Kathmandu

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CHAPTER ONE

The trail led out of the trees. Falling ahead of them, green terraces descending to the valley floor; in the distance, a white-topped line of the Himalayas. The air fresh, so clear. The silken, soothing sound of a brook. Jo watched her mother take a deep breath and stretch – to soak up the scene and make it a part of her for always.

This is so beautiful, she said. I never want to forget... Then, Oh.

She fell – crumpled gently; a hand reaching, grasping at air. What was that whistling noise? The slow-motion fall of her mother.

Mum? Mum? Are you OK?

A giant hand grabbed Jo’s shoulder; threw her hard to the ground. Her head hit a rock. Dimly, she was aware of the violence of her fall; another blow to her leg.

While the blood meets the air and does its pre-programmed best to seal the flow from Jo’s body. While the mangled and ripped cells in her mother’s brain shut themselves down …

As a day, it had started so well.

A marriage breaks up. Mother and daughter go away to spend some time together. Totally logical, right? Ally, Jo's Mum, was an adventurous kind of person, and nobody was surprised that they chose the beautiful wildness of Nepal. Everyone told them that the Maoist terrorists were not interested in tourists, and the normal trails weren’t touched by the minor troubles. Ally, of course, was not a woman to stick with a group on the normal trails. As soon as they arrived in Nepal, she made special arrangements with the organisers.

We just need to hire someone local so we can explore safely on our own, she said – anything rather than follow the same old trail as everyone else.

It had worked really well. The guide they found was very happy to take them back to the area he came from - the west of the country, mostly well away from the trekking tourists. Ally had a thing about being a traveller, not a tourist. Jo knew she was fooling herself a bit, but she certainly had a lot more fun on her holidays than most kids.

Frederick (her year's smartarse) use to chant at her: I'm an explorer; you are a traveller; they are tourists... But he, along with most of her friends, wished he'd been to the places Jo had seen.

What they didn't know (and Jo found out weeks after Ally was killed) was that the guide they'd chosen wasn’t exactly popular in his home area. That was the reason he'd come to Kathmandu. Of course, he wasn't going to say no to a rich westerner offering him money, was he? Like a lot of people, he said yes, and reckoned on sorting out any problems later.

Ally loved the idea of going where no tourists had ever been. She loved trying to make friends with people she’d never normally meet. She loved being different. Except now she was the same as millions of others over millions of years. She was dead. Killed for no reason worth thinking twice about.

CHAPTER TWO

Jo wandered between worlds. She had no idea of time. She walked in a fog through which she dimly discerned shapes, felt hands, heard voices. Then she fell once more into darkness. Sometimes pain sparked sharp lights across her world. Or burnt in droning underscore to her wandering consciousness.

Once quite clearly she saw a child come to wipe her face with a cool cloth. She saw that she lay in a house - a boarded ceiling, light from a glassless window. The child wore a bright sari and beads that rattled faintly in front of her face.

Jo tried to speak, but no sound came out. She tried to reach out to stroke the smiling face of the child. But her arms wouldn't answer her requests. Then that world, too, was gone.

Jojo her mother's voice. Jo stood on the mountain top, watching the sparkling silver thread of the little river in the valley below her. She turned around to see her mother's smile. Jojo, she said again. Jo laughed aloud. So it was all a horrible dream. Everything was OK. They’ll be going home together as soon as ...

A stone clicked behind Jo, and she turned round. Nothing there. She turned back, and it was night. She heard a single mosquito in the room. Its thin whine stopped, started up again, stopped.

Slowly, a grey patch in the dark took the shape of a window. Jo realised with a shock that she was waking at last - waking to a real world. She was going to have to handle real life again.

Her body ached. It was a great effort to move anything more than her eyes, but she found that if she tried she tried hard enough she could wriggle around a bit – fairly uselessly, but at least she wasn’t paralysed.

Everything was new. What was this place? A bare box, the rising sun gradually lifting the black to grey. A hanging in front of a window with no glass. No light bulb. The sound of running water outside. Wind in grass? Trees? Was she imprisoned somewhere? Where was she? Tired again by too much thinking, she closed her eyes and dozed a little more.

She woke again to someone wiping her face with a cool, damp, cloth. She opened her eyes to see an expression of shock on the face of the girl she remembered from the Bad Time. The shock spread to a broad smile of delight. Excitedly she ran from the room - Jo heard the thumping of bare feet on floorboards. Every sound was sharp and clear. As if someone had turned the volume of the world up too high.

An older woman knelt beside her, peering at her and asking questions, but Jo understood not a single word. The woman and the girl talked excitedly to each other. The girl ran out again.

Someone was lifting her shoulders and feeding her spoons of some kind of vegetably soupy kind of thing. Jo recognised the taste, but couldn’t remember what it was called. She dozed again.

Several times during the day she woke. She saw smiling at faces, all smiling excitedly back. Some of her worries began to fade. They didn’t look like the kind of people who would hold her prisoner. But she wished she could move properly.

Night came round again, the way it does. She slept, mostly - riding the dull swell of pain that had occupied her body, its headquarters in her shoulder; an outpost in her leg. There was some kind of forward scouting party in her foot, too, but she thought they might be ghosts.

How do you feel? a young woman’s voice - Mum? No. Not English. Jo opened her eyes again. A young woman was kneeling on the floor beside her bed. Jo tried to smile, but her lips were dry, Bad, she said.

The woman smiled, We thought you would die.

How long..? Jo wanted to ask so much, but it was all too tiring.

Two weeks.

Am I a prisoner?

What? the woman laughed. No. You’re not a prisoner.

My mum .... my mother?

So sorry.

Dead?

She knew really. The woman nodded, and stroked Jo’s head.

You are safe, she said. We will talk again.

Through the window, the night-time hanging removed, Jo could see part of another house, the tops of trees, a hillside on the other side of the valley. She stared at them all day, thinking, listening to the sounds of people moving in the house and outside.

The Healer came to see her the following morning. She knew he was the Healer, because he made her drink from a tin mug full of an absolutely disgusting liquid - cold and bitter - and he made her drink all of it. Also, he probed around where it hurt most, in her leg and her shoulder. So much so, that she was panting with the effort not to scream, and - to her shame - once or twice couldn’t hold back a little yelp when the sharpness of his exploration surprised her. He looked at her, without expression, but he seemed a little more gentle after that.

Also, she knew he was a Healer, because he said very little, and clearly expected people to do whatever he wanted without question.

Good, he said, patting her head as he left. That was a surprise. So he spoke a bit of English. And treated her like a baby, just like doctors did back home.

Back home. A surge of sadness made her gasp. She felt so lonely. So far from home. She almost sobbed. She wanted to give in. Curl up and give in. But she knew she mustn’t. And deep down she knew she wouldn’t. Nobody else was going to help her; and when she thought about it, she was quite decided that she was going to get home, somehow.

And later, looking back on that time, she saw that moment as the beginning of her journey. The moment when she started to take control of her life again.

CHAPTER THREE

I’ve just found my diary – it’s just an exercise book, really – and a bit of pencil. There’s a dark stain on the cover. The first couple of pages are stuck together.

I hurt. I’m bored. I’m lost. I’m alive. I don’t know what to do. I wish someone was here to tell me what to do. I wish you were here, Mum. I can’t believe all this. I can’t get my head around it.

I’ve got to get home. I’ve got to get to the airport. Kathmandu. I’ve got to find Dad. Maybe he’ll come and get me.

Except he doesn’t even know we’re not at home. Last time he visited, you made a big thing of not telling him anything. There’s got to be email here somewhere. Maybe these people can help me get to Kathmandu. If they’re really not kidnapping me. I’m so tired. Scared.

Funny. Last term at school, talking about this holiday; talking about going to Kathmandu - it seemed such an exciting place. A place with so many romantic, mysterious stories linked to it. A place she might hope to visit one day. Now, from a bed in a village a long way into the mountains, the magic city was halfway home again. Strange how your view can change. Yeah, whatever… Now she had a Plan.

Dawn inched round again. There were people moving in the house above and below her. She resolved to make a start on her Plan. She swung her legs round and sprang out of bed.

Well, that was the idea. What she actually did was she tried to sit up and move her legs at the same time. Big mistake. It hurt. A lot. Not only did it hurt, but it didn’t work. Clearly such complex moves needed a bit more planning than she had been prepared to give them. Her mother had always accused her of jumping in without thinking first. Maybe she should listen to her mum