The children stood in a row on the stage and Olive was last in line. Each student took a turn to step forward into the spotlight and talk about their old and wonderful thing.
A tennis racket.
A fancy watch.
A strange, skinny skateboard.
Arthur’s turn came and instead of the squeeze box, he held up an old book, crumbling at the corners. Whatever he said about it made the crowd laugh, but Olive hardly listened; all she could hear was her pounding heart.
Her body quivered. Her teeth chattered.
She wasn’t sure if she could do this.
She looked beside her and noticed a door open to the oval outside.
She could run. Just run out the door, across the oval and home to Freddie.
‘Olive,’ somebody hissed. It was Ms March crouched in front of the stage. ‘It’s your turn.’
Olive stepped into the spotlight. There was a sound, a sweet musical sound, which seemed to be getting closer. Everybody in the hall turned to face the edge of the stage as Arthur’s grandma sauntered up to join the children. A gleaming smile stretched across her face as she nursed the old squeeze box in her hands. She pressed buttons and squeezed the box in and out. It filled the hall with beautiful chords and it was hard to believe this was the same instrument Arthur had squeaked and honked on just a few weeks earlier.
The microphone shook in Olive’s hand. ‘This is a song my grandad taught me,’ she said.
Arthur’s grandma stood beside her, bumping the music along with the squeeze box.
Olive began to sing.
It was a quirky little song – old and wonderful.
It was ‘Side by Side’.
Another Old and Wonderful Thing
With each line in the song, Olive’s voice grew stronger and louder. Her hand stopped shaking. Her knees stopped clunking together. As she sang, she noticed all the tiny things that happen in a crowd when people enjoy themselves: their hands tapped out the rhythm, their bodies rocked from side to side, their eyes shone like tiny raindrops in the darkness of the hall.
By the final verse, Arthur was suddenly beside her, bopping along to the song as if they were old sailors chanting at sea. He slung his arm around her shoulder and pretended he knew the words. All he really managed to sing, though, was the final line, and some of the audience belted it out as well.
The applause that filled the hall was deafening. It sounded like a plane coming in to land on the roof. Olive had never heard anything as loud.
She spotted Grandad, perched on his plastic chair at the edge of the hall. A proud grin had spread across his entire face. His eyes were so sparkly and watery that small drops trickled down his cheeks, finding a home in his wrinkles, the way fresh rain tracks its way into dry riverbeds. It was the happiest he had looked since Olive’s fall and it was hard for her to imagine the tortoise bothering him at a time like this.
Her plan had worked, but she wasn’t quite finished. She wanted that tortoise gone for good.
She cleared her throat. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, like a circus ringleader. ‘I want to thank Arthur’s grandma, and Arthur, too.’
More clapping and cheering, then an important sort of silence fell over the hall as she spoke again. ‘That was my favourite song. It’s old and wonderful and I love it because Grandad and I sing it all the time. It’s about sticking together and that’s what we do.’
Grandad nodded as he rubbed his eyes.
‘But there’s one more old and wonderful thing I want to talk about.’
She paused.
All eyes were upon her.
‘What is it?’ a small voice whispered from the front row.
And Olive said, ‘It’s Grandad.’
Heads turned to face the old man at the side of the hall. He sat wide-eyed, his mouth open.
Olive beckoned him to the stage. He unfolded himself out of the chair and strode towards her. Hundreds of captivated faces followed his path as he stepped onto the stage and stood tall and straight beside Olive, his hand on her shoulder. With his skinny chest puffed out, he looked like a proud pigeon wrapping a warm wing around its chick.
‘Grandad is my most favourite old and wonderful thing of all,’ said Olive. ‘Grandad does everything. He makes my lunch and dinner. He walks me to school. He hugs me before bed and as soon as I wake up. He sings songs and takes me on adventures around town. He teaches me about beautiful birds and paper planes and magical things from long ago like typewriters and record players. And he tells me stories about my mum.’
She paused to unfold a piece of paper from her pocket. It had taken her a long time to get these next words right, and she had written them down so she wouldn’t forget.
‘Grandad rubs out the grey parts of my day and fills them in with colour.’
At this moment, Grandad swept her up in his scarecrow arms. The crowd cheered, Ms March blinked away tears and Arthur’s grandma gave the squeeze box a triumphant blast, startling some of the children who had forgotten she was still there.
Wrapped up in her grandfather’s arms, Olive looked over his shoulder and watched the old, grey tortoise disappear out the door.
A Falling Sky
The following day, Olive lay on the trampoline, gazing at the pale sky above. It stretched all around like a giant, billowing bedsheet, faded in the sun. She thought of a line from ‘Side by Side’ about the sky falling down. It was supposed to be a bad thing, the end of the world. Looking at the sky now, so light and empty above the town, Olive didn’t think a falling sky would hurt very much at all. She didn’t think anything could hurt her right now. She had chased away that creaky, old tortoise. She had made Grandad happy.
The feeling of power flooded her body with a tingly sense of joy, until she wriggled and bounced and jumped on the trampoline, higher and higher, much higher than she’d ever jumped before. She spotted the small plant in the gutter on the roof. It shimmered in the afternoon light.
But then she slowed down as she spotted her father wandering home, the elephant plodding beside him.
Since the party, she had pushed them both out of her mind. After all, her father had missed the whole thing. The bike was still broken and now she didn’t need it as much as she once had. She had been fine without it.
Without him.
She watched her father and the elephant round the corner of the house and she noticed something. The elephant looked bigger than ever, a great hulking mass, dragging her father down, burying him in its shadow. She watched them both climb the stairs to the house. The steps bent and buckled under their weight.
Just before they disappeared inside, Olive called out. ‘Dad!’
He turned around. His face was like a pale stone, worn flat by sea and sand. She had never seen him look so sad.
She suddenly wanted to talk and talk, to tell him everything – about the tortoise and the party, the squeeze box, the paper planes, the colourful pigeon, Ms March’s earrings, and Arthur’s books. She longed to share it all and she knew that if she just kept talking they would share secrets to fill more than a cup, more than a river. Bigger than the ocean.
In the end, she said nothing because her father would never listen – really listen – with the elephant beside him.
He went into the house.
Olive slid off the trampoline and sat against the trunk of the jacaranda tree. As Freddie snuffled beside her, whimpering and wagging his tail, her voice was calm and strong.
‘I’m going to get rid of that elephant.’
A Very Big Heart
It was another purple backpack day.
Olive and Grandad stood on the path outside a shop with dusty windows and an old wooden door. The shop was in town, on the edge of the mall. It had taken seven and a half ‘Side by Sides’ to get there.
Grandad fished a water bottle out of his backpack and
took a sip. Olive cupped her face against the window and looked into the shop. She couldn’t see much through the dust on the glass.
‘What is this place?’ she said.
‘A second-hand shop,’ said Grandad. ‘It’s full of old and wonderful things.’
‘I didn’t know it was here,’ said Olive, brushing dirt off her hands.
‘Not many people do, but it’s been here for years.’
Olive turned to look at him. ‘Can we go in?’ she said.
‘Even better,’ said Grandad. ‘We’re going upstairs, to the very top.’
He opened the old wooden door, which groaned as if waking from years of sleep. They stepped inside, into the smell of old timber and musty clothes. They wheeled their heads around to let their eyes soak up the cluttered beauty that surrounded them. Shards of afternoon sunlight angled in through the windows, falling on the piles of odd things that filled every space and every corner.
There were racks of old-fashioned clothes and towers of battered, brown suitcases. Thin-framed bicycles and kitchen chairs hung from the ceiling. A maze of bookshelves zigzagged towards the far wall. There were desks and beds and boxes of shoes, tables covered with cups and saucepans and teapots. Olive spotted a giant telescope sprouting from the middle of the shop, aimed at a high window.
‘This way,’ whispered Grandad, and she followed him.
As she crept and squeezed her way past so many old and wonderful things, she dreamt up stories for some of them and imagined how important they had once been for somebody, somewhere, a long time ago.
They reached a narrow, carpeted staircase at the back of the shop, spiralling upwards, much further than Olive expected. She watched Grandad’s scarecrow legs as she followed him up and up and up until they finally reached a door.
‘Here we go,’ said Grandad, turning the handle.
They were suddenly outside again and were now on top of the shop, standing on the roof. There was a concrete railing all around. Olive leant over and looked down on the mall as it stretched into the distance. There were no cars, just people moving about. Everybody looked so small as they hurried in and out of the shops.
‘We’re up very high, Grandad,’ said Olive.
‘We are,’ he said. ‘That’s why we’re here. This is the tallest building in town.’
Just as he had done at the cricket oval, he took a piece of paper from the purple backpack. He folded it this way. And that. To make a paper plane.
He cast it off the roof. A breeze lifted the plane higher than their heads. It circled above the mall, swimming through the afternoon air, smooth and silent. Finally, it neared the ground and landed at the feet of a small boy. He picked it up and looked around.
Grandad and Olive ducked behind the concrete railing. They giggled and gasped with the sort of tingly excitement that overwhelms you when you have just pulled off a trick, something marvellous and secret.
As they hid, Grandad gazed at the milkshake clouds bubbling above the town.
‘That was a lovely thing you did for me at the party,’ he said. ‘To do something like that, to make an old man so happy – you’ve got a very big heart.’
Olive’s body prickled with that same sensation she had felt on the trampoline.
She had an idea.
‘Do you have some more paper?’ she said.
She and Grandad made another plane. But before she sent it flying off the roof, she paused.
‘Grandad,’ she said. ‘Do you have a pen?’
He rummaged in the backpack and found a blue one.
Olive wrote on the plane: Your hair looks nice.
She flung it off the roof. It swirled through the air, dipping and diving. At last, it bumped gently into the arm of a lady struggling with a load of shopping bags. The lady put down her bags and picked up the plane. As she unfolded the paper, she glanced around the mall, as if wondering where the plane had come from. Olive and Grandad peered over the edge of the railing and watched.
The lady read the message. Her face brightened and she patted her hair. Once again, she looked around the mall, then carried on with her shopping bags, grinning all the way.
Grandad patted Olive’s shoulder. ‘Let’s do another,’ he said.
As the afternoon stretched on, they sent more and more planes flying off the roof, each with its own message for whoever might find it skidding at their feet.
One of the planes said: I like your shoes. Another said: Look at those purple clouds. And: You have a wonderful laugh.
People picked them up, slightly bewildered at first. Then their faces shone when they read the messages. Nobody seemed to suspect the planes had been launched from the top of the second-hand shop by an old scarecrow and a small girl with a big heart.
The Animals
The two friends wandered home, humming their song and watching the sky turn from blue to orange and yellow and pink, then a rich purple, like the breast of that beautiful pigeon. Olive hopped and twirled beside Grandad. Pictures of the old and wonderful things played in her mind and she felt as light and free as a paper plane floating above the town. This had been her favourite purple backpack day ever.
Perhaps it was the beauty of the sky, perhaps it was the giddiness of the afternoon, but she suddenly felt a compulsion to do something she had never done before, to tell Grandad something she had kept inside for a long time.
She cleared her throat.
‘Grandad,’ she said.
‘Hmm?’
‘Sometimes I see animals. Big grey animals. But they’re not real.’
He didn’t flinch. He kept walking as if she had said something quite ordinary about school or dinner.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I know the animals aren’t really there. I just imagine them, following people around.’
‘All the time?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Only when people are sad. If I see somebody is sad – really sad – I imagine there’s a big grey animal just, you know, hanging around, making everything difficult and heavy.’
The two of them waltzed on home. The sky darkened further, and a splatter of stars appeared like pinholes in a curtain.
‘Do I have one of these grey animals?’ Grandad said.
‘You did,’ said Olive. ‘When I fell out of the tree you were really sad, so a big tortoise followed you around. But I chased it away.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘I cheered you up,’ she said. ‘Remember, at the party?’
The old man smiled and stole a glance at his granddaughter. ‘Who else?’ he said.
Olive fell quiet but her body twitched and clenched as if something was bursting to get out.
‘Your dad? Does he have an animal?’
Olive felt the weight of the question slow her down. She kicked a pebble as she walked and, for a moment, thought she heard Freddie’s bark in the distance.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he does. He has the biggest grey animal of all.’
Grandad slowed down so he could keep close beside her. ‘Because he’s so sad?’
Olive nodded. Then she stopped. She stood on the footpath and rolled her head back to look at the dark sky. She hoped it wouldn’t fall right now.
‘He has an elephant,’ she said. ‘A big grey elephant. I imagine it beside him all the time. It’s so big and heavy, and I don’t know how I’ll ever chase it away.’
Grandad bent his scarecrows legs to crouch down beside her.
‘Your father has been sad for a long time,’ he said. ‘And he might be sad for a bit longer. But it won’t be forever.’
‘It feels like forever,’ Olive said.
‘I know. And I know you chased away the tortoise, but the elephant might be too big for you to move on your own.’
Olive gazed again at the night
sky and, slowly, an idea began to swirl and take shape in her mind. It started off small, like a star, then it gathered into something bigger and brighter, a cluster of stars, a shimmering constellation.
‘Grandad,’ she said slowly, careful not to let the idea fall to the ground before it ripened. ‘What if you helped me? What if you helped me chase the elephant away?’
The old man looked down at that small, wise face.
‘There’s something I should show you,’ he said. ‘It’s old and wonderful – and I think it might help.’
The Shed
Later that night, Olive sat on a stool in Grandad’s shed with Freddie by her side. A light bulb that hung from the ceiling cast a dusty orange glow on all the things stacked around the place. Rusty shovels, teetering piles of pots, an upside-down wheelbarrow missing its wheel. The sweet stench of soil and manure hung thick in the air and Olive heard cockroaches scuttling under the shelves.
‘Here it is,’ said Grandad in a soft, croaky voice.
He reached up to a high shelf, where there were broken pieces of clay. Perhaps they had come from a cracked pot or a vase. He fumbled with the pieces for a moment, then cradled them down to his workbench. Olive slid off the stool and stood beside him.
She watched as Grandad fitted the pieces together and she instantly recognised its shape.
‘An elephant,’ she said. ‘It’s an elephant.’
He nodded. It was broken into four or five separate pieces, but joined together by his scarecrow hands, it was beautiful. Everything looked just right – the ears and the trunk and the half-moon toes at the end of each chunky foot. There was a hole on top so you could fill the elephant with soil and use it as a plant pot.
The the Elephant Page 4