Whistling for the Elephants

by Sandi Toksvig

  ‘I’m pleased to see you too, Artemesia.’

  It was a greeting of two old friends. The strangest greeting I had ever seen but heartfelt none the less.

  ‘There’s two, I’m afraid,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I thought my eyes had gone.’

  I handed Miss Strange the paperwork from the driver. She looked at it without focusing and handed it on to Sweetheart. Miss Strange went back to stroking her old friend. Sweetheart looked at the papers.

  ‘So, Artemesia, you have a daughter.’ She turned to the slightly smaller creature. ‘Welcome…’ She checked for the name. ‘Betsy? Hmm, we’ll think about that. Now where the hell are we going to put you?’

  The enclosure wasn’t ready. Wouldn’t be ready for at least another day. It was Sweetheart who thought of the swimming pool. Miss Strange went kind of funny. She was drunk so there was no reason in it.

  ‘We are not using the pool. I am not going in there.’

  ‘It would be perfect,’ argued Sweetheart. ‘They’ll be fine for the night. It’s empty, it’s strong, we can wash it down easily.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘What else do you suggest?’

  The argument was going strong when Helen drifted up from the field. She had a strange faraway look in her eye and a small tear in her dress. The dress flowed behind, loosening itself on her shoulders so that they stood out milky white in the night sky. She smiled and ran with her arms outstretched toward the elephants. When she reached Artemesia she hugged her.

  ‘They need to go in the old pool,’ said Sweetheart, trying to get everyone shifted. ‘There isn’t anywhere else.’

  Helen was not herself She didn’t look like herself and she sure didn’t act like it. ‘Come on,’ she shouted. Helen never shouted and now she led the way, Pied-Piper-like, turning to make us march to the old marble pool.

  The place had been shut up for years and the lights came on with fizzy reluctance but it was perfect. There was no water now but the shallow steps down into the basin made it easy to get the elephants in. The solid marble and mosaicked walls would easily hold them until the enclosure was done. Miss Strange was stiff as we moved to get Artemesia and Betsy happy.

  ‘Come on,’ said Helen again.

  ‘I don’t want to be in here. I don’t think they should be in here,’ replied Miss Strange. She looked sweaty and tired, the alcohol beginning to wane.

  Helen continued to work with confidence. She and Cosmos got bales from the barn while Sweetheart and I tried to find a drinking bucket. Miss Strange sat at the side and watched. It was weird to see Helen take over. You would have thought that these creatures were too big for a woman who lived in the land of the winged insect.

  Artemesia and Betsy stood head to head in the middle of the empty pool while all the activity went on around them. Occasionally they would reach their trunks to each other’s mouth, then entwine them, sniffing each other’s face and body, appearing to sample breath and saliva, then Artemesia would give a low rumble and they would stand still again. Miss Strange sat on the side of the diving board, looking down to where once the water had been.

  ‘They never said anything about two. Did they say anything to you, Sugar?’ I shook my head.

  Helen didn’t sit for a second. She was unstoppable. She shifted hay, pulled the hose and gave it to Sappho to fill the bucket we’d found. Sweetheart went to check on Perry in the house. When she came back Perry was awake and sitting up in her arms. Aunt Bonnie, Judith and the goose drifted in behind.

  ‘Elephants!’ Perry cried at the sight of them. ‘Look, Great-Grandma, Aunt Bonnie, elephants!’ He jumped down and ran towards the steps.

  ‘Perry!’ Sweetheart called in panic.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Miss Strange. She had gone very quiet. The drink had left her subdued. She picked Perry up and moved down the steps with him. She gave a slight shudder and then moved toward the two new inmates.

  ‘I like elephants,’ announced Perry, and reached out to hug Betsy, who seemed to hug him back. ‘Why are they so wrinkled? Great-Grandma is wrinkled.’

  Sweetheart laughed. ‘So I am, thank you, Perry.’

  ‘It helps them to keep cool,’ explained Miss Strange, stroking the gnarled but delicate skin. ‘See, there’s more skin to get wet. The cracks hold on to the water and keep it longer in the bright sun.’

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’ Helen seemed almost intoxicated as she danced around the bottom of the pool.

  ‘They can’t really stay here,’ said Miss Strange. ‘I don’t think the enclosure will hold both of them.’

  Helen jigged about. ‘Of course they can. Do you know, Perry, if it wasn’t for stupid people then elephants would probably be the most successful species on earth. They or their ancient relatives have lived everywhere from deserts to rainforests to glaciers.’

  ‘They can live here,’ agreed Perry. ‘Look at the ears, look how big they are!’ he cried.

  Helen smiled and reached up to touch one. ‘You know, it is said that in Ethiopia the elephants link themselves four or five together into a sort of raft and, holding up their heads to serve as sails, are carried on the waves to the better pastures of Arabia.’

  Cosmos left her hay preparations and jumped down beside Miss Strange. ‘Come on, Sugar, Perry, Helen, hold my hand, let’s duck under them. It’s good luck. Come on, Sweetheart.’

  Sweetheart laughed. ‘They’re too big for me.’

  ‘Nothing is as big as it looks,’ cried Cosmos, trying to get all of us to join hands. ‘We increase the size of things in our minds. I don’t believe it is as far to Africa as we think it is.’

  ‘Yes, come on.’ Helen and Cosmos were unstoppable. Helen grabbed Aunt Bonnie’s and Sweetheart’s hands:

  Cosmos grabbed me and Miss Strange, who held on to Sappho. The two women got us in a line all holding hands. Helen was leading, with Miss Strange and the orang at the end. ‘Come on,’ called Helen, beginning to move us all, ducking under Artemesia and then dancing round Betsy for good luck. Judith stood at the side. As we passed her Miss Strange let go of Sappho and reached out her hand but Judith looked away.

  It was late. Sweetheart went back to the house with Perry, Judith and Aunt Bonnie. Judith was beginning to say that she ought to go home but she clearly had no heart for it.

  ‘Shouldn’t you go home, Sugar?’ Miss Strange asked. I didn’t say about Mother going. I just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t want to.’

  She shrugged back. She didn’t ask about my family and I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to. We slept that night amongst the hay and the elephants. I dozed for a while. Cosmos was whittling at a piece of wood and I slept to the steady sound of her knife. When I awoke Miss Strange was sitting above the deep end looking down at our new charges. Cosmos lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Her whittling lay beside her. Helen slept on a hay bale, her arms and legs outstretched like she was making angels in the snow. She smiled in her sleep. Artemesia and Betsy slept side by side, standing up. The air was full of deep contented breathing.

  ‘Both female,’ said Miss Strange, looking at the elephants.

  ‘Yeah, like not even a cute couple,’ agreed Cosmos. ‘Be no good in Siam. The men in Siam would no more ride a female elephant than you’d get a guy to ride a donkey in the Memorial Day Parade.’

  ‘I think having two females is great,’ I said, feeling very defensive.

  ‘Sure. It’s great,’ agreed Cosmos. ‘We’re not like, in Siam.’

  I lay down next to her and stared at the ceiling. A god on a snake stared down at me.

  ‘That’s Vishnu,’ explained Cosmos. ‘Reclining on the Ananta-Sesha serpent as he floats on the cosmic ocean. He is dreaming his cosmic dream. Every now and then the world is destroyed and Vishnu must recreate it in a dream. See, from his navel on a long-stemmed lotus is the god Brahma, the creator. It is his job to create what Vishnu dreams — everything in the universe.’

  ‘Vishnu has the great vision then he
gets the builders over,’ chuckled Miss Strange.

  Cosmos was not distracted. ‘It is said that from the many petals and stamens of this miraculous lotus the gods Vishnu, Siva, Brahma and Agni eventually created the various castes or families of elephants, the celestial ancestors of Artemesia and Betsy.’

  Miss Strange shook her head. ‘Betsy! What kind of a name is that?’

  On the walls a mosaic of mountains and trees spread up to the gods. ‘Look there,’ commanded Cosmos. ‘There, sheltered in the Himalayan Mountains, is the mythical Himaphan forest, where many real and fabulous creatures including the elephants live.’

  It was a dream world. We lay in a dream of elephants and mythical forests. This was where I wanted to stay always.

  ‘Here, Sugar,’ said Cosmos, ‘I made you this.’ She handed me the most perfect wood carving of Betsy playing. ‘It’s a Shinto-baku — a tiny elephant kept by believers near their bed to ward off nightmares.’

  ‘Harry will close us down, Cosmos,’ said Miss Strange, quietly changing the subject. I clutched my new power against evil.

  ‘No,’ Cosmos replied. ‘We have something he does not. We have the power of concentrated calmness over unreason and brute force.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  Cosmos looked at me and smiled. ‘Buddha had enemies. They sent wild Nalagiri elephants to trample him to death, but Buddha subdued their ferocity by the power of his inner strength. The elephants came toward him and he simply raised his hand to calm them. We shall do the same.’

  And I believed her.

  Sweetheart sat smiling at the elephants. ‘Just think what John Junior would have made of this. What a show he would be planning.’

  Miss Strange laughed. ‘He could make a show out of a dead elephant. Culpeper-Meriweather’s Great Combined Circus.

  Sweetheart nodded. ‘Boston. Fourth of July fair.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. Miss Strange smiled at me.

  ‘Our Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie was due into Boston for the fair when an old elephant we had — this was before Toto and Ellen — died. So Culpeper heard about this and started advertising his event with the slogan Come See the Only Living Elephant at the Fair. John never worried for a second. He put up posters saying Come and See the Only Dead Elephant at the Fair. And they came. The public ate it up.’

  Sweetheart shook her head. ‘Not as much as the pigtailed macaque monkey which inhaled when it smoked.’ It was another world.

  The next day was all hands on deck. None of the women sat and watched. Aunt Bonnie and Judith came out from the big house with Sweetheart and Perry. Judith looked real pale but she had stopped crying. Her hair hung straight now and she had no make-up on at all. I thought it was much better. She looked younger. Troilus followed in her footsteps. Everyone gathered on the lawn. Women from all over the town. Even more than the night before. Women I had never seen before. No one had said anything. All Miss Strange did was bring Artemesia and Betsy out on the lawn. There was a long pause and a lot of murmuring and then everyone just kind of got on. Half the workforce immediately set to completing the enclosure. Everyone else was on food detail.

  Helen gave out the shopping list. ‘Okay, now, mainly vegetarian, please, ladies. We are looking for one hundred pounds of hay and twenty-five pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables per elephant per day. Bark, grass, hay, apples, cabbages, carrots, bananas, oranges, bread, and, before you rush out and think you’re on to a winner — they don’t like peanuts. Delicacies and treats include grapefruits and sweet-potato tops.’ She grinned at the women. Helen had taken on a new life. I went with Sweetheart to the A&P. I just knew Alfonso would help us out. Then there was Frank’s Franks — he always had lots of bread left over.

  It was hot, unbearably hot in the enclosure. Gabriel arrived early. He never said a word to Helen and she didn’t speak to him. It was as if nothing had happened the night before between them and yet everything had. Helen was a new person. She had her brown cords back on but she had tied a bright pink scarf from the cabin trunk round her neck and it stood out against her usual clothes. Gabriel got on with the job and on with sweating. About halfway through the morning the chain broke on his tow-truck. He tried to fix it but it was no use.

  ‘No can do,’ he said with his gift for language.

  There were still a dozen or more pieces of track to come over from in back of the house. Helen didn’t stop for a minute.

  ‘Isn’t the old harness still in the house?’ she asked Miss Strange, and the two of them went off. When we got back Artemesia was wearing a large leather harness and doing the work of the truck. It seemed like nothing to her. She used her tusks like a forklift to get the track in place. Then Gabriel would fasten it to the harness so she could pull the load round to the enclosure. She and Gabriel seemed to have got into a rhythm so that Artemesia could even hold the pieces in place while Gabriel welded. Seemed kind of a strange trick, getting her to build her own stockade. She worked with great precision, apparently understanding the concept of balance and symmetry in loading and stacking the metal pieces.

  Judith had moved herself sufficiently to take over providing the drinks, and Aunt Bonnie was working in the field. She didn’t need to play with Perry any more. He had a new friend. Perry and Betsy played together every hour there was. Neither one seemed to know they were boy and elephant babe and maybe not ideal playmates. Certainly Betsy hadn’t got the idea at all. Despite having the wizened look of a little old gnome she saw the whole world as a thrilling adventure. She would get so excited that her ears flapped, and then she would bounce up and down with her two forefeet together. Quite often it was while bouncing like an India-rubber ball that she would try sucking her trunk. She usually stood on it instead and fell over. Her feet and legs lacked coordination. They seemed too big and long for her tiny body.

  When Perry took time off to play on the swing outside the barn, she stood and watched. Then she moved toward him and waved him away with her trunk. Perry got off and Betsy backed up to the swing and tried to sit down. The swing swung out of the way of her substantial bottom and she fell backward as Perry laughed. At least half an hour went by with Betsy trying to use her tail to hold the swing steady.

  She tried using her trunk but to no avail. That brilliant elephant arm was no use to her yet. A piece of flesh sensitive enough to read Braille but at the moment incomprehensible to the young calf. One hundred fifty thousand muscles and Betsy didn’t know how a single one of them worked. Eventually it would be flexible sideways, upward and downward, slightly telescopic, but not yet. One day it would be able to pick up a needle in a haystack. She twirled it like a long bobble cap placed on her head by Artemesia to keep her warm. It made everyone giggle, even Judith. Artemesia, however, knew exactly what she was doing. Her trunk was a six-foot-long, one-foot-thick third eye.

  The women detailed to shopping had filled a huge shed near the field with different foodstuffs and bolted the door. Helen was busy organizing it all. She had fixed a pulley system to a tree and was busy hanging vegetables off it to make feeding as interesting as possible. ‘Imagine you were in jail and all your meals just came on a tray.’

  Sappho handed me an Oreo cookie. I wasn’t sure it would be so bad. I don’t know if the women were either. A lot of them had spent twenty years cooking family dinners. The thought of anything arriving on a tray was probably pretty attractive. Helen carried on organizing. She hung brackets for ‘multi-level feeding’ and a big trough for vegetables.

  ‘Don’t cut it up,’ she ordered her brigade of women. ‘The elephants need to pick and sort the food themselves. Just like in Africa.’ There were other notions too about making the elephants at home. It was the coconut matting which finally got Judith involved. Until then she hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t left either, but she hadn’t really helped. Cosmos had a thing about ‘abrasion.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I, Helen?’ she called out. ‘You see, elephants need abrasion. Their skin i
s used to it in the wild so we need to make some. Help keep them in good trim.’ Cosmos held up some coconut matting from a Welcome doormat. ‘Maybe I could…’ She tried fixing it to a log. For the first time Judith took an interest. She stood up. This was fabric. This was her area. She took the mat and she and Troilus went to get string and a strong needle. Soon she was sewing in abrasion all over the place. I’m not sure that Artemesia appreciated all the effort.

  During a short break Sweetheart and Aunt Bonnie handed out drinks to everyone. It must have been a hundred degrees out and everyone was feeling it. Artemesia and Betsy stood side by side with Artemesia sheltering her calf from the sun. Cosmos sat on the ground looking at them.

  ‘It’s so weird,’ she said. ‘These huge creatures. I mean, like, they have all these feelings but they can’t tell us about them.’

  Aunt Bonnie giggled. ‘Bit like men then.’

  ‘Exactly like men,’ chortled Sweetheart. Everyone laughed.

  ‘Show us some of Artemesia’s tricks,’ called one of the women.

  ‘What did she do?’ called another.

  Miss Strange patted Arterifesia and looked her in the eye. ‘Tightrope-walking,’ she sighed.

  ‘Did you see it?’ I asked, trying to imagine such a thing. I mean, an elephant on a tightrope. It was incredible.

  ‘Once,’ replied Miss Strange. ‘She had a special rope. Maybe twenty foot long, six inches in diameter and four foot off the ground. It was ridiculous. She would walk along the rope, get off, play the organ, blow a whistle and fire a cannon.

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Doreen.

  ‘I don’t know. Isn’t it enough? What do you want her to do? Write her name with a piece of chalk? Drive a car?’ Miss Strange wiped the sweat from her forehead. It ran in strange patterns down the right-hand side of her face. A kind of glacial facial movement.