Read The Last Gift for Free Online Page B

close to him as they could and stared with wide-open eyes while he revealed his little wonders. He told them the most absurd incredible stories, and they swallowed them whole, Hanna and he. He knew how to draw them in, and they could see in his face that the stories were true. They were not, but he told them like that and they believed him, and perhaps he believed them himself as he told them. There was one story in which he was chased for hours by a troop of laughing elephants. He described them to his children, the great beasts thundering behind him, lumbering leather-cheeked pachyderms laughing their trunks off, their double chins and their huge bellies swinging as they trotted after him, cackling and snorting. Do you know why they are called pachyderm? Because they have such thick skins. He outwitted them in the end by lying flat on the ground. They stood around him not laughing any more, but puzzled and sad, and then wandered away. You have to understand, their Ba told them, that it offends elephant sense of fair play to stamp on something lying flat and still on the ground. Only you have to lie completely still otherwise it’s curtains, the end, squelch.
    Another time their Ba was forced to play hide and seek with a hungry shark in a coral reef in Sulawesi. The sharks in Sulawesi are famous, he told them. They are big bullying brutes with a huge appetite. They just love their work, swaggering in the ocean and barging into whatever gets in their way. If you watch them carefully, keeping your distance, of course, you’ll see them smile as they open their huge jaws to chomp a little friendly parrot fish that’s swimming by. But they are not very clever, they can’t resist knocking into things, so as long as you don’t let those huge teeth get too near, you have a chance. In the end, after being chased by the Sulawesi shark for ages, their Ba tricked him by swimming through a narrow coral alley, and the shark barged in and wedged himself in there while Ba escaped.
    There was another time when he spent a week in a tree while a pack of barking hyenas patrolled beneath him, raising their bums and firing streams of their poisonous shit towards him. Did you know that hyena shit scalds? It’s one of their deadliest weapons. Hyenas fire shit into the eyes of their prey and then pounce. Their Ba had no choice but to climb as high as he could on that tree and hope that the hyenas would empty their bellies and run out of ammunition. He did not even dare doze in case he slipped off the tree, because then those powerful hyena jaws would crack his bones with one snap.
    Their favourite was the one about a talking camel. Their Ba was a sailor before he met their Ma, and he went everywhere, and in India he met a talking camel. Everything fabulous is to be found in India: unexpected and magical creatures, ladhoo and halwa badam, precious stones that hatch out of birds’ eggs, marble palaces and rivers of ice. The talking camel told their Ba stories, and they became such good friends that Ba invited him to come and visit. So maybe one day they might meet him, although India was a long way and it might take the talking camel a long time to walk all the way to England. In the meantime, Ba told the children some of the stories the camel had told him. They were endless, because the camel’s supply was infinite. There were no hyenas or sharks in the camel’s stories, but baby camels and monkeys and swans and other small friendly creatures.
    Sometimes he told them proper stories, ones that he knew from childhood. He only told them on special occasions, when they were younger, on their birthdays or at Christmas. Birthdays were a problem at first, because Ba said celebrating birthdays was conceited, something foreigners did to spoil their children. What was so important about them that their birthdays should be celebrated? He did not celebrate his birthday. Their Ma did not celebrate her birthday. He did not know anyone apart from these