by Joan Aiken
And hand in hand the happy pair of them ran out of the town, up the road to the high moors and the world, leaving behind a pocketful of rubies to glitter in the ashes, and a golden egg for anyone who was fool enough to pick it up.
A Portable Elephant
You want to go into the forest? Gotta have a passport for that,” said the man who sat with a machine pistol beside the thick tangle of rusted barbed wire that blocked the path into the trees.
“A passport to go into the forest? But where can I get a passport?”
Miles Pots gazed miserably at the armed guard. Miles was thin and droopy, he looked as if the east wind had always blown on him. His no-colour hair was ruffled up in a crest, his face was pale, he wore big black-rimmed glasses, and his likeness to a bird was increased by his habit of standing on one leg when in doubt or dismay, which he often was. Once he had been a schoolteacher, till things got too much for him.
“Passport office thirty miles along the boundary road, big black and white sign, can’t miss it,” said the bored guard.
Miles got back on his motor scooter and chugged through the endless shanty village that bordered the edge of the forest: little flimsy houses made of paper and string, egg boxes, soap crates, bleach bottles—anything that could be stuck together to keep out the weather. Dusty ground between them was strewn with rubbish and spoiled words: like, I mean to say, sort of, gigantic, pleasure, supersonic, bargain, cheap, aggro, peace-loving—words of this kind, crumpled, faded, chewed and discarded, lay scattered all over the place. At first Miles had tried to dodge them with his front wheel—but by now he had realized there was no help for it, trying to dodge them was too dangerous. There were plenty of people about, men, women, even children, mooching around among the dismal shacks, looking as bored as the guard with the machine pistol; Miles had his work cut out to avoid them, never mind the words that littered the ground.
On he rode, always aware of the forest on his right hand, hardly more than a hundred paces beyond the miserable row of houses, but out of bounds, separated from them by that uncrossable barricade of rusty barbed wire. Some people said the wire was electrified, but Miles could see no use for that; the most agile worm would never be able to wriggle through before he was spotted by the forest guards who sat with their guns on high lookout towers fifteen metres apart all the way along.
Behind them the forest towered like a green and gold wall. The trees were huge, higher than twelve-story buildings. Their shape could hardly be seen for the curtain of creepers and vines that hung over them, making the side of the forest really like a wall covered with tapestry, thick, bright, and complicated. Birds flew in and out; nobody stopped the birds going into the forest when they chose. Up at the top, single branches could be seen, moving gracefully in the wind; down at the bottom, small gaps were visible here and there. Near the ground, of course, the leaves and stems were soiled with dust like the scattered words; soiled, dry, and greasy with exhaust fumes—but oh, those branches up in the sky, how beautiful and green they showed against the sky!
Sometimes Miles, stopping for a warm brackish drink from his water-bottle, could look through a gap into the wood itself, which was all piled, lined, and crammed with crowded lavish greenery, growing sideways in layers, growing downwards, growing every possible way, growth packed thick like feathers in a cushion. So much there, so little here! Beyond the close undergrowth near the edge, Miles caught glimpses of wonderful trees, unbelievable trees, amazing foliage, red or gold or tawny, violet or peacock blue; he had never imagined such trees, not even in dreams. They said that once you were in the forest you never wished to come back; but of course you had to swear a solemn promise at the entry-point, and leave your passport or a cash deposit; otherwise they wouldn’t let you in.
At last Miles came to the passport office, a tin shack with a big faded sign. To his dismay he saw outside it a hundred-metre-long line of people, patiently waiting. Miles braked and dismounted from his scooter; he shackled it to a lamp post with a piece of iron chain, and added himself to the end of the line, which shuffled along at the speed of one metre every half hour.
“At this rate it will take all day!” Miles lamented to the woman in front of him.
“Twenty-four hours is the average wait, they say,” she told him flatly.
“Twenty-four hours!”
Now he understood why skinny tattered boys and weatherbeaten shifty-looking men lounged along beside the queue, selling pale soggy pies and bags of leathery crisps. Some of the boys offered to “take your place while you get a bit of kip, mate.”
“You planning to go into the forest?” Miles asked the woman in front.
“Of course. Why else would I be here? I’ve got a better chance than most,” she said. “Got a certificate from my Parish Council. We want a garland of words for the Mayor when he retires. That should be enough to get me a passport. The people they come down on are those who want just one or two words, something they’ve forgotten, or to fill a hole. They get turned back at the rate of one every two minutes.” She cast a sharp glance at Miles and said, “What are you after?”
“I’m freelance,” he said. “Got a commission for a carpet of words to welcome a Nobel prizewinner.”
“Oh, you’ll be all right then,” the woman said sourly. “You oughtn’t to have any trouble. Lucky to get something like that, weren’t you? Been freelancing long?”
“Not long,” he said, wishing she’d mind her own business; people were staring and it made him feel conspicuous.
“What were you before?”
“I used to be a schoolmaster.”
“Fond of kiddies?” she said suspiciously.
“No, I can’t stand them!” he would have liked to shout, remembering how the little monsters used to plague and tease him, pretending to be deaf, pretending to stammer, dropping plastic bags of water on him, shooting chocolate beans at him through test-tubes, writing rude messages on the board, till he couldn’t stand it a day longer. Stop Selim, they used to shout at him, Old Backward Selim, he had never discovered why. There was one girl who had been the worst of all—H. P. Sauce, the others called her—the very worst of his tormentors, a fat, pink, pop-eyed mocking girl with a big mop of black hair . . .
Luckily the line shuffled forward at that moment, and the woman turned and shoved vigorously at a man who was trying to slide in ahead of her. “Got to watch it,” she hissed over her shoulder at Miles. “They pinch your place as soon as look at you.” After a moment she added, “I suppose you got your companion?”—at least the words sounded like that; but Miles had pulled a paperback Shakespeare out of his pocket and pretended to be absorbed in it so as not to have to answer.
By nightfall he was nearly at the head of the queue. But just as it reached his turn the tin shutter was slammed down over the counter and a sign put up: “Closed till 8 a.m.”
“Shame, really,” said the man behind Miles. “You’d think they could manage a twenty-four hour shift, wouldn’t you? All right for us to sleep on our feet in the street, but not for them, oh no.”
By eight next morning Miles was aching, weary, hollow with hunger, and stiff in all his joints.
Sleepily he answered the sharp official questions. Age, twenty-three; profession, freelance writer, previously schoolteacher. Official commission? He showed his certificate, granting him leave to go into the Forest of Words for a period of not longer than four weeks in order to construct a carpet of words to lay under the feet of Herr Professor Doktor —— at the city of —— on such-and-such a date.
“Yes, well, this seems to be all right,” said the officer at the desk, and issued Miles with a stiff little blood-brown folded ticket, not much bigger than an ice-cream wafer, watermarked and ink-stamped with his name and the date. “Got your companion, I suppose?”
“Companion, what companion?”
That was
the word the woman had used; Miles began to feel uneasy.
“Can’t enter the forest without an animal; have to produce it at the barrier. Otherwise they take your passport away again.”
“Any animal?”
“Got to be portable, ennit? One you can carry. No use showing up with a two-ton grizzly, or a twenty-metre boa, would there be?” snapped the officer. “Where have you been all this time not to know that? Next!”
Miles found himself shoved aside. He stared doubtfully at his tiny brown passport, then slid it with care inside his breast pocket. It was riskily small, dangerously easy to lose, by theft or accident. Indeed the pie-boys were also offering magnetic theft-proof passport cases at expensive prices.
Miles asked one of the boys where he could acquire an animal.
“Animal? You kidding? Why, people travel hundreds of miles to get hold of animals. None round here, I can tell you that. Even the rats have been snapped up.”
Now Miles noticed that in the other lines of people queueing patiently at the forest entrances, each and every traveller was lugging a pet-basket or birdcage, or had some creature on a lead—dog, cat, ferret, rabbit, tortoise. Some carried moth-eaten parrots or scrawny cockatoos on wrist or shoulder. Others had invisible wriggling passengers buttoned inside their jackets.
“Why do you need an animal to get into the forest?” Miles asked another boy, who simply shrugged.
“Don’t ask me, mate. I ain’t the gu’ment. I don’t make the rules.”
“Aren’t there any pet shops?”
“Used to be one at Foil Town, fifteen miles along the border. You could try there.”
Dejectedly, Miles unshackled his scooter and set off again. All along the way, he asked people about animals. He heard the going price for a cat was £500; for a dog, £1,000; mice were even more expensive because they could be carried in pockets; poisonous snakes were a bit cheaper than harmless ones, but in either case there weren’t any; frogs and toads were unobtainable; scorpions, black widow spiders, and gila monsters fetched three or four hundred pounds apiece.
“Scorpions?”
“Anything that weighs over thirty grammes counts as an animal. Butterflies are a no go.”
“Are there any scorpions?” asked Miles, bracing himself. But his informant, a man who sold him a leathery liver-sausage sandwich, said, “Nah. Ent seen a scorpion in two years.”
Penalties were severe for stealing animals: a prison sentence and deprivation of your passport for life. But still thefts were common.
The pet shop, when Miles reached it, was another disappointment: a tin chalet, like the passport office. It contained some bowls of goldfish, some cocoons, and a minute scorpion. Miles had already learned that fish would not do; they did not qualify their owners for admission into the forest.
“Is this all you have?” he asked despairingly.
“Sorry, chum; I was just going to shut up shop, as a matter o’ fact.”
“You can’t tell me of any animals anywhere?”
“I did hear something about an ad for a portable elephant, down Plastic Hamlet way; you could go and ask there. Or you could send for it, mail order; I’ve got the address written down somewhere.”
“I’m not ordering a mail-order elephant! Anyway, I don’t see how an elephant could be portable.”
“Must be a midget breed, I reckon,” said the shop owner. “Or a baby.”
“Where is Plastic Hamlet?”
“Carry on west; you can’t miss. There’s a big plastic tower. Made o’ lemonade bottles.”
Miles carried on, and came to Plastic Hamlet, which looked like all the other places he had passed through, apart from the lemonade-bottle tower. At the foot of the tower, on a rough open patch of ground, strewn with chocolate wrappers and trodden words, he found a notice-board on a post, and among the weather-tattered cards: “Scooter for sale, going cheap”, “Wanted, cat, any price paid”, “Machete and poison darts, offers?”, he found one that read “Portable elephant, £1,000”, with an address in Leaf Lane.
Miles had already observed the street sign for Leaf Lane, a squalid alley leading towards the forest. He turned back and soon found it again. Number Ten was a small shanty built from compressed cereal packets tied in bundles; surely this hovel could not house an elephant? But behind it there was a bigger shed, a kind of aircraft hangar; perhaps the elephant was in there.
“Mr. Moor?” Miles said to the wizened little man who answered his knock. “My name is Miles Pots. I’ve come about your advertisement for an elephant.”
“Noel? You want Noel?”
“Is Noel the name of the elephant?”
“Sure it is, didn’t think he was a camel, did you? Noel’s a good boy, good elephant. He won’t play you no tricks. Loving nature, Noel has. You got a thousand nicker?”
“I have a credit card from my District Council, expenses up to a thousand.”
Miles showed his card, wrote a draft, Mr. Moor checked and rechecked until at last he was satisfied.
“Right, now, I daresay you want to get acquainted. Noel’s quarters are back there.”
He led Miles round the side of his flimsy dwelling, lifted a bar out of two staples, and pulled aside a large door made from bashed-out bus panels.
Inside the big curved corrugated structure it was pitch dark. A strong smell came out to meet them—a sweetish, fusty, musty dusty smell, like no other that Miles had ever smelt.
“There he is, the boy,” said Mr. Moor fondly. “Noel enjoys company, that he does. Hear ’im croon? Haven’t a banana in your pocket, I don’t suppose?”
Miles had not.
“I think I’ve a gum drop somewhere,” he said, rummaging.
Meanwhile his eyes had become used to the gloom and he began to see—with disbelieving horror—a very large shape towering over him.
“Portable? You said—the advertisement said—a portable elephant?” he exclaimed in outrage. “That’s not portable—it’s just the regular size of elephant!”
“The ad never said portable by who, did it?” replied Moor reasonably. “Anyone could port old Noel, if they had a crane, or a big enough boat, or a decent-sized truck, or a jumbo jet. O’ course he’s portable. It’s all a matter of relativity, ennit?”
“I can’t carry that into the forest! I want my money back.”
“No. No. No,” said Mr. Moor, very shortly, sharply, and crisply. “Signed and sealed is signed and sealed. You bought ’im in good faith, he’s yours. I don’t like, and won’t have, argumentation and disagreeables. Tell you what, though, I’ll throw in his fodder, what’s left, and you can have this place, into the bargain; I’m planning to move to Paper Village, they say there’s Quality Homes there. So you can stop here with Noel. Maybe if you bathed him in hot water, he’d shrink. He wants feeding twice a day; just fill that rack. And give him plenty to drink, he’s a thirsty beggar, aren’t you, Noel boy?”
After which Mr. Moor clapped Miles on the back and Noel on the trunk, hopped on a moped which he wheeled from the shadows of the elephant shed, and disappeared down the dusty lane at a surprising turn of speed for one so bent and wizened.
Miles Pots was left alone with his new belonging.
However Mr. Moor appeared again, having gone round the block, and shouted, “You could try feeding ’im on gin. They say that’s reducing.” Then he left for good.
Noel the elephant was battleship-grey in colour, dusty and hairy; his big ears hung down like shapeless curtains, his little eyes twinkled and short tusks, which turned out at quarter-angles, like a ballerina’s feet, gave him a carefree expression.
“Where can I get hot water in this wildnerness?” Miles peevishly shouted after Mr. Moor, who was long out of earshot.
“You can buy water at the pump on the corner of Polythene Place and
Melanine Mews,” suggested a girl who had ridden past on a bicycle during Miles’s conversation with Mr. Moor and, evidently becoming interested, had dismounted and stood listening.
“But how in the world shall I heat it up?” objected Miles helplessly.
“Light a fire, of course.”
“What with? I can’t go into the forest for sticks.” He wished the wretched girl would go on her way, instead of hanging about making useless suggestions.
“There’s plenty of rubbish,” pointed out the girl rather impatiently, and kicked a few crumbled words from under the wheels of her bike.
“Burn those?”
“Why not? They’re no use to anyone, nor ever will be.”
To Miles, burning words seemed like burning pearls and rubies. He stared at the girl with dislike. She was thin, with an unkempt tangle of black hair down her back, her dress was faded, and her stockings were in holes. Miles had a faint idea that he had seen her somewhere before.
Having no better idea of his own, he at last followed her suggestion. He bought a pail of water for a penny from a pump outside the rest center, a cardboard shack where bandages and insect-bite powder were also to be had. Then he raked up a heap of words, sparkling, tops, pits, fantastic, best, worst, magic, mystery, holocaust, whizz kid, unbeatable value, and set fire to them. They burned briskly, he was able to heat the water, and to shampoo Noel, scrubbing him with handfuls of more scrumpled words. The bicycle girl gave Miles a hand; she said she didn’t mind, it helped pass the time while she waited for her baby lizard to grow another few grammes.
Noel absolutely adored his hot bath. Even Miles was affected by his rapture. And so the bath became a daily event. As the steaming pail was borne towards him, Noel would stand trumpeting with ecstasy; he sounded like a fanfare for tubas, trombones, bombardons, and fugelhorns. When the pail was set down he would delicately suck a little hot water up his trunk, then squirt it over himself, while Miles and the thin girl (her name was Hannah Palindrome) rubbed and massaged him with handfuls of tender fresh gripping classic and flattering words. Then Noel would kneel on all fours while the whole pailful was sloshed over him, running down his ears, tail, and toenails.