ELEPHANT MOON (26 page)

‘No. We kind of mislaid it, back at that ravine.’

‘We’ll handle that,’ said Peach.

‘Get some rest for an hour or two. And then–’

‘Five miles down the track?’

‘Yes. Good luck.’

Grace and Peach began the descent back to the camp. When they reached the jungle floor they walked off the main path for a distance and came to sit on a mossy bank to catch their breath. Sunlight cast threads of golden light against the higher treetops, while rags of mist still drifted this way and that, drawing a curtain between them and the world. It was the first time they had been alone together since they had met at Government House in Rangoon, when he had been obnoxiously drunk.

‘I feel so guilty,’ said Grace, ‘so guilty to be alive.’

‘You shouldn’t.’

‘I didn’t used to believe in evil. But I do now.’

‘Yes. There doesn’t seem to be another explanation. I still don’t quite believe that an elephant deliberately killed a man. They seem such gentle creatures.’

 ‘They’re gentle, that’s true, Bertie. But they’re more like us than you think. They joke around, they get angry, they remember.’

He fell silent. Sunlight slid down the tree trunks, burning off the mist, igniting the light in her eyes, the oval beauty of her face framed against the dank green-blackness of the jungle behind her.

An awkwardness between them.

‘Did you love him, the Jemadar, very much?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

He was soon to go back down the track, towards Burma, towards the Japanese. He might never come back, he might die like all the others, the hanged planter, the refugees by the roadside, Miss Furroughs, Allu, the Jemadar and Emily.

Part of her was utterly afraid, afraid that this love too would end with a bullet in the throat. Did she love Peach? Not as much as she should, as she had loved the Jem. But there
was something pitiful about his ‘oh’ – so full of frustrated desire and unquenched lust and human need that touched her.

‘Come here, you damned fool.’ Her fingers lightly brushing his shoulders, running down his chest, undoing the buttons of his shirt. The touch of her fingers on his skin made him shudder, as if she had whipped him with an electric live wire, and the aching hunger of his desire was matched by her unfathomable lightness of spirit, masking the guilt rippling through her.

When they were done he rolled off her and lay on his back and started to laugh, a rich deep sound, like a big Atlantic wave crashing into a shingly beach.

‘What?’ She was a little taken back, a trifle angry.

‘I’ve dreamt about this, about us making love, about you and me, a thousand times. Since that very first time.’

‘There was a lizard on the wall. I had come to complain about a man reading
Mein Kampf
.’

‘A Burmese in a suit. Wearing glasses. Great description.’

‘You still haven’t explained. Why laugh?’

‘Well, after all that effort, chasing you around Rangoon and up the length of Burma, and all the people we’ve lost, I finally get to make love to you. This is the greatest moment in my entire life.’

‘So why are you laughing?’

‘Because I am lying in elephant dung.’

And when he put a hand underneath his bottom and it came out with a handful of tangy elephant muck she started to laugh too, lost in the pure absurdity of the moment. Right then, she began to believe that Peach could be her man.

An hour later she woke up to find him dressed and ready to go.

‘Rearguard duty. No problem. I’m sure the Japanese have given up long ago.’

‘The truth?’

‘They don’t give up very easily. But fingers crossed, they’ve gone.’

She kissed him hungrily, then they hurried down to the main elephant camp where the children and the oozies eyed them with comic knowingness. Peach and his Sergeant-major left to head back down their track, east, him turning to her and waving shyly just before he disappeared from view. For the first time in a long time she closed her eyes and made a prayer, to the God of Love, that, of all the thousands who had died on the road of this terrible journey, Bertie Peach would make it back, whole.

It was hard, exhausting work, sawing and chopping, levering out a few inches of rock at a time. But the elephant men knew what was at stake and they were relentless. At times, their jungle knives would snap in two, at others the wind, soughing down from the Himalayas, would gather force and they were compelled to lie flat and grip the rock lest they be blown over the side to a certain death hundreds of feet below.

The slenderest of eclipses grew and grew as the elephant men fought against the rock, wider and deeper, higher and bigger.

By the end of the day the Havildar came down from the rock, his beard coated in sandstone dust.

‘Well?’ asked Sam.

‘It will still be a squeeze for the bigger elephants. ’

‘But possible?’

‘So long as they breathe in. Yes.’

 ‘Fingers crossed, eh, Havildar?’ It was a joke that Sam risked only when he knew the Havildar was in a very good mood.

‘When do we start?’

‘The hour before dawn.’

To begin with, everything went beautifully to plan. Henry VIII, led by Po Toke gently holding his ear, ascended  the land-slip in the half-light before sunrise, one footfall at a time, until they reached the flattish start to the goat-track. Sam, superstitious, decided to walk on ahead, to the other side of the narrow path sculpted by the Havildar and his men.

He waited an eternity of time – or so it felt like, to him – but eventually he caught sight of the magnificent tusker rounding the bend, his enormous belly scraping against the freshly sculpted rock wall, and hundreds of feet far below, an eagle spiralling on a thermal. Then came Po Toke, who gave Sam an enormous wink, and behind him, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Claude, Ragamuffin, Nebuchadnezzar, and all the other elephants following steadily, their oozies on foot. He stood and counted every single one go past him. Forty-five adults and eight calves, fifty-three in all, the last being little Oomy, trotting on behind Mother, her aching leg muscles shivering with fatigue.

After the elephants passed him, he heard a snatch of something on the wind. It died, and came again, stronger this time, all the stranger and more moving because it was sung here, far above an alien jungle, on one of the highest points on the India-Burma border south of Thibet itself, so utterly, eerily, out of place:

Bishop Strachan’s filed past, Joseph in a litter hanging from bamboo poles carried by two oozies, Ruby with Molly and Michael, and last, Grace, and every single one of them grinned at Elephant Sam as he looked on, upon a peak in Burma. Not one child looked down at the appalling drop a few feet away. They were all too busy singing, singing their hearts out.

The chatter of machine-guns rang out across the mountain. The Japanese were on their tails, again. The children hurried on towards India, but going back down the track at a tremendous rate was the Havildar, carrying a rucksack heavy with grenades. The plan had been simple. Once the rearguard, made up of Peach’s men, appeared and climbed past the narrow ledge of the goat-track, they were going to blow a bloody big hole in the mountain, making it impossible for any Japanese to follow in their footsteps.

 More gunfire from below, from where they’d just come. The children quickened their pace. Sam took the rucksack from the Havildar and the two men started placing the grenades in the holes that had already been drilled, prior to demolishing the track. He looked up and scowled.

‘Grace, you need to be with the children. We’re going to blow the track.’

‘Sam,’ the Havildar grunted and vanished back down the narrow path.

‘Grace, you must go. The children need you. We’re going to blow the track.’

‘Let me…’

‘What now, for Christsakes?’

The Havildar returned, panting. ‘No sign of Peach. Six, seven Japs, coming up the track. Behind them, another thirty, half a mile back, with dogs. Moving fast.’

‘Well, let’s blow the bloody thing to Kingdom Come. Grace, you must go.’

‘You’ve got to wait for Peach,’ said Grace flatly.

‘Enough,’ cut in Sam.

‘Wait for him. You must!’

‘Please don’t fool around,’ said Sam.

‘Hold the demolition! Don’t blow the track. You need to double-check.’

‘I’ll go and check,’ said the Havildar.

‘No, God help me, I will,’ said Grace, and before they could stop her she was gone around the bend, towards the Japanese.

‘That bloody woman!’ cried Sam, taking the binoculars and following her around the ledge. The wind was freshening, and began to whistle sourly through the chiselled half-tunnel.

Down below they could see the Japanese, unmistakable in their uniforms of burnt ochre, climb up the land-slip.

‘You see Grace, we’ve got no choice.’

There came a ragged burst of fire, and it was the turn of the Japanese to scatter. Five British soldiers emerged from cover at the very top of the land-slip and started to run uphill. None of them was especially tall.

‘Once these chaps are through, we’ve got no choice.’

More gunfire, then a small barrel of a man appeared, giving a piggyback ride to a daddy-long-legs of a man, moving with unbearable slowness.

The first of the Yorkshiremen arrived at the neck of the narrow gap, gasping for air. He turned round, aimed his rifle at the Japanese, and started firing. Two, three, four, five men made it. The barrel-man and his gangly burden were still hobbling towards them.

The Havildar disappeared, rattling down the slope at an astonishing speed for such a big man. He reached the pair, shouldered the tall man and began racing up towards them, followed closely behind by the sergeant-major.

A bullet hiss-cracked overhead, a second slammed into the rock beneath them, sending shards of sandstone spinning down to the jungle floor below.

They ducked, backing into the shadow of the half-tunnel, and had barely come to rest when the giant Sikh appeared carrying Lieutenant Herbert Peach, his face a deathly green, his right calf a porridge of skin and blood and bone.

‘Bertie!’

‘They shot him up, Miss,’ said the sergeant-major. ‘Not sure he’s going to make it.’

The wound to his leg was ugly. Sam looked grim, shook his head. ‘Not good. May lose the leg. May lose him. There’s some new medicine, pencillin they call it. Might fix it, but we need to get him to a hospital fast. Once we’re in India.’

Peach groaned, opened his eyes, saw Grace, and said with limpid clarity: ‘Grace, about that glass of champagne…’

And then he passed out. More bullets whined past their heads, chipping the rock.

 ‘Everybody out of here, NOW!’ shouted Sam.

They all ran through the half-tunnel to the far side. Sam had wired the grenades together, so that with one yank of the wire, the whole lot would go up. At least, that was the theory. He counted to thirty, giving the others enough time to climb further up, flattened his belly to the ground, pressed his head into the rock and pulled.

There was not that much to running a tea estate, really. The sun shone, the rain fell, the tea bushes did their trick. You had to keep an eye on the accounts, make sure the schoolteacher didn’t brainwash everybody with talk of the Mahatma, look out that the chaps and the ladies were paid, fair and square, especially the tea-pickers for their back-breaking work, keep the cricket pitch flat – he’d managed to purloin a cast-iron roller, his pride and joy – and that was pretty much it. No, there was not much drama to running a tea estate, even one on the very far eastern edge of India. At least, that’s what Mr McGregor thought until one afternoon in May 1942 at half-past four, just before the monsoon broke. He was enjoying a cuppa on his verandah when the biggest elephant he had ever seen came clumping up his drive, eating his hydrangeas on the run, on its back a pannier full of half-caste kids and a bloody white woman to boot.

Behind the monster came a whole long line of more elephants, dozens of them, snacking on his tea, trampling over his prized garden.

The monster stopped, half-buckled and the woman and the children tumbled out. She was blonde, needed a good wash from the look of her, and started yelling at him.

‘I’m sorry to intrude, sir’ – she spoke rather nicely, considering her attitude towards hygiene – ‘but may I ask, have you a telephone?’

 ‘Yes, of course,’ shouted Mr McGregor. ‘Would you care for some tea?’ Of that, they had an elegant sufficiency.

The line was ghastly, a stew of hisses and crackles, but finally, she heard a clipped voice: ‘Dugdale.’

No time for introductions, the line could die at any moment.

‘Bose, he’s in Berlin.’

‘My word. What’s your evidence?’

‘Twelve letters to Jiff sympathisers from his address in Berlin, personally signed by Bose himself. To be hand-carried to the recipients by messenger, to launch an uprising against the British in September.’

‘And have you got the letters?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Grace Collins, schoolteacher, formerly of Rangoon, only daughter of Alfred Collins, of HM Treasury. Sir, we have a British officer with us, he wrote a report on the Jiffs. He’s dying, he was shot by the Japanese, he needs penicillin.’

‘How did you get hold of these letters?’

‘They were given to me,’ Grace could scarcely bring herself to finish the sentence, ‘by Bose’s personal messenger, the courier. A Jiff who turned against the Japs.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Dead. Murdered. He wanted me to tell you.’

The line creaked and howled.

‘What?’

‘He wanted me to tell you that he wanted an independent India. With Bose in Berlin, we must promise independence.’

‘That’s for upstairs, Miss Collins.’

‘Then you must tell upstairs. You must promise.’

‘I promise I will. Where the hell are you?’

She told him the name of the tea estate.

‘How did you get there from Burma?’

‘By elephant.’

A weird knocking on the line, a fizz, then his voice, more clearly than before: ‘What did you say?’

‘E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T.’

‘Is that bugger Sam Metcalf anything to do with this?’

‘Yes, he’s brought fifty-three elephants into India. He can’t talk on the phone because he’s still a little deaf. He blew up half a mountain to stop the Japanese from following us.’

‘Typical. Officially, he’s been dead for two months. Tell Sam we’ve got a new boss, name of Slim. He’s good. And tell him we’ve stopped losing to the Japs. What’s the name of the injured officer, the one who wrote the report on the Jiffs?’

‘Peach. Lieutenant Peach. Bertie Peach.’

‘Ah, yes, Colonel Handscombe’s told me all about him.’

‘Good?’

‘No, all bad.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Don’t worry. Handscombe’s a moron. Can’t wait to meet Peach. I’ll get the penicillin. Need those letters from Bose. Where’s the nearest airstrip?’

She asked McGregor, who told her the name of a town.

‘How far is that?’

 ‘One hundred miles away.’

She told Dugdale.

‘That’s too far. Make one.’

‘What?’ It was her turn to be incredulous.

‘Ask the elephants nicely to roll around on their bottoms and you’ll have an airstrip in no time. Three hundred yards long. No bumps. Got that? We’ll land at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll bring a quack with me, and a bucket of penicillin.’

‘What if—’

‘Winston wants to know where Bose is, has been driving everyone mad about it, always “Where’s Bose?” No bumps. See you in the morning. Bye.’

They worked through the night, the estate lit by hurricane lights, Henry VIII, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the others expanding the cricket pitch, uprooting the tea bushes, the animals taking turns to flatten the ground with the roller. Oomy tried to help but really he just got in the way. By sunrise, the tea estate boasted the smoothest landing strip in the whole of Bengal.

Sam looked in on the patient lying in the McGregors’ guest bedroom, with a view east, looking at the high country from which they had come. Grace was nursing him, dabbing his feverish skin with cold water, but the infection was gaining on him. The elephant man unpeeled the make-shift bandage, revealing the sorry mess of his right leg. The foot was beginning to go a pale green.

He shook his head. ‘The leg has to be amputated, I’m afraid.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘I’d rather not. I do elephants, not humans.’

‘Can it wait?’

‘No. If the foot is going gangrenous, the blood poisoning could kill him in hours.’

‘So?’

Sam sighed, closed his eyes. ‘I’ll do it.’

He took off Peach’s right leg, below the knee. After he had finished making a tourniquet for the amputated stump, Grace glanced at Sam. He shrugged: ‘That’s the best I can do. He might pull through. We need that penicillin.’

She soothed Peach’s brow with a damp rag, and kissed him on the lips and said: ‘Stay with us, you damned fool.’

A murmur outside, and she raised her head to look out of the window to see the entire school watching, silent in sympathy.

At nine o’clock sharp, they heard the drone of an aeroplane engine, rising and falling. The pilot turned to his first officer, saying ‘Looks like a bloody zoo down there’ and tilted the wing, losing height with every second.

THE END