The Little Friend

Amongst the slippery tinfoil lumps, Harriet caught sight of a grape Popsicle. With difficulty, she extricated it, thinking enviously of the deep-freeze at Hely’s house which was crammed with Fudgsicles and frozen pizzas, chicken pot pies and every kind of TV dinner imaginable.…

With the Popsicle, she went out to the porch—without bothering to put the chair back where she’d got it—and lay on her back in the swing, reading The Jungle Book. Slowly, the color drained from the day. The rich greens of the garden faded to lavender, and as they dulled from lavender to purple-black, the crickets began to shriek and a couple of lightning bugs popped on and off, uncertainly, in the overgrown dark spot by Mrs. Fountain’s fence.

Absentmindedly, Harriet let the Popsicle stick fall to the floor from between her fingers. She had not moved for half an hour or more. The base of her skull was propped on the swing’s wooden arm at a devilishly uncomfortable angle but still she remained motionless except to draw the book closer and closer to her nose.

Soon it was too dark to see. Harriet’s scalp prickled and there was a throbbing pressure behind her eyeballs but she stayed where she was, stiff neck and all. Some parts of The Jungle Book she knew almost by heart: Mowgli’s lessons with Bagheera and Baloo; the attack, with Kaa, upon the Bandar-log. Later, less adventurous parts—in which Mowgli began to be dissatisfied with his life in the jungle—she often did not read at all. She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what “growing up” entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.

Somebody was cooking steaks outside on a grill. They smelled good. Harriet’s neck hurt in earnest, but even though she had to strain to see the darkening page she was strangely reluctant to get up and switch on the light. Her attention slipped from the words to drift without purpose—mindlessly brushing along the top of the hedge opposite, as if along a length of scratchy black wool—until seized by the neck and marched back forcibly to the story.

Deep in the jungle slumbered a ruined city: collapsed shrines, vine-choked tanks and terraces, decaying chambers full of gold and jewels about which no one, including Mowgli, gave a fig. Within the ruin dwelt the snakes that Kaa the python referred to, rather contemptuously, as The Poison People. And as she read on, Mowgli’s jungle began to bleed stealthily into the humid, half-tropical darkness of her own back yard, infecting it with a wild, shadowy, dangerous feel: frogs singing, birds screaming in the creeper-draped trees. Mowgli was a boy; but he was also a wolf. And she was herself—Harriet—but partly something else.

Black wings glided over her. Empty space. Harriet’s thoughts sank and trailed into silence. Suddenly, she was not sure how long she had been lying in the swing. Why wasn’t she in her bed? Was it later than she thought? A darkness slid across her mind … black wind  … cold.…

She started, so hard that the swing lurched—something flapping in her face, something oily, struggling, she couldn’t get her breath.…

Frantically, she slapped and batted at the air, floundering in space and the swing creaking and not knowing which way was up or down until, somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized the bang

she’d just heard was her library book, fallen to the floor.

Harriet stopped struggling and lay still. The swing’s violent rocking slowed again, and quieted, the boards of the porch ceiling sweeping slower and slower overhead and at last coming to a stop. In the glassy stillness she lay there, thinking. If she hadn’t come along, the bird would have died anyway, but that didn’t change the fact that it was she who had actually killed it.

The library book lay open and face up upon the floorboards. She rolled on her stomach to reach for it. A car swung around the corner and down George Street; and as the headlights swept across the porch, an illustration of the White Cobra was illumined, like a road sign flashing up suddenly at night, with the caption beneath:

They came to take the treasure away many years ago.

I spoke to them in the dark, and they lay still.

Harriet rolled back over and lay very still for a number of minutes; she stood, creakily, and stretched her arms over her head. Then she limped inside, through the too-bright dining room, where Allison sat alone at the dining-room table eating cold mashed potatoes from a white bowl.

Be still, O little one, for I am Death. Another cobra had said that, in something else by Kipling. The cobras in his stories were heartless but they spoke beautifully, like wicked kings in the Old Testament.