The Girl With No Name. Marina Chapman

fact that the little ones in the family would make the ‘immediate danger’ call just for the fun of it, and that the adults seemed to know when to ignore them. That too was a comfort in those early days.

      Less comforting would have been to know that I would be there so long that I would have time to learn the meaning of almost every monkey sound. If I had known that then, perhaps I would have died of despair. But thankfully I didn’t. Every day dawned with at least a thread of hope to cling to, and, fragile as it was, that was enough to keep me going.

      *

      After my first night-time brush with what I’d thought might be a snake, I was terrified of encountering another. But my fear very quickly abated. Snakes were actually among the most timid of the jungle creatures. They liked to do what they did without anyone noticing them. Though I had always been afraid of them, thinking they wanted nothing more than to bite me, I soon realised they didn’t even like to be seen. Most of them had markings that made them blend into the background – looking like the leaf litter on the forest floor, or the bark of the trees – and they seemed altogether more scared than I was. The smallest noise would send them anxiously slithering away for cover, and, watching the monkeys, I learned to whistle whenever I saw one, which would invariably send them on their way.

      Timid too, were the spiders, which were almost all huge and hairy. If I’d seen one in my bedroom at home I would have been sobbing in terror, but in the jungle they were so different – so sweet and so shy. I found them fascinating and would watch them for ages, wanting to reach out and stroke their lovely silky legs. I’d watch how they’d scuttle into little hidey holes if you dared to come near them, then look out at you, their little black button eyes peeking out, as if pleading ‘Please, please don’t hurt me!’ It wasn’t long before I thought them really cute. I still do.

      Not that they were completely defenceless. Within a very short period of time I learned that it was silly to tease them. I would sit for ages watching them go about their business, just as any small child with time on their hands would do. If you watched for long enough, you could begin to learn which spider lived where, and I soon got to know the location of all their little ‘houses’.

      They were very private, of course, and there were periods when they’d all be inside and nothing much would be happening. So after a time, anxious for action, I would get myself a stick and try to tease up the little ‘lids’ that formed the entrances. Understandably, this made them very cross. They’d come bustling out to see who was interfering with their front door, and I noticed they’d often stop and shake their furry bodies, much like a wet dog would do. One day I also noticed that after just such an episode of irritation, the spider in question, having shaken itself, seemed to have a little cloud of something rising from its body.

      It wasn’t water. It took the form of tiny particles that looked like dust and I soon realised this must have been the source of the painful stinging and itching that I suffered afterwards.

      Not all the lessons I learned in those early days were about the world around me – some were about me, and the day-to-day business of taking care of myself. I was a little girl of not quite five. I was used to being looked after. Used to my mummy helping me to dress and undress, to wash myself, clean my teeth and brush my hair.

      All these daily rituals were now gone. My pretty cotton dress was ripped and filthy, and within days I had no choice but to discard my white knickers, as the elastic around the waist had snapped and they kept falling down. And though not being made to wash or having a comb forced through my hair was no hardship, going to the toilet and cleaning myself afterwards became something quite distressing.

      Again, I watched the monkeys for clues about what to do. They would go to the toilet whenever and wherever they felt the need. If they were high above me in the canopy, their poo would simply rain down onto the forest floor, or have its progress halted by the undergrowth. On one occasion I saw a dollop of it land on a fat, tufty fungus, which immediately responded by puffing out a big spore cloud, as if to let me know it was fed up.

      If the monkeys were on the ground themselves, they would bury what they’d done by covering it with earth or moss and leaves. They would also, I noticed – but by no means that regularly – clean themselves by sitting on their bottoms on a grassy area and sliding themselves along the ground. Alternatively they’d rub their backsides against a moss-covered tree trunk. That done, they would simply finish the job by contorting themselves and licking themselves clean.

      This last part was obviously a physical impossibility for me, but I was desperate to feel clean and not smelly. On the first few occasions I had to go to the toilet, I remember I wiped my bottom on my dress. Once 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