Good Thing for the planet or not, it had to be said that Flo could be very (what Mum privately called) Full of Herself in the mornings. Being Full of Herself basically consisted of Flo talking non-stop rubbish from the minute she opened the car door, according to Mum. And non-stop rubbish was not something Mum generally found easy to deal with first thing in the day.
This morning was no exception.
‘Did you know that my dad once got attacked by a Real Live Elephant?’ Flo announced, flinging open the passenger door.
Felix beamed. This was exactly why sharing lifts with Flo was a brilliant idea.
‘Good morning, Flora,’ said Mum wearily.
Flo bounced on to the back seat next to Felix and chucked her school bag over her shoulder into the boot, thereby giving Dyson’s snoring snout its second near miss of the day.
‘It was wild, the elephant,’ Flo chattered on, her eyes wide and shining.
Mum turned the radio up suddenly so that the boring man’s voice got a bit too loud and meant Flo had to really shout above the news and the traffic reports and the weather and all that yawn-worthy stuff to get Mum to listen to her.
‘Yes! A Real Live Wild Elephant, right—’
‘Strap yourself in, Flora, please,’ said Mum.
‘How can it have been wild if it attacked your dad?’ Felix asked excitedly, getting Bernard the snail out of his pocket and stroking the shell. ‘Was he in India or Africa at the time?’
‘No, he was in Croydon,’ said Flo, pulling the seat belt out in furious long loops. ‘Where his important office work is. WOW!’ She started at the sight of Bernard making his way across the back of Felix’s hand. ‘Is that a—?’
Felix shook his head violently to stop Flo Giving the Game Away to Mum about Bernard and said loudly: ‘Go on – what happened?’
Now obviously Flo could handle most bugs and creepy-crawly type things and frogs and toads and whatnot, but it just so happened that she was not all that keen on snails, so she made a face and backed herself into the corner of the car seat, as far away from Bernard as possible. ‘We-ell, this Real Live Wild Elephant had escaped from the zoo—’
‘Aha! So it wasn’t wild then!’ Felix cut in, triumphantly waving poor Bernard in the air. The snail zipped back inside his shell in fright. ‘It couldn’t have been wild if it was in a zoo – animals in zoos are Captivated Animals, you see.’
Flo gave Felix a long hard look with narrowed eyes and crunched-up eyebrows, and Felix stopped feeling so triumphant. ‘So,’ he said, a bit nervously, ‘what happened next?’
‘So the WILD elephant,’ said Flo firmly, ‘charged at Dad, which was very frightening as he was driving one of those beetle-shaped cars at the time so he couldn’t run away. You know the kind I mean. What are they called, those beetle-shaped cars?’ Flo called out to Mum.
Mum turned the radio down a tiny bit and said, ‘Beetles. Volkswagen Beetles, to be precise.’
Flo frowned and then shrugged. ‘One of those, yes. He was driving a Forksvargen-Beetle-to-be-precise, and then this wild elephant charged at him and stuck his tusks right through the seat!’ She started kicking the back of Mum’s seat in a determined and rhythmical way as if to emphasize her point.
Mum let out a strangled snarl.
Felix gasped. Why did exciting things like this always happen to Flo’s family? His dad just cycled everywhere. He did not have a car shaped like a beetle, and he had never seen so much as a badger on his way to work, let alone a wild elephant. Then again, Felix realized, Dad probably wouldn’t tell him even if he had seen a wild elephant or a badger. His head was so full of strange work language, such as: ‘You’ve got to push the envelope’ and ‘I think we should think outside of the box’ and ‘It’s not rocket science’, that he wouldn’t remember about the elephant or the badger by the time he got home in the evening.
‘Wouldn’t it be cool to own an elephant!’ Flo cried suddenly, kicking Mum’s seat a bit too hard this time.
‘Sit. Still. Flora.’ Mum sounded as if she was trying to hold pins in her mouth without dropping them.
‘If I was going to own a wild animal,’ Felix began, reaching for the book on apes and flicking through the pages, ‘I would prefer one of these monkeys that can climb—’
But Flo wasn’t listening to Felix. She wasn’t listening to Mum either. She was bouncing up and down vigorously, straining at her seat belt as if gravity had suddenly stopped working.
‘An elephant would be so much more exciting to own than, say, a snail,’ she said. She fixed Felix with one eyebrow raised in a challenging sort of way.
‘Felix!’ Mum snapped. ‘You haven’t brought that snail into the car, have you?’
‘Oooo, an elephant!’ said Felix enthusiastically. He decided to take Flo’s lead – anything if it meant Mum could be diverted from the presence of Bernard. ‘It would be totally amazing to have an actual elephant, yes. But how do you think you get to be an Owner of an Elephant – or any wild animal at all?’ he added, sticking out his bottom lip thoughtfully. ‘That is, unless you are a zookeeper, which I am not.’
‘I think you have to prove that you are going to look after it in a responsible way,’ Flo said. ‘I should ask your Uncle Zed,’ she went on. ‘He knows everything about all the animals in the world, doesn’t he?’
‘Mmmm,’ said Felix. ‘Almost everything.’ Zed hadn’t known what to do about the bird Felix had found in the garden which wouldn’t fly and wouldn’t walk and wouldn’t eat the bread and milk he got for it. It had died in the end.
‘Of course, it would need tons and tons of green stuff to eat,’ continued Flora. ‘Does your dad grow enough green stuff for an elephant to eat, d’you think?’
Felix chewed a fingernail and thought it sounded suspiciously as though Flo was having one of her Missions. When Flo had one of her Missions, it usually meant that Felix ended up getting involved in something he couldn’t quite remember agreeing to. Like the time Flo had persuaded him that it would be a very Scientific Experiment About Gravity if they put Hammer the hamster at the top of the slide in the garden to see how quickly he would get to the bottom. Everything would probably have been all right if Colin the cat had not noticed and flung himself out of the apple tree in the path of the sliding hamster with the word ‘LUNCH’ written all over his fangs. Felix had been grounded for a week and Hammer had been so traumatized that the vet had had to give him some special medicine called Sedatives which had Cost the Earth.
Flo stopped bouncing and picked her nose instead. Then she wiped it quietly on the back of Mum’s seat while looking at Mum’s reflection in the rear-view mirror in an entirely innocent and charming way.
‘Hmm. Yes, I think your uncle would know exactly how to get hold of an elephant,’ she said. ‘And if you looked after it then that would help to protect it from being hunted for its Ivory Bits.’
‘It’s terribly sad, that hunting thing,’ Felix said knowledgeably. ‘They use the Ivory Bits for things like drinking horns.’
Flo rolled her eyes. ‘Derrrr! Not any more – that was in the Olden-Fashioned Days,’ she said in exasperation. ‘But they do use them for making pianos, you know. I used to have a piano with Ivory Bits for the keyboard – only the white part, obviously. The black keys cannot be made from ivory, as ivory is not black.’
This was so fascinating that Felix had now completely forgotten about the elephant idea. He sat back, his book on apes lying discarded beside him. He had also forgotten about Bernard who had worked his way out of Felix’s pocket and on to the edge of the car seat and was making for the door handle.
‘So what is the black part of the piano made of?’ Felix asked, eyes wide in wonder.
‘Oh, sabre-toothed tigers’ teeth,’ said Flo airily.
‘Wow!’ said Felix. It never ceased to amaze him how wonderfully wise and full of information his best friend was. He had not even known that sabre-toothed tigers had black teeth.
Mum coughed as if something had got stuck in her throat. ‘I think you’ll find that pianos these days have plastic keyboards,’ she said, looking at Felix and Flo in the rear-view mirror with a tight-lipped smile.
Flo went a bit red. Then she shrugged and quickly said, ‘Well, obviously I know that. I don’t have that piano any more, anyway. It was an Olden-Fashioned-Day one. I gave it to my worst best friend at my old school . . . So, Felix,’ she said, changing the subject in a firm and determined voice, ‘what about this elephant then? Shall we get one, or not?’
‘No more time to chat,’ Mum said, sounding suddenly a lot more cheerful as she pulled into the school car park. ‘The bell’s about to go – out you get, you two. And careful when you get your bags out the back. We don’t want Dyson trying to escape.’
Dyson lifted his head hopefully at the sound of his name.
‘Don’t forget,’ Mum added, raising her voice above Flo who was still rabbiting on about elephants. ‘Felix, are you listening? Zed and Silver are picking you up tonight. I’ll come and get you from the boat after tea.’
Felix flung open the car door and Bernard took his chance, dropping to the ground and slinking off before he could be pulverized by Felix and Flo as they ran in through the school gates, babbling to each other at top volume just as the bell rang for register.