For my parents, with all my love,
and a heartfelt TRONK
Contents
Cover
Dedication
The First Chapter: In which the Elephant arrives
The Second Chapter: In which the Elephant earns a reputation
The Third Chapter: In which the problems really begin
The Fourth Chapter: In which hiding an Elephant proves to be tricky
The Fifth Chapter: In which the truth comes out
The Sixth Chapter: In which a whopping lie is told
The Seventh Chapter: In which the question is taken to the top
The Eighth Chapter: Farewells
Epilogue: A note from Erica
Facts about elephants
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The Elephant was on Erica’s doorstep on the morning of her tenth birthday. There was also a piece of paper stating that she, Erica Perkins, had a Legal Right to the Elephant. “But it’s all very well,” said Erica, “fussing about whether I have a Right to the Elephant. The Elephant has been Left to me, and that seems to be the bigger problem.” She looked the Elephant in the eye. “Who left you?” she demanded. “And why?”
TRONK, said the Elephant. It seemed to Erica to be the sort of TRONK which said, I am the wrong elephant to ask. I am confused by life in general and your doorstep in particular.
She felt a little sorry for the Elephant, TRONKing on the step with no idea why he was there or who had sent him, so she patted him on the trunk and led him inside. He broke the door frame, but TRONKed so sadly about it that Erica wasn’t even cross. Besides, it wasn’t really his fault. The house was certainly not built for a fine, big elephant like him. It was a two-up, two-down terraced house by the coast, with nice views of the sea but very little space.
Erica had lived in that house for as long as she could remember. At first she had shared it with Uncle Jeff, who was the only family she had. He meant well, but he was very distracted, and he usually forgot that she was there. He was an ornithologist, which means he studied birds, and he was forever thinking about birds and where he could go to see them and what sort of binoculars he ought to take. Erica had to do all the practical things like cooking and cleaning the house. When she was eight he left to hunt for a bird called the Lesser Pip-footed Woob. He had left some money in an envelope to last until his return, but here she was two years later, with only £30.42 left and no word from Uncle Jeff.
And now there was an elephant in her house.
“Well,” she said, “I suppose you can have Uncle Jeff’s room.”
TRONK, said the Elephant. This time the meaning was a bit unclear, but Erica thought he sounded confused about what an unclejeffsroom was, and unsure about whether it was a good thing to have. She sighed. He was not going to be an easy house guest to look after.
For a start, she didn’t know what elephants like to eat. While the Elephant explored the unclejeffsroom, discovering which bits were strong and which made satisfying CRACK noises when stamped on, she looked it up online. Any plants would do, she learned – cabbage was a good bet – but he would need 150 kilograms of it a day. You or I might eat, say, two kilograms of food a day. 150 kilograms is rather a lot of cabbage. Erica was a very practical girl, and she thought about the £30.42 that she had left, and the cost of cabbage, and did a quick sum.
Upstairs, the Elephant discovered a mirror and started TRONKing in terror. Erica had already sighed, and as she was a very practical girl she knew there was no point sighing again, so she went out to the garden to see what greenery she could collect as a snack.
By the time she came back in with the final bag full of grass, leaving the garden lawn bare, the Elephant had tired himself out and was taking a nap. She left the food in his doorway and went back to bed with a book. Sometimes that is the best response to life.
Rain was battering the roof. The sound was comfortingly normal, and seemed to say that there was nothing she could do about the Elephant Question while the weather was so bad, and she might as well stay warm in her duvet. Suddenly, mixed in with the rain, she heard the THUMP of shy Elephant steps. They came closer, then went away again. She got up and opened the door.
There was a stuffed puffin in the doorway. It was one of the horrible stuffed birds that Uncle Jeff kept in his bedroom. It lay on its back with its feet in the air, one glass eye fixed on Erica, the other on the Elephant – as if by watching both of them at once, it could work out what was going on. The Elephant looked down at his trunk and flicked his tail around nervously. TRONK?
“I don’t understand,” said Erica.
The Elephant thought about this. He went into his room, used his trunk to hook up one of the bags she had used for grass, and set it down next to the bird. He carefully placed the bird in the bag, and the bag at Erica’s feet. TRONK?
“Oh!” she said. “You’re bringing me dinner?”
He nodded, ears flapping.
“Ah.” There was nothing she could say to that which didn’t seem rude or ungrateful, so she settled for a noise: a sort of “Mmmmharrrhm”. And then, when this didn’t seem to reassure him, she said, “Well. Thank you… That’s very… Thank you.”
Now, the Elephant was not stupid. There was a lot he didn’t know, but that is not the same thing at all. He knew perfectly well that “Mmmmharrrhm” and “That’s very…” did not mean that Erica liked the bird. A little sheepishly, he hooked up the bag and took it back to the unclejeffsroom with a sorry TRONK.
“No, really, thank you!” Erica called after him. “I mean, I can’t eat it. But it really was very nice of you.” She thought she heard him sigh, but she had never heard an elephant sigh before, so it was difficult to tell. He didn’t come out again that evening.
The next day a postcard was lying on the mat, showing a building topped with what looked like ice-cream dollops made of white stone. It read:
She turned the postcard over a few times, as if hoping to find the part she had missed, where Jeff said when he was coming home or what to do about money or how to look after an elephant. The postcard stubbornly continued not to say any of these things. TAJ MAHAL, AGRA, UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA, said the small type at the bottom. Which was not, as such, helpful.
Whenever Erica felt a bit lost – which wasn’t often – she went for a walk to the end of the pier to clear her head. She went there now, first tip-tapping down the pavements and then crunching along the stony beach, while the wind did its best to tug her sideways, like an annoying younger brother that you are quite fond of really.
On the pier she leant against the railings and watched the back-and-forward of the sea. For a while she didn’t think anything at all, and then eventually she thought these three things:
1.I am so glad that whenever I am in a Tricky Situation, everything here is Familiar and Soothing.
2.It must be horribly hard to be in a Tricky Situation when you are somewhere Strange and Unknown.
3.Oh. It is probably quite hard to find yourself on an Unknown Doorstep with a bad knee, in a world where things are so Strange that you can’t even get someone dinner without making a fool of yourself.
After she had thought these three things, she crunched to the tourist office, filled her rucksack with free leaflets, and tip-tapped back home to the Elephant. When she went upstairs, he was sitting looking out of Uncle Jeff’s window, trunk scrunched up against the glass. Erica coughed. The Elephant, puzzled by the greeting, coughed back to be on the safe side.
“Do you like the view?” she asked.
He TRONKed politely.
“You’re in England,” she said.
The Elephant blinked.
“That’s the sea you were looking at just now.” She started pulling the
leaflets out of her bag and spreading them out on the carpet, lining them up like a game of solitaire. “We’re very close to it. And we’re right by the Pavilion, where the Prince used to live. We could visit that … although I’m not sure they’d let you inside… Anyway. I just thought I’d talk you through it all. Look, here’s a map: this is us.” She pointed to the squiggle that stood for her road. Then she traced her finger around the curves of her town, stopping at every major landmark to open a leaflet and show him the pictures. He ran his trunk in wonder over the fish at the aquarium, the bright white of the pier, the impossible soaring carts of the Ferris wheel.
When they had looked at all the leaflets, she pulled an atlas from the bookcase and showed him where they were in England, and where England was in the world. The scale of the world seemed to puzzle him.
Erica watched him flip from the map of Britain to the map of the world and back again with his trunk, as if he was trying to understand how something which took up a whole page could possibly be so small.
“Shall we go for a walk?” said Erica, when he had tired of the maps. “What would you like to see?”
The Elephant looked from leaflet to leaflet in great uncertainty. He looked out of the window at the glinting sea, and back at the leaflets, and at Erica, and for a while at the ceiling. At last, he jerked his head towards the window with a hopeful TRONK.
“The sea? Of course.”
And so Erica and the Elephant pattered and crashed down the stairs, and tip-tapped and thumped along the pavements, and crunched along the beach. The Elephant’s steps were a little uneven. It seemed his knee had not quite recovered.
The beach was made of pebbles, not sand, and the wintry sea air was biting at their skin. The Elephant didn’t seem to mind. It was obvious that he adored the sea. Erica showed him her favourite game: wading out a little, waiting for a wave to roll in, then trying to jump high enough to clear it. He was very, very bad at the game – elephants cannot jump – but he would earnestly watch each wave with a worried squint, and then stagger about with a loud TRONK of victory, believing he had done very well. She began to feel rather fond of him.
To get to the main road from the beach, they had to climb up using one of the sets of metal steps that were set into the wall, spaced out along the shore. Erica tripped over the final step, turning her ankle to one side as she fell. She was a very practical girl, so she got up and dusted herself off, but a nasty twinge in her ankle turned her tip-tapping into more of a ti-TUM, ti-TUM.
The Elephant watched her in alarm, and after she had limped on for a few steps, he blocked her path and knelt down in front of her. TRONK, he said: Get on.
“No,” she said, “you have a bad knee.”
He flapped his ears and TRONKed angrily. For the first time, Erica realized how powerful he was, and for a moment she was almost afraid of him. But he wasn’t really angry with her, just very unhappy about something else. TRONK, he repeated, firmly but more kindly. I’m fine.
So Erica got on the Elephant’s back, and hung on for dear life as he tottered to his feet again (elephants are not well designed for standing up, and they are very clumsy about it). They swayed back home, the Elephant finding the way with a proud THUMP and a very slight limp, pausing to take bites out of people’s hedges here and there. Erica decided to explain “front garden” and “private” some other time; it had already been a big day. Besides, she had something much more important to explain, which she had been putting off ever since the postcard had arrived that morning.
She put it off all through the Elephant’s first viewing of The News on the TV (which he didn’t like at all), and then put it off some more while showing him how to make tea (which he liked once he had got used to the way the kettle jigged around towards the end). But when he started yawning the most enormous YAWNs, she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. She fetched one last leaflet from her bag. It read:
THE SEABREEZE ZOO
A great day out for everyone!
This was stamped over a picture of a roaring lion, who was presumably having a Great Day Out. Erica put the leaflet on the table. “We need to talk,” she said.
Now, humans know that “We need to talk” means “I am about to say something difficult”, but elephants don’t. The Elephant’s TRONK was curious, but not worried.
She took a deep breath. “I can’t afford to feed you.”
The Elephant looked politely interested.
“Do you understand? Your food costs money. I don’t have any. I’m really sorry.”
The Elephant tried and failed to hide a yawn. Erica, being a very practical girl, saw that they would be there all night if she didn’t say it very plainly. “You can’t stay here.”
The Elephant reeled in his trunk in shock, and blinked. He looked at Erica. She looked at him. A fly crawling down the window stopped in its tracks and looked at both of them.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Really I am. But you’d starve here. Look” – she held up the leaflet – “I found somewhere you could stay, where they could feed you. There’s a whole enclosure full of elephants!” The Elephant looked puzzled. “Enclosure? Er…” said Erica, “well, it means… It’s a place you can stay! But you can’t – well…” She was a very honest girl, but this was a difficult sort of thing to tell him. “The thing with an enclosure is, you can’t leave it. But it’s nice there.”
At this, the Elephant draped an ear over his eyes and refused to look at her. She read the leaflet out loud to him, but he stayed firmly behind his ear, not showing any interest in the Wild Child Play Area or the One-stop Tiptop Treetop Gift Shop. When she had finished reading there was a long silence.
She put her palm on his trunk. “I’ll visit,” she said softly. “All the time. I promise.”
He stayed behind his ears. But he patted her gently on the shoulder with his trunk. TRONK, he said, and it sounded to Erica like Thank you.
The next morning there was a gaggle of people on the front doorstep. Erica saw them from her bedroom window, and watched them argue about who should ring the bell and speak to her. “Well, if they have been sent by Uncle Jeff as well,” said Erica, “that is tough. They aren’t coming past the front door.” And she went downstairs wearing the sternest face she could manage. (It was not bad. She had learnt it from a furious stuffed owl that Uncle Jeff kept in the living room.)
She opened the door. “Yes?”
The Gaggle looked shifty, and nudged each other, and ummed, which was not really an answer. At last one of them piped up: “We hear you’ve got an Elephant.”
Erica wanted to say that she wasn’t sure whether she had got an Elephant or an Elephant had got her, and that anyway they were about to un-get each other so it was all beside the point. But she thought that if she tried to talk about it she might get upset, and it really wasn’t any of their business. So instead she just said, “Yes,” and carried on looking like the Furious Owl.
This information made the Gaggle brave. “Can we see it?” asked several at once.
Erica opened her mouth to say no, because you can’t invite strangers in to gawk at someone before they’ve even had breakfast. Then she remembered that there wasn’t any breakfast, of either cornflakes or cabbage. She remembered the £30.42, which was all she had left in the world, and how upset the Elephant had been to learn that she couldn’t afford to keep him. “Wait here,” she ordered the Gaggle. “I’ll see if he’s awake.”
She sped up the stairs and told the Elephant her idea, and he TRONKed in delight so loudly it made her stagger a little.
Back down the stairs she went, patter-patter-patter.
“You may see him,” she announced very grandly. “Three pounds entry, please.”
The Gaggle didn’t even grumble; they were so excited to see a Real Live Actual Elephant. Suddenly, Erica had doubled her money. They clattered upstairs and admired the Elephant, who had draped himself in curtains tugged off Uncle Jeff’s window, to give the viewing a Sense of Occasion.
He behaved beautifully, stealing their things with his trunk to make them shriek before handing them gently back, trumpeting tunes through his trunk, and altogether giving them a bargain for their three pounds.
When they had gone, Erica went to the shops and bought one large blackboard, one stick of chalk and all the cabbage she could carry. She brought it back to the Elephant, helped him get the curtains off his back (which proved to be a much more puzzling matter for him than getting them on), made a cup of tea and sat sipping it on the stairs while he munched cabbage in the hall.
“I think,” she said, “that we have found an answer. If you don’t mind doing it?”
TRONK, said the Elephant. It was a bit hard to understand because he had his mouth full, but it sounded like he meant Of course I don’t.
“I don’t suppose you can do rides, with your bad knee?” she asked.
He stopped chewing and looked her in the eye. He was cross, and she remembered that he didn’t like her to worry about his knee. With great dignity he started chewing again, cabbage hanging out of his mouth, and ignored the question. So she took the hint, and wrote on her blackboard:
Visit the amazing
Elephant!
Viewing - £3
Rides - £6
And she drew a picture of the Elephant at the bottom, which delighted him. She propped the board against the wall of the house. It was a strange sight, sitting next to the boring geraniums in window boxes. Nothing else about the house suggested that there might be a girl living by herself with an elephant.
Then they waited.
And waited.
They waited some more, but now with less enthusiasm. The Elephant’s stomach started to grumble, reminding Erica that she had only given him a fraction of the cabbage he needed.
Eventually the living room grew darker as day turned to dusk. Erica and the Elephant did not meet each other’s eyes. It seemed they had been wrong. No one was interested in seeing a girl and her hungry Elephant.
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