ELEPHANT MOON (16 page)

Slash.

Something was writhing on top of him, and he took a tumble out of the hammock and hit the ground - and came face to face with the severed head of a Burmese python. A few feet away, on the ground, was the rest of the snake, at its widest as barrel-chested as a small pig, marked with a deep brown zig-zag, longer than a fireman’s hosepipe, it’s tail still moving.

Terror choked him, but only for half a second, and then he smelt a rat. For a start, one of the oozies, standing about ten yards away, was giggling fit to bust. You don’t have a laugh when a man is about to be killed by a snake. Second, the snake stank, of rotting flesh. Thirdly, the blood at the end of its severed neck had dried hard and brown. Fourthly, the neck end had its own thick halo of flies, buzzing this way and that. The flies in the jungle were fast, but not that fast. You had to be dead at least a couple of minutes before they started to feast. Finally, he’d just glimpsed one of his oozie mates hiding behind a bush, jiggling the carcase by its tail to give the impression of a snake still thrashing in its death throes. Dead snakes don’t bite.

Po-faced, when one of the oozies shoved the python’s head towards his mush a second later, impaled on a dah, he didn’t budge an inch.

‘Ha bloody ha. Pull the other one mate. This one’s been dead as long as my Aunt Fanny.’ The oozie didn’t understand English, but the flatness in Eddie’s voice needed no translation.

Later, giggling, the oozies mimed to him they’d found the python as they had set up camp, writhing around a tree trunk, and had hacked off its head there and then. The joke was guaranteed to make a man scream – some victims had, in the past, soiled themselves – so Gregory’s stone-dead lack of reaction was even more remarkable. The incident confirmed his reputation among the elephant men as a man without fear.

No relaxing of the muscle or the mind
. That was how he’d made it this far, that was how he was going to make it all the way to India and back to Blighty, and that was how that bitch poppet would end up a rotting carcase in the jungle.

Thing is, he could do something with the oozies’ snake trick, he could use it for his own purposes. ‘I’ll be keeping that head for a bit,’ he said, and levered it off the oozie’s dah with his own knife, ‘as a trophy.’

And he lit up a cheroot and worked up a plan while the oozies gathered fodder for the elephants and cooked dinner, giving the cold-blooded sergeant the widest of berths. The same trick, he thought, could work with one of the schoolgirls, that leggy one. Yeah, he’d plant the head in her hammock, swish it out – and then he’d be her hero for life. No, that wouldn’t work. They kept too tight a watch on where the girls slept. It would have to be when she was going to the toilet in the bush. Yeah, they were all very sheepish about it, their bodily functions, that would be the moment. And no better time to strike than now.

Wrapping the snake’s head in his blanket, he took his dah and sidled into the jungle. They’d stopped in the usual sort of place, heavy jungle overhead, hiding them from prying Japanese eyes in the sky, but with a stream, twenty foot wide, close by, so that the elephants could wash and scrub at the end of their long day’s walk. As usual, he had been at the very head of the main party, with the girls and the schoolmarm some way back, and the Chin at the tail, guarding the entrance to the track they’d beaten through the jungle, such as it was.

He walked about fifty yards into the jungle and then cut and slashed his way downhill, roughly parallel to where the girls would be sleeping, and waited, his eyes adjusting to the growing gloom. If they weren’t snappy, he’d miss dinner. Still, look at it this way, going a bit hungry for one night was better than a hanging.

Sure enough, there she was, wearing a frock that had become muddy brown with jungle dirt, a tear in it giving him a lovely glimpse of thigh, walking towards him into a small glade of trees, on which a little of the dying light to the west cast a red glow.

As she hoisted her dress and bent down to do her business, he curved around the glade, cutting off her retreat to the camp. He unwrapped the snake’s head from the blanket and jammed his dah up through the mouth into the gullet.

A crackle underfoot. Damn his clumsiness. She looked up, uneasy, the very picture of startled innocence. He held still, motionless. Wiping herself with a fern, she stood up and started towards him.

Slash, slash, slash!

The snake’s head, speared by his dah, landed a few feet in front of her. He came blundering out from behind a spread of bamboo and there she was, white-faced, frozen, goggle-eyes at the snake’s head.

‘Sssh,’ said Gregory, ‘it’s all right now. Mr Snakey won’t be causing you or anyone else any trouble, ever again.’ He picked up the handle of his dah, swept the python past her face and lobbed the head into the undergrowth before she could work out the trick he had played on her.

‘Oh sweet Jesus!’ she whispered.

‘It’s all right, love. What’s your name?’

‘Emily.’

He could have her right now… But that would be bloody stupid and besides, play it long, and he could enjoy her night after night.

‘I’m Eddie,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Thank you ever so much. That snake, it could have…’

‘Listen, Emily love, I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about this. I mean, they might think I’m a Peeping Tom, or somethink, hanging around the girls’ camp.’

‘No, no, you saved my life.’

‘That’s a lovely thing to say, love, thank you very much. You should go back now, lest they start to worry about you. But tomorrow night, love, do you fancy a chat or somethink? This time, just after dinner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Step out into the jungle, towards the west, where the sun sets, and I’ll find you. And don’t mention this to anyone. Not a soul, just a secret between you and me.’

‘A secret. Yes,’ and she smiled at him, and turned, and walked back towards the camp.

Emily would come to him the following night. And, if she stayed too long, then old Missy Grace would not be too far behind.

Luck of the devil, eh?

Whittling a piece of bamboo with his knife, he whistled his tune: ‘Oranges and Lemons…’

A warm whoosh of air, tangy and moist, blew softly against her cheekbones. Grace stirred from her midday snooze, her eyes opened, and she looked up into a dark, bristly tube. The tip of Mother’s trunk patted her gently on her forehead and swung away from her face. As wake-up calls go, it was not as bad as the jangle of an alarm clock, but not to be recommended. She had only meant to have five minutes’ rest from the heat and torpor of the day’s march, but realised that she and the children by her must have dozed for much longer. Putting on her best schoolmarm voice, she roused the day-dreamers, got them on to their feet and they continued on their long slog to India.

The novelty of living cheek by jowl with the elephants was wearing off for Bishop Strachan’s. A week ago, if someone had told Grace that she would get so accustomed to being woken by elephants that it would be only mildly irritating, she would have thought them quite mad.

And yet the sight of little Oomy scrabbling uphill to keep up with his mother, gently plodding along, could not but make her smile. Ahead of her was a rise in the ground, which Molly reached first.

 ‘Look, Miss! Oh, that’s gorgeous!’

Far below them, the forest floor was carpeted with butterflies,  tens of thousands of fluttering wings, saffron, blue, orange, indigo, scarlet and black.

Emily, a girl who normally showed restraint, screamed with joy. ‘Oh, Miss, that’s the most beautiful thing!’

The butterflies lifted as one, a quivering rainbow of light that fluttered up towards them. Then the cloud disintegrated and a few seconds later it re-formed, a living kaleidoscope.

Screwing her eyes against the harsh sunlight, Grace saw that the butterflies were rising to make way for long lines of brown ants, all trudging westwards. No, not ants, but refugees, scurrying as best they could to India.

This was the end. This was where they would say goodbye to the elephant men. They’d come a long way, thanks to their help. She could not but feel cast down at the imminent split. Try as she might, she couldn’t see how the children would cope, on their own. Men, elephants and the school party descended the slope to join the much broader path taken by the refugees. When they got to the path and walked through the clouds of butterflies, the creatures rose up, revealing a sight less beautiful, a landscape spattered with puddles of bile-yellow diarrhoea. By a tree in the shade, Grace saw something grinning at her. A half-rotted skull. Everywhere she looked, blankets of butterflies lifted to reveal the rotting carcases of the freshly dead. Butterflies rested on a skeleton adult hugging a skeleton child; butterflies on skin dragged over bone; butterflies on corpses flat on the jungle floor; butterflies on bodies kneeling upright, as if at prayer. Fluttering butterflies and the stink of the dead.

The worst, the most heart-breaking sight of all, was the families who were not yet dead, still walking, still managing to put one step after the other, but for how much longer? A father carried a toddler with stick limbs and a bloated belly on his back, a mother in mud-bespattered yellow sari prodding two young boys up the path. Behind them, Grandmother, every step causing her to grimace. Grace took out a banana leaf of stodgy rice she had been saving for a break from her bag and walked over to the emaciated grandmother. The old lady accepted it with a quick bow of the head, but said something in Bengali to her grandsons who
scampered downhill and wolfed the rice in seconds. Granny would not make it to India, but her grandsons might, just.

Soon, the elephant men would carve their own track through the jungle and Grace and the children would be left, on this road of butterflies and bones.

Ahead, she saw at the edge of the track two shapes standing in the dark blue shade, hard to distinguish from where she was, half-blinded by the sun’s glassy stare. Masking her eyes with the flat of her hand she made out Sam huddled with the Havildar. Sick to the bottom of her stomach, she trudged towards the two men. One of the Chin guides was pointing to a turning off the track, almost vertically straight uphill, running south-west, away from the north-west path taken by the body of refugees. The elephant men had halted, children on foot and in the baskets, hushed, pale-faced, wondering what was going on, what was going to happen next.

 ‘So, is this goodbye?’ she asked.

The Havildar was as stern as ever, his face impassive, unreadable. Sam was poker-faced too, staring down at his boots.

A vulture flapped its wings and barely managed to become airborne, heavy with a full meal.

When Sam lifted his face towards her she could see the right side of his lips crinkling, and his eyes had a rare twinkle in them.

‘Change of plan. You chaps are coming with us. It would be boring without you.’

‘Thank you, thank you so very much.’

‘For God’s sake, we can’t promise safe passage. The Japanese…’

‘Anything is better than this.’ She looked back, down the track, at the dead and the dead to come.

‘Yes.’

‘Is there anything we can do to help them?’

‘I’m ashamed to say, no. When we get to India we can tell Delhi what we’ve seen, what a bloody shambles the whole damn thing is. They probably won’t believe us. I’ve given up counting the dead. It’s a bloody disgrace. I am ashamed to be British.’

‘Me too.’

Sam stared at the earth, lost in thought.

‘Let’s go,’ barked the Havildar, and the whole caravan began to move on.

The elephant men’s route – there was no track to speak of – led almost straight up, up a precipitous ridge that seemed to have no end. Mother turned her head away from the ridge in dismay. Prodded by Po Net, she gazed at the thick jungle growth and picked out a slightly less forbidding ascent, plopping one foot down, resting her weight, bringing up the next. Slow, laborious, tireless. Oomy was almost too weak for the climb. Three Chin guards, the Havildar and Sam pushed and shoved the little elephant up the last hill, one hundred feet, a cruel and unbearable slog at the end of an unforgiving day.

They gained the ridge, Oomy giving out a snort of irritation and running to Mother. Looking back at the riot of butterflies, Grace remembered Mr Peach’s haiku from another life, the one about a pale butterfly, and knew she would not be unhappy if she never saw a butterfly again.

At camp that night they snacked on sardines and jam, again, sitting on a grassy bank and watching the elephants playing in the stream. None of the children spoke about what they had just seen. It was a dark secret, never to be mentioned again.

The elephants seemed ignorant of the black mood of the humans, enjoying play-fighting in the small stream that ran through the heart of the camp, clambering on each other’s backs, squirting water and mud at each other.

Further off, a bull hooted his might, but the females snorted back their derision, as if to say ‘pull the other one, Big Boy’. The babies played more gently, molly-coddled and secure, the grown-up ladies seeming to chat and chirrup to each other like next-door neighbours over the garden fence.

Faced with this display, the children, sitting on the bank of the stream, seemed to pick up a little. Soon, they were grinning, alert, and played a game of giving individual elephants nicknames. Rungdot, the biggest of them all, became Henry VIII. You would not want to mess with him. The whiskery tusker with a hollowed-out face and wobbly ears was Nebuchadnezzar, the oldest of them all. Four inseparable tuskers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The youngest tusker, the one who had stamped on Grace’s dress, was Ragamuffin and the last tusker to be named, who had a rather miserable face, was Clive, sometimes Boring Clive. Aside from Oomy, the other calves were named after the Seven Dwarves, Dopey, Sneezy and so on. The other mothers suffered the strangest of nicknames, flowing from imagined features which Grace could not at all fathom: Custard, Splot, Haberdashery, Shrubbery, Mrs Griffiths, Mrs Miggins, Lady Macbeth and Ophelia. But after that the children’s invention trickled into sand, and calveless females were called, simply, Twenty-Nine or Forty-Three. Remembering their names and counting them was an endless game for the children. They tracked the fortunes of their favourite elephants with the same rapt attention as they used to follow their favourite Hollywood stars at the cinema in Rangoon.

The movies. The night she had gone to see
The Road to Zanzibar
with Mr Peach, had hurdled over the seats leaving him tangled up, all that seemed so long ago. The old, stodgy colonial life, the tired rituals of bridge and tea and cucumber sandwiches and adultery, Miss Furroughs reading the Brontes, the girls singing hymns, Colonel Handscombe and Mrs Peckham laughing in their black saloon. A lost world, peopled with numberless ghosts.

The clatter of a motorbike, rumbling back along the hillside road. Green eyes, peering across the abyss. Frozen in fear, the school bus dangling over the edge: ‘Good morning, Miss Collins. Did you sleep well?’

Memory, a jagged edge. Helplessly, she began to sob out loud.

Molly stared at the teacher, made to say something but Emily shook her head and stared at the grass beneath her. Ruby frowned, unsure what to do. They had never seen her like this, not once, and none of them knew how to handle it.

A small boy’s hand reached out and held Grace’s: ‘Baby, aaah.’ Opening her eyes, she saw Joseph swinging his arm, miming Oomy’s trunk. She lifted him to her, and held him close.

‘Oh, Joseph, when we get to India I’ll buy you the biggest cream bun you ever did see.’

Reflection was so painful – how much death she had seen, how much she had lost – that it was a good thing, she mused, that she hardly ever had a moment to herself. The last of the light was dedicated to sorting out the children’s hammocks and panniers, making sure everyone was safe.

As darkness fell, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have dropped into her hammock. Dog-tired, stunned by the sickening vision of the butterflies feasting on the dead, she made herself seek out Sam.

His tent had been erected in a shade of trees, on a rise looking down over the rest of the camp. In the gloom she could just make out that he was sitting in a canvas chair, a glass in his hand.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ From his voice, he did not sound especially happy to see her.

 ‘It’s not that stuff you gave me before, is it?’

‘No. That’s all gone. Gin and tonic.’

This brought out the Puritan in her. Frowning, she reflected that the children were struggling to survive on near-starvation rations, and here was Sam lording it over everyone, downing gin and tonics.

‘There’s no lemon, no ice, no tonic and no gin. I just drink water and imagine the rest.’

‘Ah,’ said Grace, declining the offer of the not-so gin and tonic.

‘I just want to say once again, on behalf of the children, thank you so very…’

‘Please, don’t go about it.’

‘No, I know what you’re doing. I was torpedoed in the Atlantic, and we ended up in a lifeboat. There were many sailors in the ocean and a destroyer went by, and it didn’t stop and rescue them, because if it stopped the U-boats would target it. By rescuing us, you run the risk of the Japanese capturing all of us. I know the huge risk you are running to save us, and I want to say thank you.’

‘Let’s hope the weather holds good tomorrow.’

‘Don’t change the subject.’

He was impossible. She was doing her absolute best to give him the credit for all that he was doing for them, and yet he made her sound like a bickering wife who no longer liked the look of the wallpaper in the lounge.

His quietness was a kind of rebuke. For a man who had pretty much forgotten how to speak English, he knew the value of silence.

‘I’m sorry I snapped,’ Grace said finally. ‘Look, there’s something else I need to talk to you about.’

‘Sergeant Gregory?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed.

‘What are you going to do with him?’ she wanted to know.

‘The Havildar told me there was some unpleasantness between Gregory and you. He interrupted your bathing. Is that right?’

 ‘He threatened me, but that’s not the problem. He’s a murderer. What are you going to do with him, Sam?’

‘Do we have to have this conversation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what the bloody hell do you want me to do?’ Sam’s exasperation flared again. ‘Lock him up? Tie him to a tree and leave him to be eaten by ants? Hand him over to the Naga head-shrinkers? Listen Grace, I appreciate your feelings about him…’

Anger flashed through her mind. Feelings? She did not have ‘feelings’ about Gregory. He was a killer. Once again, Sam was softening the wrong, making life easy for the murderer.

A dark shadow came near. By its bulk, Grace recognised the Havildar. He coughed, diplomatically. Private business – a signal, she suspected, of bad news.

‘What is it, Havildar?’

The Sikh coughed again.

‘Go ahead,’ said Sam. ‘We’re all in this together.’

‘The Chin rearguard have just heard from the look-out who stayed behind to watch the Chindwin. The Japanese crossed by elephant and raft yesterday afternoon. Sir, there’s hundreds of them, he reckoned. And they’re coming this way, directly following our path.’

Sam made no reply.

‘He said they’re going very fast, sir, and they’ve got dogs.’

‘How far behind us?’

‘Two days, if that. Scouts might be much, much closer.’

‘I’m not going to end my time in a bloody Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. We rise at four, everybody. I go ahead, to scout the route out to India. Havildar, you’ll be in charge of the main elephant party. Tomorrow, we start moving. No more fannying about.’

 ‘I’m sorry, Sam, but what about Sergeant Gregory?’

‘You don’t stop, do you? Listen, I will order him to keep away from you and the girls at all times and stay in the very front of the main column. The Havildar will watch him like a hawk. For now, that’s the very best that we can do.’

And with that, he turned his back on her and started muttering to the Havildar.