ELEPHANT MOON (25 page)

‘Traitor.’

‘Those letters are proof that the Jemadar was no such thing.’

His face darkened. ‘Bitch. You’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh yes I have. When the Intelligence people read the letters, they will arrest all the recipients and the Jiff uprising will never happen, thanks to the Jem. But also, now that we know the leader of the Jiffs is in Berlin, we must promise India her independence. He gave those letters to me to give to the British. You stole them. The Jem was no traitor.’

‘You would say that. You were fucking him. Traitor’s bitch, ain’t ya? Little bird told me all about it.’

Not the obscenity, but that
he
knew the truth of it shocked her, revolted her. That
he
should know that she had made love with the Jemadar, the most precious memory of her whole life, was to be defiled, utterly, unutterably.

Who had told him? How did he know? Who had betrayed her?

‘Emily.’

It was he could read her mind.

‘Little, sweet Emily told me all about it. She heard you and him, heard every last word. There’s nothing I don’t know about you and him.’

‘Oh.’

Life – her life – depended on self-discipline, on keeping her mind level and focused, on keeping him talking for as long as possible. In boasting about Emily’s betrayal of her and the Jemadar, she knew he was playing with her mind, she knew he wanted her to explode at him, and as she did so, she knew that she was falling into the trap with eyes wide open. But she could not bear to hold back, not bear to dissemble with him, for a second longer.

‘You were not there.’ She spat out each syllable, righteous anger in every word. ‘You were not there. How dare you speak ill of the Jemadar? You, sir, are a common thief and a common murderer. You shot him in cold blood. You didn’t know him. He was a better man than you will ever be. No traitor. He wasn’t loyal to nations, to flags. He was loyal to people, loyal to the children, loyal, God help him, to me. He wasn’t a traitor. You are.’

 He waved the tommy gun at her.

‘Don’t give me cheek, traitor’s bitch. Dance.’

She did not move.

The champagne bottle fell to the ground with a soft clunk, liquid slopping from its lip. Making a great show of cocking his finger, he placed it on the trigger of the tommy gun and pointed the snout directly at Grace.

‘Dance.’

She did not move.

‘Dance, bitch, or you’re dead.’

She did not move.

‘I’ll count to three. One.’

She did not move.

‘Two.’

She did not move.

In the sky above, circling a vulture.

‘Thr…’

Exactly as Gregory’s finger locked on to the trigger, the champagne bottle whacked him on the side of his head.

Emily’s throw was weak. She stood in the grass, ten feet from him, half-dead with self-loathing. Groggy, Gregory rubbed his head with his free hand, recovered his balance, and aimed the tommy gun, first at Emily, then at Grace, back to Emily and hovered in between.

‘Dance, bitch, or I’ll kill her.’

‘Miss, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to tell him. I’m so sorry.’

‘Shut it, you tart.’

A simple killer, Grace realised, would have shot them both dead by now but there was something sick about Gregory, the way he found his pleasure in the tension suffered by the dead-to-be. He meant to kill them – of that she had absolutely no doubt – but all in his own time, after his enjoyment.

A slow waltz, the loneliest dance in the whole world, her bedraggled blonde hair, sweaty body and grimy frock, once cream, illuminated in the falling sunbeams. Ten seconds, twenty, an agony of humiliation.

‘Take your clothes off.’

The snout of the gun pointed directly at her; behind his back, coming up the slope…

‘No.’

‘I’ll shoot her.’

‘You like killing, don’t you?’

‘Take your clothes off.’

‘And prove what? That a man with a gun can terrify an unarmed girl?’

A shudder of bass, thunder.

‘Does it excite you, two women at your mercy, helpless? You’re going to kill us, aren’t you? I can dance for you, make love to you, but still, the killing is the real pleasure for you, isn’t it? You’ll kill me, kill her, kill the rest of them, won’t you? Just like you killed him.’

A school of monkeys chattered to one another, heedless.

 ‘Shut it. Take your clothes off.’

‘No.’

Closing her eyes, Grace waited for the inevitable.

A single shot from the tommy gun, and a ruby petal grew between the eyes of Gregory’s victim. She sank to the ground, stone dead.

War is all about waiting, thought Peach. Here he was, waiting by the river, waiting for the rebel oozies to return with ten elephants and Eric, alive or dead. Of course, they could betray him, sell him out to the Japanese. But one million rupees was an awful lot of money, far more than the Japanese would ever give them. Too much, thought Mr Peach. If they ever get to India, there will be a terrible argy-bargy with some revolting specimen sitting behind a desk. Well, what could they do? Sack him? Lock him up? Not hand over the money?

Ah, yes, they would do that, all right. But he would write out a receipt for the elephants and give it to the oozies, and keep a copy, and find them the best lawyer in the whole of Bengal to fight their case, and phone up the newspapermen to tell them all about it. On the bright side, he would have turned up with ten elephants and they were worth something, especially in this war. And if a million rupees was the cost of getting his chaps safely out to India, fair enough. And to get word to Grace, that she was in mortal danger. How was she doing? he wondered. She was probably in India already, draining a gin and tonic and relaxing in a cosy chair, flirting with some new victim.

Maybe not.

All he could do was wait.

It was amazing how quietly they could move, these great beasts, through the jungle, even though it was quite pitch-black. The first and second filed passed him, but the third one stopped and he found himself being lifted up high onto the animal’s naked back, joining another man sitting behind the oozie.

‘Ooh, look what the fucking cat’s dragged home,’ said a familiar voice.

‘How is your head, Sergeant-major?’

‘It hurts. Some bastard whacked me hard enough to send me to Kingdom Come. But here I am. Bloody hell, I don’t know how long this is going on for, but it’s bloody uncomfortable sitting here, legs akimbo.’

‘Sssh, Sergeant-major, sssh.’

Peach hissed ‘Sheffield United’.

Nothing moved.

Then a voice growled: ‘It’s Sheffield bloody Wednesday, yon idiot. I almost blew your head off.’

Their little group of nine men were reunited, but they had the river to cross, a ferocious boiling mass of water plummeting down from the mountains. The oozies had had to abandon all the elephant gear when they vanished from the Japanese camp so the animals could not be tethered together. However, they lined up the elephants, two-by-two, in five rows. Just before they were about to cross, one of the elephants whinnied in fear, and tried to pull away. Dawn was beginning to break, and everyone knew that the Japanese would very soon realise that something was wrong – and that the only direction the oozies would have taken was to the west. There was no time to lose. Desperately, the oozie urged the panicking elephant to calm down, whispering into his ear until finally the animal turned back and, an immense mass of bone and muscle, the ten elephants and their human cargo began to ford the river, the force of the current threatening to knock them sideways at every step. The light was brightening with every second – brighter out in mid-stream where the jungle canopy didn’t over-hang - and Peach felt horribly exposed. The water leapt up the flanks of the elephant carrying him and the sergeant-major, soaking them, but still the great beast plodded on. Two
thirds of the way across was another islet. Bamboo parted, and they heard a high-pitched squeak as a tiny baby elephant emerged.

The bigger elephants appeared to cluck and mother him. A she-elephant wrapped her trunk around the little one’s head, and soon the whole caravan was swimming across the final third of the river. Here, the current was at its fastest and most treacherous but they made the bank, slogged up its steep side and were safe, for the time being. All they had to do now was keep one step ahead of the Japanese, and find Grace and the others before it was too late. From the direction of the sun, Peach reckoned they had saved maybe half a day’s march on where he thought the rest of the party might be. But there was no hurrying the elephants. They ploughed through the jungle, steady and slow, the little one squeaking and parping, calling out to its lost mother.

Two hours’ marching later on, there was a great crash and splintering of bamboo, and Mother burst through. The reunion of Mother and baby was one of the most touching things that Peach had ever seen, the old lady’s trunk ruffling the red-brown fuzz of hair on his back, then entwining her trunk with his. Burbling with joy, baby plugged into her teat.

‘Booger me, that’s a story to tell the bairns,’ said the sergeant-major, and Peach could not but agree.

 Soon they met up with a great Sikh with crippled hands. He was delighted to see Mother and baby reunited, but his face darkened when Peach asked him the whereabouts of Grace and Gregory. The Sikh led the way, Peach by his shoulder, pounding through the jungle. Strangely, Mother and Oomy kept up, as if they too shared Peach’s worst fears.

‘No.’ The sound came from the survivor, soft, almost beyond the edge of hearing. She dropped down and knelt, holding the lifeless head in her hands, uselessly.

‘I told you, didn’t I?’ said Gregory plaintively.

‘Oh, no,’ she repeated, kissing the hair on top of the victim’s head.

‘Your decision, love.’

The good and the beautiful die, and the people left alive know only one thing for certain, that they do not deserve to breathe, that life is some absurd and cruel gift, granted by a malign idiot. Not that she would live long. Gregory had her in his power, and she knew that soon he would become bored and shoot her too. And there was nothing she could do to stop him. For him, killing was as simple and natural and necessary as breathing. Someday, the good people might catch up with him but so far Gregory’s luck had proved stronger than justice. In front of him, human decency seemed to shrivel and die.

He raised the tommy gun straight at her chest and started to smile. An evil smile. Was this to be her last ever thought?

There was a grey blur, a thud, a sickening crack, the sound of a branch snapping in two. The jungle, for once still, the quiet broken by gargling from a blood-frothed throat; the mouth spurting bright red. She hated Gregory more than she had ever hated anyone or anything in her whole life, but she could not but wince.

Flies immediately settled on the blood-flecked mouth, black, green, iridescent; beyond them, fuzzy, out-of-focus, men, and then one man hurtling towards them, his absurdly long legs bounding through the jungle, other British soldiers following him, then more elephants, ridden by oozies she did not recognise at all.

Peach took in the scene, Grace nuzzling the schoolgirl with a bullet through her brain, surreally beautiful in death, the sergeant on the ground, face down, dead, gripping a tommy gun in one hand, a letter with a swastika on it close by, the paper rustling in the light morning breeze, spotted with blood. A few yards off, a baby elephant suckling his mother, the latter’s eyes blinking in quiet ecstasy, a splash of red on one of her front feet.

‘Grace!’ There was something intense about the way he said her name.

She kissed the forehead of the dead girl.

‘Christ, Grace, I’m so sorry.’

‘He should have shot
me
. He had no reason to kill her.’

‘Grace, it’s not your fault.’

Kneeling, Peach held her, as she held the dead girl, locking together the living and the dead.

After a time Peach motioned to the killer on the jungle floor, his bloody mouth already black with flies.

‘How?’

‘Mother,’ said Grace.

‘What?’

‘The mother elephant. She knocked him down and I heard the sound of his spine breaking.’

‘Why?’

Grace explained ‘We’d been climbing out of a riverbed. I believe Gregory deliberately cut the cradle they were using to haul the baby out of the river. He fell back into the water and disappeared. Mother got her own back.’

‘No.’ The story affronted Peach’s sceptical intelligence.

Mother nuzzled her baby, as peaceably as any living thing.

‘Is she capable of revenge?’

‘Yes, Bertie, I do believe she is. Gregory did wrong by her baby. That’s all.’

The elephant men started digging two graves, one for the killer, one for his sometime lover. They buried the two bodies far apart, Emily in a little dip, open to the sky, kissed by sunlight,
with a view of the setting sun to the west; Gregory in a dank bog, the shallowest of graves, the big toe of his right foot, blue-grey, peeping through the soil. Two bits of wood tied together made a cross for Emily; nothing for Gregory.

Over Emily’s grave, Peach said the Lord’s Prayer in a dull, official’s voice. As he did so, Grace wept soundlessly; Ruby sobbed Emily’s name out loud again and again, shrieking, until the Havildar gently hugged her into silence. The other children stood mute.

Then they left.

They walked in silence for hours.

But eventually the rhythm of the journey took over, and besides, Peach had his duty to learn what the enemy was planning. In late afternoon they stumbled across a fossilised oyster-bed, a thousand miles from the sea.

They stared at the coils of rock while Peach summoned up the courage to raise the subject of the letter with the swastika on it.

‘That letter. It was from Bose. Have you any more?’

‘About a dozen.’

‘Bloody hell. How on God’s earth did you get hold of this stuff, here, in the middle of the Burmese jungle? It’s from Berlin. Bose is in Berlin. Of all the places on earth, what’s it doing here?’

‘Long story.’

‘Grace, I know you think I’m a bloody fool but I happen to be an Intelligence Officer and I can’t just produce this and they ask, “Where did you get it?” and I say, “Long story”. It just won’t do.’

As they walked on, she told him all of it, her love affair with the Jem, how he had confessed to her that he had been a Jiff, his horror at discovering the true ambitions of the
Japanese, giving her the letters, how Gregory had killed him at the ferry crossing on the Chindwin and how eventually Gregory had found out about them from Emily and stolen them.

‘He called the Jem a traitor.’

‘The Indian chap on the motorbike, escorting the bus? Crossed the Irrawaddy with you?’

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘I remember thinking… These letters, they are pure gold. I’ll recommend the Jem for a medal. Posthumous, of course, so it won’t make a damn bit of difference to him, but his family might appreciate it.’

‘I’m not quite sure they will, Bertie.’

‘Oh.’

‘His grandfather is in jail.’

‘One of ours?’

‘Yes.’

 ‘The Jem will get his medal. They can always throw it back at us. I probably would.’

Two scouts from Sam’s party found them. With the help of the scouts, the elephant party arrived at the foot of the rock in the last hour before sunset.

Sam was struck dumb by their news, the murder of Emily, the killing of Gregory. He closed his eyes and held his head in his hands for a time.

‘I let you down,’ he told Grace.

‘Sam, we would all of us be dead without you. It’s no one’s fault. Or rather, it’s all of our faults.’

He was overjoyed to see that Peach had brought with him ten more elephants. But he had news of his own and it was grim.

‘We can pass, but not the elephants. The track’s not wide enough. We’re going to have to abandon the elephants. Or risk losing them to the Japanese. Or shoot them.’

Grace asked to borrow his binoculars. The rock glowed a darkening pink with the dying of the light.

‘Sandstone,’ she said.

‘So?’

Close by, an outcrop of rock punched through the green mattress of the jungle floor. Grace asked, ‘May I borrow your knife?’

‘Yes, but what are you doing?’

‘This rock is sandstone. Watch.’

She took the heavy dah, raised it over her head and slashed down into the side of the rock. It didn’t bounce off, as Sam expected, but bit into the rock, surprisingly deeply. She pulled the knife out, and slashed again, at a different angle. Three more cuts and a lump of rock fell away, leaving a rough bite out of the rock, like a quarter-moon.

‘I didn’t teach all that geography for nothing,’ said Grace. ‘You can carve sandstone.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘You can sculpt it, carve it, shape it. We can shape the rock so that the elephants can pass.’

‘What a bloody marvellous example of the fair sex you are.’

 ‘It will be as hard to work with as frozen butter.’

‘You bloody marvel. You bloody marvellous girl. If I weren’t so old, I’d kiss you. Havildar! Havildar! Where’s that bloody Sikh? Havildar, get twenty men with dahs, now, and lights, torches. We’ll work through the night.’

‘Me too,’ said Grace.

‘But you’re just a girl.’ Sam regretted saying it as soon as he had opened his mouth. ‘I thought you might be a little afraid.’ She gave the elephant man such a look of scorn. ‘Yes, of course you will. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘Miss Collins isn’t afraid of a Bengal Tiger,’ said the Havildar, wiggling his two-and-a-half fingers.

The moon rose behind them them as they clambered up the rock, framing a tusker against its silvery disc. ‘Elephant Moon,’ said Grace, and brushed her hand against Peach’s.

They laboured as the wind hissed and whistled, carving the sandstone. When the moon sank, they carried on working by feel and touch, rather than seeing, occasionally lighting small fires which cast eerie shadows against the rock. To one side was a chasm, unseen, black, to the other, the rockface at its narrowest. They chipped away with jungle knives and sharp-edged rocks. As dawn broke, the grey light revealed their work.

‘What do you think?’ asked Grace.

 ‘You might be able to squeeze a thinnish pig, the runt of the litter, along here,’ said Peach. ‘But there’s not enough room for an elephant.’

After they were relieved by a fresh roster of elephant men, Sam sought out Peach.

‘The rearguard.’

‘Is there one?’