When the train got in, we took a taxi home, which I thought was a bit odd, because Mum had always made out that taxis were a waste of money, and far too expensive. As the taxi stopped outside home, she turned to me and told me to stay where I was, that she wouldn’t be long. She asked the driver if he’d mind waiting a minute or two. She seemed suddenly excited, almost as if she were trying to suppress a giggle.
“Where are you going, Mum?” I asked her, but she was out of the taxi by now and running up the path into the house. She didn’t answer me. I couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on.
It wasn’t long before she was out again carrying a heavy suitcase. “Can you take us back to the station, please?” she asked the driver.
“Take you to the moon, if you’re paying, darling,” he said.
“Not going to the moon, not quite that far,” Mum told him breathlessly, as she climbed back into the taxi.
Then she told me to close my eyes. When I opened them again, she was flourishing two passports at me, a huge smile on her face. “Grandma’s idea,” she said, “and I promise you, Will, it’s the best idea she ever had – actually I think it was Grandpa’s. Anyway, she said that they thought it would be good for us to have Christmas away on our own, just the two of us, somewhere very special, somewhere we can forget … y’know, somewhere thousands of miles away.”
She took a brochure out of her bag, and waved that at me too. “Look, Will! There’s the hotel. There’s the beach. There’s the sea and the sand. And do you know where that is? Indonesia, where my family come from. I’ve never ever been there, and now I’m going, and you’re coming with me. Full of surprises, your grandma. She never asked. Well, she wouldn’t, would she? She just went ahead and booked it. ‘A Christmas present from Grandpa and me,’ she says. ‘You just go and enjoy yourselves.’”
Mum’s whole face was bright with laughter now. “All we needed were those injections – remember, Will? – then just our passports, our summer things, and we’re on our way.”
“What, now? We’re going now?”
“Right now.”
“What about school?”
“No more school, not for the time being. Don’t worry, I’ve asked Mr Mackenzie. He’s fine about it. We’re going to chill, Will.”
It was one of Dad’s old jokes. This was the first time we’d really laughed in a very long time. It turned to tears soon enough. Crying together, I discovered then, was so much better than crying alone. We clung to one another in the back of the taxi, and at last began to let go of our grief.
At the station, the taxi driver helped us out with the suitcases. He wouldn’t accept any payment. “It’s on me,” he said, taking Mum by the hand, and helping her out. “It took me a while to work out who you were. I was in the crowd outside the church at the funeral. I saw you and the lad. I was a soldier once myself. In the Falklands. A while ago, but you don’t forget. Lost my best friend out there. You have a good holiday now, I reckon you deserve it.”
I’d been on a plane a few times before, to Switzerland. But this plane was massive. It took an age lumbering down the runway before it lifted off. There was a moment when I thought it never would. I had my own screen, so that I could choose whatever film I wanted. I watched Shrek 2, again. When it finished, I happened to pick up Mum’s holiday brochure. I opened it. The first picture I saw was of an orang-utan gazing out at me, wide-eyed and thoughtful. There flashed through my mind then a most dreadful image. I must have seen it on television, or maybe from a nature magazine, most likely the National Geographic – we had a pile of them in the bathroom at home. It was a photograph of a terrified young orang-utan clinging pathetically to the top of a charred tree, the forest all around burnt to the ground.
I turned the page quickly, not wanting to be reminded of it any more. That was when I came across the picture of an elephant walking along a beach, and being ridden by a boy no older than I was. I could not contain my excitement. “Mum,” I said, “look at this! They’ve got elephants, and you can ride them!” But Mum was fast asleep, and showing no signs whatever of wanting to wake up.
Some of the people in the brochure looked a lot like Mum, I noticed. She’d never talked to me about Indonesia that much, but I’d always known that was where her family had come from originally. She was Swiss as well, which was why we’d been over there a few times, to see my other grandparents. ‘Liquorice Allsort’, that was what Dad used to call me: “Bit Indonesian, bit Swiss, and a bit Scottish, like me. Best of all worlds, that’s what you are, Will,” he’d say.
I’d always been very proud of having a mother who didn’t look much like my friends’ mothers. Her skin was honey brown, smooth and soft, and she had shining black hair. I would have preferred to look like her, but I’m much more like my father, sort of pinkish, with a thatch of thick fair hair, ‘like ripe corn’, Grandpa called it.
I couldn’t help myself. It was something I’d been doing a lot. I kept trying to picture Dad as he was when I last saw him, but all that came into my head was the photo of him I remembered best, the one on top of the piano with him holding the pike. I knew that a memory of a photo isn’t a real memory at all. I promised myself again that I would think about Dad more often, however much it hurt me. How else could I keep in touch with him? I wanted to see his smile again, to hear how his voice sounded. Remembering him was the only way. It worried me that if I didn’t remember him often, then maybe one day I’d forget him altogether. I needed to remember, but then it troubled me when I did. It was troubling me now, which was why I turned my attention again to the holiday brochure. On every page there seemed to be more elephants. Elephants, I decided, were quite definitely supreme.
And now here I was actually riding one along a beach. I couldn’t believe it. I wished then I had Mum’s mobile phone on me. I longed to ring Grandpa and tell him what I was doing. I said out loud the first words that came into my head: “You’re not going to believe this, Grandpa!” I held my arms high, lifted my face towards the sun, and whooped with joy. The mahout turned round and laughed aloud with me.
I think I’ve loved elephants ever since I was little, probably ever since my first Babar book. Best of all I loved the story of ‘The Elephant’s Child’, whose nose had been tugged and tugged, until it was stretched into a proper trunk by a crocodile, down by ‘the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees’. Grandpa had read it to me so often at bedtimes that I knew some of it by heart. Ever since then I’ve always loved any natural history programme, just so long as there were elephants in it.
And now I was in one, on one, and it was my own programme! I whooped again, punching the air. High above me, probably at about 35,000 feet, I thought, flew a silver dart of a plane, its vapour trail long and straight. “I was up there,” I told the mahout. But he didn’t seem to be listening. He was looking out to sea. He seemed distracted by something. So I told Oona instead. “I was up there with Mum,” I told her, “in a plane just like that one. And there was an elephant just like you, in the brochure. Maybe it was you.”
I remembered how, up in the aeroplane, when Mum woke she leaned over me, brushing my hair away from my eyes. “I should have cut your hair at Grandma’s,” she said. “I’ll do it when we get to the hotel. It’s too long. You look like a right ragamuffin.”
“Mum,” I told her, fixing her with my most determined look. “When we get there, I’m not going to waste time having a stupid haircut, am I? You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go for a ride on an elephant.” I showed her the brochure. “Look at that!”
“Are they safe?”
“Course they are, Mum. Can I?”
“We’ll see,” she said. “I expect it’ll be a bit expensive. We’ll have to watch our pennies, you know.”
The