Monkey and Me

by David Gilman

  “It’s my auntie Joan’s baby,” I said.

  “And who are you when you’re at home?” she said, squinting at me.

  “My name is Beanie and this is my mum’s sister’s baby and we’re taking him home because she had to go out shopping so she paid us to babysit him.”

  “Beanie? What sort of name is that?” She peered back into the plastic. “Well, it’s lovely that your auntie Joan trusts you with her baby. How old is he?”

  “Three,” I said at exactly the same time as Mark said, “Four,” and Pete-the-Feet said, “Don’t know.”

  “He’s nearly four,” I said quickly.

  “Oh.” She bent down again. I could only imagine what Malcolm must be seeing as the moon-faced Mrs Blanchard with her wobbly jowls pushed her nose close to the pushchair. It must have looked like a soggy balloon with a face drawn on it. Please don’t do your monkey scream, I begged him in my head.

  “It’s a bit unusual for a child of that age to have so much hair,” she said.

  “He’s wearing a fleece,” I told her. “He’s a very beautiful three year old.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sure he is. I haven’t got my glasses. Hang on a bit.” She started rummaging in her handbag. “I’ve got them here.”

  “Sorry, Mrs Blanchard, we’ve got to run. There’s our bus. We’ve got to get Malcolm home for his tea,” Pete-the-Feet said, and pushed the pram away, with the rest of us following.

  She didn’t really have much of a chance to say anything else other than, “Well, Malcolm’s a nice name anyway.”

  Which I was pleased about because it meant I had chosen the right name for him.

  We pushed him past a row of shops and then down Cavendish Road, which meant we had gone in almost a big circle to keep us off the streets where people might know us. Just as we had one more street to go a police car came around the corner. They were driving so slowly you just knew they were looking for someone.

  They stopped.

  “All right, lads? What are you lot up to then?”

  “Just walking,” Skimp said.

  “Walking where?” the cop said.

  “Down there,” said Rocky.

  “Down where?” said the cop.

  “Meeting his mum,” Mark said, pointing to Skimp.

  “We’re looking for a monkey,” said the cop.

  “He’s sitting next to you,” Pete-the-Feet said.

  The driver leaned across his mate and pointed a finger. “Don’t get cheeky with me, son.”

  The first cop smiled. “Small monkey. A young chimpanzee. It’s gone missing,” he said.

  “It sounds like Auntie Joan’s toddler,” I said. “He’s in the pushchair. Do you want to see him?”

  “You kids are something cruel, you are,” the policeman said.

  Then they drove off.

  This time “almost” became “definitely”. We were at our house.

  I could see Dad was in his shed. I think he was trying to make Mum a footstool because she always says how tired she is at night. He’s been making it for a while now, but the legs are always a different length and so the stool is always wonky. It’s her birthday soon, so I think he’ll probably give up any day now and go down to B&Q and buy a flat pack one.

  The good thing is that it keeps him busy. While everybody else went into the house and took Malcolm out the pushchair and up to my room I went in and said hello to Dad.

  He had just lifted the footstool off the bench onto the floor but you could see right away that it just wasn’t going to work. Wonky is the only word you could use for it.

  I told him I’d been out with Mark and that now I was going to have some thing to eat and do a bit of homework. He was nodding, listening to me, but with his attention focused on the footstool. Then he looked at me, and for a second I thought he could see all the lies I was storing in my head.

  “You’re home late.”

  “I went round to Skimp’s with Rocky and Pete-the-Feet and Mark and…” I almost said Malcolm, and that could have opened up a whole new line of questioning.

  “I didn’t know it was so late,” he said. “I’d better go and collect Mum.”

  That would keep him out the house for a least an hour, because he always goes early to collect her from the supermarket and he ends up on the magazine and DVD shelves. I think Dad does most of his reading in Sainsbury’s.

  Back in the house everyone was very quiet. “Where’s Malcolm?” I asked.

  “Shush, Jez, he’s sleeping,” Mark said.

  I pulled off my coat and ran upstairs.

  The good thing about having an older brother is that when you move to a new house, as we did a couple of years ago, they get their own room. Which means I got my own room, which is better than sharing. So I still had the bunk beds in my room.

  I usually just put my clothes on the top bunk and sleep on the bottom. It’s much easier than having to open and close the wardrobe or the drawers. You just fall out of bed, reach up and grab your shirt and underpants and that’s it. Just like Clark Kent.

  Pete-the-Feet, because he’s so tall, had been able to reach up and lie Malcolm down on the top bunk without disturbing him. The little chimpanzee was fast asleep; it must have been all the fear and tension and excitement of what had happened at the Black Gate. I knew how he felt.

  They had covered him up with my duvet and put my old teddy bear next to him to keep him warm. It’s not really my teddy bear, it’s Mark’s, but he’s too cool to admit that now. So the teddy bear just lives on the top bunk, usually with my undies thrown on top of his head.

  I stepped up and put my face next to Malcolm’s. He was Harry Gonkers, which Rocky’s uncle told him was army slang for being fast asleep.

  Mark came upstairs and we whispered. “Where’s everyone?” I said.

  “Gone home. Rocky’s going round to Tracy’s to see she’s all right.”

  “We might have been sunk without her,” I said.

  Mark shrugged. He knows girls can do tough stuff – we’ve all watched Spooks. It’s just a bit different when they’re in your gang.

  “I’m going to stay here in case he wakes up,” I said.

  “It’ll be a problem when he does.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it yet, have I?”

  Malcolm might be dead to the world right now, but if he woke up and started swinging from the light bulb, we were all going to be in trouble.

  “We’ve got to keep him amused somehow,” Mark said. “Blimey, Jez, you don’t half cause problems.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Mark. I didn’t want anyone else to get involved. But I’m glad you are. I couldn’t have managed on my own.” And I meant it. My brother had been really good, had accepted Malcolm and made the gang his bodyguard. You couldn’t ask much more from a brother, could you?

  “Yeah, well.” He shrugged again. Shrugging is what he does. It means a lot of things. Quite often it means, Don’t embarrass me by saying something soppy. So I knew everything was all right between us. But neither of us knew how we were going to get through till tomorrow, when the gang could take Malcolm and hide him in the caravan.

  “Anyway, we’ll have to think of something,” he said. “We could always tell them he’s a long-lost relative.”

  Which in a way is true.

  I climbed up and snuggled down next to my sleeping friend. He still smelled warm and furry, and a bit doggish. And I could imagine us sleeping together in the tree tops in the special nests that chimpanzees make.

  We would lie there and let the wind gently rock the tree. If it rained we could hold a big banana leaf over our heads and just sit there and reach up and touch the clouds.

  I always get butterflies in my stomach when I go to the hospital for treatment. Everyone is very nice there and they’re very kind to me, but it’s still ho
spital. And it is still treatment. But it’s really important for me to do it, so there’s not much use complaining about it. I think it’s worse for Mum and Dad sometimes. It depends how they are, because when we have our tea the night before and we’re all sitting around with the telly on in the background and we’re oohing and aahing about this and that – and Mum’s telling Mark not to talk with his mouth full, and Dad is laughing at something really unfunny on the telly, then sometimes they get a bit too boisterous. I mean, you can see they’re not really laughing. They’re hiding.

  Mum brings home organic everything. She says it’s better for me and will help my immune system. I wallop down the broccoli first and then get into the roast potatoes and gravy.

  But tonight, they seemed to be laughing a lot.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I said and they gave each other a funny look which meant, Is he all right? What’s wrong with him? You think he’s feeling sick? You think it’s about tomorrow? And anything else you can think of that might be worrying them about me.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I’ve just got a project I’m working on, and Mark said he would help me because he’s going to lend me his computer.”

  Mark opened his mouth and you could see half the sausage still in there. “I did not!”

  “Mark! Don’t talk with your mouth full of food,” Dad said, even though he was chewing a potato at the time. It’s a different world being a grown-up.

  “Yes, you did, don’t you remember? We were going to research monkeys.”

  Mark had no choice. He swallowed. “Oh yeah, I remember.”

  “What about your pud?” Dad said. “You’re not going to miss your favourite, are you?”

  There was custard and chopped banana for pudding.

  “Can I take it up with me? I want to start on the project.”

  “I suppose,” said Mum.

  “Can I have some extra bananas as well?”

  “Extra?”

  “In case I wake up in the night and want a snack.”

  “Do you normally wake up in the night and want a snack?” Mum asked.

  “Quite often. I sometimes come downstairs and mooch around.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Dad said.

  “You never hear me because I’m very quiet. And you’re always snoring anyway.”

  They looked at each other. Mum shrugged. “That’s true, Jim. You do snore a lot.”

  “Do I?”

  “Always.”

  “I didn’t know that. You’ve never said.”

  Mum absentmindedly gave me a couple of extra bananas with one already chopped into the custard. They were just talking away between themselves. The only thing she said as I went out the door was: “Don’t make a mess.”

  I sometimes find their expectations a bit unrealistic.

  I’m nine years, eleven months and twelve days old. I’m supposed to make a mess.

  Mark brought his laptop into my room. “You could have warned me,” he said. “Under any other circumstances I wouldn’t let you near my computer.”

  “I know, but I had a brainwave when I was eating the broccoli – maybe it really is brain food after all – so I thought that if we had a project with chimpanzees on the screen and Malcolm woke up, then that would cover any noises he made.”

  I think Mark realised then that I was the one with the brains in our family. If ever he made Prime Minister because of his leadership skills I would have to be the one pulling the strings behind the scenes.

  Malcolm was sitting under the duvet that we had draped like a tent across the edge of my bed and a chair, the tea cosy still on his head. I didn’t want his brain to get too hot, because that’s what tea cosies do, they keep teapots warm. I pointed and pulled off my beanie. He copied me and rubbed his head.

  He was looking around at his new surroundings. He spent a lot of time gazing at the poster of Steven Gerrard on the wall, and then he looked at the T-shirt I’d given him.

  I’m sure he made the connection.

  I spooned some custard into his mouth but he spat it out and it made an interesting pattern on the wall. I think it must have been too hot. I blew on it, and he soon ate both mine and Mark’s. That was quite a sacrifice. Custard and sliced bananas is an age-old favourite in our house.

  Mark and I set up the laptop so that I could sit on the top bunk and have it open, so that if Mum or Dad came in I might be able to hide Malcolm quickly. That’s when we made a bit of a mistake. As soon as he saw video links of chimpanzees in the wild he went nuts. He screamed and chattered and had a right old fit. He chucked the bedding everywhere.

  Dad called up the stairs: “Mark! Jez! Turn that thing down, will you?”

  But Malcolm was in full frenzy. Mark turned the picture off the screen and I made a grab for Malcolm, who was trying to reach the light. If he leapt onto that the whole ceiling would come down.

  Dad was halfway up the stairs.

  “Lads! Did you hear what I said?”

  Mark had hold of Malcolm’s feet and I wrestled him under the bedclothes and shoved a half-peeled banana into his mouth, then put a finger to my lips – which was a sign that anyone could understand. Malcolm sucked and chewed the banana, turning it into a gooey pulp. He took some of it out of his mouth and examined it, then sucked it off his finger.

  He would fit in nicely at the school canteen.

  After half an hour Mark went downstairs to make Malcolm some hot chocolate. We thought this would help make him sleep through the night. Malcolm sat on the bunk reading comics while I tried to do some more research on how to look after chimpanzees who were on the run.

  The round face of a chimpanzee stared at me from the screen. It wasn’t as beautiful as Malcolm but it had that same appealing look. Did I know, the text on the screen asked me, that chimpanzees have ninety-eight per cent of the same genes as us?

  “I didn’t know that,” I told the computer. That’s amazing! Malcolm and me are nearly the same people. There’s only two per cent between us. That’s like semi-skimmed and full-cream milk. There’s virtually no difference. One’s slightly fattier than the other is all! I looked at Malcolm, who had a quizzical look on his face as he studied the amazing artwork in Silver Surfer, and it made the whole idea of someone experimenting on him even more horrible.

  I felt very fuzzy inside as I looked at him reading my comic upside down; he was so close to getting it right.

  Mark came back with his sports-drink bottle full of warm milk. “I thought he could suck through this without making a mess,” he said. Then he looked at me. “What’s up?”

  “Malcolm is nearly one of us,” I said.

  “Well, his eating habits certainly qualify him.”

  I suddenly felt a bit tearful. I don’t know why, it just started to come out. Mark’s face screwed up because I don’t think he knew what to do. “What?” he asked.

  I wiped the tears away with my pyjama sleeve. “Nothing.”

  “It’ll be all right, Jez,” he said and touched my arm. “Mum and Dad will be with you tomorrow.”

  I wasn’t upset about that. I was thinking about Malcolm, the small lost chimpanzee being chased by someone. He had no home, he’d been separated from his family, and someone wanted to lock him up in a cage and hurt him.

  And there was only me to hold his hand and tell him it’d be all right. Just like Mum and Dad did with me.

  But I wasn’t sure that it was going to be all right.

  If Rocky had been sleeping over he’d have lain in the corridor guarding our bedroom door, because he’d have thought he was “on stag”. Which is what soldiers call doing guard duty. Rocky knows all those things, but it would have been a bit difficult explaining to Mum and Dad that Rocky was “on stag” because we had an escaped chimpanzee sleeping in my top bunk. So we decided that I would sleep on top and cover Malcolm and me with the duvet and that Mark would sleep on the bottom bunk.

  We hid Malcolm in Mark’s room and told Mum and Dad that I was f
eeling a bit iffy about tomorrow so Mark wanted to stay in my room with me. You could tell they thought this was Mark being really sweet and very kind towards his younger brother. Which I suppose was true in a way.

  Mum came in and tucked me up. She crinkled her nose a bit and said she’d better wash the duvet cover again – it smelled a bit doggy – while Dad said I should change my socks more often. Once we heard them go to bed and the toilet flush and the light go out beneath their door, we went into Mark’s room and carried Malcolm back. He was very dopey.

  “The hot milk worked a treat,” I whispered.

  “It wasn’t the hot milk, it was one of Mum’s Valium pills I put in it. I nicked it out her handbag when I went downstairs.”

  “You drugged Malcolm? You could kill him!” I hissed.

  “No, I won’t. It’s only a mild sedative to stop Mum from cracking up.”

  Those ‘circumstances’ again. I checked Malcolm’s breathing. It was slow but regular. Mark pulled the mattress on the floor blocking the door just in case Mum or Dad came in, which would give us a chance to make sure Malcolm was hidden under the bedclothes. I snuggled down next to Malcolm.

  I knew I wouldn’t sleep a wink. Tomorrow was a big day in more ways than one. Malcolm was going to be smuggled out like a prisoner of war, and then we had to think of how I could get him back to Africa, where he could sit in those tall trees and shelter under banana leaves and find a chimpanzee family to adopt him. Maybe one day he would teach them sign language and tell them about his big adventure where he came across other chimpanzees, but who had much less fur. I imagined the breeze ruffling the high branches, and felt it gently rocking the monkeys to sleep.

  Me too.

  When it’s hospital day I am always up first. We have to get there early and Mum usually has only a quick cup of tea before we leave. I don’t get to eat anything. I usually moan and groan, but this morning I was glad to get out the house and leave Mark to look after Malcolm.

  “Don’t forget to take him to the loo. He’ll need a pee,” I told Mark.

  “Chimpanzees don’t use toilets,” he said.

  “Well, he’s got to go somewhere,” I told him. “And as soon as Mum and me leave, get Malcolm to the caravan.”