Then the bolt on the door squeaked and she tensed up again as the warbling noise grew louder.
The door squealed open and the alien came in, holding what looked like a wire lampshade, and a plate of Mr Kipling Bakewell tarts.
Ang Nu was getting married.
He was barely fifteen but his older brothers, Chen and Po, had already been married, so he knew what to do.
He had saved up the bride price. He had chosen his bride. He had given her a gift and she had accepted it. He had followed her home ….
Then – as the Hmong tradition of zij dictated – he had kidnapped her.
Hmong girls understood zij. They understood that they would be kidnapped and stay at the groom’s home while his father and brothers negotiated a bride price with her parents. After three days – if they did not come to take her home – then the wedding would proceed, with singing and dancing and so much food that Ang still dreamed about it.
It hadn’t exactly gone the way he had expected.
On a cold and dim January morning, he had stopped Edie to tell her to get into the car, but instead of doing what he’d told her, she had pedalled away from him – as if she had forgotten all about the Mickey Mouse bell!
Ang had been confused. His bride had accepted the gift; now she must submit to the zij, not run away! It was embarrassing, and he had put his foot on the throttle and gone after Edie, not a little flustered.
But Mr Knight’s car was big and powerful, and Ang could barely see over the dashboard. He was only used to moving cars about on the forecourt – not driving on roads and going into second gear.
He had hit her. Not hard, but hard enough to knock her off her bicycle and on to the grassy area alongside the pavement.
Ang had got out and manhandled Edie into the back seat. He was strong for his age, but she was unconscious and so it was hard work. But that was good in one way. It gave him time to carry her bike to the bushes and throw it away. The wheel was bent and it was no good to anyone. The Mickey Mouse bell had fallen off. He looked about for it because it had cost him four pounds and was a symbol of their love, the way the spirit mask had been his father’s zij gift to his mother. But he couldn’t find it, and only looked briefly, before losing his nerve and driving the car back to the garage with adrenaline throbbing through his veins.
Things had already started to fall apart.
And for the first time since leaving Padong village on China’s endless south-western border, Ang Nu felt completely alone.
He had left home by accident.
Two years before, he had followed his third brother, Suav, out of their house in the dead of night, just to see where he was going.
It was only when Suav spotted him a mile away that he’d found out his brother wasn’t going back. A girl called Ka Yang had rejected his zij gift and Suav thought everybody was laughing at his shame.
In fact, that was true. Even Ang had laughed, because it had been funny to see Ka Yang hold her hands behind her back so that Suav couldn’t give her the necklace he’d made. Ever since then, Suav had been angry. He’d got into a fight with Ka Yang’s brother because of it.
‘Go back,’ Suav had told him angrily, so at first Ang had kept following him, just to be annoying.
But the first time they’d stopped to wash and eat, he’d discovered that Suav had taken his mother’s story cloth, and the spirit mask his father had given her for zij.
‘I’ll sell them for food,’ Suav had boasted. ‘Then they’ll be sorry.’
They had fought in the dirt and Suav had beaten him soundly. ‘Go back,’ he’d shouted again.
But even if he had been able to find his way back through the dense forest, Ang knew he could never go back now. Who in Padong would believe that he wasn’t a thief? Taking the story cloth was bad enough, but the ancestors resided in the spirit mask, and to have stolen it was sacrilege.
He could never face the shame.
And so Ang had kept an uneasy alliance with his brother through the forests, across the rivers, in the cities and on the ocean as they headed for their goal of England, where, Suav told him, money was easy to come by. He planned to make a thousand dollars and return to Padong so Ka Yang could see what a big mistake she had made.
Every night Ang prayed to the ancestors for forgiveness so that he and Suav would not go to Dab Teb, and every day he worked tirelessly to find them enough food so Suav wouldn’t have to sell the mask or the cloth.
As punishment, Suav had made Ang carry both.
So when the two brothers finally made it through hell and arrived in Folkestone tucked precariously on the axle of a flatbed lorry, Ang was hungry – and Suav had the bagged rice and the chocolate.
The first time the lorry stopped at lights, Ang asked for something to eat, and Suav took one hand off the chassis and reached into his shirt.
The lorry started with a jerk, and Suav toppled backwards and disappeared.
Ang didn’t even have time to call his brother’s name. One minute he was there, the next he was gone.
The next time the lorry stopped, Ang slid from his hiding place and dropped on to the wet tarmac of a foreign land. Praying fervently to the ancestors of the spirit mask, he walked all the way back to the docks.
But he never found Suav, or even the chocolate.
Only when the zij started so badly did Ang realize the true depth of his isolation. He hadn’t only left his home and the fields and his parents and brothers, he had left a world he understood, and which understood him.