The Child's Elephant (20 page)

‘Now walk,’ he commanded, ‘and don’t even think about escaping. If you so much as breathe without my permission, you are dead.’ Prodding Bat in the back with the stock of his rifle, he set him stumbling across the clearing. The pain of the blood rushing back into his numbed limbs was excruciating and it was hard not to trip with his hands still tied; but ahead of him, a third person – he looked no more than a child, Bat now noticed – was already leading the way down a narrow forest track.

The path seemed endless to Bat. He wondered how Muka was managing. He could hear the smack and swish of the bushes as she stumbled behind him,
and Lobo’s casual whistling as he sauntered along at the back. What was the boy doing here? Bat was too bewildered to think much about it. In fact, oddly, he realized, he almost welcomed his presence. At least he and Muka were not quite among strangers.

Thorns tore at Bat’s clothing; insects clung to his skin; branches slapped him across the face. His feet were so swollen that every step hurt him. Sometimes he was forced to scramble over a fallen tree-trunk. The sun slammed down through the hole that had been ripped in the high canopy. Dense thickets of new plants clambered for the light.

After a while they reached a pool of water. Pushed to their knees, he and Muka were allowed to drink. They lapped like animals in a drought, neither looking at the other as they quenched their first searing thirst; but with water inside them, they began to recover a little. They flashed one another a quick reassuring glance as, dragged once more to their feet, they were set roughly back on their path again.

Almost at a step, the two children passed from the gloom of the trees to the glare of the sun. They were at the edge of a small forest clearing. For a moment they stood blinking, half blinded by the light.

A few huts were scattered about the fringes where the overhang of the trees would have all but hidden them even from an eagle flying above. They looked makeshift, Bat thought, cobbled together from hacked branches and pieces of corrugated metal and bits of old sacking. A fire smouldered unattended just in front of him. Rusting tins, scraps of plastic, bones that had been smashed open and sucked of their marrow, and gnawed maize husks lay littered about it. Nobody had swept the trampled red dust. There was nobody to do so, he thought. And then he saw a young boy, standing alone at the far side of the clearing holding a gun that
looked almost as tall as he did. He was leaning against the door of one of the shelters, a low circular construction with no windows and a flat corrugated-iron roof. And it was towards this shack that Bat, pulled away from Muka with a barely stifled cry of panic, was suddenly pushed.

A door scraped open and he was shoved inside. At first he could see nothing. He stood swaying and befuddled while someone fumbled at the ropes around his wrists. The blood gushing in his veins hurt so much that he wanted to run about, but the door was dragged shut behind him. All was darkness, except for those pinprick spots where the sun, streaming down through nail holes in the roof, inserted shafts of pure brightness like shining wires through the black. He heard branches being propped against the entrance.

Bat was too exhausted and frightened to know what to do next. He just stood there while slowly his eyes adjusted to the gloom. And it was only then that he realized, with a start, that there was someone else with him. A boy was huddled in the corner. His thin legs were drawn up to his shoulder-blades and his hands clung about them, but his head was dropped down so that Bat couldn’t see his face. ‘Who are you?’ Bat whispered. But the boy didn’t answer. Bat looked at the cuts on his close-shaven scalp. Then, slumping down miserably against a wall opposite, he sat and waited. He didn’t know for what.

A while later, the door opened and the child with the gun came in. He was clearly Bat’s guard. But now his weapon was slung by its strap over his left shoulder and in his hands he was carrying two plastic bowls instead.
One contained water, the other food. It was just a millet flour paste but the boy in the corner scuttled over, took a fistful and, retreating, started gulping it down as if he was starving. Bat only drank. The boy eyed him warily as a hyena that shares the kill of a lion.

‘Take it,’ said Bat, pushing the rest of the food over. ‘Take it if you’re hungry.’

The boy scuttled over again and then back to his corner. He had a strange crab-like shuffle. He crammed the paste into his mouth before Bat could change his mind.

Bat studied him. He was wearing nothing but a pair of ragged green shorts and he was thin: so thin that his shoulder-blades stuck out in knobbles and his ribcage protruded like a basket’s wicker struts. A pair of heavy black boots made his feet look far too big. His legs were like the bits of charred bone that you find when you clean the ash from a cook-fire. There was no flesh on them. But when Bat looked again he could see that they were corded with muscle. It was impossible to tell what colour his skin really was. Layer after layer, the dirt had baked onto his body. But it was not this dead blackness that made Bat shrink: it was the darkness in his eyes. They were completely blank.

Time passed. Bat must have slept because the next thing he knew it was night. The moonlight shone down through the chinks in the roof. Outside in the forest, insects chirped, sawed and hacked. Bat heard the gobbling whoops of a troupe of mangabey monkeys crashing through the leaves as some predator roused them. He imagined the babies clutched tight to their mothers’
shaggy backs. He felt a terrible loneliness. He had never slept beside a stranger. There had always been Meya or his grandmother or Muka. The worst thing about loneliness, Bat thought, was that it left too much space to think.

Where was Muka? he wondered. Was she hurt? Was she as frightened as him? The questions crowded about him, closing in like a quagmire. They were sucking him down. He was helpless to resist. His thoughts drifted to that day when Meya had sunk in the swamp. How desperate he had felt! He clamped his hands to his ears as her squeals rang down the tunnels of memory, rising more and more frantically as he ran further away. He had not wanted to forsake her, he thought, as he tried to stifle the sound of them. But there had been nothing else at the time he could do.

The wild elephants had saved Meya. But who would come for him? Who would come for him and Muka? His grandmother didn’t even know where he was. What was she doing now? he wondered. She would be hopelessly searching, he thought, shouting their names out across the savannah, eyes glued to the ground as she cast about for their tracks. She would have found the scattered cattle; perhaps even the very spot where Kila had been slaughtered. She would have seen the trail of the jeep vanishing into the dust. She would have guessed what had happened.

In his mind’s eye he saw her sitting alone by her cook-fire. Who would look after her without him there to help? Or had his kidnappers gone on to
the village? Was it even now laid waste: huts burned to the ground, shambas trampled and raided? Had there been something more that these people had wanted?

His whole body flinched as he remembered once more the moment of the ambush. Why hadn’t he been watching? Why had he been such a fool? It was his fault that Muka had been taken. He should have looked out for her, not led her into a trap. He hoped that she wouldn’t fight. She could be so ferocious. He prayed that they wouldn’t hurt her. He prayed that she wouldn’t struggle and lash out.

Before he had even begun to try and answer one question, another was rising. He tried to stop them from coming, but they kept piling up, an impossible muddle that towered higher and higher and then toppled and fell crashing down through his head. In a shaft of moonlight, he saw a chameleon. It watched him, eyes swivelling in their baggy sockets. Old Kaaka said it was bad luck to disturb one of these lizards. Their colours, as they changed, were the spirits of the ancestors passing over. Bat reached out and picked it up gently. He found solace in the feel of its dry fingers plucking at his flesh. The questions whined in his head, like the mosquitoes around him. They bit at his thoughts. There was no point brushing them away. They would always come back. Where was Muka? What was his grandmother doing? Who were these people? When would he know what was going to happen to him?

Dawn broke. Every bone in Bat’s body ached. He was tired and hungry and he was also very cold. He must be high in the mountains, he thought. Bundling his legs up into his arms, he shivered. Outside he could hear people stirring. Voices were speaking. There must have been several people. An order was barked. Someone turned on a radio and tinny music floated out.

Bat looked at the boy opposite him. He was awake, though it was quite hard to tell if he had ever been asleep. He was staring blank-eyed at the wall. He looked even younger than Bat had at first guessed. He couldn’t be more than ten years old. And yet already he seemed completely broken. He still didn’t speak; and even if he had done, Bat wasn’t sure that he would understand anyway. There were so many languages spoken in his country: more than fifty, his grandmother had told him; and besides, Bat didn’t even know if he was in his own country any more.

‘My name is Gulu,’ the boy suddenly said. It was a shock to Bat: not just to hear him talking, but speaking with the familiar glittery sounds of Bat’s own tongue.

‘My name’s Nakisisa,’ he answered. ‘But everybody calls me Bat. I come from Jambula. Do you know where we are now?’

The boy shook his head.

‘Don’t you know?’

The boy shrugged as if it didn’t much matter.

‘But who are these people?’ Bat asked.

‘These people?’

‘Yes, who are these people who have put us in this hut?’

‘You don’t know?’

Bat shook his head.

‘They’re the army,’ said the boy. ‘You are in the army now.’

‘Yes, you’re in the army now.’ A voice made Bat jump. He turned. Lobo had dragged the door open. Now he towered above the two boys, his broad shape blocking the abrupt flood of light. ‘You are in the army now and I am your officer.’ He grinned. ‘From now on you do as I say.’

He didn’t explain further, only, taking a step forward, he prodded Bat to his feet with the stock of a rifle. Then, pushing the muzzle into the small of his back, he shoved him out of the hut.

Bat glanced, bewildered, about the forest clearing. The trees rose up on all sides. They looked impenetrable as a wall. But he could see several other children now, gathered in groups around the edges. A few turned to look. Some of them could not have been more than seven or eight years old. They were as small as the little boys who peeped and played in his village, their eyes dancing with mischief, their noses running with snot, and yet these children seemed more like adults already. Most of them had close-shaven heads, though a few of the taller ones had matted dreadlocks. Some had boots, some didn’t; one wore a dented tin helmet and several had strips of green cloth knotted around their brows; but all of them looked ragged and tattered and hungry as they turned
to examine him with indifferent faces, as if all curiosity had long ago been blunted, all expectation long since fallen flat.

Bat’s gaze swept rapidly across them. He was searching for Muka. She must be among them. Narrowing his eyes, he squinted against the light, but before he had even had time to search half the faces, the muzzle of the gun prodded him onwards again. It jagged him just below the rib cage where the body is most unprotected. He stumbled and bit his tongue as he cried out. The sound as he swallowed it tasted sour as blood.

Crossing the compound at a half-trot, he reached a shelter made of palm fronds that had been set up on the far side. There, a man sat on a grimy plastic chair. His back was turned to them, his thick legs sprawled to either side of him as he leaned back and listened to the radio that Bat had heard from his hut. It was playing a tinny dance tune.

The man swivelled slowly. Bat recognized the dark bulging face with its slow bloodshot gaze. He dropped his frightened eyes and found himself looking at a pair of black leather boots. An empty bottle lay between them. The man had been drinking. His trousers were stained and he smelled like a hyena. He reached forward, using the blade of a knife to lift the boy’s chin. Bat trembled so hard he could feel his lips shaking.

‘Look! He’s scared as a soaked monkey,’ he heard Lobo jeer.

The man didn’t answer. He had a crocodile’s
stare. He smiled, but there was no emotion in his face.

‘So, you are the boy who knows about elephants?’

Bat nodded dumbly.

‘Good. Then we’ve got work for you.’

Bat was bewildered. Was that what they wanted him for? Had they brought him all this way to look after an elephant? He looked around as if half expecting to see one, searching the clearing for that familiar grey shape.

‘Do exactly as you’re told and you’ll be fine,’ the man assured him, unpeeling the cellophane from a packet of cigarettes. He took one and placed it thoughtfully between his lips. He spun the wheel of a lighter. A flame sprang into life.

‘But if you don’t do what I tell you, then—’ He made a swiping movement across his throat. It was the movement a butcher makes when he kills a goat, its last bleat pouring out on a flood of dark blood. Bat’s stomach cramped as a wave of fear swept over him. A plume of cigarette smoke was puffed into the air. He could feel his head growing giddy. He tried to steady himself by fixing his eyes on some small detail, but they couldn’t seem to focus until he noticed the scratches that raked the man’s forearms.