Whistling for the Elephants by Sandi Toksvig Read Free Book Online Page B

not many words which can have so
immediate an effect. I had never heard it before and it had much the same
impact on me then that it might still have in the middle of a BBC wildlife
documentary. Cunt. It is a splendidly satisfying, sharp sound. The least
onomatopoeic word in the world. I looked through the doors to the tower room.
    High up
on a balcony I could just see someone standing. The last rays of the sun were
behind them, spilling down from the tower windows. I couldn’t see if it was a
man or a woman. Certainly it was a person. A tall person with what appeared to
be a parrot on their right shoulder. My storyteller folded up like a moth and
scuttled away.
    I ran. Out
of the house, back through the gardens, across the tracks over the river and on
to my bike. I was frightened but all the way home I couldn’t stop thinking
about spiders. Even steeped in alcohol I couldn’t imagine my mother reaching
out to haul me in.

 
     
     
     
     
    Chapter
Three
     
    Donna Marie Dapolito lived
next door but one at Cherry Blossom Gardens. Although she was twelve, and two
years older than me, I wanted her to be my friend. I thought if we became pals
she could tell me if I still had cooties from sipping her cream soda. After my
visit to the Burroughs House I held off exploring for a while. Most afternoons
I would just drift up and down on my bike past Donna Marie’s house. Mother and
Father might be beautiful people with perfect manners but the Dapolitos — that
was a family. They had the untidiest house in the street but it also looked
like the most fun. There was the best part of a 59 Oldsmobile, several
abandoned bikes and most of an old bathroom on the front lawn. Round back they
had a trampoline. It was the noisiest house on the block. Boy, could the Dapolitos
yell. Aunt Bonnie yelled and her kids, Donna Marie and Eddie Jr, yelled. The
noise was as much part of the neighbourhood rhythm as the banging of the
halyards across the water. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t used to noise. Not
just because Father’s voice never rose above a soft breath and Mother rarely
got up, but because it wasn’t welcome in our house. Everything, every footstep,
was taken quietly, carefully and with much planning, preferably by map.
    Three
of the houses in our dead end had their own floating docks with gangways from
the backyard down to the harbour edge. There was ours, the Dapolitos’, and
Sweetheart’s, who lived between us. The Dapolitos’ dock ran way out into the harbour.
Uncle Eddie was in salvage. He wasn’t a yeller. He left that to the family
while he worked the waters of the harbour all day on his flat-bottomed boat
with a large crane. When he wasn’t pulling things up from the bottom of the
river and the sea he was helping rich people move their yachts. Uncle Eddie
knew every inch of the seabed. He’d either dragged it or fished it. Other than
recycling from the deep, fishing was Uncle Eddie’s life. He was a big man.
Everything about him was big; he was maybe six foot four and as wide as an ox.
Every year he won the ‘Biggest Hands in the County’ competition at the Harbour
Island Carnival. Eddie Jr said his dad could catch a shark by just scooping it
out of the water with his bare hands.
    Aunt
Bonnie was the thinnest woman still actually breathing in the United States.
She was thin because she never ate anything. She just sat on the back stoop
drinking Budweiser straight from the can and watching over her kids. The Dapolitos
didn’t have much money but whatever her kids wanted they got. She was always
there for them. Never asleep when they got home. I guessed it was because she
spent so much time on her family that Aunt Bonnie didn’t really ‘make the most
of herself’. She always wore trousers (pants) and I think she even cut her own
jet-black hair. Maybe she had been pretty once. Now she just looked kind of
used up. If she were a Dixie cup you would take a new one. Of course they weren’t
my real aunt and uncle