Olive of Groves and the Great Slurp of Time (14 page)

25

In which we make a crayon rubbing

‘Mathematics!' cooed Mrs Groves. ‘The fascinating study of space exploration!'

‘Excuse me,' said Olive. ‘I don't think that's quite right, Mrs Groves.'

‘Of course it's right!' said Bullet Barnes, squeezing down into his cannon at the back of the classroom.

‘Absolutely!' cried Carlos, lighting the fuse. ‘Why else would there be an astronaut climbing through the window?'

A man clad in a puffy white spacesuit heaved himself up onto the sill, waved the American flag and declared, ‘The
Eagle
has landed!'

‘Look!' shouted Chester. ‘It's Neil Armstrong! The first man ever to have walked on the moon!'

‘It can't be!' scoffed Peter. ‘That was way back in 1969.'

‘
Ja!
It can be,' said Basil. ‘It is because of the Time Slurp.' He smiled sheepishly at Olive with a German accent.

I know what you're thinking, but please, dear reader, just trust me. One can laugh, smile, shrug and even snore with a German accent . . . provided one is genuinely German, of course!

Basil smiled sheepishly with a German accent and Neil Armstrong looked around the classroom with an American accent. He seemed a little confused, but carried on with his moon-landing mission.

‘That's one small step for man!' He lifted his foot from the windowsill. ‘One giant leap for manki–'

KABOOM!

Bullet Barnes shot from the cannon, flew across the room and headbutted Neil Armstrong out the second-storey window.

‘Bullseye!' shouted Carlos.

‘Head for the hills!' cried Mrs Groves, and she dived into the nearest cupboard,
slamming the door with a
bang
. A stack of dusty old books toppled down from above and scattered across the floor. There was a collection of detective novels in which the sleuth was a penguin, a giant tome called
Fascinating Things to Do with a Stapler: the Illustrated Guide
and a tiny black leather-bound volume.

‘Poetry!' Wordsworth cried. ‘I do so love poetry!' He seized the tiny black book and scampered down the corridor, waving it above his head.

‘Good grief,' sighed Olive, closing her notebook and popping her protractor back into her pencil case. Maths, it seemed, was over for the day. Although, to give Mrs Groves' students their due, a number of them did embark on maths-
related
activities.

Wally the wombat tore the pages, one by one, from his geometry textbook and folded them into origami snowflakes. Samuel the servant boy helped Hamish booby-trap a box of tangrams with slugs and trifle. The peg-legged pirate and Cracker the parrot made up a rude song about three-dimensional shapes. And Basil and Eduardo engaged in some sort of game in which they tried to whack each other with a metre ruler.

Sparky Burns and the dragon had a competition to see who could breathe flames the furthest and accidentally
set fire to the times tables chart. Glenda the goose was delighted for she was terrified of the nine times tables. She stood on Helga's head, flapped her wings, wagged her tail feathers and honked for joy, ‘I'm free! I'm free!'

Unfortunately, Glenda was also scared of fire, so her joy was short-lived.

‘Oh, mercy!' she cried. ‘The times tables chart is on fire! Fire! Fire!' Swooning, she slid down Helga's nose and fell to the floor with a
splat
.

Olive, eager to escape the smoke that was puffing around the upper reaches of the room, dropped beneath the desk. Tearing a fresh piece of paper from her notebook, she lay on the floor and started to write a letter home:

She tapped her forehead with her crayon. ‘Mmm. What can I possibly say?'

Letters home were always a challenge. Granny and Pop thought Olive attended a regular boarding school in which she was surrounded by normal, everyday children completing normal, everyday activities. They had no idea that Mrs Groves was bonkers, that Olive's lessons were full of acrobatic stunts and explosions, that her roommates were three talking rats, or that, currently, she was learning all about the mysteries of time travel. No, it was best not to reveal too much in her letters home. But at the same time she did not wish to lie. That would be disrespectful, and Olive loved her grandparents very much.

‘Hi, Olive!' Reginald crawled past, spreading a thin layer of butter across the floor. Reuben the rabbit sat on his shoulder, pulling gold coins from behind his ear and popping them into a little red purse.

‘For buying sweets,' Reuben explained.

Olive giggled and carried on with her letter:

She stopped writing. She scratched her head and chewed on the end of her crayon.
Did
she miss them?

‘Of course I do!' cried Olive. ‘Silly. Why, just on Monday, while eating Granny's blueberry mini muffins, I felt dreadfully homesick . . . until Blimp, Chester and Wordsworth made me laugh.'

But as she pondered the question, she could not deny that something had changed in the last three days. The longing for home had faded a little, lost its edge. Then today, when disaster had almost struck, she had not given a single thought to Granny and Pop. Rather, her concern was for her friends at Groves.

‘Hmmm,' she murmured. ‘How very odd.'

‘Num-num-num-num-num-num-num!' Num-Num dived beneath the desk, wrapped her arms around Olive's neck and chewed half the collar off her blouse. ‘Num-Num lub blouse! Num-Num lub Olib!'

Olive's heart skipped a beat. ‘I love you too, Num-Num.'

And that, she realised, was her answer!

Of course she missed Granny and Pop. It is natural to miss those we love. But the ache that started the day she left home had been softened by the affection of her wonderful friends and soothed by the love of this crazy dinosaur. It was as simple as that!

Olive laughed. She peeled Num-Num off her neck and finished the letter:

She drew seven hearts, filled the rest of the page with a crayon rubbing of the scales on Num-Num's back and folded the letter in half.

‘Done!' said Olive.

‘Din-ner!' growled Num-Num, and she gobbled up the letter, the crayon and the rest of Olive's collar. ‘Num-num-num-num-num-num-num!'

26

In which we see the contents of many nostrils

‘Good morning! Special delivery!'

Olive opened the front door of Groves.

‘Take this and wait, please,' said the courier. He handed her a brown paper package and returned to his van.

‘Oh, goody!' cried Olive. ‘A parcel from Granny and Pop!'

‘Marvellous!' squeaked Blimp, scuttling onto her shoulder. ‘Does it sound like choc-chip bickies?'

‘What do choc-chip bickies sound like?'

‘They sing,' explained Blimp, ‘ever so quietly and sweetly . . . in a chocolatey sort of manner . . . with a chippy edge to it.'

Olive giggled. She held the package up to her ear, closed her eyes and concentrated.

‘Well?' asked Blimp.

‘
Definitely
choc-chip bickies!'

Blimp leapt onto the parcel and ripped the paper aside to reveal a round biscuit tin, brightly patterned and cheerfully large. He lay down on the lid, all four legs stretched wide, and sighed.

‘Where do you want this, love?' The courier was back, poking his nose between the sails of a metre-long model sailing ship. It was magnificent – the decks polished to a shine, the sails as white as snow, the ropes coiled, the cannons perfectly aligned and ready for action, the portholes sparkling. There was even a tiny logbook open on the miniature mahogany desk in the captain's cabin.

‘
I'll
take it,' said Olive. She sat the bickie tin by the door and took the ship in her arms. She would be proud
to deliver this beautiful gift to one of her friends. ‘Who is it for?'

‘No name,' said the courier. ‘Just says it's a special delivery for a very special person.'

Olive smiled. ‘Probably someone's birthday. I'll see that it gets to the right place.'

Leaving Blimp in charge of the chocolate-chip biscuits, she tottered up to the first-floor landing. ‘Special delivery for a very special person!' she called along the corridor.

‘I'm special,' said Tommy.

How very true! He was the only boy in the school who ran around after breakfast with a rasher of bacon
and
a fried mushroom stuck up each of his nostrils. He was not, however, the owner of the beautiful ship.

Olive trotted up another flight of stairs. ‘Special delivery for a very special person!'

‘I'm special,' said Fumble, frothing at the mouth. ‘Look. Ever since I started eating this apple, I can blow bubbles.' He hiccupped and a large bubble popped out between his lips and floated through the air. ‘It must be a magic apple, Olive. It tastes disgusting, but the bubbles are ever so exciting!'

Olive frowned at him between the sails of the ship. ‘Dear Fumble! It tastes disgusting because you are eating
a
cake of soap
, not an apple!'

A surprised bubble squeezed its way out of his right nostril.

Olive giggled and carried on up the third flight of stairs. ‘Special delivery for a very special person!'

‘Oh, mercy!' honked Glenda the goose. ‘I do not have time for playing with model ships! I need to visit Mrs Groves in her parlour. She is going to teach me how to knit.'

‘How terribly disturbing!' thought Olive. ‘Asking Mrs Groves for knitting lessons is as foolish as asking Num-Num for advice on table manners.'

Glenda clacked her beak and cried, ‘I need to knit myself a scarf, a vest and a beanie to ward off hypothermia during the coming Ice Age.'

‘Ice Age?!'

‘Have to dash!' honked Glenda, and she flapped downstairs to pursue her knitting lessons.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, six bold red uppercase letters flashed before Olive's eyes:
B-E-W-A-R-E.

She squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head, then announced once more, ‘Special delivery for a very special person!'

‘That's mine! I'm very special . . . and handsome.' Pigg McKenzie snatched the ship from Olive's arms and retreated into his apartment. He didn't even say ‘thank you'.

‘I thought you wanted to build model aeroplanes,' accused Olive, running after him. ‘This is a
ship
. . . and it's all done!'

Pigg McKenzie tossed the ship carelessly onto his sofa and sneered, ‘What a bore you are, Origami. Always trying to spoil people's innocent fun.'

‘My name is
Olive
, not Origami,' she said. ‘And there is no innocent fun in lying to Mrs Groves. This model ship is already built. It will do nothing to keep your trotters and mind occupied.'

Pigg McKenzie tore one of the snowy white sails off its mast and used it to blow his snout. He oinked at Olive. ‘You didn't expect me to do all that work myself, did you, Origami? I am a very busy pig.'

Olive looked around his lounge room. Comic books, plastic farm animals and toy trucks littered the carpet. In the bedroom next door, the large four-poster bed was a scrambled nest of eiderdowns, satin pillows and toffee-apple
cores. The bathroom floor was messy with damp towels and cupcakes from which the icing had been eaten, and the bathtub overflowed with plastic tugboats, wind-up scuba divers, loofahs and empty shampoo bottles. It did not look like the pig had been busy at all.

‘It does not look like you have been busy at all!' scolded Olive.

‘Whatever,' said the pig. ‘But I might
become
busy and then where would I be?'

‘A special delivery hath arrived for Pigg McKenzie!'

The pig pirouetted to the door, where Samuel the servant boy bore a heart-shaped chocolate box with a large pink bow on top.

‘See!' snorted the pig. ‘I am about to become
extremely
busy eating these delicious assorted chocolates.' He grabbed the box, whipped off the lid and stuffed two chewy caramels, three truffles and a piece of French nougat into his mouth. Melted chocolate dribbled down his chin. He rolled his eyes in delight.

‘Special delivery for Pigg McKenzie!'

The pig snatched a brown paper parcel from Valerie the owl. He turned the parcel over in his trotters, shook it up and down, then tore off the paper.

‘Aha!' he grunted. ‘See, Origami! My superglue and tiny screwdrivers have arrived. Now it's full speed ahead. Busy, busy, busy! I won't have time to scratch myself!'

He elbowed Samuel in the stomach, kicked Valerie in the tail feathers and threw a comic book at Olive. Shoving them all into the corridor, he slammed the door and let out a shrill and terrifying squeal of delight.

Valerie flew along the corridor and out the third-storey window, sobbing. Samuel hastened away, muttering something about pelting the cod-brained festering-footed swine with rotten eggs. And Olive dawdled off, thinking that Pigg McKenzie really was rather stupid.

‘Silly pig!' she cried. ‘Fancy being excited about superglue and tiny screwdrivers when his model ship is already built!'

And she might have given the matter more thorough consideration had she not suddenly panicked about the fact that Blimp had been left alone to guard the choc-chip bickies.