The third lot of words my son chose to make a story out of. Cranes (the vehicule, not the bird) are particularly important to him. The giraffe, I think, comes from a small ceramic giraffe I bought him that he recently broke.
27th September, 2026
There once was a boy who lived on the twelfth floor of a big building in an enormous city. This building had been made by a window-maker who loved windows more than anything, and so he had decided to put different shaped windows for every single apartment. On the first floor were stars and moons and planets. On the second were guayabas, pears and mangoes. On the third were fish of all shapes and sizes — from sunfish to to starfish — and the fourth and fifth were smart cutlery (including a tiny teaspoon small enough for a mouse to look out of). On the twelfth, where the boy lived, every window was a fried egg. The building had twenty-one floors, so this went all the way up until the top had one huge, enormous, round spaceship-like window — in fact the whole apartment looked like it was a spaceship about to fly off the building and into the sky. A very old blind man lived inside: he was the only person brave enough to live in a house on the twenty-first floor that was nearly all window and nothing else. The window designer had envisioned it looking like a big burger. It had been his failed big finale, but nevermind.
Recently, it hadn’t mattered if the building had any windows anyway, let alone ones of all shapes and sizes, because the windows were so dirty it was as if the building had none at all. Nobody living inside — including the boy, who used to watch the sun come up in the morning but had resigned himself to pretending his breakfast fried egg was the sun instead — could see the sky anymore. It was as though they were all living in a huge anthill made of mud, with just faint lights where windows should be.
The reason for this was that every window cleaner in the city had refused to come and clean the building anymore. It took them five hours just to do floor two, they complained, because just the pineapple-shaped window needed special brushes that got into all the tiny spikes (the window designer was incredibly detail-orientated). And so they had gone on strike.
The little, beetle-y building manager Salvador — who had a big white moustache that nearly met his big white bushy eyebrows in the middle, and always wore a beige suit, so that he looked a bit like a vanilla ice cream — was in a deep panic. He was always in a panic, in fact, and when he panicked a lot you’d see a flurry of white rushing past your face and feel the tingle of fluff on your cheek, and you’d wipe at it, thinking some ice-cream had landed there.
He didn’t know what to do. Everyone in the building would come down the lift in the mornings and burst through the doors in a fury, telling him they hadn’t seen the sun for four days straight and what was he going to do about it? Salvador would nod and nod and twirl his moustache nervously as he listened to them, then run into his cabin in the back, sit down, take a deep breath, and wonder what to do. He’d called everyone — even his great aunt, who sometimes doubled up as a window cleaner. But nobody would do it. He’d run through his whole address book, and every cleaner in the whole city had turned him down.
One day, when Salvador had fallen asleep from the exhaustion of all the complaints, he woke up on his swivel chair with a jolt. The sun was peeping through a crack in his cabin window (which was shaped like a chicken) and hitting his face. He sat up: he’d had an idea.
Salvador rushed round the city handing out flyers and putting up posters. They read: Competition: One Million Pesos to the first person who manages to clean every window of the building above the park.
Soon there was a line of window cleaners around the block, strike or no strike, because a million pesos is a million pesos. But it was no good. Just as they got started they’d get exhausted, their elbows aching from the scrubbing and the wiping. One managed to get to the sixth floor, but then nighttime came, and it got cold, and he decided to give up and go home to his dog, who waited for him on the step each night, and who was probably getting hungry by now.
That same night, as the window cleaner went home in a grump, having imagined himself having a million pesos that morning and now realising he wouldn’t have them, he threw the flyer out the window of his car. It fluttered into the backlot of a crane company, where all the cranes were asleep. Except one — the littlest one, who had been shoved right to the back corner because he had a broken wheel and nobody could think of what to do with him.
The little crane wheeled over to the crumpled flyer and picked it up with his shovel. “This could be the ticket that takes me out of here,” he thought. “This way, I could get to the countryside and live on a farm, like I’ve always wanted to do.”
There was just one problem. The crane was tiny, and there was no way he’d be able to stretch up twenty-one floors, and certainly none of the other cranes would help him. He looked at them as they slept, their enormous bulky bodies all still in the dark warm air, and wished he were taller, and didn’t have his broken wheel.
This backlot was right next to the zoo, and when the crane couldn’t sleep he often looked in to see the other animals. It made him feel like he had company, watching them, as they often weren’t asleep either, and would sit there, missing home. The wall of the backlot divided him from the giraffe pen, where a big beautiful giraffe called Maisie lived. Maisie was always sad, with her neck curled out on the floor.
Maisie’s neck was especially long — the longest of all her friends and family, whom she’d left behind long ago — meaning she had never, since being in this cage, been able to really and truly and properly stretch upwards. She had tried this angle and that angle, twisting it so she could peep sideways through the bars and craning backwards so she could look at the wire right up above, but nothing worked. There was simply not enough space for her. And so she had resigned herself to the floor, lying flat, where she could at least have her long, beautiful neck laid out in front of her, and the tears rolled downwards and left her face quickly onto the ground.
For this reason the other cranes had hardly seen her, and nor had many of the people who came to the zoo. Except the little crane, who stretched upwards to exercise his broken wheel.
That night, he lifted himself upwards and peered over the wall at Maisie. There she was as always, with a little pool of tears dampening her cheeks. The crane said “Psst,” and Maisie blinked and opened a big brown eye and looked at him sideways.
“Look at this,” said the crane, and he tossed the flyer into Maisie’s cage. Maisie looked at it blankly, blinked, and closed her eyes again.
“Can you help me?” the crane said. “If I — I mean we — win this competition, we could both escape.”
Maisie only sighed. In her mind there was no point escaping: she didn’t even know where her family were these days.
The crane tried again; he was getting determined now. “If I — I mean, we — win this, you could come with me to a farm, and we could have an orchard, and you could pick apples off trees all day long.”
At that the giraffe raised her head and looked at the crane.
“We could find a farm with an oak,” went on the crane. “An ancient, tall oak — the tallest and most ancient in the country — and you could prune the leaves right from the very top of it.”
Maisie closed her eyes and imagined the feeling of a breeze right up high, far above the oak, on her soft golden cheeks. She gave a slow nod to the crane, who leapt upwards — and then regretted it, because he tumbled down behind the wall again and woke up the other cranes, who all grumbled and mumbled at being woken up.
The crane spent the rest of the night gathering tools, stretching upwards as far as he could, and cutting a hole in the top of the giraffe’s cage. As soon as he’d made one big enough, the giraffe lifted her head, and lifted and lifted, and the little crane watched in awe, craning his own neck backwards, as the giraffe’s head shot into the sky on the end of her immensely long neck, which was double the length of any other giraffe’s.
By dawn the two had set off, the giraffe folded neatly into the crane’s shovel as he zoomed along the quiet motorway.
They arrived by six o’clock outside Salvador’s cabin, and had to tap on the window to wake him up, as of course he couldn’t see that they were there. The angry residents had been making Salvador’s window extra dirty by putting mud onto it, and poor Salvador felt so guilty about everything that he had always insisted the window cleaners don’t clean his window, incase the residents get even more furious.
When he opened the door and saw the crane and the giraffe holding his flyer he startled, then shook his head. “No giraffes!” he said, angrily, knowing the Zoo would come after him now, thinking he’d let their animal escape — and the last thing Salvador needed was more people after him. Salvador slammed the door in their faces and went back to bed, trying to get a few more moments before people started rapping on his door complaining. But he couldn’t sleep. He lay there with his eyes open and his moustache twitching, expecting to hear the sound of a zoo van any minute now.
What happened next was even more surprising than seeing a crane and a giraffe at your door at six o’clock. Salvador heard waves of clapping and cheering outside. He rubbed his eyes and went outside. On the pavement stood a huge crowd of people, all looking upwards. Salvador blinked and looked upwards into the bright light and couldn’t believe his eyes.
There were the crane and the giraffe on the tenth floor — the crane stretching upwards as far as he could, reaching with all his might despite his sore wheel, with a bucket of water in his shovel. And there beside him, balancing on top of the shovel, was Maisie, who had a brush tied to the end of her long purple tongue and was whipping it through and along each tiny crevice of each window. Even every individual pineapple spike was shining in the morning sun.
They moved at record speed, swinging along each row of each floor. People leaned on their gleaming hammer and trombone and lolly shaped windows, handing Maisie and the crane snacks as they went and cheering them along. The boy from the twelfth floor handed them a fried egg he’d made himself, saying he wouldn’t be needing it today, and Maisie and the crane ate it up in one and thanked him.
But Maisie was frantic, she hardly had time to stop — she had never had such a passion for life; she hadn’t stretched this much in years. The bigger cranes from the backlot had woken up and come along when they heard what was happening, and when they saw the littlest one stretching up on his broken wheel with a giraffe on his shovel they stopped grumbling, and lifted him upwards so that he and Maisie could reach the topmost floors.
When they reached the very top, the burger-spaceship twenty-first floor, they stopped and looked in. The blind man stood face to face with Maisie, staring at her through the dark window with his dark sunglasses on. Maisie got a bigger brush and cleaned the whole window in one big long swoop, looping her neck all around it, then whipping it back again.
The man didn’t move an inch. Maisie felt a little sad. But then, very slowly, the man took a step forward and rested his hand on the window. He kept it there, just in front of Maisie’s face. And then he smiled. He could feel the hot sun starting to warm the glass for the first time in months.
Now Maisie could see all around, and hear from right down below the small sounds of the loud crowd. They were all packed tightly together — so tightly, and all looking up so hard, that they didn’t see the white van with the word ZOO written across it come rushing into the car park.
But Maisie saw it. And she saw, standing in front of it with his little arms held out at his sides like a very small scarecrow, a tiny ice-cream-looking man with a fistful of papers: Salvador.
He was not letting them past. Maisie could see his white moustache going in four directions at once like a helicopter as he waved forms at the zookeepers, telling them there was a form for this, there had to be a form, and that they couldn’t take anything out of this car park and his building site until somebody had filled one (actually, there was no form, and Salvador knew that, but he stood there anyway).
The zookeepers were a good deal bigger than Salvador, and they could have stepped around him at any moment, but he seemed to always get just in front of them with his moustache and his papers, both of which were tickling the zookeeper’s faces so much that they got distracted. Then one of them took Salvador by the shoulders to move him out of the way — and that was when Maisie decided.
She whizzed downwards, ordering the little crane down with her. They flew past the crowd, who all wanted to congratulate these new heroes, and Maisie shot her long head out across the car park and stood herself between Salvador and the van, and rose up, and up, and up, to her full height.
The zookeeper let go of Salvador’s shoulders immediately. He tipped his head back, and back, and back, as far as it could go, and looked up at Maisie in her full, glorious height.
“Blimey” he said. “I had no idea you were this tall.”
And he and his partner got into the van and drove away as fast as they could. Salvador was nowhere to be seen. The crowd had now all come to where Maisie was and were cheering her and the crane loudly, but Maisie didn’t stop.
They all looked to where she was going now; the little cabin. “Typical Salvador” said on of the residents “always hiding away”. But Maisie ignored them. She picked up her brush and ferociously cleaned the chicken-shaped window on the cabin, taking extra care to make sure no mud was left on any of the feathers. Inside, Salvador flinched and cowered, believing the crowd were coming to get him. But when he looked up he just saw Maisie’s big brown eyelash-ed eyes blinking at him through the window. Then she laid the brush down on the step by the door, gave Salvador a nod that said be brave, and went to find the crane.
Nobody ever came looking for the little crane at the backlot. The big cranes admitted, when people asked them, that they had never once been able to think what to do with him anyway — and so nobody had ever thought to go looking for him.
Little did they know that only two months later, the crane and Maisie were wheeling down the track of a country lane. There were tall golden and green trees all around. They came out at the end of the lane at a big, flat farmyard, and stopped. “Here we are,” said the little crane.
Maisie looked about. There, in the middle of a little humpback hill above the farmyard, was the biggest, most ancient, curling and whirling oak tree she had ever seen. Maisie stretched up her head as far as it went and felt the breeze on her cheek. A tear rolled down her face, and this time it had to travel all the way down her long long long long prize-winning neck before it reached the grassy ground.