Number 9 dream Page 0,18

because I always do her worrying for her. She skip-reads her way up trees. She finds fingerholds in coarse bark and toeholds in smooth bark. Last week was our eleventh birthday, but already Anju can climb the gym ropes faster than any of the boys in our class, and, when she is in the mood, multiply fractions, read second-year texts and recite most Zax Omega adventures word for word. Wheatie says this is because she grabbed most of the brain cells when we were growing inside our mother. I finally unpick my T-shirt and climb after my sister, swift as a three-toed sloth with vertigo. Minutes later I find her on the top branch. Copper-skinned, willow-limbed, moss-stained, thorn-scored, dungareed, ponytail knotted back. Waves of spring sea wind break on the woods. ‘Welcome to my tree,’ she says. ‘Not bad,’ I admit, but it is better than ‘not bad’. I have never climbed so high before. We have already trekked up the razor escarpment to get here, so the view is awesome. The fortress-grey mountain-faces, the green river snaking out of the gorge, the hanging bridge, mishmash of roofs and power lines, port, timber yards, school soccer ground, gravel pit, Uncle Orange’s tea-fields, our secret beach, its foot rock, waves breaking on the shoals around the whalestone, the long island of Tanegashima where they launch satellites, glockenspiel clouds, the envelope where the sea seals the sky. Having bombed as tree-climber-in-chief, I appoint myself head cartographer. ‘Kagoshima is over there . . .’ I am afraid to let go and point, so I nod. Anju is squinting inland. ‘I think I can see Wheatie airing the futons.’ I can’t see our grandmother but I know Anju wants me to ask ‘Where?’ so I don’t. The mountains rise towards the interior. Miyanoura Peak props up the sky. Hill tribes live in the rainshadow – they decapitate the lost tourists and make the skulls into drinking bowls. And there is a pool where a real webby, scaly kappa lives – it catches swimmers, rams its fist up through their bum-holes and pulls out their hearts to eat. Yakushima islanders never go up into the mountains, except for the tourist guides. I feel a lump in my pocket and remember. ‘Want a champagne bomb?’

‘Sure.’

Anju suddenly monkey-shrieks, swings, and dangles down in front of me, giggling at my panic. Scared birds beat away near by. Her legs grip the branch above.

‘Don’t!’ is all I can blurt.

Anju bares her front teeth and chicken-wings her arms. ‘Anju the bat.’

‘Anju! Don’t!’

She swings to and fro. ‘I vant to suckkk your bluddd!’ Her hair clasp falls away and her ponytail streams earthward. ‘Bother. That was my last one.’

‘Don’t dangle like that! Stop it!’

‘Eiji’s a jellyfish, Eiji’s a jellyfish!’

I imagine her falling, ricocheting from branch to branch. ‘Stop it!’

‘You’re even uglier upside down. I can see your bogies. Hold the tube steady.’

‘Swing back up first!’

‘No. I was born first so you have to do what I say. Hold the pack steady.’ She extracts a sweet, unpeels the wrapper and watches it flutter away into the sea-greens. Watching me, she puts the sweet in her mouth, and lazily swings herself back upright. ‘You really are such a wuss!’

‘If you fell Wheatie would murder me.’

‘Wuss.’

My heartbeat gradually calms down.

‘What happens to you when you die?’ So Anju.

I don’t care as long as she stays upright. ‘How should I know?’

‘Nobody says the same thing. Wheatie says you go to the pure land and walk in gardens with your ancestors. Boooring. Mr Endo at school says you turn into soil. Father Kakimoto says it depends what you were like in this life – I’d get changed into an angel or a unicorn, but you’d come back as a maggot or toadstool.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘When you die they burn you, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So you turn into smoke, right?’

‘I guess.’

‘So you go there.’ Anju lets go of the tree and shoots the sun with both hands. ‘Up, up and away. I want to fly.’

A careworn buzzard rises on a thermal.

‘In an airplane?’

‘Who wants to fly in a pongy airplane?’

I suck my champagne bomb. ‘How do you know airplanes pong?’

Anju crunches her champagne bomb. ‘Airplanes must pong. All those people breathing the same air. Like the boys’ changing room in the rainy season, but a hundred times worse. No, I mean proper flying.’

‘Like with a jetpack?’

‘No such things as jetpacks.’

‘Zax Omega has a jetpack.’

Anju airs her recently acquired sigh. ‘No such thing as Zax Omega.’

‘Zax Omega opened the new