When I was a kid my dad made me animals from plywood, orange-juice cartons and the odd old sock. They seemed to appear by magic like the man who appeared after a certain time of night, muttering and smelling of Laphroaig. All through those years the animals came until, one day, I woke to find […]

She is only three, yet she has touched an elephant, something I have never done. She touched the elephant because of me. I sent her to the nursery, signed the consent form for the zoo trip. She knows nothing of this. “The skin”, she says, “is rough” – a new word parroted from someone else, […]

The elephant that sat, unmentioned, in the far corner of my uncle’s living room, was not grey, or white (as these creatures sometimes are), it did not brood – fogging up the windows with thickly exhaled gloom – rather, it waltzed. On gaily painted toes, it skirted round the usual chat – traffic, rain, mumbled […]

The bleak swing of the matriarch’s trunk shocks them. Daughters approach, surge through mosquitoes, pace a lament between femur and scapula, nuzzle the skull with its family smell, as if to send love into death. Then, enough. They sway like galleons into the dusk, churning up insects snatched by a wake of birds. Bark consoles […]

Like the six blind men arguing over the appearance of an elephant none of them has seen, we debate the nature of the child. A dozen women, arranged across a polite restraint of carpet, shielded from the subject of discussion by suction-sealed doors and clinker-built blinds. As though any of us could see beyond our […]

What if the small black dot in the heart of the glop – which even on tadpole terms seems unlikely to prosper left out high and all but dry on the hillside like a troubling child – were to bud in all directions: the bulbous head blossoming two ears lavish as palm-heads, the tail springing […]