Ivory - a short one by Phil

After months of acrimony; teenage petulance and parental stubbornness, I thought I’d seen a new phase beginning in the relationship between my husband and daughter.  We were on holiday in Thailand, the three of us, enjoying blissed-out beach time.  It was a welcome reprieve, but not without dramas, such as our daughter’s vigorously ill response to some searing spicy street food, and my husband offending monks at a temple with his attempted deference; it came off like a piss-take.  Nevertheless, all of us had begun to forget the conflicts of home, where the minutiae of the exact time our daughter was due home, her precise location and the people accompanying her when ‘just out’ had become overwhelming, a cul-de-sac.  That day, the beach was beautiful, the sea a folded blanket gently resting on a deep carpet of sand.  I blistered uncompromisingly in the sunshine while my husband took a swim with our daughter.  They had been pushing against one another so hard for so long I felt a rising relief to see them relax with each other, goofing about in the water. 

A magical moment then occurred, when my husband shouted urgently to Fiona, ‘What’s that, behind you?’ as a dark shape moved in the water a few meters away.  She swam towards him and turned, and both saw that it was an elephant swimming right there in the ocean, unconcerned about the tourists, nobly skirting most swimmers as it came into the shallows.  Massive but elegant, its trunk stuck periscopically two feet above the surface of the water.  Fiona and Daniel watched with childish excitement, and I saw him put his arm over her shoulder.  I could see the fondest of memories forming, could feel the two of them remembering they loved each other.  It was dreamlike, unreal, as the elephant swam until the water was too shallow then proceeded to loll about in the wet sand.  Serene and self-possessed, the beast unabashedly sloshed water and sand about.  Tourists took photographs.  My husband and daughter just stood in the water, drinking up the scene. However, the reconciliation was to be incomplete.

Just then, a gunshot sounded, so unexpected and intense, and the elephant shrieked shrilly.  The anguish was human, unbelievable.  Two more shots followed, with quick ferocity.  The elephant thrashed about, the wounds to the head, neck and chest – a deadly triumvirate.  Shocked tourists scattered; Daniel and Fiona rushed towards me on the beach.  We clustered on the towels, Fiona shivering.  The gunman ran out of his vantage point among the palms, heading a gang of five men with hatchets and machetes. 

One plunged a hatchet into the elephant’s neck, as though to ensure the murder was done.  The others dragged the front legs back, and the head upwards, giving them plenty of room around the tusks.  They viciously hacked at the root of the left tusk first, two men holding the tusk and rocking it back and forth.  One man repeatedly raised his machete high in the air and brought it slamming down on the side of the elephant’s great head, uncompromising in his violence.  They worked fast, in silence, so we could hear the garish butchery.  Blood mingled with the perfect sand, a sudden and shocking confession of brutality and desperation. 

The team had removed the first tusk within ten minutes.  The second was more difficult, with the elephant’s head lying over its root.  The tourists returned to gather and bear witness to the macabre scene.  The men chopped away even more aggressively.  They were all bare-chested, blood and sweat-soaked.  Eventually, while we watched, still stricken, they yanked out the huge right tooth.  It took two men to carry each tusk; hoisted onto their shoulders like they were bearing a coffin. 

The men dashed off, disappearing into the trees, leaving the mutilated giant on the beach, the wavelets of the receding tide lapping at its haunches.  The crowd slowly dissipated, and the three of us went to the elephant and each touched it once on the forehead, a shared moment of humbling melancholy.