The Singing Ape

by Justin D'Ath

  ‘Do you think they saw us?’ she whispered.

  ‘They must have,’ whispered Mr Busby, leading them through the gap and out into the early morning sunshine on the other side. ‘But the sun was in their eyes – I don’t think they saw Caruso.’

  ‘Thanks for helping,’ Colt said.

  Mr Busby glared at him. ‘I did it for the gibbon, not you. Follow me and keep your mouths shut.’

  He led them on a big loop around The Menagerie and back past Circus City. They walked fast. Colt had no idea where Mr Busby was taking them, only that he was putting distance between them and the rat cops, and that suited him fine. He hadn’t expected Officer Katt to come so early. There could be only one reason why she’d staged a dawn raid. It was lucky they got Caruso out in time. But the gibbon wasn’t safe yet.

  Caruso rode comfortably on Colt’s hip, unaware of his narrow escape. He was lighter than Colt had expected. Or was it because Colt was so strong?

  ‘Home,’ Caruso said when they walked past a lone, straggly tree. Or that’s what it sounded like to Colt – the others just heard him grunt.

  They came to a wide gravel car park. There were two rows of circus vehicles. Colt spotted his mother’s car and Birdy’s parents’ six-wheel drive. Over on the other side, right next to an old green station wagon with one blue door, was an orange DoRFE van. Mr Busby gave it a sideways look as he led Colt and Birdy to a battered Nissan ute with a fibreglass canopy on the back. He used a key to open the lift-up rear door.

  ‘Put the gibbon in there,’ he said.

  Colt peered in. It was a dark, dirty space strewn with tools, plastic crates, jerry cans and at least two spare wheels. The only window was a glass rectangle at the front that gave restricted view into the driver’s cabin. Caruso clung to him, shivering. He didn’t want to go in.

  ‘Can’t he ride in the front?’ Colt asked.

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ snapped Mr Busby. He was back to his nasty old self. ‘If anyone sees him, we’ll wind up in jail.’

  ‘Then I’ll get in there with him,’ Colt said.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said the foreman, looking back the way they had come. ‘But hurry up about it. When they find the gibbon’s cage empty, there’ll be rat cops everywhere.’

  Colt crawled in among the tools and spare wheels, clutching Caruso to his chest. Birdy started to follow them.

  ‘Hold on – not you, missy,’ said Mr Busby. ‘This isn’t a kindergarten outing.’

  ‘I’m nearly eleven!’ she said indignantly.

  ‘I don’t care if you’re eleventy-eleven, you’re not coming.’

  ‘He’s right, Birdy,’ Colt said from inside the canopy’s cave-like interior. ‘Someone has to stay behind to tell Mum and Captain Noah what’s going on. And to show them the holovid.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Birdy.

  ‘There isn’t time to explain,’ Colt said. ‘Tell Mum I’ll phone her.’

  It was only after Mr Busby had slammed the rear door, plunging him and Caruso into near darkness, that Colt realised he’d given his wrist-phone to Birdy.

  And, worse, he hadn’t told Mr Busby where they were going, either!

  The ute’s tyres crunched noisily in loose gravel. Colt knew they had to go right past the DoRFE van. He held Caruso in his lap and hardly dared to breathe. His skin tingled, his muscles bunched like coiled springs. At any moment he expected to hear Officer Katt shouting at them to stop.

  Would Mr Busby stop, or would there be a car chase?

  Nothing happened. There were no shouts. The ute passed uneventfully through the gate and out onto the smooth bitumen road outside.

  They had escaped.

  But Mr Busby didn’t know where they were going. Colt gently pushed Caruso off his lap and crawled forward to peer through the little window. He could see the back of Mr Busby’s head and shoulders, and a bit of the road outside. Wherever they were going, it was away from Officer Katt, and that was good enough for now.

  There were traffic lights coming up. They were red. The ute stopped behind a taxi. More cars had stopped ahead of it. Two streams of traffic passed by in both directions across the intersection. At last the lights turned green and everyone ahead of the ute started moving again. But when it was Mr Busby’s turn, the lights went orange. The taxi got across the intersection, but the lights were red by the time Mr Busby got there. They had to stop again. Colt nervously chewed his lips. The rat cops must have discovered Caruso was gone by now.

  Would Officer Katt work out what was going on and set up road blocks?

  Finally, after fifteen minutes of frustrating stop-start town driving, they reached the open road. Colt saw Mr Busby light a cigarette. Blue smoke coiled on the other side of the glass. Urgh. Lucky I didn’t go in the front, Colt thought.

  A large green-and-white highway sign flashed past. It listed the towns and cities ahead. Colt rapped on the glass.

  ‘WHAT?’ Mr Busby yelled over his shoulder.

  ‘STOP!’ Colt yelled back.

  They stopped in a parking bay beside the highway. Mr Busby got out and opened the rear door. The cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He looked annoyed.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘You don’t know where we’re supposed to be going,’ Colt said, restraining Caruso who wanted to go outside.

  ‘Of course I know where we’re going,’ Mr Busby said crossly.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Across the border.’

  Colt stroked Caruso to keep the gibbon calm. He and Birdy had saved Lucy by getting her across the state border. Officer Katt had no authority on the other side.

  ‘And then what are you going to do?’ Colt asked.

  ‘Let him go,’ said Mr Busby. ‘There’s lots of forest.’

  ‘He’ll get rat flu and die.’

  Mr Busby sucked on his cigarette. ‘You should have thought of that before you busted him out of quarantine.’

  ‘I just wanted to save him from the rat cops,’ Colt said. ‘But there’s somewhere we can take him.’

  And he told Mr Busby his plan.

  ‘You’ve certainly got a wild imagination, kid,’ Mr Busby said, flicking away the stub of his cigarette. ‘But don’t expect me to waste my time on your wacky theories.’

  He reached up to close the rear door.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Colt. He shuffled out of the ute, leading Caruso by the hand.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘If you won’t take us, I’ll hitch a ride.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ snapped Mr Busby. ‘Nobody’s going to pick up a kid with a monkey.’

  ‘He’s an ape,’ Colt reminded him, hoisting Caruso onto his hip. ‘I’ll work out some way to save him without you.’

  Mr Busby rolled his eyes. ‘Suit yourself, kid.’

  Slamming the back of the ute, he stalked around to the driver’s side, got in and roared out of the parking bay in a cloud of dust. Colt watched him disappear back in the direction of town, then walked over and stamped out the smoking cigarette butt.

  ‘Now what are we going to do, Caruso?’ he asked.

  The gibbon pointed a human-looking finger at a line of trees growing next to the highway and made a noise that sounded like ‘Home’.

  But the trees weren’t home, that was the problem. There was nowhere Caruso could go where either the rat cops or rat flu wouldn’t get him.

  Well, there was one place – if Colt’s ‘wacky theory’ was correct – but how on earth were they going to get there without Mr Busby’s help?

  A car was coming. Colt walked down to the edge of the highway and hoped it was someone who liked Lost World animals. He put his thumb out for a ride, but the car flew past as if he wasn’t even there.

  Over the next ten minutes about two-dozen more vehicles went past. None of them stopped.

  Finally a car slowed down. It was an old blue station wagon with one green door. Colt lowered his thumb and stepped back to make room as it pulled in to the
side of the highway. Then a strange thing happened. At the very last moment, the driver seemed to change his mind. Suddenly the engine roared, its tyres spun, and the station wagon went speeding off.

  Another vehicle was pulling in, blinkers flashing, where the station wagon had almost stopped. This one did stop. It was a battered Nissan ute with a fibreglass canopy on the back.

  Mr Busby leaned over and pushed open the passenger-side door. ‘I just had a call from Captain Noah,’ he said. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

  Colt shrugged. ‘The good.’

  ‘Most of the blood tests were clear. The orangutans and other monkeys are no longer in quarantine.’

  ‘I think I know the bad news then,’ Colt said, shifting the gibbon to his other hip. ‘Caruso’s tests weren’t clear, right?’

  Mr Busby nodded. ‘But Captain Noah said that it’s nothing to worry about. The shots your mother gave him the other day would have stopped the virus before it took hold.’

  ‘What do the rat cops think?’

  ‘They’ve got a destruction order. And guns. Legally, they can shoot Caruso on sight. It’s lucky we busted him out before they got there.’

  We? Colt thought. ‘Will anyone get in trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘Only us, if they catch us.’ Mr Busby cleared some papers and lolly wrappers off the passenger seat. ‘Jump in. We’d better get moving.’

  Colt hesitated. ‘I’m not letting you take him across the border.’

  ‘That’s not where we’re going,’ Mr Busby said. ‘I’ve been thinking about that theory of yours and I reckon it’s worth a shot. Get in.’

  ‘In the front?’ Colt asked, surprised.

  Mr Busby winked. ‘Try to keep Caruso’s head down when we go through towns.’

  It took four hours to reach the little fishing village on the southern coast. Mr Busby had phoned ahead and a bearded man in a sailor’s cap was waiting for them at the jetty.

  ‘Peter, you old sea dog!’ Mr Busby said jovially as the two men shook hands. He turned to Colt. ‘Peter used to work with me at the zoo, but now he’s a fisherman.’

  ‘And who’s this?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I’m Colt.’

  Peter gave him a friendly nod, but he seemed more interested in the fidgety black gibbon in Colt’s arms.

  ‘Don’t tell me that’s Melba?’

  ‘It’s Caruso,’ said Mr Busby.

  ‘Caruso!’ Peter stepped forward and held up his palm. Much to Colt’s surprise, the gibbon gave him a high-five. ‘Hey, you remember me!’

  Mr Busby smiled. ‘You always had a way with animals, Pete.’

  ‘Those were the days, eh?’ said the former zoo-worker -turned-fisherman.

  He and Mr Busby spent a moment staring out to sea.

  ‘Why do you want to go back there, Allan?’

  Mr Busby jerked his thumb in Colt’s general direction. ‘Sherlock Holmes here has been doing some detective work,’ he said.

  When Colt was in hospital, he’d spent a lot of time watching holovision. There wasn’t much else to do before his mother got him the Sky-reader. One of the afternoon programs was a show called Truth or Myth?. The idea was that they interviewed people who reckoned they’d seen ghosts or UFOs or things nobody really believed were real. On one of the episodes, an old guy who owned a yacht told how he’d been lost in thick fog when he heard an eerie siren. He’d turned his yacht towards the spooky noise and nearly crashed into some treacherous rocks.

  Duh! Colt had thought. He should have sailed in the other direction! Weren’t sirens supposed to be warnings?

  But a few days later, when he went back to school, Colt learned about a different kind of siren – a mythical half-human creature that sang songs to lure sailors to their death.

  Suddenly the old guy’s siren story made sense.

  And when Birdy said the sirens sounded just like beautiful ladies singing, Colt’s brain had started swirling with ideas.

  After school he’d rushed back to his caravan and gone online on his mother’s palmtop. He found the same episode of Truth of Myth? on Catch-up HV and watched it again. This time he paid more attention. The yachtsman named the place where he’d nearly come to grief.

  It was called Skull’s Jaw.

  So Colt had googled Skull’s Jaw. It was actually an island – a pile of rocks that stuck out of the ocean in the middle of nowhere. It was uninhabited. There were dangerous reefs and underwater rocks that made it impossible for boats to land there. In fact, back in the days before GPS-assisted navigation there had been several shipwrecks when their captains sailed too close.

  When Colt tried to find Skull’s Jaw on Google Maps, he’d discovered there was actually another island about ten kilometres away. This island was much bigger. It was called Ark Island.

  Next Colt did a search for Ark Island, and up came a page on Wikipedia about an offshore zoo where the animals had survived the outbreak of rat flu. Ah-ha! Colt had thought. Further down it said how the owner, Capt. Philip Noah, had shut down the zoo after a few years and taken all his animals to the mainland to start the Lost World Circus.

  But nowhere in the article did it say that two of the zoo animals hadn’t made it to shore. Caruso’s father, Rex, and a young female gibbon named Melba had jumped overboard and disappeared, presumed drowned.

  By the time he’d shut down his mother’s computer, Colt was ninety-nine per cent sure that one or both of the two escaped gibbons hadn’t drowned after all.

  Skull’s Jaw was a scary-looking place. The jumble of tall, pale rocks that gave it its name rose vertically out of the heaving green ocean. They did look like teeth – huge ones, fifty or sixty metres high.

  Peter didn’t want to go too close. ‘There are lots of underwater rocks, too,’ he said, keeping his big fishing boat well clear of the foaming waves that dashed against the base of the towering cliffs.

  Colt and Mr Busby took turns with Peter’s binoculars. There were no trees on Skull’s Jaw, just a few straggly bushes and tufts of grass poking out between the rocks.

  ‘It would be impossible for anything to live there,’ Mr Busby said, scanning the barren outcrop with the binoculars. ‘What would they eat?’

  Colt stood next to him at the rail, one hand locked with Caruso’s in case the gibbon got any ideas about jumping overboard.

  ‘They could find shellfish and sea worms,’ he said. He’d looked up Lost World animal diets on Google and found out what gibbons used to eat in the wild. ‘And leaves and roots from the bushes. There might even be insects.’

  ‘What do you want to do, Allan?’ Peter called from the wheelhouse. ‘We’re going to run out of light soon.’

  They had been there nearly an hour, slowly circling Skull’s Jaw hoping to see signs of life. But so far there’d been none.

  Every so often, when the boat rode up over an extra-big swell, they glimpsed Ark Island on the horizon.

  ‘One more time around, Pete,’ Mr Busby said. ‘Then we’d better call it a day.’

  They did another slow circuit. Colt took the binoculars and searched every nook and cranny in the sheer rock face. But he didn’t see what he hoped so desperately to see.

  Mr Busby put a hand on his shoulder. ‘It was a nice idea,’ he said kindly. ‘But we’d better get going, son. It’s a long way back to shore, and it’s getting dark.’

  Tears blurred Colt’s vision as he kept the binoculars trained on the tiny island. He’d been so sure they would find something. A companion for Caruso. A home for Caruso! The boat pitched and rocked under his feet. He was starting to feel seasick, but he hardly cared. All he could think about was Caruso.

  ‘That’s it, Pete,’ Mr Busby called in the direction of the wheelhouse. ‘Time to go home.’

  Colt lowered his binoculars. ‘Wait!’

  ‘Have you seen something?’ Mr Busby asked.

  ‘No. But I want to try something. Ask Peter if we can go a bit closer.’

  ‘We can’t go closer,’ said
Mr Busby. ‘He said there are rocks under the water.’

  ‘Just a bit closer,’ Colt said. ‘Ask him. Please!’

  Mr Busby went and spoke to Peter. The fisherman looked grim. But he nodded and turned the boat until it faced Skull’s Jaw. Its big GreenGas-powered engines throbbed and the boat started to move closer.

  Mr Busby came hurrying back. ‘We’re going to make a slow pass next to the northern face. Peter said the water’s deeper there. But it’s dangerous – you’ll only have one chance.’

  Colt thanked him. He crouched next to Caruso and looked him in the eye.

  ‘Sing!’ he said.

  The gibbon seemed confused.

  ‘Sing!’ Colt repeated. He looked up. The rocks were getting close. They filled the early evening sky like craggy skyscrapers. ‘You’ve got to sing, Caruso!’

  Caruso just looked at him. He didn’t understand.

  In desperation, Colt turned towards Skull’s Jaw. The island had become a huge rocky wall. Cupping his hands around his mouth, Colt filled his lungs until they’d take no more air, then he tried to sing like a gibbon. It sounded terrible and Colt felt like an idiot. But Caruso seemed interested.

  ‘Sing!’ Colt begged him. He pointed at the rocky cliffs that towered over them. ‘Home!’ he said. ‘Sing!’

  Slowly a look of comprehension dawned in Caruso’s eyes. Lifting his chin towards the sky, he inflated his throat sac like a small black balloon, and demonstrated how a gibbon really sang.

  It was amazing. It was spine-tingling. And the cliffs made it sound even better. Then a spooky echo bounced back from the rock face. It seemed to pair with Caruso’s voice, making a haunting duet.

  Only when they had completed their slow pass along the northern face of Skull’s Jaw, and Peter had turned the boat back out into safer waters, did Caruso end the performance.

  He looked up at Colt, as if to say, Is that what you wanted?