The Child's Elephant (23 page)

A few days later they were all handed guns. Bat had never held one before. His hand trembled. The commander glowered at the group. ‘It seems that you all have two things in common,’ he sneered. ‘You are afraid to look a man in the eye and you are afraid to hold a weapon. Your hands are shaking as if that gun was held to your head. Well, it soon will be,’ he snapped, ‘if you don’t learn fast.’ He paced up and down the line, searching their faces with his bloodshot eyes. His cheek muscles bulged. ‘This gun’ – he held it high above his head – ‘will soon belong to you. So you better not be scared of it. It will soon be your best friend. You will look a man straight in the eye and you won’t tremble. You will pull the trigger and laugh. Our salvation lies
here where our ancestors have always known they must seek it: it lies in the barrel of a gun.’

‘Ignore the safety catch,’ the commander told the children; ‘it will only slow you down.’ He showed them how to raise their new weapons, to wedge the butt hard and shove their cheeks against the stock. Two of the little ones weren’t strong enough to support it. They had to lie it down on a piece of wood. Bat gripped the barrel tight with his left hand and, with his right forefinger on the trigger, squinted down the gun’s length. Things looked impossibly small as he lined up the sight. A row of bottles had been set out at the far side of the clearing. Bat squeezed. The kick hurt his thin shoulder. Everything felt a long way away. Everything felt distant – even his own thoughts. It was as if he was looking at himself down the barrel of a rifle. He felt as brittle as the bottles which leaped upwards before falling, tumbling to the ground in a glitter of shards. That night, he couldn’t sleep. His ears rang with the gunshot. The smell of cordite stained his breath. He could taste it whenever he tried to swallow. It was the taste of his new life. It was the taste of death.

It was chilly at night when the sun went down and the children all slept in a line on thin scraps of plastic, the thirty-two boys on one side of the camp, the seven girls on the other. At night they would often scream out in their dreams. They would wake sweating and shaking, with racing fears and wild eyes.

Bat shared a blanket with Gulu. The boy had almost recovered, though he had lost a front tooth and, despite all his best attempts to disguise it, he now walked with a
limp. The tiny child who had brought them food when they were shut in the hut slept on his other side. He was called La, Bat now knew, but it was not the boy himself who had told him. He never spoke. ‘Not because he can’t,’ Gulu told Bat, ‘but because he doesn’t want to. Only the commander can draw a sound from his lips. Kindness is useless; only fear now works.’

But sometimes, late at night, Bat would hear La whispering to a bushbaby that he kept in his pocket. It came out at twilight and sat on his hand, swivelling its head and cuffing the backs of its ears. When the patrol swept their bodies at night with the beam of a torch, its eyes would glow orange as embers in the light. Then Bat would fall asleep dreaming of the days when he had lain alongside his elephant. He would imagine the sound of her heartbeat, like the far-off rolling of thunder, as strong and as powerful as the heartbeat of the world.

During the day, the camp was mostly empty. Only the trainees and a couple of sentinels stayed behind, loitering in the shade at the fringe of the trees, waving their guns about as casually as a herd boy waves his switch. Bat wasn’t sure if they were there to keep the rebel soldiers in or the government soldiers out. He suspected the former. Sometimes he caught them staring at him, as if they knew what he was thinking; knew that every time his eyes strayed towards the fringes of the compound he was wondering whether he could escape, whether he could find his way home through that wilderness of trees. The guards would tense and lay their hands on the stocks of their guns.

Only the trained child soldiers were trusted to go looking for food. ‘They lay traps,’ Gulu explained to Bat as they lay under their blanket one night. ‘They dig pits for the bush pigs to stumble into and set snares for hyrax and squirrels. They prise the porcupines out of their holes. It’s easier to get them once they’ve lumbered down their burrows because then their spines can’t stand up. But even out in the open they’ll risk their sharp quills. Porcupine meat is the fattest in the jungle, and when they come back they will fight over who has the feet.’

The soldiers in training were never given such tender morsels. Grown thin on a diet of millet porridge, they had to hunt lizards and grasshoppers instead. When the gristly stews were prepared, they dipped their handfuls of goo eagerly into its gravy. They didn’t care if their fingers got burned. They were too hungry to mind about that.

One day Lobo killed a chimpanzee with a slingshot. Its flesh was dark and rich and the smell of it roasting drew the children into a circle of glittering eyes.

‘Here, it’s for you,’ Lobo beckoned, and held out a steaming hunk to Muka. His cheeks dimpled with a smile. ‘Take it,’ he said, reaching out cautiously, as if he was reaching to a stray dog that might bite. He saw the girl hesitate. ‘You only have to ask me if you want anything,’ he encouraged. ‘We are from the same village. I’ll always help you.’

Muka vacillated for a moment. Her stomach was churning with hunger. She let her eyes drop. The lopped-off hand of the chimpanzee was lying, cupped like the palm of a pleading market beggar, in the dust. Her face flinched as she backed off.

Lobo shrugged. ‘One day you’ll be glad I am so patient,’ he muttered, and stalked stiffly away with an over-confident swagger, cuffing a small boy across the ear as he passed. His eyes vanished into the thick furrows of his frown, but later he was laughing as he and the commander returned to the fire and, squatting beside it, ate the liver and heart smoking-hot. The children stared round-eyed with yearning as they chewed.

The only time the children ate well was when the older soldiers had returned from a raid. They would be away for days, and all the while the trainees would wait, longing for them to come back with corn cobs and pumpkins and the carcasses of slaughtered goats; with sticks of sugar cane which they sucked down to dry fibre and the biscuits which they tore at, scattering wrappers across the clearing. Once, the raiders even brought back a thin dun cow. For a while it had stood there, tethered short in the compound, gazing with mild interest at the alien forest; and then it had been shot. Bat thought of his own cattle as he watched it crumpling to its knees. He let their names reel through his head in a list: Kayo and Leko; Toco and Tara; freckled Anecanec and the restless Bwaro. For a moment it steadied him; but then he remembered the silvery Kila and the memory was no longer a comfort to him.

The child leaders squabbled and yapped, ferocious as wild dogs, as they dashed to cut up the carcass. Bat was scared of them. Their skins were marked like a map of all they had gone through. The Goat had great welts on his arm from the swipe of a panga that, in a battle with a villager, he had tried to fend off. The Thief had
a hard, puckered burr in the skin of his back where a government bullet had entered his flesh. But the worst scars, Bat thought, were the invisible ones. When he looked into the eyes of these child leaders, he would see that they were dead. And yet it was they – they who bore the brands of the army not just on their bodies but inside their heads – who ruled the camp.

In the evenings, stripped to the waist, the leaders liked to play football: jostling and trampling and stirring up clouds of dust, they would scuffle over a plastic bag stuffed with sacking, barging and tussling and kicking until it was no more than a tattered scrap; then the members of the victorious team would swagger about, ammunition rolled around their waists. ‘We are kings,’ Bat heard the Thief crow. ‘No one can defeat us. We are kings and we’re going to take over this land.’ And he burst into laughter. It was not like the laughter that Bat remembered from his village. It was fierce and staccato as the firing of a gun.

‘It’s witchcraft that gives him his strength,’ Gulu explained the next day as he and Bat crouched together in the evening, cleaning their guns. They were old and rusty and their mechanisms jammed easily. ‘He has met the Diviner, who founded this army. And he has bush magic. The Diviner can change shape when he likes, become a leopard or a dog. He can pick a rock from the ground and it will sparkle like a storm of lightning. The government forces can’t catch him because he knows when they are coming. Like a spider, he sees the fist falling and always scuttles off.’

Gulu twisted the butt stock from the barrel of
his rifle, and set to work cleaning a rusted bolt with a rag.

‘Once an ambush was laid for him on the far bank of a river,’ he went on. ‘It was in the very place that he had been about to cross, but somehow he sensed it and, fording further downstream, he doubled round in a loop and attacked his ambushers from behind. “We will kill the crocodile that waits in the water,” he said. The current of the river ran red that day.’

‘Were you there?’ asked Bat.

But Gulu didn’t answer. He was absorbed in adjusting a metal spring. All his stories were told as if he had just been watching, reporting on something in which he had no part. It was almost as if he stood outside himself, Bat thought; as if he was watching his own actions like some appalled witness. He never spoke of the feelings that made him screw up his face and scream in the night, that left his eyes so dark and blank when he woke.

‘When the Diviner speaks,’ Gulu eventually continued, snapping the rifle’s clip-latch back into place, ‘his voice echoes all around you. It’s as if it is rising up out of the air. It swirls all around you and gets inside your head.’ He looked critically at the gun, which he had now almost reassembled, and screwed the barrel a little tighter into the chamber end. ‘You too will meet him one day. He meets all his soldiers. He will come for you one day; one day when he’s sure that you’ve finally become his, and he will sprinkle you with water that has the power to ward off bullets and tell you that no one who is true to him can ever be harmed again.’

Bat shivered as he glanced across the camp at a
gang of child leaders. They wore trousers and grubby canvas shoes that had come from the market, and the Goat even sported a watch on his wrist. A few were dancing to the music on the commander’s radio, their dreadlocks whipping around their necks. The rest squatted by the fire, gambling and passing a bottle of maize spirit between them. The giddy smell of dagga mingled with the wood-smoke.

Gulu followed Bat’s gaze. ‘Dagga is a strong drug,’ he warned him. ‘It’s dangerous. It can make you do anything. And you won’t even mind doing it because it somehow makes you feel as if everything that’s happening is happening somewhere else. And for a while that seems good,’ he told him. ‘You can forget for a bit. Forget what you’ve seen . . .’ His voice trailed off as, turning, he looked outwards into the night, as if he could see something, as if there were pictures out there in the blackness. ‘And forget what you’ve done,’ he added quietly as he finally turned back.

The eyes of the two boys met. And for a moment Bat thought he saw a fresh life flickering up in that blankness. He saw the sorrow that made this child cry out at night. He saw the pain of the memories unlocked from his head. He reached out an arm and slid it around his shoulders. But Gulu’s thin back hardened, resisting his touch. He shook his head rapidly as though trying to dislodge something from it. ‘But dagga only works for a bit,’ he murmured. ‘The memories always come back . . . they always come back . . . and then they are even worse.’ And picking up his rifle, he rose swiftly to his feet and went.

Bat was left alone. It was true, he thought sadly. All the soldiers were troubled. He had noticed how shaken they would be on their return from a raid. Then, even the most fearsome might sometimes be spotted withdrawing into the shadows, watchful as a spider whose web has been shaken, stroking his gun as tenderly as a little girl strokes her painted wooden doll, as if it was the only thing in the entire world he could trust. Once, he had even seen the Goat squatting alone on a stump, his head dropped in his hands as he rocked back and forth, back and forth. He had gone on for hours, as if his whole being was tuned to the swing of a soldier’s march.

And then suddenly, a few days later, the boy they called Bonyo because he was like a locust went mad. He jumped up from the fire where he had been smoking dagga and staggered about waving his gun over his head. ‘I killed the last owner of this,’ he cried. ‘He deserved it. He had done too much damage with it . . . and since then I’ve used it to do some damage myself.’ Then all at once he began shooting, firing all over the place, round after round singing across the compound, rattling the tin huts and ripping through the forest foliage. The air smelled of cordite. The camp was blue with smoke. Most children ducked; hurling themselves flat on the ground, their hands over their heads. A few reached for their weapons. Lobo fled.

The commander stormed over in a rage. ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ he thundered. ‘Do you think we have bullets to waste?’ He sent the boy reeling to the ground with a ferocious blow of his arm. The blood poured from his head.

The commander turned away and spat. Then he swept his slow stare across the now rising children.

‘Ammunition costs money,’ he said. His tone had grown frighteningly calm. And then, to Bat’s terror, it was his face that was singled out of the crowd.

‘But you are going to help us with that, aren’t you, elephant boy?’