The Cuckoo Colloquium

2 - Nini

They had just arrived and it was only afternoon, but shadows already engulfed fifteen-year-old Nini Read. It seemed as if the rain forest had some pressing need to turn to night quickly, like it was some old person that needed the sleep.

'What's the point of having a family if no one's here to give me Christmas presents?'

She scribbled the question into her journal, trying to make sense of why she and the other four kids in the colloquium-plus the old guy, their chaperone-had just endured three-hours on a jouncing minivan to get to this shabby ruin they were calling Cuckoo Camp.

She had taken her own walking tour of the place-past a couple of ramshackle huts, where elderly women sat on benches, splitting strands of green rattan, perhaps to be woven. And the old things didn't even look up from their labors at Nini, as if the passing Canadian tourist was insignificant to their worlds.

It didn't seem like much of a camp at all-more like a decrepit assembly of a half-dozen buildings-and buildings was a kind word: the structures stooped, as if their pathetic bodies had broken long ago, and they didn't know that standing was a command they didn't have to follow anymore.

It was December twenty-third, only four days into the colloquium, which meant Nini had to endure another ten wretched, gift-less days of what some incompetent moron at her high school had said was a mentorship program.

So where were the mentors?

The whole place was pitiable in a jungly kind of way. And the deeper Nini probed, the junglier it all seemed to get. The verdict was in on Cuckoo Camp, all right-major, mentor-less, buzz-kill. The sooner she got out, the better.

"Nothing farther upriver than Cuckoo Camp," the proprietor, a pock-marked Malaysian fellow called Fat Hus, chirped like some jungle bird, when Nini and the other five spilled out of the van, and up the scraggy trail to the lodge.

Two things about this Fat Hus guy: he wasn't fat, not really; maybe for a Malaysian, though Nini wasn't sure-she'd never met any. The second thing was his face: the poor guy's cheeks, chin, forehead, even his nose, were marred up and scarred by some marauding case of skin rot, or some such jungle disease.

And what did he mean by nothing farther upriver? - Nothing as CUT OFF, nothing as EVACUATED? ... Those were her first impressions, that Cuckoo Camp resembled less of a resort and more of an internment camp.

She was kneeling on the ground, trying to finish the day's journal entry in her little notebook when the odious American kid named Windy came crashing through the foliage toward her.

"We're lost, my Canuck friend," he squeaked in his little boy voice, "out here in Tarzan land."

He was an odd, fat kid, this Windy. And he poked out his chest and looked around, as if pondering the route of their salvation.

Nini drew in a breath: he has larger breasts than I do! Real boys were not supposed to be busty.

He tapped at some gadget in his hand, giving it a shake, and then frowning like some theater clown. "Just testing the GPS, working out the tweaks. It's brand new."

She didn't look when he waved the little blue gadget. Instead, she rolled her eyes, pointing back through the foliage to the corrugated eaves of a shack, their camp, still visible through the trees.

Windy squinted back through the flora, disappointed, like he thought they'd gone deeper.

"Jangala, jangala, jangala," he chanted, eyeing the surrounding forest. "It's the stuff of our nightmares, the heart of darkness."