Monkey Business

by Anna Wilson

  As a result, Felix was a very happy boy indeed.

  3

  THE ELEPHANT

  IN THE CAR

  Good Thing for the planet or not, it had to be said that Flo could be very (what Mum privately called) Full of Herself in the mornings. Being Full of Herself basically consisted of Flo talking non-stop rubbish from the minute she opened the car door, according to Mum. And non-stop rubbish was not something Mum generally found easy to deal with first thing in the day.

  This morning was no exception.

  ‘Did you know that my dad once got attacked by a Real Live Elephant?’ Flo announced, flinging open the passenger door.

  Felix beamed. This was exactly why sharing lifts with Flo was a brilliant idea.

  ‘Good morning, Flora,’ said Mum wearily.

  Flo bounced on to the back seat next to Felix and chucked her school bag over her shoulder into the boot, thereby giving Dyson’s snoring snout its second near miss of the day.

  ‘It was wild, the elephant,’ Flo chattered on, her eyes wide and shining.

  Mum turned the radio up suddenly so that the boring man’s voice got a bit too loud and meant Flo had to really shout above the news and the traffic reports and the weather and all that yawn-worthy stuff to get Mum to listen to her.

  ‘Yes! A Real Live Wild Elephant, right—’

  ‘Strap yourself in, Flora, please,’ said Mum.

  ‘How can it have been wild if it attacked your dad?’ Felix asked excitedly, getting Bernard the snail out of his pocket and stroking the shell. ‘Was he in India or Africa at the time?’

  ‘No, he was in Croydon,’ said Flo, pulling the seat belt out in furious long loops. ‘Where his important office work is. WOW!’ She started at the sight of Bernard making his way across the back of Felix’s hand. ‘Is that a—?’

  Felix shook his head violently to stop Flo Giving the Game Away to Mum about Bernard and said loudly: ‘Go on – what happened?’

  Now obviously Flo could handle most bugs and creepy-crawly type things and frogs and toads and whatnot, but it just so happened that she was not all that keen on snails, so she made a face and backed herself into the corner of the car seat, as far away from Bernard as possible. ‘We-ell, this Real Live Wild Elephant had escaped from the zoo—’

  ‘Aha! So it wasn’t wild then!’ Felix cut in, triumphantly waving poor Bernard in the air. The snail zipped back inside his shell in fright. ‘It couldn’t have been wild if it was in a zoo – animals in zoos are Captivated Animals, you see.’

  Flo gave Felix a long hard look with narrowed eyes and crunched-up eyebrows, and Felix stopped feeling so triumphant. ‘So,’ he said, a bit nervously, ‘what happened next?’

  ‘So the WILD elephant,’ said Flo firmly, ‘charged at Dad, which was very frightening as he was driving one of those beetle-shaped cars at the time so he couldn’t run away. You know the kind I mean. What are they called, those beetle-shaped cars?’ Flo called out to Mum.

  Mum turned the radio down a tiny bit and said, ‘Beetles. Volkswagen Beetles, to be precise.’

  Flo frowned and then shrugged. ‘One of those, yes. He was driving a Forksvargen-Beetle-to-be-precise, and then this wild elephant charged at him and stuck his tusks right through the seat!’ She started kicking the back of Mum’s seat in a determined and rhythmical way as if to emphasize her point.

  Mum let out a strangled snarl.

  Felix gasped. Why did exciting things like this always happen to Flo’s family? His dad just cycled everywhere. He did not have a car shaped like a beetle, and he had never seen so much as a badger on his way to work, let alone a wild elephant. Then again, Felix realized, Dad probably wouldn’t tell him even if he had seen a wild elephant or a badger. His head was so full of strange work language, such as: ‘You’ve got to push the envelope’ and ‘I think we should think outside of the box’ and ‘It’s not rocket science’, that he wouldn’t remember about the elephant or the badger by the time he got home in the evening.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to own an elephant!’ Flo cried suddenly, kicking Mum’s seat a bit too hard this time.

  ‘Sit. Still. Flora.’ Mum sounded as if she was trying to hold pins in her mouth without dropping them.

  ‘If I was going to own a wild animal,’ Felix began, reaching for the book on apes and flicking through the pages, ‘I would prefer one of these monkeys that can climb—’

  But Flo wasn’t listening to Felix. She wasn’t listening to Mum either. She was bouncing up and down vigorously, straining at her seat belt as if gravity had suddenly stopped working.

  ‘An elephant would be so much more exciting to own than, say, a snail,’ she said. She fixed Felix with one eyebrow raised in a challenging sort of way.

  ‘Felix!’ Mum snapped. ‘You haven’t brought that snail into the car, have you?’

  ‘Oooo, an elephant!’ said Felix enthusiastically. He decided to take Flo’s lead – anything if it meant Mum could be diverted from the presence of Bernard. ‘It would be totally amazing to have an actual elephant, yes. But how do you think you get to be an Owner of an Elephant – or any wild animal at all?’ he added, sticking out his bottom lip thoughtfully. ‘That is, unless you are a zookeeper, which I am not.’

  ‘I think you have to prove that you are going to look after it in a responsible way,’ Flo said. ‘I should ask your Uncle Zed,’ she went on. ‘He knows everything about all the animals in the world, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ said Felix. ‘Almost everything.’ Zed hadn’t known what to do about the bird Felix had found in the garden which wouldn’t fly and wouldn’t walk and wouldn’t eat the bread and milk he got for it. It had died in the end.

  ‘Of course, it would need tons and tons of green stuff to eat,’ continued Flora. ‘Does your dad grow enough green stuff for an elephant to eat, d’you think?’

  Felix chewed a fingernail and thought it sounded suspiciously as though Flo was having one of her Missions. When Flo had one of her Missions, it usually meant that Felix ended up getting involved in something he couldn’t quite remember agreeing to. Like the time Flo had persuaded him that it would be a very Scientific Experiment About Gravity if they put Hammer the hamster at the top of the slide in the garden to see how quickly he would get to the bottom. Everything would probably have been all right if Colin the cat had not noticed and flung himself out of the apple tree in the path of the sliding hamster with the word ‘LUNCH’ written all over his fangs. Felix had been grounded for a week and Hammer had been so traumatized that the vet had had to give him some special medicine called Sedatives which had Cost the Earth.

  Flo stopped bouncing and picked her nose instead. Then she wiped it quietly on the back of Mum’s seat while looking at Mum’s reflection in the rear-view mirror in an entirely innocent and charming way.

  ‘Hmm. Yes, I think your uncle would know exactly how to get hold of an elephant,’ she said. ‘And if you looked after it then that would help to protect it from being hunted for its Ivory Bits.’

  ‘It’s terribly sad, that hunting thing,’ Felix said knowledgeably. ‘They use the Ivory Bits for things like drinking horns.’

  Flo rolled her eyes. ‘Derrrr! Not any more – that was in the Olden-Fashioned Days,’ she said in exasperation. ‘But they do use them for making pianos, you know. I used to have a piano with Ivory Bits for the keyboard – only the white part, obviously. The black keys cannot be made from ivory, as ivory is not black.’

  This was so fascinating that Felix had now completely forgotten about the elephant idea. He sat back, his book on apes lying discarded beside him. He had also forgotten about Bernard who had worked his way out of Felix’s pocket and on to the edge of the car seat and was making for the door handle.

  ‘So what is the black part of the piano made of?’ Felix asked, eyes wide in wonder.

  ‘Oh, sabre-toothed tigers’ teeth,’ said Flo airily.

  ‘Wow!’ said Felix. It never ceased to amaze him how wonderfully wise and full of informat
ion his best friend was. He had not even known that sabre-toothed tigers had black teeth.

  Mum coughed as if something had got stuck in her throat. ‘I think you’ll find that pianos these days have plastic keyboards,’ she said, looking at Felix and Flo in the rear-view mirror with a tight-lipped smile.

  Flo went a bit red. Then she shrugged and quickly said, ‘Well, obviously I know that. I don’t have that piano any more, anyway. It was an Olden-Fashioned-Day one. I gave it to my worst best friend at my old school . . . So, Felix,’ she said, changing the subject in a firm and determined voice, ‘what about this elephant then? Shall we get one, or not?’

  ‘No more time to chat,’ Mum said, sounding suddenly a lot more cheerful as she pulled into the school car park. ‘The bell’s about to go – out you get, you two. And careful when you get your bags out the back. We don’t want Dyson trying to escape.’

  Dyson lifted his head hopefully at the sound of his name.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Mum added, raising her voice above Flo who was still rabbiting on about elephants. ‘Felix, are you listening? Zed and Silver are picking you up tonight. I’ll come and get you from the boat after tea.’

  Felix flung open the car door and Bernard took his chance, dropping to the ground and slinking off before he could be pulverized by Felix and Flo as they ran in through the school gates, babbling to each other at top volume just as the bell rang for register.

  4

  FLO IS

  ON A ROLL

  Felix could not sit still all of that morning. He could not work out whether he was fizzing with excitement at the prospect of a Real Live Elephant coming to stay, or whether he was full of anxiety and worry about the idea. The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was actually both. An elephant as a pet would mean that life would no longer be boring at home. Even Merv would be impressed and probably leave him alone once he had an elephant by his side.

  But then how on earth did anyone get hold of a Real Live Elephant in the first place? Did zookeepers bring them over from Africa on aeroplanes or on ships? And how did you get an aeroplane or a ship? Did you have to know someone who owned one, or could you just buy a ticket? He knew that there were planes called jumbo jets. Maybe they were the ones for the elephants.

  It was very frustrating. Felix had all these extremely important questions that needed answers, and he was stuck in the classroom learning the nine times table.

  He looked across the table at Flo who was busily filling in her maths sheet.

  ‘Flo?’ he hissed.

  She looked up at him from under her fluffy blonde mop of hair and frowned.

  ‘I need to talk to you about this Elephant Thing,’ he whispered.

  ‘Felix!’ Mr Beasley had magically appeared by his side and was breathing his cheese-’n’-onion breath snortily down Felix’s neck. ‘You will be staying in at break if you have not finished the worksheet!’

  Felix sighed and started filling in numbers at random.

  By the time the bell had rung for break, Felix had decided that the whole Elephant Thing was not going to work out. His head was hurting from the nine times table anyway, and he simply didn’t have enough brain power left to work out how to get hold of an elephant. He ran into the playground with Flo hot on his heels. Once they were safely by the bug bases and away from the Boys Who Played Football, he turned to face his friend and said, ‘About this elephant—’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to talk to you too. I have been thinking about it all morning and I have decided we absolutely must do what we can to Progress This Project immediately,’ she said in a posh, TV-newsreader-type voice.

  Felix frowned. ‘No, I don’t agree—’

  Flo arched one eyebrow impressively, stopping Felix in mid-tracks. ‘I have actually come up with a brilliant idea which you could say is Foolproof. I was multi-tasking it while I was doing my maths sheet and I have got it all worked out.’

  She backed Felix into a corner and, dropping her voice to a hush, told him what they needed was A Plan of Action.

  ‘Last week my dad read a book to me about a man who had travelled to Africa and could talk animal languages and brought animals back from Africa to live in his house. He was called Doctor Dolittle. So you see it must be possible.’

  The rumbling feeling Felix had had in his tummy all morning grew stronger. It was panic, he realized. Flo was most definitely On A Roll.

  He took a deep breath and said calmly, ‘This book could not have been a true-life story if it said that the man could talk animal languages, cos no one in true life can actually do that.’

  This was a way of buying Felix a bit of time. He did secretly think that there probably were people who could talk animal languages, because otherwise how did you explain those people on the telly who could get seals to understand exactly what tricks to do in those big swimming pools? And how could people train parrots to talk as well? And once he had seen a sign at the zoo which said ‘wolves talk: 2.00 p.m’. (He did wonder why they only spoke at two o’clock in the afternoon, but there were some mysteries in this life which were not worth bothering to solve.)

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter about whether the animal languages bit is true life or not,’ Flo said dismissively. ‘What I am talking about is getting an elephant.’

  ‘Yes, but, Flo, no one has ever had an elephant as a pet. Not in England anyway. If they did, it would have been on the news,’ said Felix. ‘And it would never fit inside my house and we only have quite a small garden at the back.’ He tried to change the subject altogether. ‘Can we talk about apes and monkeys now? Cos I have brought in my book to show you—’

  Flo held up her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Felix Stowe, but I think you will find that I was talking first.’

  Felix rolled his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ he said heavily. ‘So where do you think we would keep it? IF we could get one in the first place,’ he added with deep scepticism.

  Flo looked up at the sky as if she was talking to someone who had not one single ounce of a brain. ‘That would be your responsibility, obviously,’ she said. ‘I absolutely could not have it at my place. My mum has only just finished having the garden designed, and Dad has filled the allotment with new plants. And our garage is completely Full to Bursting with simply heaps of stuff. But just imagine!’ she said, changing tack hastily. ‘If we had our Very Own wild elephant, we could set it on mean people, like Humphrey Darling. He would soon learn his lesson and not flick wet tissues and bogeys at us in RE.’

  Felix was worried that he was losing control of the situation far too rapidly. Flo was tricky enough to keep up with at the best of times, but today she seemed to be on Planet Janet with the Weirdos. If the elephant lived in his house, how would he get it to school to set it on mean people like Humphrey Darling, for goodness sake? He could hardly just squeeze it into the car without Mum noticing.

  ‘You still haven’t said how we are going to get this elephant,’ Felix said, a bit sulkily.

  ‘Listen,’ Flo said, ‘you are the one who is always saying that you wish you had a pet that was not boring. And you keep telling me you need a replacement for Jonah.’

  Poor Jonah. He had not survived longer than a week. Felix missed him rather a lot considering he was only a goldfish.

  ‘That’s true,’ Felix said, nodding. ‘OK, fine. I’ll ask Zed about elephants when he picks me up. It’s my birthday soon and he’s been asking me what I want as a present . . . Do you want to come back with us tonight and see what he says?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Flo. ‘I’m going to Millie’s.’

  Millie was a very pink and girly girl. Felix was about to say as much, but Flo gave him another one of her Looks, so he didn’t.

  5

  THE

  FAVOURITE UNCLE

  Felix tore out of school at the first sight of his uncle.

  ‘Hey, dude!’ Zed cried, throwing his arms round his nephew.

  ‘How do you get hold of a Real Live Extra-Wild Elephant?’ said Felix,
gasping for breath and struggling to free himself from the monster bear hug.

  ‘Heeey! A joke!’ Zed said, slapping Felix on the back. ‘What do you reckon, Silvs?’ he asked his girlfriend. ‘How do you get hold of a Real Life Extra-Wild Elephant?’

  ‘Errr. Like, stick it in the fridge?’ Silver asked, twirling one of the long ribbons that trailed from the back of her head like octopus tentacles.

  ‘Yeah! Those jokes always have elephants in fridges, don’t they, Feels?’

  ‘NO!’ Felix cried. It was quite frustration-making talking to Zed and Silver sometimes. ‘It’s not a joke! I really entirely mean it – how do you get hold of an extra-wild elephant? To KEEP?’

  ‘OK, OK – less stress!’ Zed said, putting a suntanned hand on Felix’s shoulder. ‘You can tell me all about it once we’re on the boat.’

  But Felix was desperate to talk to Zed about the elephant. He was worried that Flo would be asking him for all the details of his conversation with Zed the next morning, so he needed to talk to him – and fast.

  ‘But it’s Immensely Important,’ Felix said, hopping from foot to foot.

  ‘Feels, man,’ said Zed quietly, stooping down and looking deep into his nephew’s eyes, ‘we have all the time in the world, yeah? Let’s save it till we’re out of this madhouse.’ He nodded in the direction of the hordes of other children streaming out of school towards their parents and carers, all shouting and talking at once.

  ‘All right,’ Felix said grudgingly. Zed had a point.

  He climbed on to the trailer bike that was attached to the back of Zed’s tandem and strapped on the helmet his uncle handed him. This was the way to travel – far better than the car. Zed was up in front, then Silver, and Felix pedalled on the trailer bike behind them. He loved the way the warm spring air went all whooshy around his ears as they sped off down to the tow path. That was the other good thing about the bike – you didn’t have to stick to the road, and you didn’t get caught in traffic jams.