Geometric elephant head on a calf

Years back, before the new bakery went in, a travelling fair came through with a grey elephant called Mabel and a wagon that had lost both its wheels to a ditch. The showman sold his posters, took the train, and left her standing between Pell's umbrella stall and the fishmonger's, tethered to a drainpipe with a rope of faded bunting. Nobody had the heart to move her. The fishmonger's boy fed her cabbage stalks. Pell, who had never been nearer to anything bigger than a goose, measured her ears with a tape and said they were the shape of a chapel roof.

Her head was what people remembered. Broad at the brow, with lines running down her face like the spokes of a wet umbrella, and tusks that caught the light the way wet slate does. She stood with her head lifted in the gap between the two stalls, and when the teal dusk came down over the square, the spattered rain on the canvas made the whole place look like a painted sign someone had meant to finish.

The turn came when the bailiffs arrived with a van and a rope of their own. The market gathered, because a market always gathers when there is a row to watch. Pell opened every umbrella he owned and held them over her, one after another, until the square was a field of black domes and the bailiffs stood in the wet with nothing to do. Mabel lowered her head to the gutter and drank, long and slow. When she lifted it again, the bailiffs had gone home to their tea.