The Child's Elephant (6 page)

At first, Meya needed to be fed frequently; she seemed constantly hungry. But as the moons waxed and waned, she learned to suck properly, lifting her trunk and curling it back over her head. She started to lose her crumpled appearance. Her small gourd-like body was soon quilted with fat. ‘Soon you must teach her to find her own food,’ said Bat’s grandmother. ‘We can’t give her all our milk for ever. I haven’t got any spare for the market place.’ It was true. Where normally on her way down the track that led into town the big can on her head would be almost full, now there was nothing left over. She would carry a blanket of baked vanilla
cakes or ripe jackfruit instead, and there would be no fresh-caught Nile perch to grill with a handful of red tomatoes when she came home. Dipping his matooke into a gristly stew of goat’s neck, Bat would chew disconsolately. Then, to make matters worse, the lamp would be snuffed out. Without the sale of milk, his grandmother explained, kerosene had to be saved for when it was most needed; there was no longer money to spare to buy more. Yes, Meya would have to learn to forage for herself, Bat thought.

But learning to find her own food meant learning to use her trunk and Meya seemed to treat hers like an unruly rubber toy. It wasn’t that she didn’t try it out constantly. From the very beginning it was always exploring: sniffing and poking and pulling and stroking, prodding and twiddling and twining about. Whatever Bat was doing, it would seem to find a way in: jogging his elbow when he was trying to pour water, nudging his back when he wanted to sleep, sending his piles of cut cattle fodder scattering, knocking his lantern out of his grip. Sometimes Bat grew exasperated. ‘Why did you do that, you clumsy clot?’ he would shout. And the little animal would look sheepish. Sidling over, she would push herself up against him until he finally relented and scratched her behind the ears. Then she would smile and lift up her head so that he could also reach her chin, where she was sprouting a little whiskery beard. But, however much Meya practised, her trunk remained a source of problems. Sometimes she stepped on it and stumbled and tripped; sometimes it got stuck in a big clumpy knot; and often, snuffling about, she breathed
up a great whoosh of dust which would madden her with its tickling and she would writhe it and wave it and slap it violently about.

Once, shambling off to investigate an indignant mongoose, Meya had got her trunk trapped in a tree hollow. Her squeals brought Muka running in from the fields, hotly pursued by a furious puffing aunt who, when she finally caught up, stood legs akimbo, bent almost double as she fought to catch her breath, while Muka, who had only just succeeded in extricating the stuck elephant, backed on her hands and knees, bottom first, from the piece of hollowed-out wood. Scrambling quickly to her feet, she dusted down her wrap. She looked sullen. She suspected she was in for a scolding and indeed she was right.

‘That’s it. I’ve had enough,’ her aunt managed between puffs. ‘Do you hear me? I’ve had enough.’ She glowered meaningfully at the girl. ‘One moment you are working and then the next you have gone. You have dashed off who knows where . . . and I won’t put up with it! Do you hear me: I won’t put up with it!’ And as if repetition weren’t enough to emphasize her point, she slapped hard down on her thigh. ‘You are completely unbiddable,’ she bawled, mopping hopelessly at the sweat that had sprung to her brow. Her lips, fat as bananas, were quivering with fury. Her eyes shone with impotent rage.

For a moment Muka held her gaze and they stood there locked in head-to-head combat. Then the girl let her eyes drop. If she had actually apologized, it would have felt like a rare capitulation; but she didn’t, and the
silence that rose between them grew rapidly into its own kind of contest.

The auntie’s hand was just rising to deliver a great slap when Bat’s grandmother appeared. ‘What’s the matter? What brings you here, Mama Brenda?’ she enquired politely. ‘Can I offer you water? You look so very hot.’ She gave a quick wave of her wrist to Muka who, already ducking in readiness to receive the blow, dashed off.

‘What’s the matter?’ replied the woman with a great exasperated sigh. ‘That girl is the matter. As if five aren’t already a handful, I’m expected to make room in my house and my heart for one more. And what can I do with her? She’s like a wild animal. As soon as you aren’t watching her, she’s running away. Who can blame her mother for getting rid of her?’ she wailed. ‘What can be done with a girl like that?’

Muka, returning at that moment with a calabash of water, scooped from the clay pot inside the kitchen hut, approached with the bowl and, eyes respectfully lowered, handed it to her aunt, who merely gave a great huff. The water was cool and clear. It refreshed her. ‘What would
you
do with her?’ she asked Bat’s grandmother at last when the bowl had been drained.

‘What would I do with her?’ Bat’s grandmother paused and thought for a moment. ‘I would give her a home. Would you like that, Mama Brenda? Would you like it if she came to live with me? You have five girls already and I have none.’ She didn’t so much as glance at Muka. ‘Bat is growing now. He sleeps with the elephant in his own boy’s hut. So your niece Amuka can
come to stay with me. I will feed her. I think we can find enough to spare.’

Muka’s face sparkled bright as a bush-full of fireflies. Beyond downcast lashes, her black eyes were aglitter with hope. For a moment the three stood there, the silence electric between them. Muka could feel it like the static of an approaching storm.

‘Well . . . hmmm . . .’ Her aunt hesitated. ‘That is good of you,’ she ventured. She was starting to wonder if there was some hidden catch. ‘Yes. If she could live with you . . . until her mother comes to fetch her . . . just until then . . . then yes . . . if you were able . . . it’s just that I . . .’

‘I have plenty of room,’ Bat’s grandmother reassured her. ‘And I will try to bring her up as well as you have done.’

The aunt nodded and smiled, fatly satisfied by the praise.

‘Well, that’s all fixed then,’ said Bat’s grandmother, taking the calabash. She turned to Muka. The girl’s face was wreathed with smiles. ‘Now go back to the fields,’ she instructed her sternly. ‘Go and work with your cousins. Your auntie needs help with the hoeing. She doesn’t want to see any more slacking today.’ Muka sprinted off as fast as she could, the soles of her feet flashing pink in the dust.

But that evening, she and Bat could barely contain their excitement.

‘How long will it be?’ he kept asking his grandmother. ‘How long will it be before Muka comes to live with us? She could even stay tonight. We have a spare blanket.’

‘The sooner the better,’ grinned the wriggling girl. ‘Then no more of this . . .’ Jumping to her feet, she walked right up to Bat and, planting her hands on her hips, started yakking as loud as she could. She was imitating her aunt when her temper was lost.

‘She always does that,’ cried the giggling Bat. ‘She stands right in front of you and yells. Even though you’re right in front of her . . . she yells right in your face.’

‘Enough!’ scolded his grandmother. ‘Show some respect. Every tree has its own anthill.’ Everyone has their own problems was what she meant. ‘Mama Brenda has to struggle to hold her family together. She and her girls have little enough as it is. And it is not right to mock them. Remember that she took you in, Amuka,’ she admonished. ‘She might have complained, but she never rejected you. And if she works you hard it’s because she has to. Her family can get by, but there is no room for slack.’

Muka hung her head. She felt ashamed. Would Bat’s grandmother not want her now? She sat down meekly again.

‘I will work you hard too,’ said Bat’s grandmother. ‘And I will still want you to go and help your cousins. You still have a lot of learning to do.’

The elephant also had a lot of learning ahead of her. Right now, how to suck water remained the great mystery. Meya preferred to kneel by the river and scoop it up with her mouth, and this worried Bat. The crocodiles listened for the noise of an animal lapping. They sneaked up and launched their surprise attacks. He was
relieved when one day she at long last got the knack; suddenly discovering that she had drawn up a nose-full of liquid, she trumpeted joyfully in her amazed delight, spraying it all back out again in a blast of rainbows. She had to make dozens more experiments before she mastered the art. Sometimes she sucked up sand from the riverbed too. Then, mad with the itching, she would writhe her trunk into clots until finally she worked out how best she could scratch it, holding it down with one forefoot and rolling it gently back and forth.

Little by little, she became adept. ‘An elephant’s trunk
is an amazing thing,’ Bat’s grandmother said. ‘It can feel the tiniest shapes and the subtlest textures. It can test minute changes in temperature and tell the precise bearing of a scent on the wind. But you have to be careful. It is strong enough also to snap an acacia. It can smash the bones of a lioness with one swipe.’

By the time the short rains came, swathing the savannah in wild flowers and filling the air with fresh scents, Meya was learning to forage. At first, she would twirl her trunk round and round a solitary grass stalk, eventually securing it only, once more, to let it drop; then, having spent twice as long again in her efforts to retrieve it, she would seem to forget why she had originally wanted it and pitch it pointlessly over her head. But soon she worked out how to choose one tussock at a time, how to grasp at it firmly before giving a strong forward kick that would sheer through its fibres as efficiently as a panga swipe. Then she would pop it, free of earth, into her mouth.

Sometimes Bat would sneak her bananas from the shamba. He would bring her sweet potatoes and guava fruits. He would show her acacia pods and give her bunches of sweet dates. Meya guzzled the hard bitter fruit of gardenia bushes and, popping them in, two or three at a time, she would get the next couple ready with her trunk while she chewed; but she never touched the long yellow pods of the fever trees or the black and red beads of the trichelia bush, and she avoided the dangling beans of the sausage tree if she could.

As Meya grew bigger, she grew bolder. While Bat watched the cattle, she would go off exploring: pushing
at termite mounds to see if they would topple, probing the burrows of the bush hyrax, shaking high branches and setting the weaver birds chattering as their nests swung to and fro, scattering leaves and loose twigs. Once she disturbed a porcupine. It rattled its quills and lumbered off with the inquisitive elephant in pursuit. When Meya returned squealing, Bat had to extract several needles from the tender skin of her trunk and afterwards she had stood there sucking at it disconsolately, like a tired human baby sucking at its thumb.

One day she followed a spur fowl that was dragging its wing, pretending to be wounded so as to lure the clumsy intruder away from its nest. When it thought it had gone far enough, it whirred miraculously off. Only then did Meya look round to discover that she didn’t know where she was. That was how Bat learned her distinctive ‘I’m lost’ call: a sound that, beginning with a low throaty rumble, cranked up louder and louder to end in a panicky scream.

Elephants talk all the time, the children found out. Each different trumpet blast, they gradually discovered, each bellow, groan or snort, had its meaning; and slowly they learned them. ‘It’s like learning our letters,’ said Muka who, every evening, sat down at Bat’s side while his grandmother, pulling out the tattered old book which she kept in a tin chest to protect it from termites, ran a long bony finger along the lines of words.

The children learned to distinguish Meya’s deep ‘let’s go’ rumble from the lighter ‘I’m here’; the scream of excitement from the scream of distress, the mock playful trumpet from the urgent ‘come at once’ call. And
they discovered that, if they tried, they too could talk. Licking his lips, Bat pressed them together and blew with all his might and the elephant would respond with high-squealing excitement, racing in circles, trunk curled tight under chin, returning back-end first with a funny high-tailed shuffle, the whites of her eyes showing as she watched him from over her flank. But when she was frightened and started squeaking like a dry branch in the wind, Bat would come running to offer her comfort, humming a sound that seemed to rise from the very depths of his heart.