Neville the Less Read online

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  Cookie Camp, the property one step further north, which touched only a pin-point corner of Home Country, had no brighter asset than that friendly dilapidated fence. Aside from it, the Camp’s defining feature was utter drabness. The house was a vaguely in-between-ish yellow-brown colour and the yard was no better, somehow contriving to have virtually no greenery at all . . . ever . . . at any time of the year. Even the family that lived there seemed slightly out of focus, their spectacularly earnest austerity having banished every colour but that of dust from their lives.

  The ‘Cookie’ of Cookie Camp was Cookie Hughes, Neville’s friend, whose simple earnestness had come, by various means, to intrigue Neville, as had that of his young brother, Robert, and even that of his parents, the dour ‘Mister and Missus’ of Cookie Camp. It wasn’t that any of them seemed sad; only constantly vigilant - alert to the lurking-ness of something whose name must always be in mind lest it take offense and desert them forever.

  Mister Shoomba, whose wisdom burned brightly concerning all things, both within the neighbourhood and in the far beyond, had explained it to Neville.

  “Them Hughes’s,” he’d whispered, as though it should explain all, “they’re born-agains!”

  On hearing of this shocking possibility - that of being ‘born again’ - Neville had immediately asked how such a thing could come about, and that too Mister Shoomba had known.

  “Well first of all, ye gotta want it!” he’d winked. “Real bad! Which not everyone does, see; ‘cause it all gets to be very tryin’ on folks, this livin’ business. But if you do want it then, when ye die, ye get someone to bury ye with yer arse stickin’ outta the ground, see? Just yer arse!” That story had been interrupted by Missus Shoomba’s loudly chirruped ‘Ahem!’ from somewhere amidst the collection of flotsam under their house, and Mister S’ had quickly corrected himself.

  “Oh no! ‘At’s right! ‘At’s them Madagascar Azbite’s do that! Heard o’ them? Great sailors, them! ‘At’s their way o’ makin’ sure the wind keeps blowin’, that is! Very strange ‘n’ exotic folks, them Azbites. All them Madagas-carts, in fact! Very strange. No, the Born-agains . . . lemme see. The story there, as I recall is, ye wanna be one of ‘em, ye gotta . . . !“ He’d glanced over his shoulder and found himself under the careful, if still somewhat distant scrutiny of Missus Shoomba. In barely more than a whisper, he’d dashed out, “Ye gotta find the Great Tiggywand, mate! An’ tell ‘im all the bad things ye done! ‘N’ say yer very sorry ‘n’ ud like to try again, see? Then, if he decides yer fair dinkum, ‘e might give ye a do-over - let ye come back as sump’m else.”

  “What’s a Great Tiggywand, Mister Shoomba?” he asked, correctly sensing yet another addition to the invisible world.

  “Sshhh!” Finger across lips. “’S a spirit, mate. Cantankerous as all get-out. Never know what he’s up to; what he’ll do to ye once he gets ye in his sights. So ye don’ wanna be usin’ ‘is name too loud ‘n’ callin’ ‘im up! Not ‘less ye know egzackly what yer doin’. Anyways, ye don’ wanna be born again, take my word. Second life got all the fun sucked out’ve it see? Lookit them Hughes’s! Like eggs without yolks! Nothin’ there to break the monoto-me.”

  Neville had wanted to ask more but Mister Shoomba had shooed him away, turning instead to Missus Shoomba and, before beetling off into the house, squeaking something about the sadness of life without a yolk. For his part, Neville had felt the instant need to recite ‘Soon’s warding verse ten times in a row: La-ila-ilala-Muhammad-rasil-i-Allah. And then he had taken his questions to Cookie who, perhaps as a result of his own wariness of the Great Tiggywand, had declared outright ignorance of the process.

  Over time, though, Neville’s persistence had won out and Cookie had confessed that, though he didn’t know how or why he’d been changed to his present form, he had once, in a former life, been a Whistling Kite. He even took, whenever one of the birds was spotted in the distant sky, to reminiscing about flight.

  “I ‘member, when yer a kite, ye can see a million kilometres! See that speck up there? I could count the hairs on yer head from up there.”

  “Why would you want to count my hair?”

  “I wouldn’t. But I’m just sayin’, if I wanted to I could, that’s all. An’ that’s the reason you can’t shoot a kite too; ‘cause they can see if you got a gun. People, you could sneak up on and shoot, but not a kite. Even if you try to hide it, a kite can see the look in your eye.”

  Sometimes, when one of the birds swooped low over the Rahimi’s chicken yard, Cookie was able to whistle it away.

  “Just tellin’ ‘im,” he’d say, “that them chickens ‘re off limits.”

  When Neville asked what Robert had been before he was born again, Robert, whose mouth always hung open because he couldn’t breathe through his nose, had shrugged his shoulders and whispered, “Doe doe.”

  “Loaf o’ bread,” Cookie had declared. “That’s what he was. ‘Til someone made him into a sandwich an’ ate him.”

  “Was dot!”

  “Was too! Just a dumb ol’ jelly sandwich.”

  What the elder Hughes’s had been was a secret that Cookie would not share, though Afsoon whispered to Neville that she’d once, accidentally in a dream, found herself inside Missus Hughes’s brain. Missus Hughes, she said, had been a famous actress but had used all her acting ability and hadn’t brought enough into this life even to act happy, which anyone could see she wasn’t. All Neville knew about them was that they had lots of pictures of sad people in their dingy little house and at the drop of a hat they’d drag you into a prayer. He was, in the end, a little sad for them since, judging by their solemn outlooks and the run-down state of Cookie Camp, the fear of the Great Tiggywand had them pretty well cornered.