The Child's Elephant (9 page)

Now the witch doctor called out to Muka as she lingered. ‘Give me one of your plaits,’ he croaked. The decaying stumps of his teeth were bared in a smile. ‘I can weave it with gizzards and a rat skull,’ he persuaded. ‘It will make the boys crave you more than the sweetness of a newly cut piece of cane.’

‘I don’t want them to,’ Muka snapped, stepping briskly away, and, clasping her arms round her chest, she walked hastily off. She was heading, as she always did, up the hill into that part of the town where the shops were more than just blankets thrown down on
the ground. Walking between buildings made of bricks and breeze-blocks, of sheets of rusted metal and cross-nailed struts of wood, she made her way towards the shack of the man who sold electrical goods. She was fascinated by this place. Easing her way into the group of gathered children, she stood and stared entranced into a row of little boxes full of light. There were pictures inside them; they shifted and flickered like the shadows of moths, and she gazed at them, mesmerized by each changing fragment. They all seemed so different. She struggled to work out how they might all come together, but there were always more gaps in the puzzle than pieces that could be made to fit.

Muka was about to leave when she heard someone calling her from inside a doorway. She turned but couldn’t see who it was: the day was so bright and the interior so black. All she could make out was shapes among shadows. She stepped closer, and suddenly Lobo dashed out. ‘Come and meet my friend,’ he cried, grabbing her round the wrist.

‘This is Amuka,’ he called, as he tugged her into a bar. ‘She’s the prettiest girl in Jambula.’

A man swivelled round slowly in his chair to inspect her. Even though he was inside, he still wore a peaked cap. It was pulled low on his forehead so that half his face was hidden, and his sunshades had mirrors instead of smoked glass in their lenses. She couldn’t see past them to tell what he was thinking as he looked. He took a puff on a cigarette that had been bought ready-made rather than rolled.

‘Want one?’ he offered, holding out the packet.

She was silent.

He shrugged. ‘A drink for the young lady,’ he called to a man behind the bar. A waiter returned a moment later with a bottle of orange liquid. Tiny bubbles were blinking and bursting at the top.

Muka didn’t move to take it. She watched herself scowl in the mirror of his glasses. She was wary of this stranger. His skin had a sharp oily tang that made her nose wrinkle. It gleamed almost purple in the gloomy light.

‘It’s nice,’ encouraged Lobo. ‘Take a sip,’ and picking up the bottle, he thrust it towards her.

She shied away.

‘Muka and I are alike: we neither of us really belong to the village,’ explained Lobo.

The man nodded. ‘So you like the town?’ he asked, reaching for an empty chair and dragging it across. He motioned to Muka to sit down. She ignored him, but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘I expect the market seems exciting to a lively girl like you. You are far too pretty for dull village life.’

‘Or a boring old elephant,’ Lobo added.

‘Elephant?’ The man’s voice rose in quick enquiry.

Muka sensed the sudden fine-tuning of his attention. She turned instinctively to go. Quick as a snake, the man darted. A hand encircled her wrist. ‘Don’t leave just yet,’ he persuaded; but though his mouth was smiling, there was no mistaking the tenacity of his grip. ‘Tell me about this elephant.’

Muka hung her head and remained stubbornly mute but Lobo, despite a passing frown of puzzlement,
was now sprawling splay-legged, looking pleased with himself. He took a long slug at the bottle from the table in front of him, then, smacking his lips in satisfaction, said: ‘There’s this boy in the village with an elephant. He’s had it for ages.’

‘How long?’

Lobo shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I only saw it a few weeks ago.’

The man looked at Muka.

Still she didn’t speak.

The man gave her wrist a sharp rousing shake.

‘She’s nearly three,’ the girl mumbled.

‘A three-year-old elephant . . . and where did you get it?’

Muka shifted uncomfortably. ‘My friend found her,’ she murmured.

But Lobo was eager to go on with the story again. ‘Its mother was shot by poachers,’ he said, ‘and so the villagers reared it.’ He smiled, a single boyish dimple popping into each cheek. ‘And the boy’s learned to speak elephant, so the villagers say.’

‘Speak elephant?’ From behind his mirrored glasses, the man was scanning Muka’s face.

Shrinking, she cast her eyes quickly around the shack. Another man was slumped in the corner, head down on the table, while his drinking companion, legs stretched out in front of him, leaned a cheek on one hand and stared emptily out through the open door. Outside, a man wobbled by on a bicycle. A child bowled the rim of a car wheel along with a stick. The waiter, arms folded, stared impassively from behind his wooden counter. A hard-shelled
beetle dashed itself hopelessly, again and again, against a dusty strip light. This is not a good place to be, thought the girl. She could feel her anxiety pulling like a hot wire through her blood, tweaking at secret fears.

‘Just sit down,’ Lobo was saying, tipping his head back to take another pull at his bottle. For the first time, she noticed the scars on his neck: two shiny nubs at the base of his throat.

‘I’ve got to go now,’ she mumbled. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’

‘Let us persuade you?’ A smile slid from the man as he at last loosened his grip.

Muka gave a sharp tug and, shaking her head, slipped rapidly away. She could feel their eyes following her as she pushed between two tables. A clatter of laughter broke out behind her – as if she had barged into something and it had fallen and broken, she thought. She felt as if something inside her had also been dislodged. She hurried away down the street, the tassels of her wrap whipping fretfully at her ankles, her nerves rattling like palm leaves when a sudden breeze picks up. She didn’t look back.

Walking briskly on, she found herself winding through the small tin-roofed shanties. The rank odour of rubbish steamed in the hot afternoon. Ditches brewed foul smells. The alleys were strewn with broken glass and discarded plastic, with fish heads and eggshells and the green crowns of pineapples, with thrown-away tins and sliced-off chickens’ feet. A hog snivelled in the muck, its eyes closed as if meditating. For a moment Muka thought of the village women, bent double every
morning, as they swept round their huts with little palm-frond brooms. By the time they had finished, not a maize husk or mango stone littered the stamped earth. It helped keep the pests away from the home. But here in the shanties, the flies gathered in thick buzzing clusters. They rose in zigzagging clouds at the approach of her shadow and then dropped back down again like black scabs as she passed.

At the end of the street, she could see the rough grasslands beginning. The transition was so abrupt. One moment you were standing amid a maze of cluttered buildings, the next you were in the rolling savannah. It stretched unbroken to the furthest horizon, interrupted by nothing but acacias and great termite citadels and, somewhere in the far haze, a tree with flowers so red that it looked, through the shimmer, as if it was aflame. What had one world to do with the other? she wondered. It was a bit like watching the television sets. She could not see how the different bits of life could ever quite meet.

Muka took no more pleasure in the market that day. Finding a cluster of women in the square, she sat down in the feathery shade of a spreading mvule. The women had finished their work and now they were relaxing. They were peeling oranges and talking, drawing gossip like honey sucked from flowers by bees. Normally, their chatter would have washed over Muka. She would have only half listened to their tales of bad husbands and good children, of troublesome neighbours or beneficent uncles, of the crops they were growing and the prices they would fetch. But of late, she had started to grow more attentive. Rumours
were rife of a strange rebel army. There were gangs of fierce children living up in the hills. They seldom came down to the plains, it was whispered, but when they did they stole chickens and cut the maize from the shambas, they raided the tool stores and slaughtered the goats.

‘They will burn down your hut if you utter so much as a squawk,’ one woman now said.

‘Or worse,’ nodded another.

‘In the village next to mine,’ a lady whom Muka had never seen before was now saying, ‘a boy has disappeared . . . a youngest son. He went out with the goats, just as normal . . . and then
pouf
’ – she puckered her lips and blew at the air – ‘he was gone . . . just vanished . . . nothing seen of him since; not of him or his animals. His family has searched . . . but not a single trace found.’

‘A lion?’ someone suggested.

The lady shook her head firmly.

‘Abducted?’ another ventured.

The storyteller nodded solemnly. ‘They say so.’

‘By the rebels?’

She nodded again.

‘Tssk . . . the child army,’ a round-eyed mother murmured, clutching her nursing baby a little tighter to her breast.

‘They are coming closer,’ her neighbour warned. ‘And they say that there’s nothing the government can do about it. The bush is too wide and the cover too thick. They send out their soldiers and they fall into ambushes; so now they just sit in their camps instead and smoke.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to be cut up into pieces by a panga.’

‘And so . . . what? . . . the child army should just be allowed to run wild . . . to go anywhere it likes?’

‘They already do,’ said the woman who sold eggs. ‘The stories are terrible if you travel further east. There the rebels have taken over whole towns. Their commanders sit in the market squares, laughing and drinking, their guns hanging on straps over the backs of their chairs. And out in the bush the villages are empty. No one dares stay any more. They go to live in the camps that the government has set up for them. Their stomachs are empty while the rebels feast on their crops.’ She paused to shift herself into a more comfortable position, but nobody else began speaking. Everyone wanted to hear what more this woman had found out. ‘Life in the camps is dreadful,’ she continued. ‘More people than you can name are all crowded onto one tiny spot. They hand out food but it’s not enough for a family. You send your daughters for water and they have to queue all day long just for one gallon can. But who would dare leave?’ She spread her hands helplessly. ‘If you go, you just run into the rebel army. And what then? If you are young and strong they abduct you and force you to join them; if you are old and weak you are lucky to escape with your life.’

‘No one will take my children,’ Fat Rosa declared stoutly. She seldom went anywhere without her daughters at her side. In the village they joked that all three could fit inside her broad shadow. But there was nothing funny about what the egg-lady was telling her now.

‘That’s what you think. It’s what they all think,’ she
said. ‘But you have no choice. One moment you are working out in the shamba, the next the child soldiers are in your compound. They are running like rats around the village . . . and they are just as ferocious. They will slaughter your laying hens and take all your seed grain, strip your crops of their harvest and steal your knives from the thatch. In a village called Jwato,’ the woman went on, ‘they rounded everyone up at the point of a gun. Even the chief’s youngest son, who had seen them and run to hide by the river, was found in the rushes and dragged back. Everyone was gathered into the central compound. They were weeping and begging; but the soldiers just laughed. Mothers had to stand and let their children be chosen. That’s what you must do if you value your life. And even if you don’t, it’s no good. They will shoot you . . . or worse . . .’ she added with a significant look. ‘And your children will still be abducted just the same.

‘In Jwato,’ she continued, ‘all the strong boys and girls were separated out. Those that clung to their parents were beaten with millet pestles. One had his arm broken. And then, laden with burdens of whatever food had been ransacked, they were marched off into the bush. None of them, as far as I know, has ever come back.’

Muka listened, appalled. She could feel the sweat creeping in runnels through her scalp; it ran down the sides of her face and the back of her neck but she kept her mouth firmly shut. If Bat’s grandmother had been there, she suspected, she wouldn’t even have been allowed to listen. The old lady would have dreamed up an errand for her to do. Better keep it a secret, the girl
decided; better not to discuss what she had just heard. In the corner of the market place, a huge dark bird was wrestling with a creature that it had pinned under its claws. It was a rat: one of the impudent rodents that scuttled through the shanties, sitting up on their hind legs to examine those who passed. The bird tugged at the fur with its beak, exposing raw flesh beneath.

As they set off for home, Muka was unnaturally silent; but the worries were simmering away in her head and she hadn’t gone far before they finally boiled over.

‘What would happen if the child soldiers came our way?’ she asked Bat’s grandmother.

A dark frown flitted across the old woman’s face. She too had heard the rumours. ‘The rebels are a long way from here,’ she eventually said. ‘They live right up in the mountains. The government soldiers will stop them from coming as far as us. But if they should reach these parts . . .’ She paused. She did not know what to say.

‘If they do?’ prompted Muka.

‘If they do we will have to think . . .’ She let the sentence drop. ‘What does that say?’ she asked, changing the subject abruptly and pointing to a sign that had been painted on a tin sheet and propped up beside the road.

Muka squinted and began slowly to spell the letters out. ‘It says:
Beware of invisible cows!
’ she said.

Bat’s grandmother chuckled, but Muka, who would normally have broken into peals of laughter, could force only the faintest smile. Her mind was elsewhere. What if the child army did come as far as Jambula? What if, even now, they were creeping out from their hills?
What would she do if, one day, she looked up and found one of them watching her? Should she run, or give up? And what if they found Bat? He wandered so far with his cattle. He might stray into their territories, and then he would be taken. Someone should warn him; he should be made aware.