The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit)

by Gyland, Henriette

  ‘You didn’t have to …’

  ‘You open.’

  Inside was a silver amulet, shaped like a coin, with the Hindu elephant god Ganesh seated on a lotus, in relief on one side and flat on the other, and with an inscription in Hindi. She held it up by the leather cord, and it glinted in the sunlight that fell in through the open door. Mamaji must have noticed the pendant Helen always wore and decided to match it. Her heart constricted at this unexpected kindness; they were so poor and so generous at the same time. She didn’t deserve it.

  ‘I can’t possibly accept this.’

  Mamaji’s face split into an almost toothless smile, and she closed Helen’s hand over the parcel with more force than you’d expect from her bony hand. ‘Ganesh will remove all obstacles for you. He is the god of learning, and of peace. He will give you strength.’

  Joe helped her pack. Clothes, mainly jeans, T-shirts and a few floaty skirts. A vintage leather bomber jacket she’d picked up in Hong Kong on impulse. A pair of Doc Martens boots. Jewellery made from Thai silver filigree, ornaments. Five years of travelling and her belongings took up precious little room in her rucksack, but they both pretended it amounted to the contents of a proper life.

  On the morning of her coach journey back to Mumbai, Joe cooked breakfast in his cramped kitchen. Helen sent him a questioning glance when he placed an enormous plate of crispy streaky bacon and fluffy scrambled eggs in front of her and sat down, his own plate untouched.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.

  She avoided his gaze. Outside, below the flat, on Arambol High Street, the clamours and smells of early morning rose. People shouting, street dogs barking, cooking tins rattling, and above it all the sound of impatient auto-wallahs honking the horns on their three-wheeled auto rickshaws. The din was impossible, and she was going to miss it.

  ‘You can turn your back on the past,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s eating you, but you can. I did.’

  Helen weighed her words carefully before answering that. She’d told Joe about how her father had died before she was born, that when her mother died when she was five, it left her with no living relatives to speak of, but she’d never elaborated on what actually happened. With only hours to go before her coach left, this was hardly the right time to begin. But she owed him something.

  ‘A long time ago someone, a woman, did something terrible to my family, and she went to prison for it. Now she’s out, and I have to—’

  ‘Have to what? Kill her?’

  ‘Of course not!’ How come Joe could read her so well? That was exactly what she had been thinking. ‘But she has to pay.’

  ‘And a couple of decades weaving baskets isn’t payment enough?’

  ‘Not for me.’ Fay had ruined her life. How could any punishment ever be enough?

  ‘Then God help you,’ he said and began picking at his food.

  Helen pushed her own half-eaten food away, all thoughts of breakfast gone. ‘I don’t expect help from anyone, not even God. I gave up on that a long time ago.’

  ‘And what’s back home? Is there no one you care about, or have kept in touch with?’

  Helen thought of her family who had rejected her, the countless foster homes where her epilepsy had been a source of either mirth or disgust. A bitter taste welled up in her, and she clenched her jaw to bite back the tears. ‘No. Although I suppose I ought to see my grandmother.’

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t have one.’

  ‘Step-grandmother. It’s complicated.’ She shrugged. ‘And I’ll need to see my neurologist. He’s all right.’

  Joe nodded and went back to being taciturn. She was grateful for that.

  She’d known him for two years. With Joe what you saw was what you got. He never pretended to be a friend and then groped her when her guard was down, like some blokes. He never cross-examined her either. She could lean on Joe. And now she was saying goodbye and going back to …

  What exactly? Even her mind hadn’t played the scenario that far.

  At the coach stop she hugged him and briefly leaned into his strength. ‘There will always be a place for you, here,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  Helen nodded, unable to speak.

  The driver stopped at midday at a chai place along the route. The heat hit Helen as soon as she left the air-conditioned coach, and she pulled at her T-shirt to fan herself. She bought a Coke and a couple of onion bhajis from a stall. Pressing the ice-cold can to her cheeks, she found a rickety bench under a graceful ashok tree, its downward-sweeping branches and shining green foliage providing perfect shade. The bench was deliberately placed so it overlooked a sludge-coloured river.

  When she’d finished eating, she leaned back and watched a group of boys of different ages washing an elephant in the murky water. The boys, wearing only shorts, were lithe and tanned with bright white teeth and reminded her of the cricket boys on the beach.

  The elephant was a young female if the way it only reached up to the shoulder of one of the older boys was anything to go by. Helen could still see remnants of decorative paint on the front of its head and trunk, an intricate design of swirls, circles and stars in turquoise, red and white. Unfazed by the chattering boys around her, the elephant dipped her trunk in the water, raised it over her head and emptied it over her back, splashing herself and the boys as they scrubbed her sides and legs vigorously with palm-sized stones.

  It wasn’t an uncommon sight in India, but it was a peaceful scenario. Sighing contentedly in the pleasant shade from the tree, she closed her eyes and dozed off.

  A high-pitched trumpeting pulled her out of her slumber, and she sat up, disorientated. Then she remembered where she was: the coach stop by the river. She lifted her hand to rub her eyes and knocked over the rest of her Coke which she’d left on the bench beside her. The liquid hissed and bubbled before soaking into the ground.

  The boys had rinsed the decorations off the elephant and were joined by another young handler shepherding a baby elephant forward with a twig. Trumpeting again, the calf made his way into the river on long clumsy legs and headed straight for his mother, where he drank from her teat.

  There were sighs of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and ‘isn’t he just adorable?’ from other travellers nearby as they watched.

  The spectacle held Helen’s attention. Somewhere, inside her, a dull ache throbbed.

  When the calf had had his fill, the handlers gently guided him forward and began to wash him in full view of the spectators, while another boy walked among the tourists collecting coins in an old condensed milk tin.

  ‘Please, for baby?’ he said, over and over again, with pleading large eyes. A gross manipulation, as the animals looked well-fed, but no one seemed to mind.

  The mother elephant had curled her trunk around that of her calf, almost as if they were holding hands, and the small, black eyes of the formidable beast held an expression of utmost gentleness.

  Stirred by a sudden, vague memory, Helen hardly noticed the smiling young boy in front of her rattling his tin, but dropped a few rupees in it like the others had done. He quickly moved to his next victim while Helen kept her eyes on the elephants.

  ‘You like elephants?’

  She turned to find the coach driver leaning against the tree behind her. He was a squat man with a sheen of sweat on his forehead and red-black teeth from chewing paan, made from betel nut, lime paste, spices and sometimes a dash of opium. Grinning widely at Helen, he now displayed his teeth in all their discoloured glory. It looked like blood.

  ‘They are supposed to be very clever, aren’t they?’ she said.

  ‘They have good memory.’ He nodded enthusiastically and pointed to the young men who were now preparing to round up the two elephants. ‘They are reghawan. What you say? Good handlers. They use love. A balwan is cruel, and elephants remember.’

  He continued talking about elephants, a subject he seemed to know a lot about. Helen wasn’t really listening. The young men h
ad ushered the animals out of the water and were heading back to where they’d come from. She watched the baby follow on his mother’s heels, faithfully and trustingly, on unsteady legs, occasionally chivvied forward by the boy with the stick if it fell too far behind.

  The pain caught her off guard.

  Mother and child.

  Tears welled up in her eyes as the elephants and their handlers disappeared behind a group of silver trees, a cloud of dust the only evidence they’d been there in the first place.

  ‘Are you okay, lady?’ The coach driver patted her arm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re crying.’

  Helen brought her hands to her face. She hadn’t realised she’d cried for real, and she quickly brushed the tears away and wiped her hands on her jeans. ‘I’m fine. Everything’s fine.’

  Eighteen hours later she stumbled into Mumbai airport still wondering why Aggie needed her to come back to England so urgently that she would use the dirtiest, most rotten trick there was.

  It was obvious that sending Sweetman to Goa with the message that Fay had been released from prison was pure manipulation. Aggie knew nothing else would get Helen to come back, not even the threat of being cut off without a penny. And it worked.

  But it wasn’t Aggie’s motives which kept her awake for the entire coach journey. That bitch Fay was free, and when Helen found her, she was going to show her what hell on earth was like.

  Chapter Three

  Jason’s good mood lasted until he reached the front door and the bodyguard who held it open for him. Then something curdled inside him like sour milk, because the goons always reminded him of what his father was.

  ‘Have a nice day, Master Moody.’

  I bet you practised that one, thought Jason tetchily.

  It sounded like mockery. Jason remembered the teachers calling out names for the register every morning when he was at school. Moody, Jason. That always raised a few titters, and it wasn’t far from the truth. Throughout his time at boarding school he’d been Moody Jason.

  Suddenly he felt the need to take it out on someone that he’d had to come crawling to his father yet again. Even if he had won this time.

  ‘Get stuffed, moron.’

  ‘Whatever you say, sir.’ The goon kept an almost straight face, and he was tempted to plant a fist in the man’s already crooked nose.

  Then he was shamed by his own hypocrisy. This guy doing the dirty work for people like his father was the kind of person he was trying to help. It was just that there was something about his father and his whole operation which had made Jason see red for as long he could remember.

  It wasn’t difficult to see that the problem stemmed from never having fitted in. His father had set out to give him everything he himself never had as a child. That part was easy to grasp; what parent wouldn’t want the best for his kid? So, he’d had the best bike, the coolest clothes, the most exclusive education, the exotic holidays, the swankiest twenty-first birthday bash.

  There was a time when he’d enjoyed the attention. Until the tender age of thirteen when he’d begun to realise his father didn’t give him these things out of the goodness of his heart or even for Jason’s benefit. It was entirely for his own sake. Jason had become a showcase for Derek’s wealth. Everything was bigger and better than what his friends had, which started out as being fun, but in the end set him apart.

  Sure, he had the school tie and the songbook, but he’d never be part of the old boy’s network because of his background. For his father to think that you could move from nouveau riche to posh in one generation was both cringe-making and pathetic, and Jason had wanted nothing to do with these attempts at social climbing.

  ‘I want to go to a normal school,’ he’d tried to tell his dad, but was met with blank incredulity.

  ‘Are you out of your mind, son? You don’t know how good you’ve got it. I’d have killed for an education like yours. Now get on with it, I don’t want to hear about you slacking. The money I’m paying, you’d bloody well better get straight As, you hear?’

  On top of that, despite the trappings of wealth and the appearance of respectability, there was no way of hiding what his father was, what the goon at the front door epitomised. His friends knew it, their parents too. The childish outburst ‘I’ll get my dad to beat up your dad’ took on a unique significance. People were afraid of him. It wasn’t empowering; just plain embarrassing.

  The final straw came when, at twenty-three, he’d got a girl pregnant. Sexy Cathy, whose hips moved as if on ball bearings, was from Australia and worked in an Aussie pub in London. Brash, golden-haired and with respect for nothing, she was the exact opposite of the girls his father paraded in front of him and a whole lot of fun. They partied, cooked and slept together. Every day. Sex with Cathy was like an exuberant dance between the sheets.

  But sex occasionally resulted in babies, and while he was still reeling from the impact of her shocking news and psyching himself up for marriage and fatherhood, Cathy disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Six months later he received a letter postmarked in Perth with no return address, in which she told him she’d had an abortion, thanked him for the money, and called him every name under the sun. He knew then he had to get out from under his father’s influence.

  ‘Stay the fuck out of my life, Dad. I mean it! I don’t interfere in yours, so just leave me the hell alone.’

  His father tried to play the innocent. ‘What? All I did was offer the girl some money – and for the record, I didn’t have to offer it twice. You’re a fool, Jason. I’ve saved you the trouble of having to support the kid. Hell, who knows, maybe it wasn’t even yours?’

  ‘Did you threaten her?’

  Derek’s eyebrows rose, and he looked almost affronted.

  ‘Well, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t have to.’

  Of course his father didn’t have to. One look at him and the muscle-men flanking him would have been enough to intimidate even Cathy.

  ‘Oh, really? And did you know she had an abortion? Hmm?’ Jason knew that would rankle. His father didn’t approve of terminations. The barb hit home and Derek’s mouth tightened.

  ‘She said nothing about that. You told me she was Catholic.’

  Jason had never discussed Cathy with him and hadn’t been the one to tell him she was pregnant, but what was the point in arguing about it? What was done, was done.

  Instead he said, in a voice marred by both pity and disgust, ‘I’ve always suspected what sort of man you are, but now I know. Owning other people is the only kind of love you understand, and you’ll do anything to keep us all under your thumb. Even if it leads to the slaughter of an innocent child.’ And he’d stormed out of the room but not before he’d seen his father turn pale.

  Since then he’d had only casual girlfriends and very few friends in general, careful not to leave himself exposed to the same kind of manipulation again.

  It was working with young offenders at a music recording studio which showed him a way forward. He became passionate about helping people who were less fortunate than himself, and, if he had to be completely honest about it, it was also a way of getting up his father’s nose. When annoying his father slowly became less important, Jason knew he’d finally found something to do with his life which truly mattered. Somewhere he could make a difference.

  Derek had only given in about the house because he’d played him at his own game, but it seemed to be the only language he understood. Jason sensed a grudging respect, but the victory felt hollow because he didn’t want to be respected for the part of himself which he loathed the most.

  The part that was like his father.

  After the sweet air in Goa the smells of London were like an assault on the senses. Helen checked into a hotel in a cheap but bustling part of town and slept off her jet lag.

  Aggie’s Kensington home was a Victorian semi-detached house covered in white-painted stucco. The roof of a summer house could just be seen o
ver the top of the walled garden, and yellow climbing roses spilled over the iron railings that bordered the small paved area outside the entrance. The front of the house was almost entirely covered in a trailing wisteria, its flowers resembling succulent grapes. The air was heady with their perfume, and if she turned her back on the traffic and shut out the noise, Helen could almost imagine herself back in Goa.

  Almost.

  She’d called beforehand because with Aggie you didn’t just ‘drop in’, and the voice on the phone, a secretary perhaps, had told her to come at eleven. It galled her that her step-grandmother had lured her back from India and then expected her to schedule a meeting like some office junior, but sometimes you had to play by the rules to get what you wanted.

  And Helen wanted something very specific – answers.

  On the front step she stopped with a feeling of déjà vu. Same time of the year with the wisteria in bloom, clutching her mother’s hand and staring up at the house which she’d thought belonged to a witch. She wore a rose-pink velvet dress made by someone called Laura. Her mother had been particularly fond of that dress and told Helen it made her look like a little princess, so it became her favourite too. They referred to it as ‘Laura’s dress’, and for years she’d believed this Laura was a friend of her mother’s until she’d walked past the Laura Ashley store on Oxford Street, and the penny dropped.

  The woman who opened the door now was unfamiliar, but Helen wasn’t surprised. When she last saw Aggie’s housekeeper Mrs Ingram, seven years ago, the old lady had looked ready to drop.

  ‘Yes?’ She looked Helen up and down, took in the scuffed Doc Martens boots, the ripped jeans and the long tie-dye top, and wrinkled her nose. ‘We don’t buy or sell at the door.’

  ‘I’m here to see Mrs Ransome.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ The woman made to shut the door.

  Helen stopped it closing with her boot. ‘Excuse me, but I have an appointment to see my step-grandmother. Unless she’s popped her clogs or moved out, I suggest you let me in.’

  The woman opened the door reluctantly as if she still suspected it to be a con. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’