Saving from Monkeys

by Star, Jessie L.

  "It looks like you're scratching the paintwork off the skirting boards outside my room. I take it you're going to blame that on me too, just for old time's sake?" Elliot crouched down next to me, his face twisting as this move presumably pressed awkwardly against his fading bruises.

  I glanced back along where I'd worked and reassured myself that he was just being a pain; there were no scratches, where I'd been shone proudly.

  "Haha," I deadpanned. "You know, a simple thank you would suffice."

  "Thank you?" He reached across and tugged the cloth out of my hand as I leant forward to wipe some more, pretty much non-existent, dirt away. "I think this is crap, Rox."

  "Well there's gratitude for you!" I pressed my brush in against my chest in case he got any ideas about snatching that from me as well and glared at him.

  "So is this what you've been doing when I've been gone?" He asked, a definite bite in his voice. "You're here as a guest and you've been sneaking off to do this?"

  Oh dear. I wished then that I hadn't glared at him because it blew away my ability to pretend that we were having normal banter. His skin was dull and his eyes were hooded as if he was just too sad to keep them open properly; he was heartsick and I knew exactly how that felt. I had a sudden, mad impulse to reach up and rest my hand against his cheek, like I could push his disjointedness back into place, but I gripped the brush tighter to prevent myself.

  "You say 'do this' like it's some dodgy thing," I huffed, trying to keep up a semblance of normalcy. "I'm helping my mum, not hiding in a corner mainlining heroin."

  "Your mum knows you're roaming the house double cleaning stuff she's already done?" He asked sceptically and I bashed him on the knee with the brush I was holding before I could stop myself.

  "Stop being right," I snapped. "It's really annoying. And if you're here to drag me off to your family dinner you can rack right off."

  It was a false bravado, I knew I'd go with him, and he knew it too. We'd been summoned, after all.

  Most of the time since we'd arrived at the Sinclair's it'd been like Nan, Chase, Elliot and I had been the only ones in the house. My mum was the master of gliding around making sure everything ran smoothly, but staying invisible herself, Elliot's mum was shut up in her study all the time and Elliot's dad…well, God knows where he hung out. Frankly, who cared?

  Elliot and I had been fine with the isolation, using it to comfort Nan in peace, but it had been ruined that morning when Mrs Sinclair had suddenly strode into the downstairs guestroom.

  Elliot had been reading out the Agony Aunt column from a girly magazine at the time, and I’d been repainting Nan's fingernails, but Mrs Sinclair's appearance shattered the cosy scene. Nan's room was our space and Elliot's mum coming in felt like a full on invasion. In response, Elliot crumpled the magazine he'd been holding and I'd streaked one long line of hot pink polish down Nan's finger.

  We hadn't seen Mrs Sinclair in days, but she hadn't bothered with any niceties as she said, "I'm expecting you for dinner tonight, Elliot."

  Whilst I’d pretty much got frostbite from her tone, Elliot had simply flicked the flop of his hair out of his face affectedly and drawled, "Can’t wait."

  She'd ignored his less-than-enthusiastic reply, her eyes sweeping across her mother's prone form to where I was trying to melt into the background the way my mum and Chase were able to.

  "You're welcome too, Rox."

  It hadn’t been a request.

  Back in the present, kneeling in the corridor, my stomach bubbled with anxiety at the dinner to come. I felt that if we'd been able to wheel Nan into the dining room that night, the amusement she would have gained from watching her dysfunctional family had a chance of bringing her back to full health. Still, that wasn't an option and, anyway, I'd always found something vaguely unsettling in the way she took such joy out of the lack of love between the three Sinclairs.

  "Seriously, you're not paid to do this anymore. It's not your job."

  I'd been concentrating so hard on what a disaster the dinner was going to be that, for a moment, I had no idea what Elliot was talking about. When I figured it out, I wasn't impressed.

  "Nan's in a stroke coma, your mum has issued a terrifying dinner invitation where I suspect it's us that'll be on the menu, and you're worried about me doing a bit of cleaning in my spare time?" I pushed myself to my feet and looked down my nose at him. "Organise your priorities, Sinclair."

  I should’ve told him that cleaning provided me with a sort of catharsis; that I wasn't doing it to bring back any bad memories or because I felt the servant role was the only one I could play in the Sinclair house. But I didn't, and as he too slowly rose to his feet, I could see him starting to shut himself off from me.

  Panicking slightly, I grabbed his arm and gabbled, "Your priority right now, for instance, should be making sure I don't walk into dinner on my own."

  It was like I'd thrown my foot into the gap between a slamming door and the jamb. He relaxed infinitesimally, the loosening up so slight that if I hadn't been so close to him I doubt I would have seen it.

  "I mean it," I growled, pushing the point. "Gentle-man up."

  "Fine." He shoved the wave of his hair out of his eyes and I saw a faint glimmer of trouble in his dark irises. "I've got you on one condition." He looked down, his gaze taking in my cleaning outfit of old ripped jeans, faded t-shirt and socks with a hole over the left big toe. "Don't change."

  Maybe I was just copping a back-draft of all the emotional stuff flying around, but some weird little part of my brain let out a girly shriek as it took those two words entirely out of context. Even as I told myself not to be stupid, I couldn't help clutching his arm just that little bit tighter and murmuring, "You can count on it."

  ~*~

  Three things told me right off the bat that the dinner was going to be just as much of a disaster as I'd feared.

  First, Mr Sinclair had walked into the dining room, seen Elliot and me sitting next to each other at the massive table and stopped dead. He'd then looked around as if checking to see if he'd walked into the wrong room. Elliot had snorted and leant over to mutter, "Can't you just see his facebook now? Daddy Sinclair 'likes' that awkward moment when you remember you have a son."

  Next, I'd realised that of course it was my mum who had cooked the food in front of us and the previously delicious smells curdled in my nose. I was just glad that she'd gone home for the day and wasn't around to see me sitting there amongst the Sinclairs. I knew I would choke on every bite.

  Finally, Mrs Sinclair had breezed into the room fixing Elliot and me with a look of such calculated determination that my shoulders had snapped back, squaring themselves for whatever was to come. I didn't know how, and I didn't know why, but this was a set up. Mrs Sinclair had invited us to dinner for a reason. We were so screwed.

  Whatever Mrs Sinclair's intentions, however, she didn't seem keen to jump straight to them, so the dinner started out in oppressive silence. I saw her eyes flick over me, once, twice, three times and knew that Elliot's request for me not to change into fancier clothes had hit the bull's eye. It bugged her.

  I ignored the looks, her distaste wasn't what bothered me. I picked at what I had renamed the 'traitor food', stirring it around my plate as my stomach churned. I couldn't help but think this was exactly what my mum had feared when Elliot invited me to stay. It made me want to stand up and shout 'I'm not one of you! I don't want to be one of you!'

  I was spiralling down into a mad realm of freak out and beginning to twitch in my seat when I suddenly felt a little prod against my leg. Looking down, I saw Elliot withdrawing his fork in a scene reminiscent of that first lunch with Jonah and Abi when I'd jabbed him. Payback had never been so welcome; it was like his fork had punctured my balloon of crazy and the claustrophobic panic I felt began to withdraw.

  Maybe Mrs Sinclair saw the way I'd turned towards her son and sent a muted smile in his direction, because that's when she decided to get the ball rolling.

  "S
o, how are you enjoying university, Roxanne?" She asked politely and I snapped my head round to look at her so fast I felt momentarily dizzy.

  Me? Why was she starting with me? Why ask about my life? She never had before. Unless... My heart sank. Please don't, I thought to myself, don't make me even surer about what I think you've done. Not now.

  I was going to have to face her sooner or later about my suspicions, but what with one thing and another, I was definitely choosing later.

  "Fine," I managed to gasp out, even as my internal monologue continued to rail against her. "It's fine."

  For someone who clearly thought that 'effusive' was a rude word, Mrs Sinclair seemed rather put out by my lack of enthusiasm. God, what did she want from me?

  "I mean it's really, really great. I love it...heaps!" I could feel sweat starting to break out across my forehead and, beneath her blandly polite expression, I could tell that Mrs Sinclair thought I'd gone nuts. "Elliot's doing really well too," I blurted out desperately. "I mean, he's enjoying it," I added awkwardly, in case they’d seen his results and they weren't as rosy as I thought they would be.

  "Really?" The quirk of Elliot's mum's eyebrows suggested to me she wasn't convinced, and Elliot muttered sarcastically,

  "Yeah, I get a big gold star for every lecture I go to."

  OK then...

  "We're very lucky," I tried as a last ditch attempt to smooth things over, accidentally tugging open a hole in the hem of my threadbare t-shirt as I fiddled at it anxiously. "The campus is beautiful and the courses are very...uh...scintillating."

  Everybody around the table decided to ignore me this time and Mrs Sinclair levelled a serious look across at Elliot that suggested she was ready to move onto the main event.

  "So, Elliot, how are your finances?"

  I gaped, my hands stilling on my top from sheer shock. What kind of question was that? Surely she knew better than him?

  "Finances?" Elliot asked, clearly playing dumb. "You mean like the magic cash that comes out of those money machines?"

  "Because you can't expect anything from Nan's estate."

  In unison, Elliot and I sucked in low, shocked breaths.

  "You've got to be fucking kidding me," he hissed beside me.

  There was a sharp 'ting' and we all looked across to see that Elliot's dad had tapped his knife impatiently against his plate. We waited to see if he'd add more, but he just continued to eat and Elliot's lip curled in disgust.

  "As always, Dad, your input is a real game-changer. And as for you," he fixed his mum with a steely look that made me sink down in my seat, "could we at least wait until Nan's actually dead before we pick over her bones?"

  Mrs Sinclair delicately placed her knife and fork in the proper 'pause' position on her plate and dabbed her mouth gently with her cloth napkin. Once everything was as it should be, she replied, "That's what I'm saying, there won't be anything to pick over. My mother has been relying on my money for years."

  "And you think I care?" Elliot's harsh tone made me blanch and I eyed my fork wondering whether I could jab him into calming down the way he had with me. No, I decided, probably not.

  "I think, like her, you don't have the faintest understanding of what it means to be an adult." Mrs Sinclair smoothed back her already impeccably smooth hair, apparently unmoved by insulting both her mum and son in one breath. "If my mother had put anything by, or ever looked to the future and beyond herself, there might have been something for you to take from this."

  "'This' being her death?" Elliot suddenly leant forward, as if he wanted to leap across the table at her, and his voice was positively dangerous as he snarled, "Every day I'm glad I'm not you. Every single bloody day."

  His mum remained completely unperturbed, in fact she even smiled a tight, grim little smile as she said, "You're just like her, you know, you think everything's so easy. You've grown up thinking your Nan is perfect; you never relied upon her to feed you, or clothe you, you had everything handed to you and then you could run to her for reassurance that mocking your way through life was acceptable."

  My eyes widened so much they actually hurt, and my fingers took up their destruction of my top again as Mrs Sinclair continued, "Like her you've never once made a hard decision or had to make do with a situation that wasn't exactly as you wanted it. Once you have, you've earned the right to judge me, Elliot, not before."

  God, she was stealing from my script. More eloquently than I could ever have put it, and with a sharpness I couldn't have conjured even on my crabbiest days, but that didn't change the fact that that was everything I'd been thinking all these years.

  Oh, monkeys, it wasn't my mum I had to worry about being. It was Elliot's.

  There was a loud scraping as Elliot pushed his chair heavily back from the table.

  "You know nothing about me," he said, and he matched his mother's icy tone in a way that made me shiver, even though the frost wasn't directed at me. "You’ve never spared me a second's thought when I wasn't right in front of you. Don't try to clue in 20 years too late and expect not to be judged."

  "Sit down." Mr Sinclair suddenly spoke, and I jumped, having completely forgotten that he was sitting there off to my right.

  I looked round quickly to see what Elliot's reaction would be to this rare interference. If his mum had been a robot while he'd grown up then his dad had gone that one step further and been a statue; an object that didn't interact in any way.

  Elliot looked faintly amused, in the way I imagined a condemned man would upon hearing that rain had meant an hour's delay in his execution.

  "How about you stand up, Dad?" He let his words hang in the air, but I was fairly sure I was the only one who heard the plea in them for his dad to step up, to do something. But he didn't, he just shook his head slightly as if he couldn't believe the drama he was being subjected to and Elliot said flatly, "No, I didn't think so."

  It was no good then, he was on his own.

  Or maybe not. I felt Elliot press his fingers lightly to my shoulder and I shot to my feet. I hadn't been able to protect him from his mum like I'd tried to when we'd first arrived, but I could at least show that I was with him now.

  It should have been a textbook storm out, but there was another scrape of chair legs against the floor and I looked back to see emotion cut across Elliot's mum's face like a scar.

  "Leave her alone, Elliot." Her voice was so sharp, I winced as if she'd cut me. "Tonight you need to give my mother a chance to die in peace. She wouldn't want to hang around uselessly like this, it's cruel to keep her here just for your benefit."

  Elliot didn't turn back, and Mr Sinclair kept his face resolutely focused on his dinner, so I was the only one who saw the pain stark across her features.

  OK, seriously, was no-one going to remain in the roles I'd cast them in for so many years? Elliot was supposed to be a spoilt rich boy with whom I had nothing in common, Nan was supposed to be awesome in every way and Mrs Sinclair was supposed to be a cold hearted bitch without a single shred of human emotion. Life was easier that way.

  I was far from forgiving of Mrs Sinclair's coldness towards her son, but I managed a tight nod to recognise what it had taken for her to say what she had. Elliot, for his part, just kept on walking.

  There was no question that I wouldn't follow him, but I didn't say anything as we went down the corridor and up the stairs to the second floor.

  There was a hierarchy to grief, I realised as I trailed after him. Being with the stroke-affected Nan, knowing what she had brought to my life when I'd felt so powerless, had made me think I knew the depths anguish could bring you down to. Now, however, watching Elliot break apart with every step, I knew I came in on a lower rung. He was at the peak of the pain pyramid and, as someone below him on that scale, I knew it was my job to look after him.

  We were back outside his room and, if I'd had the wherewithal, I would've tried to break the moment by pointing out how clean I'd made the corridor. I didn't, however, and besides, when Elliot op
ened his door other words popped straight into my brain and flooded out of my mouth.

  "Have you been robbed?"

  As I'd said to that Samantha chick, I really had spent time cleaning Elliot's room when I was younger, but that was when he was just some idiot rich boy. Now I was being forced to admit he was more than that, I had avoided it like the plague. Which was why I was so confused by the change in it I was seeing now.

  When we'd left for uni, Elliot's room had been packed full of rich boy accoutrements. Snowboards, computer games, electric guitars he didn't know how to play, you name it he’d had it, but now it was all gone. Even that monkey poster I’d hated so much had disappeared.

  Elliot looked around his barren room, empty apart from the bare bones of furniture, but his eyes stayed glazed and uninterested. "No," he replied shortly. "I haven't been robbed."

  'So what the hell?' I wanted to demand. It shouldn't have even rated a flicker of a thought in the scheme of things, but I needed to focus on something that wasn't as soul-destroying as the dinner we’d just sat through so I hovered in the doorway cataloguing everything that was missing.

  It would amount to a fortune, I realised. All his stuff had been top of the line, even three years later the sheer amount of stuff missing would have resulted in a very tidy sum indeed. But that was stupid, Elliot didn't need money. Then his mum's question from just before came back to me. 'How are your finances?' She'd asked, almost as if... as if she didn't know.

  My eyes met Elliot's and I could see that he knew what I was thinking.

  "I sold it," he said hoarsely, his shoulders jerking up in a 'what the hell' kind of shrug. "You were right when you talked about me studying history. My parents don't like it and they thought they could dictate what I did by threatening to cut off the money. I got sick of it. Selling all my crap sorted it."

  My mouth was dry, but I managed to croak, "Your car?"

  "You always said it was worth some people's houses," his bitterness caught at the back of my throat. "Well, I stuck the money from it into a high interest account and it was enough for rent on my flat. And the odd trip to Papua New Guinea when necessary."