Running Wild

I always wanted train journeys to go on for ever, and especially this one. I liked trains, the rattle and the rhythm of them. I loved to press my forehead against the cold of the glass, and trace a single raindrop with my finger as it found its way down across the window. I’d be gazing out at the countryside rushing by, at cows and horses scattering away over the fields, at clouds of starlings whirling in the wind, at a formation of geese flying high into the evening sun.

And I’d be on the lookout for wild animals, for foxes or rabbits, or even a deer. A glimpse of just one of these was a marvel to me, the highlight of any train journey, because they hardly ever ran away. They’d just gaze back at me from out there in their wild world, interested perhaps, but quite unconcerned. It was as if they were trying to tell me: we don’t mind you being here, just so long as you’re passing through, just so long as you leave us alone. I had always longed to be part of their world. For me that momentary glimpse was never enough, always too quickly over.

On this train journey though I had seen no foxes, no deer, not even a rabbit, and that was because I hadn’t been looking for them. My mind was elsewhere. I didn’t want it to be, but it was. Everything out there was nothing but a blur of grey skies and green fields, interrupted with monotonous regularity by endless passing telegraph poles. None of it was of any interest to me. I wanted this train journey to go on forever, not because I was enjoying it one bit, but simply because I did not want to go where I was going. I did not want to arrive.

I glanced up at Mum sitting beside me, but she did not look back at me. I could see she was lost deep in her thoughts, and I knew well enough what they had to be, that they were much the same as mine, and that it was better not to interrupt them. I regretted again that I’d yelled at her at breakfast that morning. I shouldn’t have done it, but it had been the shock of it, the suddenness. She’d just said it, right out of the blue, without any warning at all. “We’re going back home, Will, as soon as I’ve packed the cases. Grandma says she’ll drive us to the station.”

I tried arguing, but she wouldn’t listen. So that was when I yelled at her, and did a runner to the hay-barn, climbing up the stack to the very top. I sat sulking there, till Grandpa came and found me, and fetched me down. Mum was very upset, he told me, and we shouldn’t be upsetting her, not after everything that had happened. He was right of course. I hadn’t meant to do it, but I’d been so looking forward to staying for Christmas down on the farm with Grandpa and Grandma. It was the house where Dad had grown up, the place we’d always been for every single Christmas of my life, whether Dad was home on leave or not.

But if I’m honest, that wasn’t the only reason I’d shouted at her. The truth was that I was dreading everything about going home, and what’s more I knew Mum felt the same, which was why it was a complete mystery to me that she was suddenly so anxious to leave. And there was something else I couldn’t understand. Before she’d come out with it at breakfast that morning she’d never even discussed it. She’d just told me. It wasn’t like her. Mum always talked things over with me, always.

After all, hadn’t she been the one, who only a few weeks before had insisted that it was a good idea to go to stay with Grandpa and Grandma, to get away from home, and the memories, and the ghosts? Hadn’t Mum explained to me that she thought we should be with Grandpa and Grandma at this time anyway, because after all, weren’t we all going through the same thing, and wouldn’t it be good for us to do it together? So why this sudden change of heart?

I gazed blankly out of the train window, trying to work it all out. I thought then it might have been because she had just had enough of Grandma. And it was true that Grandma was never the easiest person in the world to get on with. She did like to organise, to try and tell everyone what to do, what not to do, and what to think even. With Grandma everything had to be just so, and that could be a bit irksome at times, and annoying. But as Mum was forever telling me, that was just how Grandma was and we had to put up with it, like Grandpa did.

No, we couldn’t be leaving because of Grandma. It didn’t make any sense. But if it wasn’t Grandma, what was it then? It certainly wasn’t Grandpa, and it certainly wasn’t the farm. For Mum and for me, for all of us, it had always been just about the best place in the whole world, and my idea of heaven. I loved being there, whatever the weather. I was up before breakfast with Grandpa, milking the cows, and feeding the calves, and then opening up the hens and geese on the way back to the house for breakfast. Afterwards, it was out on the tractor, with Grandpa again – and driving it sometimes too, when we were far enough away from the farmhouse for Grandma not to be able to spot us. We’d be checking the sheep together, counting the lambs, or mending fences when we had to. We’d be doing whatever it was that needed doing, and doing it together.

And Grandpa was like a walking encyclopedia of nature. He knew all the bird songs, all the plants. He even had a weekly nature column in the local newspaper, so he knew what he was talking about, and I loved to hear him talking about it too. Grandma said one afternoon when Grandpa and I came in for our tea: “Happy as Larry out on the farm, aren’t you, Will? Give you half a chance, and I reckon you’d be sleeping in your wellies. You’re just like your Grandpa.”

She was right about that. For a start Grandpa never said a lot, and nor did I. We knew each other so well that maybe we just didn’t need to. Grandpa never mentioned anything about what had happened, except once, when we were down in the milking parlour together, washing down after milking. “Got something to say to you, Will,” he began. “What I think is this, and I’ve thought a lot about it. In fact these last weeks, I’ve thought about precious little else. When you’ve cut yourself, what you do is you make sure the wound is clean, and you put a plaster on it, don’t you? Then you give it time to heal – if you understand what I’m saying. You don’t keep taking the plaster off and looking at it, because if you do, you’ll just be reminded of how much it hurts. And you don’t keep asking yourself why it had to happen to you in the first place either, because that won’t make it better. Sometimes – and I know it’s not what some people think these days – but sometimes when you’re hurting, I think the less said the better. So you and me, Will, we’ll say no more about it, unless you want to, that is.”

But I didn’t want to, and so between us, nothing was ever said about it again. And in fact, Grandma hardly spoke of it either, not in front of me anyway. It became like an unspoken pact between all of us, to say nothing, and I was glad of it. I knew well enough that they were doing it for me, to spare me the pain. They were trying their very best to take my mind off it.

But the trouble was that it was always there, in the back of our minds, despite all that Grandma and Grandpa were doing to keep everyone busy and happy. And we were happy, as happy as it was possible to be, under the circumstances anyway. But as each evening came to an end, and the time came for me to go upstairs to bed, I always began to dread the night ahead of me. One look at Mum’s face told me we were sharing the same dread.

Whether I kept my bedside light on or off made no difference. Lying there in my bed everything would come flooding back, the ache inside me, the pity of it, and worst of all, the awful finality of it. I longed every night for sleep to come, so that I wouldn’t have to remember it all again, so that my mind wouldn’t go over it and churn it all up. But the more I longed for sleep it seemed, the more it was denied me. I’d lie there listening to the murmur of their talk downstairs in the kitchen.

If I tried, I could hear most of what they were saying. I didn’t want to eavesdrop, but sometimes I couldn’t stop myself. I’d hear Mum sobbing again, and Grandma sometimes as well. Soon enough I would find myself crying too, and once I’d started I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop, not until I fell asleep, because everything Mum was saying down there in the kitchen seemed to echo so closely everything I was feeling.

It was her words I was hearing again in my head now, as I rode along the beach on the elephant. Ahead of us a large lizard or iguana skittered away over the sand and disappeared into the shadows of the palm trees. A sea eagle soared out over the sea. There was so much to see, but my memory would not leave me in peace. I was doing all I could to force myself to live for now, to bask in the joy of the moment, in the beauty of this strange paradise, and for a while I could and I did, but not for long. So I determined that if I was going to have to relive anything in my mind, I would will it to be only the good times: driving the tractor with Grandpa, pulling off a newborn lamb and rubbing the warmth of life into her, seeing the fox padding across High Meadow early one morning.

But instead, all that came to my mind was everything I had overheard Mum saying down in the kitchen only a few nights before. Her words still fell just as heavily on my heart, as when I’d first heard them.

“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.

“Look at me, I need a smile” (#ulink_f6255bb4-36f5-5c8b-88f8-6d23c86a4fe8)

[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 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.