Read Online ELEPHANT MOON by John Sweeney - Free Book Online Page A

flat palm, waving vehicles through with extravagant, scimitar sweeps of his other arm – the impression of authority enhanced by a white solar topee on his head. Other than the topee, he was stark naked. One of the lunatics Mr Peach had spoken of was relishing a taste of freedom. Many of the girls had been weeping but at the sight of the man in the topee, they stood up in their seats and stared and giggled. Grace frowned at them, feebly, dutifully. That made him all the funnier. The bus moved on and the girls settled down and Ruby stood up and silently re-enacted the naked traffic policeman’s hand gestures – one palm flat, blocking, one arm waving on – and a fresh wave of hilarity swept over the bus. It was a lovely moment, and, better, they were on the road.
    ‘Discipline is going out of the window. We cannot allow standards to drop,’ said Miss Furroughs.
    ‘It’s not just standards that are dropping, Miss Furroughs,’ said Grace, trying to turn her laughter into a hiccoughing fit.
    At the edge of Rangoon, paddy-fields quilted the landscape. The traffic slowed to sludge, the beginning of a monstrous traffic jam that threatened to last all the way to Mandalay. Stuck in the jam, the school bus was a target for hawkers and beggars of every description.
    Molly saw them first.
    ‘Miss,’ she said urgently. ‘Miss, look! Look!’
    Five lepers clawed up at the windows of the bus. Faces without form, stumps fingerless. Allu was  uncertain, hesitant. Miss Furroughs barked at him: ‘Drive on! Damn you sir, drive on.’
    The children gazed at the lepers, aghast. Joseph, the Mongol boy, started to grind his teeth and cry out. Grace ran down the length of the bus to comfort him and as she did so, there was a sudden lurch as Allu found a break in the traffic, and Hants & Dorset accelerated away.
    The lepers were by no means the most distressing thing they encountered on the road north to Mandalay. By mid-afternoon, they had joined an enormous queue of lorries, ox-carts, and a sea of people, Indians, Chinese, Anglo-Burmese half-castes and a sprinkling of the Heaven Born, travelling in limousines and sedans. Grace got down and walked up the queue, north, towards Mandalay for a spell, simply to get some exercise. Two planes screamed past. Red, white and blue roundels – the RAF – but, to her astonishment, they opened fire, machine-guns stuttering into the traffic jam, blowing up a petrol lorry in a great cascade of orange half a mile ahead.
    Grace remembered what Mr Peach had told her, that they’d sent back the radar kit to India. The poor airmen had no clear idea where the Japanese might be, had no way of telling who were enemy and who were refugees, so they were fighting blind. And that, back on the road, meant breathing in the stink of burnt flesh from half a mile distant.
    ‘The Japanese?’ asked Miss Furroughs. Grace hesitated, then shook her head.
    ‘Oh, sweet Lord, what a terrible time,’ said the headmistress.
    ‘No one knows where the Japs are,’ Grace mumbled.
    They swept past broken bodies lying in blood-treacle, survivors stone-faced, the injured mewing in pain. In the back of one wreck – a lorry, once – she saw a tail of chalkyrubble leading to an off-white football, lying on a mat of charred black goo. With utter horror, Grace realised what exactly she was looking at: the chalky stuff had been someone’s backbone and the football a skull, the black the remains of skin, blood, vitals. And of all this had been a horrible own goal. The invisibility of the enemy made them all the more terrible.
     
    At the end of the first day they planned to pass the night in a house owned by a planter, a friend of Miss Furroughs. The shadows were lengthening as the bus turned off the main road into a kind of heaven: peacocks strutting across a lawn, gorgeous flowers, blue delphiniums, scarlet poinsettia, snowy bauhinia, purple wisteria and yellow laburnum tumbling out of a rockery, a fishpond set in crazy paving.