ELEPHANT MOON (8 page)

‘Well put, Sergeant-major.’

Lieutenant Peach sighed as the bus rattled across the bridge. The sergeant-major coughed, officiously, as if he was about to make a formal announcement, a toast-master at a banquet.

‘Yes, Sergeant-major?’

‘Sir, when we first heard that you were going to be our new officer, sir, we all thought you were an arse, sir. We’d all heard about you jailing that officer. But we heard wrong, sir. The men would like you to know you’re not an arse, sir.’

‘Not an arse,’ said Lieutenant Peach, frowning. And then, after some thought, ‘Very good, Sergeant-major.’

The lieutenant stared after the bus clattering along the bridge’s span: ‘Let’s hope they don’t get strafed while they’re crossing the river. God speed, little bus.’

But the luck of Bishop Strachan’s held, for a time.

Hants & Dorset rumbled off the far end of the bridge, coughing and chugging past a group of staff officers, whose gallantry withered once they saw the VIPs they had gathered to salute with their own eyes. Elbows held at perfect angles hung downwards; moustaches drooped; shoulders slumped. A vein on the brigadier’s temple throbbed and he marched to the field phone, a martinet bent on revenge. ‘Get me that idiot, Lieutenant Peach. I’m going to bust him down to Private… ’ But no one stopped the bus.

Ruby turned to Emily: ‘Good morning. I’m not sure that we’ve been properly introduced. I am the grand-niece of the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava… ’

Emily’s giggles were interrupted by a
boom
.

A mushroom of smoke and dust and water rose up into the air and slowly fell in on itself, revealing a tangle of metal knitting lying higgledy-piggledy in the river, and two spans of the bridge gone.

The signalman on the west bank of the Irrawaddy saluted the brigadier. ‘Sorry, sir, you wanted Lieutenant Peach?’

‘Yes, I bloody do,’ said the brigadier.

‘Phone line is dead, sir,’ said the signalman. Behind the back of the brigadier, he replaced the receiver in its cradle and permitted himself a ghost of a smile.

Ten miles, twenty, thirty, one hundred. Past Shwebo, Ye-u, Pyingaing, always to the west, past an army camp, hidden from the sky, littered with the junk of war, empty wooden crates of ammo, a fifty-five-pounder with a broken axle, brown tents thronging with British and Indian soldiers resting in the shade of a giant banyan tree. The Jem overtook, fast, on his
motorbike and disappeared around a bend. He drove on a few miles and then pulled over, hiding from the sun in the cool of a fig tree. Arms resting on the handlebars, he closed his eyes and waited. The sounds of Burma – the itchy crackle of insects, the moo of an ox, a weird hiccoughing, repeated endlessly, hard to place, maybe a bird - and then an engine, growling and whining, and, in a higher register.

This singing bus, he thought, will be the death of me.

For some magical reason the engine of Hants & Dorset kept going. Every thirty miles or so, they had to top up the radiator with fresh water. At one stop, the wheels got stuck in sand, as soft and treacherous as the dunes at West Wittering, where Grace had swam when she was at school. They feared they would have to abandon her, because the bus by now had become a friend– and a female one at that– and walk. The Jem disappeared on his motor-bicycle and returned with a Honey tank on his tail. The school decamped off the bus while the tank men fixed a chain to the chassis of Hants & Dorset, Allu looking on, nervously. The tank’s tracks bit deep through the sand onto harder, packed earth beneath and soon the bus was on the road again.

Theirs was a race against the Japanese, and the monsoon. When the rains came, the dusty cart-tracks along which the bus could struggle, just, would be turned into sludge and mud, becoming impassable. But for the time being the landscape was parched, the earth bone dry, the bus stirring up a great wash of fine red dust high in the air, making it a comically easy
target for Japanese fighters overhead to spot them and descend for a kill. But still, somehow, they drove on, unhurt.

At a road junction, they spotted a small fuel depot. Allu pulled up and Grace got down to beg for a few more gallons of fuel. The clerk in charge was Indian, the lord and master of a hut with palm fronds for a roof and no walls. He refused Grace’s chit for more fuel and handed it back.

‘The details are not correct, Miss. You must go back to Mandalay and get it counter-signed by the appropriate authorities.’

‘Sir, we cannot do that. They have blown up the bridge. We saw it happen with our own eyes. And Mandalay is burnt to a cinder. We cannot go back.’

‘The paperwork is not correct, Miss.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t you know there is a war on?’

‘The chit must be counter-signed by the correct authorities,’ he insisted.

She sighed deeply.

‘The paperwork is not correct, Miss.’

No response. Her shoulders heaved, tears welled up and ran down her cheeks. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Emily stare at her from her seat on the bus, her face revealing that she was, to put it mildly, unconvinced by her teacher’s performance. Likewise, the little man was not to be moved. The moment she stopped, he repeated in a voice as unfeeling as an abacus: ‘The paperwork is not correct, Miss.’

The Jem, as usual, was nowhere to be seen. He had been scouting ahead, making sure the road was clear, searching out stores, shops, anywhere still open and working where they could pick up extra food and water. The splutter of his returning motorbike lifted her. When he arrived, she whispered the problem into his ear. Smiling, he said: ‘Boorishness, too, has its geniuses,’ and went into battle.

The Jem sat down opposite the depot clerk, studied her chit, delved into his leather satchel – she’d never seen him without it, not even when asleep in his hammock - and extracted the largest rubber stamp Grace had ever seen. He brought the stamp down with a bang, counter-signed the chit with an expansive scrolling signature, turned it over and stamped it three more times and counter-signed.

A bead of sweat formed on the clerk’s upper lip.

The Jem turned the chit over again, back to the first sheet: stamp, stamp, stamp. Again, he counter-signed, then handed it over to the clerk.

The clerk said impassively: ‘Everything is now in order. You may have the fuel.’ Sitting with her face in her hands, Grace studied the Jem through her fingers. The clerk walked off to help Allu fill up the bus.

‘I swear you are a sorcerer, Jemadar.’

‘I don’t have a white rabbit, Miss Collins. At least, not yet.’

She read the chit upside down and felt a twinge of unease.

‘The name you’ve signed. That’s not Ahmed Rehman, that’s not your name.’

‘Ah, yes. “When fighting for truth and justice,” wrote Balzac, “it’s never a good idea to wear one’s best trousers”.’

 ‘Sometimes, I wonder about you.’

‘In what way?’

‘You might be a Jiff– you know, “Asia for the Asiatics” and all that.’

He frowned, momentarily.

Emboldened by his unease, she challenged him directly. ‘So, are you a Jiff, Jemadar?’

‘A Jiff, Miss Collins? Perhaps we Indians are a little smarter than that. I no longer think that the British have a God-given right to rule the lesser breeds without the law, as Mr Kipling thought. One day India will be free of the British, although I suspect we may still
play cricket and drink tea and sit around and chat when there is work to be done. But are the Japanese our friends? Perhaps it is the case of better the devil you know.’

‘And do you think every Briton is a devil?’

‘Well, yes, I do rather. I know one in particular I cannot but serve, never mind what hell she may take me to.’

‘Your eyes are of the deepest green, Jem,’ she said, ‘just like the stuffed tiger in the Pegu Club. But do I trust them?’ She marched back towards the bus, holding a smile within herself.

‘Grace…’ the Jem called out, but the moment between them was lost. He gunned his motorbike and was off. Soon, all that she could make of him was an exclamation mark of dust rising in the air, one, two, miles ahead, shimmering in the heat.

The immense flatness of the Irrawaddy Plain, here and there interrupted by stubs of rock, capped by Buddhist stupas, gleaming in the harsh sun, gave way as they drove west to a more undulating landscape, and soon they were travelling through a frozen green sea of sharp ridges, high peaks and low ravines, the road circling and wheeling and doubling back on itself.

Half-dozing in the front seat immediately behind Allu, Grace opened her eyes as she sensed Hants & Dorset chugging to a halt. A white pole lay across the road, figures moving in the deep shade of a banyan tree. Three or four British soldiers brewing up, a kettle whistling. A checkpoint, of sorts. In no great hurry a corporal walked up to them, perched on the first step of the bus and took in the rows of children, many asleep, quiet.

‘Afternoon, Miss. We’re supposed to check everyone’s papers, Miss, but then we’re supposed to be doing lots of things. This lot looks pretty harmless to me. Refugees?’ She nodded. ‘Can you vouch that you’re not concealing the enemy?’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

‘Good, thought so. On your way, then.’

 ‘Who are you looking for?’ It was the very first checkpoint they had come across.

‘Deserters, suspicious people without papers, Jiffs–’ said the corporal.

‘I see. Have you seen our Jemadar? He’s on a motorbike?’

‘Nope. No one on a motorbike the whole afternoon.’

‘And the Japanese?’

‘One hundred miles away, according to our latest intelligence. That means they’re playing cards round the next bend. Good luck.’

Allu put Hants & Dorset into first gear and the ancient green bus moved out of the shade onto the road, driving on and on, its wheels still kicking up a great quantity of dust; the flow of air through the open windows providing the children with some measure of relief from the heat. They passed small knots of Indian refugees, straggling along the road, fewer in number, now, but no less exhausted.

She heard the familiar pop-pop-pop of his motorbike, overtaking the bus. The children waved, calling out: ‘Hello, Jem!’

How could that have happened? Before the checkpoint he had been miles ahead of them, and somehow he had fallen behind. The old bus must have overtaken him when she had been sleeping.

Through cathedrals of green they drove on, past rice paddies and teak forests and tidy European bungalows with white picket fences, empty, and wooden houses on stilts, thatched by sheaves of palm,  where the Burmese watched them pass by in silence, like standing stones.

The violent white of day, making black silhouettes of the shade, began to dim. To the west, a dark bottle green, the road immediately ahead a golden brown. They passed a farmer, following an ox ploughing up an old rice paddy, turned a bend and drove on and on…

As the sun died behind the hills, Hants & Dorset eased to a full stop. The children got out, stretched their legs, scrubbed their faces in a mountain stream tumbling down rocks on the far side of the road. Grace busied herself, feeding them, playing with the boys, making sure that she had a word here and there with the more anxious-looking girls.

Night fell with the suddenness of an axe. Only then did she hear his motorbike, the sound of its engine making her all but purr with pleasure, and the realisation of that both terrified and excited her, very much.

He parked the bike at the back of the bus, lit a cigarette and waited for her to join him. There was something supremely arrogant about the way he did that, she thought, and smiled to herself.

‘Tell me about that English lieutenant, the one who looks like a giraffe,’ he asked.

‘Oh, Lieutenant Peach.’ Moonshine bathed them in silvery-grey, eerie and surreal, ghouls poised to frighten a ghost train. Looking at him along her eyes, she said: ‘There is nothing to tell, Jem.’

‘My name is Ahmed.’

‘I prefer Jem. It is more proper.’

‘Proper?’

‘Proper.’

‘I think there is something between you and Lieutenant Peach, you know. You kissed him. I dared to steal a Generalissimo’s cake to impress you’ – Grace’s eyes widened – ‘but I would never have dreamt of holding up the demolition of the biggest bridge in Burma. Not with the Japanese Imperial Army a few miles off. He dared risk the whole of Upper Burma to impress you.’

‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

 ‘He loves you. If he didn’t love you, he would never have risked disobeying orders.’

‘I don’t know about that. I find Mr Peach rather plucky, sir, but my heart belongs to another.’

‘And who would that be?’ The Jem’s green eyes grew more tigerish.

‘That would be telling, Jem, that would be telling.’

‘That bee around your neck. How old is it?’

‘Fifty million years old.’

‘I would give my life to be that bee.’

She bade him goodnight, brushing against his arm, and began walking back towards the bus.

‘Stop.’

‘Jem, no… ’ The kiss was urgent and longed-for. This was no time to fall in love – but what can you do other than stop time itself?

Allu rose before sunrise, said his prayers, and sat behind the wheel. The engine wheezed into life, causing a pack of vultures to thwack the air as they wheeled off. Away from the rising sun, mile after dusty mile, through walls of morning mist still hanging in the river valleys, desperate to put as much distance between them and the invisible enemy. Twice, Allu began to nod off before she jabbed him in the back and the old driver shook his head, dabbed his eyes with water from a flask and drove on. The mist thickened, lifted, thinned and fell heavier than before, sometimes clear for half a mile, at others a thick grey treacle flowing against the windscreen. A jolt, the haze of sleep pierced by tyres squealing, Allu wrestling with the wheel, his right leg pumping the brakes, uselessly.

Brakes don’t work on thin air.

The bus lurched not forwards, but
down
. Through the open door at the front Grace gazed down at the rags of mist. They melted away revealing a dry river bed one hundred feet
below. Molly, sitting next to her, squeezed her hand. ‘I’m scared, Miss.’ Grace wanted to say, ‘So am I, Molly,’ but instead she said: ‘I’m sure the Jemadar will sort it out.’ He was nowhere to be seen.