Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms by Katherine Rundell Page A

aching to touch him, to laya thumb on his tired eyes and to love him back to his old, wheezing, leather-skinned, indomitable self. Whatever it was, it made him shiver, and sigh again.
    â€œI’ll write to you, my wildcat. Cynthia thinks I should wait a month or so—give you time to settle in, ja ? But after that. And you’ll write to your old captain, won’t you?”
    â€œJa.” Will tried to smile.
    â€œAnd you look after yourself. England’s a good place. But don’t forget how to be brave out there, Will, ja ? Will?”
    â€œJa.”
    â€œRight. Don’t you get out of the habit of bravery. Even if you think nobody’s seeing, hey? It’s still so important, Will, my girl. So important . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked desperately around for something to say.
    There was the sound of a car horn. The captain touched Will lightly on the cheek. “Safe travels, little Wildcat. Brave, remember? No tears, hey?”
    Will swallowed. It was all she seemed to do these days, say good-bye. She’d worked out that silent partings were easier than noisy. There was less to regret later. She nodded. “No tears, Captain Browne.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss the rough-stubbled cheek. Then without another word, without looking up again at the old face, Will walked out to the waiting car.
    There she stumbled, brought up short. There had been two car journeys into town (for the shopping, and for a passport photograph—Will liked the photo; her bird’s nest of hair stood up at the back like a halo, and she was scowling ferociously, because the jolly photographer kept telling her to “Say chongololo”), and for both they had taken the captain’s rusty red Toyota pickup. It had smelled of petrol and sawdust, and Cynthia Browne had sat in the cab with gritted teeth, but for Will it had been the best part of each expedition, a tooth-rattling ride in the open back with a gang of farmhands. Will had looked forward to the drive to the airport. “It’ll be my Last Ride,” she’d said to Simon—they’d spoken about it in capital letters. “ Ja —it’s going to be wind-rushing and bumpingly good; it’ll be my Ride Out of Africa.”
    But the car that waited in the drive was a hire taxi, large and monstrously sleek. It was the sort of car that mustn’t be scuffed and mustn’t be smudged. Nobody had ever sung in that car, or wound down the windows and perched on the sill and snatched at fruit from the trees by the side of the road. Will felt, with a new coldness in her chest, that when she climbed in, she would be opening the door to a new way of being. It would be a different version of reality. And any world that you reached this way, through chrome and asmell of leather (it was a smell of false , she thought, a smell that bypassed nostrils and shot straight to the brain) could not be a good world. It was that simple.
    The boys had gathered to see her off. Will had already given out her parting presents. She didn’t have much she could give; her most treasured possession was her box full of books, which none of the boys wanted. In the end she forced Simon to take them, with strict instructions to teach the younger ones to read. To Lucian Mazarotti, she gave Shumba’s saddle and reins, and she would have given him Shumba, but she wasn’t sure he was hers to give now. To Tedias she gave her precious green tin mug and her collection of cricket balls, and she had sewn her sheet into a shirt for Lazarus. To Simon, best of all, she gave Kezia, and now the monkey hung from Simon’s neck, chattering nervously, perhaps picking up the stiffness that had come over the children.
    Simon had given Will a flashlight. “The batteries aren’t great, hey,” he had said. “It’s a bit flickery. But they probably have loads of batteries in England, ja .” She had felt oddly swollen in