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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
'A beautiful book - not just heartwarming but heart healing' Chris Riddell A big grey elephant is following Olive's father around. It leaves with him for work and trails behind him when he comes home, keeping him heavy and sad. Every day, Olive wishes it would disappear. When she is asked to bring something old and wonderful to show her class, Olive immediately wants to bring her old bike - but she will need her father's help to fix it. Teaming up with her cheery grandad and best friend Arthur, she sets out to chase the elephant away.
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Seitenzahl: 77
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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This book belongs to
The Elephant
Peter Carnavas
Pushkin Children’s
For Bron, Sophie and Elizabeth
Contents
The Elephant
When Olive walked into the kitchen, she found an elephant sitting beside her father at the small wooden table. They both wore the same weary expression and stared out the window, as if it were a painting they had never seen before. The elephant’s shadow filled the room with darkness and it wore a small black hat.
‘Hi, Dad,’ said Olive.
Her father swung his head away from the window and looked at her with raincloud eyes.
‘Hi, honey.’2
A frown fell upon his face. ‘Why are you wearing your bike helmet?’ he said. ‘I haven’t fixed your bike yet.’
Olive smiled, hoping the smile might be contagious.
‘Well, it’s only a bike helmet when I’m riding a bike,’ she said. ‘I’m going to climb my tree, so today it’s a tree helmet.’
Her father nodded and turned back to the window. The elephant sighed.
Olive left them cocooned in the kitchen. She opened the back door and stepped outside.
3
Grandad
Olive’s backyard was a neat rectangle of grass, with flowers and vegetables hugging the edges. A thin concrete path stretched towards a rusty clothesline and a giant jacaranda tree stood near the back fence, covering half the yard with slow, dancing shadows. A tyre swing hung from one of its branches and a round trampoline stood nearby.
Olive loved the yard, though it hadn’t always looked like this. Once it had been a mess of knee-high weeds, and the jacaranda had barely flowered. 5
That was before Grandad moved in.
He was in the garden now, hunched down in the pumpkin patch as Olive skipped across the grass towards the tree.
‘Heya, Olive!’ he called.
He straightened up and Olive thought he looked like a skinny scarecrow, his old straw hat full of holes.
6‘Hi, Grandad,’ she said. ‘How are the pumpkins?’
He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a dirty hand.
‘You could ask them yourself,’ he said.
Grandad was always telling Olive to talk to plants.
‘You’ve got your helmet on,’ he said. ‘Has your dad fixed your bike?’
Olive shook her head. She felt something brush her legs and she looked down.
It was Freddie.
7He was a small grey dog with short legs and an extra-long tail.
She bent down and scratched him behind the ears.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t fixed it yet.’
Then she ran to the tree.
The Thinking Spot
Olive started to climb.
She needed to wear her helmet today because she was going to one of the higher branches, to her thinking spot. Hand over hand, foot over foot, she scrambled up and nestled into a comfy nook.
She looked up.
There was a tiny speck in the sky, high above the town. It was a bird in the shape of the letter V, like a fine pencil mark in the sky.
How might the town look from up there, from the wings of that bird? It would be 9something like a storybook town, a toy village. Olive pictured it all as a tiny patchwork quilt, the roofs of the houses like coloured squares stitched loosely together. She imagined the thin, grey roads weaving between the blocks of houses like fine cracks in eggshell. The trees would billow and breathe like tiny puffs of deep-green cloud and the backyards would look no bigger than the fingernails on her hands.
She watched the bird until it became smaller and smaller, a dot in the sky, and then so tiny that it seemed to disappear, as if it had become part of the air itself.
How could something be so light? Olive’s gaze drifted back down, down to her own backyard. Her eyes settled on her house and the kitchen window.
All the lightness fell away as she thought about the elephant. 10
The big grey elephant that shadowed her father.
It hung over him at breakfast.
It trudged beside him when he left for work.
At night, it lay by his side, weighing everything down.
Every day she saw that elephant.
And, every day, she wished it would go.
Just then, there was a sharp yap. Olive snapped awake from her thoughts and looked down to the bottom of the tree. There was Freddie, his long tail standing tall, his watery eyes gazing up at her.
Arthur
The next day was the beginning of a new school term. Olive sat at her desk beside Arthur. He was a small boy with curly hair and dark, brown eyes. Those eyes were usually focused on the pages of an enormous book – Amazing Facts About Frogs, or Everything You Need to Know That You Don’t Know Already – but sometimes Arthur’s eyes would sparkle and dance, when he told a story or flipped around the playground.
Olive liked Arthur most of all because she could tell him anything. Anything at all. 12
‘An elephant?’ he gasped. ‘In your house?’
She nodded.
‘But— How? What?’ Arthur blinked hard. ‘What do you mean?’
Olive’s eyes swept around the classroom as the children sharpened pencils and rummaged through their desks.
‘It’s a bit hard to explain,’ she said. ‘It follows my dad around. Whenever he looks sad, I see the elephant there.’
‘Doing what?’ said Arthur. 13
‘Not much,’ said Olive. ‘Just there, making everything really heavy and really hard for my dad.’
The other students had settled into their desks and their conversations softened to a gentle hum around the room.
‘How long has it been there?’ said Arthur.
‘As long as I can remember.’
‘And you’ve never told me?’
‘I’m telling you now. Besides, I wasn’t sure if you would believe me.’
Arthur shook his head. His eyebrows bunched together. He spoke between blinks.
‘I believe you, but— Well, is it real?’
Olive leant a little closer to Arthur and lowered her voice.
‘Well, that’s the thing,’ she whispered, but she couldn’t say any more for Ms March had started talking to the class.
Ms March
‘Good morning, children,’ said Ms March. ‘I hope you all had a lovely break.’
Ms March was a thin, cheery woman who seemed to move whichever way the breeze blew. A clutter of jewellery hung around her neck and plastic earrings like small hula hoops dangled from her ears. Her hair was a delightful mess, an orange nest of tangled twirls and curls, with ribbons and clips and flowers springing out, as if trying to escape the knotted jungle.
Her desk was much the same. 15
It was piled high with books, folders and stacks of paper, pencils and pens, calculators and counting blocks. There was probably a tennis ball under there somewhere, a floppy sun hat that she would fish out for playground duty, and a jar of wilted flowers balanced on top of it all. She could never find anything she wanted, and this amused the children endlessly.
16‘This term, we’re going to share some very important things with each other. But first – does anybody know how old our school is?’
Olive and Arthur looked at each other and shrugged.
‘Anybody?’ said Ms March.
A tall boy with big ears edged his hand into the air.
‘Um, I don’t know how old it is, but I know it’s really old,’ he said.
‘How do you know that, Kyle?’ said Ms March.
‘Because Mr Briggs has been teaching here his whole life and he’s about a hundred years old.’
The students broke into laughter until they saw Ms March wearing her unimpressed face, though Olive spotted a smirk curling at the edge of her mouth.
‘Cedar Hills Primary School – not Mr Briggs 17– is turning one hundred years old this year,’ said Ms March.
The children smiled and raised their eyebrows at the mention of such a big number.
‘Therefore,’ she took a deep breath, ‘we will be having a school birthday party at the end of term.’
This time, cheers and applause filled the room. Ms March waited for silence.
