The Child's Elephant (3 page)

But now he was curious. Why did Amuka prefer to fetch water alone? The other girls in the village always went in a group. And why did she come now when the sun was still hot? And to this spot when there was another pool much nearer? There must be some reason. Perhaps she had a secret that nobody else knew. From his treetop vantage point, the boy watched her. But though he noticed her pausing as she spotted the cattle, she didn’t see him as he lay there spying down through the leaves.

For a while, Muka just stood gazing out over the river. Apart from a broad channel that looped down the middle, it was almost dry. She looked at the ducks as they dabbled in the mud at the edges, at the flamingos on the far bank as they dozed with necks bent. Then, stooping, she picked up a handful of pebbles and, one by one, skimmed them across the surface of a pool. Most of them disappeared in a few splashy plops; but a couple, Bat noticed with some admiration, hopped right across to land skittering on the far side. He wanted to scramble down, to see if he could throw better, but by the time he had decided that this was what he should do, she had sat down again – not like a girl with her legs stretched straight out in front of her, but squatting like a boy on her haunches, her hands cupping her chin. She was humming softly to herself. Was she missing her family? Bat wondered. The boy began to get bored. He was relieved when Muka eventually got back to her feet. Hauling her big clay pot down the banks of the river,
she let it fill before hoisting it from the ground to her shoulder, and then from her shoulder onto her head. Adjusting it carefully, she began her slow homeward walk. Bat was disappointed. Was that all that was going to happen? If so, then it certainly hadn’t been worth the wait. Plucking an acacia pod, he playfully hurled it. It landed right where he had meant it: right before her feet.

Amuka froze instantly, watchful as a mongoose when it first senses danger and, standing on its hind-legs, starts to utter its shrill growl. If she had been a mongoose, Bat thought, the neat little ears on either side of her skull would have pricked and her hair-braids would have bristled; and forgetting completely that she still hadn’t seen him, he laughed out loud. The sound made the girl jump. Her water jar toppled. All its contents spilled. Bat scrambled down from his tree. He was going to apologize; he was going to make sure that her pot hadn’t cracked; but the girl didn’t wait to find out what he intended. Springing at him in fury, she knocked him flat on his back.

Now Bat was enraged. He leaped to his feet in a rapid counter-assault. Arms flailing, eyes flashing, he lashed out, temper boiling. The girl was ready and seized him in a head-to-head lock. Shoulder to shoulder they tussled in a fierce riverbank scuffle, clawing and heaving and kicking and shoving until suddenly, pushed backwards and losing his footing, Bat found himself sliding. The situation was desperate, he realized, as he felt his grip slipping: he was about to lose to a girl in a fight. He made a last grab at Muka. It didn’t stop him from
falling; but at least he pulled her down too.

They landed with a splash in a stagnant pool. The water was filthy: slimy with bird-droppings and stinking of rotten fish. For a moment the pair of them sat there, completely stunned. Then Bat, wiping the gloop in a handful from his face, looked up and saw to his amazement that Muka was smiling. He flung the mud at her in impotent fury. She hurled a handful back. He retaliated. His aim had always been good. He could explode a ripe melon from twenty paces with his catapult. The shot landed smack in the middle of her forehead. But instead of howling as he had fully expected, she let out a peal of open-mouthed laughter. It poured from her like the new rains pouring over a rock. She reached for her own load of slopping ammunition and, even as she drew back her arm for the chuck, Bat could feel his own laughter starting to wriggle about inside him. It broke out in a great gap-toothed grin on his face.

A few moments later, they were both plastered head to toe in flung goo. Their shouts rang out around the rocks, sending the ducks bustling and unbalancing a fishing stork. Even a flock of flamingos came eventually to the conclusion that the time had at last come when it might be more prudent to take flight. They rose from the water in a honking pink cloud. The children laughed all the louder and flapped their arms about.

They were completely exhausted by the time they had calmed down and started to try and clean themselves. The water poured from their skin in thickly muddied runnels. ‘We’ll smell like old fish for weeks now,’ said Muka as she scrubbed. Bat giggled and nodded, but
inside he was hoping that their friendship might last even longer. He still wanted to beat her at making stones walk on water.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked when they had finally finished washing. He knew that she would be: even after the harvest her aunt’s grain store was never more than half full. Muka nodded as she wrung out the folds of her wrap. In Bat’s little satchel were two roasted maize cobs. ‘Here! Take one of these,’ he called, and soon they were sitting side by side, backs propped against a tree-trunk, silently eating their way through his lunch. Bat gnawed his from the side. One big front tooth had recently fallen out and, though the new one behind it was already emerging, the thin wavy edges pushing through the pink gum, it still had a long way to go. Muka nibbled in neat little lines down the cob. Curious, Kila came ambling over. She stared at the intruder and picked her nose with her tongue.

‘My mother used to roast maize for me,’ said Muka eventually, wiping her mouth and handing the husk to the cow.

Kila crunched at it meditatively. But Bat just sat puzzled. Why was that so remarkable? Surely everyone everywhere roasted maize cobs.

‘I don’t know where my mother is now,’ Muka said. Her voice was so low it was barely more than a whisper and, half turning her head, she gazed at the cow as if it was the animal and not the boy whom she was now addressing. ‘She was sick,’ she murmured, ‘and the villagers drove her away. “Why should we feed you,” they said, “since you are going to die? You do not feed a ghost.”
So one day my mother just got up and left. She told me she had to while she could still walk. She was going to look for my father, she said, and I couldn’t go with her. She just handed me over like a bundle of washing to a neighbour. She asked her to take me to the home of my aunt. And that’s what the woman did. I was handed over . . . again . . . and I’ve been here ever since.’

She paused for a moment. Bat wondered if she was crying. He stole a quick slantwise look but, although Muka’s lips trembled, her eyes remained quite dry. ‘Auntie thinks that my mother will come back and fetch me,’ she whispered, ‘but I don’t suppose she ever will. I don’t even think she’s alive any more.’

‘What about your father?’

Muka just shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know him.’

A long silence hung between them. When Muka eventually turned she saw that it was Bat who was crying. The tears were spilling from the rims of his eyes, hanging in sparkles at the end of his lashes, rolling in big shiny drops down his cheeks. Seeing her looking, he hastily wiped them away.

‘I don’t know my father either,’ he said and, stretching out a hand, he reached over for Kila, letting his fingers ripple down the loose folds of her neck.

‘Do you know where he is?’

Bat shook his head. ‘But I know that he’s dead.’ His mind darted back to the scene of yesterday’s slaughter, to the great swollen carcass and the clambering people; to the clouds of black flies and the hacked-apart face. For a moment he thought he was going to retch. ‘My
father was killed by poachers,’ he said. ‘It was before I was born. He was a ranger, you see. He worked with elephants, and although he had often been warned of the danger, he still went out on the savannah, and it was there that he was shot. My grandmother says he died for the animals that he most loved.’

Bat gulped, trying to get rid of the lump that was rising in his throat. ‘People told my grandmother she was lucky,’ he said hoarsely. ‘They said that my father had died a warrior’s death; that it was better to be killed out in the bush, to lose your life hunting or fighting, than to die on your mat like a weak old man. But she didn’t think she was lucky at all. “I know luck when I see it,” she told me. “It’s when a swarm of locusts flies over your crop without settling, or a delicious ripe mango drops straight into your lap. It’s not when someone turns up at your home to tell you that you have just lost your only son.” They never brought my father back. They couldn’t find him; so he couldn’t be buried outside his hut like he ought to have been. He had no family beside him to watch over his grave or throw sand on his body or plant a tree where he lay.’

‘But didn’t your grandmother do the ceremonies?’ asked Muka. ‘Didn’t she say the prayers that bring the soul back?’

Bat nodded. ‘She did. She performed all the ceremonies but her prayers were never answered. She never feels his spirit brushing by her in the hut. She never looks up and senses him just standing there watching. And now she says it’s all over. He’ll never return.’

‘And your mother? Where’s your mother?’

‘She died too. It was only a few days after I was born. Her blood ran dry. That’s what the villagers whisper; but my grandmother told me it was not her blood but her soul that could not drink. She missed her husband, my father, so much. Death is a scar that never heals: that’s what my grandmother thinks.’

Bat’s face brightened a little. ‘It was my grandmother who brought me up . . . in the city at first. She worked for the white people with sky-coloured eyes.’ He gave a slight smile. ‘It was the white people who gave me my nickname, you know. My mother had called me Nakisisa. It means “born of the shadows”. But the white people just started calling me Bat. Bats are born of the shadows, they said. And somehow the name stuck.’

‘Because it suits you,’ Muka said. She had seen him out with his cattle, weaving through the dusk as he brought his cows in, zigzagging this way and that way across the open spaces, skimming the savannah like a bat skims the night.

The boy nodded. ‘That’s what my grandmother thinks. She says I suit a world as wide as the sky. That’s why she stopped working in the city and brought me back here. I was still only tiny when she bundled me up in a cloth, knotted me round her shoulders and carried me home to our village.’ Knuckling his fist, Bat leaned forward and rubbed fondly at Kila’s broad brow. ‘I was fed on the same milk as this cow,’ he told Muka. ‘She was born on the same day as me and so we shared her mother’s milk.’

Kila shifted and kicked at a fly on her underbelly,
then, stretching out her neck, she gave his arm a rough lick. She liked the taste of the salt; but it made both children laugh.

‘I’ve got to go!’ Muka jumped up suddenly. She hitched at the waistband of her crumpled blue wrap. ‘I’ve already been too long and Auntie will be waiting.’ She pulled a face. ‘She’ll be grumbling away by the time I get back.’

Bat clambered up too. Hastily they returned to the river, where Bat helped the girl fill her water jar and hoist it on to her head. Then he stood and watched her as she walked away, one crooked arm raised to support the balancing container, the other hanging loosely. Her hips swayed lightly from side to side.

‘See you later,’ Bat called when she was a short way off.

She half turned and, with her free hand, gave a shy little wave. ‘I’ll come back and find you,’ she cried.

Bat smiled. He hoped that she would. He was still smiling to himself as he turned to check on his cattle. She had had a secret after all, he thought, and that was the secret of her real self.

That afternoon, Bat led the cows a little further down the river where the grasses were longer and thick bushes gave shade. He lay down beneath one to shelter. The day was still very hot and he must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew he was waking, head throbbing, tongue thick. The sun had moved on, pulling with it the shadows that had covered him like a cooling blanket. Jumping hurriedly up, he looked about for his animals. For a few worried seconds he thought they had strayed, until he spotted them shining amid a patch of far scrub. He squinted into the light. They were anxious; he could see them shifting about restlessly, hear the low rumble of Toco as she called out for her calf.

Grabbing his panga, Bat walked swiftly towards them. Something was moving. He tensed. A shadow slid secretively under a bush. He froze, still as a duiker surprised
on a forest path. Every nerve in his body was trilling. And then, just as suddenly, he relaxed again. It was a skulking hyena, hunting a spurfowl or a perhaps a ground hare . . . nothing larger than a jackal, or it would be with its pack; but even so, Toco’s calf would still have been tempting. Breaking into a run, Bat sprinted towards it, flailing his arms and uttering loud whoops. The hyena tucked in its tufted tail and loped off. Hitching up his too-big shorts, Bat raced in pursuit, bounding so rapidly through the rough scrub that he didn’t see the little creature crouched low among the bushes until he nearly tripped right over it. He stumbled to an abrupt halt and looked down.