by John Sweeney
Sam’s eyes drilled into Grace. ‘Miss Collins, I beg you to keep these children under control. If I hear another squeak from them, I will hold you personally responsible. Now stay quiet. The sooner we find the main track, the sooner we can say goodbye,’ he hissed, and disappeared back up the way he had come.
‘Miss, why is he so bad-tempered?’ asked Molly.
‘I don’t rightly know, Molly.’
‘Perhaps he prefers the cha-cha-cha,’ whispered Ruby, but not so quietly that Grace couldn’t hear every word.
‘Sssh,’ said Grace, ‘he’s got a lot on his plate. You’ve got to remember that sometimes people with a bad temper may be right, after all.’
‘Hmph.’ A perfect imitation of Sam’s signature elephantine grunt. Grace knew damn well it came from Ruby, she elected not to hear it.
‘What will happen when we join up with the rest of the refugees, Miss?’ asked Emily.
‘The colonel would prefer it if we carried on to India on our own.’
‘But we’d miss the elephants,’ said Emily.
The last leg of the march was a slip-sliding miserable business, over low, swampy ground, thick with mosquitoes. The walkers looked up with envy at the lucky ones riding on their elephants. At six o’clock, another furious chaung, 100 yards across, blocked their path, the snow-melt raging against the rocks. For the strongest adult, it would be a suicidal risk to swim across. The elephants stepped across, the older ladies making sure their little ones were tucked in by their sides, sheltered from the force of the current. Grace bit her lip. This journey, without the help of the elephant men, would be impossible.
On the far bank, the children dismounted from their elephants, exhausted. In the golden half-hour before sundown the yellow-green glare filtering through the jungle canopy changed to ochre and saffron. Down at the water’s edge Grace washed her hands, then lay full-length face down by the bank and plunged her head into the running water. It was bitingly cold but thrillingly refreshing. Her ears rang with the current, but she became aware of another sound – a weird bubbling. Lifting her dripping head out of the water, she saw an elephant’s trunk two feet away. Like a boy bubbling up a strawberry milkshake through his straw, Oomy was blowing air down his trunk into the water’s muddy bottom. A few feet away Mother looked on, making a wholly different sound, that low, gravelly gurgle of old-fashioned plumbing, the elephant purr of motherly love.
Elephants weren’t truly grey at all, Grace realised. It was mud and dust that turned them so. Washed clean in the stream Mother’s skin was far darker than her calf’s, almost blue-black for most of her body, but speckled black-on-pink like a trout behind her ears and across her trunk as it tapered into her head. Where her tummy met her legs the skin sagged in multiple folds, deeply corrugated and as comfortable as Grandad’s corduroy trousers. The mother’s eye, one only visible from side on, was tiny, set in the vast frame of her head, not pig-like because of the effect of a series of rings of skin rippling concentrically from it, as if the eye was a stone lobbed into a black pond. Whereas the eye remained locked on her calf, all but motionless, her trunk barely stayed still for a second, grubbing on the ground or raised up to sniff the wind. Entranced, Grace gazed on as Mother watched over her baby playing in the water.
Oomy was absorbed in his game of blowing bubbles, black eyelashes as beautiful as a girl’s, shading a liquid brown eye. Mother tilted her head every now and then, this way and that, making sure that there was no threat to her son. A few yards further off upstream, two aunties were drinking the water, but also keeping the baby in full view. The two aunties formed two sides of a loose triangle, with Mother at the base, and the calf, playing in the water, in the middle: what looked a casual arrangement was in fact a fortress of flesh and trunk and bone, virtually impregnable. In the baby’s playfulness and the subtle watchfulness of mother and aunties, Grace found the elephants more like humans than she had ever thought possible.
Stopping his game, Oomy’s eye fixed on Grace. He gave her a wicked wink and showered her with a blast of mucky water.
‘He got you, Miss!’ shouted Molly.
‘Baby,’ said Joseph, pointing at Oomy. ‘Aaah.’
Grace gave him a squeeze. ‘Yes, Joseph, Oomy is Mother’s baby.’ The anti-malaria pills seemed to have done some good, to have slowed down his fever. He didn’t look at all well, but he managed a feeble smile. Looking at Oomy, his eyes sparkling with glee, he repeated: ‘Baby, aaah.’
Po Net used bark he had cut from a tree by the bank to create a kind of soap, and soon Mother’s back was lathered with a scummy blancmange. Fearlessly, he crouched underneath her belly and washed where the ropes attaching the basket had chafed against her. He ordered her to lift each foot, which he checked laboriously for thorns and wear and tear. One stamp from the elephant would crush the oozie stone dead, and the children marvelled at how much man and beast trusted each other. Inspecting Oomy’s feet was more problematic. He made such a fuss, squeaking and squirting Po Net whenever he got near the baby, that Mother had to give him a hefty thwack on his bottom before he settled down and let the oozie do his job.
Before dinner, Sam called a pow-wow of the adults. Recalling Sam’s irritation with the singing of the Lambeth Walk, Grace put on her apologetic face. Her reward was a brief nod, and a grunt, in elephantese.
Addressing the Havildar, Po Net and Grace, he said: ‘I’m still calculating that the main body of the Japs are intent on pressing north after our army. So long as we head due west, we’ll be well out of harm’s way. At least,’ Sam continued, ‘I think they won’t press hard in this direction. But it remains a gamble. And the bad news is that they’ve got elephants, ten of them by the looks of things, and almost certainly my bloody elephants. We had to leave four hundred behind, thanks to the incompetence of some useless types in the British Army. The Japs have obviously found ten.
‘No fires – and that means no hot meals, no boiling water, no tea tonight - because Japanese scouts will almost certainly have crossed the river on their elephant. They may confuse our party with a strong force of British soldiers, and that would not be good. Sentry pickets are to be placed on all four corners of the camp and five miles back down our track, less for fear of enemy attack than tigers, pythons and the like.’
Winston, Sam’s spaniel, licked the Havildar’s bare knee. He cursed the dog lavishly in Urdu and the animal yapped back at him and suddenly the two men were quarrelling, until Grace put a finger to her lips and cried: ‘Sssh! You’re setting a terrible example.’
A long, grisly silence, broken by a deep growly burbling. The Havildar was laughing. Everyone joined in, apart from Sam who glared at her. Grace had had enough of being demure and returned his gaze. After a beat, Sam studied his boots, the right-hand corner of his mouth wrinkling slightly.
The children were fed and watered, and the sick – Joseph and three girls with diarrhoea – were put up in the first aid tent. Word had got out that if you had the shakes you would get quinine and that meant chocolate to kill the taste, so Grace had to spend quite a bit of time suppressing a fake epidemic of malaria.
The fearsomeness of the Havildar helped. The children half-jumped every time he looked at them. At the end of the meal, Grace found she was standing next to him, as he gathered up the empty sardine tins.
‘I hope you don’t think I’m rude, Havdilar, but the children keep on asking: what happened to your hands?’
The Havildar stood up, towering over her, and smoothed his moustache down with the half-finger of his right hand. ‘Dinner was late one night.’ His voice was very deep. He paused. ‘I was hungry.’ Another pause, longer than before. ‘So, I ate my fingers,’ and, yelling at a Chin who had dared to start lighting a fire, he marched off.
The children were to sleep in the elephant baskets or placed two to a hammock, so that every one of them slept off the ground. No one was allowed a kerosene lamp in the open, but the stream, close by, gave off a faint phosphorescence which somehow grew more vivi
d the blacker the night became.
Sam had a moment to himself, reached into his pocket and produced a hip-flask, draining it deeply, and then he became aware of Grace standing close by.
‘My weakness, I’m afraid. Home-made firewater. My own recipe. Do you want a sip?’
‘Have you any to spare?’
‘Not much, but I’m going to run out in the next few days so one sip won’t make much of a difference. Go on. It will do you good. Sam’s Own Peculiar.’
It was quite the most vile drink she had ever drunk, a slurry of rancid coconut milk, swamp juice and cough mixture with, she was sure, more than a hint of elephant excrement.
‘Eeeyuckthankarrghyou,’ her eyes watering at the strength of it. ‘What’s it made of?’
‘Ah. That would be telling. After the war, I’m going to market it and become a rich man. Another?’
‘No. Good luck with that,’ she said so drily, and with such little sign of enthusiasm, that his right lip crinkled again.
‘When we join the rest of the refugees, what will you do Sam?’
‘The best track – correction, the only proper track – is due north. The problem is, it’s bunged up with what’s left of the army and thousands of refugees. Poor company for elephants and besides, the general staff have banned me from trying it, lest my elephants get in the way of their filing cabinets. So we’re going due west, finding our own path. It’s not easy without a proper map.’
‘Gosh, no.’
‘Hit the wrong ridge, and we add an extra week to the journey. And time is a luxury we don’t have. Our destination is a tea estate the size of Yorkshire so we shouldn’t miss it.’
‘Do you know the people there?’
‘Hell, no. They’re in India, after all. I’m imagining a fine old bungalow, a vast, Victorian bath-tub, full of hot water, plenty of bars of soap with gleaming white towels and an unending line of gin and tonics – fine anti-malarial prophylactics. And in the morning bacon and eggs, white toast, Seville marmalade, nice chinwag with the planter, he’ll be very old, and he’ll have a charming young wife. And a fine bitch for Winston.’
The dog looked up, expectantly, and panted his approval.
‘Sorry, that came out a bit wrong. Not used to company. Not used to female company, excepting elephant cow.’
‘Excepting elephant cow,’ she agreed, laughing. He wasn’t sure but he suspected that because of the whiteness of her teeth in the gloom she was beaming at him.
‘On behalf of the children I would like to say thank you very, very much for rescuing us, Sam.’
‘Thank the elephants.’
‘I’m thanking you.’
‘I’m sorry I was pompous when we first met. How was Rangoon when you left it?’
‘Stinking. Chaos, naked lunatics running around, looters. The Indians afraid of revenge from the Burmese. Thousands running away, walking, dying by the road.’
‘We…’ he hesitated ‘…let our people down. Badly. Both the Burmese and the Indians. Too many whites have just buggered off or flown out of Burma without a bloody care in the world. But the lesson I’ve taken from that is that you must not promise protection if you can’t deliver it. Had I known that you’d spout bloody poetry in the middle of the Chindwin…’
‘You would have abandoned us?’
‘“Tirra-lirra said Sir Lancelot.” Bloody disgrace,’ and he gave his elephant snort.
‘But you didn’t abandon us. The children are loving it. They can’t wait for morning. Yesterday was the worst day of my life but today may have been, somehow, the best. I thought we’d never, ever make it across the river.’
Another snort.
Moonrise. Shafts of silvery light tunnelled through the forest canopy high above and splashed down onto the jungle floor.
A commotion and three Chin guards – the rearguard – came, carrying a fourth man hanging in a sling from a bamboo pole.
The Chin lowered their burden in a puddle of moonlight, resting the man’s bloodied head against a thick liana, his slumped form casting a shadow, eerie and forlorn. The Chin explained in Burmese that they had found him by the Chindwin.
The faint light illuminated the man, unconscious, blood on his head, dried almost black against his blond hair.
‘That’s him,’ said Grace. The undergrowth murmured, twitching with a breath of air, the rhythm of the crickets rising and falling. ‘That’s the man who shot the Jemadar. That’s the murderer.’
The last word detonated like an assassin’s shot.
Sam motioned the Chin to carry the wounded man into his tent.
‘Murderer or not, let’s have a look at that head.’ Inside, she glimpsed a wide hammock, a canvas chair and a small table, on it an unlit kerosene lamp. The Chins sat the man, all but comatose, on the chair. Sam closed the tent flap after Grace, lit the kerosene lamp with a match and unlocked a small medical chest. He dabbed the head wound with alcohol spirit, wiping away the dried blood, and wrapped a clean white bandage around it, tying it off neatly.
By the lamplight she noticed something she hadn’t seen before in the gloom: a framed picture of a dark-haired woman in her thirties, laughing at someone else’s joke. In Burmese, Sam asked a Chin to find a hammock for the wounded man, telling him to get one of the sentries to check his breathing every hour and, if there was any change in his condition, to wake Sam up. They carried him away, gently, his head lolling onto the shoulder of the man supporting him.
‘Nasty cut – shrapnel, of some sort, bit of concussion, but the skull isn’t fractured. He’ll live. Pretty bloody amazing for him to swim the Chindwin after that bash to his head. Luck of the devil.’
Stone-faced under the moonlight, Grace said: ‘He’s a killer.’
Sam extinguished the kerosene lamp, leaving his face all but invisible in the gloom of the tent. He made no reply.
She repeated what she had just said.
‘He’s no threat. He can barely breathe.’
‘He shot the Jemadar in cold blood.’
‘I’m not a judge, still less a hanging one.’
The reluctance to take her side riled Grace. ‘I saw him shoot the Jemadar with my own eyes. I was but fifty feet away when it happened.’
‘If you really think the army will be over the moon about the idea of prosecuting a British sergeant in the middle of a war, one we appear to be losing extremely badly, by the way, after one Indian officer has been killed, probably by a stray bullet, then you have another think coming.’ Tiredness – no, worse than that, a grimy, exasperated fatigue – edged Sam’s voice as he went: ‘Are there any other witnesses? Oh, not the children. No court-martial will entertain a bunch of half-caste bastards.’
‘The children didn’t see anything. I was the only witness.’
‘Well, I fear they will look at you and dismiss you as just a girl who knows next to nothing about war or soldiery or what stray bullets can do. The very last thing they will want to do is rake up the mud between an Indian officer and a British soldier, what with all this talk of Jiffs and everything. That will be a disaster for them. So, if you insist on calling this chap a murderer, you’d better be right, but it’s going to be the word of a girl against a sergeant, one who has been injured in the line of duty. Nothing’s going to happen to him until, or rather if, we all reach India. And if you think that’s going to be easy, then, on that subject, too, you are horribly mistaken.’
‘Mr Metcalf,’ Grace started.
‘It’s either Sam or Colonel Metcalf, actually.’
‘Colonel, then. Murder is murder. That man killed our Jemadar in cold blood because he couldn’t abide waiting five minutes to help a busload of orphan not injured in the line of duty but in the act of making a very selfish escape from the enemy. He murdered an officer who was trying to maintain discipline and help us. What I think you are saying is that because the perpetrator is a white Englishman and the victim is of a coloured race, an Indian, no one will mind at all. I may be just a girl, in your view, in cha
rge of sixty half-caste bastards, as you put it so disgracefully, but let me tell you this, Colonel, that to suggest he was killed by a stray bullet, sir, is a filthy lie. I saw what happened and I mind very much indeed, and when I am free of your travelling circus and get to civilisation, I shall say so, loud and clear. Good night to you, sir.’
‘Grace, I didn’t mean to…’
But she was gone.
Chapter Seven
The luck of the devil? Bugger that. Easing himself out of the hammock, he got to his feet puffing and blowing like an old man of ninety. The mist drifted in, a grey fuzz that confused the lines and shapes of everything ten feet beyond him. Groggily, he rolled up his hammock and passed it to one of the oozies who stowed it in a basket on the back of a pack elephant. After a pantomime of slapping down his shorts and shirt for a smoke, the oozie smiled and lobbed him a cheroot. Filthy things, but better than nothing. The Burmese produced a match, he lit his cheroot and inhaled deeply, saluting the oozie for the smoke and leant back against a tree, watching the elephant camp wake up.
Fingering his head wound through the bandage, it felt sore and gooey. Would it heal in the wet heat? Hmm. Still, not dead yet.
The mist winnowed, revealing the big bastard – Rungdot, they called him – emerging from a clump of bamboo, chomping away, riderless. They had chained one foreleg to a hind-leg so he could not wander far, but the oozies watching over him seemed on edge, looking askance, keeping an eye on him, angling their bodies, ready to run. That was stupid. You had to show who was boss. Funny thing was, they were watching him the same way, too.
Slowly, deliberately, he walked towards the monster. The oozies were occupied with a harness, further off, faffing about, but someone coughed and they began to take notice as the blond Englishman with the bandage on his head became dangerously close to Rungdot. Eddie Gregory came to a stop within touching distance of the elephant’s tusks, blowing a cloud of cheroot smoke at the creature’s face. The elephant raised his head and eyed the sergeant murderously. On the far side of the clearing Sam came out of his tent and his attention was immediately gripped by the scene beneath him. Looking on, Sam watched aghast as the sergeant puffed out another smoke cloud directly at Rungdot. The head of the great elephant dropped a fraction, held, then he swung his tusks away and hobbled off towards the edge of the clearing.
