Whistling for the Elephants

by Sandi Toksvig

  ‘All right, darling? I didn’t want to wake you, et cetera,’ she said against the rasp of her file.

  ‘I think we’re on our side,’ I said, looking at yet more water beyond Mother’s window. Mother looked at the window.

  ‘That can’t be right, darling. Aaagh!’ Mother fell back into almost a dead faint on the pillows.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother. I don’t think we’ll drown. We’ve been on our side for some time.

  ‘Dear God, what will your father say?’ I couldn’t think what Father would say if we drowned. Something appropriate.

  ‘I expect he’d have a word with the shipping company,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh darling, how could you? Your beautiful hair.’ Mother began to weep. In the face of a potentially watery grave only my appearance was causing my mother grief I looked out of the porthole. Under the strain of the storm, the ancient stabilizers of the Hallensfjord had simply given way and we were, to put it mildly, listing. The Atlantic wind continued to whistle outside. Mother, unable to face anyone with me by her side, went back to sleep and I went to have a look. There was no danger of sinking and no one seemed in the least bit distressed. At least no one in first class. They had paid far too much money to do anything as undignified as drowning. A rope had been strung up in the ballroom to assist passengers with cabins on the raised side of the vessel to get to them. I spent some time with a Polish waiter hauling myself to the top of the shiny wooden floor and then sliding swiftly down to the other end. The only person I remember being at all put out was the chef He sat drinking gin in the Polar Room and weeping and weeping.

  ‘My kitchen is ruined. I can do nothing for you. Steaks and lobsters. I am reduced to steaks and lobsters.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said one of my octogenarians. ‘We don’t mind one bit. Come on. Chin up, man.’

  Everyone was most sympathetic but there was an underlying sense that the chef was behaving rather badly. It was far too much emotion, even for a person allowed to be ‘creative’. I think some attempt was made at a lifeboat drill in the Columbus Bar but Mother refused to go. She said her nails weren’t dry yet and anyway what shoes could she possibly wear at this angle?, but I knew she didn’t want to be seen with me. Mother liked the idea of lifeboats. She had raised money for them even when we lived in landlocked countries.

  Everything was like a strange Alice in Wonderland dream. The library tables stood all askew. People picked a spot to walk to and then sort of fell towards it. That evening, in full dinner dress under large orange life-jackets, my octogenarians and I played gin rummy on the floor. As I was going to bed I met my Polish waiter in a corridor on the Boat deck. He was trying to push open the door to the wooden deck outside. I don’t know why. There was no job to do out there. No one had had a drink on deck all day. He pushed at the door but the wind was too fierce. At last he managed it and the heavy door almost ripped from his hands as he flung himself outside. It was utterly foolish but I followed. The storm was blowing itself out but the wind didn’t want to let go of the boat. The waiter turned his face to the blast and then slowly put his hands up as if arrested. He smiled as he leaned his whole body forward at an angle and began doing press-ups against the wind. It was so strong it held him easily. I struggled to his side and put my hands up in a great act of faith. We did press-ups on the wind and I wanted that. I wanted that feeling all my life.

  Father was waiting for us at Pier 96 when we docked. We saw him from quite a long way off, like a patient fly waiting on a great wooden arm. I don’t know what to say about Father. I didn’t know him that well. I suppose a lot of people have never seen their father naked; I had never seen mine without a tie. We could see him from the embarkation deck. An immaculate, entirely white-haired head. His back ramrod straight and his collar so tight that he constantly twitched his head sideways to relieve the pressure. He saw us but he didn’t shout. He never shouted. A cricket ball with an unlucky bounce had once hit him in the throat at school and I never heard him speak above a whisper. He didn’t need to be any louder. You always knew where you were with Father. He was a man of few but clear notions in life. They were mostly to do with men:

  Manners maketh man

  Coloured shirts on a man are a sure sign of

  homosexuality and

  Never trust a man in a ready-made bow tie.

  Ex-Army, he had a surprising amount of chin for an Englishman and rather more hair than must have been thought sensible in the mess. He had not been ‘fast track’ enough for the services and they had tipped him out as major, fit for nothing except to be in charge. After a comfortable and extended bachelorhood, at the age of forty-five he had made up his mind to marry and picked the first attractive woman who came along. Twenty years younger than him, Mother had rather shocked him by producing two children. I don’t know what he thought about fatherhood except that it was an awkward announcement to make at his club.

  After the Army, Father travelled with the Foreign Office. I’m not entirely sure what he did. I desperately wanted him to be a spy but in my heart I knew he wasn’t. His shoes were too squeaky and he was clean-shaven. I think he was something to do with protocol. It was both his business and his passion to know exactly how one ought to behave in any given situation.

  ‘Hello, my dear.’ He patted me on the back and kissed Mother politely on a proffered cheek. ‘No trouble, I hope?’

  We were three days late. Mother dismissed it with her hand and frowned at the customs officer examining her lingerie.

  ‘Hey, lady, whatja got here?’ the Bronx officer shouted, holding up an intimate item. The family shuddered. We were not ready for New York.

  I didn’t know why but Father had done a very strange thing. We had had many postings and had lived in one city-centre flat after another. This time, he had rented us a house. Not just any house but one outside the city. The sort of place that families actually lived in. With a garden. I suppose it should have been the first hint that things weren’t quite right. Now that I think about it, certainly it was a place where no one Father knew would ever bump into Mother by chance. It was a hideaway but I didn’t take it as that. I was too excited. I had also fallen in love with Father’s car. A station wagon. I had never heard of such a thing. Powder blue and unbelievably long. Longer than necessary for any conceivable car purpose. A huge, pointy, chrome-covered, road-eating monster. It was too big to be just for business. It was a family car. Our first family car.

  ‘It’s a Pontiac,’ whispered Father.

  I kept saying the word over and over to myself like a kind of mantra. ‘Pontiac, Pontiac, Pontiac.’ We headed off on the expressway. ‘Pontiac, Pontiac, Pontiac,’ all the way upstate, about fifty miles to Sassaspaneck. I didn’t know I was going home. Pontiac. Pontiac.

  ‘Indian name.’ I leaned forward to hear as Father whispered to me on the back seat. Mother slept bolt upright in the front, seeing nothing. ‘Sassaspaneck. They say it’s Algonquin for “Where the fresh fish meets the salt”. Been reading up on the history. Fascinating bit of colonial stuff’ If Father had a passion for anything it was for history. He liked anything which had already happened. Where you knew the end of the story. He was not given to fiction. ‘Place used to be packed with Algonquin. Tricky fellows. Europeans had a terrible time. No crops, smallpox, and no one could calm the Indians down. Then the British sent in General Amherst. Jeffrey Amherst. Tremendous chap.’

  We crossed over the Amherst River which ran down into Sassaspaneck Sound. Congregational and Methodist churches, so white that they had to have been touched by God himself, dominated the street corners. Past Tony’s Pizzeria and the Dairy Queen, and then we turned down into the residential area. I couldn’t imagine the Indians living here at all. Clapboard houses with porches needing paintwork and swing seats that had lost their swing stood shielded behind acres of ripped flyscreening. Everything looked big and expansive to our English eyes but I guess even then the town must have begun to feel a little down-at-heel. It was ex-grandeur rather than
grandeur.

  ‘Know what he did? Amherst? Gave all the natives blankets from the smallpox hospital. I think it must be the earliest example of modern germ warfare. Tremendous. They all died of smallpox and the settlers used the Indian stores to survive the winter.’

  It was what the town was famous for. The spreading of smallpox. The killing of Indians.

  ‘Here we are.’

  The house was right on the waterfront. 5 Cherry Blossom Gardens was in what the Americans call a dead end. The French call it a ‘cul de sac’, which sounds slightly exclusive. The English call it a ‘close’, which breathes their horror of proximity, but it was a dead end. A dead end of five houses. Four of them were rather large, with one lawn running casually into the next. Ours was the smallest and the only one with a holly hedge at the front. I think that’s why Father chose it. I’m sure he could never have hired a house without boundaries. The house itself was a large bungalow covered in light green clapboard which on closer inspection turned out to be made of aluminium. (It would take me a while to learn it was a ranch-style house, not a bungalow, and it was made of aluminum, not aluminium.) The clang of halyards against masts rang out across the water. A real house. I couldn’t believe it. It was wonderful. Mother got out of the car and stood in the driveway looking at the new place. Father didn’t look at her. He busied himself with the luggage. Mother never travelled light. He would be busy for some time. I took my own bag and headed for the front door.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Mother didn’t yell. She didn’t even raise her voice but it was enough to stop us porters in our tracks. We looked at her. Standing in the driveway at Cherry Blossom Gardens, her expensive coat flung casually across her cashmere shoulders, Mother was patently entirely out of place. The Empress of Russia come to rest in some peasant quarter.

  ‘You need somewhere quiet,’ whispered Father. ‘You’ve not been … yourself lately … have you? I thought by the water…’

  ‘Charles, I am not living here. People with smallpox wouldn’t live here.’ She had been listening.

  Father looked at me, his neck surging around his collar looking for air.

  ‘We need to tighten our belts a little. It will be fun, won’t it, Dorothy?’

  I think I was supposed to help him but I wasn’t sure how. I nodded, trying to imagine us having fun.

  ‘I am not living here,’ said Mother, raising her chin but not her voice.

  Father addressed a large hatbox firmly. ‘I spent the money on your tickets. This is what there is.

  It had been quite close to a row and everyone felt most uncomfortable. I didn’t know about money then. We had always had it and I had never thought about it. If not having money meant living in a real house then I thought it was great. Father opened the door and began staggering in with luggage. I dumped my bag and wandered around. The lounge was at the heart of the house. A vast room with plate-glass windows on to a flyscreened porch overlooking Sassaspaneck Harbour. Dense flyscreening protected all the large windows and made the view of the bright harbour endlessly grey. Off the sitting room were the dining room and the kitchen. The kitchen was absurd: thirty feet of fitted shininess which Mother would never set foot in. It had the most enormous fridge I had ever seen. Taller than me with a great silver lever of a handle, it bulged as if it had already overeaten. The other side of the lounge was a large bedroom for Father and Mother, again facing the harbour, a small bedroom for me and a third room for Father’s study. The furniture was all ‘early American’ — a heavy, semi-quilted look straight from a catalogue. There was nothing about the house which suggested that it was ours but I loved it. I wandered from room to room, trying to soak it all in and ignore the strong smell of mothballs. When he had finished with the bags, Father went and stood by the front door. He held the screen open until Mother had no choice but to come in. She stood in the lounge looking down at everything. Father got her a drink of water.

  ‘Have one of your pills,’ he said quietly, getting them from her bag. Mother took it and handed him back the glass without looking. Each word she spoke came out like a telegram.

  ‘We are not staying here. I won’t. I can’t. You know how I get all … et cetera.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he soothed. He always soothed her in the end. Mother went to lie down. Which was probably just as well. Father had just helped her into the bedroom and was looking out to the boats with me. We were trying to think of something to say. I thought maybe I should ask what had happened and why we were here but I couldn’t think where to begin. Anyway, I liked it. I didn’t want to not stay. That was when the front screen door banged open and a woman with skyscraper hair appeared.

  She was the most carefully constructed woman I had ever seen in my life. Everything about her was carefully polished and planned but it didn’t quite work like Mother. It was a much cheaper imitation. A market-stall run-up of a Gucci bag. A whole beauty shop of smells enveloped me as I stood, gawky and unsure in the face of such blatant womanhood. Mother often complained about women who ‘hadn’t made the most of themselves’. This woman had made the most of herself some time ago and then just carried on, not knowing when to stop. Nothing, not a hair was out of place. She wore very tight trousers. Black pedal pushers in spray-on form. I had never seen my mother in trousers. Indeed I don’t think at that time I even had a pair myself. Her fluffy white sweater finished rather too early around her midriff and her high heels stopped rather too late. She wasn’t young. I guess she must have been as much as forty but she carried her youth preserved in pancake and powder.

  In her arms she carried a very elderly white poodle, a hatbox of a cake and a large black bag. The poodle too had been manicured to within an inch of its diamanté collar. It looked down its nose at me as water ran from its slightly yellow, rheumy eyes.

  ‘Hey, honey. Judith Schlick. You have gotta be Dorothy. Ain’t you cute? What do they call you?’

  ‘Dorothy,’ I said.

  Mrs Schlick raised a pencil-line eyebrow. ‘Well, I never. Is your father home?’ She swept in, moving towards Father in a spectacular series of curves as if avoiding unseen sharp objects. ‘Charlie, so they came. Finally. How fabulous. A little cake. What else could I do? Think of it as a kind of Welcome Wagon.’

  ‘Mrs Schlick…’ The dog wrestled its way to the floor and Father had no choice but to take the violent cake. I had never seen an American layer cake before. It was incredible. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. For a start it was green. And not just any green. Mesmerizing green. A sort of poor-man’s-St-Patrick’s-Day celebration green. A green you couldn’t imagine anybody coming up with for anything, let alone a cake. The bright green icing was raised up all over in sharp little spikes which spat from its sides. At least a foot and a half in diameter, the cake gave rather more the impression of having landed than having been baked. It was an alien thing.

  ‘Charlie, Charlie! Mrs Schlick! Really, you English and your manners. Judith, remember? He is sooo polite, your father, such a gentleman.’ Mrs Schlick settled carefully on the settee like a rather rare butterfly come to rest, and crossed her legs. ‘Charlie and I have had such nice talks, haven’t we, Charlie?’

  This was impossible to imagine. Her right foot swung rhythmically in the air. Perfect pink polished toenails peeked out from her mesmerizingly tall sandal. I took a sharp breath. She had an ankle chain! I gawped. I know I did. Mother had talked about women like this. Women who were genuine floozies. Women who didn’t use doorbells. Women who wore ankle chains.

  ‘Rocco, you dirty devil. Stop that.’ She began to giggle. The elderly poodle was standing on its hind paws and had firmly attached itself to Father’s leg. It had a slightly strange grin as it humped hell out of his highly polished brogues. Sex had entered our house. Father’s neck twitched uncontrollably against his collar but he did not move.

  ‘And your wife?’ Mrs Schlick scanned the room with rapid radar.

  ‘Sleeping, the trip, you know, et cetera,’ he whispered.


  ‘Of course, of course.’ Every word sprang straight from her nose.

  When Mrs Schlick and Rocco finally left, Father was still standing in the middle of the sitting room, with a stain on his trousers, holding the green cake.

  ‘She lives across the road,’ he whispered, his neck going double speed. I felt I ought to say something.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes?’ he mouthed.

  ‘What flavour is green?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We stood and looked at each other for a moment. He never mentioned my hair. I went outside.

  A group of children were playing in the street. I didn’t know what they were playing. It involved a rugger ball and a lot of shouting. They stopped when they saw me. No one said anything. There were about six of them and they circled warily towards me. One of them, a girl, older and bigger than me, picked up a bottle of squash or pop or something from the edge of the road. She thrust it towards me.

  ‘Hey you, you wanna soda?’ I wasn’t sure that I did, any more than I wanted green cake, but they were all watching so I carefully put the drink to my lips and sipped. The place erupted, the children screaming and jumping about.

  ‘Cooties! Cooties!’ They pointed and jabbed at me.

  ‘Urgh, you got cooties!’

  There was no two ways about it. I had got cooties and I didn’t know what they were. I did know one thing. I did not have the language for this place. Not yet, anyway.

  Chapter Two

  America. Land of therapy. Where something or someone is always to blame. They say the Americans have such a restless frontier ethos that when they got to California and couldn’t go any further they carried on exploring inside themselves. It hadn’t reached a national obsession yet in ‘68. The country was only just beginning to put itself on the couch. No one knew that pets could have ‘abandonment issues’, that cheese was a dangerous foodstuff or that America could lose the Vietnam War. The US had not yet adopted for itself the onerous role of the world’s policeman, but the foundations of the place were beginning to shake a little. Martin Luther King was dead a month and it pricked the conscience of people who had thought he was nothing to do with them.