Monkey Business

by Anna Wilson

  ‘So you threw it away into the landfill place after all?’ Felix said, eyes wide with outrage.

  ‘No! No!’ Zed protested. ‘If you can’t reuse, recycle, remember? I took it to this place in town where they take computers to pieces and recycle what’s inside them and make them into other things.’

  ‘Other computers?’ Felix asked, his eyes lighting up.

  ‘Er – I guess so,’ Zed muttered, inspecting the big toe on his right foot.

  ‘So can we go there and ask them to make us a new one out of the Bits and Bobs from the old one then? That would be like a second-hand computer, wouldn’t it? Like from one of those shops for charity where you take in your old clothes and toys and you can spend your pocket money on new clothes and toys except that it’s much cheaper than what your own old stuff really cost when it was new?’ Felix was getting really excited now. He could just see himself walking into this place in town and giving them all his pocket money (he had £9.76 now, which was a Total Fortune and would be bound to impress them in the shop) and walking out with his very own laptop!

  Zed looked up at Felix through his stringy hair and said, ‘No, mate. Sorry. It’s all in pieces now and that’s that. No more computer. Finito. Nada. Kaputt.’

  ‘What?’ said Felix, shaking his head. Was Zed speaking Swahili again? But even though he didn’t understand some of the words he knew what Zed was telling him. ‘Never mind,’ he said brightly. ‘We can use the computer at my place. You’re picking me up tomorrow with Flo, aren’t you? You can go on the Internet at my house then. We’ll have loads of time to look up everything before Mum gets home!’

  Zed nodded slowly. ‘Sounds like a plan. OK. I’ll tell your mum I’ll cook supper tomorrow.’

  Felix’s face split into the cheesiest grin ever to be seen on anything that wasn’t made of cheese. ‘Yay!’ he shouted, punching the air with his fist.

  7

  FLO’S

  NEW IDEA

  ‘Zed said “yes”!’ Felix whispered to Flo.

  It was the next morning and Mrs Small was doing the school run. He didn’t want her hearing about the elephant as she would be bound to try and Put A Stop to it. Mums always did try and Put A Stop to anything fun or exciting in life.

  ‘What?’ Flo shouted. She had her headphones on because she was trying to get to Level 5 on her favourite game, Animal World, where the tortoise lets you buy a twirly umbrella to match the curtains in your house.

  Mrs Small hated Animal World ‘with a passion’. She said it was a ‘waste of time’ and that Flo became ‘so impossible to live with’ when she played it that Mrs Small frequently said she felt as if she had ‘frankly lost the will to live’. Felix just thought it was boring cos he couldn’t play it with her, and the animals in the game did not behave like real live animals, because they had hats and umbrellas and houses, and Felix did not approve of such nonsense.

  He tried once more to compete with Animal World for Flo’s attention by lifting one of the earpieces and yelling right into Flo’s ear, ‘Zed said “YES”!’

  ‘Hey!’ Flo yelled back, leaping in her seat and glaring accusingly at Felix. ‘Whaddayoudo that for?’

  Felix pointed to Flo’s ears and mimed taking off the headphones.

  ‘Flora Small, for goodness sake stop screeching like that – oh, you haven’t brought that awful game with you? Honestly, I feel as if I’m losing the will—’

  ‘ALL RIGHT!’ Flo said to Felix crossly. She yanked off the headphones. She had not heard a word her mum had said, which Felix thought was just as well, as he didn’t enjoy the journey to school with Flo and her mum bickering. Flo seemed to actually like a good fight, Felix had discovered. Mrs Small would say, ‘It’s a bit nippy today,’ and even if Flo’s teeth were chattering and the tip of her nose was turning blue, she would say, ‘No it’s not. The sun is shining.’

  ‘So what is more important than Level Five then?’ Flo said, turning on Felix moodily.

  Felix ignored the sulky tone and announced, ‘Zed said he’s going to adopt me an elephant!’

  Flo’s moodiness turned to hyper-excitedness in the blink of a second. ‘OH! That is fanterabulacious!’ she cried. ‘What kind of elephant? African or Indian?’

  ‘African,’ Felix said firmly. ‘Ears are important when it comes to elephants, and everyone knows that African ones have the biggest. Anyway, Zed lived in Africa, so he’ll know all about how to feed it and so on.’

  ‘Good,’ Flo said, nodding seriously. ‘And will it be fully grown or still kind of a baby? Babies don’t have tusks, you know.’

  Felix got a tiny bit irritated when he realized that he hadn’t thought through many of the details. ‘I know babies don’t have tusks,’ he said, and then to Mrs Small: ‘Can Flo come round for tea tonight to do Research on Elephants?’

  ‘That sounds lovely, dear,’ she replied. ‘Now, grab your bags – we’re here.’

  There was still time before registration as they were early for once, so Felix and Flo raced into the playground to the bench where they began to plan for the arrival of the elephant in earnest.

  ‘So, first of all, we need to write it all down,’ said Flo, rummaging in her book bag for a pencil and a special-looking sparkly notebook.

  Felix eyed the notebook suspiciously. ‘I thought you didn’t like sparkly things that were girly?’ he asked her.

  Flo blushed a bit and snapped, ‘It’s not mine, OK? I kind of borrowed it from Millie yesterday.’

  Felix shrugged. ‘OK.’

  Flo started scribbling furiously on one of the pink pages. ‘El-e-fants and Addopshun’ she wrote and then turned to Felix excitedly. ‘So, what are you going to call it? Will it be a boy or a girl?’

  Felix rolled his eyes. ‘Duuuuuh! It will already have a name, won’t it?’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ Flo protested. ‘If it’s going to be our elephant, we should get a chance to name it!’

  ‘Look,’ Felix replied extra-patiently, ‘if you were a baby and you were adopted, then your real mum would have given you a name and so your adopted mum would have to keep calling you that same name, otherwise you would get confused.’

  ‘You know nothing about adoption,’ said Flo, tutting. ‘If you are a baby, then you don’t know your name yet, so you can be called another name, actually, and it won’t matter. Anyway,’ she added, a note of triumph entering her voice, ‘elephants don’t understand human language, so you can call them anything you like.’

  Felix thought that for once he might get really quite annoyed with Flo. He was about to say so when Flo’s pink friend from the day before walked up and said, ‘Flora Small, that is MY notebook you are writing in, I think you will find.’

  ‘OH WELL I’m so sorry, Millie Hampton, but I think you will find that you said I could borrow it, and so that is what I am doing,’ said Flo, standing up and putting her hands on her hips in a quite impressively scary manner. Felix shrank back into the bench a bit, just in case.

  Millie Hampton raised her eyebrows. ‘And what is so important that you need to write it all down in MY notebook?’ she asked.

  Flo narrowed her eyes and said, ‘Not that it is actually any of your business, I think you’ll find, but Felix and I are planning to open a zoo, actually.’

  Felix made a small squeaky sound. He wasn’t quite sure where it had come from, but it was the only noise he seemed capable of making in response to such an outrageous claim. A zoo? What on earth was she talking about?

  ‘Yes,’ Flo said. ‘We are starting with an elephant, which Felix is adopting for an extra-special birthday present, and once that has settled into its New Environment, we will move on to bigger and better things such as bears and giraffes. (But obviously not together as the bear would probably eat the giraffe and that would not be very good news for the giraffe.)’

  Felix had stopped breathing. This was unbelievable. He knew that Flo had always enjoyed telling Tall Stories, as Mum called them – like the time she told Felix that her dad
was in hospital and only had days to live, but actually he was in Swindon teaching a computer skills course.

  Anyway, Felix was ninety-nine point nine per cent certain that Flo had not got him to agree to this new zoo idea. Flo had mentioned about possibly adopting a few monkeys once the elephant had settled in, but no one had ever said anything about bears or giraffes. Bears and giraffes were slightly harder to hide in a house than an elephant, surely?

  ‘A zoo? Coolio McSquoolio!’ Millie said. ‘Will you get any flamingos? I love flamingos! They’re so PINK!’ And she ran off squealing and flapping her arms, telling anyone who could be bothered to listen that she was a flamingo.

  Flo rolled her eyes and blew out through her nose, sending a fleck of snot flying out, Felix noticed, though he decided now was not the time to mention this.

  ‘She is a Waste of Space.’ Flo grimaced.

  ‘But I thought you went to her house yesterday?’ Felix pointed out.

  ‘So?’ said Flo. ‘Doesn’t mean I have to like her today, for heaven’s sake. Now, what do you think about my new idea?’

  Luckily Felix was what is called Saved by the Bell – in other words, he didn’t have to think of an answer straight away or try to understand what he had just been told about the complicated rules of girls’ friendships, because the bell for registration rang.

  Felix found his mind wandering during the first lesson, which was geography. Felix was not a Big Fan of geography. He could not see the point of knowing about gorges and rainfall and evaporation. When would he ever need to know about evaporation, for goodness sake? All evaporation was good for was making steam, and when did a human need steam in the course of a normal day?

  Felix began staring out of the window at the new, fresh, green leaves on the beech tree in the playground. He loved new beech leaves: they were soft and furry like newborn baby mice. He pondered for a while on the marvels of New Life and from there his mind wandered to tiny elephants being born, and before he knew it he was thinking about what Flo had said to Millie about the zoo.

  We can’t have a zoo, he thought. In fact, I’m really not at all sure even about adopting an elephant, now that I come to think of it.

  He went round and round in circles in his head, fretting and sweating. How was he going to get out of this? Flo was going to be so cross with him if he told her he’d changed his mind.

  He put his head in his hands and groaned aloud.

  ‘Felix STOWE!’ Mr Beasley shouted.

  Felix jumped and knocked his table’s pot of crayons flying. ‘Er – evaporation?’ he twittered, thinking he’d missed a question.

  ‘What?’ Mr Beasley barked. ‘I asked you how your diagram of the water cycle was coming along!’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Felix answered, shifting his eyes sneakily sideways at Flo’s exercise book, on which was a beautiful picture, all coloured in with the arrows pointing the right way and everything.

  He scrabbled to pick up a blue crayon from the spilt pot and started scribbling furiously to try to persuade his teacher that he was in fact colouring in a blue lake. Mr Beasley sighed heavily and crossed his arms and walked to the other side of the classroom to see how some others were getting on.

  ‘Flo, are you serious about the zoo?’ Felix whispered, leaning towards Flo so that the teacher wouldn’t see he was talking.

  ‘OK, well, maybe not an actual zoo,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m not sure how you get the cages and stuff for that. But maybe we could just get a few more animals that need looking after and then we could let them free into the wild when they are ready. What about that?’

  Felix shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he said. His mind was full of images of adopted elephants being let loose on to the housing estate where he lived. But hopefully that didn’t count as The Wild. At least Flo had backtracked a bit on the zoo idea, though.

  But Flo had no intention of backtracking. Instead she had started drawing elaborate pictures of animals on her water-cycle diagram. ‘Elephants need green stuff to eat, so we will have to keep it in your garden,’ she said. ‘And say we had a few seals to keep the elephant company . . . they would need water to swim in. Well, I’ve got a pond at home, don’t forget.’

  Felix sat back in his chair moodily. ‘Seals won’t fit in your pond!’ he said.

  ‘That is the only correct statement you’ve made so far this morning, Felix Stowe.’ Mr Beasley was standing over him, shaking his head in disbelief at the scribbly blue blob in Felix’s geography exercise book. ‘Now – I think you’ll be staying in at break-time to finish your diagram, won’t you?’

  Felix should have been relieved to hear the bell go at the end of the day. Break-time had been the worst ever with Mr Beasley breathing his cheese-’n’-onion breath down Felix’s neck. And lunchtime had been pretty bad, with Flo wittering on to Felix about the zoo, which was growing vaster by the minute. When she started talking in great detail about the Marmoset Enclosure in Felix’s bathroom, he raised his voice and said in a panic, ‘FLO! Flo . . . I was thinking about the elephant—’

  But it was no good – she simply raised her voice higher and talked right over him.

  ‘I KNOW! I can’t STOP thinking about it! It’s sooooo exciting!’

  ‘Yeah, erm – maybe it would be more exciting if we just visited one—’

  ‘You’re right. We should visit one first, so we know what to expect.’

  The conversation had gone from Downright Difficult to Completely Impossible. Felix miserably decided that he did not know how to get out of the hole he was now in. Flo was dead set on the elephant, and nothing short of an earthquake or some other totally major event was going to distract her or change her mind.

  8

  FELIX GOES

  FOR PLAN B

  Zed and Silver were waiting for Flo and Felix outside school. They had each brought a bike with its own trailer so that Felix could pedal behind Zed, and Flo could pedal behind Silver. The cats had come along for the ride too. Yin was in Silver’s basket and Yang was in Zed’s.

  ‘Oooh, they are just so cuuuuuute!’ cooed Flo, in what Felix thought was quite a girly way.

  People stared at them and waved as they went past and commented on the cats, who occasionally woke and stretched and peeked over the edge of the baskets. Felix felt altogether rather Special and Important, which cheered him up a bit after the Very Uncomfortable Day he had just had.

  Flo quickly tired of the whole bike ride thing, though.

  ‘I wish people would stop waving and calling out,’ she shouted grumpily after about the hundredth passer-by had said, ‘Hellooooo!’

  ‘Why?’ Silver asked.

  ‘It’s embarrassing when I can’t wave back, cos I’m concentrating so extra-hard on not falling off,’ Flo moaned. ‘And my hair is flicking into my mouth when I speak, so I can’t shout “hello” back at them,’ she added, through a mouthful of blonde fluff.

  Flo’s hair was, even on a normal, unwashed day, the bounciest, curliest, ringlet-iest hair Felix had ever seen on a human being. It reminded him of a poodle’s fur, except that it was shinier and didn’t smell doggy.

  Felix loved it. He often found himself thinking that he would like to take one of the curls of her hair and wind it round and round his finger the opposite way from the curl to see if it would straighten out, like you can with those curly ribbons you get on presents at Christmas. He was sure that if he had hair as fascinating as Flo’s he would play with it all the time and possibly hide useful things in it like spare pencils and rubbers and spiders and stuff. Maybe even hamsters as well. You could take Hammer around with you everywhere for a Total Eternity if you had hair like that. No one would ever know.

  But even Felix could see the downside to having Flo’s hair when you were on a windy bike ride. Poor Flo looked like a yeti by the time they reached Felix’s house. (Not that Felix had ever seen a yeti in real life, but he was sure it would look like Flo did at that moment in time.) Her hair had gone into a wild manic frizz-ball so that it was not ju
st sticking out in its usual triangly way, but was now sticking bolt upright as well as out. She actually looked a bit like a dandelion clock too, except her hair was yellow and not white, thought Felix, as he got off the trailer bike and helped Zed lock it up down the side of the house.

  ‘Hello, everyone!’ trilled Mum, opening the door to greet them. ‘Is that you hiding under there, Flora?’ she asked.

  This was a bit mean, Felix thought, as it was quite obvious Flo was Suffering a Great Deal already.

  Flo scowled from under her yellow birds’ nest and puffed at her fluffy fringe.

  Felix was annoyed that Mum was home early. He had rather been hoping that he and Zed and Flo could have had a Moment’s Peace together before she arrived on the scene.

  ‘So you’re doing a project on elephants at school, Felix tells me?’ Mum said.

  ‘No— I mean, yes absolutely that is correct!’ said Flo.

  Felix’s heart was fluttering so hard it hurt. It was bad enough being worried about hiding an elephant in the house without Flo giving the game away.

  ‘Riiiight,’ said Mum. ‘Well, you’d better lock your bike up, Silver, and I’ll help with those bags of food.’

  ‘Thanks, Marge,’ said Silver. She flicked her tentacles of hair over one shoulder and heaved her bike down the side of the house while Zed got the food out of the bike panniers.

  ‘Oh, Clive. You haven’t brought the cats with you?’ Mum moaned, catching sight of Yin’s little face peering over the side of Silver’s basket.

  Zed winced. He didn’t like Mum calling him Clive, even though that was his real name.

  ‘Listen, sis – less stress, OK? It’s cool with the cats. They won’t be any bother,’ Zed said.

  ‘But if Colin sees them—’ Mum started.

  ‘Colin won’t see them if they stay in the baskets,’ Silver said, laying a calming hand on Mum’s arm. ‘Now, you were going to help me carry this lot in,’ she said, pointing to the food.