Washy and the Crocodile by James Maguire Page A

strange noise just outside the back door. Then she heard it and didn’t know what it was. Was it someone knocking? She didn’t know. It didn’t sound like it, but what else could it be?
    Evie wished whoever or whatever it was would go away. She was only a little girl, after all, and although she had a twin brother he wasn’t being a great help at the moment, as he’d gone out with his mother, who was also her mother, if you follow me—which you probably do. Uncle Otto was there to look after her, and Uncle Otto was a very good looker-after. Except when he was asleep. Like now.
    Evie had been given strict instructions by her mother never to go to the door if she were alone, and she had promised, and she was a good little girl who would never disobey her mother or break a promise, would she? But this was different, and they would all understand that if they knew. Surely. After all, someone might be in danger. So she went to the back door and opened it.
    What she saw was big. Very big. Much bigger than she had imagined. Enormous, in fact. Evie had never seen a camel before, not face to face, but she was too surprised to be frightened. The camel was very hairy, and it was camel coloured, and it had extra large brown eyes with huge lashes, and it was looking very thoughtful. Evie took all this in very quickly.
    â€œHello, Mr Camel,” she said. She thought it best to be polite. “What are you doing here?”
    â€œI was sent,” said the camel, in the deepest voice that Evie had ever heard, and nudged his huge head through the door and looked around. The camel was as curious as Evie and had no inhibitions about being polite. It seemed clear that he had never seen inside an English cottage before. Come to that, he had probably never looked inside any cottage before, whether in England or anywhere else, and—
    â€œI’m sorry,” said Evie, who wasn’t, “but you said you were sent. Who sent you?” She thought that just this once she would be extra polite. Especially to visiting camels who hadn’t even telephoned beforehand to say they might be dropping by, and might not like to have this mentioned. And what did it mean by ‘sent?’ Was it a camel with a divine mission? That was unlikely. Camels, as far as she knew, were not prone to going on divine missions. Eating thistles, yes; following divine missions, no.
    Uncle Otto, she remembered, had said that camels were touchy and could bite ferociously and that their breath smelled appalling. Camels, it seemed, were awkward, unpredictable, dangerous creatures, and only their Afghan camel-drivers really knew how to control them, although Uncle Otto had done his best, and those same Afghan camel drivers had all left and had gone back to Afghanistan, probably because of the White Australia policy that Mrs Waldegrave had referred to in school, only she had been so quick to condemn it that none of her pupils really understood what it was, and—
    â€œ He did,” said the camel, still searching the cottage with his huge brown eyes, and lifting up an even huger foot to scratch himself behind his astonishingly huge ear—an action that appeared to afford him intense delight. “Washy.”
    â€œOh, Washy,” said the little girl, as if her uncle’s friend Washy were in the habit of posting camels to their back door every week. “Why?”
    â€œHe was worried,” replied the camel, who had ceased to scratch and was looking around for something to eat. He didn’t have a big appetite — for a camel — but he did get awfully peckish in the evening.
    â€œAbout me?” Wondered the little girl.
    The camel stared at her as if she had lost her senses.
    â€œYou?” He said in his strange, dark, gravelly voice, which sounded as if it had been marinated in vinegar and then baked for several hours in a primitive oven — far beyond the time it needed to become a proper voice.