Free The Child's Elephant by Rachel Campbell-Johnston Page B

eyes following her as she pushed between two tables. A clatter of laughter broke out behind her – as if she had barged into something and it had fallen and broken, she thought. She felt as if something inside her had also been dislodged. She hurried away down the street, the tassels of her wrap whipping fretfully at her ankles, her nerves rattling like palm leaves when a sudden breeze picks up. She didn’t look back.
    Walking briskly on, she found herself winding through the small tin-roofed shanties. The rank odour of rubbish steamed in the hot afternoon. Ditches brewed foul smells. The alleys were strewn with broken glass and discarded plastic, with fish heads and eggshells and the green crowns of pineapples, with thrown-away tins and sliced-off chickens’ feet. A hog snivelled in the muck, its eyes closed as if meditating. For a moment Muka thought of the village women, bent double everymorning, as they swept round their huts with little palm-frond brooms. By the time they had finished, not a maize husk or mango stone littered the stamped earth. It helped keep the pests away from the home. But here in the shanties, the flies gathered in thick buzzing clusters. They rose in zigzagging clouds at the approach of her shadow and then dropped back down again like black scabs as she passed.
    At the end of the street, she could see the rough grasslands beginning. The transition was so abrupt. One moment you were standing amid a maze of cluttered buildings, the next you were in the rolling savannah. It stretched unbroken to the furthest horizon, interrupted by nothing but acacias and great termite citadels and, somewhere in the far haze, a tree with flowers so red that it looked, through the shimmer, as if it was aflame. What had one world to do with the other? she wondered. It was a bit like watching the television sets. She could not see how the different bits of life could ever quite meet.
    Muka took no more pleasure in the market that day. Finding a cluster of women in the square, she sat down in the feathery shade of a spreading mvule. The women had finished their work and now they were relaxing. They were peeling oranges and talking, drawing gossip like honey sucked from flowers by bees. Normally, their chatter would have washed over Muka. She would have only half listened to their tales of bad husbands and good children, of troublesome neighbours or beneficent uncles, of the crops they were growing and the prices they would fetch. But of late, she had started to grow more attentive. Rumourswere rife of a strange rebel army. There were gangs of fierce children living up in the hills. They seldom came down to the plains, it was whispered, but when they did they stole chickens and cut the maize from the shambas, they raided the tool stores and slaughtered the goats.
    ‘They will burn down your hut if you utter so much as a squawk,’ one woman now said.
    ‘Or worse,’ nodded another.
    ‘In the village next to mine,’ a lady whom Muka had never seen before was now saying, ‘a boy has disappeared . . . a youngest son. He went out with the goats, just as normal . . . and then pouf ’ – she puckered her lips and blew at the air – ‘he was gone . . . just vanished . . . nothing seen of him since; not of him or his animals. His family has searched . . . but not a single trace found.’
    ‘A lion?’ someone suggested.
    The lady shook her head firmly.
    ‘Abducted?’ another ventured.
    The storyteller nodded solemnly. ‘They say so.’
    ‘By the rebels?’
    She nodded again.
    ‘Tssk . . . the child army,’ a round-eyed mother murmured, clutching her nursing baby a little tighter to her breast.
    ‘They are coming closer,’ her neighbour warned. ‘And they say that there’s nothing the government can do about it. The bush is too wide and the cover too thick. They send out their soldiers and they fall into ambushes; so now they just sit in their camps instead and smoke.’She shrugged. ‘I don’t