She tried to imagine her mother here, as a young girl standing on this hill. Her small hands folding paper this way and that, then shooting a plane across the oval. Did she leap and laugh just as Olive had this afternoon?
It was hard for her to picture her mother so young.
It was hard to picture her mother at all.
The Photograph
Later at home, Olive lay on her bed. Freddie wrestled with an old sock beside her, tossing it into the air as he rolled on his back.
She reached for the framed photograph beside the lamp.
It was a photo of her parents.
Both of them.
In the photo, her father had his arm around her mother and his other hand shoved in his jeans pocket. He was smiling so much that you couldn’t really see his eyes. They were all squinty. Olive hadn’t seen him smile like that, with squinty eyes, for a long time.
Her mother wore a white hat that looked like it was about to blow off just as the photo was taken. She wasn’t looking at the camera. She was looking at Olive’s father as if he was more important than anything else and there was an ocean full of secrets that only they shared.
A year after the photo was taken, Olive arrived. And a year after that, her mother was gone.
Olive let the frame lie on her chest and wondered what a picture of her father would look like today. No smile. No ocean full of secrets. Just her father and the elephant squashing itself into the frame.
She blinked away a tear and noticed that Freddie was at her feet. His head was low, buried in the blanket on the bed, and he growled the way he always did when he knew Olive was sad.
Under the Bed
‘Knock, knock.’
It was Grandad outside Olive’s door.
‘Are you okay?’ he said.
She let him in and Freddie scampered under the bed. Grandad spotted the photograph in Olive’s hand.
‘Need cheering up?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘Tell me something about school today.’
So she told him that she needed to find an old and wonderful thing to show the class.
‘I want to take my bike,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Grandad.
He nodded slowly. Olive knew the bike was special for him, too.
‘That’s your mum’s old bike,’ he said. ‘A beautiful thing.’
‘I know,’ she said, twisting the corner of her blanket. ‘But Dad hasn’t fixed it. He took it to his workshop and I haven’t seen it since.’
‘Well,’ said Grandad, his eyes big and bright. ‘I have something else you might like.’
The Typewriter
It sat on a rough wooden desk at the front of the house, in the room they called the sunroom. It was black with freckles of rust. The keys were small and shiny and round, like little saucers perched on metal arms. All you had to do was push down one of the keys and a tiny metal hammer would fling forward and punch the ink ribbon, stamping that letter onto the page. It all happened with cheery mechanical noises and Olive’s favourite noise was the bell that sounded when you edged nearer the right-hand side of the page.
Ding! it said. You’re running out of room!
All she knew of the typewriter was that Grandad had owned it for most of his life. Now she was about to find out more.
‘This typewriter kept me close to your mum,’ said Grandad, with a faraway look in his eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Well, your mum loved poetry. When she grew up and moved out of home, I used to type out her favourite poems and send them to her. I could have just bought her a book of poems, but there was something special about typing them on the typewriter – she knew I must have read them and typed them the way they were supposed to be set out. It was something we shared.’
Olive ran her fingers over the keys, then noticed Grandad dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. She climbed on to his knees and wrapped her small arms around him, squeezing him tight.
Dinner
At dinner, Olive sat opposite her father and the elephant. She had Arthur’s words running through her mind. Your dad won’t fix your bike until you fix your dad. But Olive didn’t know where to start. The best plan she had was to talk, to tell him about the old and wonderful things and why she needed her bike fixed more than ever before.
‘How many cars did you fix today?’ she said.
Her father chewed slowly. ‘Just one,’ he said, ‘and a half.’
More chewing.
Olive tried again.
‘Ms March showed us a bike today,’ she said.
This time he glanced up from his plate.
‘It was really, really old,’ she said. ‘Everything was rusty and the paint was peeling, but it still looked amazing.’
He nodded, then looked back down and kept chewing.
One more try. ‘We have to take something old and wonderful to school,’ she said.
She glanced at Grandad. He raised his eyebrows and nodded for her to keep going.
‘I really want to take my bike – Mum’s old bike.’
Her father rested his fork on his plate.
‘Are you still fixing it?’ she said.
He rested his chin on his fist and looked at her.
She waited for him to say something. Waited for him talk about the bike, the shape of the frame, the colour of the seat.
She waited for him to look at her as if there were secrets that only they shared, if not an ocean full then at least a cupful.
She waited for the dirty, grey elephant to take off its hat, apologise and disappear out the door, into the night.
Instead, her father said nothing and went back to his dinner. The elephant breathed heavily through its trunk.
Olive felt Freddie nudge her feet beneath the table. She patted his furry head and remembered the other advice Arthur had given her.
Get rid of the elephant.
Then she whispered to Freddie so that only he could hear, ‘How am I supposed to do that?’
The Squeeze Box
A few days later, Ms March sat on the edge of her cluttered desk.
‘Now, children,’ she said. ‘Before we present our old and wonderful things at the school’s birthday party, we’re going to take turns at presenting them to the class. So, I’d like to write down what you’re all planning to bring.’
One by one, the students named their important things.
An old telephone.
A watering can.
A pair of binoculars.
A treasure map. (Ms March raised an eyebrow but wrote it down anyway.)
It was Olive’s turn.
‘A bike.’ She looked down and scratched her knee. ‘I hope.’
Ms March moved on to Arthur.
‘Well,’ he said, fumbling with something under his desk, ‘I’ve brought it along today.’
Before Ms March could say anything, Arthur was standing before the class. He held a strange box-shaped thing with hexagonal sides and his face was a picture of goofy pride, as if he were showing off a baby brother. He cleared his throat louder than necessary. A ripple of giggles swept through the class.
‘This is a squeeze box,’ he announced, holding it out for all to see. ‘It’s a box,’ he said, ‘and you squeeze it.’
There was another flutter of giggles.
Arthur pressed some buttons on the side of the box and squeezed it in and out. A blaring, wonky noise blasted the room. It sounded like a wobbly chorus of busted car horns and the children’s giggles turned to squeals of laughter.
Some of them fell off their chairs, or pretended to. Some, like Olive, nearly lost their breath, cackling, snorting and banging the desk. Arthur played on, laughing himself, but he tried to look serious by closing his eyes.
>
‘Very good, Arthur,’ Ms March called over the noise, though she was red-faced and breathless, too. ‘What can you tell us about it?’
‘It’s my dad’s,’ he said. ‘But it’s really my grandma’s. She used to play it at parties, I think, but she doesn’t play it much anymore.’
‘Why not?’ somebody shouted.
Arthur scanned the children with his dark, brown eyes, as if the answer might be written on one of their faces.
‘Um,’ he said, ‘maybe she just hasn’t been to a party for a while.’
Then he gave the squeeze box one final blast, and the class erupted again.
The Book
‘That was fantastic,’ Olive told Arthur, as he slipped back into his desk. ‘I mean, you played it badly, but it looked great.’
Arthur laughed as he clipped the instrument back into its case.
It was Quiet Reading Time. Olive fished a tattered novel from her desk and began flipping through the pages. Ms March insisted on silence, but most of the children still carried on hushed conversations because she was usually under her table looking for something.
‘Has your dad fixed your bike yet?’ Arthur whispered, turning towards Olive.
She shook her head.
‘Elephant still there?’
She nodded.
Arthur glanced over his shoulder, then pulled from his desk the biggest book Olive had ever seen. He held it up so she could read the title.
The Big Book of Elephants.
He heaved the book onto his desk. Olive tried to read her own book but her eyes kept flicking back towards Arthur. He turned the pages and whispered to her as he read, keeping his eyes on the book. His voice fizzed with energy.
‘Elephants are the biggest land mammals in the world,’ he said. ‘They keep growing their whole lives – up to four metres tall and as heavy as ten tonnes.’
Olive swallowed. Her throat stung. Her father’s elephant was only going to get bigger.
‘Elephants can live up to 70 years,’ Arthur continued.
She buried her head in her hands. It would be here forever.
He kept reading and whispering facts. With every bit of information, he suggested a way for Olive to get rid of the elephant in her life.
‘Elephants eat bark and grass and leaves,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you tempt it out of the house with a big juicy branch?’
She smiled at the idea.
‘They like mud baths,’ he said. ‘You could push it into that swamp behind the school.’
She giggled.
‘I know!’ he declared, forgetting he was supposed to be whispering.
Ms March peered at him from behind a bookshelf. He waited until she turned away.
‘Why don’t you dress up as a lion? Lions sometimes attack elephants if they’re really, really hungry.’
Olive laughed, imagining herself with a tangled mane and sharp claws, jumping out in front of her father.
‘It would definitely surprise my dad,’ she said to him, ‘but I’m not so sure about the elephant.’
‘I know,’ he said with a shrug, and Olive knew he understood. If it was any old elephant, these ideas might just work.
But her father’s elephant was different.
It didn’t eat leaves.
It didn’t have mud baths.
And while her father was sad, nothing could scare it away.
The Pigeon
That afternoon, Olive ran to the gate and hugged Grandad. He carried his purple backpack again and Olive asked him where they were going this time. He refused to give her any clues and even resisted singing ‘Side by Side’. Olive sang it secretly in her head, and after eight and a half times through they stopped at the entrance to a big patch of bushland. A sign read Cedar Hills Nature Reserve and Olive realised she had been here once before on a school excursion. All she remembered from that day, though, was a goanna that had scampered up a tree and a boy called Tyler getting a leech stuck to his leg.
Hand in hand, Olive and Grandad stepped into the reserve. The ground was damp under their feet and Olive breathed in the sweet smell of rotting leaves and decaying logs. Birds chirped and screeched somewhere among the trees, but Olive couldn’t see them. Grandad let his hat slip off and hang down his back. Olive noticed his head was constantly moving, scanning the canopy, studying the undergrowth, as if his eyes were cameras trying to capture every detail of the place. She started to do the same, not knowing what she was looking for but hoping she would see something anyway.
They walked on, following the track that wound through the trees. They could have been anywhere in the world, lost in a tunnel of branches and leaves. The school, the town, the elephant – they were all so far away. Hidden in this forest with her grandfather, side by side, Olive felt safe.
Grandad stopped.
So did she.
He put a finger to his lips, signalling her to stay quiet, but his eyes were fixed on something else, something up high. In slow motion, he peeled off the backpack, unzipped it, and took out a pair of binoculars. He used them to look at the top of the trees. After a few seconds, his old face creased into a smile.
‘Olive,’ he whispered, still peering up through the binoculars. ‘Do you know what pigeons look like?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Small grey things. Dad calls them rats with wings. They’re ugly.’
Grandad crouched and handed her the binoculars. He pointed up, through overhanging leaves, at a high branch. ‘Through there,’ he said.
She stared through the lenses and saw nothing but green. Then something moved. She focused on that spot and waited. It moved again and suddenly she saw it clearly. A bird, a great bulking lump of a bird, round and plump, with a slender neck and beady eyes, and the most beautiful colours she had ever seen – rich greens, golden yellows, and, on its belly, a striking, deep purple.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘A pigeon,’ said Grandad.
‘But … it’s so big,’ she said. ‘And it’s beautiful.’
‘I know,’ said Grandad. ‘This one’s called a wompoo fruit-dove.’
Then he patted her shoulder. ‘Just remember – they’re not all grey.’
Still gaping at the bird, she nodded.
Old Movies
The weeks passed and nothing changed. Olive watched her father lurch through the door every afternoon with the elephant lumbering beside him. He did the same thing each day. He put his wallet on the fridge. Drank a glass of water. He kissed her on the head.
The elephant followed him, without a sound.
It reminded Olive of old movies, the ones Grandad had played for her – black and white. And silent.
Some days, she asked her father about the bike. Some days, she talked about other things – anything.
But most days, like today, she said nothing.
She watched her father’s routine – wallet, water, kiss – then ran outside with Freddie.
The Colourful Parts
Olive bounced on the trampoline, landing on her knees, back to her feet, then belly. Feet, back, knees, feet.
She jumped higher, stretching her arms to reach the jacaranda flowers hanging above. When she jumped this high, she could see a small plant growing in the gutter of the roof. She had seen it a week before but promised herself never to tell anyone, in case they pulled it out.
She slid off the trampoline, strapped on her helmet and climbed the jacaranda.
Once again, she made her way to the topmost branches, to her thinking spot.
She looked down at the yard, at her world, and thought about her mother. Grandad always said her mother was looking down on them and she wondered if this was what she saw.
The circle of the trampoline.
The rectangular backyard, coloured green.
The scruffy blob of Fr
eddie, stretched out on the grass under the tree.
Everything looked neat and colourful from up here, but life was a bit grey and untidy once you were down there; once you climbed down the tree and shared the house with an elephant.
She hoped her mother could only see things from up high. And just the colourful parts.
The Record Player
One night, Grandad sat on Olive’s bed as she drew scribbly thoughts onto a sketchpad.
‘I need to take my old thing to school next week,’ she said.
Grandad peeked at the sketchpad. There were pictures of birds and an elephant and purple flowers. A bicycle was drawn in the middle of the page.
‘Still not fixed?’ he said.
Olive shook her head and started to rub out her drawings. She dragged the eraser across the page, cutting the elephant in half.
If only it were that easy.
‘Come on, then,’ said Grandad, rubbing his palms together. ‘I have something else you might like.’
It was a chunky brown box with knobs and dials and a plastic lid on the top that flipped open. Under the lid was a big round platform, a perfect circle about the size of the clock that hung in Olive’s classroom. There was a curved arm beside the circle, with a needle pointing out the end. Olive watched Grandad slide a round, black disc out of a plastic sleeve. It was a vinyl record and it looked like you could use it as a frisbee. Grandad studied both sides of the record, as if he were checking his reflection, then placed it on the round platform and lifted the curved arm. The platform started spinning around. He cradled the arm in his fingers and the needle hovered over the whirling record. Then he gently lowered the needle.
The the Elephant Page 2