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 elephant, I noticed then, was strangely mottled, with a sort of pink pigmentation under her grey skin. A pink elephant! I laughed out loud, and the elephant tossed her trunk as if she understood the joke and didn’t much like it.
Everything I was seeing was new and exciting to me, the deep blue of the waveless ocean on one side, the shadowy green of the jungle on the other, where the trees came down to the sand. And beyond the trees I could see the hills climbing higher and higher into the far distance until they disappeared into clouds. Ahead of me the narrow strand of white beach seemed to go on for ever. I was hoping my ride would go on for ever too. I was thinking that maybe Mum had been right, that this was the perfect place to forget. But I didn’t forget. I couldn’t.
Mum and I had drifted through the days like sleepwalkers, enduring it all together, the phone calls, the cards, the dozens of bunches of flowers left outside our door. The television news kept showing the same photograph of Dad, always in his uniform, never as he was at home.
Then there was the silent drive to the airport with Grandpa and Grandma in the front. Beside me in the back seat, Mum looked steadfastly out of the window all the way. But she did squeeze my hand from time to time, to reassure me, and I would do the same in return. It became a secret sign between us, a kind of confidential code. One squeeze meant, ‘I’m here. We’ll get through this together’. Two meant, ‘Look at me. I need a smile.’
Out on the tarmac of the windswept airfield, we stood and watched the plane land, and taxi to a standstill. A piper was playing, as the flag-covered coffin was borne out from inside the plane, slowly, slowly, by soldiers from Dad’s regiment. After, there were more long days of silent sadness, with Grandma and Grandpa still staying on in the house and doing everything for us: Grandma cooking meals we didn’t want to eat, Grandpa out in the garden trimming the hedges, mowing the lawn, weeding the flower bed, Grandma busying herself endlessly around the house, cleaning, tidying, polishing, ironing. There were telephone calls to answer, and the doorbell too. A lot of callers had to be kept at bay. Grandpa did that. There was the shopping to do as well. He did that too. Sometimes we did it together, and I liked that. It got me out of the house.
For the funeral, people lined the streets and the church was packed. A piper played a lament over the graveside in the rain, and soldiers fired a volley into the air. The echoes of it seemed to go on for ever. Afterwards as they walked away, I saw that everyone was holding on to their hats in the wind, except for the soldiers, whose berets seemed to stay on somehow, and I wondered how they did that. Whenever I looked up I found people staring at me. Were they looking to see if I was crying? Well, I wouldn’t, not so long as Mum was there beside me squeezing my hand, once, twice.
At the gathering of family and friends in the house afterwards, everyone seemed to be speaking in hushed voices over their teacups. I was longing for it to be over. I wanted them all to go. I wanted only to be left alone in the house with Mum. Grandpa and Grandma were the last to go. They’d been wonderful, I knew they had, but I could see Mum was as relieved as I was, when at last we said our goodbyes to them later that evening. We stood by our front gate and watched them drive away.
Two hand squeezes and a smile. It was over.
But it wasn’t. Dad’s fishing coat hung in the hallway, his Chelsea scarf round its shoulders. His boots were by the back door, still muddy from the last walk we’d all had together along the river to the pub. He’d bought me a packet of cheese and onion crisps that day, and there’d been a bit of an argument about that, because Mum had found the empty crisp packet in my anorak pocket afterwards – she always hated me eating that kind of food.
Whenever we went up to town to Stamford Bridge to see Chelsea play, Dad and I always had a pie and some crisps at the same pub, out in the street if it was fine weather, and everyone would be wearing blue. We’d walk to the ground afterwards. The whole street was a river of blue, and we were part of the river. I liked the ritual of getting to the match as much as the game itself. Sooner or later, after we got back home, Mum would always ask what we’d had for lunch, and we would always tell her, confess it sheepishly, and she would tell us both off. I loved it when we were both told off together – it was all part of it, of going to the football with Dad.
Dad’s fishing rod was standing there in the corner by the deep freeze where it always was, and his ukulele lay where he’d left it on top of the piano. Beside it, there was the photo of Dad, smiling out at me, proudly holding up the ten-pound pike he’d caught. Often, when Dad was away, on exercise somewhere or overseas – and recently he had been away a lot – I would reach out, and touch the photo. Sometimes when I was quite sure no one else was around, I’d even talk to him, and tell him my troubles. The photo had always been like a treasured icon to me, a talisman. But now I tried all I could to avoid looking at it because I knew it would only make me feel sad again if I did. I felt bad about that, but I preferred to feel bad than sad. I was so filled up with sadness that there was no room for any more.
Some days I would wake up in the morning thinking and believing it had all been a nightmare, that Dad would be having his breakfast in the kitchen as usual when I got downstairs, that he’d be walking me to school as usual. Then I’d remember, and I’d know it was no nightmare, no dream, that the worst really had happened.
I was back at school a week or so after the funeral. Everyone was kind, too kind. I could tell that no one really wanted to talk to me. Even Charlie and Tonk and Bart, my best friends – they had been all my life – even they were keeping their distance. They didn’t seem to know what to say to me. Nothing was how it had been. Everything and everyone was suddenly awkward. The teachers were all being sugary kind, Mr Mackenzie too, the head teacher – ‘Big Mac’, we all called him. He was sweetness itself, and that wasn’t natural. No one was natural any more. Everyone was pretending. It made me feel alone, as if I didn’t belong there any more.
One morning I decided I just couldn’t stand it any more. I put my hand up in class, and asked if I could go to the toilet. But I didn’t go to the toilet. I just walked out of the school, and went home. Mum wasn’t there and the house was locked. I sat on the doorstep and waited for her. That’s where Big Mac found me when he came looking for me. Even then he wasn’t cross. Mum was called away from her work at the hospital. She was upset, I could see that, and told me how worried everyone had been, but she wasn’t angry with me either. I was almost hoping she would be. It wasn’t the only time I ran away.
One
