by John Sweeney
Malaria.
They had no quinine. Taking off her cardigan, she wrapped it round the boy. Instantly, it was soaked. Out in the open, by the bus, the whole sky was a wall of water, but even under the trees the fall of rain was relentless, seeking out every last dryness and soaking it, goose-pimpling skin. The children could not spend the night out in the rain, but Grace had no idea how to construct a shelter. The Jem, of course, would have known.
When the Zeroes had struck, the bus did not burst into flames. Its wreck was the only shelter for miles, but none of the children would go near it while the thing behind the wheel stayed where it was.
‘Molly, could you hold Joseph’s hand? I just need to get something from the bus.’ The little girl gripped the boy’s hand so solemnly that, despite everything, the gesture would have caused Grace to smile had she been capable of feeling or demonstrating any emotion at all. The stream that hadn’t been there half an hour ago was three feet wide as it splurged down towards the Chindwin. She skipped over that and emerged from beneath the trees. The full power of the rain in the open was brutal, pounding her head. Once up the steps and in the bus, any comfort from escaping the wet was knocked flat by the stink of death. The bus was suffused with a green dimness, but she could make out the memory of a kind brown face. The flies fizzed and fluttered over the congealing gore. Her hands swept the air. The flies rose, circled and spun, settling back on the dead man’s flesh.
Someone spoke – every consonant and vowel articulated perfectly, as if the person was asking a guest whether he would like more tea: ‘Do you mind terribly,’ – she realised, weirdly, it was she who was talking – ‘if I try and move you?’
No reply.
‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’ And suddenly she could sob. After a while, she could sense that she was not alone. Behind her, on the lower steps of the bus, stood Emily and Ruby.
‘Can we help, Miss?’ asked Ruby.
‘Oh, Ruby, Emily – thank you, girls, thank you.’
Only then could she bear to do it.
Her fingers gripped his left arm. Not warm, but not yet cold. A fierce tug and the top half of the body sagged towards her. A harder tug and he – it – somehow jammed, the legs trapped in the gloom beneath the wheel. Reaching out, she curled her left hand beneath his armpit and pulled with all her strength. He would not budge. Crouching down, her hands groped in the darkness to feel what was trapping him – an ankle, twisted, caught between the pedals. Emily and Ruby pulled on his arms, while Grace wrenched the ankle clear and suddenly the dead man was free and they were all tumbling down the steps. With Grace by the mess that used to be his head and the two girls by his legs, they lifted him clear of the bus and staggered, sloshing through the porridge of mud underfoot, away from the children underneath the trees, down towards the great river. There, Ruby missed her footing and landed on her back, down in the muck, her frock, once white, a filthy parody of femininity. She stood up and they dragged him towards a spot where a gushing stream plunged down a decline to the river, its level rising fast.
‘Oh Lord,’ prayed Grace to a God Who, for her, no longer existed, ‘bless Allu, our devoted driver, who never let us down.’
The body slithered down into a depression. Within seconds, it had gone.
‘May he rest in peace. May Allah be with him.’
They slithered back to the dripping trees and gathered a crocodile of children, swinging them over the stream and into the shelter of the bus. Joseph, his hand as cold as snow, mumbled: ‘I’m hungry.’ Momentarily blinded by the rain, she saw the Jem standing at the entrance to the Masonic Hall, the first time they had met; flourishing the dagger he’d taken from the boys; kick-starting his motorbike; calling out, as they hung above the abyss, ‘Good morning, Miss Collins. Did you sleep well?’ Tilting into the river, blood gurgling from his neck.
A sound dragged her back to the green coffin, to Joseph shivering and mumbling, to the long line of children snaking towards the bus – a girl’s voice. Straining eyes and ears over the steady thrumming of the rain, she picked out Ruby, in her sodden, filthy frock at the head of the crocodile, singing:
‘Into each life some rain must fall,
But too much is falling in mine.’
‘You would have got a detention for singing that back in Rangoon.’ Ruby looked up, startled, but Grace added, ‘so it is a good job we’re in the middle of the jungle, you naughty terror,’ and teacher and pupil started to laugh. A feeble joke, while only despair made sense, but that made it bite all the more. Bent double, Grace’s ribs ached with laughter. They boarded the bus, ignoring the dark mess where the driver had sat. She rubbed down Joseph with a dry towel and he warmed up a little and picked up on their laughter and started to chirrup along with them, and soon, through exhaustion, flashed frail grins. For people used to one hundred degrees of heat, it was shockingly cold. Rain trickled through bullet-holes and broken windows, but the bus was drier than outside. The mass of children generated some warmth, and that eased the mood, too. Grace picked up a kerosene lamp and shook it. Not much oil left. Once lit, the bus was suffused with a glow-worm of light, etching shadow against shadow, while outside the rain pummelled down. It was almost cosy. Joseph settled down in a bed of blankets, nuzzling his thumb, his skin still clammy to her touch. Behind him sat Emily, moon-faced, staring out at nothing.
Taking out the Masonic dagger the Jem had given her, Grace went out in the rain and returned with an armload of thick, wide leaves, which she used to shore up the worst of the leaks. Hacking into the undergrowth drenched her, again. She dried herself a little, but it was feeding time.
In the rack above the seats only four boxes of food were left. When they were used up, they would starve. Just as she was about to serve out the rations she felt something between her legs, high up on her inner thigh. Returning to her seat at the front of the bus, she crouched down for some privacy and used the kerosene lamp to see three leeches, bloated with blood, nestling against her skin. Her eyes closed. A few months ago, she would have screamed her head off at this disgusting violation of her body. But Grace had become a different woman. Taking Allu’s bag down from the rack, she fished in it until she found his matches and cheroots. She struck a match, lit up a cheroot, sucked on the smoke hungrily, to make the red glow at the tip hotter and stronger – Ruby cried out: ‘I didn’t know you smoked, Miss’ – then she crouched down again and rammed the glowing end against the first of the leeches. It curled away from the heat, then, with a squish, fell from her skin, leaving a raw, bloody spot. Each time a leech fell to the floor, she stamped on it with her heel.
‘God help me when we run out of matches.’
Doling out the rations, she walked down the aisle of the bus. Between two children: one tin of sardines – made in Japan – one packet of biscuits and a dollop of jam each. When she handed over the tin and the biscuits to Ruby, the girl cupped her hands and said, po-faced: ‘Please, Miss, more.’
‘For God’s sake, Ruby, there isn’t any more. Just eat it and shut up.’
None of the children had ever heard Miss Collins snap like that before. Ruby’s cheery features crumpled.
‘I’m so sorry, Ruby, but there isn’t any more, I’m afraid.’
‘What are we going to do when the food runs out, Miss?’ asked Emily.
‘Something will turn up, Emily. We will be all right.’ She returned to her seat, wolfed down her meal and wondered at the hollow nonsense of what she had just said.
When Miss Furroughs had been in charge, every evening had ended with a prayer. For Grace, who no longer believed in God, prayer smacked of hypocrisy. She searched in her bag and found a battered copy of the novel, Moonfleet. By the light of the kerosene light, she started reading: ‘The village of Moonfleet lies half a mile from the sea on the right or west bank of the Fleet stream.’
One by one the children dropped off to sleep. Grace read on and on.
The world seemed still, the bus quiet apart from the rustle of sleeping children, and
the unceasing drone of the rain without. Grace shut the book and, yawning, was about to close her eyes in a sleep of dazed grief when Emily, still awake, got up from her seat and sat down next to her. Despite the wretched circumstances, Grace realised that Emily was poised to become a young woman of astonishing beauty. She was fragile, though– a quality that worried the teacher, like porcelain so precious you dare not touch it, lest it might break.
‘Miss, there is something I need to know.’ Her voice was so soft Grace could barely make out what she was saying.
‘Yes, Emily, what is it?’
‘Miss Furroughs, Miss. You said she had gone ahead, didn’t you? No one would go ahead here. It’s just jungle. There’s nothing here. Nothing. What really happened to her?’
Grace pressed her fingers together, an unconscious mimicry of prayer.
‘I told a white lie. I did it to protect the little ones, Emily. I’m going to tell you the truth, but I want you to promise me to keep it a secret. Can you do that for me?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘She walked out into the middle of the street in Mandalay during the air raid.’
‘She… she killed herself, Miss?’
‘No, Emily, or, I don’t know. I don’t know what she was thinking, so therefore you can’t call it suicide. You cannot make a window into other people’s souls – that’s how the Jem put it.’
‘He’s gone too.’
A numbness consumed Grace. The rain pattered down, without ceasing. No moon. In the distance, a monkey hollered to its mate, a weird, alien sound.
‘Miss, what’s going to happen to us?’
‘We are going to India, Emily. All of us. There will be bacon and eggs, jam sandwiches and tea. As much tea as you could ever drink.’
‘Is that another lie, Miss?’
And she was gone.
Joseph had malaria. They had no way of treating it. He was the weakest in the whole party. She was no doctor, no expert on the tropics – God, no! – but there was something plainly grim about this dank river valley. The leeches were the least of the dangers. They had enough food for two days, maybe three if they stretched things out, and then they would begin to starve. They could use the bus for shelter at night, but not during the day, lest the Japanese planes return. They had no means of transport, no means of escape, no way of crossing the river. It was too wide for them to swim across. They had no one to help them. Allu dead, Miss Furroughs gone, the Jemadar murdered. If they stayed here long, many more children would fall sick and then they would start to die.
If the Japanese came, and put them to the sword… Well, that might be a mercy. Shuffling her limbs until exhaustion overcame discomfort, she dreamt of a man shouting for a taxi in the middle of a burning city, while she played bridge, the cards dealt by a man with no hands.
Part Two
The Number One Elephant Company
Chapter Five
Spring 1942, Upper Burma
Through a shifting fog, myths drifted through the trees. Shapes, grey on grey, stirred, fell still, moved again. Grace’s eyes fluttered open. She saw only the bus, cocooned in the early morning mists. The rain had stopped in the night.
There was nothing else. The ghosts in the mist, gone. Closing her eyes, she ached to return to the comfort of sleep. She’d slept awkwardly, her neck cricked.
A vast grey wall, as high as a battleship, passed in front of her nose.
‘Oh my giddy Aunt.’
The biggest living creature she had seen, ever, halted close to the bus, its trunk snuffling around a clump of bamboo, two massive tusks standing out proud. A fat round eye, some kind of goo running down from it, studied Grace as, with the laziest of pulls, the trunk uprooted the bamboo and bashed it against a tree, causing lumps of mud to fall off. The bamboo was dipped in a puddle like a maiden aunt dunking a biscuit in a cup of tea. But the smell was nothing like that of a maiden aunt. The air was drenched in a rich, moist, cabbagey pong.
‘Miss! Miss! Elephants!’ shrieked Molly, her voice electric with excitement.
The mist rose, a little, for two hundred yards or so, down to the Chindwin, and Grace could see that the bus was being passed by ten, twenty, thirty elephants, each one commanded by a Burmese elephant man, sitting high up on the animals’ necks. The elephants plodded towards the great river, ears flapping, trunks and tails swishing the air, haunches swaying now this way, now that.
To Grace’s mind, the swaying motion suggested that the elephants were tipsy, enormous drunks on their way home from a fancy dress ball, a fantasy both silly and utterly delightful. A calf, tripping along in the wake of its massive mother, emerged from the swirling low mist, passed the bus and, having sniffed the presence of flowing water, could not bear to dally. Skin covered in a threadbare coat of brown-red down, trunk raised aloft as if summoning a waiter, he pounded towards the Chindwin as fast as his very little legs could carry him.
‘Look at the baby one, Miss!’ shouted Molly and the bus erupted, an explosion of joy. On his backside he slid down the muddy slope into the water, making a fat splash.
‘There’s more babies! Oh, Miss, they’re so sweet,’ cried Ruby. Seven more calves hurtled across the open space, tobogganed down the mud bank into the water and, while mothers and aunties stood guard, there began a riot of squirting and squishing and squeaky trumpeting.
‘Elfunt, elfunt,’ cried Joseph.
‘Miss!’ It was Molly, the best watch-girl in the world. ‘It’s a man, with a dog.’
Sure enough, from the green curtain of jungle emerged a man with a dog. The man wore British Army uniform, had dark hair, turning to silver, was tall, lean; the dog a cocker spaniel, chocolate-coloured, who paused to sniff the air pompously, then caught up with his master. The pair of them looked as though they could have been out for a stroll on the South Downs. Another figure emerged behind them, an old Burmese gentleman in a sarong.
Leaping out of the bus, Grace ran towards the elephant men.
Another clump-clump of big guns, the sound muffling in the hills, making it hard to judge the distance between them and the artillery. Not far enough.
‘The Japanese!’ She barked the word, bubbling with fear.
‘Good morning,’ he replied, a little warily.
‘They’re only a few miles away.’
‘Is that a bus? What’s a bus doing in my jungle?’
‘Have you got a boat?’ demanded Grace. ‘The Japanese sank the ferry. The river’s too wide. The children can’t swim it. Have you got a boat?’
He peered at the occupants of the bus. ‘Schoolchildren?’ He seemed astonished – no, worse, affronted - by the presence of the bus, the children and Grace, as if he’d caught them trespassing in ‘his’ jungle.
‘The children can’t swim this river. Have you got a boat?’
‘What?’
‘We left Rangoon six weeks ago. We…’
‘What? Why didn’t you evacuate sooner? What on earth do you think you are doing?’
Thrown, Grace turned away, hiding her face. ‘We should have left Rangoon sooner. It was a mistake.’
‘A bloody awful mistake, if I may so, and one for which your children have yet to endure the full consequences. I suppose you’re hanging around expecting a bloody taxi, eh?’
The word ‘taxi’ hit her like a punch in the solar plexus. All her restraint, all her self-control vanished. Bent double, suddenly her chest racked with great gasping sobs: ‘I begged her to leave, but she just wouldn’t. I’m so… it’s…’
The words tumbled out of her, incoherent, more than a little mad.
‘The taxi thing…something happened to me… she just wouldn’t listen… torpedoed in the Atlantic… but you must not abandon us, the children, now, we’ve come too far.’
He half-turned away from her, presenting his shoulder to her face. ‘You realise we can’t take you to India.’
‘You can’t take us?’ She was incredulous.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘
But otherwise…’
A cone of sunlight punched through the mist and Grace was bathed in a pool of amber translucence, an actress spot-lit at the theatre. To him, she was one of the most ridiculously beautiful women he had ever met – a tumble of blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, a body exactly engineered to male desire, all curves and angles - and without doubt the most beautiful Englishwoman on this, the eastern and very much the wrong bank of the Chindwin. No competition, really. But off her rocker. Ga-ga. A madwoman, lacking only the twigs in her hair. No idea what she was doing up here, miles north of the main refugee tracks. Nor could he make head nor tail from her babbling, bursting into tears at the mention of the word taxi. Mad as a hatter she might be, but still, here she was. And the girls in the bus, staring out of the windows. Two boys as well. Half-castes, by the look of them. Never mind that: there were far too many to look after, let alone feed.
‘If you don’t help us, the children will die.’
‘How many children, er…’
‘Miss Collins, Grace Collins. Sixty-two.’
‘Adults?’
‘Just me left.’
‘You’ve had a rough time?’
‘Our headmistress, Miss Furroughs, died in the Mandalay fire. Yesterday our bus was shot up by Zeroes. They killed our driver, Allu, and the Jemadar. I haven’t told the children, but it wasn’t an accident. He was murdered by a British sergeant, one of us.’
The man kicked a clump of mud with his boot. ‘Have you any food?’
‘Very little, I’m afraid. We’ve all but run out. A few tins of fish, some packets of biscuits, they’re on the bus. Enough for two days, perhaps three. The children each have their own water bottle, but that’s it.’
‘If we take you, it will imperil the whole operation. We need to hand you over to the appropriate authorities.’