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 hotel was right on the beach, and just as beautiful as it had looked in the brochure. And there was an elephant too, we were told, that sometimes gave hour-long rides all the way down the beach and back. Every day I looked out for this elephant, but much to my disappointment it was never there. There were compensations enough though. We spent an entire week messing around on the beach, swimming and snorkelling. It was a week filled with endless sun and fun, all in all the very best kind of forgetting. Then on Christmas Day, Mum told me I wasn’t getting a Christmas present this year, I was going to have an elephant ride instead. She’d arranged the whole thing for the next day, for Boxing Day.
So that’s how come, on Boxing Day, I found myself sitting there high up on an elephant, on a kind of cushioned throne – Mum said she thought it was called a howdah, or something that sounded like it anyway. There was a wooden rail all round to hold on to. But when the elephant set off, the ride was so smooth that I found I didn’t need to hold on at all. I rode along the beach on my throne, looking down on the world around me. I felt like a king up there, or an emperor maybe, or a sultan, except that Mum did rather spoil the illusion, by trotting alongside taking photos of me on her phone to send home to Grandma and Grandpa. I acted up for the camera, waving at it regally. “Hi, Grandpa, hi, Grandma. King Will here. What d’you think of my new tractor then, Grandpa?” I shouted all sorts of nonsense. This was better than I had ever imagined. I felt on top of the world. “Happy up there, Your Majesty?” Mum said, beaming up at me.
“S’all right, I suppose,” I told her.
“Mind you keep your hat on, Will, and your shirt. Don’t want you getting sunstroke or sunburn, do we?” She went on, and on and on. “And you’ve got the sun cream, and that bottle of water I gave you, haven’t you? It’s hot, and it’ll get hotter.”
“Yes, Mum. I’ll be all right, Mum.” I was trying to make light of my irritation.
“I’ll be fine. Honest, Mum. See you when I get back.”
“Don’t fall off,” she called after me. “Hang on tight. It’s a long way down. You will be all right up there, won’t you?”
I didn’t like her fussing over me, and especially not in front of the mahout. I waved her goodbye, waving her away at the same time. “Don’t worry, Mum,” I told her. “You go and have a swim. It’s brill, Mum, just brill.” And it was true. I’d never had a ride as brilliant as this, nor as easy as this, nor as high as this. I remembered the donkey on the beach at Weston-super-Mare, with its jerky little steps; and Minky, the Haflinger horse I’d ridden once in Guarda in Switzerland, who used to break into a sudden trot whenever she felt like it, who bumped me up and down in the saddle so hard I couldn’t sit down afterwards. This elephant was slow, gentle, dignified. Whatever this elephant had for shock absorbers were fantastic. All I had to do was move with her, sway with her rhythm, and that was as easy as pie. It felt almost as if I was afloat. Riding an elephant seemed as natural to me as breathing.
I’d been so wrapped up in my own thoughts, so enthralled by the elephant, and by everything around me, that only now did I think of Mum. I swivelled around in my howdah to look for her. I could see there were dozens of swimmers in the sea just below the hotel. I tried to spot her red bikini, or the light blue sarong that Dad had given her, but we’d gone a long way away from them by now, and I couldn’t pick her out from among the others. The sea was so still now, it seemed almost unreal. It seemed to me as if it was breathing in, then holding its breath, waiting for something to happen, something fearful. It made me feel suddenly anxious too, which was why I kept turning round now, looking for Mum. I still couldn’t see her. I began to feel myself being gripped by a rising panic. I didn’t know why, but all I wanted to do was to go back. I wanted to be with her. I had to be sure she was safe.
That was the moment Oona stopped, without any warning at all. She was looking out to sea, her whole body tensed. She was breathing hard, short sharp breaths. Then she lifted her trunk and began trumpeting at the sea, tossing her head as if there was something out there, something that terrified her. The mahout was trying to calm her, but she wasn’t paying him any attention.
I looked out to sea then, and noticed that the horizon had changed. It looked as if a white line had been drawn across it, separating sea from sky. As I watched I could see that this line was moving ever closer towards us, that the sea was being sucked away, leaving hundreds of fish floundering on the sand. Oona swung round, and before the mahout could stop her, she was running towards the trees. In those first few hurried strides I very nearly fell off. I managed to stay on, only by clinging on tight with both hands to the rail in front of me. I held on for dear life, as Oona stampeded up the beach, and into the shadows of the jungle.
“No leaves, Oona, I can’t eat leaves”
