Amato Bianca - Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms

Also by Katherine Rundell

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 2011 by Katherine Rundell

Originally published as The Girl Savage in 2011 in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited

Jacket illustration copyright 2014 by Melissa Castrilln

First US edition 2014

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Jacket design by Lizzy Bromley

Interior design by Hilary Zarycky

The text for this book is set in Bembo.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rundell, Katherine.

Cartwheeling in thunderstorms / Katherine Rundell. First edition.

pages cm

A slightly different version was published in 2011 in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited.

Summary: Will must find her way after shes plucked out of a wonderful life in Zimbabwe and forced to go to boarding school in EnglandProvided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4424-9061-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4424-9063-5 (ebook) [1. OrphansFiction. 2. Interpersonal relationsFiction. 3. Boarding schoolsFiction. 4. SchoolsFiction. 5. ZimbabweansEnglandLondonFiction. 6. EnglandFiction. 7. ZimbabweFiction.] I. Title. PZ7.R88827Car 2014 [Fic]dc23 2013021053

To my parents

W ILHELMINA KNEW THAT THERE WERE some houses that had glass in every window and locks on the doors.

The farmhouse in which she lived was not one of them. If there was a key to the front door, Wilhelmina had never seen it. It was likely that the goats that wandered in and out of the kitchen had eaten it. The house was at the end of the longest of the farm roads in the hottest corner of Zimbabwe. Her bedroom window was a square space in the wall. During the rains, she sewed plastic bags to make a screen and stretched it across the frame. During the heat, the dust blew in.

Years ago, a visitor to the farm had asked Will about her window.

Surely your father can afford a pane of glass?

I like to be dusty, she had said, and wet. Dust and rain made mud. Mud was full of possibilities.

The farm roads were bald and red with the settled dust. They were walked daily by Captain Browne, owner of the farm, driven daily by William Silver, foreman of the farm, and ridden daily by Wilhelmina, Williams only child.

Wilhelmina rode better than any boy on the farm, because her father had known that to ride before you can walk is like drinking from glass bottles of Coke underwater, or hanging by the knees from baobab trees: disorienting and delicious. So Wilhelmina grew up running under horses bellies and tripping up into horse manure and tugging handfuls of her long dark hair when horseflies stung. The horseboys living in the tin-roofed cottages in the staff quarters never wept at horsefliessometimes they swore in a leisurely, laughing way in Shona Ach, booraguma and Wilhelmina was sure that she was the equal of any boy. She was faster than most of the boys her age on foot, too. And she was many other things: When the men on the farm talked about her in the evenings, they needed handfuls of ands to describe her: Will was stubborn, sha , and exasperating and wild and honest and true.

In the morning light of late October, Will was crouched on the floor stirring a pot of methylated spirit and water. Meths, applied to the feet, hardened the soles and made living shoes. There were six assorted chairs in the airy sitting room, but Will liked the floor. There was more space. Will had widely spaced eyes, and widely spaced toes, and was altogether a favorite of space. Her talk was spaced too, she knewthe slow talk of the African afternoon, with good gaps of silence.

Will heard the clatter of hooves and a hungry whinnying. That meant William Silver was home from his early-morning gallop over the farm. Everyone in that part of Zimbabwe rose early. The main part of the days work had to be done by lunch, and October was the hottest month. The heat melted the roads into tarred soup; birds got stuck in it.

The sitting room door opened, and a hairy face peered round it. Will felt the door open before she saw it; it was joy. Dad was back; she jumped up in one single movement, all speed and legs, and hurled herself into his arms, wrapping her feet around his waist. Dad!

Morning! Morning, Wildcat.

Will buried her face in her fathers neck. Morning, Dad, she said, her voice muffled. With most men, Will was tense-muscled. They left her half-marveling and half-wary, and she made sure to keep her few steps of distance. She hated having to shake hands with the unknown skin of strangers; but Dad, with his muscled softness, was different.

But I thought you were gone for the day, hey? said William.

Ja . Ja , soon. But I wanted to see your face first, Dad. I missed you. Will had been out at the tree house last night, asleep in the largeness of the night air by the time her father had gotten home. They could go for days without seeing each other, but she thought it made the happiness, when they did, sharpermore tangy. But nowshe scrambled upI can go, ja . I havent fed Shumba, and Simonll be waiting. She turned at the door, wanting to say something that would mean I love you. Goodness how I do love you.

Faranuka , Dad! Faranuka . Wills Shona was good, and Faranuka was Shona for Be happy.

Simon was waiting. Simon was Wills best friend. He was everything that she wasnta tall, fluid black boy to her waiflike, angular white girl. It had not been love at first sight. When Simon had arrived to train as a farmhand, Will had taken one single look and with six-year-old certainty announced that, no, she did not like him. He was flimsy . That was because Simon had enormous bush-baby eyes, tender trusting pools that seemed to hold tears just ready to fall from beneath stupidly curled lashes.

But it hadnt taken long for Will to see that Simon was breathing, leaping, brilliant proof that appearances are deceptive. In fact, she knew now, Si was a stretched-catapult of a boy, the scourge of the stables, with a hoarse laugh much too deep for him, and arms and legs that jerked and broke any passing cup or plate. His dislike of the tin bathtub, and his reveling in the softly squelching Zimbabwean mud, meant that Simon had a distinctive smell. He smelled to the young Will of dust and sap and salt beef.

Will had smelled to Simon of earth and sap and mint.

So with such essential aspects in commonthe sap, most obviously, but also the large eyes and the haphazard limbsit was inevitable that the two fell in sort-of-love by the time they were seven, and by the time their ages were in double digits, they were friends of the firmest, stickiest, and eternal sort.

Simon was the one who had taught Will how to bring her horse to a gallop on the home stretch to the stables, yelling Yah! Ee-yah! Come on , slowcoach! And he taught her how to swing herself round to the underside of the horses neck and ride upside down so that her long hair was coated with the flying dust, and her cheeks slipped into her eyes.