, letting go of the chill that had caught hold of him in the night out in the bayou.

She didn’t ask him if he shouldn’t really be at school and Lenny, having clean forgotten about his earlier plan to walk the distance, let it go from his mind.

‘So, where did you travel to this morning, Léonard?’ Miss Julie asked him, her expression serious, her eyes sparkling in a face creased with years of laughter and tears (for one often accompanies the other, she found).

‘I was in the desert, fighting enemy combatants,’ he replied, quite solemn and thoughtful, before scooping up more food from the pot to fill the space he had just cleared on his plate.

Each time he would empty a small piece of plate, he would fill it again, hoping she didn’t think him greedy. The ache in his stomach had dulled somewhat and he felt the warmth of the meat slip down his throat, and the gravy juice sticky on his lips.

‘And what was the outcome?’ She leaned forward, her bony elbows on the tablecloth, keen to hear what he had to tell her.

‘Well, it was a fierce battle of wills, but I brought them down in the end, though I’d not much help. They left me to it, you know.’

She nodded.

‘And did the other fighters die?’ Miss Julie never shied away from the tough questions.

Lenny looked down at the flowery lace tablecloth under which he hid his dirty jeans, marked as they were with soil and grass stains.

‘They did.’

‘I see. And how do you feel about that?’

Her question surprised Lenny, but he thought about it.

‘Sad, I guess. Happy too. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Oh, murder always is,’ she said, disapproving. Miss Julie was very much a pacifist.

‘It was either them or me.’ Lenny looked up at her, defiant.

‘Well, when you put it like that, it’s more a matter of self-defence, I suppose.’

She looked thoughtful. Miss Julie’s husband, Stanley, had been in the Navy. She had last seen him, one bright spring day, 1952, not long after they’d married when he’d left for war, smart in his uniform, headed to Korea … He had looked very handsome, she thought, still optimistic, still certain. He had never come back – though she never got a letter, she said, and so she remained hopeful that one day he might just walk back into the house and they’d pick up again like before, though as the years passed this got harder to keep a hold of, love and memory both being slippery to the touch.

She kept a photograph of him in uniform on the hall table and Lenny liked to go talk to him sometimes after lunch, and tell him, ‘Stanley, it’s about time you came home now. Miss Julie is missing you.’

He would touch the glass as if stroking Stanley’s face and the sight of it always made Miss Julie tear up a little, not that she’d let Lenny see that.

‘You ever cooked Jamaican food?’ Lenny asked.

‘What food?’

‘Jamaican?’

‘Can’t say as I have, matter of fact.’

‘Just, they have a new book at the library – looks kind of tasty.’

Lenny blushed at the audacity of the suggestion, but Miss Julie kept a steady hand to the conversation.

‘Well, that sounds adventurous. Jamaican, you say? And what style of thing they like to eat?’

‘Um, mainly saltfish, fried dumplings, roasted breadfruit and I saw something called callaloo fritters, sounded kind of interesting.’

‘That so?’

Lenny nodded, worried now he had offended her cooking.

‘Why don’t you take my library card, next time you go, pick it up if it’s there. You’ll have to help me with ingredients and whatnot – can’t be carrying heavy bags, can I?’

Lenny laughed, that deep belly laugh he had when happiest.

‘You can help me cook. Always said a man should be able to cook his own food, not be reliant on a woman doing it.’

Lenny thought of his mama and his laughter dried up. Miss Julie didn’t seem to notice.

‘You want some pecan pie and ice-cream, for afters?’

Lenny nodded, lifting the empty plates to the sink, helping her tidy everything away and then they sat with the bowls and big spoons, a blast of heat coming from the stove as she opened the door again to lift out the pie dish.

Miss Julie’s house was the same as Lenny’s house. That’s to say, both were made in the same design and layout, the same strip of lawn to the fence and path and jetty edging the river at the bottom, the same kitchen windows looking out over the back yard, the fronts looking up towards Main Street. Inside they were entirely different. Miss Julie was keen on flowery wallpaper, the flock kind that you can run your fingers over, and it feels bumpy to the touch. She liked net curtains too, and silk cushions in pastel colours – peach and pink and baby blue. It was not to Lenny’s taste, but then it was not his home.

He pushed back his chair, groaning with a full belly, feeling sated and warm and happy, and he did not want to leave.

‘Can I help clear away?’ He lifted the last remaining dirty dishes and bowls to the sink and she let him, grateful not to have to do it for the sink was a little high these days for her to reach into and she preferred a sink-stopper to save the water from running out.

‘People are so wasteful these days,’ she’d say, showing Lenny how she liked everything washed and rinsed and left to ‘air dry’ as she called it.

In the early evening, she would have a bit of a sleep, just sitting up in her chair in front of the TV by the window, a crocheted blanket across her knees. Her niece, Annabelle, had once brought her a gift of one of those soft towelling all-in-one contraptions to wear, like they advertise on television and in the backs of magazines, but it had looked so ridiculous Miss Julie had made her take it straight back home with her.

‘Colder winters up where you are,’ she said to the girl, ‘be much more use to you than me. Don’t worry. It’s the thought that God sees – he sees your kindness, go on now, take it with you.’

The girl had smiled at her, uncertain, before packing it back up in the plastic it had come in, and putting it back in the car, then kissing the woman goodbye, leaving her alone once more, muttering something about how she should spend the holidays with them – Miss Julie just waving her away.

‘There’s no blanket can stop you from feeling lonely,’ she had sighed to Lenny, who liked the sound of the gift and wished she’d held on to it.

The girl didn’t come back and Miss Julie never missed the gift nor the visitor.

‘Some folk just passin’ through, ain’t got what it takes!’

She’d chuckled and switched on the news, which she liked to hear low in the background as she slept.

Lenny tucked the old crocheted blanket around her.

‘Who we writing to today, Miss Julie?’

She raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh, you want to help with that?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, okay then. Today it’s the turn of Belly Rae’s Grill …’

‘What’s the issue?’

Lenny chewed the end of the pen, the blue ink squirting into the corners of his mouth and staining his fingertips.

But no answer came for she was already fast asleep in the chair, the blanket hopped up around her.

Lenny settled down with the newspaper to read up on what was happening in the world while the old lady slept, her head tipped back against the headrest, her mouth open, a gentle rhythmic snoring soon filling the room.

To the side, on a low wicker coffee table sat a stack of envelopes ready to go in the mail. She would ask Lenny, usually once a week, to send them off.

‘Small acts of protest, love letters to our better angels,’ she called them, this bunch of letters complaining about poor customer service, or environmental ills and unseen injustices, often calling for recompense – usually financial. Miss Julie was, in addition to being financially astute, well read and widely read, and she watched more than one channel of news, so she had a range of views on the state of the world and opinions on what was to be done about it.

Lenny had really learnt how to write with her, how to connect the letters up and keep them all in a straight line, practising as she dictated to him, for her own hands had the shakes and most days now if she picked up a pen, the end result, she said, was more like ‘One of those heart-monitor machines in the hospital in the middle of heart failure.’ Miss Julie laughed for there was nothing else she could do about it.

Outside the air had grown cooler, the day’s dust settling on the golden spines of autumn colour. The light had drained from the sky, vivid pinks and oranges being sucked back into the swamp, so Lenny pulled across the net curtains and went to heat up some milk for her on the stove. She had taught him how to light it, and balancing on a chair he could reach up and get cups down, and the milk from the ice-box, and pour a little into a pan, keeping an eye on it and the heat turned down low so that it didn’t bubble. His mama had never let him near the stove at home, but Miss Julie thought him sensible enough.

‘There’s adults not wise enough to use such things,’ she’d sigh, ‘but Léonard you’ll be fine, just be safe!’

He nodded and felt grown-up and trusted and helpful, all at once.

On the television, he watched the news. Helicopters flying over a dusty ochre landscape, buildings with their sides blown out, smiling children, sad children, a soldier smoking a cigarette in the background, the reporter wearing a bullet-proof jacket and talking earnestly into camera, impossible to tell if the words were the first or second take. Miss Julie preferred the volume down low as she rested and so Lenny sat close to make out what was being said. His hand reached up to the screen and traced the glass. He was looking as if behind the soldier. He was looking for something.

Today Miss Julie didn’t wake up at her usual time and he let the milk go cold on the small wicker table beside her and the stack of letters. He would soon have to leave – his father would be looking for him, wanting to hear about his day. Lenny looked at the clock on the hall table next to Stanley. Nearly seven o’clock already. If she didn’t wake up soon, he’d have to leave without writing the letters and she’d be annoyed at him. Miss Julie could get plenty scratchy. Lenny wondered about what to do. Then he decided to risk it and shook her gently on the shoulder.

‘Miss Julie? You still want to write those letters today? Miss Julie?’

The old lady opened her eyes and looked at the little boy a moment, as if unsure who he was, then her face cleared again. ‘Oh Léonard, sha, you made my milk. You are a treasure.’

He blushed, not used to being fussed over.

‘Those letters will keep until tomorrow, not much that can’t wait a day or two, right? You’ll come see me then? Here, take my library card with you. Why don’t you bring me that Jamaican cookery book if it’s still there? We can have a look at it together.’

She sat up, looking at the clock.

‘There’s an old sweater of Stanley’s in the cupboard by the stairs, a navy blue one. Full of moth holes, I’m afraid, but otherwise cosy and clean. I took it out for you – noticed you forgot yours today, and it’s getting cold, nights out. Take it, if you like?’

She looked at the boy who in turn stared at the swirl of carpet on the floor of the front room, his cheeks reddening, before saying, ‘Okay, if you looked it out special. And I’ll bring it back.’

‘There’s a good boy. You can tell your father I said it’s okay to keep it …’

Her voice tapered off, her eyes hovering on the screen now, her mind caught by the newscaster’s voice.

Lenny opened the hall cupboard. A dusty golf bag, then a couple of fishing jackets and a solitary orange ski jacket (bought long ago optimistically in a sale, back when she had dreamed of great adventures further afield with Stanley, all the places they would travel to when he would return, kept just in case, but never worn) all fell down on top of him before he found the navy sweater hanging on a hook to the back. It was a warm and cosy sweater, and he pulled it on over his denim jacket, tight up around his ears and cheeks to cut out the bite of the breeze down by the river.

‘Thanks Stanley,’ he said, saluting the absent husband.

‘Thanking you, Miss Julie, see you tomorrow.’

‘Bless you, Léonard, good to have your help.’

She always said this – even on the days when he didn’t feel like he had been any help at all, even then she thanked him and it made him feel good about the day, and it made the night-time easier to manage.

Chapter Three

Ubari Sand Sea, Libya, 2011

The pilot awoke in the tent a few weeks later. As he opened his eyes, several faces stared back at him and, at the front, sat the young boy who had shaded him from the sun and carried him here on his camel. The voices spoke, a mix of Arabic and another language he did not recognise.

He was alive, but who he was, was lost to him.

At first, the edges of the day blurred around him, faces coming and going, a strong smell that he grew to realise was his own, shame rising in him, trying to turn away to face the goatskin canvas behind him. He could not move.

A woman leant over him, her dark eyes warning him to stay still.

He looked down and saw his arm and shoulder were wrapped and pinned against his side. From the corner of the goatskin tent, a group of women and girls giggled. He tried to sit up but the hollowness in his chest had him flat against the mat on which they had laid him.

‘Where am I?’ The words, in faltering Arabic, came to him from somewhere he could not remember.

‘Safe.’ The boy smiled. He leaned towards him, offering water. The man’s lips were dry and cracked. He let the water spill down his chin, swallowing in sips, grateful that the boy held the flask steady for him, helped him raise himself up enough to drink.

The boy gesticulated for him – mimicking a sleeping man (snoring, more laughter followed from the far side of the tent), hobbled (to show the damaged leg) and a hand to his head, wincing in pretend pain.

‘Shukran.’

This feeble thanks was all the man could offer as the darkness claimed him once more, his head hurting behind his eyes as if he had been dropped from a great height, as if the days and nights lost to him waited there behind his eyelids, and he held to them, weighed down and dragged along by them.

In his dreams, he saw the world below; the desert stretching out for miles, the dunes echoing back into the pale pinks of the sky. He felt the thrust, acceleration, G-force, pressure on his abdomen and legs, the jet turning upside down, his mask pressing upon his skin as he shot through the sky. Free. Then the engine catching, something amiss as he had struggled to right the jet, and a feeling of the earth falling away from him. Panic. Just for a second, then he pulled her round and accelerated again – until the blues of the sea in the distance came into view, except it wasn’t the sea, it was the sky and the clouds above as he broke through. Free once more.

Below he left behind a dusty clutch of sandstone dwellings, blackened and smoking now in the heat of the day, flames rising into the sky. He did not look back. Fire-and-forget.

The boy let him cry out in his sleep and went outside to play. The caravan of tents was hidden in a wadi, in a dip near a large oasis, date palms fringing the water where gazelles and jackals would come to drink, and lizards darted between the rocks.

This was a place they liked to stop, some even arguing they should remain throughout the year, there where the water and shade was plentiful and yet it was far from the towns and cities that skirted the borders of the country. Beyond the wadi