Chapter 35 #3
It was raining the night we found the elephant.
And finding the elephant did, I think, solve the mystery of the lion.
I’d had my eye on the farm as a place to stop for most of the afternoon.
In a landscape of greens and browns it stood out and caught the eye from a long way off.
It was an old stone-built farmstead, with a house in front and a farmyard in the back, made up of low outbuildings on two sides and a big steep-roofed barn that looked like a church with the steeple cut off.
It stood on a rise of land overlooking the road, which curved gently around the base of the hill on which it stood.
Like a lot of these hill farms it also looked like a fortress, with the high walls on all four sides of the inner yard.
What wasn’t like a fortress or indeed any farm I’d yet seen was the range of bright colours it had been painted in.
They must have been thick paints designed to withstand the weather, because even lifetimes after the buildings had fallen vacant the yellow and the orange and the blue and the white blocks stood out at a distance, as if a giant’s child had dropped their toy farm buildings on the landscape.
Each building had been painted one colour and was distinct from its neighbours.
When we finally approached, we could see from the variations in the weathering that the pink one had once been red, the yellow one a much harsher version of itself, and that the white had actually once been silver.
What also was not obvious at a distance was that the owners – and they must have been the last owners – had also written all over the buildings, in a variety of styles that were just as mismatched as the colours: some phrases were in smooth joined-up writing, some were in blocky capitals like a shout, some seemed measured and controlled, constrained within neat rectangular boxes, others snaked and curved around the structures like brambles, so you might have to walk round the house twice before you got to the end of the poem or the saying.
For example, the main house was garlanded with loopy writing that followed a flight of arrows that circled the house twice and read – “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth… Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness…
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable!
” Over the arch into the courtyard a long ribbon of writing spangled with stars and streamers emerged from the tip of a wand held by the side silhouette of a bearded wizard painted on the gatepost, proclaiming – “The world is full of magic things – patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper!” On the other gatepost a beady-eyed witch with a long sharp hat had been painted, pointing her finger at us with her own speech bubble that read “So sharpen up sharpish!” I don’t think she was meant to frighten the people who must have lived here.
She looked serious as any witch in a storybook should, but the painter had caught a bit of a grim twinkle in her eye, and she had her name on a band round the pointy hat which read “Granny W”, so it was probably a funny painting of a relative.
All the bright colours and the criss-crossing words and phrases that had once been important enough to someone for them spend time decorating the buildings with them made the whole place feel much more abandoned than normal houses.
I’ve never been to a party, but I read about them; laughter and singing and dancing and everyone celebrating and having a really good time.
This felt like a party that had just ended, so close but we could have enjoyed it if only we arrived earlier, but so far that we’d missed a chance for ever that would never come again.
Even though Cat and I didn’t believe in ghosts, we’d always agreed that some of the old buildings we went into felt haunted.
This place felt like that, but not haunted by people or what it had been, but haunted by the fact it would never be that thing again.
Which makes no logical sense really, in the way some feelings just don’t.
See? I said. This place. It’s what I was talking about. It’s haunted by the future.
No such thing, said Cat.
But I knew what I meant even if she didn’t understand it.
The long shadow cast by the future of these bright buildings was darkened by all the things they would never be again as their brightness faded and the walls fell in, and one day no one would even know that there had been a farm here, let alone one that had seen such a colourful final act.
Because the words on the walls were like echoes.
The last occupants had not gone quietly.
They’d clearly enjoyed themselves, and had loved life.
And strangest of all, I think they had had children.
Probably at a time when nobody else could.
I’m pretty sure that though they’d had children those children hadn’t had friends of their own here and so the grown-ups gave up part of being adult and sort of grew back down into their own childhood and played with them as children to keep them company.
That’s why everything was painted so vividly.
For fun. At least that’s the story I made up for myself.
In the old days, before we had to do everything for ourselves to survive, children had had fun. And these adults threw themselves back into that.
You’re just guessing, said Cat.
I wasn’t. I pointed at the handprints where people had put their palms down in paint then printed them on the walls.
There were big hands everywhere, but they always surrounded two pairs of little ones.
I pointed to the splay of hands on the bottom of the green barn door.
It was so covered in writing that the handprints seemed like a signature.
I’m not guessing, I said. I’m deducing. Deducing means—
I know that, said Cat.
We looked up at the big double doors in the arched opening and the writing that covered them like a tombstone:
Tread softly gentle passer-by, for beneath the roof of this barn, sleeping like a king under a hill lies King Arthur, mightiest of nelifs, most loyal of friends, the last freed elephant of England.
King Arthur was an elephant. A nelif-an, I worked out.
The barn was cavernous and vaulted like a chapel, and in the middle of the floor the body of an elephant had been very carefully laid out, lying on its stomach like Digger sometimes did, resting but alert.
The massive skull lay between two forelegs stretched out in front of it, and the rest of the bones and skin were stretched out behind, like a massive puppet waiting to be picked up and used again.
Except the body was so massive that it would have defeated any puppeteer.
It needed a giant but of course it was the giant.
The dried skin that remained had shrunken in on the bones beneath like a tent.
Rats had probably eaten the flesh long decades past. There was no smell of rot anywhere any more, though there once must have been.
Thanks to the roof remaining intact the place actually smelled clean and dry.
And so that’s where we spent the night undercover, sleeping with a dead elephant.
The saddest things were the graves. They were human sized, low mounds dug in the floor laid within the protective space between the elephant’s front legs, each with a wooden marker. One read DAD the other was more faded but you could read MU… and fill in the rest.
What do you think happened to the children, I said.
They got old, Cat said.
Everyone gets old, I said.
If they’re lucky, she said.
I hoped that they’d been lucky, these kids with the colourful parents and the much-loved elephant.
Where do you think the elephant came from? I said, later, after the babies were down – cleaned, fed and sleeping happily next to Digger.
From a zoo, Cat said.
That’s what I had been thinking. I knew what zoos had been, and I said that I supposed as people got too old and there were no younger zookeepers to take over, something had to be done. These people had adopted an elephant, and then they had loved it.
Cat didn’t say anything.
I wonder who adopted the lions, I said.
Maybe they escaped, Cat said.
I thought about it. I thought about the last old people in a world that had been full and sort of safe when they were young and how it would have been for them suddenly finding it emptier but now with lions where once there had only been foxes and badgers.
Maybe that’s where all the cats and dogs went, I said.
Maybe, Cat said. Maybe not.
I went to sleep thinking how annoying she could sometimes be and dreamed of elephants.
The next day we finally saw the sea in the far distance.
And though we crossed no real border between the southern and northern countries, that was a day when everything changed again, as if the rules that we’d lived by till then altered a bit – and looking back I wonder if we took some magic onwards from the elephant.
Or maybe I just left a bit of our rigid way of seeing the world behind, and so started to notice things that made no sense but worked.
Or maybe it was just a result of the sickness I was still carrying, fever dreams that had never quite burned out, but left char marks in my head.
I tried to talk about this with Cat later, but it was one of the increasingly many things she didn’t seem to have the energy for. So that was something else I had to carry on my own. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel resentful about that too.