my pants had to go, I then used the material as a rag. But once that was no longer usable, I copied the monkeys or took to wiping myself with unfurled dry leaves. I soon realised, however, that if I grabbed myself handfuls of moss, its softness and moistness did the job all the better because it didn’t tear my poor bottom to shreds.
The rest of my body, on the other hand, grew filthier and filthier, and as the days passed I found myself scratching more and more. Like the monkeys, I became home for all manner of little creatures. Not only was my skin growing drier and scalier, I was also soon crawling with fleas. As beautiful as the jungle was, it was also very dirty. Flies buzzed unceasingly, clouds of them – all green-blue and jewel-like, and feasting excitedly on the many piles of animal poo. They buzzed around me too, which I found upsetting; was I as smelly as the poo all around me? I was certainly gathering more dirt and fleas daily, as well as crawling lice, beetles and strange, silvery-white insects that seemed to shimmer as they teemed on my skin.
Sometimes, initially, this would drive me to a frenzy. Scratching frantically all over, I’d weep with frustration, unable to work out how to stop it happening. It only took the briefest of looks around me to realise that I could not. If I sat down, I just became another part of the landscape – another piece of ground over which the relentless tide of insects could scuttle. Escarabajo (scarab beetles) and cucarron (small brown cockroaches) simply ranged over my limbs as if they had every right to do so, nibbling at my increasingly gnarly flesh as they saw fit. This was frightening. How could I stop it happening before they began to eat me all up?
The monkey’s solution was, again, to lick themselves clean. And if I physically couldn’t – and definitely wouldn’t – lick the poo from my own bottom, I thought that at least I could lick some of the skin on my filthy, crusted, bitten limbs. But my first lick was destined to also be my last. I had never before tasted anything quite so vile. I was so foul and bitter that I simply couldn’t fathom how the monkeys managed to do this all day.
My hair, of course, was faring even worse. Unwashed for so long now, and playing host to even more scuttling insects, it was literally alive with jungle animals. I knew from the itching that it played host to even more crawling wildlife with every passing day, as it matted and wound itself into lumpy black dreadlocks.
I would sit and watch the monkeys carefully grooming one another, desperately wishing they would include me. But for now they didn’t. I was allowed to be close, but not that close, and I would look up enviously as they sat in the cool of the upper branches, picking the nasties that they dug out of one another’s chocolate coats.
*
Wanting to be up in the trees with my adopted monkey family fast became a preoccupation for me – even more of a preoccupation, over time, than thinking about my lost human family. I was sleeping each night now in the hollowed-out trunk of an old tree, and though it felt safer, there were periods – long periods, sometimes – during the days when the whole troop would ascend to the top of the canopy. A place where I simply couldn’t follow.
I wanted to get up there so badly, yet the idea seemed impossible. The trees were almost as big a problem to master as the Brazil nuts they unwittingly flung down for me to eat. With the latter, I could only even attempt to break into those fruits whose outer pods had split open from the fall. The intact ones were just impossible. Even the nuts inside didn’t yield without putting up a fight; it would take an awful lot of bashes, using my cranny-and-rock system, before I could make so much as a single crack in their armour.
Similarly, the trunks of these trees seemed to spite me. About six to eight feet in diameter, they towered upwards to the sky – an almost smooth vertical corridor. If I looked up, it made me dizzy to see how impossibly high they grew, disappearing up through the steamy air before seeming to almost come to a point, and only then graced with any branches I could climb on.
But there were smaller trees too, striving upwards between these colossal kings of the jungle; the friendly trees that provided the delicious little bananas, and others, jewelled with the hanging waxy flowers I would later learn were orchids. These would also be draped with graceful looping vines and fronds of dark, spongy mosses, and, between them, the curls and arches of delicate green ferns.
Perhaps, I wondered one day, when the monkeys had again deserted me, I could find a way to join them by making my way up the smaller trees, in the hope of somehow gaining access to the upper reaches of the Brazil trees. My plan was doomed to failure – it would be many months before I mastered that particular monkey talent – but it was to provide me with an unexpected discovery.
It had just rained, I remember – perhaps not the best time to try being an acrobat, because as ever the whole jungle ran with water and dripped. The boughs and vines were slippery, but, perhaps invigorated and energised by the cooling, cleansing downpour, I decided I would give it a try; if I didn’t try, as my mother used to say to me, how did I know what I could or couldn’t do?
At first, it wasn’t too difficult. I made my way upwards about six or seven feet, using a tangle of roots and vines and low boughs, and finding plentiful foot- and handholds. But no sooner had I ascended to the top of a small tree than I was faced with a difficult horizontal clamber across a bough, to have any hope of getting higher.
I tried anyway (now I was this far, I could hardly bear to look down, much less climb down), but the slippery, slimy branch was my undoing. As soon as I put all my weight on it, I immediately lost purchase and crashed down, screaming loudly and frantically, terrified and sure I was about to die.
But the undergrowth was kind to me. While buffeting me and winding me, the tangle of massed foliage and latticework of stems, stalks and branches also broke my fall. And as I lay there getting my breath back, feeling tears of self-pity spring to my eyes, I realised I was looking straight at something I’d never seen before. It was a tunnel – the entrance to which was just about big enough to crawl through, and which disappeared into blackness around a bend.
I looked more closely. It seemed to be fashioned out of the same tangle of tree roots and undergrowth that had just been obliging enough to break my fall. It looked like it had been hollowed out some time ago as well, as its inner edges – the same latticework of branches and roots, mainly – were quite smooth of snags and spikes.
I pulled myself up and crawled across to it. It was a bit of a tight fit, but I could just about wriggle into it and venture in. I still remember that I didn’t feel too frightened. Sufficient light filtered through so that, although gloomy, it wasn’t pitch-black, and as I crawled along it opened out – it was a whole network of tunnels! – with branches heading off in several directions.
I began to wonder what kind of animal would have made such a tunnel, but curiosity triumphed over anxiety and I decided to crawl a little bit further. It was then, rounding a bend, that I made my next big discovery. There was a monkey up ahead of me – one of my monkeys – and it was scampering towards me with a nut in its hand. No sooner did it see me than it veered off down a side tunnel, with another monkey (they were both young and playing chase, it was obvious) scrambling along and screeching playfully in hot pursuit.
Seeing this made everything fall into place. They had created this network of tunnels on the floor of their territory to enable them to get around on the ground just as easily as they traversed the tops of the trees. And I realised that I would also be able to use it to get about the jungle floor speedily and safely. My disappointment about my lack of climbing skills now all but forgotten, I crawled after the monkeys and finally emerged in a small, familiar clearing, feeling as uplifted as at any point since I’d been abandoned in the jungle. Making this new discovery felt – and I remember the feeling to this day – almost as if Christmas had arrived. It really was as thrilling to me as that. A mark, perhaps, of just how feral I’d become.
I
