that english story that i never typed up

She’d been leading a life. Like any other. No one had told her about this. No one had heard of it happening before. No doctor could help her out. Yet everyone was so incredibly interested in what she had.
            Blessed with beautiful, long (and I mean long, like down to her bum) and rich brown hair with weird eyes the colour of dirty snow Kieli (pronounced like Kylie) was a normal girl. She hated science, was bored through maths, hated French and liked playing Netball and going shopping with her friends. Her parents lived together in a moderate house, she had one younger brother (who was extremely irritating) and an older sister who’d already moved out. There was nothing weird about this girl except one thing. On her 14th birthday (which strangely enough was Kieli’s lucky number) she woke up from a very strange dream. She’d been searching for something. But she couldn’t remember what it was. She’d been shivering so it must have been cold. Just before she’d woken up she’d found it. Imagine Pandora’s Box, something wooden, beautifully carved and with a strange light emanating from it. She’d opened it and finally found what she’d lost, her voice. Like everything else about her life Kieli usually had normal dreams. This was really out of the ordinary. She went to breakfast and asked her brother for the cornflakes. It came out as “kan du ge mej flingorna?” Sam looked at her as if she was a ghost. “What are you staring at, geek?” “Ummm, what did you just say?” “Oh come one, stop being a moron just gimme the cornflakes.” So Sam obliged but kept staring. Kieli decided to ignore the little twit. After breakfast Kieli was opening her presents. Her first was a new mobile phone. “Dankel!” Now it was her parents turn to stare. What in god’s name was going on with their daughter? Kieli demanded “What!? Are there cornflakes in my teeth? Have I got a massive pimple? What are you all staring at? “She did it again mum; she did it at breakfast too.” Sam informed. “What? What am I doing to shock you so much? Can someone please explain what the hell is going on here?” Kieli was getting more and more scared. What was going on? “Ahh, darling what did you say after you opened your present?” “Well thanks of course! What else would I’ve said?” “Darling sorry to break it to you but you actually said something like dankel.” Then Sam went on to explain about the cornflakes. At first Kieli wouldn’t believe them. But then it happened again and she finally realised what was happening. “OMG!! This is so weird. Mum what’s happening to me?” “Honey I think somehow you’ve learnt to speak different languages. All of a sudden Kieli’s dream flooded back to her. She’d been travelling the world because Marguerite the future seer had told her about her future. She was to find the hidden box of language so that she could help out with healing the newly found tribe from the amazon. No language expert could understand a thing uttered by these people and the entire forest depended on them. They were somewhat like the pygmies. Strangely enough the box had been hidden in St. Petersburg. That’s why the dream had been so cold. That’s why she’d lost her voice. That’s why she could now speak all the languages that ever existed. All this came blurting out. “Mum do I have to go to school? I’ll get laughed at and everyone will think I’m a weirdo.” “Honey it sounds like you’re headed for Brazil, or wherever they’re keeping this tribe.”                                                      
The leaves brush against my bare arms and legs like caressing fingers. I’m still getting used to the lack of noise. Compared to Manhattan this place is full of silence. The trees swish and sway, they’re so big and old and somehow comforting. The constant drip, drip, drip of water from sky to leaf to ground is soothing. The shadows moving everywhere are still really scary. Are they really shadows? “Espera,” rasps the short, dark man in front of me. I wait as Charla instructed. Charla told me he was the one who’d found the tribe in the first place. He’d been the only person dealing with them until an American specialist doctor was allowed in to their territory. He’d told me to ‘keep my trap shut’ unless someone spoke to me. I stood still as stone. There in front of me was the boy from the tribe in my dream. He had the same tiny hands and feet. His eyes are the same charcoal black and scarily deep, as if you could drown in them. They seemed to x-ray me. I tried to portray nothing in particular. Then he stepped forward and put his hand up as if to wave. Charla explained this was a variation of a handshake. I was to put my own palm up against his. Then he turned and began walking away. It seemed like he never touched the ground nor made a sound. He blended with the rainforest as if he himself was a tree. I would have lost him if it weren’t for Charla. We reached what seemed to be a small village. The specialist stood out like a zebra among horses. His white skin was such a contrast to the deep brown of all the others, I realised I must look the same. Eventually we got down to business. The specialist was sitting beside the fire with the boy I’d first met. Turned out he was the elder of the tribe. Oops… anyway the sick people from the tribe were sitting beside the fire too. The specialist had introduced himself as Harvey. I was told to ask the people all sorts of questions. First of all I introduced myself and Harvey and told them why we were here and what we wanted to do, help them get better. Then I proceeded to extract their symptoms from them. The older ones had tender fingertips and rashes all down the backs of their legs, arms and right down their spine from the bottom of the head to the coccyx bone. As well as the rash these bones were aching. Their sight and hearing was also beginning to fail dramatically fast. They also seemed to be getting increasingly tired and weak. The specialist wrote all the things I repeated, down in a little notebook. Then the younger ones repeated their symptoms. They were getting extremely painful headaches, sleeping fitfully, getting tender skin on their entire hands and feet (sort of like bruising) and their concentration span was getting shorter and shorter (irritability too). These things Harvey noted down in his book too. After an extremely long and excruciatingly boring session of this kind of thing I was entirely ready to go right back home and flop on my bed with the newest magazine I’d bought. But nothing of the sort was going to happen. Charla told me I’d be staying with the tribe until this was over. It was so I could develop a relationship and my language skills. I was deeply scared, until the ‘boy’ I’d first spoken to introduced himself as, well there’s no equivalent in English. Let’s just call him Jimmy. His daughter was the same age as me yet she had a baby on her hip and was cooking dinner for her family. Her name meant beautiful and beautiful she was. She’d inherited her father’s eyes and calm way of life. But the fine shape of her jaw and chin were indefinitely her mothers. The darkest dark brown hair which was so long it nearly touched her knees, when it was out that is. The tradition in the tribe was to never cut their hair. I still didn’t understand how it had grown so long. It was extremely thick too. How on earth did she keep it looking that nice when she was living in the jungle? She seemed to have read my mind. “I use fruit pulp and juice.” I spent the rest of the night helping her cook and take care of everybody. Another thing I found peculiar about her was her long fingers. It seemed she was the only person in the tribe with such hands. She explained it as a gift from the spirits. I was surprised at how much she knew and was ashamed at my lack of maturity when I compared myself to her.  She was so grown up. But I comforted myself by thinking that she’d never known any different. Sadly enough one of her children had this scary sickness. I’ve always loved children so I made friends with “beautiful’s” children. They were adorable. They made the world around them their playground. They seemed to be taking care of the forest even when they were just innocently playing. They’d rip off bark off of certain trees to pretend that they were fighting sticks (it turns out that these particular trees need this done to reproduce), they pick lots of flowers and then crush them and spread them in the wind whilst playing weddings (this is how they pollinate naturally anyway so they’re just helping out) it was just an uncanny ability. They also had a knack of creating so much fun, with no toys it seemed amazing how much fun we could have. By the end of the first day playing with them I was dirty, exhausted and hungry. I sat down to dinner after helping out with cooking it. I shovelled it down without thinking I was so hungry. Then I realised Harvey was there. After dinner we were going to have another long and boring conversation about the sickness. Harvey told me it was something similar to Scurvy but there must be more to it because otherwise we’d never have been called. I asked what the symptoms of scurvy are. He replied “tiredness, weakness, irritability, aches and pains, poor healing, bleeding symptoms, weak capillaries, fingertip bleeding, bruises, bruising easily, bleeding from old scars, internal bleeding, dental symptoms, swollen purple spongy gums, bleeding gums and bone symptoms.” I was comparing these with what I’d relayed last night. There were a couple of things in common but so many more to satisfy. I wondered at the strange ways of traditional medicine. We went through and asked all of the sick how they were going and they were all pretty much getting steadily worse. I was pondering everything when I started becoming curious myself about this sickness. Maybe I should be taking a little more interest. So I began talking to one of the oldest of the sick. She was very small, her hands and feet and legs were covered with veins which made her look spindly somehow. Her face was so covered with lines that you could barely make out her features, except that she was permanently smiling. I began by asking when they’d first started feeling sick. She asked everyone and we finally figured out that the first person to get it started getting the symptoms to the equivalent of 4 western weeks ago. I reported this to Harvey. He wanted to know what the conditions were like then. I relayed this and she said it had been colder and wetter. I asked if anything special went on around that time. She said of course, don’t you know? That’s when our rain festival starts. Through my puzzled expression she began explaining all about it. It was when the people danced in the rain for hours on end and then made special offerings to the rain spirit. It was when they wove all the new skirts and loin cloths for their people for the coming year. She went through to explain the method of weaving, it sounded exceedingly complicated. The final thing she said was what the weaving was done with. It was some kind of grass which grew near the river. I relayed all this to Harvey who began scribbling things down in his notebook furiously. He said that was enough for now and went on his way. I decided to stay and ask more about this sickness. It was what I was here for anyway. I decided to test the sick people’s memory. I don’t know why but it just suddenly occurred to me. I asked everyone to find one object each. I ended up with fifteen things. I took off my jumper and used it as the cover. I took away the leaf and asked what was missing. They were doing pretty good. Then I began asking them about how they made their food. If it was something like scurvy then it might have something to do with their diets. Their way of cooking was fairly similar to the way everyone cooked. Over fires on sticks and on heated rocks with wet grass wrapped around sometimes. It turned out it was the same kind of grass they used for their clothing. I asked to be shown this grass. They said it was too dark and dangerous now but they’d show me tomorrow. So I went back to beautiful’s house and slept.

The next morning I’d just finished breakfast when the oldest sick woman came past and was going to go get some grass for her cooking that day. I went with her. When we got there the grass turned out to be a burnt mix between yellow and orange. I thought that’s strange it looks like its dead or has a disease. So I picked some and took it back with me. I kept it to show to Harvey next time he came back. For the rest of the day I helped beautiful cook and looked at the tribes people’s woven grass clothing. Everyone had the same colour, burnt orange/yellow. It seemed pretty normal until I realised that the material felt like cloth. How was it possible to turn grass into fabric? So I asked beautiful to show me how to weave. It was very complicated but I could see how it changed while she worked. Then I decided to take a break from all this serious investigation so I went looking for the children and found them at the village’s trading market. They were doing the weeks trading for their mother. Then something clicked inside my brain. All the meat these people ate were they herbivores or carnivores? I asked a man nearby and he replied that the villagers only ate carnivores. But some people who believed in different spirits ate herbivores. All this seemed to be leading somewhere but when I relayed it all to Harvey he said he’d already ruled it out. I was disappointed. Yet I really believed it had something to do with this. I kept asking questions about this grass. Why it only grew in this one place. Why it had such a strange colour. The villagers had no answers except that it had just appeared one day. I was so startled by this. How could something just appear, poof! Then all of a sudden something just started to appear out of nowhere, on my own skin. I began to get rashes all over my hands and face and arms. I didn’t understand. I’ve never reacted to anything at home before. I’ve been fine until now. What was going on? I thought maybe I should start massaging my hands with the strange oil the other villagers used for their hair. It didn’t help but instead made the situation worse. I was going over all the things I’d been doing that day when the rashes had started. I’d slept, eaten, fed the chicken equivalents, washed myself with cold water, helped cook, played with the younger kids and lastly I’d climbed a tree and daydreamed a bit. I couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t done before. Then I went through it all again scrutinizing every little detail and finally it jumped out at me, the answer to everything. All the sick people all my rashes. It was so obvious. I couldn’t believe I’d overlooked it. I asked beautiful who traditionally fed the chickens. I was rewarded with the answers I wanted. Feeding the chickens was left to the younger children and older villagers. Then I asked what was fed to the chickens, the same yellow/orange grass. Finally I asked who wove the skirts and loin cloths during the rain festival. Again I was rewarded with positive answers. This was another chore left to the children and elders. After you turned 8 you were seen as an adult. I went asking all the sick children their ages. All the children below 8 fed their chickens and all the children above eight wove the clothes and helped feed the chickens anyway. These older children also spent all their time with the younger children who’d spent time with the chickens. This all adds up in an interesting way. It’s a chemical reaction between the particular oils on human hands, chicken feathers and this yellow/orange grass. I reported this to Harvey and he decided to take samples of everything and go back to his lab. Guess what? I’m now back home lying on my bed reading that new magazine I so longed for such a long time ago. Except now I’m a changed person. I can speak all the languages which have ever existed, I intimately know a very hidden tribe from the amazon and I’ve been taught how to cook and take care of children and how to take on the role of an adult at age 14. My mother told me all this just this afternoon when I asked if she needed some help with the cooking. Well everything does seem to happen for a reason doesn’t it?