Читать книгу Marked For Life - Emelie Schepp - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

THE SEA WAS ROUGH, which meant that the stench got even worse in the confined space. The seven-year-old girl sat in the corner. She pulled at her mama’s skirt and put it over her mouth. She imagined that she was at home in her bed, or rocking in a cradle when the ship rolled in the waves.

The girl breathed in and out with shallow breaths. Every time she exhaled, the cloth would lift above her mouth. Every time she inhaled, it would cover her lips. She tried to breathe harder and harder to keep the cloth off her face. Then one time she blew so hard it flew off and vanished.

She felt for it with her hand. In the dim light she instead caught sight of her toy mirror on the floor. It was pink, with a butterfly on it and a big crack in the glass. She had found it in a bag of rubbish that somebody had thrown onto the street. Now she picked it up and held it in front of her face, pushed away a strand of hair from her forehead and inspected her dark tangled hair, her big eyes and long eyelashes.

Somebody coughed violently in the space, and the girl gave a start. She tried to see who it was, but it was difficult to distinguish people’s faces in the dark.

She wondered when they would arrive, but she didn’t dare ask again. Papa had hushed her when she had asked the last time how long they would have to sit in this stupid iron box. Now Mama coughed too. It was hard to breathe, it really was. A lot of people had to share the little oxygen inside. The girl let her hand wander along the steel wall. Then she felt for the soft cloth from her mama’s skirt and pulled it over her nose.

The floor was hard, and she straightened her back and changed position before continuing to run her hand along the steel wall. She stretched out her index and middle fingers and let them gallop back and forth along the wall and down to the floor. Mama always used to laugh when she did that at home and say that she must have given birth to a horse girl.

At home, in the shed in La Pintana, the girl had built a toy stable under the kitchen table and pretended her doll was a horse. The last three birthdays, she had wished for a real pony of her own. She knew that she wouldn’t get one. She rarely got any presents, even for her birthday. They could hardly afford food even, Papa had told her. Anyway, the girl dreamed of a pony of her own that she could ride to school. It would be fast, just as fast as her fingers that now galloped back up the wall.

Mama didn’t laugh this time. She was probably too tired, the girl thought, and looked up at her mother’s face.

Oh, how much longer would it actually take? Stupid, stupid journey! It wasn’t supposed to be such a long trip. Papa had said when they filled the plastic bags with clothes that they were going on an adventure, a big adventure. They would travel by boat for a while to a new home. And she would make lots of new friends. It would be fun.

Some of her friends were traveling with them. Danilo and Ester. She liked Danilo; he was nice, but not Ester. She could be a little nasty. She would tease, and that sort of thing. There were a couple of other children on the same journey too, but she didn’t know them; she had never even seen them before. They didn’t like all being in a boat. Not the youngest one at any rate, the baby, she was crying all the time. But now she’d gone quiet.

The girl galloped her fingers back and forth again. Then she stretched to one side to reach up even higher, then down even lower. When her fingers reached all the way into the corner, she felt something sticking out. She became curious and screwed her eyes up in the dark to see what it was. A metal plate. She strained forward to try and study the little silver plate that was screwed into the wall. She saw some letters on it and she tried to make out what they said. V... P... Then there was a letter she didn’t recognize.

“Mama?” she whispered. “What letter is this?” She crossed her two fingers to show her.

“X,” her mother whispered back. “An X.”

X, the girl thought, V, P, X, O. And then some numbers. She counted six of them. There were six numbers.