The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels)

by Michael Morpurgo

  All through that terrible journey I had tried all I could not to look at the tiger, because I found that if I did my eyes would fill with tears. But it was almost impossible not to look at him, stretched out as he was right in front of me. I knew I mustn’t give in to tears, that whatever happened, the little orang-utans would be relying on me for everything now. I had to concentrate all my mind on their needs and nothing else. What they really needed of course was to feel their mothers’ arms around them, their mothers’ love, and most importantly the milk that went with it. They were all of them desperately hungry by now, sucking obsessively on my fingers and elbows at every opportunity. And when sucking proved fruitless, then they would use their teeth and gnaw at me, which was often painful.

  But painful or not, I had to endure it and let them suckle on. Of course, there was little enough satisfaction in it for them, but it was clearly of some comfort to them, and I thought that must be better than nothing.

  There were dozens of people running alongside the pickup truck now, as it slowed and then ground at last to a halt. Thinking this might be the last moment we would have together, I looked long into the eyes of the tiger. It was my way of saying goodbye, I suppose. But from those eyes, gleaming now at me in the flickering light of the fires, I drew all the courage and strength I knew I would be needing, to face whatever was to come. I promised myself then that whatever was going to happen to us, whatever they did to us, I would cry no tears in front of these kidnappers, these murderers. I had a powerful feeling that the tiger was handing to me at that moment the guardianship not only of the three little orang-utans I was cradling in my arms, but of the spirit of the whole jungle.

  We were already surrounded by an excitable mob, pushing and shoving to get a better look at us, at the orang-utans, at me, at the dead tiger. I was ready for them. There would be no cowering, no fear shown. I gripped the bars and glared back defiantly at every one of them. Whooping in triumph the crowd dragged the tiger out first. My eyes filled with tears despite myself, as I watched them carrying him away swinging from the pole, head hanging, limp in death. They hauled out the cage then, and we were carried away, swaying like the tiger in front of me as we were borne along through the hubbub of the crowd, the orang-utans crying in their terror, despite all I could do to comfort them.

  The gathering crowd looked on in awe as the tiger passed by, but this soon turned to mocking laughter when they spotted me, and the little orang-utans, in the cage. They rattled the bars with sticks, poking and jabbing at us. They made monkey faces at us, and some of the children were laughing at us and sticking their tongues out. Everywhere there was whooping and yelling, and shooting too. They were firing their rifles off over our heads in celebration. With every shot the orang-utans clung tighter to me, pushing their faces into my chest, into my armpits, my neck, desperate for somewhere to hide.

  All this time I was trying to confront the crowd with a fixed, unflinching stare, and as I did so, I recited to myself again and again, like a mantra, the first lines of my tiger poem: “‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night …’” I found the words sounded like a bugle call to me inside my head. They kept my courage from failing, they rallied my spirits.

  This journey through those baying crowds was like torture for the little orang-utans, and it only ended when at last they set the cage down outside a rickety-looking wooden shack with two chimneys belching smoke at either end. The place smelled and looked like some kind of a cookhouse. I could see there were several pans left steaming on the vast stove inside, and there was a long low table covered with chopped vegetables and fruit outside, under the eaves. Everything looked as if it had been hastily abandoned in all the excitement of our arrival.

  Nearby, the three hunters stood with their rifles, arms around one another, posing for photographs, the tiger stretched out on the ground in front of them. One of them – he had a red bandana around his forehead – put his foot on the tiger’s head and punched the air again and again in triumph, to the evident delight of the crowd, who were cheering him wildly all the time. I remembered the red bandana now. I’d seen that man back in the clearing, and he’d been driving the pickup truck. He had the look of power about him, and seemed to me to be a ringleader. He was certainly the hero of the hour for the crowd. He hushed them easily, with a flourish of his hand, and began to make a speech, his foot still on the tiger’s head.

  It became clear very soon that he was telling them all the story of the hunt, and doing it dramatically, flamboyantly. I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying of course, but I understood the gist of it: how they’d lain in wait by a river where the tiger came to swim and ambushed him; how they’d shot him in the water as he was swimming, and dragged him out. Then, and he was pointing at us in our cage now, he began to make much of how they’d shot the orang-utans out of the trees. He counted out in English the number they’d killed: “One, two, three, four, five, six …” Up to fifteen he counted, firing his rifle into the air to celebrate each one, and every time they roared their approval.

  They had shot fifteen.

  By this time the whole crowd was cheering and laughing. And then, he went on, they had discovered that one of them was not an orang-utan at all, but a ‘monkey boy’. He said that in English too, and that got the loudest laugh of all. There were more stories, more jokes, and then the bottles came out and the drinking began. Shortly after this, with the excitement over, they drifted away, carrying the tiger with them, leaving us in peace at last. The little orang-utans fell asleep, but only fitfully, clutching me all the while.

  But they didn’t leave us alone for long. The mineworkers and their families were beginning to line up for their evening meal outside the cookhouse. As they passed by our cage with their bowls of food, most of the children would crouch down and have a look in at us, and it wasn’t just out of curiosity either. They teased us and taunted us, offering us food, and then snatching it away at the last moment. Some would put their faces to the bars of the cage and screech at me: “Monkey boy! Monkey boy!” One or two were trying out some words of English. “What are you? You monkey? You American monkey boy? You English monkey boy?” I sat there, confronting every inquisitive look, enduring every mocking grin, with the same cold gaze, all the while reciting the tiger poem silently to myself, over and over, keeping the spirit of the tiger alive inside me, keeping him strong, keeping me strong.

  It was only when the last of them had gone, the cooks had left, and the cookhouse shutters were closed, that I felt I could try to get some sleep. I lay down and tried to stretch out as best I could. But the cramped cage gave me little room to move, and no comfort at all, and the little orang-utans were constantly crawling over me, always on the search for food, pestering me for it almost constantly, and there was nothing I could do to help them. They weren’t going to let me sleep, that was for sure. I was as hungry as they were by now, but there was no way I was ever going to beg these people for food. With the smells of the kitchen still in the air all around me, it was impossible to put the thought of food out of my mind. I knew that only sleep could drive that away. So, even knowing it was unlikely in the circumstances that I would be able to make myself go to sleep at all that night, I closed my eyes and tried.

  I was almost there, almost asleep, when I heard footsteps coming, then the sound of someone breathing close by. “Boy?” came a voice. I looked up to see a figure crouched by the cage. After a moment or two, I recognised him as one of the cooks I’d seen dishing out the rice earlier. He had a knife in one hand, and was holding some kind of a huge fruit in the other, the size of a small rugby ball.

  “Durian,” he whispered. “It is for the orang-utans. It is fruit. You give it to them. And you must eat it too. Smell bad this fruit, but taste very good all the same. They like it. All orang-utans like it. You like too. You see. The hunters, they always say the same to me, every time they bring little orang-utans back from the jungle. Many times they bring them back. They say, ‘You fe
ed them, Kaya.’ But when they very young, very small like these orang-utans, they are not so easy to feed. They do not like to take food from stranger, only from mother. But mother is dead, and they know this. They are very afraid. The hunters say to me, ‘Kaya, no one buy dead orang-utan. Dead orang-utan no use to nobody, not worth a flea. If they die we beat you, Kaya.’ Many times they beat me. I tell them it is not my fault, that I try my best, but sometimes little orang-utans do not take fruit from me. They are not stupid – I tell them this. I say, ‘They know I am not mother. They want food only from mother. They do not want to take it from me.’ And then they die. These people, these hunter men, they do not listen. They just beat me. But I think little orang-utans die from sadness inside, not because they do not eat. These ones are very sad, like the others. But I watch you. They think you are like mother. They trust you. I can see this. They will eat this food if you give it to them.”

  He cut the fruit and handed it through the bars to me. “Is it true?” he went on. “Are you wild monkey boy of the forest, like they say?” I took the fruit from him, but said nothing.

  “Kaya is your friend, boy,” said the man. “You remember this. I must go now. I come again.”

  When he’d gone I soon discovered that my problem wasn’t getting them to eat, far from it. It was sharing it out that was the problem. They were pulling it apart, tearing at it, stealing from each other. I was hoping for some of it for myself, but there was no chance of that.

  By the time they had finished, they were still looking for more, gnawing at the skins again and again. But it must have been enough for the moment, because they all fell asleep soon afterwards, which was more than I was able to do. I had pins and needles in so many places. I was longing to move, but I didn’t dare, for fear of waking the orang-utans, who were still clinging tight to me, even in their sleep.

  Kaya came back a short time later, as he had said he would, scurrying across to the cage, bent double as he ran, looking around nervously all the time. He crouched down, his face close to the bars. “They eat it all, this fruit?” he whispered, reaching in and picking up one of the discarded skins. I nodded, but said nothing more. Kaya looked back over his shoulder again. “You must be very good mother, I think. I have water for you, boy, and I have coconut. You like coconut? My son, he like coconut very much. I have son like you, not so young as you maybe. He is back home in my village. I work here because I must feed him, I must feed all my family, my mother and father too. He is very old man now, and sick. How can they live if I do not send them money?”

  I wasn’t sure he wanted me to answer, so I said nothing.

  “I do not like what they do to this tiger, boy,” he went on. “I do not like what they do with orang-utans. But if I say what I think, they will beat me and maybe send me away, and then I have no work. Maybe they will kill me. These are not good people. They do bad things. The hunter men they say to me, ‘Starve the monkey boy, no water, no food.’ But I cannot do this.” He handed me a bottle of water through the bars of the cage. I drank it without stopping, and afterwards wolfed down the coconut so fast that I almost choked on it, and then I washed it down with the last of the water.

  As I handed back the bottle, I looked at him properly for the first time. He was a withered, diminutive man, his skin stretched thin over his hollow cheeks, as if life was draining out of him with every passing minute. But in his eyes he was strong, and kind too. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “I will do what I can to save you, boy,” Kaya said, “but I cannot do much. They watch me. Here everyone watches everyone.”

  “What will they do with us?” I asked him.

  “They sell you maybe. Here they sell everything, the gold from under the ground, the trees they cut down, the orang-utans they capture, the tigers they shoot.”

  “And me?”

  He shrugged. “I do not know what they will do with you, boy. Maybe they sell you too. Tomorrow Mister Anthony comes from Jakarta. He is God round here. He will decide. He decides everything round here. It is Mister Anthony who decides who works, who does not work, who lives, who dies. Everything. You sleep now, boy.” He got up to go, but before he left, he crouched back down again. “You say nothing about this water I give you, boy,” he whispered, “and you say nothing about the coconut, eh? If they know I have done this, they will beat me. You understand? You promise?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  Kaya smiled at me suddenly. I noticed then that he had very few teeth. “Your babies, they are asleep. I must sleep too. I will come again in the morning.” And he was gone into the night.

  It was the longest night of my life. Only now did I truly realise just how much I had relied on Oona all this time, and not only for companionship. For so long she had solved all of my problems, kept me out of danger, been my protector and guide, been a mother and father to me. Now she wasn’t there beside me I felt alone and abandoned, and then suddenly angry with her too. I even found myself blaming her for running off as she had, and saving herself. Why hadn’t she driven the hunters away? Why hadn’t she stayed to help us? And where was she now? Maybe she would still come to rescue us. Maybe she was out there now, just waiting for the right moment. She would come charging out of the jungle to save us. Yes, that was it. She would come. She had to come.

  It wasn’t the flies, nor the incessant chattering of the forest that would not let me sleep that night, nor the little orang-utans who lay all over me, their bodies hot and sticky. Hope and dread kept me awake, hope that Oona might somehow be coming to our rescue, and dread of what would happen to us the next day if she did not. I couldn’t help wondering who this man was that Kaya had spoken of, this Mister Anthony from Jakarta who seemed to have the power of life and death over everyone in this place, including the orang-utans, including myself.

  I thought of escape too, even though I knew it was quite impossible. The cage was made of wood, but strongly made and well padlocked. The more I thought about everything the more anxious I became, and the more I came to believe that unless I could find some way of escaping that night, unless Oona came for me, then the next day I might very well be sold into some kind of slavery.

  In the end, to stop myself thinking about such things, to stop the panic rising inside me, I began to say the tiger poem, out loud this time – but softly, because I didn’t want to wake the orang-utans. I recited it again and again. Then I decided to hum to myself all the songs I could remember one after another, all the George Formby songs we used to sing back at home, with Dad strumming away on his ukulele, ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’, and “I’m leaning on the lamppost at the corner of the street in case a certain little lady comes by! O me, O my …”

  And then, and I’ve no idea why, I found myself humming the Chelsea song, “Blue is the colour, football is the game,” the one Dad and I would stand up and sing, along with 40,000 others, at Stamford Bridge at the end of every match. It was during one of these familiar tunes that I must have drifted off to sleep at last.

  I was woken by the sound of an engine, and the splash and crunch of a car coming down the track. I propped myself up on my elbows, but only as far as I could without disturbing the still-slumbering orang-utans, and saw a huge black four-by-four with darkened windows, pulling up outside the largest of the shacks. I’d noticed it the evening before. It was the only one that had looked anything like a proper house, with proper glass windows, a veranda, and a low wooden fence all round, and there’d been a rocking chair out on the veranda right by the front door. I remembered thinking that seemed incongruously domestic in this sprawling mess of a place.

  One of the workers was hurrying barefoot past the cage now to open the car door, and there were a couple of others frantically rolling out a length of matting, from the car to the steps of the veranda. Not wanting to be noticed, I shrank back in the cage, and lay down again. All I could see now were the doors of the car, its huge tyres covered with dirt, and a lot of mud-splattered legs running past me.

  The man
who stepped out on to the matting had highly polished brown shoes, and white trousers with immaculate creases. He walked away along the matting for a few steps. But then he stopped, turned round and came straight back towards me. He was carrying a shiny black stick. His fingers were covered in huge gold rings, at least one on every finger. Suddenly his face was there right in front of me, pale, puffed up and sweaty, with small, shining eyes, venomous eyes.

  “So there you are,” he began – he spoke in a kind of drawl. “The little monkey boy they told me about. Sit up, Monkey Boy, let’s have a look at you.” He spoke English, but his accent was strange – I couldn’t think where it came from. All I knew was that this had to be the Mister Anthony from Jakarta that Kaya had told me about. This had to be the man who was God here. He mopped his neck with his handkerchief. “Do you know what you are, monkey boy? You’re a flaming nuisance, that’s what you are, a flaming nuisance, a lousy spanner in the works. You know something? I don’t like people who cause me problems. Best thing to do with a problem is to get rid of it, I reckon. So maybe I’ll put a bullet in your head, and throw you in a hole out there somewhere in the jungle. Problem solved. But then, maybe … maybe there’s a way to make a dollar or two on you first. I can always kill you later, can’t I? I’ll have breakfast and think about it.”

  He stood up. “Bring Monkey Boy up to the house. But I want the little beggar washed down good and proper first. He stinks to high heaven.”

  As Mister Anthony walked away through the crowd – Kaya among them – I noticed they all lowered their eyes and bowed as he passed them by. “Now where’s this lousy tiger?” he was saying. “Show me. I want to see the tiger. He’d better be a good one.” He was escorted on all sides by a phalanx of bodyguards, all dressed in the same shiny black suits, every one of them carrying a rifle.