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in the open on the night of the first day of our trek to cross the border.
    The uncomfortable rock had pushed the snake dream out of my mind. I wasn't frightened of snakes anyway, and it was way too cold for any to be out and about now. But the hissing was real.
    My eyes fastened eagerly onto a glow of reddish light and followed it to the remains of the campfire. The Guide sat motionless in its glow, his khaki trousers and shirt lit almost orange against the black, starless sky. Then he reached out and pushed another few twigs into the middle of the fire and there was a crackle and a few blue flames suddenly flared orange. His shape shone white for a moment.
    The hissing, I realized, was coming from Dad, still lying down, but propped up on his elbow with his back to me. He was whispering to the Guide acrossthe campfire, but he wasn't very good at it, I thought, if it was loud enough to wake me up.
    “Are you sure?” hissed Dad, just a black shape with a cold white glow about the top edge. “I really didn't want to try and cross the mountains. I mean, with a woman and child. And we're not equipped …”
    The Guide spoke softly.
    “The rumors as we left were that they have closed the border. We will not be able to cross by the road at the checkpoints. I don't care if you have papers. The border guards have their orders. The camps are overflowing, conditions are terrible. They just cannot let in any more people. As for the woman and child, this is always what men say. Do they not shame us all with their strength in the end? Has your woman not done things you thought that even you could not do?”
    And I remembered Mum working with everyone all day to help build the school hut, and then, just as everyone almost fell, rather than sat down, to eat that evening, rushing out to help a woman who was having a baby, which was stuck the wrong way up orsomething, and then staying up all night with one of the woman's other babies, which was sick and crying.
    And then there was the time when I was quite small and I was asleep and Dad was out, and the roof over my bed started to fall in and Mum reached up and grabbed the great big timber, and held it up, and she was trying to wake me to make me move out of the way, but she couldn't reach me with her foot to give me a good kick and
still
hold up the timber. She tried shouting and everything, but still I slept on. She had told me the story and teased me about it when I was older.
    “Typical you! It was terrible getting you off to sleep, you never wanted to. But when I needed you to wake up, you wouldn't!” she'd laugh.
    And Dad would say, “Oh, that kid was always clever. Why bother waking up when you seemed to be hanging on to that beam all right?” But you could see he couldn't really joke about it like Mum. He still had that worried look in his eyes when he thought about it.
    He'd come back, he said, and found her standingthere like she'd been there forever (“It felt like it,” said Mum), still holding up the beam after nearly two hours, and he went to grab it from her and she just looked up and said wearily, “No, the child! Move the child. You won't hold it.”
    He decided she was right about moving the child, though obviously wrong about him not being able to hold the beam, as my mum is very small and Dad is, like I said, pretty tall, if not very wide across.
    So he picked me up and moved me into the other room (and I
still
didn't wake up) and put his hands under the beam so Mum could let go, and when she put her arms down, both of them went “Oww!” and “Agh!” Mum, because of the pain as her arms came back to life, and Dad, because he could hardly take the weight and he suddenly realized what she'd been holding up.
    “And it wasn't
possible
that she could,” he would say, again and again.
    When the men Mum had fetched had rushed in and propped up the beam with a big bit of wood (tosave the roof till it could be fixed properly the next day), Dad had let go and his