We're delighted to present an extract from Lenny, the new novel by Laura McVeigh, the author of Under the Almond Tree.
Lenny is the story of a young homeless boy in the bayou, who helped by the classic tale The Little Prince, seeks to repair his broken family and save his hometown, Roseville, from destruction. Meanwhile in the Ubari Sand Sea, a pilot falls to the earth in the desert and is rescued by a young boy. The two storylines travel between Libya and Louisiana in a story of family, love, hope and the power of the imagination.
Ubari Sand Sea, Libya, 2011
In the middle of the desert, the boy sat on his young camel, al mataya, and looked across the dunes, north to where Ghadamis lay, east across the Ubari sand sea, south to the Acacus mountains, but he could see only the haze of the day bubbling on the horizon, heat melting the edges of land and sky.
At first, Izil heard nothing beyond the snort of the beast and a dry, clicking sound from its throat, and the suck of the sand as the animal stepped along the ridge.
When it came, the sound carried high – a whine, insistent and far off, then louder, closer. He looked up and saw the fighter jet as it passed overhead, a dark-grey shadow against the haze of the skies. The jet shot out of view, smaller, higher once more, the sound dwindling. The boy waited. He waited for the sound of dropping bombs, in the distance, with an echo that would shake the valley. He waited for more planes in the sky, but they did not come. His camel, tired of waiting, pulled his head to the side and walked on, following an invisible path back toward the tents.
The boy wondered what it would be like, to pilot such a plane, to fly at speed and altitude, to hold the fortunes of whole villages and valleys under the pressure of your thumb, tensed on a control stick. Out here in the Ubari desert, they had no television, but once when he had travelled with his father to Ghat for a cousin's wedding, he had sat in a row with all the children, while the adults ate and danced and celebrated, and he had sucked on sweet dates while watching Top Gun on a large screen. He, along with all the boys, apart from one, had fallen in love with Kelly McGillis. The refusenik was his cousin Hassan, who loved Goose, though he told no one of his feelings, only repeating, 'I feel the need ... the need for speed’ over and over, falling about, laughing. His uncle, Ahmed, had beaten Hassan, and offered Izil a job selling mats to tourists in Ghat, if he wanted to stay on in the town, leave behind the desert life as they had chosen to do, but his father would not accept, and they had travelled back to Ubari. He had been sick on reaching his mother, the sugar heavy in his belly, the memory of the movie fresh in his mind.
The noise began again, the low far-off hum, the growl of approach, and for a moment the boy grew fearful. He was alone. The tents were at least an hour away. He feared for his family, even though the planes were meant to protect – that is what they said on the radio. Sky devils, his father called them, spitting in the sand.
The boy felt the inescapability of it all – he could not hide, could not run. He would not be able to warn them. So instead he just watched, looking up, his hand over his eyes, the pale cotton of the cloth cheche he wore loosely on his head flapping in the light breeze, as it wrapped around his cheeks and over his nose, leaving only his eyes exposed to the wind and light.
The plane flew high above him. For a moment, it paused in the air, then a sound of stuttering and the jet plane began to spiral downward as if it had forgotten how to fly. As it hurtled towards the dunes the boy saw the pilot eject, dangling for a moment in the sky, then dropping, his canopy opening late, the bulk of it dragging him along the dunes.
Further away, the jet plane burst into flames, sending up smoke signals far into the valley.
Izil had watched the man fall from the sky. Others would look for him – the boy was sure of that – but he had never seen one of these sky devils up close and he would not be robbed of the opportunity. So Izil, even though closer now to home, turned and set out for the ridge where the parachute billowed.
The pilot lay twisted in the desert dunes, his body torqued, his breathing faint – lips crusted in sand. Behind him, in the distance, smoked the wreckage of the jet. The man’s arms and shoulder blades were pulled back at a sharp angle, weighted by the billowing of the parachute.
He had not had enough time to control his landing, and instead had hit the dunes, dragged along by the heavy rig until it had dropped to the sand, air filling the canopy late, and he had become tangled in it as he tumbled to earth.
The man’s head throbbed with pain. His nostrils filled with the acrid smell of burning oil. The earth was still spinning. He remembered ejecting from the Viper, the spring-back of the cord, then free-falling as the desert grew closer too quickly, yanking at the cord, once, twice until it released and the air caught it and he righted, too late, dragging along the top of the dunes at an angle, a reluctant puppet caught up in his own strings. Not a textbook landing, granted, but a landing nonetheless.
He moved slowly, wriggling fingers and toes, bending his knees, checking for signs of damage. He would have liked to have sunk down into the sand, to become one with the earth. But the earth did not want him and so he lay there, the sun burning the back of his head, the parachute canopy rising and falling, sighing in the breeze.
The man waited for death. It did not come. Instead, after a long while, he felt the shadow of what he assumed was the enemy. The sky darkened over his head and looking up through one eye he saw the knobbly knees of the camel, smelt its dung drop to the earth beside him, and sitting on top, a barefoot figure, a small boy dressed in dusty indigo trousers and a faded red long-sleeved California Dreamin’ T-shirt, an amulet, made of yellow desert glass, tied around his neck, his mother had told him to protect him from djinns, a pale cheche worn around his head, only the eyes uncovered, watching the man who found he could not speak, his throat parched and his tongue swollen, full of sand and silt.
The boy looked down at him as he lay there – this broken sky king.
Once it became clear that the man posed little immediate threat, Izil decided what must happen next.
Lenny by Laura McVeigh is published by New Island Books on March 18th
