Neville the Less

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  Back to Rahimi Island, though! As well as angry Riff and beautiful Raff and bewitched Afsoon, the island held any number of items of fascination. The animal house, for example, was occupied at night by chickens that pecked in the yard all day long and by a trio of white ducks that quacked around the fringes of a small pond on which sailed a metre and a half long replica, made by Riff, of the boat that had brought them to Australia. There was also a nanny goat named Latifeh which Mrs Rahimi - Parisa (Neville could never bring himself to think of her as ‘Raff’ when her real name was so beautiful) - milked in a space under the house; and there was a pair of stumpy-legged brown pigs.

  “In Ganny- stan,” Mister Shoomba had once told Neville, “a pig always faces the direction it faced when it was born, d’ja know that? You throw food behind it, it runs backward to fetch it. You throw beside an’ it runs sideways. They han’t got the energy for all this turning around. Australian pigs, on t’other hand’ll spin like a top. True story!”

  Sometimes, from the branches of the mango tree, Neville watched Afsoon and her father gathering the animals’ manure, the first portion of which always went to feed the bougainvillea that climbed on Ralph’s Folly. He especially watched the brown pigs to see if they’d run backwards, but they never did. Mostly they just slept or hid from the heat in the shade of the little shed-sized barn. It was that little barn-shed whose narrow end nosed through the field of banana palms in the north-west corner of Home Country, butting up against the stockade. Its long side, however, ran along the much lower and much friendlier mesh fence that separated Rahimi Island from Cookie Camp.