“Why did he have to go and leave us? What am I supposed to tell Will, Grandma? I mean, how can you tell a nine-year-old? How can you explain the stupidity of it? And all the while I have to put a brave face on it, when what I really want to do is scream. I know he was your son, Grandma. I know I shouldn’t say it, and I know I shouldn’t feel it. But I do feel it. I love your son. Since the first day I set eyes on him I loved him. But I’m so angry with him that sometimes I find myself almost hating him. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t it? Back home, I have to pretend to everyone all the time, that it was all in a good cause, that I’m proud of him, and I’m brave, that I’m coping. Well I am proud of him, but I’m not coping, and I’m not brave, and it wasn’t a good cause. Tell me why. Will someone tell me why? Why did he have to go? Why did it have to be him?”
When they came up to bed later, and Mum came in to kiss me goodnight as usual, I pretended to be asleep. I was crying silent tears, and when she’d gone out again, they kept on coming. All night long they kept coming. That night, I felt I would drown in sadness.
I knew that if I went on remembering like this I would only be making myself live through the same pain all over again. I wrenched my mind away from where it was taking me. From now on I would recall only the marvellous times, the magical moments that I knew would lift my spirits, that would banish all grieving, that would make me smile. I thought it was working too. I could almost feel Mum’s arm come round me and hold me, and the coolness of her hand as she smoothed my hair above my ear. But then I remembered her doing it just like that back at home, on the last day the three of us had been together.
I could see it all in my head now, just as it had happened: Dad going off down the path in his uniform, Mum there beside me, watching him go, her arm round my shoulder, her hand smoothing my hair. After we’d waved him off, we stood there on the doorstep in our dressing gowns, watching the milk float come humming down the road.
“Don’t worry, Will,” she’d told me. “Dad’s been out there twice before. He’ll be fine. He’ll be back home before you can say Jack Robinson, you’ll see.”
“Jack Robinson,” I’d said. When I looked up at her moments later, I saw I’d made her smile through her tears, and I knew I’d said just the right thing.
Every moment of the afternoon a month or so later was so deeply etched in my memory. Despite all my best efforts not to, I lived it again now riding up on the elephant thousands of miles away from home, from where it had all happened. A rainy Sunday it had been. We were flopped on the sofa in front of the television, watching Shrek 2, for about the tenth time. It was my favourite film – Dad had given me the DVD for my birthday a couple of months before. We were enjoying it just as much as ever, anticipating every wacky moment, every hilarious gag. The doorbell rang.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, who’s that?” Mum said. She pressed the pause button, got up wearily from the sofa, and went to see who it was. I wasn’t a bit interested in who it was, I just wanted to go on watching Shrek. There were hushed voices in the hallway. I heard footsteps going along the passage into the kitchen. The door closed. Whoever the visitors were, Mum obviously wasn’t coming back into the sitting-room for a while. So I pressed the play button and settled down again to watch. Only when the film finished, an hour or so later, did it occur to me that it was a little strange that Mum still hadn’t come back – I knew she loved Shrek almost as much as I did. That’s why I went to find her.
She was sitting alone at the kitchen table, her head lowered, her hands cupped round a mug of tea. She didn’t look up when I came in, and she didn’t speak for a while either. I could see then that something must be wrong. “Who was it?” I asked her. “At the door. Who was it?”
“Come and sit down, Will,” she said, her voice so soft and far away that I could hardly hear her. When she looked up I could see that her eyes were red with crying. “It’s your Daddy, Will. I told you where he went, didn’t I? We found Iraq on the map, found where he was, didn’t we? Well, there was a bomb by the side of the road, and he was in a Land Rover …” She reached out across the table and took my hands in hers. “He’s dead, Will.”
We sat there in silence for a few moments. I went to sit on her lap, because I knew that was what she needed, what I needed too. We didn’t cry. We just held on to each other tight, as tight as we could. It felt to me as if we were both trying somehow to squeeze the pain out of one another. Later that night we lay side by side on my bed, holding hands. Neither of us had spoken, not a word, for a long time. Then I asked her the one question that had kept coming into my mind again and again all night long.
“Why, Mum? Why did he have to go to the war?”
It was a while before she replied. “Because he’s a soldier, Will,” she told me. “When countries fight wars, it’s the soldiers who do the fighting. It’s always been like that. It’s what soldiers have to do.”
“I know that, Mum. Dad told me,” I said. “But what was the war for?”
She didn’t answer me.
[bad img format]he young mahout who was leading the elephant, sometimes by the ear, sometimes by the trunk, was wearing a long white shirt that flapped loosely about him. The elephant kept trying to curl his trunk round it, tugging at it. The mahout ignored him and walked on, speaking all the while to the elephant in confidential whispers. I longed to know what he was saying, but didn’t dare ask. He looked friendly enough, smiling at me whenever he glanced back up at me to see if I was all right. But he didn’t seem to want to talk, and anyway I wasn’t sure he spoke any English. But I knew that if we didn’t get talking, then I’d be left alone again with my thoughts, and I didn’t want that. And besides, I really wanted to find out more about this elephant I was riding. I decided to risk it and talk.
“What’s he called?” I asked him.
“This elephant is not he. He is she,” he told me, in near perfect English. “Oona. She is called Oona if you want to know. She is twelve years old, and she is like a sister to me. I know her from the first day she is born.” Once the young man had started talking, he didn’t seem to want to stop. He spoke very fast, too fast, and never once turned round, so he wasn’t at all easy to understand. I had to listen hard.
He went on, trying all the while to extricate his shirt-tail from the grip of the elephant’s trunk. “This elephant, she likes this shirt very much, and she also likes people. Oona is very friendly, very intelligent too, and naughty. She is very naughty sometimes, you would not believe it. Sometimes she wants to run when I do not want her to run, and once she is running she is very hard to stop. Then once she is stopped, she is very difficult to start again. You know what Oona likes best? I tell you. She likes the sea. But it is a strange thing. Not today. Today she does not like the sea. I think maybe she is not feeling so good today. I take her down to the sea early this morning for her swim like I always do, and she does not want to go in. She does not want to go near. She only stands there looking out to sea as if she never saw it before. I tell her that the sea is the same as it was yesterday, but still she will not go in. One thing I know for sure: you can’t make Oona do what Oona does not want to do.”
He tugged his shirt free at last. “Thank you, Oona, very nice of you,” he said, stroking her ear. “You see, she is happier now, and I think maybe this is because she likes you. I can tell this when I look in her eyes. It is how elephants speak, with their eyes. This is a true thing.”
I did not ask any more questions after this, because I was far too busy just enjoying myself. I was savouring every moment of this ride. The