The Child's Elephant (7 page)

Towards the end of the afternoon, when Muka had finished her last village chores, she would go out to fetch water and meet Bat and Meya by the river. The cattle would browse while the children waded out, splashing each other and sometimes ducking right under until their dark skin was gleaming and Muka’s braids dripped. Their happiness would shine like the air: Bat’s laughter breaking around him like airlocks bursting open in his ears while Muka’s higher peals rang out, chinking against the rocks, bright as the jumbling cadences of a twittering sunbird. Meya would join in, squeezing the tips of her trunk together so that the water sprayed like a fountain. She would do it again and again, waggling her head from side to side in never-tiring delight.

The hippos, which paddled half submerged in the shallows, would monitor her warily with little pouched eyes. Meya liked to visit their wallows. Flopping down on her side, she would wriggle about until she was completely plastered, before heaving herself over onto the other flank. It was only much later that she learned to
be more dignified, to fling mud in dollops that landed with luscious wet slaps on her skin.

After bathing, they liked to play on the banks. Sometimes the children would hide, dodging behind termite mounds and waiting for Meya’s squeal. Sometimes they would play throw and catch. But they had to be careful: where they chucked a stick, Meya would fling a whole branch, and once a wildebeest bone had landed right on Bat’s head and left a bump on his temple that, when he touched it, had felt almost the size of a speckled plover egg.

When Meya was at her most boisterous, when she went on the rampage and beat up the bushes and charged through the pampas as if on the attack, the children learned to jump smartly out of her way; but when she was gentler they would join in her games, one of them leaping away through the grasses with Meya lumbering after until the other dashed suddenly in at a tangent and set her galloping off on another tack. She would get so excited that she raced around in circles, trumpeting shrilly with her trunk held aloft. And when she felt particularly silly, she would lollop and flop, waggling her ears and wriggling her trunk.

The village boys liked to wrestle in the evenings. While their sisters fanned cook-fires and their mothers rinsed rice, they locked arms together and shuffled round in slow circles, each waiting for a chance to wrong-foot the other, to trip him and hurl him on his back in the dust. Often the matches ended in a real fight. Women stormed from their huts, hands wet and knives waving, to pull their squabbling offspring back home by the ears. But the girls peeped eagerly out of their doorways, finding any excuse to run over and find out what was happening, and when the tussles between the elder boys had finally produced their victor, he was sure of coy smiles as he strutted home to eat.

Meya soon learned to enjoy this evening sport and the village children, gathering excitedly under the jambula tree, were delighted to find in her a new opponent. Arm
wrapped about trunk, boy and beast shoved shoulder to shoulder, the former heaving away until his calf muscles ached, the latter planting herself, a solid unbudgeable force, until she grew bored and, with slow easy strength, shunted her wriggling antagonist back across the marker line that had been drawn in the dirt. And among the loud cheers that rose after each bout, none would be louder or more excitable than Bat’s. He would dart forward to congratulate the little elephant, scratching her vigorously behind her ears. ‘No one can match her.’ He would grin as proudly as if it was he who had just stripped off his T-shirt and fought.

‘Lobo might have,’ one of the older boys piped up one evening.

The others, who enjoyed few things more than an argument over tactics, over feints, throws and stances, grips, lunges and headlocks, quickly picked up the challenge. They loved to recall the great moments of such now near-legendary fighters as the Cat, who had never once let his back touch the ground; or Weasel who, however tight the spot he was trapped in, had always managed somehow to wriggle his way out. Lobo, when he had lived in the village, had been known as the Hog for the sheer power of his head-on frontal pushing; for his trick of ramming straight into his opponent, sometimes so hard that you could hear skulls crack. Locked forehead to forehead, the two combatants would tussle until Lobo found some way of delivering his brutal trademark swipe: a killer sideways blow that sliced assailants from their feet. Failing that, he would bite. ‘Everything is fair in war,’ he would say and, fixing his bludgeoned
and often bleeding loser with his slitted stare, he would utter the deep
whooomph
sound of a warning warthog.

Now, a few of the older boys nodded: ‘Lobo might have,’ they agreed.

‘He wouldn’t have been tall enough,’ one of them ventured.

‘But that made him better,’ another argued back. ‘Nothing could knock Lobo off those thick legs.’

‘And he was heavy. I would have got him once if I’d been able to lift him. I’d got my shoulder right—’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘I nearly did.’

‘I was there! You had no chance.’

‘Remember the day he broke Okeny’s finger?’ interrupted another and, as if even the thought of it still had the power to hurt, he sucked air through his teeth and started flapping a loose hand about.

‘And the time he bit Komakech?’

Bat shifted uncomfortably. He was younger than Lobo and, like all the other little ones, had learned to be wary, to try to keep out of his way. He glanced across at Bim. He looked agitated too, and though he didn’t say anything, Bat could tell by the way his eyes flickered that he would have liked to if he could.

‘That bite got infected,’ Komakech cried out excitedly. ‘My mother said it was poisonous as the bite of a market-place dog.’

Several boys giggled. But Bim got up and crept towards Bat, squeezing in beside him where he squatted, one in a line of boys on a log. Only Bat saw the shiver that moved across his face. It was like a breath
of wind stirring across a pool of still water: just the tiniest motion – but if someone can’t speak, other things become more eloquent and this slightest of tremors left Bat feeling disturbed.

No wonder then that he felt his heartbeat start fluttering when, a few months later, sitting under a tamarind cracking one of its pods, he spotted a far-off figure coming along the track, plodding doggedly on in the direction of the village. It was Lobo. Bat knew it at once. He didn’t need to see the dark face with its small deep-set eyes or the scar on his neck from a long ago viper-bite to recognize him. He could tell at once by the short thickset figure, the heavy straddle of the walk. He let the bean that he was about to pop into his mouth fall.

Lobo had left the village more than three years ago. He had gone to live in town and no one had heard more than the odd rumour since. So what was he doing now coming back to Jambula? What did he want? The afternoon sun was striking hard as a hammer, but the boy felt a sudden chill running down his spine; like when an evil spirit brushes by you in the forest, he thought.

‘Who’s Lobo?’ Muka asked carelessly when Bat told her later by the river. She was busy scraping the mud from Meya’s toenails and she didn’t sound very interested.

‘He’s the son of the medicine woman,’ said Bat. That got her attention. Everyone knew the medicine woman but few ever visited her dilapidated hut where it stood in its weed-fringed dirt patch at the very edges of the village; so far off, some insisted that it wasn’t even a part
of Jambula. Foul-smelling smoke would rise up from its cook-fires. Even to breathe it was dangerous, people whispered. They seldom braved the dark interior with its tangles of roots and its bits of dried animals, its charms stoppered in bottles and its baskets of snakes. To do so was to risk running foul of a temper that was quick as a striking cobra, and many a village child had taken a hard crack from the medicine woman’s stick.

‘When Lobo was little, you would hear his cries ringing out even from under the jambula,’ Bat told Muka. ‘And sometimes you would see his mother chasing him, raining blows and black curses. The bruises would come up in big lumps. But when he got older, all she could do was scream at him. You would hear her howling like a jackal at night, but Lobo would just laugh. Sometimes he would show us the scar on his neck. He got it from a gaboon viper. It escaped from a basket in the medicine woman’s hut. “See this,” he would say. “Her bark is no worse than this viper’s bite and I survived that.”’

Muka looked up from where she was kneeling by Meya. ‘But who would have married the medicine woman?’ she asked in astonishment. ‘Who would have wanted to live with her in that hut? I didn’t know she’d had children.’

‘He isn’t her real son,’ Bat explained. ‘She just brought him up. She found him living on scraps in the market and brought him back. Nobody knows who his real mother is. Some say that she came from the land across the mountains, others that she’s in prison and will never be let out, and others that she’s dead; but once I heard a market woman tell my grandmother that she knew
someone who had met Lobo’s real mother, that she was still living and had replaced him with more sons.’

‘Do you think that’s true?’

Bat shrugged. ‘Lobo used to tell us that he had a father who lived in the city. He used to tell us that one day his dad would come to fetch him and that he would drive here in a motor car.’

Muka’s eyes widened. ‘Did Lobo make that up?’

Bat shrugged again. ‘Don’t know . . . but we always pretended to believe it; he would have leaped on you in a fury if he had seen you shake your head. He would have sat down on top of you and pushed your face into the dust. Lobo is scary. One moment he is smiling and joking and laughing, and the next, for no reason, he is flying into a rage. “Staying near the termite hill turns the antelope brown.” That’s what my grandmother thinks. She says that since roughness is all he has ever known, it’s the only way he now knows how to be.’

‘Oh well . . .’ cried Muka, dropping the subject and jumping to her feet. She gave the back end of the elephant a hard, playful shove. ‘Let’s play catch,’ she called.

But Bat wasn’t in the mood. ‘Anecanec has a cut on her hind leg. I’ve got to wash it now.’

‘Why are you being so dull today?’ Muka kept taunting as they walked home together. ‘It’s boring! Why are you being like this?’ But Bat refused to be shifted from his sombre brooding. Whenever Muka asked him he would just hitch up his shorts and shrug.

He spent much longer than usual in the cattle pen, milking. It always calmed him to squat there, his forehead
pressed into warm flanks, listening to the slow purling of milk into a calabash. By the time he had finished, two village boys had been delegated to go and fetch him. ‘Come and fight! Come and fight!’ they were crying, dancing eagerly about him. ‘We’re fighting under the jambula. Come and bring your elephant.’

Reluctantly, Bat was persuaded to follow them. He picked his way along the paths that wound around each compound, the two little boys still hopping about him, tugging at his T-shirt and pulling at his hand when he lagged. Meya, who loved wrestling, shambled hastily along behind him, barging into his back when she wanted to break into a trot. Then even he had to smile a bit.

Hastily, he scanned the crowd that had gathered under the jambula tree. No sign of Lobo. That was good. He was beginning to brighten.

Meya took her place. She was eager to get started. Impatiently she swung her trunk back and forth.

‘What a squit of an elephant!’

The sneer curled up from the back of the crowd. Bat felt his smile dissolve. It was Lobo . . . he had come, just as Bat had feared he would, and now he was elbowing his way roughly forwards. He pushed behind Bim. The little boy was blocking his path.

‘You!’ Lobo cried, narrowing his eyes. ‘I had forgotten about you!’ Bim tried to skip aside before Lobo could grab him, but his way was blocked by the crowd and, pushed backwards, he landed instead on Lobo’s foot. Twisting his head, he looked upwards with large frightened eyes. ‘Look what you’ve done now!’ Lobo shouted.
‘You’ve put dust on my shoes.’ He grabbed the child by the shoulders, spun him round and shook. A bellow of fear erupted from the boy’s throat. The surrounding watchers shrank back.