ELEPHANT MOON (14 page)

La Mah, the deputy head elephant man, and another oozie emerged from behind a thicket of bamboo, displaying a glee that Grace found indecent – and she realised that was a fair description of her state of dress, too. Was there something a little forced about their humour? Had they deliberately led the elephant towards the bamboo her hammock was tied to? Perhaps. But the comedy of the moment broke in, relief that no real harm had been done, too, and she joined in their laughter. The two elephant men picked up the torn hammock with an apologetic air. From their faces, if not their words, she could tell that they would prefer it if she did not share this story of elephant chaos with Sam. Giving them a deep smile, she tried to convey that what had happened was not the end of the world but a small misfortune.

And then she saw her dress, originally pale cream, a Parisian design, decorated with red and yellow roses and, now planted on the bosom, a very large muddy footprint of an elephant.  Lost in the jungle with a circus, and nothing to wear! Her shoulders shook, and she half-wept, half-exploded with the ridiculousness of it all, and set off for the stream a couple of hundred yards away, wrapped in her blanket.

The logic of the elephant camp came alive with the half-light of early morning. Men and animals were used to the routine, of pitching camp one night and upping sticks at dawn, all part of the nomadic life of harvesting the teak forests, and moving on when the work was done in that part of the woods. Elephant men, bent double, were returning from the bush, carrying great sheaves of bamboo on their backs.

 Rice from a black pot, a spoonful of jam, washed down by foul-tasting chlorinated water. Back at the school in Rangoon in the old days, the children would have rioted at this breakfast, but out here, in the jungle, it was a banquet.

The Havildar stood over it all, looking as though he might chop off someone’s head at a moment’s notice, or strangle them with his two and a half fingers. The ferocious appearance was just a foil, she realised, the children sensing that he was not a man they should fear, that his fiery gaze and grisly hands were some sort of comic trick, like a gun that fired a little flag bearing the word: ‘bang!’

Looking at the food fast disappearing into the mouths of the children, she sensed something of the scale of the logistical nightmare that her orphans presented to Sam and the elephant men. They didn’t have enough food for a week, let alone a month, he’d told her the day before.

She called over to the Havildar: ‘Where’s Sam?’

‘He got up very early this morning, Miss. He’s gone ahead with Po Toke to scout the trail ahead. We’ll catch up with him later.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’ He stabbed his kirpan knife into a tin of sardines, opened it with the thumb and half-finger of his right hand and gave it to a ten-year-old girl with the sternest of frowns.

Grace stared at his maimed fingers and her curiosity got the better of her manners. ‘Forgive me, what did happen to your hands, Havildar?’

‘A tiger ate them.’

Thinking that the Havildar would never be good company at breakfast, she headed down to the stream, walking a good way on from the camp, upstream, past a clump of high elephant grass, to gain some sense of seclusion from prying eyes. At the water’s edge, she unwrapped the blanket, laid it out on a bush, knelt down in her underwear and began to wash her frock, soaking it and rubbing soap into the elephant footprint.  As she did so, her mind went over the elephant men’s route out. Very few Europeans had ever been due west out of Upper Burma into Bengal, over the mountains, and certainly not a party of fifty-three elephants. The tusker that had stamped his footprint on her dress had been enjoying a breakfast of an enormous amount of bamboo. With no clear idea of what they would find when they pitched camp of an evening, they would have to take a huge cargo of bamboo with them, in case there wasn’t enough food for the elephants later in the day. And the humans needed feeding too.  That was why Sam was so keen to see the back of them.

Examining her dress critically, she saw that her washerwoman’s work had broadened the mud-smudge, not removed it. It would have to do. A bird squawked derisively, suggesting to her a sound Miss Furroughs used to make when scolding her: ‘I hope you haven’t come all this way to take part in a fashion parade, Miss Grace. Rangoon is not Paris.’

Smiling at the memory of her vanity – it belonged to a different time - she decided to have a quick dip. The stream was deep, quickly flowing and clear down to the stony bottom. No monsters, only a feather of minnows darting in and out of the current. A gorgeous yellow butterfly skimmed the water and fluttered off into the jungle. But still she hesitated.

‘Grace Collins,’ she said out loud, ‘you have been torpedoed. You are not afraid of a little water, are you?’ And with that she plunged in, squealing at the shock of the cold. Not
having had a proper wash for weeks, this was the first time when complete responsibility for the children had been lifted from her by the elephant men. It felt wonderful to get some of the grime off. She ducked down and held her breath for as long as possible. Bubbles of air passed between her lips and floated up but still she stayed below the surface, exhilarating in the sense of weightlessness, savouring the clear green-blue light, before she paddled up, gasping for air.

A bowl of mist had descended on the pool, walling it off from the rest of the world by a curtain of grey fog. She moved towards the rock where she had left her frock to see, standing by it, a man with a bandaged head.

‘We haven’t been introduced. Sergeant Edgar Gregory. You can call me Eddie.’

Not like this. Not half-naked, shoulder-deep, shivering in a jungle stream.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ His voice edged with mockery.

‘You shot the Jemadar.’

The surprise on his face was genuine.

‘What?’ Cautious now: ‘What are you talking about?’

Perhaps he hadn’t seen her standing on the bluff.

‘You shot the Jemadar. By the ferry. I saw the whole thing.’

A gibbon hooted its weird call, like a motor-car horn, close by, to be answered by a mate from further off.

‘It was the Japanese. A sniper. I didn’t shoot him. Cross my heart and hope to die. These things happen in war, don’t they, Miss? You can’t be sure, can you? You’ve got to have doubts.’

Doubts? Immobile, caught between going down to the ferry and Emily – oh why did it have to be Emily? – shouting at her that Joseph was having a fit, that she must come. The
sergeant calling the Jemadar ‘a black bastard’. The rifle trained on him halfway across the plank. ‘Nigger, goodbye.’

One shot.

His neck spouts blood. Falling into the great river. Floating off, no different from a log.

‘You shot the Jemadar. I have no doubts at all.’

Something implacable about the way she stared at him made him uncomfortable. Even, and this was a strange experience for him, a little afraid.

‘I fancy hanging around here,’ he said, ‘for as long as I please. And who’s going to make me move? You? And whose army?’

The mist began to lift.

‘Miss.’ Molly materialised from the undergrowth. ‘The Havildar says we mustn’t dilly-dally. He told me to find you, “Jaldi, Jaldi!” That means “hurry, hurry” in Urdu, Miss.’ The girl paused her language lesson and took in the extraordinary scene: her teacher, half-naked, shivering in the river, the sergeant with the bandage on his head, taunting her from the bank. Molly took a tiny step back.

‘Molly, I beg you to run back to the Havildar straight away and tell him to come here this instant.’

‘No, you don’t, you little Minx. You stay where you are,’ Gregory’s voice rasped. The sergeant walked towards her, saying ‘Come on, love…’ but he hadn’t covered a yard before Molly spun on a sixpence and vanished into the jungle, scurrying back towards the camp.

The sergeant savoured Grace with one last stare, and disappeared.

Shivering in the smudged frock, Grace stumbled back towards the camp. Molly greeted her bearing a chapatti smeared with jam. ‘I couldn’t find the Havildar but I saved you breakfast, Miss.’ The girl made it sound as grand as Eggs Benedict at Claridges.

Then:

‘Miss, who was that man?’

‘A Sergeant Gregory, Molly.’

‘How did he hurt his head, Miss?’

‘I don’t know, Molly.’

Wolfing the chapatti and two sardines, she caught a glimpse of Gregory, sauntering through the trees up a hill towards Rungdot and the front section of the march.

Nearby, the Havildar was loading up Michael, Joseph and three girls with tummy problems onto one elephant.

‘Havildar.’

He turned to lift a girl high up to an elephant, leaving her addressing his massive shoulder. ‘I have a serious complaint to make,’ she went on.

‘Not now, Miss. I’ve got to make sure we get started. We’re half an hour behindhand as it is, and Colonel Sam will have my guts if we’re not out of here as soon as possible.’

‘Sergeant Gregory threatened me.’

‘Sam’s gone ahead, Miss. Let’s talk about it when we’re on our way.’ The big Sikh gestured and, in the distance, far ahead, she just caught a glimpse of a white bandage disappearing into the high bamboo, accompanying the first of the pack elephants.

Her suspicion grew that, faced with the charge of murdering the Jemadar, the sergeant would know how to lie about what had happened. If they ever got to India, there might be question marks raised about Gregory, but she worried that her word against his alone would
never be enough to see him hang. And that would mean that Gregory would get away with the murder of the only man she had ever loved.

Emily and Ruby came down from the direction where Grace had last seen the sergeant, giggling to each other.

‘That man, Emily, Ruby. Don’t go anywhere near him,’ said Grace.

Their laughter dried up. ‘Why?’ asked Emily. The challenge was direct and unfriendly.

‘Because I said so.’ It was the very worst thing an adult could say to a teenager, but Grace could think of no other way of putting it, short of telling the girls that she had witnessed him shooting the Jemadar in cold blood.

Emily stared back at her teacher, haughtily. Grace looked to Ruby for support, but the other girl kept her eyes locked on the ground and – was she mistaken? – seemed to be blushing.

Sick of it, he was, sick of the sodding endless green, sick of the heat, sick of the bloody place throbbing with noise the whole time. Sick of the endless walking. A right bellyful of it, he’d had. They let him ride on an elephant the first couple of days, because he was still poorly, but now they’d realised that he was fit they insisted he walked. Monkeys shrieking away in the trees, all manner of creepy crawlies underfoot, nasty insects making all sorts of weird clicks.

He should have stayed in the nick. Things would have been so different for him, if only he hadn’t got caught in the first place. That Jewish bitch. He should have sorted her out, good and proper, when he had had the chance.

Sure, the jungle would be far worse if it weren’t for the elephant men. They’d given him food, clothes, cheroots and even his very own dah, a thick broad knife with a square end. Handy at slicing through bamboo. He was getting on well with them, especially the three lads who looked after the big tusker, Rungdot. They’d seen him puff smoke in the old monster’s mush – that had shown them. And they liked a laugh. He didn’t speak their lingo but he could still make them smile with a gesture or look.

That teacher bitch, beautiful as she was, was pure poison. He’d had no idea there’d been a witness on the bank. Well, he’d have to do something about that. But the schoolgirls were all right. Most of them were just kids, but there were one or two he had his eye on. ‘Miss – could you help me with my bandage?’ That could do the trick. The thin one, about eighteen he was guessing, didn’t know her name. She was a real beauty. He was playing it long with her, but he’d caught her looking at him out of the corner of her eyes. He’d see what he could do with her…

It was the end of another long day’s march, in that precious half an hour before sundown when the jungle seemed to burn with flame. Taking a long drag on his cheroot, he
thought back on how he had ended up here, surrounded by elephants and schoolgirls, on the run from the Japanese. And the others.

The strange thing was, he’d ended up doing pretty well in the army. That was the thing about the nick. It trained you to cope with the bullshit.

The old order, an England run by wretched fuddy duddies, was finished, useless when it came to a real fight. He’d always known he had it in him – the ability to command, the guts to take the tough decisions – but, of course, with his eel-pie accent and, the trouble he’d got into when he was a teenager, they’d never have let him be an officer. It was the war that had given him his chance. Gregory had come out East in a troopship, a private straight out of the nick, so low in the pecking order, his bunk so dark and tiny he declared to the others he missed the light and space of his ‘rooms’ back in the Scrubs. And the cuisine in the slammer had been so much better, too: toad-in-the-hole, consommé, rarebit – he had them all in stitches when he cracked that one. The ship his regiment had embarked on had just missed the disaster of Singapore and, at the very last minute, had been re-routed up the Bay of Bengal, to Rangoon.

Gregory didn’t believe in fate. That was rubbish. But even so, he didn’t like it when 100 miles out to sea the ocean turned blood-red. The sailors said it was just the muck from the Irrawaddy. Still, it looked like an omen, or something. The switch to Burma had only meant a delay in being smashed up by the Japanese war machine. The ship hadn’t even docked when the Jap bombers came over, sunk five ships, machine-gunned the coolies, set fire to warehouses, cloaking the sky with smoke, so thick and black you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Most of the coolies had run away – afraid of the Japanese, or, just as likely, willing the end of the British Empire – leaving the wharves a ghost land. No cranes lifted, no tugs moved, nothing was working. The colonel hadn’t even got out of his fancy cabin, let alone off the boat, before he had a heart attack and died. So there they were,
anchored in the harbour, a sitting duck for the next wave of bombers, with all the majors and captains running around. Posh twits, clueless. It was Private Gregory, whose first job as a kid had been down the docks, who suggested he could drive a crane, that he could organise the unloading of the lorries, guns, ammo, gelignite and get the regiment off the boat. They made him a lance bombardier for that – on the spot – and sergeant the very next day when the Japanese airmen came back and he stayed in his crane, unloading the gelignite for the demolition of British Burma, doing his duty for King and Emperor, as the bombs rained down.

But for what? They hadn’t even left the ship before all the government nobs, fancy pants and senior officers were bursting up the gangplank, desperate to flee. And behind them a sea of faces, Indians, men, women, children, cattle too, all mooing in terror that they might be left behind.

Once on land, they fought so that the lords and masters could run. When he and the other blokes worked out what the game was really about, they started running too. Back home, the papers had said that the Japanese were ‘yellow men’ with silly stick-out teeth and pebble thick glasses. Well, that was not how he’d seen it. It was the British who were yellow, who ran away, who were unfit for the struggle, who didn’t want to fight. To Sergeant Gregory, the whole thing was a dirty, degrading sham. The British Empire was there to protect the ‘lesser breeds without the law’ – that’s how one of the arty-farty officers on board ship had put it. Tell that to the thousands and thousands of Indians refugees he’d seen with his own eyes, walking, crawling along in the dust, hundreds of miles, getting thinner and sicker all the time, stick-limbed, as the brigadiers flashed by in their staff cars, racing past in a cloud of dust, running away from the Japanese. None of the officers stopped, not once. He’d seen the rich Europeans on the road too, big American cars, followed by lorries loaded with snooker tables and fancy furniture, while the poor bloody Indians had to walk. When the
weaker ones could no longer be carried – babies, the old ones, the sick, shitting everywhere – some would be nursed hopelessly, and some would be dumped. They would lie there, in the full heat of the day, covered in flies, stinking to high heaven, for days. It was a strange bloody pong, too: sick, but somehow sugary. It lingered on your clothes.

The moment you saw the great black birds circle in the sky, you knew what you would find below. Tough as he was, Gregory started to gag just at the sight of the vultures in the distance. The crunch they made when their beaks bit into bones, that was the ugliest sound he’d ever heard.

Another eye-opener was the hatred race had for race. Back in the Smoke, you could feel the hate the boys had for Ikey Mo, the Jewish brethren. Gregory had known all about that. It was, after all, why he had ended up in the nick in the first place. The real shocker was the way the Burmese had it in for the Indians. One of the blokes said it was the British who had brought in the Indians to do all the dirty work in Rangoon, cleaning up the filth and all, and the smart ones had become landlords and the Burmese despised them. Now their British protectors were running away, and the Japanese were heading this way, it was time for revenge. You could see the Burmese line up by the side of the road as the Indian refugees passed through their villages, swinging their jungle knives, waiting for the dusk, waiting for the British Army to move on, so they could have their way. You could see the results of their handiwork after sunrise.

One boiling hot morning they had loaded up, lorries trailing the guns, and left camp. Sure enough the vultures were circling above a bend in the road, just before a bridge. Down the embankment of a dried-up paddy field, he had found this Indian woman and her kid. She had been a looker, a big-boned woman, not fat, but curvy, dressed up like a gipsy in a red skirt. Finchy said the gipsies came from India in the first place, but he didn’t know about that. Still, no one would fancy her now. They’d cut her throat from ear to ear. Her blood, still
warm, had spurted out and pooled up, congealing in her long black hair. One hand was across her face, protecting her, her top had been pulled down and the bastard that had killed her had left his knife stuck between her breasts. He’d hiked up her skirt, too, above her fanny. The kid was close by. They’d smashed his head in, and gooey grey stuff was dribbling out into the muck. Finchy shouted, pointing to some Burmese men running off in the distance, lifting the skirts they wore – sarongs they called them – so that they could leg it. Gregory had fired a few rounds off but the figures were too fuzzy in the heatwave, and they were gone.

Point was, of course, that they all hated each other. Why stick around? Why get killed by the Japanese if the bloody ‘awficers’ in charge were legging it as fast as their staff cars could go? They were all the same. Apart from that daft captain in charge of them with his la-de-dah public school accent and posh manners. Brave enough – nah, far too brave, acting as though it was the proper thing to get them all killed. He had ended up with a hole in his face. Well, to be strictly accurate, a hole in the back of his head that came out of his face, but that was the captain’s look-out for leading from the front just once too often.

The Japanese had overtaken them, sure enough, and they had cut the only half-decent track out to India. You could fight and die, or think of getting out another way. Well, dying was a mistake that he was not going to make. He’d seen enough of death to know that King and Country wasn’t worth risking your life for.

Dealing with that stupid teacher tart wasn’t going to be easy, as easy as he had hoped. Whenever he looked out for her, she’d catch him watching her, alert, on edge whenever he came within 100 yards of her, and if it wasn’t the bloody school marm then it was that little brat, Molly, they called her, keeping a look-out, staring at him from behind a tree or looking down at him from the top of a bloody elephant. He didn’t think Grace had told the kids who’d shot the nigger – that would be too upsetting for the little darlings – but he couldn’t be entirely sure. The way Molly looked at him made him feel uneasy.

And that Havildar had eyes in the back of his head. You had to watch it with cripples. Of course, the Havildar wasn’t a proper cripple, but you don’t lose that many fingers and not let it get to you.

As soon as they joined the refugee track, they were going their separate ways. He wouldn’t do anything while they were with the elephant men. Once they split up, then he wouldn’t hang about. Creep up on her in the middle of the night and slice her throat, double quick, the old one-two. But perhaps that would be too risky. The children would suspect him straight away. No one else wanted to hurt a hair on her head. The kids would talk and he would be hard placed to wheedle his way out of it. An accident could be arranged, a slip down a ravine or, if the worst came to the worst, a simple disappearance. Much better. They’d wake up, her hammock would be lying empty. No corpse, no proof that he had had anything to do with it. Teacher had got caught short in the dark, lost her way back to the camp in the thick of the jungle. Such a tragedy…

The thing about killing is that once you’ve started, you get a taste for it.

That bloody Jewess. She’d almost done for him.

The funny thing was, he’d almost ended up a Red. When he’d left school at fourteen, there were no jobs to be had in the whole of London docks. The great port of the Empire was just ticking over, the Labour Exchanges packed. You would have to queue for three hours to be told by some toffee-nosed old trout that there were no jobs but put your name down and they would see if anything came up.

‘Next!’

And outside he’d met a Yid who gave him a leaflet about Communism and ending the Depression by sorting out the rich, by putting a boot in the face of the boss class. This bloke could talk the hind legs off a donkey. He was passionate and funny and almost demented
about it. Up until then, all that Eddie had cared about was feeling up the girls, if they’d let him, wolfing down good grub and dodging Uncle Stan – though the old bastard was getting very breathless and he fancied his chances at giving Stan one on his jaw. But this Yid, Eli Finkelstein his name was, he could talk, stuff about the playwright George Bernard Shaw going to Russia and all, saying how wonderful it all was. So he took the leaflet and read it and went along to the meeting. They all sat there, quiet as mice, underneath these posters of a Yid with a big beard and some slit-eyed bald bastard and another creepy bloke with a moustache. They listened to old Eli the Yid go on about the science behind Communism and how capitalism was dying naturally, that it was all doomed. He went on for hours and hours. It was hard to concentrate on all of it, but he wasn’t bored. It was interesting being part of something bigger than yourself. Towards the end, the Yid, Eli, started talking about the fascists and how they, too, should be smashed. That sounded all right by Eddie. So, at the end of it, he signed up and they made him a candidate member of the Communist Party and he promised to come along to the next meeting. It was free and he didn’t have any money and after all, he was a member of the working class. No doubt about that. Well, he would have been if there were any jobs going. So he was a Red.

That bloody evening he was hanging around with his mates outside the Bucket of Blood when out popped Sydney, who was going out with his older sister, Beth. A hard man Syd, but a foreman down the docks and he knew people and was doing well for himself. Eddie looked up to him.

‘I’m a Red now. Smash the ruling class,’ he’d told Syd.

‘You don’t want to end up with them Commies, you idiot.  You want to be a Fascist, son. The Black Shirts. They’re the ones who know what to do. They’re the ones who are going to take on the Yids. Britain for the British, and Ikey Mo can fuck off.’

‘Ikey Mo?’

‘Isaac Moses, you idiot. The reason why everybody is out of work is the fault of the Jews. You come to one of our meetings. Then you’ll realise what’s really going on.’

It was electrifying, the packed hall, the Leader arriving, surrounded by his biff boys, a gang of toughs, all wearing black shirts and trousers and a black belt with a wide square buckle and a little lightning flash on their lapels, hair slicked down with oil, the whole crowd rising to their feet and roaring out applause. The Leader talked about the Depression, about good people being out of work because of the crisis in international capitalism, why the British must look after their own. A smell in the air, like a boxing match when the big fighter is really hammering a loser, and everyone cheering him on and then Old Mosley hit them with it: ‘The slow soft days are behind us, perhaps forever. Hard days and nights lie ahead, no relaxing of the muscle or the mind…’